Eternal

by V. K. Forrest

  She took another sip of tea, the taste of Arlan’s blood still cool and metallic in her mouth.

  She had to resist the urge to pat her lips with the napkin.

  Arlan had come through when she needed him. No questions asked. Multiple orgasms included. His arms had felt good around her. He was good for her. He thought so. Everyone in the town thought so. So why had it been Ian’s face she had seen last night when she closed her eyes?

  Or had it been Glen’s?

  She suppressed a groan. “My plan work for you, Agent Duncan?” She rose from her chair, balling the uneaten bagel up in the napkin. She’d take the tea with her.

  They stopped at the waste can at the end of the buffet bar to leave their trash. He was watching her. No…staring.

  “You okay?” He touched his luscious neck with his fingertip. “Looks like you’ve got a spot of blood there.”

  She turned away, headed for the door, resisting the temptation to rub at the mark. She had told Arlan to be careful. “Cut myself shaving.”

  By three o’clock, Fia knew this wasn’t going to be an open-and-shut case. By three the following day, the prospects for solving Bobby McCathal’s murder within the week were looking dismal. No one had seen or heard anything at the post office that night, and there was still no sign of the decapitated head or severed feet.

  Fia and Duncan completed their photographs, and Paddy’s Cleaning Service of Clare Point was called in to remove the bloodstains from the floor at the crime scene. Sixty-one-year-old Catherine Kahill, one of two mail carriers in town, agreed to run the post office as soon as it was cleared by the FBI and reopened by the postal service. The two agents then began their interviews.

  For the most part, Glen and Fia just stayed out of each other’s way, which was fine with her. She did, however, manage to convince him to hold the interviews inside the post office lobby, rather than going door-to-door. She suggested that the police station was too small, too crowded, and they wanted to keep their investigation as separate from local law enforcement as possible. Fia didn’t tell Glen that part of her reasoning involved keeping her Uncle Sean out of the fray. He didn’t know that the police chief was too loose a cannon for her to trust entirely. The bonus that came with not operating out of the police station was that she didn’t have to deal with any of Uncle Sean’s armchair COPS advice.

  The tricky thing was that she didn’t want Glen in Kahill family members’ houses, either. Everyone was used to behaving in a certain manner in public places; it was the way they had been coexisting with humans since their arrival in the colonies. But inside their homes…Fia wasn’t so certain they would keep their guards up as well. Besides, with her and Glen both interviewing in the post office lobby, she could keep an eye on him.

  Fia’s gaze strayed from Anna Ross, whom she was interviewing, to her notepad, where she had made no notes in the last twenty minutes. Anna was going on about how Bobby’s dog had barked in the yard. She had not seen Bobby the day of the murder and knew nothing about it, but Fia couldn’t get her to budge out of the chair no matter how many times she thanked her for taking time out of her busy day of watching game shows and soaps on her new big-screen TV.

  “Some kind of mixed breed,” Anna continued. “A dumb mutt, not smart enough to…”

  Fia glanced at her wristwatch and then her gaze strayed across the room to where Glen was interviewing Anna’s sister Peigi. Fia could tell by the look on his face that he was having a difficult time ridding himself of his interviewee as well.

  Just as she looked down at her notebook again, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Glen abruptly rise from his chair. Fia got up, looking in the direction he was looking. The back room.

  Both sisters, oblivious to the fact that their respective agents were out of their chairs, continued to chatter.

  “Agent Duncan?” Fia called out from across the room. He was closer to the rear entrance than she was.

  He held up his finger. He was still watching something or someone in the rear of the building.

  Suddenly, he took off across the lobby. “Stop, FBI!”

  Fia sprinted after him.

  There was a crash in the mail room. Something fell. An unidentified object slid across the freshly mopped and sanitized marble floor. By the time Fia made it through the archway, Glen was going out the back door into the alley.

  “You! Stop. FBI!” he hollered.

  Fia leaped over a box of spilled envelopes. “Agent Duncan, wait!” She burst out the back door, down the steps, through the fluttering strips of freshly acquired yellow police tape the local police had used to block off the building. Glen ran ahead of her, down the alley, toward the street that ran behind the post office. He was chasing a pigtailed teenager.

  Fia immediately recognized the girl from the back of her head. This is getting better by the second. This young lady was not someone in Clare Point the human needed to meet. She was an important woman in the sept, but in a vulnerable place right now, which made them all vulnerable. “Kaleigh,” she called. “It’s Fia. Stop.”

  The teen flew around the corner and down the block.

  Fia pushed to catch up with Glen, but he had almost half a block start on her. “Duncan,” she called. “Slow down. I know her.”

  He continued at an all-out run.

  They crossed the street and Kaleigh zigzagged, cutting through another alley, down the next block. Dogs barked. Pat Hill stopped his pickup in the middle of the street to watch the two FBI agents in suits chase down the teenager in shorts and a tank top. They had picked up a yellow lab, that ran behind them, barking excitedly.

  “Duncan, for Pete’s sake,” Fia hollered. She was fit and a good runner, but she had not packed her running shoes and she was going to be pissed if she broke the heel on her new loafers. “I know where she lives!”

  He slowed and Fia caught up. He was panting pretty hard. Fit, but not as fit as Fia. Most humans weren’t.

  “She was in the post office. In the back,” Glen panted, jogging beside her. “I don’t know what she was doing, but she took off the minute she realized I saw her.”

  Fia looked up ahead, shooting thoughts in the girl’s direction. What are you doing in the post office? What are you doing, running from a federal law enforcement agent?

  If the teen heard Fia, she didn’t respond. Kaleigh leaped a line of waist-high azalea bushes, cutting across Victor Simpson’s scraggly lawn.

  “Damn it, Kaleigh!” Fia called out, skirting two garbage cans turned over on the sidewalk. The lab had caught up and was leaping in front of her, still barking wildly. “Don’t make me run another two blocks to your house. Your da will have your hide,” she threatened.

  The girl, tennis shoes flying, threw a glance over her shoulder. “Fee? That you?”

  “How many FBI agents do you think we have in town? Yes, it’s me,” Fia answered, aloud.

  Kaleigh halted on the far side of Simpson’s lawn, eyeing Glen suspiciously.

  “Get over here!” Fia stopped just short of the hedge, waving her hand, then shooing the dog. Take a hike, buster, or I’ll be having doggy burgers for dinner tonight, she warned.

  The lab tucked his tail between his legs and took off down the sidewalk in the direction he’d come.

  Glen pulled up and walked around in a circle, trying to catch his breath.

  “Did she take anything?” Fia asked him.

  “No, I don’t think so. I don’t know, but she ran when she saw me.”

  “You probably just scared her. Let me handle this,” she said. Then to Kaleigh, “I said, get over here.” She pointed to the grass beside her.

  Kaleigh squeezed between two bushes, still considering the male FBI agent warily.

  “He’s with me,” Fia assured her.

  “Something of interest to you in the post office, young lady?” Glen demanded.

  “Special Agent Duncan, please,” Fia said. “This is Kaleigh Kahill.”

  “Another relative?”

  �
��Distant.”

  Glen studied the teenager. She glared back.

  Please, be careful, Fia warned telepathically. “Kaleigh, do you mind telling us what you were doing in the rear of the post office? Didn’t you notice the door was taped off? Surely you knew you didn’t belong there.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” the redhead flung back. “I was just looking around.”

  “Do you know something about Mr. McCathal’s death?” Glen asked.

  “No more than anyone else in town.”

  Fia brushed her hand against the girl’s arm. “You didn’t touch anything?”

  “No. I just wanted to see if the blood was still there. Meg said her Uncle Mahon said there were gallons of blood. I said she was lying because you don’t have gallons of blood. Everyone knows that!”

  Fia glanced at Glen. He seemed to be relaxing a little. He was obviously pissed off, but she could see that he was beginning to see what this was, and that was nothing more than a nosy teenager being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “Where’s your mom and dad?” Fia asked.

  “I don’t know. Home, I guess.”

  Fia looked to Glen. “Why don’t I walk her home, speak to her parents. You better get back to the sisters. Officer Hill was the only other person left in the building and those ladies are liable to tag-team him and take him down with their armored purses.”

  She said it with a straight face and heavily laced with sarcasm. To her surprise, Glen grinned.

  She liked being surprised by humans. They didn’t do it often.

  “Count yourself lucky this time, Miss Kahill,” he warned Kaleigh with an accusing finger. “I catch you poking around my crime scene again, I don’t care who you’re related to, you’ll be arrested.”

  Kaleigh opened her mouth to respond, then, wisely, clamped it shut.

  Fia grabbed the teenager and steered her to the sidewalk and toward home. “Give me a couple of minutes, Special Agent Duncan. I’m going to escort Kaleigh home and speak with her parents. You can tell Miss Ross—my Miss Ross—she’s free to go. I don’t have any more questions for her.”

  He hesitated, then lifted his hand and headed off in the opposite direction. Fia hustled Kaleigh down the street, waiting until Glen was out of earshot before she spoke.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Fia demanded from between clenched teeth. “Didn’t you hear me telepathically?”

  The girl looked up with bright blue eyes. “No, I didn’t,” she said in the same indignant tone Fia heard from human teenagers. “I’m only ten months old, remember?”

  Chapter 5

  Fia halted, looking down at Kaleigh. This was always awkward—when sept members of prominence were reborn and had to repeat the first stages of their lives. Had to grow back into the men and women they had once been.

  The girl thrust out one hip and planted her hand on it. “The gift hasn’t come yet,” she said, speaking as if Fia was an idiot. “I can’t hear you. I can’t hear any of your or anyone else’s babbling.”

  Fia grabbed the teen’s upper arm none-too-gently and started down the sidewalk again. “You shouldn’t speak rudely to your elders.”

  “If you recall, I’m your elder.”

  “Well, I’m on the High Council and you’re not, smart-ass.”

  Kaleigh pulled her arm from Fia’s grip. “I don’t know what the big deal is. I was just looking around. I wanted to know what happened to Bobby.”

  “So do the rest of us.” Fia glanced at the teen. “And you don’t have any idea? No visions?”

  “Derek says somebody watched one too many slasher movies and went on a rampage. He’s this human boy I met when I was working at the diner. He goes to my school. He’s pretty cool.”

  “You shouldn’t be talking to human boys.”

  “I go to school with them, how can I not talk to them?” Again, the tone.

  For many years, teenagers were homeschooled in Clare Point, but eventually, with the arrival of the twentieth century and the state’s control over education, it had been a General Council decision to allow teens to attend the public school in the neighboring town. Though tricky at times, it was a good way for the newly reborn to assimilate into human society again.

  “We’re supposed to try to fit in,” Kaleigh observed. “Remember?”

  “So you’ve gotten nothing on Bobby? Not even a feeling?” Fia asked.

  Kaleigh was the sept’s wisewoman. She had powerful telepathic abilities and unheralded wisdom which seemed to increase with each life cycle. Unfortunately, because she had only recently been reborn, her gifts had not yet returned. After rebirth, it took most vampires eight to ten years to become adults. It was always a vulnerable time for the sept when Kaleigh began a new life cycle, because they relied on her a great deal to guide them and keep them safe.

  “Derek’s really cute, too,” Kaleigh went on. “He surfs. He keeps saying he’s going to teach me.” She shrugged. “I don’t know when. He has this friend Kyle and he works at a surf shop in Rehoboth Beach. He says he can get me a good deal on a used board. He goes to my school, too. You ever surfed, Fia? Derek says if I go with him, he’ll let me use his board. He’s been trying all summer to get me to go with him.”

  Fia looked at her, perplexed. “Go where?”

  Kaleigh rolled her eyes. “Not go somewhere. Go with him. You know, like go out.”

  “You’re fourteen. How old is he?”

  “Fifteen,” she said, defensively.

  “So how can you go on a date? Neither of you can drive.”

  Kaleigh rolled her eyes again and groaned. “It’s not like back in the day when you were this age, Fia. We’d just go out…you know, hang out together.”

  “You mean have sex?” They reached Kaleigh’s front yard and Fia lifted the latch on the gate of the white picket fence. “Because you know very well that’s forbidden. Nothing has changed. You have to reach twenty-one again, and then only with a consenting sept member.”

  Kaleigh closed the gate behind them. “I know, I know, because I might lose control, bite somebody, drink their blood, and then he’d be one of us.” She rattled off the warning she’d no doubt heard a hundred times. “But does that really happen?” she scoffed. “Or is that just one more story you guys tell to scare us?”

  “Kaleigh, a year ago, you were one of us, warning teenagers of the dangers of sex with humans.”

  “But I don’t remember that.” She threw up her hands in exasperation. “All I know is what you guys tell me. Mandy says you’re all lying. It’s all a big conspiracy.”

  “What is?”

  “The whole story about how we can make one of them into one of us.”

  “What about Victor? Shannon?”

  “Maybe that’s all lies, too. To keep us here. Keep us down.” The teen dropped down on the whitewashed step of her front porch. “Guys are really into us, you know. Girls from Clare Point. We have a reputation for not putting out the way human girls do, so I guess that makes us celebrities or something.”

  Fia glanced away. She really didn’t want to get into a conversation about vampire sex with Kaleigh. Not now, not ever, if she could help it. The whole subject made her uncomfortable because she still had her own struggles with it.

  But Kaleigh obviously wanted to talk and it was Fia’s responsibility as a member of the community to help one of their own through this difficult time. Reluctantly, she sat down beside the teenager on the top step. She removed her sunglasses from her suit jacket pocket and slid them on. The whole thing about vampires not being able to stand the light of day was pretty much a product of Stoker’s fiction, but the sun’s glare did give her a headache sometimes.

  “Kaleigh…” Fia attempted to choose her words carefully so as not to extend the conversation any longer than absolutely necessary. “No one is lying to you. Why would we? We’ve all been through this time and time again. We know how hard it is to be reborn and lose so many memories and abilities, and how dangerous
.”

  “But they’re so cute.”

  Fia looked at Kaleigh, not following.

  “The human boys.” The girl shrugged slender shoulders. “Different than sept boys. Cuter.” She looked at Fia earnestly. “Don’t you find human men crazy hot? Like…almost irresistible?”

  Talk about a loaded question.

  Fia clasped her hands, threading her fingers, lowering her head. Kaleigh didn’t remember Ian, yet. Didn’t remember the night that he and his vampire slayers murdered so many Kahills. Didn’t understand that it was Fia who had brought them. Fia who had betrayed her own people by loving a human.

  One of the hardest things for Fia about being a vampire was that your past never stayed in the past; it had to be retold again and again…

  “It doesn’t matter if we find them attractive, Kaleigh. It’s dangerous. For us. For them. We now exist to protect humans; a great responsibility has been placed in our hands.”

  Kaleigh leaned back on her elbows against the step and stared up at the blue sky. “Where do you think Bobby’s head is? And why take his feet?” She looked quizzically at Fia. “Derek said there was this guy in the Midwest back in the fifties who used to kill women and cut their heads off and like, put them on his bedposts and stuff. Do you think the head smelled? I mean, did he spray them with disinfectant or something?”

  Fia exhaled, rising from the step, wondering what had made her think she could ever have a serious conversation with Kaleigh in the first place. The girl was like any fourteen-year-old human right now: unable to focus, with irrational priorities. “Stay away from the post office and Special Agent Duncan, and stay away from the humans. I’m warning you.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Take it from a person who knows from experience. If you don’t, you’ll be spending the next couple of centuries trying to make up for it.”

  That night, Fia waited, stretched out fully clothed in the motel room until one A.M. Then she slipped out of the room. As she walked down the center of the vacant street, other adult sept members joined her in her silent march. Heads bowed, they wove single file down the street, around the massive old brick church, to the cemetery behind it. Shrouded in heavy, dark shadows, the above-ground graves and mausoleums looked like stacked dominoes. All of them empty graves, dug over the centuries to facilitate the lie they all lived.