Undying

by V. K. Forrest

  “I have to make a living. I told you, I just came to New Orleans to—”

  “I’m not buying it, Macy. This is not coincidence, you catching a four A.M. flight to New Orleans. The same flight I took.”

  “I took the six.”

  “You followed me here,” he continued. “You swore you weren’t a stalker.”

  “I’m not a stalker!” She said it loud enough that a husband and wife, cameras around their necks, at the table next to Arlan and Macy glanced in their direction.

  This was just what Arlan didn’t need—anyone calling attention to his and Fia’s presence. If at all possible, he wanted to get into New Orleans, get Regan, and get out before the Rousseaus ever knew he’d set foot on their soggy soil.

  “This sure makes you look like a stalker,” Arlan said under his breath. He was now as perturbed with himself for letting this happen as he was with her.

  She glanced away, her face falling.

  Arlan was at once contrite. He knew she wasn’t a stalker. He just—

  “I don’t know why I came,” she said softly, with that ethereal voice that always tugged at his heartstrings. “I swear, lately, I don’t know why I do half the things I do.” Her elbow on the glass-top table, she lowered her forehead to the heel of her hand. “I just…I feel as if you can keep me safe.” She spoke the words like a dreaded confession. “You know, when I asked you yesterday what made you think you could help people, that was about me, not you.” Her voice was breathy with emotion. “I guess what I’m saying is that I feel it, too.” She ran her hand upward, through her hair, and sat back in the chair. “I feel as if you can help me when no one else has ever—” The words caught in her throat and she couldn’t go on.

  “Macy…” He took her hand. He was no hero. He did what the sept asked of him because he was one of them; it had nothing to do with heroics. But he wanted to be Macy’s hero.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to put such a heavy responsibility on you. Honestly I don’t.” She looked up at him. “You think I’m crazy. You think I’m a crazy stalker.”

  He studied her green eyes, the flecks of gold that seemed to illuminate her very soul. Her good soul. All evidence to the contrary, he didn’t think she was a stalker. Somehow this was all tied in to the Buried Alive Killer; he sensed it. And he sensed that he would have some part in what was playing out with Macy and this man. He just didn’t know where he fit in yet.

  He brought her hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers. “I really need you to go back to Clare Point. There are people there who can keep you safe. I think that’s what brought you to Clare Point.” He clasped her hands between both of his. “I think that you know that, on a subconscious level. I think that’s why you followed me there.”

  “You think that’s possible?” Her eyes were wild and childlike and Arlan wanted nothing more than to pull her into his arms.

  He sensed Fia approaching before he heard her footsteps on the tile flooring. He sat back, releasing Macy’s hands. “Warning you now,” he said under his breath. “She’s going to be pissed.”

  “Macy.” Fia halted at the end of the table. “What are you doing here?” She looked to Arlan, not giving Macy a chance to answer. “What is she doing here?”

  “She’s going back to Delaware.” He shot Macy a look that he hoped might intimidate her. “Aren’t you?”

  “Just as soon as I see the houses I came to see.” None of the vulnerability he had heard in her voice a moment ago was now present. She rose, taking her purse and drink with her. “You two have a good day.” She walked away, raising her glass in good cheer. “Good luck on your case.”

  “I still can’t believe you would risk a human’s life like this,” Fia said. They walked single file in the dark, down a narrow alley. On both sides, the brick walls of the buildings rose high over their heads. The alley smelled of mold, crumbling mortar, rodent feces, and orange jello, of all things.

  Arlan led the way. “And I can’t believe you don’t believe me when I tell you that I didn’t invite her. I didn’t even tell her we were coming here.”

  “She just followed you?”

  “Yes.” He looked over his shoulder. “We’ve been over this already, Fia. I’m beginning to think she’s psychic. She just doesn’t know it.”

  “I think she’s a fruitcake.” They reached the end of the alley. “Left.” She pointed. “That door. The one with the finger bone hanging in the window.”

  “Charming friends you have.”

  Fia checked the pistol she wore in a holster at the small of her back, under a loose T-shirt. “They’re not my friends.”

  “More snitches? Witches snitches?”

  She brushed past him. “They see you, they won’t talk. They don’t trust me as it is. So do your thing.” She flapped her hand. “Make yourself into a mouse or something.”

  “A mouse?” He lifted a dark eyebrow, unamused. “I don’t do mice.”

  “Whatever.” She knocked on the door.

  The shop reminded him of a Hansel and Gretel cottage in the Bavarian forest, only the gingerbread was painted purple and a sign hung by the door advertising POTIONS & BREWS.

  “Feline or canine?” he asked Fia.

  There was a sound on the other side of the door. The curtain in the shop window moved.

  “Rodent,” she quipped.

  As the door opened, Arlan morphed into a lean, leggy mongrel.

  Two women answered the door. The best word Arlan could come up with was hag. The women were hags. Young for hags, but hags nonetheless. Their hair was long and stringy. Dirty. The four eyes that stared at Fia were white with cataracts. Their faces weathered by harsh living. They smelled of cigarette smoke, gin, and evil.

  I hate witches, he telepathed.

  Hush, Mousie, Fia shot back. She made eye contact with the closest hag. “Gullveig, long time no see.”

  “We’re closed,” the blonde shrieked, catching the door with bony fingers to slam it shut.

  “I’m not looking for a love potion.” Fia slipped her foot in the doorway before it banged shut. “Want to see my badge or my fangs, ladies?”

  The one sister looked at the other and then back at Fia. Her white-eyed gaze would have been unnerving to most, but not to Fia. As far as she was concerned, it was their gimmick and a good one at that. “We got out of the business last year. Nothing but potions for sale here.”

  “That mean a raid on your house would be a waste of the FBI’s time, Gullveig?” She looked to the other sister. “Heid?”

  The second sister gave a squeak and stepped back, eyeing Arlan, who had moved up to stand beside Fia.

  “Damn strays,” Fia remarked, giving Arlan a push with her knee. “You girls ought to call the dog catcher.”

  Arlan whined and stepped back. Bitch, he telepathed.

  Pussy, Fia shot back. She looked at the two women in the doorway. “I’m looking for a guy named Regan. He might be in a little trouble. You hear anything about a vampire being in some trouble?”

  The sisters looked at each other. Gullveig tried to close the door again.

  Fia slammed the heel of her hand into the door and the women fell back. Fia crossed the threshold. Arlan followed her to the door, but remained outside, growling low in his throat. The kind of mood he was in tonight, it wouldn’t take much to send him flying at one of the stringy throats. Or making salad of the gray tabby with the green eyes staring at him from the upstairs window.

  He hated witches.

  “That a yes?” Fia snarled, baring her fangs. “You have heard something.”

  It was funny how most people didn’t notice the Kahill’s fangs until they were bared. Filed down by a Kahill dentist, Kahill fangs looked almost normal, but drawn, they frightened humans and witches alike, apparently.

  “I don’t know nuthin’,” Gullveig shrieked, raising her hands as if she could shield herself from Fia’s anger. “Just gossip.”

  “What gossip?”

  �
�Somebody stole some drugs. Ripped them off. A vampire. Nice-looking fellow. Young. A Kahill, I heard.”

  “You must have heard wrong. Kahills don’t mess with that crap.”

  “I must have heard wrong,” Gullveig echoed, her voice high-pitched with terror.

  Arlan took a step closer. Fee, he telepathed.

  She ignored him.

  “Stole drugs from who?” she demanded.

  “Rousseau brothers, who else?” the witch cackled.

  Arlan growled and took another step closer, resting his front paws on the doorsill. Every sinewy muscle in his seventy-pound canine body ached to coil and leap. He wondered what the witches’ blood would taste like. Gin and cigarettes? It would probably be so foul he would have to spit it out. He would like to have ripped their throats out, just the same.

  The witches yipped in fear as Arlan crept toward them.

  Fia shot him a glance. “Get out of here, mutt. Go on.”

  Arlan acquiesced and stepped back into the street.

  “Have they got him? The Rousseaus, do they have the vampire?”

  The hags cowered. “Maybe,” Gullveig offered when Fia bared her fangs again.

  “Where?”

  “Could be anywhere in the city.”

  Arlan growled.

  Gullveig eyed the dog in the doorway. “St. Louis, Number One. Corner of St. Louis and Basin.”

  “I know where it is,” Fia snapped. She walked out of the shop, into the dark. “Come on, Fido,” she whispered to Arlan, tapping her thigh with her hand. Her anger was gone in a second; now she was just a scared big sister. “Let’s go to the cemetery and fetch my brother.”

  Chapter 19

  Macy pressed her back to the brick wall, staying behind a broken drainpipe, and watched Fia disappear down the alley. A dog trotted beside her. Macy watched the animal apprehensively. She wondered where Arlan had gotten to and exactly why Fia was so friendly with the stray. Fia was talking to the mongrel as she walked away.

  Macy glanced back at the potion shop. The two ugly women had slammed the door, but she knew they were watching from the darkened window. She could feel their silvery, cataract-eyed gazes.

  Despite the trickle of sweat that ran down Macy’s spine, she shivered. The alley smelled strongly of something akin to sulfur. New Orleans had always seemed like a perfectly nice city before. Macy liked the French Quarter. She liked the anonymity it provided, and it was always easy to pick up hot guys on Bourbon Street. But the New Orleans Macy was seeing tonight was different. Weird different. Weird like—she stopped herself before the words popped into her head. Arlan was right, she really did need a new simile.

  Arlan. Everything went back to Arlan these days, didn’t it? He and Fia had left the hotel together. Macy had followed them to Café Du Monde, where they had gone around to the back of the building and spoken to a creepy thin man in a greasy apron. She had last seen Arlan one street over from the potion shop. She’d been trying not to follow too closely; after all Fia was FBI, maybe Arlan, too. You didn’t tail the FBI too closely without getting caught.

  Which logically brought one to the question, why was she tailing the FBI at all?

  Macy wasn’t sure. All she knew was that she wanted to find out what Fia and Arlan were doing in New Orleans. Once again, on some level beyond her understanding, she needed to know.

  So one minute it seemed as if Arlan had been there and the next he had not. Then the dog had shown up, that weird dog….

  Macy waited until Fia turned left at the end of the alley and then she hurried after her. As she walked away from the cover of her drainpipe, she looked back over her shoulder. The women were still watching and Macy self-consciously shrugged her shoulders as if she could shake their sour gazes from her back.

  She followed Fia and the dog all the way to a cemetery on the north end of Basin Street, at the corner of St. Louis. She couldn’t for the life of her figure out what Fia would be doing in a cemetery. Even sunburned tourists knew the cemeteries weren’t safe after dark. Not alone.

  Macy halted in the iron gateway that led into the cemetery. She still couldn’t believe Fia would go into the cemetery at night, bad ass FBI agent or not. Macy knew enough about the city to steer clear of a dangerous place like this. There were thieves beyond these stone walls, people who would mug you for your Fossil wallet. Druggies who might kill you to get a diamond ring.

  Macy glanced up and down the street, lit by golden globes of lamplight. There were a few pedestrians on the sidewalk, but the old graveyard was beyond the boundaries of the French Quarter and foot traffic was light.

  She stopped to look at the marker on the gate: ST. LOUIS CEMETERY # 1, it read. THE OLDEST EXTANT CEMETERY IN NEW ORLEANS.

  Macy peered into the dark space beyond the gate. She could see shapes in the gloom, tombs, mausoleums. Her mouth went dry. She looked back over her shoulder, then into the cemetery again. Why was Fia here? FBI business? What was wrong with Arlan that he would let her come here alone?

  She stepped through the gate and looked behind her again. The street was quiet. She gazed into the shadowed darkness ahead. If she was going in, she needed to go now before Fia got too far ahead of her.

  Macy shrugged off her uneasiness and started down the main path, listening for sounds of anyone approaching from behind, or from the stone tombs that towered on both sides of her. As she walked deeper into the cemetery, the mausoleums seemed to close in around her. The quiet made her uneasy. She heard none of the typical night sounds. No car horns. No insect song. Just quiet. Dead quiet.

  “Christ,” Macy muttered under her breath. She was spooking herself.

  Gradually, her eyes became accustomed to the dark. The forms that had been shapeless at a distance now transformed into stone people. Angels. All of them weeping.

  She thought about where her family was buried. Greenview Memorial Park. It was pretty there, sunny, green. The old-fashioned cemetery sat on a grassy knoll with a white clapboard church in the distance. Pretty idyllic…as graveyards went. She hadn’t been there in years, but right after her parents were murdered, she had gone often. In her teenage years, she’d huddled against the large pink granite tombstone and wait for the tears. Eventually she gave up on the tears, and the idea that in order to mourn the loss of her family, she had to go to the place where their bodies were buried.

  Macy came to a standstill in the middle of the gravel path and raised her hands to her head, pressing her palms to her ears. What was she doing here? Why did she care what Fia was doing? She knew she ought to be on Bourbon Street right now, drinking a hurricane in a foot-tall plastic cup, checking out the jazz joints, checking out the guys.

  Macy was just turning on her heels to head back the way she had come when she heard a voice…. She froze and listened. Someone was talking. A woman and a man. Their voices carried on the humid night air, but she was unable to pinpoint the direction. Macy couldn’t tell if they were in front of her or behind. She turned slowly in place, the loose gravel crunching under her sneakers. She listened.

  She knew the voices. It was Fia and Arlan. How the hell did Arlan get inside without Macy seeing him? Obviously there was another entrance. Was Fia meeting Arlan in the cemetery? Was that why she was here? That theory made more sense than anything else, although Macy still couldn’t see where the dog fit in.

  She started to walk again, deeper into the cemetery. She now suspected that the voices were coming from her right. She turned off the main path she had followed in, taking a narrower one. Here, the mausoleums were even closer. She smelled the thick, sweet scent of flowers, rotting vegetation and…what could only be described as death.

  Macy wanted to turn around, but something made her keep going.

  “You hear that?” she heard Arlan say.

  “Hear what?” Fia said in a loud whisper.

  Macy spotted their silhouettes ahead and she ducked left, hoping to hide herself in the shadow of a tomb.

  “That,” Arlan said.

&nbs
p; They halted in the middle of the path. Arlan appeared to be gazing off to his left. There, a giant mausoleum, probably holding multiple family members, loomed.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Fia said impatiently.

  Macy couldn’t hear a thing either.

  Fia suddenly turned around, facing where Macy had been standing a moment before. “Someone’s here,” she said, her voice quieter.

  “Yeah, I think someone’s been following us.” Arlan’s head snapped around. “Regan!” He bolted for the mausoleum.

  “Be careful,” Fia warned, darting after him. “It could be a trap.”

  Macy crept forward, crouching low. Regan was the missing brother. Neither Fia nor Arlan had said anything about him, but Eva had told Macy that he had been on a business trip somewhere in Europe and had not returned when he was expected to. Macy knew that Arlan and Fia had been worried about him. But what did the missing brother have to do with this cemetery?

  Macy rested her hand on a headstone that jutted out of the uneven ground, trying to get closer. She was scared, but not scared enough to run.

  In front of the massive mausoleum, Arlan struggled with something upright directly in front of the entrance. She heard stone scrape stone. Was he moving a pillar of marble? This was getting stranger by the second. The thing had to have weighed a thousand pounds, a few hundred at the very least.

  “Regan! Regan, we’re coming,” Arlan called. “Just hang on, buddy.”

  Macy rose, too shocked to bother to hide any longer, and watched Arlan move aside the massive stone pillar and yank open the mausoleum door.

  “Regan!”

  “Regan!” Fia echoed.

  “Oh my God,” Macy breathed, not quite believing what she was seeing. “He’s inside?” she whispered.

  A figure stumbled out of the open door, into Arlan’s arms.

  “’Bout damned time you got here,” the young man said. “You know it’s dark in a tomb. And there’re spiders. You know I hate spiders.”