Undying Page 8

  Along with being sensible, Peigi was also direct.

  “We?” He didn’t like the sound of that. We meant the sept. We usually meant something dangerous like killing a notorious vampire slayer or cat-sitting for Miss Lucy’s five cats.

  “I’m listening.” Click, click. Click, click. “Damn it. I wonder if the charcoal got damp. It’s a new bag. I used charcoal from it the day before I left.” Click, click. Click, click. Now the lighter wasn’t lighting at all.

  “As you know, Johnny Hill’s gout is acting up again.”

  “I’m sorry. I hadn’t heard that.”

  “Both feet now,” Peigi said. “It’s too long a walk for him from his house to the museum for High Council.”

  Arlan looked up. His thumb was beginning to cramp. “He can’t take his car?”

  “We don’t drive to meetings. We walk. We’ve always walked, you know that.” She watched him push the briquettes around with the end of the lighter. “Would you like me to do that?”

  “I can get it.” He shook the lighter, listening to see if he heard any fluid sloshing around, and tried again. “So what does Johnny want? He need me to take him to meetings?”

  Click, click. “I can drive him. Why didn’t he ask me himself?”

  “We don’t drive and we don’t ride. What he needs is some time off.” She placed her hands on her sensible, middle-aged hips. “He wants you to take his place on the High Council.”

  “I absolutely am not—”

  “Temporarily,” she interrupted.

  “Peigi.” Arlan stepped back from the grill, as frustrated by the conversation as he was by the fact that he couldn’t get the damned charcoal to light. “You know me. I’m not High Council material. I’m grunt work material.”

  “Nonsense,” she fussed. “You’d be an excellent High Council member. You’re already on our short list, should a permanent position become open.”

  “Peigi,” Arlan groaned. “I can’t make those kinds of decisions. Trying to decide who should live and who should die. Who’s evil and who’s just bad.” He clicked the lighter halfheartedly over the grill, shaking his head adamantly. “You know how I am. I like being told where to go, what to do.”

  “Step back,” she ordered sharply.

  When Peigi Ross told you to step back, you stepped back.

  There was a sudden whoosh of air as if all the oxygen in the space in front of him had been depleted. Flames leaped from the barbeque, twenty feet into the air. Arlan took another quick step back, swearing he could feel his eyebrows singeing. He raised his hand to deflect the heat from his face. “I think that’ll do it, Peigi.”

  All sept members shared some inhuman abilities: their sense of smell was amazing, they were able to speak telepathically to each other, and then of course there was the bit about living eternally. But they each also had unique gifts that contributed to the common welfare of the sept. Peigi’s gift happened to be pyrokinetics. Simply by setting her mind to it, she could light a cigarette or make a ten-story apartment building burst into flames so hot that the place would burn to the ground in a matter of minutes. She was like the Drew Barrymore character in the movie, only all grown up and gray-haired.

  “Think you could have warned me?” Arlan muttered, still holding his hand up to block the heat.

  “So you’ll be there tomorrow night?” Peigi was already on the deck steps, on her way out.

  “I didn’t say that, Peigi.”

  “Come by. See how you like it.”

  “You give me a black hooded cloak and a fifteen-hundred-year-old dagger and you ask me to try it out?” He followed her to the edge of the deck. The boards needed staining and resealing. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “I’ll tell Gair he can expect you,” she sang, giving a one-handed wave as she stopped to open the back gate. “Enjoy your steak. Glad to have you home.”

  Arlan turned around. There was no sense arguing with her any further. If Peigi Ross told him to do something, he was going to do it. No matter how loudly he protested or who he complained to, sooner or later, he would do it. She knew that. He liked her the way he liked all women and she took unfair advantage of that. It was one more aspect of Peigi’s personality that made her so sensible.

  Sensible Peigi, in her sensible shoes, who could set a freighter on fire in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. In a rainstorm.

  Macy sat in her car with her hands white-knuckled on the wheel, her forehead pressed to the center. She’d already inadvertently beeped the horn once.

  The parking lot of the rinky-dink hotel where she’d spent the night was empty. Traffic passing by the place was almost nonexistent. It was like she was frozen. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t drive. All she could do was sit here. It was as if she was having some sort of silent panic attack.

  She’d already been to the bathroom in the lobby twice. The clerk had watched her closely when she’d purchased a bottle of green tea and a pack of crackers from the vending machine. He’d asked her if anything was wrong. And she’d mumbled something about waiting for her cousin.

  Macy lifted her head, taking in a deep breath. The sun was low in the sky. When she’d left the room, it had been directly overhead. Had she really been sitting here that long? She had to go before the clerk got really suspicious and called the cops.

  Macy didn’t talk to cops. Not if she could help it. Just Fia, and she didn’t really count, did she? No, there was something different about Fia than other cops. Something that made Macy trust her, made Macy believe she understood secrets. She suspected Fia had secrets of her own.

  Macy released the wheel one finger at a time. Her hands were hot and sweaty and sticky.

  She thought about Arlan. He’d been smart to run. He knew what kind of woman to run from.

  Then she thought about the coffee and donuts he had left her. And the flower. She’d pressed the flower in a book she was reading. How girlishly silly was that?

  No sillier than the idea that she might be able to help Fia Kahill catch the killer. Catch the man who had ruined her life. Would continue to ruin lives.

  Macy exhaled.

  It was time to go. Time to go back to the cottage. She started the car. Pulled out of the parking lot.

  But instead of turning right, heading south toward the Bay Bridge Tunnel, she turned left. North.

  What was north? Who was north? What was drawing her this way? Was it Teddy? Was this it? Would he finally kill her? Was he on a hot streak as the cops liked to call it? Was she the only thing that would end his hot streak? Would her death cool his jets?

  Her life seemed like a small sacrifice to her to save the lives of others.

  But she knew it wasn’t that simple.

  Arlan was just flipping his steak on the grill when he heard the back gate creak open again. He couldn’t believe Peigi’d had the audacity to return after she’d bullied him like that. But when he looked up, ready to give her hell, he saw his niece, Kaleigh, closing the gate behind her.

  “Hey,” she called. “You’re back.”

  He hung the cooking tongs on a hook on the grill and closed the lid. He opened his arms. “I’m back.”

  “I thought you were supposed to be home last night.” She walked into his arms.

  After a hug, he sat down in a chair and pushed another toward her with his foot. “I ran an errand with Fia. Stayed the night in Virginia and drove home this morning.”

  She plopped down in the chair, crossing her arms over her chest. To look at her, she appeared to be like any other teenager across America. Her red hair was long, pulled straight back in a ponytail. She wore denim shorts so short that her mother probably called them obscene and her double-layered tank tops appeared to be spray-painted onto her torso. She wore big hoop earrings and cherry lip gloss.

  But Kaleigh was by no means a typical teenager. She wasn’t even typical for a teenage vampire. Kaleigh was the sept’s wisewoman who, when she grew completely into her own again, would be the most powerfully psychic mem
ber of the sept.

  With each death and rebirth, Kaleigh seemed to grow stronger, more perceptive and more commanding. As an adult, she would have all the sept’s powers rolled into one. She was the person everyone relied on when making decisions, not just for the entire sept, but personal, as well. However, like everyone else in Clare Point, she had to die, be reborn as a teen and grow into herself once again. It had been less than two years since the girl’s last rebirth, so she was still maturing.

  A kid or not, Arlan certainly wouldn’t challenge Kaleigh to any kind of psychic duel. When she got wound up, she could be scary. She scared them all, which was probably what generated such a healthy respect for her, even in this state.

  “You want a beer?” He picked the bottle up from where he’d set it on the deck when he got up to flip his steak.

  “I’m underage, remember?” She snatched the bottle from him, took a drink—an obviously experienced drinker—and handed back the bottle. “I don’t drink.” She smirked.

  He grinned and tipped the bottle, finishing it off. “You need something or you just looking for free beer?”

  She shrugged, perfectly imitating a human teenager. “Mostly free beer.” She sat back in her chair, slipped a tube of lip gloss out of her pocket and began to apply it. “I’m working at the Dairy Queen.”

  “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.

  Chapter 10

  The 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.