Allegiance (The Penton Vampire Legacy) (15 page)

  
CHAPTER 15
  

R
obin sat on the front stoop of Mirren’s community house on Cotton Street, drinking strong black coffee that Glory had brewed before leaving for the dining hall everyone called the Chow House.

She didn’t know how Glory managed. Stayed up until dawn with her vampire, stuck with him until he was asleep, went to make breakfast and lunch for the humans at the Chow House, and then, finally, slept a few hours before cooking an early Chow House dinner and greeting Mirren again when he woke up at sunset.

Seemed like it would be easier to always keep vampire hours. Except the whole missing-the-sun thing would suck.

Sucking reminded her of vampire feeding, which reminded her of that whole freakball scene with Mirren last night. It had scared the crap out of her, not that she’d admit it aloud. Although the way she’d wimped out, she wouldn’t have to. They already knew.

It had felt good. Way too good. And she wanted to try it again, for real this time, with fangs, in private, and not with Mirren Kincaid.

Not this morning, either. Her head ached from lack of sleep. A throbbing pain had settled behind her eyeballs, where it would stay until she either napped or drank enough caffeine to fuel a battleship. She was already on cup number three.

“Figured you’d still be zonked out.” Nik came outside and sat next to her, holding his usual cup of sweetened creamer laced with just enough coffee to make it a light golden brown. Take away the man’s sugar and he’d die. “I heard you leave last night after Cage and Melissa headed out. You followed them?”

“Jeez, why don’t you announce it over a fucking loudspeaker, Niko?” Robin looked up and down the street for any sign of eavesdroppers.

“Got a tip for you,” he whispered, leaning close enough so she could smell the spearmint of his toothpaste and that caramel macchiato creamer he liked. “The vamps are asleep when the sun’s up. They can’t overhear us.”

“Smartass.” She took another sip of coffee and was about to get up for more when Nik held up the whole carafe—he’d brought it with him and set it beside him where she couldn’t see it. “Figured you’d be bitchy and needy.”

“Damn straight. That’s why I love you.” She topped off her cup and set the carafe beside her. She’d probably end up drinking the whole thing. “Yeah, I followed them.”

“I don’t want you to tell me where they went, just if you found out what you needed to know.”

Robin respected that need-to-know thing the Rangers preached. A compromised soldier, they’d told her, couldn’t tell secrets he didn’t know, even if tortured—although he’d probably die before letting himself be taken if that option were available.

But
need to know
had all kinds of meanings. “What I needed to know was where the big vamps spend their days. I might need to find them someday, and I don’t like surprises.”

“Bullshit.” Nik laughed and sucked down the rest of his cup full of creamer. “What you needed to know was whether or not Cage Reynolds is screwing the curvy redhead and, if so, whether or not it means anything.”

“That would be the curvy
married
redhead, and she’s really more of a strawberry blonde.” Might as well not deny it. Nik knew her too well. “And no, I didn’t learn much since the vamps have an annoying habit of disappearing underground before daylight.”

“What, you want them to stay outside and fry in the sunrise?”

She looked at him with interest. “Do they really do that? Fry? What does happen if one of the fangaroos goes sunbathing?”

“I honestly have no idea except our dossiers said it’s fatal.” Nik shook his head. “You are one warped little bird.”

She took that as a compliment and kept her mouth shut when Nik pulled a silver flask out of the pocket of his jeans and tipped a measure of amber liquid into his coffee cup. He replaced the flask and held up his cup in salute. “Breakfast of champions.”

He only drank his Black Jack bourbon at breakfast when he’d been having nightmares—or was planning to use his Touch to learn something. “Looks like we had the same idea for today.” She looked toward the end of Cotton Street, where wisps of smoke still rose from the burnt-out ruins that lay catty-corner from the old mill.

“Yep.” Nik sipped his drink, his dark-brown eyes fixed on the blackened brick chimney that, along with the concrete steps and porch, was the only part of the house still fully intact. “I figure between my abilities and your shifter sensibilities, we can learn more than anyone else from that fire scene.”

“My gut tells me it was no more an accident than the construction-site wall collapse.” Robin studied the hulk of the old mill. “There’s a million places to hide in there. We should check it out as well.”

“I think we’re meeting Mirren and the others there at nine tonight, to set up a training schedule. Maybe we can poke around afterward. Now that the psycho vampire’s on the loose again and we know the construction site was sabotaged, people have to be on alert.”

“They should never have not been on alert.” Robin didn’t understand why they thought the war was over just because one particularly evil combatant had been locked up. Except maybe wishful thinking. “It’s not like that Ludlam guy was the only one after them. He was the scapegoat.”

“Yeah, but part of the appeal of Penton was that it could be a kind of utopian society where they didn’t always have to be looking over their shoulders. Most people came here to avoid fighting, not to wage a war—that was forced on them. You can’t really blame them for hoping it was over.” Nik finished his drink, set it aside, and picked up the sketchbook he’d brought with him. “You ready?”

Robin looked up at the sun and gauged the time at noon or a bit later. “Let’s do it.”

She tugged at the fabric of the sweater Nik had bought for her; she had to make a trip to a place with a store, and soon. The warm brown color looked good on her, but it was too big and had a boatneck that kept slipping off her shoulder. The jeans were rolled up at the hem, so she was rocking the homeless waif look big-time.

She still hadn’t seen Hannah, but the Hello Kitty ensemble was off the table—everything in that house had likely burned or had smoke damage.

“Leave the neck down.” Nik held out a hand, and when she grasped it, hoisted her to her feet. “It’s sexy.”

“Sexy-schmexy.” Robin slapped at his hand as he tugged the brown sweater off her shoulder again. “You don’t know sexy. Wasn’t it you who told me—who’s told me on numerous occasions, in fact—that you’ve seen better figures than mine on twelve-year-old boys?”

“Aw, you know I just say it because it annoys you so much.”

True, but it chafed all the same. She was short, wafer-thin, and while not precisely flat-chested, could easily get by with training bras. What she wouldn’t do to have one of those soft, curvy figures men liked so much. Like Glory. Or that damned Melissa Calvert, whose curves Nik had obviously noticed, the jackass. At least Krys was built more like Robin, only about twice as tall.

They walked the length of the block and stood on the sidewalk in front of the burned house. It wasn’t down to ashes, at least—the back rooms of the house weren’t habitable by any stretch of the imagination, but they still had outside walls, and Robin thought one might have part of a ceiling.

“Why don’t you walk it first, before I start touching things?” Nik pulled out his flask and sipped his bourbon straight this time, sans coffee creamer.

Robin nodded and left him to his crutch. She never preached at him; she understood why he drank, and she knew he could stop if he were ever in a situation where he wasn’t in danger of being blindsided by a bunch of memories. She hardly ever saw him drink when they were away from other people.

What Nik needed was a brand-new start in a town filled with vampires. Penton was perfect for him—except for the little sabotage problem.

She walked carefully, not touching anything with her bare skin lest she leave signatures that would throw Nik off. He couldn’t read shifters for the most part but would get flashes that didn’t make a lot of sense. Shifters lived long lives, and part of their ancestors’ DNA lived through them even more strongly than in humans, so he might pick up a shifter memory flash that was centuries old.

The front rooms of the house had a couple of side walls still standing, but the roof overhead had caved, so Robin toed aside stray bits of building materials, charred support beams, and what had probably at one time been pieces of furniture. She tested each step to make sure she didn’t crash through twenty or thirty feet into the daysleep spaces built beneath each house.

A mass of debris to the right was probably the remains of the dining table Nik remembered passing in the smoke.

The thick odor of charred wood, smoke, and ash overwhelmed her senses until she wasn’t sure she’d be able to scent a can of gasoline or another accelerant, even if it were sitting in the middle of the house with flashing lights and a signpost on it.

This house had the same layout as Glory and Mirren’s, so she picked a route to the kitchen, looking for any scent or evidence of an electrical fire. It was too early in the fall to need heat and too late in the summer to need air conditioning, so the kitchen would be the most likely source of electrical malfunction.

She leaned in toward some exposed wiring and sniffed. Nothing out of the ordinary, but she’d better warn Nik to be careful in what he Touched in case no one had had the forethought to turn off the electricity.

The biggest pile of ceiling materials lay in the hallway near the middle bedrooms. This must be where Nik had fallen, and where Cage had saved him.

According to his dossier, Cage had also saved curvy old Melissa Calvert from the evil Matthias, at considerable risk to himself. Even took a bullet getting her out.

A man who made a habit of saving other people was a man with problems, at least in the Robin Ashton lexicon of life. He might save others because by focusing on their problems he could ignore his own and look like a hero doing it. Or he might get a rush from being the savior. She suspected Cage Reynolds wasn’t hooked on saving people; he was too damn reserved. Which meant he was avoiding something in his own life.

Something to think about later, or as soon as she got a chance to fly.

The worst damage lay in the center of the house, particularly the middle room on the right. The outside wall had even tumbled. Although Hannah slept in the lieutenants’ daysleep space, she kept her stuff in one of the back bedrooms, if Robin remembered Mirren’s explanation clearly. The other back room and the room on the left—where Hannah and the dog had been found—belonged to the two Rangers, Rob and Max.

Which meant the room on the right, where the fire seemed to have started, was the one in which Cage was staying, with Fen and Shawn in the front bedrooms.

If the fire began in Cage’s room, was he the target?

That genuinely sucked, since he seemed to always be running into danger with his Superman cape swirling behind him anyway. He’d make it easy for them. Create havoc anywhere nearby, and Cage would run right into it, looking for someone to save.

Nik needed to start here.

When Robin got back to the front of the house, Nik had taken a seat on the concrete stoop—now separated slightly from the house it was supposed to anchor. She didn’t have to see his face to know he was getting in touch with that inner psychic he spent most of his time trying to tamp down.

Nik’s father had had the Touch, too. That’s what Nik’s dad had called it, so Nik had picked up the name as well. It seemed to fit. But his father hadn’t learned to control it, and the visions had driven him mad. Nik had found his father’s body hanging from a purple-and-green Mardi Gras flagpole off the courtyard balcony of the family home in New Orleans’s Garden District. He’d been sixteen, and since he’d inherited his father’s Touch, everyone began treating him like a fragile freak who’d probably be hanging from the Crescent City Connection bridge over the Mississippi River at any moment.

Families were so fucking hard.

If her Niko wanted to drink to keep his demons at bay, so be it. Whatever it took.

She sat beside him, quiet and still.