Kaleigh squeezed between two bushes, still considering the male FBI agent warily.
“He’s with me,” Fia assured her.
“Something of interest to you in the post office, young lady?” Glen demanded.
“Special Agent Duncan, please,” Fia said. “This is Kaleigh Kahill.”
“Another relative?”
“Distant.”
Glen studied the teenager. She glared back.
Please, be careful, Fia warned telepathically. “Kaleigh, do you mind telling us what you were doing in the rear of the post office? Didn’t you notice the door was taped off? Surely you knew you didn’t belong there.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” the redhead flung back. “I was just looking around.”
“Do you know something about Mr. McCathal’s death?” Glen asked.
“No more than anyone else in town.”
Fia brushed her hand against the girl’s arm. “You didn’t touch anything?”
“No. I just wanted to see if the blood was still there. Meg said her Uncle Mahon said there were gallons of blood. I said she was lying because you don’t have gallons of blood. Everyone knows that!”
Fia glanced at Glen. He seemed to be relaxing a little. He was obviously pissed off, but she could see that he was beginning to see what this was, and that was nothing more than a nosy teenager being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Where’s your mom and dad?” Fia asked.
“I don’t know. Home, I guess.”
Fia looked to Glen. “Why don’t I walk her home, speak to her parents. You better get back to the sisters. Officer Hill was the only other person left in the building and those ladies are liable to tag-team him and take him down with their armored purses.”
She said it with a straight face and heavily laced with sarcasm. To her surprise, Glen grinned.
She liked being surprised by humans. They didn’t do it often.
“Count yourself lucky this time, Miss Kahill,” he warned Kaleigh with an accusing finger. “I catch you poking around my crime scene again, I don’t care who you’re related to, you’ll be arrested.”
Kaleigh opened her mouth to respond, then, wisely, clamped it shut.
Fia grabbed the teenager and steered her to the sidewalk and toward home. “Give me a couple of minutes, Special Agent Duncan. I’m going to escort Kaleigh home and speak with her parents. You can tell Miss Ross—my Miss Ross—she’s free to go. I don’t have any more questions for her.”
He hesitated, then lifted his hand and headed off in the opposite direction. Fia hustled Kaleigh down the street, waiting until Glen was out of earshot before she spoke.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Fia demanded from between clenched teeth. “Didn’t you hear me telepathically?”
The girl looked up with bright blue eyes. “No, I didn’t,” she said in the same indignant tone Fia heard from human teenagers. “I’m only ten months old, remember?”
Chapter 5
Fia halted, looking down at Kaleigh. This was always awkward—when sept members of prominence were reborn and had to repeat the first stages of their lives. Had to grow back into the men and women they had once been.
The girl thrust out one hip and planted her hand on it. “The gift hasn’t come yet,” she said, speaking as if Fia was an idiot. “I can’t hear you. I can’t hear any of your or anyone else’s babbling.”
Fia grabbed the teen’s upper arm none-too-gently and started down the sidewalk again. “You shouldn’t speak rudely to your elders.”
“If you recall, I’m your elder.”
“Well, I’m on the High Council and you’re not, smart-ass.”
Kaleigh pulled her arm from Fia’s grip. “I don’t know what the big deal is. I was just looking around. I wanted to know what happened to Bobby.”
“So do the rest of us.” Fia glanced at the teen. “And you don’t have any idea? No visions?”
“Derek says somebody watched one too many slasher movies and went on a rampage. He’s this human boy I met when I was working at the diner. He goes to my school. He’s pretty cool.”
“You shouldn’t be talking to human boys.”
“I go to school with them, how can I not talk to them?” Again, the tone.
For many years, teenagers were homeschooled in Clare Point, but eventually, with the arrival of the twentieth century and the state’s control over education, it had been a General Council decision to allow teens to attend the public school in the neighboring town. Though tricky at times, it was a good way for the newly reborn to assimilate into human society again.
“We’re supposed to try to fit in,” Kaleigh observed. “Remember?”
“So you’ve gotten nothing on Bobby? Not even a feeling?” Fia asked.
Kaleigh was the sept’s wisewoman. She had powerful telepathic abilities and unheralded wisdom which seemed to increase with each life cycle. Unfortunately, because she had only recently been reborn, her gifts had not yet returned. After rebirth, it took most vampires eight to ten years to become adults. It was always a vulnerable time for the sept when Kaleigh began a new life cycle, because they relied on her a great deal to guide them and keep them safe.
“Derek’s really cute, too,” Kaleigh went on. “He surfs. He keeps saying he’s going to teach me.” She shrugged. “I don’t know when. He has this friend Kyle and he works at a surf shop in Rehoboth Beach. He says he can get me a good deal on a used board. He goes to my school, too. You ever surfed, Fia? Derek says if I go with him, he’ll let me use his board. He’s been trying all summer to get me to go with him.”
Fia looked at her, perplexed. “Go where?”
Kaleigh rolled her eyes. “Not go somewhere. Go with him. You know, like go out.”
“You’re fourteen. How old is he?”
“Fifteen,” she said, defensively.
“So how can you go on a date? Neither of you can drive.”
Kaleigh rolled her eyes again and groaned. “It’s not like back in the day when you were this age, Fia. We’d just go out…you know, hang out together.”
“You mean have sex?” They reached Kaleigh’s front yard and Fia lifted the latch
