Eternal by V. Forrest (primary phonics books .TXT) 📕

twenty-four hours that passed, it was less likely the case would be closed quickly. Often, if a suspect was not immediately apprehended, the murder would be solved not by superior detective work, as on the TV shows Sean Kahill watched, but by the perp telling someone who would tell someone else. The criminals couldn’t keep their mouths shut. It was never a matter of if they would tell, but how long it would take. Eventually, a lead would get back to the police. Nonetheless, over hot tea and a cold bagel, Fia let Glen talk. They both took copies of the file and the photos and left Clare Point by 7:30 A.M.

Fia slipped out of her suit jacket and threw it over the back of her chair. When she sat down, the chair popped and lurched to one side, nearly throwing her to the floor. “Son of a bitch. Moron!” She got out of the chair, dragging it out of her cubicle and into the one beside her.

“What?” Her fellow agent Jeff Morone glanced up innocently from his computer monitor.

“Get out of it,” she threatened.

He chuckled and rose from his seat. Charlie Alston, in the next cubicle over, laughed, but didn’t dare show his face.

Fia grabbed the desk chair Jeff had been sitting in and wheeled it around the half wall to her desk, biting back the threats and curses—some literal—on the tip of her tongue. She knew the more she said, the more the agents would laugh and the more likely it would be that they’d play another practical joke on her the next time she left the office. With only four female agents on the floor, the office was like Boy Scout camp; the practical jokes and farting and burping contests never ended.

She plopped back down in her own chair and hit a series of numbers on the phone on her desk, retrieving her messages. Twenty-two calls, but nothing earth-shattering. She listened to each one, making notes, deleting, saving. She’d half hoped she would hear from Lieutenant Sutton on the Lansdowne murder; it had been on her mind on and off all week. She kept going back to the dead woman, splayed in the alley, and the oddity of the familiarity she couldn’t shake, but she couldn’t identify, either.

Nothing from Sutton. Two messages this morning already from her mother asking why she wouldn’t be returning to Clare Point for Bobby’s official funeral. Despite the truth of Bobby’s death, with all the outsiders poking around, it was necessary for the sept to go through the motions of a funeral.

One disturbing call.

Fia played it back twice to be sure she had identified the caller correctly, then she spent the next two hours returning phone calls and following up on several projects she’d left on her desk. She finally called him around noon. She got his voice mail. There was no doubt in her mind it was him. She left a curt message that she would see him at ten-thirty at the designated meeting place. She spent the rest of the day cleaning off her desk, her thoughts bouncing between Bobby’s missing head and Joseph’s resurrection.

Fia strode into the dark, smoky bar, ignoring the gazes that followed her. The low whistles, the single bold catcall. She liked the fact that New Jersey hadn’t yet banned smoking in public places. She knew it was bad for her lungs, but the haze served as a shroud, distancing the patrons from each other. From themselves. Here, in a crowded bar on a Friday night in August, Fia, like so many others, could lose her identity. Take on another.

She smelled him before she saw him and it stopped her dead. She closed her eyes for a second, breathing deeply. His scent was different from Ian’s, from Arlan’s, from Glen’s. Somewhere mingled in the aroma of desires, hers and his, was the sharp bite of regret.

She was almost on him before he turned on the barstool. His instincts were good, though not as sharp as hers. Never would be, but still, she knew he felt her presence.

“Fia.” He looked her up and down, his gaze somewhere between that of a hawk’s and a vulture’s. “You’re looking good.”

He hadn’t aged a bit. He had used money and facials to his definite advantage. He was movie star good-looking; dark haired, blue eyed with a patrician nose. Nice clothes; slacks, a designer oxford and Italian loafers. He reeked of sex appeal and expensive cologne.

“Not bad yourself.” She made a point of imitating his scrutiny, eating him up with her eyes.

“Still teetotaling?”

She slid onto the polished chrome bar stool beside him, giving the gawking men a glimpse of her bare inner thigh before swinging her legs around. The motion got an audible response. Humans didn’t have nearly the sense of smell that vampires had, but there wasn’t a man between the ages of thirteen and ninety-three that couldn’t recognize the scent of a woman wearing no panties.

“Perrier with lime,” she told the bartender, who stared at her breasts spilling over the lacy bodice of the black camisole she wore.

He poured the drink, still watching.

“Another.” Joseph pushed his low ball glass across the bar, toward the bartender.

“Why are you here?” She stared straight ahead, purposely avoiding eye contact with him, watching the reflections of the crowd in the massive mirror over the bar. “What do you want?”

“Still the warm, fuzzy gal I knew.”

“We agreed it was best if you stayed on the West Coast.”

“Best for whom?”

She sipped her sparkling water, savoring the sharp, clean flavor. Though they were not touching, she could feel the warmth of his skin and when she turned to look at him, her gaze settled on the pulse of his throat. She could feel his heart beating, almost see the blood pumping through his jugular. There were other places equally efficient to harvest blood, but it was blood from the jugular that always seemed the sweetest, the most satisfying.

“You didn’t answer my question,” she said, looking down