Absolution (12 page)

“What burned down?”

Melissa glanced at the ruins. “It was the only restaurant we had that was open for dinner—Clyde’s, a barbecue place. We…well, you might as well know about this if you’re going to stay here. A couple of months ago, Aidan’s brother attacked some people, including my husband, Mark. And he blew up the restaurant. Several people died, including the owner of the restaurant. Owen Murphy was absolutely nuts.”

And this was her safe haven? “Is this psycho still running around loose? Is your husband OK?”

“Mark’s fine. Aidan killed his brother Owen.” Melissa said it matter-of-factly, as if a man knocking off a sibling was an everyday thing. Maybe life had a different meaning for vampires. Heck, what was she thinking? Of course life had a different value for them. She wasn’t sure how one killed a vampire, but it couldn’t be that easy, or there wouldn’t be so darn many of them. Glory was beginning to think they outnumbered humans.

Melissa pulled into a curbside parking space in front of a small storefront with a black-and-white-striped awning over the door and the name Penton cafe painted on the window. “This is all we have left right now as far as eating places. I keep telling Aidan he needs to recruit somebody to Penton who wants to open another restaurant. Laurel does a great job with this place, but she isn’t open for dinner.”

I could do it
.
Maybe all of this happened for a reason, to bring me here.
Glory squelched the thought as soon as it rose like a balloon of hope in her chest. They hadn’t asked her to be part of their community. They were just protecting her from Matthias the Sadistic Madman, probably in hopes she’d figure out a way to use her telekinesis to help them fight their battles.
Don’t get too comfortable here
.

They entered the small, crowded diner and were pointed to a back table by a woman with a smiling, apple-cheeked face and hair that looked like Albert Einstein’s—even the same color of stark white.

“Thanks, Laurel.” Melissa waved at her and led Glory to the table. “Get whatever you want—you must be starving after eating cold takeout for a week on top of the withdrawal.”

Glory’s eyes burned, and she willed the sudden tears not to spill out while she pretended to be preoccupied with the menu. The heat in her face was bad enough—at least her skin was dark enough to hide all but the faintest blush. They all thought she was an addict, and Glory guessed they were right. Why should they think otherwise?

A small hand took hold of hers, and she looked up to find Melissa closer to tears than she was. “I’m sorry—I talk without thinking. There’s something else you should probably know. Mark had a problem with drugs—and not like you, where someone forced them on him. Aidan helped him get clean. There are a lot of people who came to Penton that way. Nobody judges here.”

Glory swallowed hard. “And Mark’s…OK now?”

Melissa smiled. “He’s Aidan’s business manager, not to mention the hottest guy in Penton. Of course, I’m prejudiced. And just so we’re all open here, I had my own problems. I got mixed up with an abusive jerk, got depressed, and tried to kill myself when I should’ve been trying to kill him instead. Aidan pulled me out of my pit too, and then I met Mark.”

Jeez Louise, no wonder everyone treated Aidan Murphy like he was God with fangs. “So, uh, what’s this bonding thing about? And exactly what does it mean that Mirren is sponsoring me? I was serious about finding a job.”

The wild-haired woman—Laurel, the café owner—brought them coffee and took their orders, welcoming Glory to Penton like she was just a normal girl moving to a normal town. Which didn’t quite jibe with the things Melissa was telling her. Nobody lived in Penton unless they were either a vampire bonded to Aidan or Mirren, or a human bonded to one of the vampires. Melissa said they’d gotten stricter about the bonding since an unbonded human had sold them down the river to Aidan’s psychotic brother a couple of months ago.

“What does
bonding
mean, exactly?” Glory figured it was some kind of ceremony or ritual.

“OK, don’t gross out, but it’s a blood exchange. The vampire takes a little of yours, and you take a little of his or hers.” Melissa laughed; Glory couldn’t keep the horror off her face.

“That is just…gross. I can’t do that.” Forget it. Glory would borrow enough money for a Greyhound ticket to somewhere remote and live vampire-free.

“It’s not that bad.” Melissa smiled. “Their blood tastes different—kind of sweetish. And you only have to taste it once.”

Glory processed that while she chewed on her toast. She guessed it couldn’t be worse than chicken livers, the most disgusting food on God’s green earth. “So, who are you bonded to?”

Melissa smiled. “Aidan—I’m his familiar, or fam. You don’t have to be a regular feeder, but if you don’t become someone’s fam, you’re expected to feed a scathe member as needed. When Mark was hurt a few months ago, Aidan used a substitute for a while so I could take care of my hubby.”

“Huh.” Glory’s toast was making her kind of queasy with all this blood talk. “If you don’t mind my asking, what do the fams get out of it? Why would anybody do that willingly? It hurts like rip.” Except her vague memories of Mirren feeding from her in the cell hadn’t involved pain—either that or she’d been too stoned to feel it.

Melissa set her coffee cup down and frowned. “It really doesn’t hurt—just a little sting at the very beginning. Then it’s…” Her face turned a bright pink. “It feels
really
good.”

Glory did a surreptitious inspection of Melissa’s throat and didn’t see the ugly tangle of scars that marked her own. She pulled her hair down to make sure it covered her neck.

Melissa didn’t miss the gesture. “Don’t be self-conscious about that. Mirren was…God, I’ve never seen him so angry as when you first got here and he saw what those animals had done to you. And Will was devastated.”

Glory tried to process Mirren’s reaction, but couldn’t decide if it was prompted by pity, anger at Matthias, or genuine concern for her. She had no right to hope it was the latter. “Who’s Will?”

Melissa leaned back in her chair, making way for Laurel to put down their plates and then get out of hearing range.

“He’s one of Aidan’s lieutenants—one of the Penton leaders. There are four or five of them. Supersmart guy. And, well, he’s Matthias Ludlam’s son. From what I understand, Matthias took Mirren in hopes it would force Will to leave Penton, but Will’s the one who figured out where Mirren was. He was the one who slipped into the compound in Virginia and got both of you out.”

Glory’s plate of scrambled eggs had lost their appeal. This was one seriously messed-up place, no matter how much like Mayberry it appeared on the surface. But what Melissa told her ft with the sketchier version Mirren had laid out last night.

She finished her breakfast mostly in silence, only breaking into Melissa’s ongoing chatter to ask an occasional question. She still didn’t know what the sponsoring business was, but she’d never been one to let bad news sit—she wanted to hear it, process it, and move on.

After Laurel left the check and while Melissa dug in her purse, Glory grabbed the ticket and tallied the amount of her meal. “I owe you five fifty. Write that down somewhere. And tell me what Mirren sponsoring me means. I need to know before I spend any more time here.”

Melissa grabbed the ticket and made a face. “Don’t worry about it. It was fun to have someone to eat with. Mark’s taking business meetings for Aidan this week. OK, so you know I’m Aidan’s fam, and Mark is Krys’s. When a new person, a human, moves to Penton, one of the vampires sponsors them—the vampire agrees to bond the person, to make sure all their needs are met, to help them ft in. It’s pretty amazing—I realized this morning that you are the first person Mirren has ever sponsored directly.” She raised her eyebrows as if this were a significant thing.

Glory was stuck back on
they agree to bond them
. “I have to drink blood? Uh, no.”
Uh-uh, no way, étouffée
. “I mean Mirren’s one tasty-looking guy, but…”
Oh crap.
Had she really said that out loud?

Melissa was still laughing when she left the money on the table, and Glory slunk behind her out of the café. She didn’t know what Melissa had planned next, but she was sure that, if humanly possible, she’d find a way to embarrass herself even more.

CHAPTER 12

A
t first, Mirren thought he was dreaming, but he rarely dreamed anymore—not since the early days after he’d been turned back in Ireland centuries ago. And thank God for that, because the nightmares used to suck.

No, he definitely smelled something savory, and it was no dream. Beef, cooked with onions and—he sorted through the rich aromas—carrots, something else earthy, maybe potatoes.

Stew. He smelled freaking stew. And somebody was in his house.

He rolled out of bed, not bothering to turn on the lamp, and grabbed a pair of his favorite combat pants from the folded pile on the chair. Only when he climbed from the subbasement to the basement level did he see they weren’t black. To him, they were gray, which meant they might be gray, or they might be army green. He hoped to God they weren’t red.

People thought he wore black to be a hard-ass; he didn’t tell them he was color-blind when it came to greens and reds. The more everyone thought he was dangerous, the more they’d leave him alone. Besides that, he
was
dangerous. Just because he hadn’t lost control in a long time didn’t mean the potential no longer existed.

He pulled socks from another pile of stacked clothes—he hadn’t yet put them away after the woman who did his laundry dropped them off a couple of days ago—and finally located hiking boots. He scrounged around for a shirt or sweater, picking a dark T-shirt off the floor and studying it a moment before pulling it over his head. Definitely black.

Since when did he care if his clothes matched? He paused at the stairwell to the first floor, trying to figure out how to handle the stew-wielding woman whose scent he’d finally recognized.

Glory was in his house. With food.

He’d thought if he ignored his new charge, somebody—Aidan or Mark or Melissa—would find her a place to live and get her settled. He could bond her to keep her safe from being fed on by anyone else, or Will could do it. He’d make sure she had the money to get what she needed and live on. Fixed and finished.

Now, he suspected one of his so-called friends had decided it would be funny to leave her on his doorstep. Probably Melissa. Aidan needed to get his fam under control.

He leaned against the wall of the stairwell and took a deep breath, savoring the aromas.

Damn, but he missed food. He used to go into old Clyde’s place before Aidan’s psychotic brother blew it up, to drink a glass of bourbon and smell the tang of smoked meats that took him back to his human days growing up in western Donegal. He’d been born in Scotland, and his father and older brothers—gallowglass, all of them—were Highlanders descended from Norsemen. They were big, trained to fight, well equipped, and well fed—mostly by draining the resources of their Irish employers.

He’d loved a rich, earthy stew better than anything.

The sound of a gunshot propelled him up the stairs, at the top of which he quickly worked the intricate lock and slid open the floor panel, easing himself silently into the hallway. His shoulders relaxed when he realized the sound had come from a television. Not
a
television.
His
television. Damn woman had touched his video system.

Torn between curiosity over the food and concern for his electronics, he followed the aroma of the stew into his kitchen, where a big steel pot sat on an eye of the stove. He didn’t even know how the thing worked beyond its occasional value in light ing a candle. Electrical appliances had come about long after his human life had ended, and big, ugly kitchen stuff didn’t hold any interest for him. He sure as hell didn’t own a pot.

He reached for the lid and hissed when the handle burned his fingers.

“There’s a pot holder on the counter—use that.”

Mirren turned and blinked. Glory leaned against the doorjamb, looking…like she was wearing one of his shirts. The folds of black cloth, or maybe gray, reached her knees. He was either in need of a good feeding or she was the sexiest thing he’d seen in a long time. Except for the edge of a scar that showed on one side of her neck, she bore no resemblance to the zonked-out wreck he’d carried out of Matthias’s house a week ago. Her Creek features—the creamy, tanned skin, dark eyes and black hair, high cheekbones tapering to full lips—rendered her as exotic as one of those night-blooming hothouse flowers Aidan grew in his greenhouse.