“Witches? I don’t know,” Fia said softly.
They didn’t need a flashlight. All four women saw almost as well in the dark as they did in the daylight. A perk of being one of the living dead.
“Yeah, sounds a little out-there, doesn’t it?” Shannon ducked under a poplar branch that hung over the path.
“I guess. But maybe not any farther out-there than vampires.” Fia glanced over her shoulder to be sure that Sorcha and Eva were keeping up. “Who knows? Maybe there is such a thing as witches and they don’t believe in us, either.”
Shannon giggled. She was tipsy. They all were, except for Fia. And considering the fact that no one had pushed her on rounds three through five of the martini menu, Fia suspected the women had planned it that way. She sensed she made them feel safe. With her in the dark woods with them, none of them seemed to be afraid they might come upon Bobby and Mahon’s killer. Or if they did, they had confidence that their own homegrown law-enforcement agent would protect them.
“Come on, you two. Keep up,” Fia called over her shoulder. They were more than half a mile into the woods now, and approaching the place where Mahon’s body had been found.
Eva giggled. “Gotta pee. Hang on, Fee. Sorcha and I need a potty stop.”
“I told you to go before you came, kids,” Shannon sang as the two women stepped off the path to relieve themselves.
“How about you?” Fia asked Shannon.
The blonde grinned. “Went before I left, but thanks for asking, Mommy.”
Fia could have taken Shannon’s comment as an insult; on Fia’s age, her bossiness, any number of things. But she knew Shannon meant nothing by it and she found herself able to let it slide. She’d never particularly liked Shannon, but she was discovering that if she could just get past the big-boobed blond cocktail-waitress image, the young woman was actually kind of nice. Not at all the ditz she appeared to be at the Hill.
“So, how’s that hot FBI agent? Special Agent Glen Duncan,” Shannon said as if announcing his name on TV.
“Fine. I guess.” Fia was so surprised by Shannon’s sudden change of topic that it took her a second to regroup. “I don’t know. I haven’t talked to him since we left here last Friday.”
“Haven’t talked to him?” Shannon walked to Fia, looking up at her. “Are you nuts, girlfriend? He’s mad for you.”
Fia frowned.
“Oh, please. I know.” Shannon raised her palm. “He’s a human. Humans are dangerous. We’re dangerous to humans,” she chanted. “Well, I say it’s all a bunch of bull.”
“You do?” Fia asked. Then realizing that the way she said it made it sound like she was interested in Glen, she pulled back a branch and called softly into the woods. “What’s taking you two so long? Come on.” She looked back down at Shannon.
“Sometimes you just have to take chances, Fia. Maybe sometimes with humans. Sometimes with yourself.”
“He’s engaged,” Fia said.
“So what?” Shannon shrugged. “You like him. I think you should go for it. The way I saw him looking at you the other night in the pub, I don’t think that’s as big a problem as you might think. And as far as him looking like…you know, so what? Who cares? That was hundreds of years ago. People in this town have too much to say about too many things. You have a right to a little happiness. Same as anyone else in Clare Point.”
Fia crossed her arms over her chest. She’d been warm, hiking through the woods, but now that she was standing still, the slight breeze cooled her. She could hear Sorcha and Eva crashing through the brush toward them, giggling.
Fia looked down at Shannon, meeting her gaze. She had light brown eyes. Almost golden. She really was pretty when she wasn’t all tarted up. And smarter, maybe even more intuitive, than Fia had given her credit for in the past.
“You know, I was just goofing around with him in the pub,” Shannon said. “It’s just what I do. I would never go after a guy I thought you cared about. One any one of you girls cared about.”
Eva and Sorcha pushed through a holly bush, squealing as the branches prickled them.
“Ouch,” Eva yelped. “Glad I didn’t pull my panties down there.”
Sorcha grabbed her arm, and linked it through hers. “Press on, leerless feeder,” she called to Fia. “Mission accomplished!”
“I’m beginning to think we should have left them on the porch with their martinis,” Fia muttered to Shannon as she started down the path again.
There was more giggling and a few stumbles, but Eva, Sorcha, and Shannon all stayed together and kept up with Fia. They passed only a few feet from the place where Mahon had been found dead and everyone grew silent. The sad heaviness in the air seemed to sober the women, literally. Even after a week’s time and a full day of rainfall the day before, they could smell the blood and scent of their friend’s burnt flesh.
Fia shivered, wishing she’d brought her hoodie from the front seat of her car. “Now which way was this thing you think you saw, Shannon?” Fia didn’t question why Shannon had been on the game preserve alone in the middle of the night. Everyone in town hunted the deer, drank their blood, but it was something they rarely spoke of.
“I don’t think I saw anything. I’m telling you, it was some kind of witches’ altar,” Shannon insisted. “Turn north up here at the fork in the path. Northeast.”
“You shouldn’t be out here alone, Shannon.”
“You like hunting with a buddy system?” Shannon asked.
Fia didn’t answer.
“Besides, it was last week, before Mahon was killed.”
“Hey, you smell something?” Sorcha asked. “Like…something burning?”
“Could have been from back there,” Fia said carefully. She knew Sorcha knew, they all knew, what she meant.
“No, not that smell. This is different.” Sorcha stopped on the path. They all stopped. “You smell that? Something burning, like wood…and something sweet.”
Fia did smell it now. But the source was downwind of them. The scent was very faint. Too faint for anyone with normal senses to smell. “How much farther to the altar?” she asked Shannon, beginning to get that uneasy feeling again that she’d first experienced when they entered the woods.
It was as if…as if someone was out there. Someone watching them.
“I don’t know. Right around here, somewhere. I think we’re close.” Shannon didn’t sound quite as confident as she had earlier, when she had insisted she could find the place again. “It wasn’t very big. Just some grass trampled down and a tree stump where there was black candle wax and some rabbit fur and blood.”
“Rabbit sacrifices? Poor bunnies,” Eva said.
Fia halted, holding her hand up to tell the other women to be silent. Everyone froze.
The smell of burning wood mixed with that sweet smell was getting stronger. And Fia thought she might have heard voices. They were far away. At least half a mile. Just a faint murmur. “Do you hear that?” she whispered.
Eva turned slowly in a circle where she stood. “Yeah,” she whispered. “Sounds as if it’s coming from east of here. Toward the beach.”
Without discussion, the three women followed Fia off the deer path. As they headed east through the darkness, dodging branches and circumnavigating monstrous trees, the smell grew stronger and the hum of the voices became clearer.
The women walked a quarter of a mile, maybe a little farther, before Sorcha, taking up the rear, halted. “Shit,” she groaned, dropping her hand to her hip. “It’s Kaleigh and Katy and…Marie, I think.”
“How do you know?”
Sorcha frowned. “I just caught a pretty interesting train of teenaged horn-ball thought. They’re not alone, ladies.”
“Human boys?” Fia whispered.
As they spoke, all the women raised mental walls to block their thoughts so that the teenagers would be less likely to suspect their presence. Although Kaleigh’s telepathy had not returned yet, the other two girls had at least some ability to commu
nicate without words.
“You want me to…you know.” Eva blinked dramatically.
“How many martinis did you drink?” Fia whispered.
“I don’t know. Four…maybe six.”
“No,” Fia said. “You are not going to attempt to teleport yourself. You’ll end up in the center of their bonfire. You remember the time you tried that in Rome after we’d drunk all those bottles of wine?”
“No,” Eva said defensively.
Shannon giggled. “I remember it. She tried to pop back to the house where we were staying and ended up in the Vatican.”
Sorcha chuckled.
“It’s okay, Eva. Don’t feel bad. You know me. I can’t teleport a leaf stone sober.” Fia squeezed the woman’s shoulder.
“Oh, baby, can you do that again, big, brave FBI agent?” Eva joked, rubbing up against Fia. “Only a little lower and to the left, next time.”
Fia ignored Eva’s flirtation. “What do you think? Split up and surround them, or just holler and make them scatter?”
“If we sneak up on them, we might catch them sacrificing bunnies,” Sorcha teased, obviously still not sure she believed there was any witch altar in the woods.
“I didn’t say it was Kaleigh who made the altar,” Shannon said. “I just said the kid was acting weird.”
“Yes, you did.”
“No, I said I wondered if it was them.”
“Okay, so maybe we should check into what they’re doing?” Fia cut in, breaking up the little tiff. She still felt uncomfortable, but she didn’t get the sense that any of them were in danger. Not the women. Not the girls. But something wasn’t right. “Everyone okay with splitting up? Everyone sober enough?”
“Pul-lease,” Sorcha moaned, walking off into the woods. “Five martinis is nothing to a Kahill. I’ll come around from the north. You guys come from the other directions. Meet you at the bunny roast.”
Chapter 16
Kaleigh was so busy swapping spit with the human that she never heard the women until Fia walked up behind her and tugged off the hood of her sweatshirt. Derek leaped to his feet.
“What do you think you’re doing out here in the middle of the night?” Fia demanded.
Kaleigh jumped up from the log and whipped around. “What am I doing? What are you doing? You’re following me, now?”
The other two girls, who had also been making cozy with human boys, were on their feet as Eva, Shannon, and Sorcha surrounded them. Fia could hear Shannon giving them a piece of her mind. The teens had all been sitting around a campfire, roasting marshmallows, of all things. And making out, of course.
“I wasn’t following you.” Fia lowered her voice so that the humans couldn’t hear her. “We were out taking a walk”—she indicated the other three women—“and we smelled the campfire.” Not exactly a lie. “We were concerned.” Complete truth. “Do you have any idea how dangerous it could be for you girls to be out here in the middle of the night?”
“Mahon was alone in broad daylight.” Kaleigh glanced sulkily over her shoulder. The boys were quickly gathering their belongings: sweatshirts, a football, a bag of marshmallows. Shannon was still giving them all hell, pointing a finger now at one of the boys. “And you guys are out here. You don’t seem to be afraid of any vampire slayers,” Kaleigh said.
Fia rested her hand on her sidearm secured in its shoulder holster. “I’m carrying a G22 loaded with a 165-grain Gold Dot. Are you?” She looked away and then back at Kaleigh. She didn’t know how to make the girl understand how selfish her behavior was. How important she was to the sept, and how much they would rely on her once she reached adulthood again. “No one said Mahon and Bobby were killed by slayers,” Kaleigh responded.
“No one saying it doesn’t mean it isn’t so.”
Kaleigh’s gaze bore into Fia. “Who else would know how to kill us?”
“I don’t know,” Fia said.
“You don’t know,” Kaleigh whispered. “None of us do. At least we agree on that. But I’m not going to live afraid. I’m not going to give up my life, my friends, Derek, just because someone might come out of the dark and chop my head off.”
“No one’s asking you to give up your life,” Fia countered. “We’re just asking you not to be stupid.”
“You’re not in charge of me. No one is.” Kaleigh crossed her arms over her small breasts. “You have no right to sneak up on us like this. We weren’t doing anything wrong. We were just sitting here, talking.”
“You could set the whole forest on fire with that thing.” Fia nodded in the direction of the campfire which had died down to a smolder.
“Could not. We dug down to the dirt. Made that log ring to contain it. Derek used to be a Boy Scout.” She said the last sentence proudly.
Fia glanced in the direction of the tallest of the boys, who was cramming an old blanket into his backpack. “That a beer can I see next to your foot, Mr. Neuman?”
The boy leaned over, snatched up the can and stuffed it into his backpack.
“Anything else you have in that pack illegal?” Fia asked. “I probably don’t have to remind you that these girls, that all of you, are underage, Mr. Neuman.”
“Fee,” Kaleigh warned under her breath. “Don’t you dare.”
The other two boys were already slipping into the woods, but to Fia’s surprise, Derek walked toward her.
“I didn’t mean to get Kaleigh in any trouble, ma’am.”
Fia hated it when young men ma’ammed her. Her first impulse was to walk Mr. Neuman and his pimply-faced buddies out of the woods and have one of the Clare Point patrol cars pick them up and deliver them to their parents. But she knew that wasn’t realistic. It was never a good idea to stir up trouble in the surrounding human communities, if it could be helped. This was already a dangerous time for the sept; she didn’t need to make it worse.
“How old did you say you were, again?” Fia scrutinized the young man more closely.
“Fifteen. Well, now he’s sixteen. He just had his birthday,” Kaleigh said, jumping in.
Fia narrowed her gaze further. “You don’t look sixteen, Mr. Neuman. You look older. Almost old enough to be an adult, influencing minors,” she intoned.
The human stared at his big feet.
Fia let the silence grow uncomfortable before she spoke again. “Didn’t I just remind you kids the other night that we have a killer in the area who has yet to be apprehended?”
“We stayed together,” he said, glancing up. Sounded like a big, dumb, human kid. “And we were going to walk the girls back to town. I swear it.”
“Derek, I’m really sorry.” Kaleigh ran her hand up and down his arm. “We didn’t tell anyone, I swear we didn’t.”
“Um…is it okay if I go?” Derek asked Fia. “I’m not sure the guys know how to get out of here.”
Fia hesitated, then raised her hand, pointing northwest. “Sure. Go ahead. But don’t let me catch you out here in the middle of the night with these girls again, or I will call the cops.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Derek leaped over one of the logs they had been sitting on and took off into the woods.
“And I better not find any beer cans littering this federal wildlife preserve, Mr. Neuman,” she called after him.
Fia heard a muffled “Yes, ma’am” as Derek disappeared into the darkness. The women were talking quietly to the other girls.
“Didn’t tell anyone what?” Fia asked Kaleigh as soon as the boys were out of earshot.
“Didn’t tell anyone”—Kaleigh shifted her weight from one sneaker to the other—“about us coming out here.”
Fia really wished she could read the teen’s thoughts right now but there was nothing there but a tangle of emotions and random words, none of which made any coherent sense. “So exactly what were you really doing out here?”
“I don’t know. Hanging out.”
“And…”
“What, you mean were we having sex?” The teen crossed her arms defensively again. “No,
we weren’t having sex. We were cooking marshmallows and…and so maybe we were kissing a little.”
“You weren’t practicing witchcraft?”
Kaleigh looked at Fia as if she was crazy. “What are you talking about? Is that what you think happened to Mahon? Witches got him?”
“So you don’t know anything about an altar? Sacrificing rabbits?”
Kaleigh wrinkled her freckled nose. “Ewww. Gross.” She took a step back. “You were out here looking for people sacrificing animals?” She gave another laugh. “Lot of people out here tonight, you know. I saw Uncle Arlan a little while ago. He was like a saber-toothed tiger or something stupid like that. All creeping through the bushes spying on us, too.”
A smile threatened to tug at the corners of Fia’s mouth but she resisted. She could just imagine Arlan slinking around the teenagers’ campfire cloaked as some prehistoric cat. Maybe he was who she needed to scare a little sense into those boys. If a four-hundred-pound saber-toothed tiger walked into their quaint little camp site, they might think twice before they entered the wildlife preserve after dark again.
“I can’t believe you were so rude to Derek.” Kaleigh began to kick dirt over the glowing embers of the campfire. “He’s going to be so pissed at me.”
“I can’t imagine a fifteen”—Fia cleared her throat—“sixteen year old could be angry that an adult suggested you all didn’t belong out in the woods in the middle of the night. And if he is, you don’t need a guy like that.”
“What do you know about Derek?” Kaleigh kicked the dirt. “You don’t know anything about him.”
“What I know is that he’s human.”
“I’m not going to stop seeing him.” Kaleigh rubbed under her eyes with the back of her wrist. “I’m not,” she repeated childishly. “Derek needs me.”
“He needs you?” Fia groaned. “Kaleigh, that’s got to be the oldest guy trick in the book. It’s just something men say to get what they want out of women.”
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