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

Blood pounding in her ears, she sprang up, raising her pistol, flipping the safety.

The two figures hurled themselves toward her, landing in her bed.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”

Chapter 11

“I could have blown your heads off, you feckin’ assholes.” Fia flipped the safety on the pistol, her heart pounding in her ears. Thank God her vision was good, even in the dark, or she might have seriously injured one of them. Kahills couldn’t die, but they still bled, got infections, suffered like humans.

“You’re getting slow in your old age,” Fin teased, straddling her at her hips and pinning her on her back, arms to her sides.

“I told him you’d shoot him. I told him it was a bad idea.” Regan dropped beside them, his head on her pillow.

“I should have shot you.” She struggled against Fin’s hold, managing to set her firearm on the table again. “Get off me!” She slapped at him. “When did you guys get back? Mom—”

Distracted by her brothers and the hum of the window air conditioner, Fia didn’t hear the bedroom doorknob turn. She didn’t realize someone was there until the three of them were staring into the barrel of a Glock pistol at the end of the footboard.

Fia shoved Fin off her and sat up. “Glen—”

“Fia, are you—” Glen lowered the drawn pistol, obviously not understanding exactly what was going on, but realizing he’d mistaken the situation. “I heard you…the door…the male voices.”

Boxer briefs. Nice. She would have pegged him for a baggy boxer man. “My brothers, Fin and Regan.” She introduced them awkwardly. She knew it had to look bad; her in her bra and panties, two young men in her bed, one on top of her.

Glen took a step back. “Okay, so I feel like an idiot.”

She scrambled off the bed, grabbing a T-shirt off the chair and dropping it over her head as she walked toward him. In the dark, he had probably barely seen her in her state of undress.

No, she could tell by the look on his face. He definitely caught a good look.

“I…they’re asses.” She gestured lamely toward the identical twins in her bed. Twenty-eight in this life cycle and dangerously good-looking, Fin and Regan seemed to be closer to eighteen or nineteen years old and used it to their advantage when they traveled for the sept. While they appeared to humans to be harmless college students, they actually hunted the world’s rapists, murderers, and child molesters.

“Who the hell is this? Jezuz, Fee.” Regan snapped on the bedside lamp. “He looks just like—”

“This is Special Agent Glen Duncan,” Fia cut in. “My…my partner on the case.”

She wished Regan hadn’t turned on the lamp. In the light, she and Glen both looked even more ridiculous, her in her old Temple T-shirt that didn’t come close to covering her red lace panties, and him in his tight boxer briefs that left nothing to her imagination either.

Heat prickled the back of her neck. Glen worked out. He wasn’t so muscle-strapped as to look like a gym monkey, but he had excellent definition: shoulders, biceps, pecs, abs. She suspected he was far stronger and more agile than he appeared in his gray pinstripe suits.

Fia’s gaze drifted from his flat abdominals to the dark line of hair that led from his belly button south.

Glen backed up, his face flushed. “I really am sorry.”

She followed him into the hall, arms crossed over her breasts, making an effort not to look at him. She felt vulnerable, the two of them standing awkwardly in their underwear in her mother’s hall, and it left her off-balance and unsure of herself. Not a state she found herself in too often.

“No, it’s okay. I’m the one who should be apologizing.” Unable to suppress a chuckle of nervous laughter, she covered her mouth with her hand. “College kids,” she explained. “They have no idea of the hours the rest of us keep.”

Glen stepped into his room. “Five-thirty?”

“Five-thirty in the dining room,” she agreed. “Good night.”

She waited until the paneled door closed and then, groaning, strolled back into her room. “Thanks a lot, guys.”

The door behind her swung shut and the lock clicked. Both Fin and Regan had strong telekinetic powers, among other gifts. It used to gall her that some sept members could walk through walls, move an apple across the table without touching it, shape-shift or make objects burst into flames while she could do none of those things. But Gair had once told her she had the gift of humanity and that was what made her special to the sept and vital to their survival. Days like today, she wondered if he had just said it to make her feel better….

“What did we do?” Fin asked innocently.

Her brothers lay on their backs in her bed, arms tucked comfortably under their heads.

“You have to be careful around him,” Fia warned, a full step past annoyed.

Regan frowned.

“No, I’m serious.” She kept her voice down. “He’s pretty perceptive for a human. And whether I like it or not, he and I are working together until we solve this case.”

“I can’t believe Mahon and Bobby are both dead.” Fin sat up, running his fingers through his dark, short hair. “You think slayers have found us again?”

“There’s no evidence to suggest it.” She perched on the edge of the bed. “With Bobby, I was hoping the beheading was just a sick coincidence, some strung-out doper, but now…”

“You think he has something to do with it?” Regan nodded in the direction of the wall.

Regan never made any bones about who he liked and who he disliked and she could tell he disliked Glen Duncan for no reason other than the fact that he resembled and carried the same surname as Ian had. “He was called in after Bobby was murdered.”

“I don’t care. The resemblance is just too weird.”

“Jesuz, it’s not that great a resemblance.” Fin got out of the bed. “All the Scots look alike, you know that. Inbreeding.