Eternal by V. Forrest (new reading TXT) 📗

again. It had been a mistake. She’d been wrong to think she could handle it. She’d been wrong to think that she could just make the relationship about sex.

“I really do need to get back to my own room,” she said carefully. “And you need to get some sleep.” She leaned down and kissed him, pulling the sheet up to cover him at the same time.

“What’s the matter,” he teased. “You don’t want another piece a dis?”

She laughed, trying to keep her voice down. “Good night, Glen. See you in the morning.”

“See you in the morning, sweet britches.”

She threw the pillow at him.

At 1:15 A.M. Fia stepped out onto the sidewalk in front of her parents’ B and B. At 1:17 a black panther joined her on the sidewalk. The creature was sleek and massive. It had to go two hundred, two hundred and twenty pounds. As it walked beside her, its tail twitched. Golden, glowing eyes watched her.

“Can you do a bear?” she asked. “A hedgehog? This big cat thing is getting tiresome.”

It’s not safe for you to walk alone, Arlan said. Actually, he didn’t speak, but Fia heard him clearly in her head.

“You don’t have to worry about me.” She spoke aloud, preferring the noise of her own voice to the stark absence of sound in the frightened town. Tonight, no cars purred down the streets. No doors opened and closed. Dogs didn’t even bark. Did their domesticated companions fear for the lives of the sept, too? “I can take care of myself.”

That’s what Shannon thought, too.

“She was killed inside her apartment, not on the street.”

Arlan walked beside her, light-footed, fangs bared, long black tail swishing back and forth in a grand arc. So what does that mean, Fee, that none of us are safe now, anywhere?

“Sweet Mary and Joseph, he cut off her breasts, Arlan.” Fia’s voice cracked with emotion as tears suddenly stung the backs of her eyelids. She covered her mouth with her hand.

She’d held it together all day but all of a sudden she felt lost. Defeated. “How could anyone do that? He cut them off and he took them with him in a garbage bag from a box under her own sink. He set her head on the bed and stuffed her mouth with garlic.”

“You know what that means.”

“Good news, I suppose.” She reached over her shoulder, trying to rub the knot that ached in the center of her back. “It’s not one of us. Only humans believe that we give a shit about garlic.”

“Thanks to our buddy, Bram Stoker.” Arlan went from four legs to two in a split second. One moment he was sporting a tail, the next he was walking beside her in human form, kneading her tired shoulder muscles with his hand. “But not just him. There were others, too. I’m actually pretty up to date on my vampire-in-the-media trivia.”

“Good to know. Should I get on one of those game shows and have to call my lifeline for the answer to a question pertaining to vampires in the media, you’re my man, Arlan.”

“Do you have to be sarcastic about everything?” He lowered his hand. “Shannon is dead. So are Mahon and Bobby. We have to do something, Fee.”

She whipped around, stopping on the sidewalk. “You think I don’t know that!”

He was quiet for a minute. They started to walk again. They passed under a streetlamp. A block ahead, an elderly woman, bundled in a hat and coat though it was sixty degrees, hustled across the street, headed for the museum.

“I think you’re taking this too personally,” he said. “No one cares if you find the killer, or if one of us does. It’s not going to make us think any less of you, Fee, if you’re not the one who stops him. It won’t mean you’re not a good FBI agent or you don’t deserve to be on the high council.”

She pressed her lips together. “The garlic is the best lead I’ve gotten on the cases, so far. I know now that it’s a human and not one of us, thank God. But it’s a human who knows how to kill us.”

“Which means one of us had to tell one of them,” he offered.

“Exactly.”

They made the turn up the freshly blacktopped driveway to the parking lot behind the museum. Neither spoke, both lost in their thoughts, but Fia found it comforting to have Arlan beside her. It would make it easier to walk into the council meeting.

They entered the building by the dark rear hallway and made their way into the main room of the museum where chairs had been set up in a circle. Tonight there was no snack table. Not even a pot of coffee; no smell of aromatic coffee this evening, just the clear, strong scent of fear.

They were among the last to arrive so most of the seats were occupied; she took a chair close to the door. Arlan gave her shoulder a quick squeeze as he walked past her, taking a seat on the opposite side of the circle.

Peigi Ross cleared her throat, tapped her pen on her clipboard. Fia noticed that the board that usually listed a dozen items for the agenda was blank. Tonight they would only discuss one topic, and Peigi didn’t need to remind herself what it was.

“Looks like just about everyone’s here,” Peigi said, “So let’s get started. “This is the way we’re going to do it tonight. I’m gonna talk and then I’m going to call on a few of you—”

“I don’t know who you think you are, Peigi Ross,” Bobby’s wife said, gesturing grandly. “We all have a right to speak on this council. I have a right to speak.”

Peigi whipped around to face the red-eyed Mary McCathal. “You do have a right to speak, but we don’t have time for arguin’, Mary, and arguing is just what you’re good at. All of us are. But I’m the chief of this council and that gives me the