Eternal

by V. K. Forrest

  The suit was polite enough. He walked on the street side of the sidewalk and when they stopped to wait for a light, he moved to kiss her. He was only a little clumsy. His mouth was cool and smoky-tasting. The scotch. And when she slid her palm over his chest, beneath his suit jacket and up to the pulse on his throat, he moaned, thinking her good at foreplay, no doubt.

  Her own pulse quickened and she felt the first prickling of desire.

  They crossed the street.

  “There a shortcut?” she whispered huskily in his ear. Once the urge began, it built quickly, urgently.

  She knew she shouldn’t do it….

  He laughed and stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to kiss her again, this time awkwardly groping her breast.

  She pushed his hand away, pretending to be playful.

  Walk away, the voice of reason urged. You get caught hunting humans and you’ll be sanctioned. You’ll be removed from the High Council and ordered to return to Clare Point where you’ll be forced to remain until your next life cycle. But already her head was buzzing, her fingertips tingling in anticipation.

  “This way,” the suit said, taking her hand, leading her between a deli and a flower shop.

  Halfway down the alley, deep inside the shadows of the two-story buildings, she halted. He stumbled, reached out and grabbed her around the waist, laughing. He thought it was all part of the pick-up game. She let him kiss her, let him thrust his human tongue into her mouth and then she let him caress her breast to distract him as she drew her mouth to the pulse of his neck. He must have shaved very early in the morning because he already had beard stubble.

  She licked his skin, testing the waters, as it were, giving his groin a stroke for good measure. He threw his head back, exposing his neck even further, groaning with pleasure.

  They were so easy when they were intoxicated….

  Excitement washed over Fia, an excitement akin to the moment just before orgasm when every nerve was tingling, every fiber of muscle tensed. Heat rose in her face, her nipples hardening beneath the lace of her bra.

  He barely flinched when she sank her teeth into him and it was her own moan she heard in her ears.

  She gripped him tightly in her arms as his body went limp and he slipped into unconsciousness. His blood was hot and thick and sweet on her tongue. Somewhere, in the depths of the honey was the taste of the scotch he had drunk. Fia had to struggle with every ounce of restraint she possessed not to take any more.

  She had to stop…but just one more sip…

  She groaned as she forced herself to release him and ease him to the ground, taking care she didn’t leave him in a rotting pile of garbage or animal excrement. He would wake up soon, unharmed, without memory beyond a tall, attractive redhead in a short skirt, and hopefully, tomorrow he would think better of drinking too much and picking up strangers in bars.

  Fia hurried off into the darkness of the alley, running for her car. Shame burned on her face and the heat mixed with the thrill of the deed until she could no longer separate one from the other.

  Back at her apartment, disgusted with herself, Fia undressed in the dark and stuffed her clothes in the back of her closet. At first, she tried not to think about what she had done, but the denial never lasted long. Her face was warm and flushed with the shame of what she had done. By the time she showered, dried off, and slipped into gym shorts and an old T-shirt, serious remorse had begun to set in.

  Lying in bed, surrounded by the scent of fabric softener, she stared at the ceiling fan, watching the blades spin. Her cat, Sam, a fat old Persian with thick black fur and a sagging belly, lay beside her, purring contentedly, making no judgments. Fia was able to do that all on her own.

  She had been doing so well. It had been weeks since she had taken a human’s blood. What was wrong with her? Why had she allowed Joseph to push her buttons that way? Why had she taken it out on the suit in the bar, an innocent bystander?

  She thought about Special Agent Glen Duncan and the way he had looked at her that night when they walked back to the motel. The craving for human blood had started then. She hadn’t recognized it at the time, but in hindsight, she knew it was true. It went hand in hand, sexual desire and the thirst for human blood.

  Fia’s cell phone, on silent mode, vibrated on the nightstand and she stared at the glaring red numerals on the digital clock beside it. It was 3:05 A.M. She rolled onto her side, her back to the phone. It was the third time Joseph had called in the last hour.

  Chapter 7

  Joseph called her cell phone twice more Saturday. She ignored the calls, deleting his messages without listening to them. Juvenile, perhaps, but an effective form of avoidance.

  Properly contrite for what she had done to the attorney, she worked Saturday through the day, giving the taxpayers of America a good return on her salary. Work seemed more a refuge than usual. Fia found herself thankful the office was so blissfully quiet; thankful to be so engrossed in her paperwork that she didn’t think about Bobby’s headless body, now stored in the cooler of the only funeral home in Clare Point.

  Turning off her cell phone, she stayed in Saturday night with a rented DVD and Chinese takeout. Sunday, she slept in, changed the cat’s litter box, cleaned the bathroom, and took her elderly neighbor, Betty, to the grocery store.

  She and Betty Gold were good companions. Betty didn’t know Fia’s history, Fia didn’t know the German woman’s, and they both seemed content to leave it at that. Neither asked questions of the other. Betty never asked Fia why she came in so late so many nights a week dressed like a high-class hooker and Fia never asked her about her glass eye or the numeral tattooed on her forearm.

  Monday, Fia went through the motions at work. She followed up on cases and resisted pulling Bobby’s file out of her left-hand bottom drawer to study images of his headless, footless torso. Nothing had come back yet from forensics, not that she expected any worthwhile evidence. The scene had been too clean.

  That night, curled on the end of the couch, laptop balanced on her knees, she entered the tombs of FBI files and researched the decapitation of bodies. There were more recorded in the U.S. in the last twenty years than one would like to think. No mention of vampire decapitations.

  She took notes on the possible psychological reasons for removing and carrying off body parts and played with the idea of giving Special Agent Duncan a call, just to let him know what she learned, which was really very little. The human psyche was complicated and became even more complicated when murder was a factor.

  She thought about Glen. Wondered if he was on his laptop, sifting through the hundreds of pages of data available to agents or if he was out having a mai tai with his fiancée. It would be silly to call him at home. Inappropriate.

  When the phone rang at eight she saw her parents’ number on the caller ID screen and, against her better judgment, she answered. It was her mother, of course. To her recollection, her father had never called her, not since Alexander Bell’s invention of the telephone.

  “You’re home?”

  “I’m home, Ma. That’s why I answered my home phone.” Fia switched screens, closing the FBI file on a 1967 beheading in Louisiana—voo doo related—and opened her e-mail account.

  “You missed Bobby’s funeral. Your father said you wouldn’t come.”

  “I told you Thursday before I left I couldn’t come. I had cases on my desk; I worked all weekend.”

  “It was nice.”

  “Ma, how nice could it have been? You buried him without his head. His soul is burning in everlasting limbo, caught between this world and the next.”

  “I made soda bread to take to the wake. Tavia said it was the best I’d ever made. You didn’t find out who did it yet, did you? Killed Bobby? Your da says a drug-crazed teenager; the big cities are full of them.”

  It was her mother’s way of reminding Fia that she did not approve of her daughter living in the big city, even after all these years. It was Mary Kay Kahill’s belief that all of her chi
ldren should live within the safety of the Clare Point city limits.

  Relative safety.

  Fia deleted e-mails on her computer screen offering financial independence and extended erections. “We haven’t found the killer yet. It’s only been a week. Forensics haven’t come back. How are the Marys?”

  “Taking it hard, especially Mary McCathal.” Her mother took a tone of arrogance. “She was always weak, Mary McCathal. Taken easily to spells.”

  Fia wanted to suggest to her mother that she, too, might be “taken to spells,” should her husband, the father of her nine living children, be beheaded and his body burned, his soul condemned to eternal unrest, but she thought better of leading the conversation down that path. Then she’d never get off the phone with her mother. “Heard from Fin and Regan?” she asked, thinking the subject safer.

  “Not since Belfast a week ago.” Her mother’s Irish accent was generally faint, but her pronunciation of the capital city was thick, weighted by a mixture of hatred and longing. It had been three centuries since she had seen the meadows of her birthplace.

  “But you’re expecting them home soon?” Fia asked. “Last time I talked to Fin, he said the investigation wouldn’t take more than two to three weeks.”

  Her brothers were following a lead on a pedophile Scotland Yard had been unable to see convicted. It was the council’s practice to fully examine a case before a name could even be brought to the Watch list. Young, adventurous, and ambitious, though with different motivations, Fin and Regan were competing to take the next opening on the council’s kill team. Fia and Fin were close, had been since the beginning. It was different with Regan, the baby of the family and her father’s favorite, but Fia tried to keep the peace with him, mostly for Fin’s sake. The two brothers were more than brothers, they were best friends.

  “They’ll be home when they’re home,” her mother said, rather philosophically. “Regan said something about Romania.”

  “Anyone talk with them? From the council, I mean.” Fia set her laptop aside and Sam jumped down off the back of the couch and climbed into her lap. He kneaded her inner thigh with his broad paws. “Do they know about Bobby?”

  “You know I’m not privy to the council’s whims.” Her mother made no attempt to keep her resentment out of her voice. The seats on the council changed periodically. Upon death and rebirth of a member, he or she was replaced. Mary Kay had been replaced and though it had happened fifty years ago, her daughter being appointed had just added fuel to the flames of her indignation.

  “Ma, I should go. I’ve still got work to do.”

  “You work too hard. Arlan was asking for you at the wake. You like Arlan don’t you?”

  “Ma.”

  Her mother was silent on the other end of the phone for a moment and Fia raised her guard. Her mother’s psychic abilities had never been particularly strong, and they were even less effective with her daughter, but Fia could feel her probing.

  “What’s wrong, Fee?” her mother pressed.

  “I’m just tired.” With the next exhalation of breath, Fia let her guard down. “And Bobby. Ma, I know I see this kind of thing more often than most, but it still scares me. Scares me more because it’s one of us.”

  “That’s it?” She didn’t sound as if she believed her. “Nothing else going on?”

  And just like that, Fia raised the bars she had carefully constructed around her years ago to protect herself. “That’s not enough?” Fia pushed the cat off her lap and got up from the couch. “Tell Dad I said good night. I’ll call you in a couple days.”

  “Promise?” It was as close as her mother ever got to tenderness.

  “Promise.”

  “You should have called me right away,” Dr. Kettleman said.

  Fia shrugged, shifting on the edge of the couch. “I already had the appointment. I didn’t think a day or so would matter.”

  Kettleman didn’t reply, forcing Fia to eventually look up at her across the coffee table. They were sitting in the lounge, as the psychiatrist referred to the area of her office set in an alcove away from her desk and bookshelves. It was supposed to be a place where a patient could pretend she was at home and in a comfort zone where she felt free to speak. To feel. Fia wondered if she was alone among Kettleman’s patients in thinking she was far more comfortable in this lounge than in any living room her family possessed.

  Dr. Kettleman waited for Fia to begin the conversation. It was an annoying but effective technique. The scent of her Chanel perfume drifted.

  Fia studied the psychiatrist for a moment. She was dark-haired with a conservative shoulder-length bob and a structured gray suit. Wire-frame glasses in a world where most people wore contacts. She reminded Fia a little of Tony’s psychiatrist on The Sopranos, enough so that she wondered if Kettleman had done it purposefully.

  Fia was an HBO fan. She appreciated the stark reality, the irony, the dry humor.

  “If you’d have asked me a week ago, I would have told you there wasn’t a chance I would fall off the wagon,” Fia heard herself say. “I’ve been doing so well. It’s been months…”

  “And how did it make you feel,” the psychiatrist asked, watching Fia. “This fall.”

  Fia thought for a moment. The office was overly warm and she considered removing her jacket, but the psychiatrist was also wearing a suit jacket and she didn’t seem to be hot. “I felt like a failure, of course,” she said. “The loser my father always knew I could be.”

  “Pretty harsh judgment,” Kettleman observed.

  Fia studied the woman’s eyebrows. She had nicely shaped brows. Fia wondered if she had them waxed.

  “Do you feel this was a minor setback, Fia, or are you falling back into your dependence?”

  Fia thought about the tangy, sharp taste of the suit’s blood, the incredible rush it had given her. She suspected his blood was as intoxicating to her as any recreational drug on the market. “I’m not going to fall back into my old habits, if that’s what you’re asking,” she told the psychiatrist. “I’ve worked too hard to get where I am to take the chance of losing it all.” She sat back on the caramel-colored leather couch. “This is a minor setback. Nothing more.”

  Dr. Kettleman was silent again. It was the silences that could kill a woman. Make her want to kill herself.

  Suicide? Fia almost laughed aloud at the irony of it. If God had given the Kahill sept the option, wouldn’t they all have killed themselves a thousand years ago? It was one of the conventions of the mallachd that made it so cruel. Not only was it nearly impossible for a human to end a sept member’s life, but they could not end their own. On good days, Fia knew it was also a blessing from God.

  “Tell me about the other night. What happened with Joseph?” Kettleman asked in her passive psychiatrist’s voice.

  “I told you. He called. I met him. We had a drink and I left.”

  “What did he want?”

  Fia’s gaze drifted to the wall of diplomas behind the woman’s head. Undergraduate degree from Temple University. Medical degree from Johns Hopkins. The woman was no slouch.

  “I don’t know what he wanted,” Fia said, her own reflection in the glass over one of the diplomas making her uncomfortable. She needed a haircut. Her shoulder-length auburn hair was losing that razor-cut edge she liked. “I didn’t hang around long enough to ask.”

  “So you drove to New Jersey to meet your ex-boyfriend you haven’t seen in fifteen years and you didn’t stay long enough to ask why he called you?”

  Fia had to admit it sounded ridiculous when put that way, but obviously she had issues, otherwise she wouldn’t be paying for twice-monthly hour-long sessions with a shrink, would she?

  “It was harder than I thought it would be,” Fia said softly.

  “What was?”

  “Seeing him.” Fia was surprised by the emotion that caught in her throat. She picked at the shell button of her Ralph Lauren linen suit jacket. “Hearing his voice again.”

  “Do you still lo
ve him?”

  Fia looked up. “Of course not.”

  “Because…”

  “Because…” She looked down at the button between her fingers. “Because we were bad together. He was…it wasn’t a healthy relationship.”

  “And yet after all these years, he calls you and you still come running.”

  Fia frowned. “I’m not finding any of your comments today particularly helpful. You know I come here to feel better. To get you to help me figure out how to live day to day with who I am.”

  “How have the last six months been?” Dr. Kettleman crossed her legs. She had nice gams. “Just in general.”

  “Not bad. Pretty good,” Fia conceded. “At least until I was sent to my hometown to investigate a murder. Until someone I knew turned up decapitated and two exes came back from the dead to haunt me. All in one week, I might add.”

  For the first time since Fia arrived today, Dr. Kettleman smiled. “I don’t think you really need my help, Fia. You know your own weaknesses; the substance abuse, the sexual addiction. You know which relationships you have that are toxic. The past relationship with Joseph. The present relationship with your parents.”

  Silence stretched between them again. Dr. Kettleman waited. Fia sifted through her thoughts. Her emotions.

  “For months, I’ve felt so in control,” Fia said hesitantly. “And then I go back to Clare Point and suddenly nothing is what it was. I’m not what I thought I was.”

  Again, Dr. Kettleman smiled. “Life changes and we have to change with it. You have to accept that not even you, Special Agent Fia Kahill, are immune to loss, to death, to the innate need to be loved.”

  Fia released the button on her suit. “All my training and I have no clue where to find Bobby’s killer. No thought even where to begin.” She knew she was hopping around, subject to subject, but her sessions with Dr. Kettleman often went this way. It took days, sometimes weeks after an appointment for Fia to sort out everything they discussed.

  “You said the FBI sent a Baltimore FBI agent in because it was their jurisdiction. You said he looked like Ian. Tell me about him. Did you like him?”