Eternal by V. Forrest (new reading TXT) 📗

Fia darted down. Sweet Mary, Mother of Christ, she hadn’t heard Judas Priest in twenty years.

Fin followed, pulling the door shut behind him, enveloping them in darkness. The walls pulsed with the heavy, pounding music and lights flashed below, reflecting rhythmically off the mason jars that lined the shelves on both sides of the stairwell. Mrs. Hill had canned peaches, green beans, beets, and what appeared to be pickles. The canning jars had to have been there for at least forty years.

“Since when did you start hanging out with Eva?” Fia whispered, glancing over her shoulder at him as she tried to make it down the steps without breaking her neck. “And Mrs. Hill? She’s ar mire.”

Fin shrugged. “Not any crazier than the rest of them. And she’s nice to me.”

“Everyone’s nice to you,” Fia grumbled.

“She makes me cookies.”

Fia stepped out of the stairwell into the room and was instantly transported through time, back to the eighties and her teenage years. The old brick basement looked just as it had the year Eva’s parents remodeled it in the late seventies: cheap paneling, a clumsy, stained-pine bar built against one wall, plaid Berber carpet under her feet. There was gray pleather modular seating along one wall, a pool table on the other.

The room was smoky and smelled of mildew, beer, cigarettes, and vampires on the prowl. “Who are all these people?” Fia marveled, repelled and yet fascinated at the same time.

The basement room was wall-to-wall with men and women dressed in black leather, chains, tight T-shirts, fishnet stockings, and bustiers. Their inky dyed hair was sleeked back in bizarre styles and many of them, their faces painted white, wore black lipstick and heavy eyeliner.

“You know, brother dear, these aren’t real vampires,” Fia whispered loudly in Fin’s ear. “What are they doing here?”

He flashed a mischievous grin. “What do you think?”

She gave him a none-too-gentle shove. “Fin, you can’t do that. It’s not allowed.”

He shrugged. “Gray area. They’re here of their own free will. They say they’re vampires. They want us to drink their blood.” He pointed to her as he passed her. “You want a beer, sugar britches?” he asked with a sweet southern accent. Fin had a way with languages and accents; he could imitate anyone on earth from a southern belle to an eighty-year-old Mongolian yak herder.

She shook her head furiously. “No, what I want is for you to—” Her voice was lost in a sudden rise in the volume of the music as the lead vocalist worked himself into a frenzy.

“You came. Oh, God, I can’t believe you came!”

Fia felt a hand on her shoulder and spun around.

Eva threw herself into Fia’s arms and smacked a wet one on her lips. It was all Fia could do to not wipe her mouth with the back of her hand as she stumbled back. “Eva.”

“I’m so glad you came.” Dressed similarly to the vampire impersonators, Eva clasped Fia’s hand. She was wearing black lace fingerless gloves.

Fia pressed her lips together, tasting the waxy black lipstick that had smeared off Eva’s lips onto her own.

“I wanted to invite you myself, tonight, at the council meeting. I really did,” Eva gushed. “But I didn’t want to put you in a bad position, you know, you being on the high council and all, but I told Fin you were invited. I told him I really wanted you to come.”

She sounded high. On what, Fia was unsure; drugs, alcohol…maybe just human blood. In small amounts, it caused euphoria. Too much, and a Kahill became downright intoxicated. Fia eyed Eva. She must have performed quite the vanishing act to have gotten here and dressed so quickly. She couldn’t have been more than ten minutes ahead of Fia and Fin. But Eva had the rare gift of being able to teleport small objects as well as herself. A regular Samantha Stevens among them.

“I…I just stopped by for a minute.” Fia attempted to extricate herself from Eva’s grip. “I really shouldn’t be here. The council…” Not to mention the Bureau. It wasn’t specifically mentioned in the agent guidelines, but she was pretty certain rounding up humans en masse and drinking their blood was a no-no.

“Just stay a minute,” Eva begged, taking Fia’s hand again.

Fia tried not to stare at Eva’s getup but it was hard not to.

The redhead sported fishnet stockings and a black knit dress that appeared to have been spray-painted on. She was wearing no bra or panties and four-inch stilettos. Her hair had been gelled and sculpted into a point on the top of her head and white plastic skulls dangled from her earlobes. She finished off the Halloween-costume-gone-bad with thick black eyeliner and the apparently requisite black lipstick.

Fia was so stunned by Eva’s getup, by the room of “guests,” that she didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t realized anyone had this kind of party in Clare Point anymore. Sure, once in a while she caught wind of a feasta oíche somewhere in Europe, but she hadn’t thought anyone dared hold them at home anymore. Leave it to Fin and Eva.

In the 1920s, at the height of prohibition, the general council had banned all feasta oíche, or feast night, celebrations after a party had gotten out of hand and humans had died. Fortunately, no one was turned into a vampire. But the bodies had to be disposed of and the sept had been in an uproar for weeks afterward, as local law officials searched for the fourteen family members that had all vanished from a silver-anniversary party. Their bodies were never found and the mystery was never solved. The cases remained unsolved to this day.

“Let me get you a drink.” Eve grabbed Fia’s hand, squeezed it and let go, darting into the crowd. “Be right—”

“No, E—” It was a waste of breath. Eva was gone and the music was so loud she couldn’t have heard Fia anyway.

“Good evening,” a man in his late twenties greeted Fia