His voice was so gentle, so compassionate that everyone in the room seemed to relax a little. Fia took a deep breath. She wasn’t going to be lynched. At least not tonight.
“So what do we do?” Tavia asked.
“Yes, what should we do, Fin?” another questioned.
“We should do what Fia asks. We stick together and don’t make unwarranted accusations, and we should keep an eye on each other.”
People nodded. A few made sounds of agreement. A hush was settling over the circle of men and women in the room. A calmness.
“Thank you, Fin,” Peigi said, smiling at him.
Fin smiled back, taking the empty chair.
Peigi checked her clipboard. “The only other subject we really need to discuss is the increasing complaints about the teenagers on the streets at night. I understand a dinghy was stolen the other night and it was found filled with shaving cream. And there’s the trees at city hall getting TPd again.”
Someone chuckled.
“It’s becoming a serious problem,” Rob argued defensively.
“Kids roaming the streets, kickin’ over garbage cans, horsin’ around, trampling flower beds,” Little Jimmy injected. “I for one think it’s time we did something about it. I been sayin’ for years, we need a curfew for these kids.”
“Jimmy, you’ve been complaining about the teenagers for at least five hundred years,” Mary Hall moaned. “Which is interesting, because I recall a certain person raising hell in his day.”
Everyone began to talk at once, all having a story about a teenager they knew or a prank they had pulled when they were teens. Thankful the attention had shifted to another subject, Fia slipped into her chair. Peigi let the conversations go on for two or three minutes and then began to strike her pen on the side of her chair, getting everyone’s attention again. “If you have something to say, give me a nod, raise your hand, I’ll call on you.”
“Exactly what is the complaint?” Tavia asked. “Vandalism?”
“Here and there, some graffiti on the boathouses, a few stolen crab pots,” Peigi responded.
“Human shenanigans,” Rob scoffed.
Several more comments were thrown into the ring.
“Yes, Mungo,” Peigi said, recognizing the portly man in the madras plaid shorts.
The voices died down.
“I for one, in light of what’s been going on around here, am concerned for the safety of these kids, not our damned dinghies. They’re at a vulnerable age. The boys are mostly out chasin’ deer, stealin’ rowboats, harmless stuff, but the girls are who we ought to be worried about. There’s a group of them spending an awful lot of time with human boys.”
“You know what they’re doing don’t you?” Eva spoke up, amusement in her voice. “Same thing we were all trying to do at their age.”
“It’s forbidden,” Mary Hall said flatly. “Sex is strictly forbidden before the age of twenty-one and certainly with humans.”
“I’m not saying it’s right.” Eva shifted her long legs. “I’m just saying we all know that’s what it’s about.”
“It’s mostly flirtation,” Rob threw in. “Harmless teenage stuff. We all did it. Those girls aren’t having sex with those boys. They know better.”
“Right. Just like you weren’t jumping that cute little blonde back when we were in high school?” Rob’s brother Joe teased. “What was her name? Samantha W—”
“I think we’re getting off the subject here,” Rob interrupted, his face reddening. “I don’t know that we need to set a curfew, but it wouldn’t hurt to talk to the teenagers, would it?”
“Maybe talk to Kaleigh?” Mary Hall crossed her arms over her chest and sat back in her folding chair. “She’s the one I see out at all hours of the night. Flirting with those human boys who work at the diner and the ice-cream shop. She ought to know better!”
Fia glanced across the circle at her brother. Though Fin wasn’t smiling, she could tell by the twinkle in his eyes that he was amused.
“I have a suggestion,” he said.
At once, everyone quieted.
“Why don’t we all make a point this week to talk to our teens, those of us who have them in our homes or in our families? I don’t mind talking to my little brothers. Rob, you wouldn’t mind talking to your niece, would you? And Mary, you’ve always had a way with our teens. You’d be surprised, but I bet Kaleigh might listen to you better than her own parents right now. She’s always admired you.”
Mary Hall sat up straighter in her chair. “She has?”
The meeting only ran another ten minutes and when it was over, Fia was quick to grab her chair, add it to the stack against the wall, and make a beeline for the door. As she slipped down the hall, she looked back, thinking that if she could catch Fin’s attention, she’d tell him she’d wait for him outside. But when she saw him surrounded by several women, all vying for his attention, she knew he might be another hour.
Just as she was about to turn away, he saw her and held up his hand, telling her to wait.
She didn’t really want to. She wanted to go back to the B and B and get some sleep. She just wanted to put the council meeting and the whole day behind her. But she couldn’t say no to Fin. Never could.
He was out in record time and breezed past her on the sidewalk. “You coming? We’re late.”
“Late for what?” she asked suspiciously.
“You know.” He turned to face her and in the dim yellow moonlight she saw him arch his dark eyebrows comically.
“Oh, no, Fin.” She hurried after him. “Absolutely not.” She glanced behind her to see who was coming out the door. It was hard-of-hearing Little Jimmy, talking loudly to one of the Marys. Fia hurried to catch up to her brother. “We can’t. You can’t,” she whispered under her breath. “Fin, that’s been outlawed for two hundred years.”
Chapter 13
“Fin, this is a bad idea. Fin!”
He veered off the street, cutting through an alley.
“Come on.” She practically begged him. “Let’s go home. Please? It’s late. You don’t need any blood tonight.”
“What I need tonight…what you need,” he shot over his shoulder, “is a little fun.”
“Fin!” Fia sprinted to catch up. Once her brother made up his mind, she knew she had two choices. She could go back to the B and B and let him find his own way out of the mess he’d get himself into, or she could go with him and attempt to keep him out of trouble.
Only four blocks from their parents’, on a street that overlooked the bay, they entered a dilapidated house through the back door. Though it was close to 3 A.M., the elderly Mrs. Hill, Eva’s mother, Petey’s aunt, was seated at her kitchen table. Dressed in a flowered, cotton nightgown, she was eating chocolate-chip cookies and drinking blood from a cut-crystal claret glass while she read a tabloid newspaper that sported the headline “Hollywood Werewolf Party Crashed by Rappers.”
“Good evening, Mrs. Hill,” Fin said with his usual charm.
“Evening, Fin.” Mrs. Hill looked up over the rims of her pink rhinestone-studded reading glasses, her cheeks coloring.
“Good evening, Mrs. Hill.” Fia followed Fin through the kitchen.
The old woman returned her gaze to the paper.
Fin opened the creaky white paneled door that led into the basement of the turn-of-the-century house. Heavy metal music wafted up the staircase. Judas Priest.
Fia darted down. Sweet Mary, Mother of Christ, she hadn’t heard Judas Priest in twenty years.
Fin followed, pulling the door shut behind him, enveloping them in darkness. The walls pulsed with the heavy, pounding music and lights flashed below, reflecting rhythmically off the mason jars that lined the shelves on both sides of the stairwell. Mrs. Hill had canned peaches, green beans, beets, and what appeared to be pickles. The canning jars had to have been there for at least forty years.
“Since when did you start hanging out with Eva?” Fia whispered, glancing over her shoulder at him as sh
e tried to make it down the steps without breaking her neck. “And Mrs. Hill? She’s ar mire.”
Fin shrugged. “Not any crazier than the rest of them. And she’s nice to me.”
“Everyone’s nice to you,” Fia grumbled.
“She makes me cookies.”
Fia stepped out of the stairwell into the room and was instantly transported through time, back to the eighties and her teenage years. The old brick basement looked just as it had the year Eva’s parents remodeled it in the late seventies: cheap paneling, a clumsy, stained-pine bar built against one wall, plaid Berber carpet under her feet. There was gray pleather modular seating along one wall, a pool table on the other.
The room was smoky and smelled of mildew, beer, cigarettes, and vampires on the prowl. “Who are all these people?” Fia marveled, repelled and yet fascinated at the same time.
The basement room was wall-to-wall with men and women dressed in black leather, chains, tight T-shirts, fishnet stockings, and bustiers. Their inky dyed hair was sleeked back in bizarre styles and many of them, their faces painted white, wore black lipstick and heavy eyeliner.
“You know, brother dear, these aren’t real vampires,” Fia whispered loudly in Fin’s ear. “What are they doing here?”
He flashed a mischievous grin. “What do you think?”
She gave him a none-too-gentle shove. “Fin, you can’t do that. It’s not allowed.”
He shrugged. “Gray area. They’re here of their own free will. They say they’re vampires. They want us to drink their blood.” He pointed to her as he passed her. “You want a beer, sugar britches?” he asked with a sweet southern accent. Fin had a way with languages and accents; he could imitate anyone on earth from a southern belle to an eighty-year-old Mongolian yak herder.
She shook her head furiously. “No, what I want is for you to—” Her voice was lost in a sudden rise in the volume of the music as the lead vocalist worked himself into a frenzy.
“You came. Oh, God, I can’t believe you came!”
Fia felt a hand on her shoulder and spun around.
Eva threw herself into Fia’s arms and smacked a wet one on her lips. It was all Fia could do to not wipe her mouth with the back of her hand as she stumbled back. “Eva.”
“I’m so glad you came.” Dressed similarly to the vampire impersonators, Eva clasped Fia’s hand. She was wearing black lace fingerless gloves.
Fia pressed her lips together, tasting the waxy black lipstick that had smeared off Eva’s lips onto her own.
“I wanted to invite you myself, tonight, at the council meeting. I really did,” Eva gushed. “But I didn’t want to put you in a bad position, you know, you being on the high council and all, but I told Fin you were invited. I told him I really wanted you to come.”
She sounded high. On what, Fia was unsure; drugs, alcohol…maybe just human blood. In small amounts, it caused euphoria. Too much, and a Kahill became downright intoxicated. Fia eyed Eva. She must have performed quite the vanishing act to have gotten here and dressed so quickly. She couldn’t have been more than ten minutes ahead of Fia and Fin. But Eva had the rare gift of being able to teleport small objects as well as herself. A regular Samantha Stevens among them.
“I…I just stopped by for a minute.” Fia attempted to extricate herself from Eva’s grip. “I really shouldn’t be here. The council…” Not to mention the Bureau. It wasn’t specifically mentioned in the agent guidelines, but she was pretty certain rounding up humans en masse and drinking their blood was a no-no.
“Just stay a minute,” Eva begged, taking Fia’s hand again.
Fia tried not to stare at Eva’s getup but it was hard not to.
The redhead sported fishnet stockings and a black knit dress that appeared to have been spray-painted on. She was wearing no bra or panties and four-inch stilettos. Her hair had been gelled and sculpted into a point on the top of her head and white plastic skulls dangled from her earlobes. She finished off the Halloween-costume-gone-bad with thick black eyeliner and the apparently requisite black lipstick.
Fia was so stunned by Eva’s getup, by the room of “guests,” that she didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t realized anyone had this kind of party in Clare Point anymore. Sure, once in a while she caught wind of a feasta oíche somewhere in Europe, but she hadn’t thought anyone dared hold them at home anymore. Leave it to Fin and Eva.
In the 1920s, at the height of prohibition, the general council had banned all feasta oíche, or feast night, celebrations after a party had gotten out of hand and humans had died. Fortunately, no one was turned into a vampire. But the bodies had to be disposed of and the sept had been in an uproar for weeks afterward, as local law officials searched for the fourteen family members that had all vanished from a silver-anniversary party. Their bodies were never found and the mystery was never solved. The cases remained unsolved to this day.
“Let me get you a drink.” Eve grabbed Fia’s hand, squeezed it and let go, darting into the crowd. “Be right—”
“No, E—” It was a waste of breath. Eva was gone and the music was so loud she couldn’t have heard Fia anyway.
“Good evening,” a man in his late twenties greeted Fia in a poor Eastern European accent as he approached her. He bared his canine teeth, which had apparently been chiseled to points.
Fia had to draw her lips tightly to keep from laughing aloud. “Hi.”
He circled her, flapping a black and red satin cape behind him.
She covered her mouth with her hand. Where did Eva find these people?
“I like your outfit,” he told her. “Very…subtle.”
She looked down. Black sweatpants and a man’s black Calvin Klein T-shirt. Flip-flops.
“Where did you—” She couldn’t help herself. “How did you…get invited here?”
He pulled his black lips back to bare the cosmetically altered teeth again.
And to think, Fia had had her canines filed down at the age of sixteen when they became more pronounced than was acceptable among humans, even in their retracted state.
“First time at one of these parties?” He moved closer, drawing his cape around her.
“Actually…” Fia found herself at a loss as to what to say. She couldn’t fathom what bad movie or what character he was imitating. He was just so ridiculous looking. As he circled her, she continued to turn so that she could face him.
He reached out to rest his hand on the wall, trapping her with his cloak. A flash of strobe light crossed his face and she saw that he was wearing black contacts. He looked silly, but he smelled…inviting.
She glanced around the room and spotted Regan on one end of the modular couch, a human woman dressed in black on each arm. He flashed a smile; not warm like Fin’s. Cold. Arrogant. Challenging.
“Hey, Fee, I didn’t expect to find you here.” Arlan wove around two human females who were doing some sort of striptease dance to Iron Maiden. “Drink?”
She took the bottle of pale ale he offered and tipped it. She knew it was a mistake the minute she tasted the yeasty, mild brew. There were reasons why she didn’t drink.
“Who’s your friend?” Arlan cocked his head at the ridiculous looking guy in the cape standing beside her.
“Jeremy.” The cape offered his hand.
“Get lost, buster.” Arlan drew back his lips and long saber teeth appeared. He snarled like a lion.
The guy in the cloak flinched. Blinked. Ducked off.
“That wasn’t very nice.” Fia took a drink from the bottle.
“He’ll never remember a thing in the morning.” Arlan’s teeth morphed back to normal as he snatched the beer from her.
She watched the way his mouth fit around the brown glass.
“Pretty naughty of you to be here, Special Agent Kahill. Especially with your boyfriend back at the house.”
“He isn’t my—”
“Hey, Fee, it’s okay,” he whispered, moving closer so that she could hear him over the pulsating music. “I get it. I
t happens to all of us once in a while, and him looking like Ian…” Arlan shrugged. “Just my bad luck.”
“Arlan—”
“Shhh. I’m talking.” He pressed his finger to her lips. “So you listen.” He drew back his hand. “See, I been thinking. And I’ve decided I’m not going to ask you to my place anymore. I’m cutting you off.”
“You’re what?” She tipped the beer back. It tasted entirely too good.
“I’m cutting you off. Cold turkey. No more hot stud vampire for you, Missy.”
She laughed, but she knew he was being serious. At least half serious. “Arlan—”
“No, no, hear me out. I’ve decided I can wait until you’re ready. Until you come to me.” Holding the beer bottle with one hand, with the other he traced her pale flesh above the collar of her T-shirt.
Fia’s heart rate soared.
“I’m going to give you some time. Some space. Let you come to your senses.”
She had to smile. He was such a damned good guy.
“And you will, Fee. Because you always do.” He lowered his hand, looking into her eyes. “You’ll realize it can never work with a human, just the way I’ve realized it. And you’ll know.” Another shrug of his broad shoulders.
“I’ll know?”
Again, he leaned close, still holding her gaze with his big brown eyes. “That I’m the only man for you.” He brushed his lips against hers…the sweetest kiss.
Then he was gone. A bobbing head in a sea of bodies twisting on the dance floor.
Fia finished the beer and made her way to the bar, hands in the air over her head, trying to squeeze through. There were so many people, bodies pushing, brushing, gyrating. The music throbbed in her head. The strobe lights in the corner of the room flashed. Someone had already taken human blood…she could smell it in the room. Was it Regan? Eva? Both of them?
She set the empty bottle on the bar.
The young woman behind the bar looked up. She wore a tight black T-shirt with a graphic of red lips on it. “Fia!” She laughed. “I have to say, you’re one of the last people I would have guessed I would see here tonight.”
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