Kaleigh closed the gate behind them. “I know, I know, because I might lose control, bite somebody, drink their blood, and then he’d be one of us.” She rattled off the warning she’d no doubt heard a hundred times. “But does that really happen?” she scoffed. “Or is that just one more story you guys tell to scare us?”
“Kaleigh, a year ago, you were one of us, warning teenagers of the dangers of sex with humans.”
“But I don’t remember that.” She threw up her hands in exasperation. “All I know is what you guys tell me. Mandy says you’re all lying. It’s all a big conspiracy.”
“What is?”
“The whole story about how we can make one of them into one of us.”
“What about Victor? Shannon?”
“Maybe that’s all lies, too. To keep us here. Keep us down.” The teen dropped down on the whitewashed step of her front porch. “Guys are really into us, you know. Girls from Clare Point. We have a reputation for not putting out the way human girls do, so I guess that makes us celebrities or something.”
Fia glanced away. She really didn’t want to get into a conversation about vampire sex with Kaleigh. Not now, not ever, if she could help it. The whole subject made her uncomfortable because she still had her own struggles with it.
But Kaleigh obviously wanted to talk and it was Fia’s responsibility as a member of the community to help one of their own through this difficult time. Reluctantly, she sat down beside the teenager on the top step. She removed her sunglasses from her suit jacket pocket and slid them on. The whole thing about vampires not being able to stand the light of day was pretty much a product of Stoker’s fiction, but the sun’s glare did give her a headache sometimes.
“Kaleigh…” Fia attempted to choose her words carefully so as not to extend the conversation any longer than absolutely necessary. “No one is lying to you. Why would we? We’ve all been through this time and time again. We know how hard it is to be reborn and lose so many memories and abilities, and how dangerous.”
“But they’re so cute.”
Fia looked at Kaleigh, not following.
“The human boys.” The girl shrugged slender shoulders. “Different than sept boys. Cuter.” She looked at Fia earnestly. “Don’t you find human men crazy hot? Like…almost irresistible?”
Talk about a loaded question.
Fia clasped her hands, threading her fingers, lowering her head. Kaleigh didn’t remember Ian, yet. Didn’t remember the night that he and his vampire slayers murdered so many Kahills. Didn’t understand that it was Fia who had brought them. Fia who had betrayed her own people by loving a human.
One of the hardest things for Fia about being a vampire was that your past never stayed in the past; it had to be retold again and again…
“It doesn’t matter if we find them attractive, Kaleigh. It’s dangerous. For us. For them. We now exist to protect humans; a great responsibility has been placed in our hands.”
Kaleigh leaned back on her elbows against the step and stared up at the blue sky. “Where do you think Bobby’s head is? And why take his feet?” She looked quizzically at Fia. “Derek said there was this guy in the Midwest back in the fifties who used to kill women and cut their heads off and like, put them on his bedposts and stuff. Do you think the head smelled? I mean, did he spray them with disinfectant or something?”
Fia exhaled, rising from the step, wondering what had made her think she could ever have a serious conversation with Kaleigh in the first place. The girl was like any fourteen-year-old human right now: unable to focus, with irrational priorities. “Stay away from the post office and Special Agent Duncan, and stay away from the humans. I’m warning you.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Take it from a person who knows from experience. If you don’t, you’ll be spending the next couple of centuries trying to make up for it.”
That night, Fia waited, stretched out fully clothed in the motel room until one A.M. Then she slipped out of the room. As she walked down the center of the vacant street, other adult sept members joined her in her silent march. Heads bowed, they wove single file down the street, around the massive old brick church, to the cemetery behind it. Shrouded in heavy, dark shadows, the above-ground graves and mausoleums looked like stacked dominoes. All of them empty graves, dug over the centuries to facilitate the lie they all lived.
Bobby McCathal would be the first Kahill to be buried in this churchyard who would not rise from the dead on the third day following his death. It was difficult to kill a vampire, almost impossible. The only way to prevent the soul from reentering the body after a fatal injury was to separate the head from the body and destroy the flesh with fire. Some called it God’s curse. Others believed it was God’s last gift to his outcast children, for so long as they could retain their earthly bodies, there was still a hope of salvation of their souls.
Inside the gates of the graveyard, the group huddled together under a weeping willow tree that had been planted by Fia’s grandfather, the sept leader, more than two hundred years ago. Crickets chirped. Rodents scurried in the tall grasses beyond the black iron fence. The waning half-moon hung low in the sky, casting yellow light through the trees of the wildlife preserve beyond the churchyard.
At first, everyone kept their thoughts to themselves, fingers of the moon’s shadows playing over their faces. Some prayed, some held hands. Bobby’s two Marys wept softly, holding hands, united tonight in their sorrow. Fia wished she had not come, but she had been compelled like all Kahills
