Undying

by V. K. Forrest

  “This might take a little finagling,” Fia warned Arlan. They approached a strip of crime scene tape stretched between two peach trees and the three Virginia State Police troopers guarding it. “I’m not authorized to be here.”

  “Never stopped you before,” Arlan pointed out under his breath.

  “You either,” she murmured. Her hand brushed his sleeve. “Be careful.”

  It wasn’t necessary for either of them to telepath the other. Fia knew what he was going to do. At times like this, their relationship seemed to go deeper even than those they held with their friends and relatives in the sept. Which was precisely why Arlan thought they were perfect for each other.

  He walked away from her, hands in his jean pockets. It wasn’t hard to blend in among so many people: uniformed police, detectives in suits, emergency medical technicians, media personnel, neighbors, relatives, probably extended family members.

  The parking area next to the white farmhouse was utter chaos. The Buried Alive Killer, as the news media was calling him, had struck again. Everyone was talking. There were tears. Sobs of disbelief. The emergency responders were taking care to keep their voices low and unemotional, but not always accomplishing their goal. A young male EMT stood on the far side of the yellow tape, hands pressed to his knees, head hanging, as an older woman in an identical uniform leaned over him, talking quietly. Coaxing him.

  News teams with cameras and microphones had set up camp in the driveway between a red minivan and a Chevy pickup. A police officer was trying to move them away from the vehicles, which Arlan guessed might have belonged to the family. Who knew what kind of evidence could have been left behind?

  Arlan’s gaze strayed to the soccer ball decal in the rear of the van window. It read “Go Shore Cats.” A kids’ local soccer team.

  He walked away, a lump rising in his throat. He could hear Fia talking to one of the state troopers, although he couldn’t quite make out what she was saying. FBI agents out of Baltimore would be here soon, if they weren’t already on the scene. This was really out of Fia’s jurisdiction and it wasn’t her case, but unlike in TV dramas, in real life, officers of the law often found common ground, overlooking the rules at times like these.

  Arlan heard a soft mew and looked up at the back porch. A tabby cat wearing a blue collar with a bell hanging from it sat on the edge, observing the commotion of the backyard. A living witness to the murders?

  Arlan walked over and sat down on the top step of the stairs leading to the porch. Someone had recently added a new coat of white paint. He could smell its freshness.

  Arlan reached out to the cat and it curled under his hand. He stroked its back. Scratched its ears. Can you tell me what happened here, little buddy? Arlan crooned telepathically. You know anything about this mess?

  The cat looked up with big green eyes. Blinked. He seemed to know Arlan was trying to communicate with him, but the message was coming through scrambled. It was difficult for Arlan to telepath to animals from a human state.

  See anything? Arlan pressed. Anything you want to tell me?

  Arlan sensed a heavy sadness.

  “Poor boy,” Arlan soothed, stroking the cat’s back.

  The cat arched beneath his hand, tail stiff in the air, and then leaped from the porch and took off across the grass. He went through a flower bed of purple impatiens, around a kid’s red plastic wheelbarrow, and past a peach tree. He flew unhindered under the line of yellow tape. On the far side of the tape, he stopped and turned back.

  Arlan glanced around. No one was paying attention to the cat, of course. Not the police, not the blonde with the microphone from WBOC, not even Fia.

  The cat waited.

  Arlan knew an invitation when he saw one.

  He glanced in the direction of the crowd being herded to the end of the driveway away from the family vehicles, then at Fia and the state troopers still in dialogue. He doubted anyone would notice him disappear around the rear of the house. Even less attention was given to the second cat that appeared a moment later.

  Arlan walked lightly over the freshly mowed grass, lifting his kitty paws high. He preferred big cat morphs over the common house cat variety, but a panther would have appeared out of place here, even in this uproar.

  Helicopter blades cut through the air as Arlan ran, tail in the air like a flagpole, under the police tape barricade. One of Fia’s newfound friends backed into an open area in the grass and waved away the helicopter.

  Arlan glanced ahead. The tabby was waiting for him, keeping one eye suspiciously on the helicopter. He didn’t seem as surprised by Arlan’s morph as he was by the news cam in the sky. The cat took off and Arlan trotted after him.

  The tabby was barely more than a teenager. Arlan sensed that he was scared. The cat didn’t know what was going on, but he knew it was bad. The bell on his collar tinkled as he ran through the grass.

  They circumnavigated two ambulances and a white van marked “COUNTY CORONER” in big block letters. The tabby couldn’t read, didn’t know what the van was, but Arlan did. Seeing those vehicles always bothered him. He couldn’t imagine how a person could do that job day in day out—investigating deaths, performing autopsies.

  Of course, the coroner probably wouldn’t have understood Arlan’s job any better. Vampires righting the wrongs of the world by selective execution were highly misunderstood. Pretty weird in its own way.

  Where are we going? Arlan conveyed to the cat as they ran through the legs of several uniformed police officers.

  Bad, the tabby said. Bad.

  They raced across a patch of grass toward a huddle of men and women under a picturesque silver maple tree that was so perfectly shaped that it appeared as if it had been drawn by a kid’s crayon.

  Arlan noticed at once that the humans standing under the tree, speaking in hushed voices, were all wearing latex gloves. He felt the hair rise along his spine. His tail bristled. The air was suddenly thick with the smell of dead flesh.

  Human flesh.

  A part of Arlan wanted to turn around and run back to the freshly painted white porch. That part of him wanted to sniff around the outbuildings behind the farmhouse and look for a tasty mole or mouse. He wanted to morph into an ostrich and stick his head in the sand…metaphorically speaking. He didn’t do ostriches.

  But Fia needed his opinion. Fia needed him and he could never tell her no. Not ever. So he followed his tabby friend, who had slowed to a trot. They went around the men and women in gloves talking in hushed tones.

  Fia had tried to warn him to prepare himself before seeing the victims. Ambulances had arrived to take the bodies away, but the dead had not yet been moved. Photos and evidence were still being taken by the crime scene investigative team.

  Arlan thought he was prepared as he walked under the tree, a step behind his feline friend. He had seen plenty of dead people before. Made quite a few of his own.

  He was not prepared.

  For a moment, Arlan just stood there, blinking his slanted kitty eyes. The scene that stretched out before him under the pictorial tree appeared to be something out of a bad slasher movie. It didn’t seem real. Their faces were waxen. Their open eyes gelatinous. Their arms artificially limblike.

  The tabby gave a strangled meow and Arlan took a stumbling. Not in fear. He wasn’t afraid of dead people. He was far more afraid of the living ones. But he was so shocked, so taken aback with surprise. He thought he had seen the worst of mankind.

  He apparently had not.

  Five heads.

  Five sets of arms stretched over the heads.

  Dead humans.

  All buried to their chins.

  Buried alive, Fia had warned. Then suffocated, one by one.

  The closer Macy drew to the farmhouse, the worse she felt. He wasn’t here, but he had been here. She could sense the remnants of his presence. She could almost smell him on the warm, early evening air. He was taunting her.

  Macy thought she would be scared to come here today. She
always was. She always went to the crime scenes, sometimes hours later, or days or weeks, but she always went as if pulled by an invisible thread. And she was always scared. Something was different tonight.

  The closer she moved to the congested crowd of TV crews, cops, medical personnel, and everyday rubbernecks, the more tied in knots she became. But there was something about this feeling that was different than before. Different than all the other times she had approached one of his gruesome vistas, in their aftermath. As she walked, contemplating her state, Macy found herself surprised to realize this wasn’t fear that balled in the pit of her stomach and threatened to constrict her airway. It wasn’t terror that made her mouth go dry and her ears hum. It was anger, pure and simple.

  Anger at him. At herself.

  As she met the edge of the mingling crowd, and felt their fear, she became conscious of the idea that she was tired of being fearful. She was tired of running. Tired of hiding. Tired of renting cottages, buying disposable cell phone minutes, and tired of living out of the trunk of her car. She was angry with him for doing this to her and even angrier with herself for letting him.

  The emotion that washed over her was so overwhelming that she halted for a moment to catch her breath. No one seemed to notice her. It was as if she was invisible.

  She stared up at the helicopter that circled high above the farmhouse and then sped north, as if to escape the horror Macy knew waited somewhere beyond the lines of yellow crime scene tape.

  How had she let her life become this? How had she let him do this to her? She’d have been better off letting him kill her years ago.

  Was that the point? Was he letting her live to torture her this way?

  Macy skirted the crowd, avoiding the cameras and microphones. She didn’t like pictures taken of herself; you never knew where they might pop up later.

  Macy didn’t know what she was looking for here. She certainly didn’t want to see the dead family. She guessed it wasn’t what she was looking for here, but whom.

  She spotted her, on the far side of the yellow tape strung between peach trees, walking between two guys in suits. Macy only caught her profile, but she knew it was her.

  Special Agent Fia Kahill was prettier in person than she had been on TV and in the news magazines and newspaper photos. She was hauntingly beautiful, with dark red hair that fell silky over her shoulders, lily pale skin, and dark, luminous eyes. And she was tall. At least six inches taller than Macy. She had to be six feet. An Amazon.

  Why hadn’t the camera angles reflected that?

  Macy, like most of America, had been glued to the TV news programs when the beheadings began to take place in the sleepy little seashore town on the Delaware coast. But after the first murder, the story had seemed to take a back burner to other news: the fighting in the Middle East, a passenger train wreck in Spokane, an earthquake in South America. Then suddenly, at summer’s end, the story broke again. All at once, Special Agent Fia Kahill’s face was everywhere. She was making statements and doing interviews on Larry King Live. She was a celebrity. She solved the mystery of the beheading murders, and two young men were currently serving multiple consecutive life sentences for their crimes. Agent Kahill was a hero.

  Macy had read the news articles. She had listened to Fia’s statement on Fox News Live. It wasn’t the beheadings that had fascinated Macy, or the fact that the clever female agent had been able to solve the mystery. It was something much more basic about Fia that had intrigued Macy. There was something about the agent that set her apart from others. Something that made her different. Macy had seen it reflected in her dark, incandescent eyes.

  Macy slipped her hand into her coat pocket and wandered away from the crowd. There was a quaint back porch that smelled as if it had been recently painted. She sat down on the steps leading up to the porch and dialed the phone number.

  She watched as Fia responded to the vibration in her pocket. Special Agent Kahill was too professional to leave her phone on ring at a crime scene.

  From across the lawn, through the branches and leaves of the peach trees, Macy saw Fia glance at her phone in her palm, note the incoming call number, then speak to one of the FBI agents in suits. She stopped, letting the men continue walking. Fia couldn’t have known the number because the cell was new, but Macy knew Fia knew it was her.

  “Special Agent Kahill.”

  Macy continued to watch her. “Hey,” she said, suddenly feeling almost shy. What was she doing calling her, right here where he had been? “It’s me.”

  “Hey, me.” Fia spoke lightly. “You thought about what I said?”

  “Thinking about it.” Macy watched her turn and look in the direction of the two agents walking away. They had to be going to the actual burial site, beyond the lean-to barn.

  “I’d really like to talk to you, Maggie. I’d like to see you. Meet face to face. I think it’s time.”

  Her elbow resting on her knee, Macy lowered her head until her forehead touched the heel of her hand. Her blond hair fell over her face as she cradled the phone to her ear. Hearing Fia’s voice on the end of the line made Macy realize how lonely she was. It was good just to hear Fia’s voice. How pathetic was that?

  “Will you come?” Fia prodded.

  Macy lifted her head, throwing her hair back. “I’m here,” she whispered.

  “You are? You’re here? At the scene?”

  Macy watched the agent turn around, studying the crowd. She started walking back toward the yellow line of tape, her long legs taking long strides. Fia Kahill didn’t look past the crowd, beyond the commotion, to the lonely back porch. To the lonely, invisible blond sitting on the step.

  Macy had made a career of remaining invisible.

  Except to him, of course.

  She felt the anger bubble in her chest again.

  “I want to talk to you,” Macy heard herself say. “Face to face.”

  Fia stopped walking, but she was still scanning the crowd. More uniformed police had arrived. Macy would have to join the crowd if she was going to stay any longer. Otherwise, someone was going to spot her. Macy made it a point to never stand out in a crowd. Never be singled out for anything if she could help it. She didn’t even like to be the only one in line in a grocery store.

  “But not here,” Macy added quickly. “I can’t talk to you here. Besides, you have to go see them. You have to…bear witness,” she said.

  Fia removed her dark sunglasses. “Okay. I’m headed there now.”

  “There’s a…a beach not far from here,” Macy said, still watching her. “A state park.” She’d been there before. Eighteen months ago or so. She’d gone walking on the beach after a photo shoot of a cottage in Chincoteague. “You want to meet me there about eleven tonight?” That would give Macy time to check in to a hotel. Think about what she wanted to say to Fia. Even think about whether or not she just wanted to get in her car and drive home.

  “I can certainly be out of here by then, but it’ll be kind of dark for a walk on the beach. Maybe a coffee shop or something?”

  Macy watched Fia check her wristwatch. Macy never wore a watch. She wasn’t all that caught up in what time it was. She always felt as if she had plenty of time to kill. A lifetime. “There’s a big waning moon,” she said into the phone. “The beach is pretty in the moonlight.”

  “Okay. Sure.” Fia slipped her hand into her pants pocket under her jacket. She turned away, seeming to give up on trying to spot Macy. “I can meet you at eleven.”

  Macy gave her the directions.

  “Got it.” Fia Kahill hesitated. “How will I know you?”

  Macy almost chuckled. “You’re quite the crack agent, Fia. I thought you guys could spot your man a mile away.” Somehow she managed to find a wry smile. “I’ll be the only one, other than you, crazy enough to be sitting on the beach in an empty state park that late at night.”

  Chapter 6

  Fia held her cell phone and glanced over her shoulder, looking toward the farmhouse. She s
canned the crowd, which was beginning to look like a mob. Where was Maggie? Was she really here?

  Fia sensed she was. Sensed Maggie was watching her. She was an intriguing woman, this informant of hers. There was something about her that tugged at Fia’s heartstrings.

  And here she thought she didn’t have any….

  More uniforms had arrived to serve as crowd control and the multitude seemed to be getting bigger by the moment. How could so many people have found out about the murders so quickly, in such a remote area? she wondered. How could they have all gotten here so quickly? Didn’t they have jobs? Families? Dinner to put on the table? It was morbid, humans’ fascination with the dead. Somehow she didn’t think they would be quite so enthralled if they were one of the living dead.

  Fia’s gaze shifted from one face to the next, but she didn’t see Maggie. Or at least she didn’t think she saw her. Fia had an idea in her head, from the voice, what the woman looked like, but she had no real idea. It had been her experience that bodies sometimes matched voices, but not always.

  The crowd was beginning to work itself into a frenzy the way a crowd could. The TV news reporters’ voices were getting shriller, even the men’s. The helicopter, waved away once, was apparently attempting to make another fly-by over the property in the hopes of getting a couple of gruesome head shots.

  Fia groaned to herself at the bad pun. She’d been doing this too long. Next life, she was going to be a gardener, or maybe a basket weaver. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a green thumb, nor was she artistic. This was what she did well—the dead. Some days she considered it a gift from God used to serve mankind and help right the wrongs committed by her sept. Other days, it was another one of His sick jokes. A curse.

  Tucking her phone into her pocket, she started down the path leading through the orchard. Agents Richter and Evans, from the Baltimore field office, said the bodies were just past the lean-to toolshed, over the little crest. They were buried under a tree. From here, Fia could see the branches and leaves. It was a big maple. Hundreds of years old. She liked old trees. They made her feel…less old.