Absolution (8 page)

M
irren struggled to reconcile the scared ragamuffn junkie he’d fed from in Matthias’s basement with the fierce woman—fierce, beautiful woman—standing in the middle of the hospital room, watching Aidan, Will, and Krys file out with suspicion all over her face. The only resemblance was her runaway mouth and a little touch of jitters that remained in her movements.

“You just going to stand there?” She made no attempt to move, so he motioned to the chair Aidan had left.

“ Are
you
?”

She propped her hands on her hips and pinned him with the same expression she’d given him before, when she came from the bathroom and first spotted him. She’d captured him with her eyes as surely as Matthias had tied him with silver. She was defiant, almost daring him to prove what a son of a bitch he could be, and yet connected to him somehow.

Shrugging, Mirren dropped into the chair, shifting to ft his bulk into it comfortably, stretching his legs out in front of him. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Your move.”

Glory glanced at the door as if she might make a run for it, but when she ran a hand through her damp hair, Mirren realized it was all bravado—she was shaking. He hoped to God she didn’t start crying. He didn’t volunteer for crying.

Maybe it was the drugs, though. She’d had a rough time of it. “Withdrawal pains coming back?”

“What were they giving me?” Glory shuffled to the bed and sat on it, facing him. She pushed up the sleeve of the blue sweater—the blue sweater that showed off what would be a beautiful figure if it had a little more meat on it. He wrenched his eyes from her curves to the track marks on her arm, a few of them still raw, red puncture wounds with bruising around them.

“Heroin.” Mirren leaned forward in his chair, watching as her face registered fear, then anger. Either she really hadn’t known what they were pumping into her or she was a better actress than he’d ever encountered. “You’d never done it before Matthias got hold of you?”

“No!” Her voice quavered, but it was definitely from anger, not fear. “I’m getting over it, right? I used to ache and have fever and chills when that man was late with the shots.” She shuddered. “Shelton.”

Yeah, well, Shelton was probably locked in the silver cell himself right now for letting Will get the slip on him, but Mirren didn’t have any sympathy for the man. “Aidan and I have been helping you through the withdrawal. The drugs are out of your system. What’s left is the psychological need—that takes a while, but if you can remember it’s mental and try to distract yourself, I’m told it helps.”

Mirren watched Glory trace the scars on her inner arms; then her fingers rose to feel the scar tissue at her neck where those bastards had ripped her skin. The idea of it uncovered a rage inside him that he hadn’t felt in over a century. Somehow, this girl brought out the cold anger that belonged to the Slayer, and that made her dangerous.

Glory frowned at him. “What did you do, you and…what was his name? Aidan? He was the guy who said he was the mayor? Can a town actually have a vampire mayor? And how did you help me through the withdrawal?”

Nothing wrong with the woman’s tongue. Mirren gave her a terse rundown of the past week. He and Aidan, being the only two master vampires in Penton, had kept her enthralled at night until the worst of the withdrawal had passed. Krys had stayed with her every night, and during the day, Aidan’s familiar, Melissa, had watched over her.

It was a procedure they’d repeated many times over the last few years, Mirren told her. A lot of the human familiars of the Penton vampire scathe had been rehabbed from Atlanta’s free clinics. They were less likely to be vaccinated because they rarely had regular medical care. The vampires would help them get clean of drugs or alcohol, then give them the choice of staying in Penton or leaving. Those who wanted to stay got a vampire sponsor, were blood-bonded, and settled in. If they wanted to go home, they got their memories scrubbed and were taken back for a second chance and no drug or alcohol habit.

Sort of like a Betty Ford Clinic, with vampires instead of therapists and doctors. But before they could think of letting Glory go home, Mirren wanted answers. “Tell me what happened. Start at the beginning. Where did Matthias find you?”

“He came in the Circle K where I work as a night clerk, in Roswell, north of Atlanta. He was buying cigars. Make that where I
used
to work. I’m sure they’ve fired me by now, not that it was any great job.” Glory leaned back on the pillows and closed her eyes, and Mirren had a fash of how she might look stretched out in his bed, with that silky black hair spread across his pillows, across
him
.

He jerked his gaze away from her.
Idiot.
He was obviously suffering from the aftereffects of being starved for a month. A quick trip to one of his favorite Atlanta specialty clubs was in order, and soon. A little rough music, a little rough sex, and he’d quit fantasizing about Circle K store clerks.

“I remember feeling weird after he left, but I swear I can’t remember what he said to me. The next thing I knew, I was in his car. Then another blank, and I was in that room and he was biting me.” She rolled onto her side, facing Mirren, and curled into a ball. Probably how she’d spent a lot of the last month. “When can I go home?”

Well, that was the freaking question of the day, wasn’t it? She could identify Matthias, maybe where he lived, might have overheard something she didn’t even realize was important. Matthias hadn’t scrubbed her memories—he’d counted on Mirren killing her. Which led to another issue.

“I’m guessing Matthias didn’t just want you for sex or feeding. He wanted you for your powers. You need to tell me what you can do and how much he knows.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it. Her lips tightened. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Mirren slid his chair closer to the bed. Yeah, he was being an asshole, trying to intimidate her. Not that it worked. She just gave him a mulish look. “Stop with the bullshit,” he told her. “You have some kind of psychic ability. I could feel it when I touched you back in that cell. Aidan felt it from a few feet away without laying a hand on you when we brought you in. I’m betting Matthias could too, which is why he took you. He’d have wanted to use you.”

“I didn’t tell him a thing.”

Mirren studied her. Stubborn wouldn’t help her survive if Matthias wanted to find her. “I can enthrall you and force you to tell me.”

Glory smiled, and Mirren saw a challenge in her eyes, but no fear. “I know what enthrallment is—it’s what they’d do to me in that other place when they wanted me to shut up. I’d have big holes in my memory. So you go right ahead and try it, big man. Matthias couldn’t make me tell him anything when he enthralled me, and neither can you. Matter of fact, if you and your buddy Aidan did that hypnosis thing on me to help me get off drugs, then I bet y’all tried to make me tell you already. And I didn’t tell you a thing, did I?”

Mirren scowled. No, she hadn’t. And, yes, he and Aidan had both tried to question her while she was enthralled to help her through withdrawal. Aidan wrote up her ability to resist as either some kind of psychic fluke or a strong mental constitution; Krys had been resistant to enthrallment before Aidan had been forced to turn her vampire, although the woman still gave him hell about how many times he did it.

Maybe little Gloriana Cummings had a Georgia drawl and worked in a convenience store, but she was smart and fearless. They’d do well not to underestimate her.

“Quit talking about killing. Nobody’s killing anybody.” Mirren stood and walked to the window, pulling back the blinds to reveal the silent street outside. The Penton clinic lay on the eastern end of the small downtown area. Before Matthias had sent Owen Murphy to rain a shitstorm all over them in January, they’d had a bustling nightlife, a thriving town of vampires and their willingly bonded familiars. Now, two months later, people were afraid to wander too far from home after dark.

Glory had no clue what she’d been dragged into. Telling her might be the only way she’d open up.
Fuck me.
How had he become the voice of Penton all of a sudden? Aidan was the politician; Mirren was the muscle. But for some reason Mirren couldn’t pretend to understand, Glory seemed to trust him, and he felt responsible for her.

He turned back to face her. “Here’s the deal. Matthias Ludlam is going to come looking for you, and next time, he won’t wait for me to kill you. He’ll do it himself.”

CHAPTER 8

G
lory watched Mirren pace the room and listened to him talk for the better part of an hour. If she hadn’t spent the last month as some kind of drug-addicted vampire hostage, she’d have thought he was loony tunes. Now, nothing seemed impossible, even the idea that there were starving vampires, crazy vampire politicians, and vampire pacifists.

“OK, just so I’m clear on this, the vampires are on the verge of some kind of civil war because so many humans got the pandemic vaccine and y’all are starving—except here in Penton, where you have your own people to feed you? And in this civil war, Matthias is the North, and you and your buddies here in Penton are the South? And this Tribunal that Matthias belongs to, it’s like the federal government that’s going to come and stomp you out like bugs if you don’t break up your town and join the union?”

He stopped midpace and stared at her. “How the fuck did you pull that from what I told you?”

Glory narrowed her eyes at him. “Will you please stop cursing? I don’t like it. In fact, anything you say to me with the F-word in it, from now on, I’m not going to respond to.”

Mirren opened his mouth, then shut it.

Hah. That put a sock in it.
He cursed more than anyone she’d ever met. “OK, then. So maybe it’s not like the real Civil War, but that makes sense to me, so we’ll stick with it.” She crossed her arms and waited for him to answer.

Mirren growled and slung himself back in the chair, almost toppling it over. “Will you shut it with the Civil War crap? The whole point is that you’re in danger. Even if you don’t tell us what you can do, Matthias will think you have—and that’s enough to bring him in here to kill you, and probably a lot of us along with you. Plus, what he did to you is illegal, so he’ll want to shut you up. The vampire leaders will punish anyone who draws human attention our way, which certainly includes kidnapping one and holding her prisoner. As long as you’re alive and free, Matthias will see you as a threat.”

“So I might as well tell you what I can do? You’ll use me against him instead of the other way around? What’s the difference, vampire?”

“Aw, fuck me. I give up.” Mirren slouched in the chair and closed his eyes like he had a headache, although Glory didn’t know if vampires got headaches. She stifled a laugh; he looked like he might be counting to ten. Annoying Mirren Kincaid was the most fun she’d had in a while.

She considered what he’d told her, though. It wasn’t such a stretch to believe Matthias Ludlam would come after her if he thought there was an off chance she might help the Penton vampires or finger him for kidnapping her. If she went home, she’d be vulnerable. There weren’t that many Native Americans in Roswell, and even if she moved somewhere else in the Atlanta area, her dark skin and eyes were distinctive enough that anyone with motivation or money could find her.

Glory felt like one of those sad helium balloons that had lost most of its gas and sagged in midair. It wasn’t like she had much to go home to anyway. A rental apartment, a crappy job she wouldn’t dare return to after what had happened—even if they’d take her back. That silly dream of going to the Cordon Bleu would probably never have come true anyway. People like her—half Muscogee and straight off the tribal lands in Whigham, Georgia—didn’t turn into chefs. They toiled at blue-collar jobs or worked in the casinos. If they cooked, it was slinging scrambled eggs at Waffle House.

Mirren still slouched with his eyes closed, so big that he made the straight-backed chair frame look like it belonged in one of those preschool classrooms filled with miniature furniture. What was his story? Matthias had said he was a killer, but she got a strong protective vibe from him—even though she suspected he’d chafe at being seen that way. He had a trace of an accent. Not English, exactly. And like this, with those thundercloud-gray eyes closed and minus the scowl, he was a rugged kind of handsome. Really handsome.