Undying (2 page)

So…to protect her, he protected her kid brother. As did Fia’s other brother, Fin. As did other young men in the sept.

Arlan wondered now if he had been remiss in not calling Regan’s shortcomings to the attention of the council. His irresponsible behavior was not only affecting him now, it was affecting others. It was affecting the sept’s ability to do its job efficiently. They could not afford to have one of their own so far out of step.

Maybe it was time Arlan talked to the council, or at least Fia. It was time he stopped trying to talk to Regan. The warnings had obviously gone unheeded.

Arlan shifted his weight on his haunches and eyed the place where Romano would come for his money. It was a good spot for a man dealing in the human slave trade to make a transaction. The cover of darkness. No police around. Few people present and those who were would turn the other way if they saw anything suspicious. There would be no good citizens loitering in the shadows of the Areopagus, waiting to give their statement to the authorities.

Arlan smelled the human before he heard the footfalls. The stench of his evil flesh pierced the air even sharper than the intense, smoky aroma of his cigarette.

This was, indeed, an excellent place to commit a crime. But it was also a dangerous place for a man being hunted by a dog.

Or a vampire.

M
acy stood at the picture window and stared into the darkness. Into the nothingness. It was a little after midnight. She had a prestigious assignment for
Home & Garden
tomorrow. She should be asleep. But she couldn’t sleep.

Not tonight. Not when she knew he was out there, restless. Agitated. She could feel his anxiety building and knew that when it reached its peak he would act.

She hugged herself. In the dark, there was barely a glimmer of her own reflection in the glass. A soft, humid breeze drifted through the pines, filtering through the open windowpanes.

She lived alone. The nearest house was half a mile away. She did not lock her doors at night or close her windows.

A death wish?

Macy studied the magnolia tree in her front yard. Her mother had always liked magnolias.

There had been a branch of magnolia blossoms on her mother’s white coffin. No lilies or gardenias or the usual funeral flowers. Only magnolias.

Daisies on Mariah’s.

Peonies on little Minnie’s.

No flowers on her father’s coffin. He hadn’t been a flower kind of guy.

Macy walked away from the window that had never had the drapes pulled on it since she rented the cottage outside Charlottesville, Virginia, more than a year ago. She had nothing to hide. Her soul had been bared to the bitter world a long time ago.

She walked barefoot, in nothing but a pair of panties and a men’s ribbed sleeveless T-shirt, through the dark house. It was only June but June was hot in Virginia.

The rooms were quiet except for the sound of her footsteps. She had no cat or dog to keep her company. She hadn’t had a pet since she was fourteen.

Fritz had been sent to the pound. No one ever knew what happened to Snowcap, her sister’s white Persian cat. Lost in the confusion of the police cars and emergency vehicles, Macy supposed.

Macy exhaled, fighting the dark cloud settling over her. As much as she hated herself for it, she couldn’t stop thinking about Teddy.

She guessed he was thinking about her. That was why she couldn’t sleep. There was this crazy, weird connection between them. Had been for as long as she could remember. And she couldn’t escape it. It was like cancer, a cavernous, black hole eating her from the inside out.

She wandered through the living room into the office. When she had rented the home, the landlady had said the cozy room would make an excellent spare bedroom for family or friends. Macy had no family left. No friends.

The Apple logo on her open laptop glowed, but the room was as dark as the others in the house. The open window as naked.

From here, she could hear an owl hooting.

She sat down in her chair and flipped on the lamp. Soft light glowed in a circle on the old oak desk she had found at a yard sale. She hadn’t bothered to refinish it, just removed the center drawer and added a keyboard drawer. When she was here at the cottage, which wasn’t all that frequently, she liked to use a full keyboard, sometimes even an additional monitor connected to her laptop. It gave her a better sense of proportions in the pictures she shot.

She touched the drawer and it glided out. She tapped the mouse beside the wireless keyboard and the laptop screen lit up. She had an instant message.

He had been waiting for her.

Her stomach tightened. He always seemed to know when she was awake in the middle of the night. Worse, she knew when he was.

You there?

The cursor pulsed.

She could feel him waiting.

She glanced at the dark window. He said he watched her. She had never known if he meant literally. Was tonight the night he was out there? Would tonight be the night he took her life and ended the last fourteen years of agonized waiting?

She looked back at the laptop screen.

Maybe tonight would be the night she took a stand. Maybe tonight she would ignore him. Maybe she’d even threaten that if he contacted her again, she would call the police.

It was an empty threat, of course. It would be nearly impossible to track him to a computer, to a location. He traveled for his work, too. He IM’d from Internet cafés, hotel business offices. Even truck stops had Internet access for their customers now. And when he contacted her from home, he said he used different laptops that he bought and sold regularly on the Internet. The stark truth was that even if she could convince the FBI that he was the nutcase they were looking for, it would be nearly impossible for them to track him down through his Internet use. The police would never find him. He knew it. She knew it.

The curser pulsed. Marceline? Teddy probed.

He always called her by her given name, as her father had. When Macy had complained as a child about being burdened by such a name, her father had promised she would, one day, grow into it in the same way that Minnie would grow into Minerva. Minnie hadn’t lived long enough to grow into it.

Macy sat back in her chair, drawing her legs up, hugging her knees to her chest. She stared at the screen. Her hand ached to close the laptop. If she could just walk away…But she couldn’t.

And he knew it.

Knees still drawn to her chest, she typed with one finger.

Why won’t you leave me alone?

Because I can’t, he replied.

Why don’t you just kill me, then?

I don’t want to kill you. I want to love you.

She drew her hand back and stared at the words. This was love? Killing her family? Stalking her for more than a decade?

Bastard. Her index finger flew over the keys and then she pulled her hand back.

Whore.

She stared at the screen again. Thought for a minute and then typed. Why can’t you sleep?

I hear her.

Is she speaking loudly tonight?

So loud I can hear nothing else.

Macy’s lower lip trembled. What he was saying didn’t make sense. The full moon had come and gone. He should be feeling better now. What is she saying? she asked.

You know. The usual. She’s upsetting me. She’s making me upset. You know what happens when she upsets me….

Teddy, please don’t, Macy begged, a lump forming in her throat as her fingers tapped the keyboard.

I have to.

Macy stared at the pulsing cursor for a long moment before she found the courage to reach out and close the laptop. She switched off the light and walked out of the office, through the dark living room, into her bedroom.

She lay down on her unmade bed. It smelled of the man she had slept with the night before. Derrick.

Or had last night been Thomas?

She wondered where he was. What he was doing. Not Thomas or Derrick.
Teddy.

Would a family die tonight? It seemed too soon after the last. Only seven months. But weren’t they always too soon?

She rolled over on her side and stared through the open window, waiting for tears. They didn’t come.

They never did.

Arlan had, for some reason, expected Romano to be a bigger man. He had no idea why. He knew from experience that evil came packaged in a variety of ways, from bright, bubbly female, to dark and brooding male, and everything in between.

Romano was short, no more than five foot five, with a slight build. His hair was sandy colored with a receding hairline. He was wearing tan pants, a polo shirt, and a navy sports jacket with a silly little handkerchief peeking from the breast pocket. On his shoulder, like most European men, he carried a small brown leather bag. He did not look like a pedophile. He looked like a father, a friend, a grocery store clerk.

But when Arlan lifted his muzzle and sniffed the night air, he was quickly able to sort out the scents; a chewing gum wrapper on the ground, still minty fresh, the roasting lamb, the whore’s perfume, the dogs. Somewhere in the midst of the scents, he smelled Romano’s malevolence. Undetectable to him was the stench left on his hands by the things he had done. The filthy money that had changed hands. The touch of what should never be touched.

Arlan’s stomach twitched and bile rose in his throat. Anger buzzed in his ears. His first impulse was to leap out of the darkness and take Romano by the throat. He wanted to rip his jugular and lap up the blood that would spurt from it.

Arlan felt his entire canine body tremble with the eager thought of it. This man did not deserve to die so easily. He deserved to be tortured before he was murdered. He deserved to watch a dog eat out his entrails.

But that was not Arlan’s mission, the human side of his brain reminded him. This execution had been entrusted to him by the High Council, by his beloved sept.

His pulse throbbed in his throat. His heart pounded in his head.

Arlan could not allow the beast in him to take over. The execution had to be carried out as planned, in the manner in which it had been ordered. Or, in this case, considering his lack of a partner, to the best of his ability.

Something itched behind his ear and Arlan lifted his rear paw to scratch it. It was a good morph. It had come complete with fleas.

Romano drew a hand-rolled cigarette from his pocket and pushed it between his lips. He tapped his trouser pockets, coming up with nothing.

He had forgotten or misplaced his lighter. It was the perfect opportunity.

Arlan had to concentrate to shift inside his present morph in order to use his human voice. “Light?” he asked in Greek.

Romano turned toward the thick stump of weeds growing up between the rocky ruins of the Areopagus. If archeologists dug for the next ten years, they would not uncover all the ancient treasure buried by rock, human trash, and the natural sediment that came from time and battle.

Arlan narrowed his yellow dog eyes, every muscle in his powerful body poised to strike as the ordinary-looking monster turned toward the darkness.

“
Ne
,” Romano said in affirmation, his cigarette bobbing, his eyes squinting to see the stranger in the dark.

Arlan glanced left and then right and sprang off his powerful haunches. Standing upright, he was nearly as tall as Romano.

Arlan sank his needle-sharp canines into the man’s throat, locking his jaw. The cigarette flew from Romano’s mouth, his brown eyes widening in shock.

Arlan dragged Romano into bushes so no one would accidentally come upon them. Romano flailed, calling out, and stumbled to his feet again.

For a split second, Arlan feared he had made a mistake. In his eagerness to see the task done, had he jeopardized the assignment?

The sound of a growl emanating from the bushes startled Arlan so badly that he nearly let go of Romano.

Out of the darkness, a shadow leaped. Arlan cried out in surprise, a deep rumble of a growl.

The gray dog hit Romano in the side, forcing him down on the ground again. The young male from the pack leaped next. The victim cried out once, but his voice was muffled by the growling and snapping of the dogs. The bitches came down on the child-seller from all sides and for an instant, they all bathed in the fury of the bloody flesh.

Teeth still deep in Romano’s neck, Arlan felt dizzy from the taste of the human blood. For some, it was merely nutrition and even distasteful, but for Arlan it was a heady drug. The man convulsed beneath them. With the aid of the pack of wild dogs, Romano would be dismembered in a matter of minutes.

Not like this,
the human inside Arlan’s dog brain warned.
This must be done correctly. There can be no mistakes. You cannot let your fury take over your common sense.

It was all Arlan could do to relax his jaw. He tore his mouth away, his teeth shredding through delicate human flesh.

Two daggers were required by law for the execution, but one would have to suffice. Arlan would answer to the High Council later.

With a blink of the dying man’s eye, Arlan morphed back into a man. “Go,” he ordered the dogs that had come to his aid.

Shocked by the transformation, the big gray fell back on the ground, eyes rolling in his head.

“Go on! Get out of here,” Arlan grunted in Greek.

The gray took off, followed by his pack, whining and yelping as they made their frightened retreat.

Thank you,
Arlan telepathed after them.
You did a good deed tonight, my canine friends.

The metallic taste of human blood in his mouth, Arlan slipped the ancient dagger from his leather jacket and leaned over Romano.
“For the little children”,
he said softly, in ancient Irish Gaelic.

Arlan plunged the dagger into Romano’s heart and the light behind his eyes flickered. By the time Arlan was drawing back the steel, the light had already gone out.

A pity he did not suffer longer.

Arlan stared for a moment at the dead man, then glanced up. He could hear voices in the distance. A drug buy. But no one had seen him kill Romano. No one would see him go.