Absolution (4 page)

W
ill Ludlam shuffled the deck of cards for the tenth time and shot a dark glance at the redhead in the armchair across the room. Randa Thomas sat ramrod straight, like she always did, with that indecipherable expression on her face, like she always wore. She might as well have a board up her butt.

“Stop staring at me, you spoiled brat.” Her voice was that of the hard-assed, ex-military woman she had been before being turned vampire five years earlier. “It’s not my fault Aidan’s making us work in pairs. And will you, for the love of all that’s holy, stop playing with those cards?”

Will shuffled them again with exaggerated slowness, then rapped the deck against the coffee table to straighten them, taking care to make as much noise as possible. “No problem,
Verandah
.” He chuckled at her compression of lips over his favorite nickname for her. It wasn’t his fault her parents had given her a name like Randa that begged to be bastardized.

With Mirren missing and more starving, rogue vampires wandering the countryside in search of rural-dwelling humans who were less likely to have been vaccinated, Aidan had insisted his lieutenants partner up. Randa was newly promoted. Will loved women on principle, but he could honestly say this one might be capable of souring him on the whole gender. She had a way of looking at him, speaking to him, that made him feel like nothing more than a spoiled rich boy.

Randa Thomas was a ballbuster, and Will liked his balls just the way they were.

They waited in the large office of the Penton clinic, where Aidan had called a meeting of the lieutenants. Randa wasn’t the only new one. Tanner James, who shared Will’s love of all things tech, would have been a much better partner for him, but no, Aidan had paired Tanner with Hannah, their resident psychic. He was on patrol tonight with a new scathe member, so Hannah would be coming alone.

“Everybody’s late.” Randa glanced at her watch. The woman had checked the damn thing ten times already, but Will decided not to point it out.

Then he changed his mind. “Not everyone lives and dies by the clock like you, honey.” He picked his cards up again and started shuffling.

Randa’s eyes narrowed at the word
honey
. “The world would be a better place if they did. And if you call me—”

Her tirade over his use of the sexist endearment, which they both knew had been meant to piss her off, was cut off by Aidan’s arrival.

Will laid the cards aside and frowned at his friend. No, Aidan was more than a friend. He’d given Will a job, a home, and a family when he’d met him ten years ago in Atlanta. Before that, Will had stayed on the move for two decades, trying to stay a few steps ahead of his manipulative bastard of a father. Until moving to Penton, Will had always kept a bag packed. As soon as Matthias showed up to smush his son back under his thumb, Will would move again.

Stress lines had taken up residence on either side of Aidan’s mouth. He’d almost died at the hands of his psychopath brother last month and had to turn his mate, Krys, vampire after she suffered a fatal injury at Owen’s hands. Now, Mirren had been missing over a month. Will couldn’t figure out how to help.

“Still nothing from the big guy?” He pulled his chair near the oversize desk Aidan had sat behind, moved another one forward for Hannah to use, and left Randa to fend for herself. He smirked when he heard her pulling her chair across the wooden floor to form a semicircle in front of Aidan.

“I know he’s alive, but he’s out of communication range. Holy hell, what a cluster.” Aidan ran his hands through his shoulder-length dark hair. He’d let it grow longer since hooking up with Krys because she liked it that way. Mated males did stupid shit like that, which was one more reason Will was determined not to become one. That and the fact that there were too many beautiful women in the world to limit himself to one. Plus, one never knew when a woman might turn into the tight-assed shrew like the one he’d been forced to take as a partner.

The door to the clinic office opened, and Hannah skipped in, bringing a smile to Will’s face. That kid was the only vampire he’d ever met, including himself, who never operated with any agenda other than what was written on her face. Maybe it was because she’d been turned vampire before she’d learned any kind of artifice as a human, or maybe it was because Aidan had taken her in and protected her from the paranoid world of vampire politics.

Hannah’s psychic abilities gave everybody the creeping willies now and then, but Will was always happy to see her.

The girl shrugged off her pink hoodie, its cheery hue at such odds with her long black hair and her presence at a midnight vampire confab, and took the chair between Randa and him. “Will and Randa don’t hate each other as much as they pretend to.” She giggled.

Then again, sometimes her psychic pronouncements were way off base. Will scowled at his new partner and was met with the same. “Sorry, Hannah, but you are seriously mistaken,” he said.

Hannah was a full-blooded Muscogee Creek, the daughter of a medicine man. Caught forever between childhood and adolescence, she’d been turned vampire two centuries ago when she was only eleven. She’d been with Aidan almost from the beginning of her vampire life, since he’d found her and killed her maker.

No one had blamed Aidan for that killing. Turning a child vampire was a serious crime in their world, even before the pandemic vaccine made creating new vampires illegal. Most children couldn’t survive the physical transition; only half of adults lived through it. Children weren’t emotionally developed enough to control themselves and their appetites without a strong guiding hand. Plus, turning a kid was just wrong.

Will hadn’t been a child when his own father turned him, although twenty-two was young enough. But every time he felt like wallowing in self-pity at his own lost young adulthood, he made himself remember this child, who’d maintained her sense of playfulness despite the burdens of her stolen life and psychic abilities. Kind of put things into perspective.

“Will and Randa can flirt on their own time. We need to talk about Mirren.” Aidan leaned back in his chair, ignoring their sour expressions. “My mental bonds to him are still open, and the scathe members in town who are bonded to him, including Randa, say the same. So he’s alive. We just don’t know where.”

“And you want me to try to find him again?” Hannah stopped swinging her legs, which dangled off the chair without touching the floor.

Aidan nodded. “I know you’ve been searching for some mental connection, but I thought maybe if we were all here it might help.”

“Let’s try it.” Will stretched out his left hand, and Hannah placed her small brown palm against his. He grasped Aidan’s hand with his right, and Aidan and Randa completed their circle. They probably should have done this right after Mirren had gone missing, but the man had been angry and upset over the death of his familiar, and they’d thought he wanted some time alone.

Each member of the group stilled, and Will focused his mind on Mirren. The idea that anyone had gotten the jump on the man was hard to swallow, but it was the only explanation that made sense. He wouldn’t go off radar this long without telling Aidan, no matter how upset he’d been when Tim was murdered. If he’d been dead, the mental bonds would be broken. Somebody had to have taken him, kept him locked away.

“It’s Will,” Hannah whispered, and Will’s gaze shot to her.

“What’s me?”

“You’re the one who can figure out how to help Mirren. The only one. I can see it.”

The door to Will’s bedroom snicked shut as Olivia, his current feeder and lover, slipped out a half hour after sundown. He’d sent her away, disappointed that all she got from him tonight was a little feeder’s high. Liv wasn’t drop-dead-and-become-a-vampire gorgeous, but she had that wholesome, pink-cheeked prettiness he’d found so appealing in Southern girls.

As soon as he was sure she’d gone, he got up, dressed quickly, and went to the central hallway of his mid-twentieth-century redbrick ranch house. It was a redbrick ranch on the outside, at least. Inside, he’d gradually turned it from an outdated set of boring white rectangles to a sleek, modern space that ft his lifestyle and needs. Lots of blond wood and glass, with a heated indoor pool in back and furnishings that combined comfort with clean lines and minimal fuss.

Will knelt in the hallway and shifted panels on the central square of wooden flooring. He’d designed similar locks to all the safe daysleep spaces in Penton, basing them on traditional wooden puzzle boxes. Anyone not practiced in the solution to the individual puzzle would find it difficult to open, even if they knew the lock was there. A few vampires were stupid enough to let their fams and feeders know where their dayspaces were and how to access them, but not Will.

He heard the lock below the wooden square click open and pulled it up, revealing a ladder leading downward into a narrow shaft. After climbing down a few rungs, he slid the floor tile in place above his head, then descended first into a basement living area with a pool table, stereo, and emergency supplies. Finally, he lowered himself into another hidden stairwell that led to his real living quarters in a subbasement—the place where he spent his daysleep and where no one else had ever set foot. Most members of Aidan’s vampire community, or scathe, had created private spaces either belowground or in existing houses retrofitted to make them impervious to light.

Will opened the armoire, which had been crafted of light oak with hand-carved dragons etched into it by an artist he’d met in Tennessee during his stint living in the Smoky Mountains. Reaching into the bottom compartment, he extracted a leather overnight bag. He’d spent the hours after Hannah’s revelation thinking about Mirren and why he might be the one to find his fellow lieutenant. He could’ve kicked himself for not thinking of it earlier.

It went back to Will’s father, as always. Aidan had suspected Matthias was behind last month’s attacks. Will had even offered to leave Penton, to keep his father away from the town. He didn’t want to endanger the only real friends he’d ever had. But Aidan had convinced him that Matthias, either with or without Tribunal backing, would come after the town anyway, because Penton had grown too strong, the number of vampires pledging fealty to him too large.

Stupid thing was, Aidan hadn’t amassed the power and the followers because he wanted to overthrow the Tribunal. Everyone in Penton just wanted to be left alone.

Freakin’ paranoid vampires.

Will knew how the warped old bastard’s mind worked. If Matthias had managed to take Mirren somehow, he’d have locked him up somewhere, trying to break him. Matthias was arrogant enough to think he could turn Mirren back into the Tribunal killing machine he used to be. He’d see the big guy as too valuable an asset to kill without at least trying to change his loyalties.

Which led him to the question—if Matthias had Mirren locked up, where would it be? Just before his last daysleep, Will had logged onto his computer, found a map of the US, and noted all of his father’s American properties that he could remember. The New York house would be too exposed; Matthias wouldn’t want to risk the Tribunal knowing he had Mirren. Miami was the wrong direction if Mirren had gone missing from North Carolina. Matthias wouldn’t want to try and move him very far and take a chance on losing him.

That left only one viable option: the estate in Orange County, Virginia.

Along with a change of clothes, Will added to his bag a length of rope woven with silver wire, a fixed-blade combat knife, a half-dozen small listening devices, and a small Mapp gas torch ensconced in a case. Two folding combat knives went in the pockets of his black cargo pants.

He got halfway to the door and stopped. Setting the bag down, he returned to the armoire and extracted a shoulder holster and his Smith&Wesson. Mirren had bought one of the bulky .45s for each of the lieutenants last year. Mirren and Aidan were both fans of the heavy pistol, but not Will. He liked knives. He might need the expediency of a gun tomorrow night, however. He rummaged in the armoire and added a silencer to the bag.

He couldn’t take a commercial fight with this much hardware, so he’d gassed up his ’54 Corvette, which was all cream-painted steel and hand-shined chrome. It was a beast, but far from subtle. Still, he couldn’t borrow a car without arousing suspicion, and he didn’t want any company on this trip.

Will climbed up one floor to the basement and paused before taking the staircase to the main level of the house. Some one was here. He scented the air: vampire. Female. Flippin’ Randa. He’d wrap his silver rope around her neck if she’d broken into his house.

He avoided the main hatch into the house and used a narrow secondary exit that opened into the floor of his walk-in bedroom closet, which locked from the inside. If she had pranced into his house, he did not want that woman knowing where the access to his dayspace was, even if she couldn’t break the lock code.

The brass of the thumb latch was cool and smooth against his fingers as he unlocked the bedroom door and stepped out, taking a deep lungful of air. She wasn’t inside, but definitely nearby.