Eternal

by V. K. Forrest

  Bobby McCathal would be the first Kahill to be buried in this churchyard who would not rise from the dead on the third day following his death. It was difficult to kill a vampire, almost impossible. The only way to prevent the soul from reentering the body after a fatal injury was to separate the head from the body and destroy the flesh with fire. Some called it God’s curse. Others believed it was God’s last gift to his outcast children, for so long as they could retain their earthly bodies, there was still a hope of salvation of their souls.

  Inside the gates of the graveyard, the group huddled together under a weeping willow tree that had been planted by Fia’s grandfather, the sept leader, more than two hundred years ago. Crickets chirped. Rodents scurried in the tall grasses beyond the black iron fence. The waning half-moon hung low in the sky, casting yellow light through the trees of the wildlife preserve beyond the churchyard.

  At first, everyone kept their thoughts to themselves, fingers of the moon’s shadows playing over their faces. Some prayed, some held hands. Bobby’s two Marys wept softly, holding hands, united tonight in their sorrow. Fia wished she had not come, but she had been compelled like all Kahills but the very youngest and oldest of the sept. One by one they joined the group until they were close to two hundred strong. Then the thoughts began to flow and Fia was caught up and swept away in the tide of their fear and sorrow.

  My Bobby, my dear, sweet Bobby.

  How could such a thing happen? How, I ask ye?

  “Tis impossible. This is impossible, isn’t it?

  My dear Bobby, my dear, sweet son.

  The killer couldn’t have known what Bobby was.

  An accident. A coincidence. So many madmen in the world today.

  Couldn’t know who we are….

  Fia felt bombarded by those around her. Men and women she had laughed with, cried with, loved, hated, for centuries. It wasn’t just the words hounding her conscience, it was their emotions. Like her dad, she had never been good with her own feelings or anyone else’s, but after Ian, it had become even worse. Harder. It was one of the reasons her career choice in this life cycle suited her so well. FBI agents didn’t have to rely on emotions, not when they had investigative techniques, forensic science, and political pull.

  How?

  Why?

  Who could have done this?

  Have they found us?

  Found us at last?

  The proverbial “they”. But in this case, the threat was very real. “They” were the vampire slayers. The men the sept had been hiding from on the peaceful shores of America for the last three hundred years.

  What if it’s worse?

  Worse? What could be worse?

  One of us.

  Hearing the words in her head made Fia shudder. It had been a possibility she had been trying to avoid for two days. Mungo was right. To be killed by one of their own would be worse. But she still wasn’t convinced by the evidence that this crime, however horrendous, was anything more than the killing she had seen in the alley in Lansdowne the other night. Some sick bastard.

  “Please, everyone.” Their chieftain, Gair, dressed in plaid shorts and a SURF THE NET T-shirt emblazoned with a surfboard, held his thick, wrinkled hands high in the air. At the age of seventy-three and nearing the end of this life cycle, Fia’s grandfather resembled Spencer Tracy—not when he was young, but as he appeared in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Inherit the Wind. The resemblance was so uncanny that in the summer months he was something of a celebrity among the summer visitors.

  Fia loved Spencer Tracy. She loved her grandfather more. In all these years, he was one of the few people who she believed had truly forgiven her for her transgression.

  “Please,” Gair repeated, trying to speak above the voices. “We cannot stay here long. There are still humans among us.”

  Human police.

  Not just police. Visitors. Mary Kay’s got a couple at the inn.

  Not police. FBI.

  That’s even worse.

  Fia brought him.

  She shouldn’t have brought him.

  There was so much disorder, verbally as well as telepathically, that Fia only caught bits and pieces. She couldn’t tell who was speaking or thinking what. What she did know was that her people were frightened. And angry.

  “I know you have questions,” their chieftain said, lowering his hands. “We all do, but for now, there aren’t that many answers.” He turned around to face Fia, who had been standing several rows back, trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible. “Fee, have you something to say? Something to comfort us?”

  She looked down at her feet, then up again. All eyes were on her. Some supportive, but many accusing. “Um…as you know, the FBI has launched a full investigation into Bobby’s death.”

  Shouldn’t have ’em here. Should settle the matter ourselves. Find the feckin’ bastard who did this ourselves.

  She glanced in the direction of Victor Thomas, a cantankerous, grizzled old fisherman who hated Fia, but no more than he hated the rest of them. “Because Bobby worked for the federal government and the crime—”

  The murder…

  “The crime took place,” Fia continued, “on federal property, we had no choice in the matter. But Bill…Senator Malley was looking out for us. He made sure I was called in, even though Clare Point isn’t in my jurisdiction.”

  “What about the other agent?” a woman demanded. “The human? Why is he here?”

  “A minor snag in the bureaucracy. This is his jurisdiction.”

  “We don’t want him here.”

  It’s not safe.

  “I don’t like him being here any more than you do,” Fia assured the crowd. “But I promise you, I’m keeping an eye on him and he should be out of town by tomorrow, the following day at the latest.”

  “Still no idea who did this, Fee?”

  She turned in the direction the voice had come from. “We’re doing everything we can, but so far, as Gair said, we have little information.”

  “Tell us this.” Her father stepped forward, his voice grave. “Was it a coincidence, Bobby bein’ beheaded, or do we have a bigger problem?”

  She knew what he was thinking without reading his thoughts. The same thing they were all thinking. Had Bobby been killed by one of the maniacs the world was so full of these days, just a sick coincidence that he was murdered in the one way that could actually kill him? Had one of their own killed him, a crime that had only been committed three times in all these centuries? Or did a human know Bobby McCathal was a vampire?

  Chapter 6

  Fia was in her cubicle in the bull pen in the FBI office in Philly by nine-thirty Friday morning. She would have been back earlier, but Glen had insisted on sitting down to breakfast at the motel and reviewing the case before they went their separate ways.

  She had thought the meeting a waste of time. Both of them knew exactly what they had, or more importantly, didn’t have. Bobby McCathal’s body, released this morning, would be buried in the town’s cemetery the following day without his head and feet. The body parts had not been located, and there were no leads as to where to look for them or who could have committed the crime. Fia knew that Glen knew that with every twenty-four hours that passed, it was less likely the case would be closed quickly. Often, if a suspect was not immediately apprehended, the murder would be solved not by superior detective work, as on the TV shows Sean Kahill watched, but by the perp telling someone who would tell someone else. The criminals couldn’t keep their mouths shut. It was never a matter of if they would tell, but how long it would take. Eventually, a lead would get back to the police. Nonetheless, over hot tea and a cold bagel, Fia let Glen talk. They both took copies of the file and the photos and left Clare Point by 7:30 A.M.

  Fia slipped out of her suit jacket and threw it over the back of her chair. When she sat down, the chair popped and lurched to one side, nearly throwing her to the floor. “Son of a bitch. Moron!” She got out of the chair, dragging it out of her
cubicle and into the one beside her.

  “What?” Her fellow agent Jeff Morone glanced up innocently from his computer monitor.

  “Get out of it,” she threatened.

  He chuckled and rose from his seat. Charlie Alston, in the next cubicle over, laughed, but didn’t dare show his face.

  Fia grabbed the desk chair Jeff had been sitting in and wheeled it around the half wall to her desk, biting back the threats and curses—some literal—on the tip of her tongue. She knew the more she said, the more the agents would laugh and the more likely it would be that they’d play another practical joke on her the next time she left the office. With only four female agents on the floor, the office was like Boy Scout camp; the practical jokes and farting and burping contests never ended.

  She plopped back down in her own chair and hit a series of numbers on the phone on her desk, retrieving her messages. Twenty-two calls, but nothing earth-shattering. She listened to each one, making notes, deleting, saving. She’d half hoped she would hear from Lieutenant Sutton on the Lansdowne murder; it had been on her mind on and off all week. She kept going back to the dead woman, splayed in the alley, and the oddity of the familiarity she couldn’t shake, but she couldn’t identify, either.

  Nothing from Sutton. Two messages this morning already from her mother asking why she wouldn’t be returning to Clare Point for Bobby’s official funeral. Despite the truth of Bobby’s death, with all the outsiders poking around, it was necessary for the sept to go through the motions of a funeral.

  One disturbing call.

  Fia played it back twice to be sure she had identified the caller correctly, then she spent the next two hours returning phone calls and following up on several projects she’d left on her desk. She finally called him around noon. She got his voice mail. There was no doubt in her mind it was him. She left a curt message that she would see him at ten-thirty at the designated meeting place. She spent the rest of the day cleaning off her desk, her thoughts bouncing between Bobby’s missing head and Joseph’s resurrection.

  Fia strode into the dark, smoky bar, ignoring the gazes that followed her. The low whistles, the single bold catcall. She liked the fact that New Jersey hadn’t yet banned smoking in public places. She knew it was bad for her lungs, but the haze served as a shroud, distancing the patrons from each other. From themselves. Here, in a crowded bar on a Friday night in August, Fia, like so many others, could lose her identity. Take on another.

  She smelled him before she saw him and it stopped her dead. She closed her eyes for a second, breathing deeply. His scent was different from Ian’s, from Arlan’s, from Glen’s. Somewhere mingled in the aroma of desires, hers and his, was the sharp bite of regret.

  She was almost on him before he turned on the barstool. His instincts were good, though not as sharp as hers. Never would be, but still, she knew he felt her presence.

  “Fia.” He looked her up and down, his gaze somewhere between that of a hawk’s and a vulture’s. “You’re looking good.”

  He hadn’t aged a bit. He had used money and facials to his definite advantage. He was movie star good-looking; dark haired, blue eyed with a patrician nose. Nice clothes; slacks, a designer oxford and Italian loafers. He reeked of sex appeal and expensive cologne.

  “Not bad yourself.” She made a point of imitating his scrutiny, eating him up with her eyes.

  “Still teetotaling?”

  She slid onto the polished chrome bar stool beside him, giving the gawking men a glimpse of her bare inner thigh before swinging her legs around. The motion got an audible response. Humans didn’t have nearly the sense of smell that vampires had, but there wasn’t a man between the ages of thirteen and ninety-three that couldn’t recognize the scent of a woman wearing no panties.

  “Perrier with lime,” she told the bartender, who stared at her breasts spilling over the lacy bodice of the black camisole she wore.

  He poured the drink, still watching.

  “Another.” Joseph pushed his low ball glass across the bar, toward the bartender.

  “Why are you here?” She stared straight ahead, purposely avoiding eye contact with him, watching the reflections of the crowd in the massive mirror over the bar. “What do you want?”

  “Still the warm, fuzzy gal I knew.”

  “We agreed it was best if you stayed on the West Coast.”

  “Best for whom?”

  She sipped her sparkling water, savoring the sharp, clean flavor. Though they were not touching, she could feel the warmth of his skin and when she turned to look at him, her gaze settled on the pulse of his throat. She could feel his heart beating, almost see the blood pumping through his jugular. There were other places equally efficient to harvest blood, but it was blood from the jugular that always seemed the sweetest, the most satisfying.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” she said, looking down into her glass.

  “You didn’t answer mine.”

  “Joseph—”

  She felt his hand on hers and she looked down at it on the bar. It didn’t seem real, but waxlike and disembodied. Her thoughts drifted.

  Why had the killer taken Bobby’s feet? Was the fact that his feet were missing an indication that the beheading had been a mere coincidence? She wanted to think so. Sweet God of St. Patrick, she wanted badly to think so.

  Joseph squeezed her hand and his face came into focus. He had that look of a man who knew how attractive he was. He knew how to manipulate people with his sexy good looks and charm.

  It was hard to believe now that Fia had once thought herself in love with him. She had once adored everything about him; his voice, the way he moved, the way he spoke. It had not been just his face that she had thought beautiful, but also his thighs, his chest, his arms, and especially his hands. As perfect as a Da Vinci drawing. They looked like the hands of a surgeon.

  “A physicians’ conference or something?” Fia sipped her drink, her voice intentionally detached. As cool as the sweaty glass in her hand. “That why you’re here? Thought you’d check out the old stomping grounds?”

  He sipped his vodka on the rocks, his sensual lips forming around the rim of the glass. “We’re opening a new office, my partner and I. Here on the East Coast, I think.”

  She lifted her gaze, locking with his as she pulled her hand out from under his. “Joseph, you can’t do that.”

  “I can. I have.”

  “It’s not safe,” she insisted, pushing off the barstool. She hadn’t expected this, not even after his phone call. Not now; she couldn’t handle Joseph’s return now.

  Suddenly she was suffocating. The smoke. The scent of the humans and their pulsing blood. The reflections in the mirror over the bar had suddenly turned hazy. They were no longer human, but ghosts of her past floating by, some uncannily silent, others shrieking in her head.

  “Once again,” he said as he watched the ice cubes dance in the bottom of his glass. “Not safe for whom?”

  Overwhelmed by the sudden emotion that welled inside her, Fia strode away. She ignored his voice calling her name. Ignored the ghosts-turned-men-and-women-again that stared. She walked out of the bar and into hot, humid night air. She had fully intended to go straight to her car, but found herself, minutes later, on another barstool. The man next to her was not nearly as good-looking as Joseph, but he wore a nice suit and he was drinking an eighteen-year-old scotch. She let him buy her a Perrier.

  The darkness, the closeness of the humans, the sound of the suit’s voice whirled around her, pulsing to the beat of the music blaring through the speakers cleverly hidden in the ceiling. The suit was a litigation attorney. In half an hour’s time, she knew the name of several of his socialite clients, that he made in the high six figures annually, and why he and his wife had divorced. Lack of sexual adventure was, of course, a major issue with him and Penny…Peggy…Pilly.

  She didn’t catch his name either. Didn’t want to be able to recall it in the morning.

  Fia didn’t know what she was going
to do about Joseph. She had an appointment with her shrink next week. Dr. Kettleman would want to talk about it. They’d talk about Bobby, too. About Fia’s feelings of inadequacy when she went home. About how guilty she felt about the fact that her father was still disappointed in her.

  The suit continued to talk, continued to order himself drinks. He was pretty loaded. At first, he had taken her for a high-class hooker, which had amused her. She guessed they didn’t see many professional women in Jersey wearing skirts as short as hers. He kept telling her how beautiful she was, how intimidating she had to be to some men. He was not, however, intimidated. Too drunk or too stupid, she guessed.

  Fia sat there listening to him ramble on about his accomplishments and how he had just bought a penthouse apartment overlooking the river. It was probably Pottery Barn furnished with a small wet bar in the living room and six-hundred-count sateen sheets on the bed.

  When he asked her if she’d like to come back to his place to see it, she had known she should say no. Known she had to, but he made it so easy. They could walk, he said, which immediately made her think of the dark streets, poorly lit alleyways.

  And he was so stinkin’ drunk….

  As she walked out of the bar on his arm, she considered warning him of the dangers of picking up women in bars. From a law-enforcement point of view, he was playing with fire. In his state, he could easily be robbed, worst-case scenario, murdered, not to mention the risk of blood loss….

  They walked past the bar where she had met Joseph earlier. She no longer sensed his presence. Angry with her for walking out on him, he had probably gone off hunting on his own. She doubted Joseph had any trouble picking up women in bars.