Voracious - (Claire Point Vampire 5)

by V. K. Forrest

  Realizing he’d left his cell phone in his car, he decided to walk the one block over and up to where he’d parked and grab it. Aedan had stopped parking on the same street as Brew because, though he had never met Jay face-to-face, Jay knew what he looked like. At least what he had looked like when he had known Madeleine as a man in his early twenties.

  Once Ashley was gone, Aedan morphed into an Ashley-esque woman: jeans, a T-shirt, a tan canvas jacket, and a patchwork fabric bag that hung on her shoulder and hit low on the hip. He passed two guys on the street. One whistled at him as he walked by, but they seemed harmless. A gaggle of women too old to be out this late on a work night poured out of a bar, laughing and stumbling and grabbing each other for balance. On Rehoboth Avenue, where he’d left his car, he walked past several people: an older couple walking hand in hand, more forty-year-old women wrapping up an evening of barhopping. A guy carrying a pizza box and a brown paper bag that looked like it contained a six-pack of bottled beer. He doubted it was Guinness.

  He walked a couple more blocks.

  Aedan had left his car in front of a caramel popcorn stand. Closed. He reached into his purse for his keys, keeping an eye on the few people still on the street.

  Where was he? Where was Jay?

  He unlocked his car. It wasn’t until he leaned in to grab his cell phone from the console between the seats that he saw the piece of paper on the windshield. His first thought was that it was a ticket. Then, as he stood up, he realized it was a napkin. A napkin from the pizza place where he and Mark had met last week. The place from which Jay had placed the phone call to the police station.

  “Sweet Mary, Mother of God,” Aedan whispered. He snatched the napkin off the windshield. There was handwriting on it.

  Pizza & Beer! So American! the note read in elaborate, Old World script. It was signed with a J.

  “Fuck,” Aedan muttered, looking up one end of the street, then down the other.

  Then he thought of the guy he had passed not five minutes ago. With the pizza and beer. Pizza from the same place. “Son of a bitch!” Aedan hit the car hard with his fist, which hurt like hell because he had a twenty-year-old girl’s fist.

  He slammed his car door and ran up the street, to the intersection near where they had passed each other, looking in every direction.

  Jay was gone. Of course he was gone.

  Aedan stood in the intersection and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to remember what the guy carrying the pizza box and beer had looked like. Damn it to hell! This was what Aedan did for a living! He noticed details. He found people. He watched them.

  The problem was, Jay had looked so average that Aedan hadn’t paid any attention to him. Aedan had been more interested in the damned beer than the guy.

  A car honked its horn, and Aedan’s eyes flew open. He threw up his hands. He was still holding the napkin. “Sorry,” he muttered, crossing to the sidewalk.

  He walked back to his car, so frustrated he thought he might scream.

  His phone vibrated in his hand, startling him. Who the hell ...

  It was Peigi’s home number.

  “Hello?” Aedan said, his voice a little higher pitched than his true voice.

  “Hey . . . man . . . it’s Brian.”

  “Brian?” Aedan asked, thinking it was awfully strange that the kid would be calling him. “What’s the matter?”

  “I was wondering . . . are you . . . you planning on coming home tonight?”

  Aedan glanced around. There was no one nearby.

  Jay was gone. He was sure of it. “I don’t know, man. Why?” He walked out into the eastbound lane of Rehoboth Avenue. Once the bars closed, the seaside resort quickly became a ghost town.

  “I . . . I don’t know, man. Peigi, she’s . . .”

  “She’s what?” Aedan asked impatiently.

  “She’s pissed. Not at me,” he said quickly. “She’s out in the backyard . . . throwing fireballs around. I think the corner of the house caught fire, but she used the hose to put it out. I . . . I went outside and asked her what was wrong, but she told me to go back in.” He hesitated. “I’m kind of worried, Aedan. About her.”

  Aedan exhaled. He had a pretty good idea he knew what had happened. The General Council had made their ruling . . . or at least Mary Kay’s committee had decided what their recommendation would be. He suddenly felt guilty. He’d been so wrapped up in his own life, in worrying about Jay and playing house with Dallas, that he’d barely spoken to his aunt in the last week. “But you don’t know what’s wrong?”

  “No. We had dinner. Me and her and Victor. She made lasagna. We talked and stuff. She was fine. Then someone called, and she went outside and started lighting shit on fire.”

  “I’ll be home shortly.”

  “You will?” Brian sounded relieved.

  “Yeah.” Aedan climbed into his car, morphing back into his own body. Wherever Jay was, he was having pizza and beer. And probably laughing his ass off. He wouldn’t be hunting tonight.

  “Just stay away from her,” Aedan instructed. “And don’t let her burn the house down.”

  Chapter 21

  Aedan saw a giant ball of fire rise high in the sky above Peigi’s cottage and then, thankfully, burst into a shower of bright sparks. Another fireball shot into the air as he got out of his car and hurried across the grass to the gate that led into the backyard.

  “Peigi?” he called. As he went through the gate, he saw that neither of her neighbors, though their properties were relatively close, appeared to have noticed that sensible Peigi Ross, leader of their General Council, was attempting to set the neighborhood on fire. Or maybe Peigi did this more often than Aedan realized. He wasn’t home much.

  The lights were off in both neighbors’ houses.

  “Aunt Peigi?”

  Another ball of fire flew into the air, exploding like cannon fire, and Aedan instinctively cowered, covering his head. As the sparks fell from the sky, he closed the gate behind him. He walked around Brian’s bicycle, abandoned on the ground near a flowerbed of daylilies that hadn’t yet bloomed.

  “Peigi!” Aedan shouted above the boom of the next fireball.

  “Go to bed,” Peigi ordered. She sat on a chaise lawn chair near the shed, dressed in jeans, a polar fleece jacket, and her slippers. A fireball was forming in her right hand.

  “You can’t make me go to bed, Aunt Peigi,” he said with amusement. “I’m a big boy now.”

  “I can set your hair on fire. Go away. Go back to wherever the hell you’ve been going every night for the last two weeks.”

  He sat down on a lawn chair beside her. “What’s going on? You scared Brian half to death with your fireworks show. He called me.”

  “He did?” That gave her a moment’s pause, then she started in again.

  Aedan didn’t know how she did it. She barely blinked, flung her arm skyward, and another fireball flew through the air. This one created a nice arc before disappearing over the fence, hopefully hitting the street, rather than his car.

  “Yeah, he’s worried about you.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?” Aedan asked. “You seem upset.”

  She threw another fireball into the air, but this one wasn’t quite so large. Her anger or frustration or whatever she was experiencing was fading.

  “How about you tell me what’s going on with you?” Peigi countered. “With the HF . . . with a child.”

  He looked at her through the darkness.

  “Mary Hall saw you at the grocery store in Rehoboth,” Peigi explained. “She said the three of you make quite the attractive little family.” Aunt Peigi could lay on the sarcasm like jam.

  He leaned forward in the lawn chair, folding his hands. “One of these days, Mary’s gossiping is going to get her into serious trouble.”

  “I imagine that, over the years, it has,” she said quietly. The last fireball had dissipated, until there were just a few cinders that glowed li
ke fireflies in ajar. “Mary said she was quite beautiful.”

  “Her name is Dallas.”

  “Pretty name.” She sat back on the chaise, stretching out her legs. “Pretty name for a pretty girl. I don’t need to tell you the danger a human puts you in. Or you put her in. With your job, you don’t exactly mix with the best humanity has to offer. This one you’re tracking, he’s a particularly bad monster. He killed that girl you loved, didn’t he?”

  Aedan closed his eyes and rubbed his temples with his thumb and middle finger. He wanted to be angry at Peigi for not minding her own business, but of course his business was hers. As his aunt and as a member of the Kahill family. And damn her, she was right.

  Peigi went on. “The one in France.”

  He hung his head. “Yes. It was just coincidence. He didn’t know about me, about what we do. Just bad luck.” He pressed his lips together. “But I loved her, and he killed her.”

  “And you love this Dallas, don’t you?” Peigi asked.

  “No, of course not. She’s human. I learned my lesson.”

  They were both quiet.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Ah, well that makes the matter more complicated, doesn’t it? Now, what do you do?”

  “How do you mean? Obviously, I’ll have to break it off. I’ve only got another six weeks before I’ll be released for work again. It isn’t like I’m staying in Clare Point, like this . . . fling is going anywhere. I can’t wait to get back to work. I love it here, but . . . the job’s calling me. Paris is calling.”

  “You don’t find love often,” Peigi said. “Hard to walk away from it, even amidst danger.” She toyed with the zipper on her polar fleece. “If I didn’t love Brian, if I didn’t love him so much, still, after all these years,” she said passionately, “I wouldn’t be in such turmoil over the predicament we’ve found ourselves in.”

  Aedan studied her face. “The General Council denied your request, didn’t it?”

  “Not yet, but it’s only a formality. Mary Kay had the decency to call me tonight and warn me.” She sounded . . . resigned.

  “And you’re going to accept that decision, aren’t you, Aunt Peigi?”

  She let her hands fall to her sides and stared at the dark house. The only light visible, now that the fireworks were over, was the glow from the den that flickered with the TV screen. “What’s everyone expect me to do?” she asked. “Sensible, logical Peigi.”

  “You always do the right thing.” Aedan leaned forward, folding his hands. “We can always depend on you to do the right thing. You never seem to struggle with right and wrong the way most of us do. It’s one of the traits we all admire most in you.”

  She got out of the chair. “So, I’ll do the right thing.” She looked over her shoulder at him. “And I trust you will, too. With the HF.” She walked toward the house. “Good night, dear.”

  “ ’Night, Aunt Peigi.”

  Aedan sat for a long time in the dark backyard before he finally turned in for the night, knowing Peigi was right. He had to do the right thing. He had to break up with Dallas. He had to end it now, before she got hurt.

  Before any of them got hurt.

  I prefer the darkness of night, but the gray sky before morning is surprisingly pleasant. And it is nice to do something different, sometimes. Something out of character. It keeps others guessing.

  Like the note on the vampire’s car. I know he is prowling the same streets I am at night because I can feel him, though I do not have the pleasure of seeing him. Perhaps he’s not just looking for me, but for his own victims. I laugh at the idea of bumping into him in the same alley, me with my knife, him with his fangs. It is really quite a funny thought.

  So after leaving the note, I went home and enjoyed my beer and the pizza and the telly. I thought I had turned in for the night, but near dawn I decided to take a stroll.

  I found her in a parking lot behind a quaint diner.

  Her name was Marsha Pimpton. She was older than the women Jay usually chose; she was thirty-four, divorced, with a ten-year-old son. Jay had attacked her at dawn. A first. Aedan didn’t know what it meant. Marsha Pimpton would live, but like the others lucky enough to survive, she would always bear the scars of the attack. No one would look at her face again without pause.

  Aedan talked with Mark several times during the day and promised to drop off the note written on the napkin at the police station. Marsha went into surgery for repairs to the muscles in one of her arms, then to have reconstructive surgery on her nose. The three inch-high letter J carved into her thigh could only be treated with an antibiotic and bandaged; there was no way for the doctors to remove it or stitch it closed, just as they had been unable to remove the signature he had left on the other women.

  Mark didn’t think it necessary for Aedan to come to the hospital to see Marsha, which actually relieved Aedan. He was already feeling like a failure; time was running out fast, and he was no closer to catching Jay than he had ever been. Aedan wasn’t up to seeing another woman brutalized by the bastard.

  Aedan stuck around Peigi’s house most of the day, just to keep an eye on his aunt. But she seemed her old self. She kept busy with sept business and cleaning out her closets, of all things. All day she carried black garbage bags out of the house and loaded them into her car to donate to a charity. In the afternoon, Aedan ran errands and insisted Brian go with him; for once, the teen didn’t put up an argument.

  At one o’clock, Dallas texted Aedan, offering to make him dinner. He texted back, declining. It was early evening before she texted again, asking if he was coming that night. He told her he’d see her after closing.

  When Tat left the bar that night, he walked Amber to her car, and Aedan went upstairs with Dallas. She knew something was up. She was restless, and even after he told her he needed to talk to her, she wouldn’t sit down. She kept trying to tidy up the apartment, putting laundry in the wash, picking up Kenzie’s toys, collecting dirty dishes for the sink.

  “Dallas, please,” Aedan finally said, grabbing her arm as she went by with an armful of stuffed animals. “I really need you to sit down with me. I need to talk with you.” He let go of her.

  Dallas opened her arms and let the stuffed animals fall to the floor. She’d stalled long enough. It was time for her to find some balls and say what she wanted to say. Before it was too late. Before the best thing that had ever happened to her walked out the door. She took a breath.

  “No, I have something to tell you first. I’m not letting you break up with me,” she said, dropping her hands to her hips.

  He was so surprised that he didn’t say anything. “I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided,” she said. “I’m not going to let you do it.”

  “Dallas—”

  “I’m talking right now.” She walked around the coffee table and sat down on the couch beside him. “I know what you’re going to say, why you’re going to say it. You think we should break up now before things get too serious, because you have to leave. Well, I’ve got news for you; things are already serious. We didn’t mean for this to happen. God knows I didn’t. But it happened.”

  “Da—”

  “I said I’m talking right now,” she interrupted him. “I don’t want to hear your logic. I don’t want to hear your common sense. I love you, Aedan, and I think you love me. So when you go, it’s going to break both our hearts, anyway.” She took a deep breath for the first time in what seemed like days. It felt good to say what she’d been thinking. “So, until you have to go, be my guy. Let me be your girl. And let Kenzie be your little girl . . . for a little while longer.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand what kind of connection the two of you have, but I know it’s there. And I know she needs you right now.” Dallas reached out and took his hand, and the waves of his past washed over her. But they didn’t overwhelm her. In fact, she found them comforting.

  “Okay,” she said in a small voice. “Now you can speak.”

  After a while, he look
ed away. Now that she was offering the opportunity, he didn’t seem to know what he wanted to say.

  He looked back at her. “I do love you, Dallas. Which is why we can’t stay together. And I’m not just talking about my job’s being a problem; it’s more than that.” He stopped and then started again. “I’m afraid you could be in danger. Today. Right now.”

  “Because you’re a vampire or because of what you do?” she asked, holding tightly to his hand, refusing to let go of it.

  “Both.” He nodded. “With my job, I come in contact with bad people, people so evil . . . you can’t imagine.”

  “World’s full of bad people, Aedan. You don’t have a monopoly on them.”

  “I know, but—”

  “You understand what I’m saying?” She slid closer to him, so that she could look into his eyes. “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me . . . or Kenzie. So you have to go.” She shrugged. “So we can’t be together forever, so what? Who gets forever? We can be together for the next few weeks, can’t we?”

  He started to turn away again, but she wouldn’t let him. She pressed his cheeks between her hands and rose up on the couch to kiss him hard on the mouth. For a moment, she thought he might resist her, but then he was kissing her back.

  He thrust his tongue into her mouth, and she climbed onto his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck. She couldn’t get enough of him. She had no unrealistic hope that the vampire would give up his life’s work and stay for her, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered right now was that he had said he loved her. That, Dallas thought, just might last her a lifetime.

  Aedan seemed as hungry for her tonight as she was for him, despite his apparent intention of coming over to break up with her. She pulled her T-shirt and bra off, and he covered her breasts with kisses, licking, sucking her nipples.

  She straddled him on the couch, his feet on the floor, her knees digging into the indoor/outdoor cushions. She ground her groin against his, stripping him of his T-shirt and kissing his muscular shoulders.