Undying (9 page)

“Like it?”

She frowned. “Hate it. But Mom and Dad said I had to find a job this summer. You know, work my way slowly up the corporate ladder; cashier this year, wisewoman next year.” She rolled her eyes, still smearing on the lip gloss. He could smell the cherry flavoring. “They seem to think wearing the paper hat will keep me out of trouble.”

She was referring to the beheadings that had taken place the summer before. She had inadvertently gotten wrapped up in a relationship with a human who thought himself a vampire slayer. He killed three members of the sept before he was stopped. Had it not been for Fia, Kaleigh and two other teenage girls might have lost their lives, their souls damned forever in a fiery limbo created solely for vampires. Not dead, because vampires couldn’t die. But not alive. Not of this earth any longer.

“A job’s a good way to spend the summer. You get to talk to all the cute human guys who come for ice cream.”

She frowned, holding up the clear tube of lip gloss. “I’m done with humans, I swear, Sweet Mother Mary and Joseph. I’ll be happy if I never see another human again in the next ten lifetimes.”

He chuckled at her naiveté. Part of God’s curse was living among humans but always having to keep your guard up, not ever being able to quite fit in. The sept couldn’t break the curse if they didn’t work to save mankind and they couldn’t save mankind if they didn’t live among them.

“So if I come by the DQ, do I get free milk shakes?”

Again, the frown. “No. If I’m going to risk getting caught giving away free milk shakes, it’s going to be to cute guys
my
age.”

He laughed, opening the grill to check his steak. “So everything else okay? Your mom and dad? Your brother?”

“Same old, same old,” she groaned, doing a great imitation of a bored human teenager. “Connor’s a dick already.”

Her brother had recently been reborn, so he was back in her parents’ house, and Arlan had heard that the siblings were into fighting like teenagers again. The week before, the two became embroiled in a contest, hurling French fries while at the local diner. The owner had threatened to call the police when Kaleigh hit a tourist in the back of the head with a ketchup-drenched steak fry.

Arlan lifted his steak with a fork and, satisfied, dropped it on a plate he’d brought out earlier from the house. “Want some dinner? I’ve got plenty of steak to share.” He showed her the hunk of meat on the plate.

She wrinkled her freckled nose, reminding him of Fia in her teenage years. Cousins, aunts, uncles, by marriage or blood, they all looked alike. “I don’t eat meat. It’s gross. I’m a vegetarian. Thinking about becoming a vegan.”

He raised a brow. “But you still drink blood?”

“Of course.” She said it as if he was a complete idiot. “No steak, but I’ll have some of those green beans.” She sniffed the air. “They smell good. Olive oil?”

Arlan came back out of the house a few minutes later carrying two plates and forks. He handed Kaleigh the plate with just green beans on it and sat down to eat his steak, potato with butter, and green beans.

“So what’s up with you?” Drawing her knees up in the chair, Kaleigh stabbed at a bean with her fork. “You and Fia figure things out?”

“I’ve got things figured out perfectly. She just isn’t with the plan yet.”

“I don’t like that human FBI dude. I don’t care if he does look just like her true love”—she rolled her eyes—“who betrayed her a gazillion years ago. I think she ought to dump him for you.”

He sampled a piece of steak. It was perfect, warm and bloody. “You tell her so?”

“Every chance I get.” Kaleigh stabbed another bean. “So what about this other chick? What’s her name? Maggie?”

“Hey. You’re not supposed to be reading people’s minds without being invited.” He poked his fork in her direction. She was good. He hadn’t even felt her probe his mind. “You know better than that, missy.”

“Guess I must have done it by accident.” She smiled in a way that made him think she knew perfectly well what she was doing.

“Maggie’s nothing. No one.”

“Another one-night stand, huh? You know, you’re going to get tired of those eventually,” she chastised, waving her fork at him.

“Ah, now I’m taking romantic advice from a woman who dates psychopathic vampire slayers.”

She hurled the bean off her fork in his direction. He ducked and it sailed over the back of his chair.

“I didn’t know he was nuts,” Kaleigh continued matter-of-factly. “That wasn’t my fault. I was temporarily…I don’t know. You know.” She munched on another mouthful of beans. “I don’t want to talk about him. Never again.”

“So who do you want to talk about?” Arlan and Kaleigh always got along but it wasn’t like her to just stop by. Not at this point in her life. She was too busy doing teenage things. Growing into herself.

She set her plate at her feet and her fork clattered. “Ummm. You know Rob Hill died, right?”

“Ah,” he said, having a feeling he knew where this conversation was headed. “Sure. Burial’s Tuesday night. I’ll be there.”

“So…ummm, he’ll be around by the weekend.”

Reborn as a teenager. As a male, he’d enter life again at around the human equivalent of sixteen or seventeen.

“Right.”

“So…you think I should go, you know, over to his house? Say hello?”

Arlan smiled inwardly, but he knew better than to trivialize the situation. While permitted to sleep with other sept members, from the beginning, the sept had ruled that they must remain with their original mates forever. Again and again, Kaleigh would marry the man who had been her husband the day they became vampires. What was difficult was that each time they were reborn, they had to re-remember. They had to get reacquainted and even go through the same awkward romantic phases humans went through.

Rob Hill would one day be Kaleigh’s husband again.

“I think that would be nice if you went by. Said hi. Maybe offered him a free shake at the DQ.” Arlan cut off a piece of potato and pushed it into his mouth. The soft, buttery saltiness was good, but not as good as the steak.

“You think that would be okay?” She squirmed in her chair. “I mean…I know he won’t remember.” She gazed out into his backyard. It was beginning to grow dark and lightning bugs sparked in the dusky half-light. “I mean, I barely remember.”

“It’ll come back to you,” he assured her.

She got up. “Guess I better go. I told Maria I’d meet her at Katy’s. We might go to a movie or something.” At the top of the deck steps she turned back to him. “So, um, I guess I’ll see you around.”

He smiled at her. “See you around.”

Arlan finished his dinner alone in pleasant silence on his deck and then went inside with the intention of washing his dishes. Instead he set them in the sink and ran water over them. He checked his cell phone to be sure he hadn’t missed a call from Fin or Regan. He’d called them both several times throughout the day and left messages. Seeing that neither had phoned, he headed out the front door. It was eight o’clock and for many in the town, first call of the night at the pub.

T
he Hill, as it was known in town, was the second oldest continuously operated bar in the United States, right after the White Horse up in Newport, Rhode Island. If it hadn’t been for the eighteenth-century hurricanes, it would have been the oldest. Originally built down near the water on top of a sand dune by one of Arlan’s distant relatives, they had finally surrendered to the power of the elements and rebuilt inland on higher ground. The town had sprung up helter-skelter around the pub, and year-round, the public room was the heart of the Kahill sept.

Arlan had to duck under the hand-hewn beam to enter through the building’s archway. Inside, he was immediately assaulted by the sights, sounds, and smells that had been ingrained in him for centuries. The resonance was overwhelming, not just of audible voices, but also the voices in his head. When alone and free from humans, the Kahills talked aloud while also speaking telepathically on a different subject. At the same time.

On occasion, especially in the summer months, humans wandered through the door of The Hill, but they didn’t stay long and they almost never came back. There was another pub up the street, O’Cahall’s, which was more suitable for tourists, and with some instinctual sense of self-preservation, they were easily guided in that direction. Tonight, there wasn’t a single human in the pub and there was a buzz of excitement, even relief among the locals because of it. Sometimes, even vampires needed to let their guard down.

As Arlan crossed the rough floorboards, headed for the bar, he was bombarded with thoughts and words.

“Bar tab’s too high again, Mungo. Pay up.”

’Bout time dead, he was…

You know, the blue with the ruffle…. Wore it last Easter Sunday.

“…Say it again, Jimmy, and I’ll walk out, I will….”

A shame.

A pitiful, sorry shame.

Arlan took the only empty stool between brothers Mungo and Sean Kahill, Fia’s uncles. Sean Sr. was the chief of police and Arlan’s buddy Sean’s father.

“Evening, gentlemen.”

“Evening.” Mungo tipped an imaginary cap. The man went four hundred pounds if he went an ounce.
Tavia tapped a new keg of stout. We should celebrate your recent accomplishment, we should,
he telepathed for anyone within listening distance. “Eva, a stout for my handsome friend,” he called to the barmaid.

“We’re proud of you, son, we are,” Sean said soberly.

He had always been a jolly man, but after the murders the previous year, he had never quite seemed like himself. Arlan knew that on some level, Sean held himself responsible for the deaths of Bobby McCathal, Mahon Kahill and Shannon Smith, even though everyone agreed there was nothing he could have done. His behavior was subtle, but Arlan had seen the change. He’d lost so much weight that his jowls sagged, and he drank too much.

Vampire beheadings would do that to you. Once beheaded, a vampire could never be reborn. He could never really die, unsaved by God, as he was, so he was left to linger in some burning limbo far worse than any human’s hell. Only vampire slayers knew a head must be separated from the body to kill a vampire. All that other nonsense—garlic, silver bullets, sunlight, spit from a virgin—it was all baloney created in books and movies.

“You’re back,” Eva said, leaning on the bar to bare more than a little of her ample cleavage.

Arlan glanced at her breasts and smiled with amusement. Eva swore she was a lesbian, but he wondered, sometimes, if she wasn’t bisexual. Why else would she always be showing men her boobs?

“I’m back.”

She wiped the wooden bar top salvaged from the original seaside pub. Before that, the boards had served as the keel of the ship they’d come to America aboard. “Everyone else safe and accounted for?” Eva asked.

He glanced up at her.
You’ve talked to Fia?

Mungo and Sean were busy watching the TV mounted in the corner of the room. The Phillies were up by one over the Orioles. Both men were shouting as a player in orange rounded second. They weren’t listening to Arlan and Eva, but he tried to put up a mental barrier anyway.

Eva did the same.
Ran into Mary Kay at the produce stand. So Regan really is MIA?

He shrugged.
Hard to say with him.
He looked up, meeting her gaze. She was pretty in a punk kind of way, with spiky hair and wild, dark blue eye shadow.

Eva caught his drift. Arlan didn’t know how much she knew about Regan’s previous screw-ups, but he guessed it was more than Mungo and Sean knew. Eva was the same generation as Arlan and Regan. They all hung out together whenever they were in town.

You talk to Fin?
She reached for a clean pint glass and pulled a stout for him.

Not yet, but he had sept business in Europe. He may have made a stop on his way home,
Arlan said, still telepathing. He pulled a bill from his front pocket and tucked it into Eva’s cleavage as she slid the ale across the bar toward him. “A round for the three of us and you.”

She chuckled. “You’re such a gentleman, Arlan. If you were a woman—” She waggled her finger at him.

He grinned, picking up his glass and tasting it. “You seen Fia tonight?” He tried to sound casual.

“I think she went back to Philadelphia. Mary Kay said she was working on that big Buried Alive case. Said she was heading up the investigation.”

The stout went down smooth and hardy. It had a honey oak taste that was a particular favorite of his. The master brewer and pub owner, Tavia, knew her stout, that was for sure. “Fia is not heading up the case. And she finds out Mary Kay is telling tourists that, she’s going to have her mother’s head.”

“Just telling you what Mary Kay told me over the new potato bin.” She raised both hands in innocence.

Arlan looked around, sipping his stout. He knew every face. Some sept members he liked better than others, some he knew better. But they were all family and he felt an intense loyalty to them. It was for these men and women, for their souls, that he risked his life in the shadows of places like Athens, Greece, and Akron, Ohio.

“Eva!” Johnny Hill called from a table. “Can a man dyin’ of thirst get a pint here?”

Eva rolled her eyes and tapped the bar top with her palm before walking away. “Catch you later, handsome.” She winked at him. “I’ll put a good word in for you with Fia, if I see her.”

Maryann Hill caught Arlan’s eye and waved cheerfully.
You’ll be there for the burial?
she telepathed. It would have been too noisy for him to have heard her at this distance.

She was referring to her son’s funeral. At times like this, their whole life cycle got a little weird. Maryann was in her midforties. Her son, Rob, had died at the age of eighty-two. He would be reborn three days after his burial, as a teenager.

Arlan raised his glass to her.
I’ll be there.

And that cute niece of yours? Kaleigh?

I imagine she’ll be there, too.
He turned on the barstool, away from her. He was not playing matchmaker. If Kaleigh and Rob were going to get together, it would have to be by their own efforts. Couples were expected to eventually live together because it helped keep up appearances to the outside world. Sept rules, however, did not demand that each couple live each lifetime as exclusive bed partners. They had realized early on that it was hard enough for a couple to live forty years in marital bliss. Four hundred years would be impossible. Sept members were permitted, once they reached the age of eighteen, to have sex with any other consenting vampire adults so long as they continued to live with their permanent partner. It was a strange form of monogamy, but it seemed to work well enough. The downside was that men and women like Arlan and Fia, who were not married at the time of the
mallachd,
the curse, could never marry.

At the crack of a bat on the TV, Sean shouted, raising a fist in the air. “I told you they’d come back, I did!”

His brother turned away, disgusted by his team’s error in the field. Sean eased off his stool, slapping Arlan on the back. “Thanks for the ale, kid. Tell my brother he pays for the next round, he does.”

Arlan watched as Sean weaved his way between tables where patrons were eating supper, back-slapping as he went.

As Arlan slid his empty pint glass across the bar top, there was an audible change in the atmosphere of the room. Voices died down considerably and telepathed thoughts flew around the room faster. The ball game on the TV suddenly seemed to get louder.

Who’s that?

Who the hell does she think she is?

One night of peace and quiet is all I ask.

Arlan didn’t look up. It was just a tourist who had wandered too far afoot. Someone would steer her the right way. She’d probably gotten confused and was supposed to be meeting her girlfriends down the street.

“Another?” Eva asked Arlan. She wasn’t interested in HF tourists either.

“One more.” He slid his glass toward her. If Fia didn’t show up by the time he’d finished his pint, he’d head home. Now that he was here, he realized he wasn’t all that interested in socializing tonight. He had too many things on his mind.

Where the hell was Regan? Why hadn’t Fin returned his calls?

Had Fia gone back to Philadelphia to the human boyfriend? She didn’t normally tell him every time she came or went in town but after the trip to Virginia they’d shared, he thought maybe…

“Here you go, big boy.” Eva slid a fresh pint across the bar top.

“Hey, big boy.” Someone sat down on the barstool beside him.

Her voice startled him. He looked over.

“Could I have what he’s having?” Maggie asked Eva.

Eva looked to Arlan. He nodded slightly.

“One honey stout coming up.”

“What are you—” Arlan closed his fingers over the cool glass, looking away from her. How was it possible that she could be here? he wondered. He hadn’t told her what town he lived in and he certainly hadn’t told her about the seedy pub where he liked to take a pint of ale a couple of nights a week. This was a little eerie. He tracked men and women for a living. People didn’t track him. “How did you find me?”

She waited for her pint, took a sip and wiped the foam off her upper lip in what was an amazingly sensual gesture. “I’m good at hiding,” she said in that disquieting way of hers. “I’m also good at finding who I’m looking for.”

Fia sped north on Route 1. If she didn’t hit any serious traffic on 95, she’d be in Philly in an hour. She felt bad leaving Clare Point without talking to Arlan, but not bad enough to call him. She didn’t want to talk to him. Not tonight. He had a way of reading between the lines.

She told her mother she had to get back to work, which was true. She told Mary Kay that Regan would turn up and that was
probably
true. She’d told Glen she was staying with her mother another night.
A flat-out lie.

But she just couldn’t go home to her apartment and her cat tonight. She was too keyed up, so keyed up that she felt as if she was busting at the seams.

It had been months since Fia had been out on the prowl, and it was killing her. A taste of human blood was all she needed. Just a taste.

Nothing in her life was going the way she had thought it would. After solving the big case in Clare Point last year, she had thought she would be promoted in the bureau. That hadn’t happened. She had started dating Glen and she had thought that would make her happy. It hadn’t, and lately it seemed as if she wasn’t making him happy, either.

And it just got better. Regan was now possibly missing, possibly in some kind of serious trouble. And the Buried Alive Killings were starting to get under her skin. Maggie was starting to get under her skin and she didn’t often let that happen with a case. She couldn’t afford to, not and do her job right.

Fia was annoyed that Arlan hadn’t gotten more out of the chick. She’d expected better out of him. He was so good with women, really good with HFs, although it pissed him off when she said so.

Now, with no way to contact Maggie, Fia would just have to sit tight and wait for the woman to call her. If she did call again. What if Arlan had scared her off? Fia couldn’t believe he had slept with her informant. Arlan was such a slut.

She smiled to herself, looking down at the short black leather skirt, fishnet stockings, and four-inch heeled boots she’d changed into at the rest stop. Her black T-shirt was so tight, she could see the rings of her areolas through it.

Nothing like calling the kettle black.

“Why are you here, Maggie?” Arlan asked.

He had never expected to see her again and now that she was sitting here beside him, looking so small and unassuming, he felt guilty all over again for his thoughts back at the hotel. How could he have even considered biting her and drinking her blood? What kind of man on the road to redemption was he? There were plenty of willing female vampires here in town, and elsewhere in the world. Attractive, smart, fun vampires in Ireland and France and Germany. Why a human? Why
this
one?