Voracious - (Claire Point Vampire 5)

by V. K. Forrest

He paused, and she found herself hanging on his every word. Her hands were actually shaking, he had her so keyed up. A single shot of JD and he probably could have had her panties around her ankles.

  Never in her life had a man affected her this way. She’d built up too strong a wall to let anyone touch her. In any way.

  “What happened the other night when we touched?” he asked.

  As if there was any confusion whatsoever in what he was talking about.

  Her first inclination was to deny the whole thing. Play stupid blonde. But she made the mistake of meeting his gaze. “You don’t want to do this,” she whispered. She found herself leaning over the bar to get closer to him. “You don’t want me. At the risk of sounding like a bad movie, Aedan Brigid, I’m bad news.”

  She was surprised by the faint smile he offered. “Probably not any worse news than me. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee it.”

  He was teasing, but it was still sexy as hell. And there was something dangerous-sounding in his voice. This was no badass wannabe. He was the real thing. A serious badass.

  She wanted to groan. She had always fallen for the dangerous guys. “No. I don’t think so.” She tried to make light of his words and the feelings rippling through her. She had to be totally hormonal. Pheromones and all that crap. “You couldn’t be trouble. Not a clean-cut guy like you, a private investigator who’s got cops singing his praises.”

  He sat back on the barstool. “People are never what they seem to be, Dallas.” His gaze searched hers, his blue eyes seeming to penetrate to the very soul of the matter. And of her.

  She liked the way he said her name. Dallas, with a strange lilt to his voice. She liked the fact that there were no Texas jokes to go with it. Dallas had been her mother’s last name, and since her father didn’t think his little baby daughter Ruth Dallas York looked like a Ruth, he had called her Dallas, and the name stuck.

  “Isn’t that the truth?” she mused. John had certainly fooled her: wealthy, handsome, just a little dangerous, successful. It had all been right on his business card . . . except for the heroin addict part. She looked up at Aedan. “The girl who was attacked. Teesha. Is she going to be okay?”

  He took his time in answering. “She’s going to live. Is she going to be okay?” He rested his hands on the bar and looked down at them. “I don’t know. Is anyone ever okay after something like that?”

  The way he said it made her think he knew what he was talking about, in some very personal way. Again, she felt his pain, only this time she hadn’t had to touch him to feel it. And a part of her felt as if he wasn’t just talking about his own experiences, but hers as well. Except that he didn’t know her. Couldn’t possibly have known what she’d been through in her short life.

  What the hell was going on here? A part of her wanted to just ask him to leave and never come back. She half thought he’d respect her request. But a part of her wanted to take the barstool beside him and rest her weary head on his broad shoulder.

  So much for being the strong, independent woman.

  “I read in the paper what happened,” she said, finally setting the bottle aside. “Can I get you a beer?”

  He smiled again, and she was smiling when she turned away.

  “You good?” Tat called to her from the other end of the bar. He was talking to two cute girls wearing way too little clothing for an evening at the beach in April.

  She gave her bartender a thumbs up. When she brought the Guinness to Aedan, she set the cocktail napkin on the bar out of his immediate reach and put the glass on top.

  “You don’t have to be afraid of me,” he said. Again, the quiet, reverberating, sexy voice.

  She gave a little laugh, pulling her hands back, leaving it up to him to bring his beer closer. “Oh, no? That’s funny, because I get the feeling I should be. I should be very afraid.”

  “You don’t want to talk about what happened between us?” he asked, reaching for his beer.

  “Nope.”

  “Okay.”

  The man was full of surprises. She hadn’t been expecting that.

  “So what do you want to talk about?”

  His question was so not what she expected that she had to think for a minute. “How about the Middle East?”

  He groaned and took a sip of beer. “Too depressing for a Saturday night.”

  “The economy?”

  He shook his head, taking a sip of his beer. “Depressing.”

  “Well, I certainly don’t want to talk about that girl.” Dallas tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “I can’t believe someone would do something like that here. That was part of the reason why my daughter and I came here, because it was such a safe place to raise a kid.”

  “How old is your daughter?”

  Dallas put the heels of her hands on the bar and straightened up. “I don’t talk about her with my customers. I don’t talk about personal stuff.”

  “Join me in a beer?” he asked, leaning toward her.

  He said it so casually, changing the subject so quickly, that she laughed again. How long had it been since someone had made her laugh like this? “I don’t think so.”

  “Ever had Murphy’s Irish Stout?”

  She smiled. “Actually I have. In Boston.”

  “Ah. A New Englander.” He sat back as if she might be tainted or something. “I suspected as much.”

  She leaned on the bar again. “What’s that supposed to mean? Do I have an accent? I don’t have a New England accent.”

  “No.” He waggled his finger. “But you have a New England, Puritan way about you.”

  “Puritan? Me?” This time her laugh was sarcastic. “Not hardly.” She almost said you don’t know me too well, but of course that was true, and if she had any sense, she’d keep it that way.

  “So, you said you just moved here?” He was smooth with his transitions.

  “I did?” She raised a brow, then realized she was sort of flirting with him. She knew all the body language from working in bars and restaurants all these years: the leaning on the bar, then standing upright, then leaning in toward him again, tossing her hair out of her face, laughing at everything he said. It was embarrassing.

  And for some reason, fun.

  “You just took over the bar and you mentioned looking in Clare Point for property,” he pointed out. “So I assume you just moved here. And you mentioned Boston.” He shrugged as if his conclusion was obvious.

  She scowled. “I could have been from Atlanta—visiting Boston when I had that stout.”

  “You’re not from Atlanta.” Again the waggling finger. “You’re a New Englander all right. A little standoffish. Guarded.”

  She folded her arms over her chest. “What if I have a reason for being those things, beyond being a New Englander?”

  “Where did you go to school?” Again, switching subjects smoothly. “Let me guess.” He paused. “Dartmouth.”

  “Dartmouth? No way. Brown,” she said proudly.

  “So you are a New England girl?”

  She started to make a snappy rebuttal, then leaned on the bar again. “You going to tell me where you’re from? Because you’re not from around here. I have powers of observation, too. You don’t sound like you’re from around here. You don’t act like it. You certainly don’t drink like it.” She glanced at his Guinness. “Guinness? Murphy’s? I’m not even sure you’re from the U.S.”

  “And what makes you say that?” He was enjoying their conversation as much as she was. “I don’t have an accent.”

  “No, you don’t.” She tried not to think about the memories she had seen in his head, most of which were definitely not in the U.S. Of course they weren’t mostly from the present century either, so she had no real frame of reference for him. They couldn’t be memories. “But there’s something about the cadence of your speech.” She studied his handsome face. “Are you really a private investigator?”

  “A state police detective told you I was.”

  She looked
at him for a minute and then smiled. She needed to go before she got herself into trouble with this guy. Because this guy was definitely trouble. “I’m out of here.” She pulled off her apron. “You have a good evening. Be safe.”

  “Is it okay if I come back? Just to talk.”

  “Bad idea.” She shook her head as she walked away. What she didn’t say was no.

  “She’s pretty,” he heard her say.

  He was seated at the little table, naked. The stew she had brought him was excellent: root vegetables, bits of lamb, and herbs.

  Madeleine lay naked on the bed, her youthful body slender, but ripe. Her blond hair tumbled all around her, tempting him. But first, sustenance.

  “Did you hear me? I said, she’s pretty.”

  He washed down a mouthful of stew with a gulp of ale. “Who?” he asked. It was only then that he realized they were speaking French, not English. “The new maid? I’ve no interest in her, ma beauté. I love you. Only you, always.”

  “Not her.”

  He tore off a bit of bread and dipped it into the bowl. “Whom do you speak of ?”

  “The girl in the bar. Dallas.”

  Aedan woke from the dream startled. Shaky. The dream had made no sense. Madeleine could not possibly have known Dallas.

  Chapter 5

  Aedan’s petition to be assigned to Jay’s case, despite his sept-imposed hiatus, was on the agenda for the General Council meeting on Monday night. Peigi had left early for the meeting, before midnight, so he walked alone through town from her cottage to the museum downtown. It was a quiet night, too early in the season for insect song. He’d worn his leather jacket; there was a chill in the air, but there was the promise of the warmth of spring to come.

  He breathed deeply as he crossed an empty street. Somewhere a dog barked. The tangy bay breeze was cleansing. Healing. This was why the sept required its members to return home. Because they needed it, as much as they hated to admit it. Aedan always dragged his heels about taking a holiday from the business of pursuing bad guys. It was so much easier to just forget how good it felt to come home.

  Half a block ahead, he spotted a figure. A woman. Vampire. Mary Kay, he telepathed.

  She turned. Sorry, lost in my thoughts. I didn’t know you were there. She waited for him. She was a Council member and headed toward the museum for the meeting, as well.

  “Good to see you, Aedan.” She shifted a plate of some sort of cinnamon-baked deliciousness from one hand to the other and rubbed his arm.

  Mary Kahill, called Mary Kay to distinguish her from all the other Marys in town, was a pretty woman for her age. She looked like her daughter, the hotshot FBI agent; Aedan had had a crush on Fia once upon a time. Both women had inky dark hair and amazing cheekbones. There was no way Mary Kay looked her fifty-some years, well, fifty-some human years in this life cycle. Mary Kay, during the summer months, ran a B & B for tourists in her old Victorian mansion in town. Some Kahills didn’t like humans under their roofs, but Mary Kay always said she liked it; it allowed her to keep tabs on them, and it was a good way to get rid of all the baked goods she made.

  “Good to see you.” Aedan leaned down and kissed her cheek. “Let me carry that.” He took the foil-covered plate.

  “Pecan sticky buns. I’m running late. I got caught up cleaning my pantry and didn’t get the dough rising soon enough.” They walked side by side toward the museum.

  “They smell amazing.” He tugged at the corner of the foil.

  “Leave them alone.” She slapped his hand none too gently.

  Aedan laughed. “How are your boys?”

  “Fin is fine, as always. You know, Regan’s been clean a while now. He’s running the arcade again this summer for Mary McCathal. Who still hasn’t returned to her senses, by the way.” She shook her head disapprovingly. “I can’t believe she and Victor ran off like that just because the Council wouldn’t let them tie the knot. Why couldn’t they just live in sin the way a lot of us do?”

  Aedan, guessing it was a rhetorical question, didn’t answer. Victor and Mary’s romance had been the scandal of the previous summer, or would have been if the Italian girl, Lia, hadn’t been killing humans. Mary’s husband Bobby had been murdered two years ago by teenage vampire-slayers, releasing her from the eternal bonds of marriage with her husband. Murdered and destroyed; he could never be reborn again. After Bobby’s death, Mary and Victor had fallen in love, or so Aedan had heard. For some reason, the senior citizen Victor had gotten it in his head that he wanted to wed Mary. The General Council had denied their request; sept rules required members to keep the partner they had when they were cursed. Instead of just having an affair like many couples did, Mary and Victor had surprised everyone by running away from home and eloping. They were still MIA, a concern of many sept members. With no support system, there was no telling what kind of trouble two old vampires could get into.

  Aedan and Mary Kay cut across the parking lot toward the rear door of the darkened museum. “I have to admit, it is kind of romantic, Mary and Victor eloping,” Mary Kay said. “In love . . . running away together. Even at their age. I heard they were in Papeete.”

  “I heard they were in Fort Lauderdale.”

  “Tahiti makes a better story.”

  He chuckled. “Fair enough.”

  They reached the back door, and Aedan keyed in the necessary numbers to gain admittance. The building served as a museum for tourists, featuring the history of the old town. In truth, it featured the story the sept had concocted to protect themselves. The tall tale, conceived by certain creative sept members, had been woven with just enough threads of truth to sound believable. It portrayed Clare Point as having been a pirates’ den of sorts in the early days, back in the seventeenth century. The artifacts displayed, for the most part, were authentic.

  When the vessel the Kahills had traveled in from the shores of Ireland had wrecked on a reef in a storm, they had been washed ashore. Sept members had collected the objects now displayed in the museum, as well as scrap wood from the ship’s decks and splintered hull. They had built their first homes on the sandy beaches with those warped planks; portholes had become windows, and the simple bone china, now displayed in the museum, had been used on their kitchen tables.

  The pirates on the shores of Clare Point when the Kahills had arrived had actually been wreckers who made their living luring ships into shallow water. When the ships sank or washed ashore, the vultures profited heavily from the bounty of the shipwreck. Any survivors, they killed. What the story told in the museum did not relay was that the Kahills, close to starvation for lack of blood by the time they reached the New World, had fed on the wreckers. Those wreckers who had survived had made the decision not to fight vampires for their little Eden and had fled south to safer waters. It wasn’t until after the Kahills were settled on the shores of Clare Point and had breathing room that the sept’s chieftain, Gair, had had his epiphany and the members had agreed to stop hunting God’s humans and begin helping them.

  The museum, built in the sixties to encourage the town’s burgeoning tourist trade, sported glass cases filled with artifacts from the pirate age, identified with printed signs and sometimes sketches. There were pieces of china marked with the sunken ship’s name, brass candlesticks, and other assorted stuff. Most came from the ship the Kahills had arrived on, although some of it was bounty left behind by the wreckers in their eagerness to escape their would-be victims. There was also a small exhibit of arrowheads and spear points from the area’s early history when the Lenni Lenape Indians had fished the waters and hunted in the forest.

  During the museum’s operating hours, in the tourist season, a twelve-minute film was shown and there was a small gift shop near the restrooms. There, plastic swords, eye patches and fake coins, tomahawks, and other junk were sold.

  The museum was a crazy mixture of the Kahills’ past and present, all jumbled up until it was hard to separate fact from fiction. Some of the items were displayed on the round table th
at had come from the ship’s captain’s cabin; it was the same table the High Council convened around when voting as to who would be the next human to die. It was those High Council members who ultimately gave Aedan his orders.

  Aedan held the door open for Mary Kay. She plucked the baked goods from his hand and marched up the dark hallway toward the bright lights of the community room, where the General Council met. As he followed her down the hall, he wondered why they turned on the lights at all. As vampires, they saw just as well in the dark.

  When he entered the museum-turned-community room, it looked more like a gathering of PTA parents than vampires. There were tables with coffee and assorted baked goods, and everyone was standing in small groups laughing and chatting while having a snack. At the door, Mary Kay marched off to set out her contribution.

  “Aedan.”

  Aedan turned to see Gair, who appeared more like a senior citizen bound for a day-trip to the zoo than the leader of a clan of vampires. Despite the fact that it was April and still cool, and the fact that he was an eight-hundred-year-old sept chieftain, somewhere in his late seventies, he wore shorts, flip-flops and a Corona T-shirt featuring a busty girl in a bikini riding a bottle of beer. He brushed a crumb from his snowy beard and took another bite of a chocolate chip cookie. “I’ve been expecting you at the house.”

  “Sorry,” Aedan said. “I’ve been meaning to come by. Things have been a little crazy since I got home.”

  “Brian?” he asked. He didn’t wait for Aedan to answer. “Peigi’s been trying to keep it all hush-hush, but I know Brian’s gone a little cuckoo since he was reborn.” He shook his head, stuffing the rest of the cookie into his mouth. “Happens to the best of us. I just hope she can keep him under control until he comes to his senses. We don’t need any Kahills running around sucking the blood from our summer visitors, do we?”

  Aedan grinned. “No, we don’t. But I don’t think that will be an issue. She can barely get him off the couch. Video games,” he explained.

  “Work of the devil, some say.” He gave a wave. “I think it’s bullshit. They say the same about the casino over in Harrington. I like to play the slot machines once in a while.” He gestured as if pulling the arm of an old-fashioned slot machine. “Never seen the devil there. Not any more often than I see him anywhere else, anyway.” He winked.