Immortal

by V. K. Forrest

  Mickey pulled open the curtain behind Kaleigh, letting her out of the room.

  “Thanks…thanks for inviting me. You know. Letting me see.” Kaleigh snapped off the mask and dropped it on the table, avoiding bumping the condom basket.

  “Come back any time,” Mickey called after her as she hurried up the steps.

  Kaleigh pushed open the door at the top of the steps and took deep breaths as she hurried across the dance floor. Luckily, she spotted Katy, and as she walked past her, she grabbed her by her T-shirt. “Come on, we’re going. Later, Beppe.” She practically pulled Katy out of his arms.

  “What’s the matter? Where are we going?”

  “Home,” Kaleigh said firmly. On the porch, she hurried down the steps, still dragging Katy along. “Do you know what they’re doing down there?”

  “Where?” Katy halted on the sidewalk, her eyes widening. “The basement?” she gasped. “You went into the basement?”

  “Sex. There are people down there having sex,” she whispered harshly.

  “Together?” Katy wrinkled her freckled nose. “Humans having sex—eww, gross.”

  “Not just humans.” Kaleigh marched down the sidewalk.

  “Not just humans?” Katy ran to catch up. “You’re kidding. Who else was down there? One of us?” she asked excitedly. “You mean one of us, don’t you?”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “You have to tell me.” Katy cut in front of her, making her stop. “Who was down there?” Her eyes widened again. “Not Pete. If Pete was having sex with a human, I swear—”

  “Not Pete.” Kaleigh met Katy’s gaze. “But the thing is, I don’t think they were just having sex.”

  Katy’s jaw dropped. “Holy Mary, Mother of God—”

  “Yeah.” Kaleigh hurried down the sidewalk again. “That’s what I was thinking.”

  Beppe slipped in the back door and closed it quietly behind him. He paused, waited for a moment, listening. He heard his father snoring, the click-click of the ceiling fan in the kitchen, but nothing out of place. Everyone was asleep. Cautiously, watching the hallway, he crouched down and set his shoes by the door. Rising, he brushed his hair out of his eyes.

  On his hands, he could still smell the girl he’d been with. She smelled sour. He liked the one called Katy, but she wasn’t falling for his charm the way other girls did. She might take a little more persuading.

  Confident his family was asleep in their beds where they belonged, Beppe crept through the living room, down the hall. He passed his parents’ room, his zia’s. Once he was past the bathroom, he was home free. Another successful night out. Another notch in his belt. He grinned.

  The bathroom door moved in front of Beppe and he took a step back, startled. His sister Lia walked out of the dark bathroom.

  “Where were you?” she asked, speaking English.

  “Um…” He pointed in the direction of the main rooms of the cottage. “Kitchen. Um. Getting a drink of water.”

  She looked at him. “You sleep in those?” She took a step toward him and sniffed. “Where have you been, big brother?”

  Beppe pushed his hair out of his eyes. What a bitch, sneaking up on him like this. Thing was, if his sister told on him, it would be the end of his holiday fun. His parents would pack up and he’d be home in the villa before he knew what hit him. He didn’t want to go home. He was sick to death of home.

  “Why do you want to know? It’s not your business.”

  “It’s my business, all right.” Lia took a step toward him.

  She was wearing pink pajamas that made her look all sweet and innocent. That was the game she liked to play with their parents, but Beppe knew better. He knew she wasn’t as sweet or as innocent as she pretended.

  “You’ve been out, haven’t you, big brother? Been out and been naughty.”

  He stared at her, not sure what to say. If they talked too loud, someone would hear them and he’d be caught.

  “Mother wouldn’t like this. Not one bit. Neither would Zia Elena. You know what they said. If you’ve done it again, there will be no more summer holidays.” She sounded crazy. Not crazy maybe, but definitely crazed.

  “I…I’m being careful.”

  “You going out tomorrow night?” she asked, only inches from his face now. She was so intense she was a little scary, really.

  “I…I don’t know. Probably not.”

  “Yes, you are.” She turned around and padded barefoot down the dark hallway.

  Beppe just stood there.

  “You’re going wherever it is that you go,” Lia hissed, turning to him. “And you’re taking me with you.”

  Chapter 15

  There was dead silence, no pun intended, as Fin met the gazes of the Council members. For once, they were too stunned to speak. Peigi found her voice first. “I suppose there’s no need for me to ask, because if you weren’t sure, you wouldn’t be standing here with that look on your face, would you?”

  Fin shook his head, catching a glimpse of his reflection in the display case on the opposite wall. How many times had he stood in this room?

  They met in the town’s museum, built in the late sixties to encourage the town’s burgeoning tourist trade. Portraying Clare Point as a pirate’s den in early colonial days, the museum mixed fact with fiction, displaying many objects that had actually been on the ship the sept had traveled aboard from Ireland. When the vessel had wrecked on a reef in a storm and they were all washed ashore, they had collected the objects as well as the scrap wood from the splintered hull. They had built their first homes from those warped planks; portholes had become windows and the simple white bone china now displayed in this very case had been used on dining tables.

  There had been a small colony of outlaw wreckers living in lean-tos on the beach when the Kahills washed ashore, but once the chieftain, Gair, declared that they had reached their final destination, the Kahill women had drawn their fangs, the men had raised their swords, and the pirates had moved south to Virginia to safer ground.

  The glass cases in the rinky-dink museum, identified by printed signs, sometimes with humorous sketches, were filled with pieces of china, brass candlesticks, and other assorted junk, mostly brought from the ship, although some of it was bounty the wreckers had left behind in their eagerness to escape a colony of vampires. There was also a small exhibit of arrowheads and spear points from the area’s earlier history when Native Americans had hunted and fished the area. Some items were displayed on the round table, now pushed to the corner, that had come from the ship’s captain’s cabin; the same table that was used when High Council took an aonta and possibly sentenced a criminal to execution.

  During the museum’s operating hours, a five-minute movie was shown in one corner of the room and there was a small gift shop off the hall, near the bathrooms. There, plastic swords, eye patches, fake coins, tomahawks, and other assorted souvenirs were sold. On rainy days in the summer months, the museum made a surprisingly tidy profit.

  Fin shifted his gaze from his reflection in the glass display case to the Council members staring at him. Their shock didn’t last long. He was bombarded so hard that he caught himself raising his hands to cover his ears to block their voices, closing his eyes to block their thoughts.

  Holy Mary, Mother of God.

  “Impossible!”

  “Ridiculous.”

  “Hail Mary, full of grace—”

  Are you sure you’re sure?

  “It’s the curse. There’s no escaping the curse.”

  The thoughts and voices boomeranged around the museum’s main room until Fin couldn’t hear his own thoughts above the din.

  “I said this would happen.”

  “You did not.”

  Did too.

  Christ’s bones, this kind of thing didn’t happen when I was the law.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  Sure you do. I’ve been tempted to kill a tourist or two myself. Especially when they butt in line at the market.
Don’t say you haven’t.

  Council members rose from their folding chairs as they raised their voices to be heard over those around them. Someone, in his or her eagerness to one-up his neighbor, knocked over a chair. It clattered to the floor, adding to the volume of the commotion. In an effort to interrupt Mary Hall and Mary Hill’s heated exchange over who had first predicted the town would self-implode in just this way, Gair spilled his cup of red punch. Rob Hail tripped over young Johnny’s cane. One minute the meeting was an orderly circle of reasonable vampires, the next minute, chaos.

  “Ladies! Gentlemen! Please,” Peigi hollered above the racket, tapping her Bic on her clipboard.

  Everyone ignored her.

  “What are you going to do about this, Fin?”

  We have to stop him.

  Who would do such a thing? I can’t imagine any one of us—

  I told you this would happen.

  Did not.

  And blessed is the fruit—

  I most certainly did. Don’t you remember that day—

  “I knew we should have replaced Sean sooner. I knew he’d never be able to keep the peace.”

  “Sean? This has nothing to do with Sean. This has to do with us. With who we are.”

  I knew this was going to happen. We’ll have to move again. Where are we going this time? Siberia?

  Fin met Peigi’s gaze across the crowded room. Everyone was out of their chairs now. Sorry, he mouthed.

  You should have warned me, she shot back telepathically. I could have spiked the punch. If you ask me, they could all use a good dose of Xanax.

  Despite himself, Fin smiled. Leave it to practical Peigi to downplay a crisis.

  “Ladies! Gentlemen!” Peigi tried one last time.

  With no acceptable response, she tucked her clipboard under her arm and shot a ball of fire from her fingertips up through the center of the broken circle of chairs. It exploded in a belch of black powder and a shower of bright red and yellow sparks.

  Everyone shut up at once. Chairs were righted; someone got napkins to clean up the red punch on the linoleum floor. One by one, the chairs were returned to the circle and the Council members took their seats. Even Fin, who technically still had the floor, felt compelled to sit down.

  “Thank you,” Peigi said, plucking her clipboard from under her arm as the last of the embers spat and popped on the old floor. The acrid smell of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate still singed Fin’s nose.

  “Fin, can you tell us what you know, beyond the fact that one of us is killing these young men?” Peigi picked right up where she’d left off before the spilled punch and pyrokinetics.

  “Not much.” He rose again, opening his arms to the Council members. “The two victims were somehow lured into the confidence of the killer—”

  “They call it ‘glamouring’ humans,” Mary Hill piped up in her gossipy tone. “I saw it on that HBO show about the vampires.”

  Mary Hall scooted her large bottom across her chair to speak to Mary Hill. “The girl’s name’s Sookie. What kind of name is that for such a pretty young thing like that?”

  “Glamouring? Too bad there’s no such thing,” the grandfatherly Gair remarked, slurping from a cup that had been refilled. He was wearing his favorite T-shirt, the Captain Morgan rum one with the bikini-clad girl. A small dribble of punch marred her bare thigh like a trickle of blood.

  “Honestly, Mary, I don’t know why you watch that kind of nonsense.” Maria Cane folded her arms over her chest. “Vampires glamouring humans. It’s ridiculous.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve seen Fin in action,” Eva piped in. She winked at Fin. “Those come-hither eyes, that voice. I’d let him glamour me anytime.”

  Thanks a lot, Fin shot at her. Eva grinned.

  “Please, let’s get back to the subject at hand,” Peigi suggested. “Fin?”

  He exhaled, choosing his words carefully before addressing the group again. “There’s been no sign of a struggle. The killer may or may not have had sex with the victims prior to death. The victims have been fed on, but not exsanguinated. In both cases, while still unconscious from the feeding, the victims’ throats were slit.” He dragged his thumb from one ear to the other. “The body is then moved and posed.”

  “Posed?” Peigi asked. She had taken her seat; her clipboard rested on her knees.

  “The body is…arranged. The first victim was seated, leaning against a trash Dumpster, the second was seated inside a game at the arcade. He appeared to be playing it.”

  Everyone was silent as they digested the information. Gazes shifted from the floor or a plate of snacks to each other.

  “No suspects?” Peigi questioned.

  “None. No fingerprints. No hair. No fibers. Whoever is doing it doesn’t want to get caught. Obviously. So, for now, I need everyone to keep their eyes and ears open. If you hear or see anything suspicious, you need to get in touch with me.”

  “Victims were both young,” Young Johnny, who was now pushing eighty, said thoughtfully. He tapped his cane for emphasis. “That has to mean something.”

  “Young and good looking,” Eva chimed in.

  “What about these teenagers?” Liz Hill scooted to the end of her chair again, keeping her plate of banana bread, cookies, and two pink-frosted cupcakes balanced on her pudgy knees. “They’re all so forward, this generation. They think they know everything. None of them want to follow the sept laws.”

  Young Johnny pointed at Liz with his cane. “No respect for their elders, that’s what I say. Been saying it for centuries. It’s time we did something about the—”

  “I don’t think this is one of our teens,” Fin interrupted. He was tired. He just wanted to go home and go to bed. He needed to get out of there, away from the scrutiny of the sept, away from the failure his investigation was becoming. He had no leads. He had no idea who the killer was, except that it was a Kahill vampire, which made it all the more tragic.

  “It’s not one of our teens,” Fin repeated more firmly.

  “You said you didn’t know any details.” Young Johnny tapped his cane militantly. “That means you don’t know it’s not one of those good-for-nuthin’ kids. Running all over the place, out after curfew. Experimenting with drugs, alcohol, bloodletting—”

  “I’m telling you, it’s not them.” Fin raised his voice to be heard over the old man’s. “The crime is too gruesome. Too well thought out,” Fin argued, his thoughts churning. Too…angry.

  An angry crime.

  The words hung in Fin’s head as he walked, head down, up the sidewalk. He was unsure where the insight had come from. Unsure he should trust himself. But it was the one clear thought in his head right now. The clearest thought he’d had in three weeks of nonstop investigation. These murders were not about sex, or bloodletting. It wasn’t about teen vampires sowing their oats. These crimes were about anger. Jealousy. Rage.

  The sound of four-pawed footsteps tapped Fin’s attention and he looked up. Out of the darkness came a big black Lab. It passed him on his left side. “Hey, Arlan,” he said softly.

  The dog made a soft growl in its throat as it went by, on the prowl, or perhaps just keeping watch over the sleeping town.

  Fin smiled to himself as he turned onto the street toward home. He had always admired Arlan’s ability to shape-shift. It was such a cool gift. What could Fin do? Move packs of gum around? Regan could, at least, transport himself short distances, but Fin had never acquired that skill, either. What could Fin do for the sept? In the days when the belief in magic had been strong in humans’ lives, his ability had come in handy, but these days, what did he bring to the table?

  The front porch light had been left on. He flipped it off as he entered the dark house. The TV was off, for once. He sensed Regan was somewhere in the house, but he didn’t go looking for him.

  As he walked into the kitchen and turned on the overhead light, he loosened his uniform tie. He took a glass from the cupboard and poured himself some orange juice. As
he drank, he stared out the little window over the sink, at nothing in particular. Today marked the one-week anniversary of Richie’s death. Colin had been dead almost three weeks. The farther they got from the crime, the less likelihood there would be of solving it.

  He drained the glass and set it in the sink, turning on the faucet to fill it with water.

  “Notice I fixed the faucet?”

  Fin looked up to see Regan in the doorway in a pair of Fin’s boxers. “Those are mine,” he accused. “Can’t you get your own damned underwear?”

  “You’re welcome. Did laundry at Ma’s and unpacked a bunch of boxes, too.” He went to the refrigerator and removed the half gallon of orange juice. He didn’t bother to get a glass; he drank straight from the carton.

  Fin leaned against the sink, pulling off his tie. He felt like a jerk but not big enough of a jerk to apologize. “You’re up late.”

  “Can’t sleep.” Regan chugged from the carton. “Nightmares.”

  “About what? SpongeBob SquarePants?”

  “You think this could have something to do with the Rousseau brothers?” Regan wiped his mouth with his forearm. “The murders. You know, some kind of retaliation for what I did?”

  Something about the tone of his brother’s voice tapped Fin’s attention. “What makes you say that? Have you seen one of the Rousseaus?”

  Regan frowned, shoving the OJ carton back into the fridge. “Only in my dreams, bro.” He drifted to the door.

  Fin almost let him go. Almost. “You do anything about a job today?”

  Regan caught the edge of the doorjamb with his hand, stopping himself. He didn’t turn around. “You know, I could get a job if I wanted to.”