Undying. V.K. Forrest
to the rippling expanse of the Atlantic seeming to move as if it were alive.
She walked south, keeping an eye on the parking lot. She had not heard Fia’s car yet, or seen the headlights. It had to be near time for their meeting.
She’d be here. Macy knew she would come.
Just as Macy was about to turn around and head north again, movement caught her eye at the woods line. She stopped and stared into the darkness. A pair of glowing eyes—light reflected from the moonlight—stared back.
She felt her mouth turn up at one corner in a half smile. It was a gray fox. A rare treat. Gray foxes were native to North America as was not the case with the more often seen red fox, which was brought to the continent by colonists wanting to hunt them. Macy stood still, staring at the fox. The fox, poised to run, every muscle in his sinewy body tense, stared back. Should she move, she knew he would startle and lope off into the darkness.
Macy, at once, felt a kinship to the woodland creature. She understood perfectly his flight instinct. It had been her modus operandi for the last fourteen years.
Chapter 7
Arlan stood beneath the prickly low-hanging pine bough as he stared at the woman on the lonely stretch of beach. She was small in stature, slender, almost boylike in shape. She wore jeans and a dark sweatshirt with the hood pulled up. From beneath the hood, golden strands of hair were visible. Her eyes were luminous in the moonlight.
Arlan swung his long tail one way and then the other, unable to tear his gaze from hers. He had morphed into a large male Urocyon cinereoargenteus so that he could get a better look at Fia’s Maggie. He’d arrived ahead of her and had been watching her since she walked out on the beach. When she spotted him, he should have darted into the brush, as any fox with sense would have done, but there was something about this woman that held him spellbound.
When she saw him, she had gone completely still, but it appeared she had done so to prevent frightening him. She was not afraid. In fact, from the intensity of her gaze, he sensed that she was as momentarily fascinated by him as he was of her.
This petite woman with green eyes and spun gold hair was not what Arlan had expected. He had worked with informants before, male and female. They were often drug abusers or alcoholics. They were humans down on their luck, willing to accept money for information. They were skinny, malnourished, and hollow eyed. They had a look about them that was often pathetic. Maggie had never asked Fia for money, for anything actually, and in no way did she appear pathetic. This woman was healthy and she was on her game. Whatever game that was. He could smell that much on the salty night air. Yet, she also seemed sad. Lonely.
When their gazes locked, he felt some kind of instant connection with her. An understanding. Arlan could not read the minds of humans, but he sensed a vulnerability about her that made him want to reach out. To touch her. To take her in his arms.
And her neck was so lovely, so pale and slender….
Arlan shook his head, trying to dislodge the forbidden thoughts from it.
She didn’t flinch. Instead, she surprised him by taking a tentative step toward him.
He wondered what she would do if he bolted toward her. Nothing, he decided. She wouldn’t be afraid of him, wouldn’t fear he was rabid. She would stand there and let him trot up to her.
Arlan had to force himself to turn away. He loped into the brush, running back toward the rental car he’d parked on the road south of the parking lot. He didn’t morph until he reached the car. Then he hopped in and drove the quarter of a mile to the lot. He parked beside her car and walked up over the dune.
She was waiting for him in the moonlight.
“Maggie?” he called, as he crossed the dunes and walked down the sandy slope toward her.
Now she was the one poised to lope off into the darkness. She still wore the hood up on her sweatshirt. All he could see was her hair and her eyes. Nothing of her face.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
Arlan was suddenly desperate to see her face. “My name is Arlan Kahill. Fia sent me.”
“She didn’t say anything about sending someone else. Fia would have called me and told me if she couldn’t make it.”
“She had a family emergency and she asked me to come in her place. Had she called to tell you, you wouldn’t have shown up, Maggie.”
She watched him with guarded eyes. “You FBI, too?”
“No.” He stood still, trying not to spook her, much the same way she had done when she had approached him farther down the beach a few minutes ago. “I…I’m an old friend. I help her out with tough cases sometimes.”
“That doesn’t sound legal.”
He smiled to himself. She was pointing out that what they were now doing probably wasn’t legal, but she was making no attempt to walk away. “Fia really wanted to be here, but—”
“Right, the family thing.”
“The family thing,” he repeated.
Both regarded each other for a moment.
“You said you were friends, but you have the same last name.”
“We come from the same town. A lot of us have the same surname.”
She nodded. “I don’t really know anything more than she knows,” she said softly after a moment. “I’m not sure what the point of this meeting was.”
“But you came anyway,” he pointed out.
She remained quiet.
Arlan slipped his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket. “Fia was…we were wondering what your connection is. To him,” he said carefully. “How do you know him?”
“I don’t know him,” she said, her tone prickly.
He waited.
“Teddy contacts me sometimes. Tells me things. Awful things,” she half whispered.
There it was again, that vulnerability he had sensed earlier, so strong now that he could almost taste it on the tip of his tongue. “Teddy?”
“I’m sure it’s not his real name. It’s what he calls himself.”
“And how does he contact you?” He took a step closer. He had suggested to Fia that she might be the killer, or at least be involved in the murders, but now that he’d actually seen her, had a chance to sense her being, it didn’t feel that way to him.
She watched him, but did not move. “Over the Internet. We’ve never spoken.”
“So…he’s stalking you?”
“I suppose you could call it that.”
“Why you?”
She looked down at the sand, breaking eye contact for the first time since he’d approached her. “I don’t know,” she murmured.
“And how long has he been contacting you?”
She shrugged her slender shoulders. “I don’t know. A year or two, maybe.”
She was lying. Anyone who had a murderer stalking them would know exactly when it started, down to the very date and time. His gaze narrowed. “And you have no idea how or why he chose you?”
She shook her head, not speaking. She was watching him again, almost beseechingly.
Arlan wanted to believe her. Logic told him he shouldn’t, but he wanted to. He tried a different tack. “Does he ask you to participate in the murders?”
She slid her hands into the pockets of her sweatshirt. The wind off the ocean had grown cool. “No.”
“Does he threaten you?”
She