Allegiance (The Penton Vampire Legacy) (4 page)

Fen seemed to realize he’d crossed a line and changed the subject to the weather, and then to how living in the States—first Wilmington, North Carolina, and then Savannah and Atlanta—had compared to Dublin. He chattered so much Melissa wanted to scream. On the other hand, he required little response and had filled up that horrible silence following his gaffe.

Melissa had always thought of Cage as compassionate but invincible. But the man she’d glimpsed in the mirror just now had been set upon by ghosts, and they weren’t friendly ones.

While her thoughts wandered, Fen had moved on to babbling about a raid into a jungle encampment in Nicaragua, during which Cage had been stabbed and had, apparently, ripped out several rebels’ throats with his fangs—thus the necessity of explaining his true identity to Fen. Cage contributed a few details to embellish the tale, but Melissa thought his facial expressions were revealing: amused at first, but when Fen got to the throat-ripping part, annoyed again.

Maybe Fen would be fun to keep around Penton after all. It might be the only way she’d ever learn about the man Cage had been before arriving in town with his worn old traveling trunk plus box after box of his favorite small cigars. Even if, as she suspected, they didn’t have a future as a couple, she really, really wanted him as a friend.

All conversation ceased when the few working streetlights of Penton came into view. She tried to imagine how it must look to a stranger. Burned-out shells of buildings, heaps of construction rubble, and, overseeing it all like a dying god of industry, the hulk of the long-closed cotton mill.

Melissa stopped the car in front of the new communal house where Aidan and Mirren were supposed to be waiting. She’d resigned herself to the loss of any remaining chance to talk to Cage alone before dawn.

She popped the trunk and Cage got his luggage out. Mirren’s bulk filled the doorway, waiting on them. The hostility practically rolled off him in visible waves when Fen bustled over to introduce himself. Mirren and Aidan had wanted to bring Cage up to date on Omega Force before daysleep, but not in front of a stranger.

Before joining them, Cage leaned in the car window. “I’m sorry we didn’t get the chance to talk, Mel. We need to . . .”

His voice trailed off, but she knew what the rest of that sentence should be. We need to settle things between us. “I know. Tomorrow night, maybe.” She looked back at Mirren and Fen. “I don’t know why, but I have a bad feeling about that guy. I’m not sure we should trust him.”

Cage looked past her at his old acquaintance, whose nonstop prattle was likely putting Mirren in a homicidal mood. “Don’t worry, love. I never fully trusted my old pal Fen when he was human. I surely don’t trust him now.”

  
CHAPTER 3
  

R
ob Thomas scratched his head, causing the bright late-afternoon sunlight and shadows to create the effect of a golden halo above his red hair. “What’s this say? Who taught Mirren Kincaid how to write, anyway?”

“Probably somebody who died about four centuries ago and didn’t speak any version of a language we’d recognize.” Mark Calvert took the notebook from Rob and blew out a frustrated breath. He bought and sold stocks, calculated investment risks, and monitored trending start-ups. He didn’t build military training facilities. Well, not in normal times.

Penton had blown way past normal almost a year ago.

The chicken scratches on the notebook made no sense whatsoever. How Mirren could be such a talented artist and yet write in gibberish, he didn’t know.

But Mirren Kincaid and the rest of the vampires were snoring happily away in daysleep while the Penton business manager stood in the broiling sun, trying to wrangle enough warm bodies to build the new Omega Force training center to Slayer standards.

Mark shoved the notebook back at Rob. “Damned if I know. Call Glory at the Chow House, and see if she can decipher it for us.”

Rob stuck the clipboard under his arm. “I’ll just go down there and ask her in person. Maybe you and Max can finish putting up that wall while I grab something to eat before she packs it all away for the day.”

Mark nodded. “When are Will and Randa coming home?”

“In a week if everything goes as planned. Never thought I’d say this, but I’m ready for Will to take over this project, big mouth and all.” Rob was the human brother of Penton lieutenant Randa Thomas. Randa’s mate, Will Ludlam, thrived on this type of planning-and-construction project, leaving the humans who toiled through daylight hours with neat printed instructions, diagrams, and explanations.

“So he’s definitely having the surgery?” Mark asked. Will’s left leg had been mangled in one of his father’s attacks on Penton and had healed badly. Using a little admittedly unethical enthrallment, Aidan had managed to get an Atlanta orthopedic surgeon to take a look at Will after-hours.

“If the doctor thinks he’s a good candidate,” said Rob. “All they’re doing tonight is shooting X-rays and hoping the doctor doesn’t see anything weird. You know, like fangs.

“Randa says Will is being one pain in the ass because he can’t start training with us.” Rob laughed. “Wait. Will is always a pain in the ass, so let me rephrase that: he’s being a bigger pain in the ass than usual.”

Mark smiled. “Yeah, but he’s a lot better than Mirren at this construction stuff. Not that I’ll be sharing that opinion with the big guy.”

“No shit. He won’t hear it from me, either. The man’s like a bad attitude with feet.”

Mark had expected a combat-tough Army Ranger like Rob to be a total hard-ass like his father. Colonel Rick Thomas, who headed up the Omega Force project, could out-grouch Mirren.

Rob was cool, though—a lot easier to get along with than their other Ranger-turned-Penton-resident Max Jeffries. Max constantly tried to prove himself bigger and badder than any vampire; as Mark could tell him from long experience as one of Aidan’s closest friends, he was wasting his time. The only way for a human to outfight a vampire was to cheat.

If a human wanted to live among vampires, he had to capitalize on his few advantages—like walking around in sunlight and conducting business during daylight hours.

Something Melissa would never be able to do again.

Mark tried to brush away the thought, but as usual when it came to the subject of his wife, he lost the battle as surely as if he’d been trying to fistfight a vamp.

He hadn’t given up on Melissa; he still loved her, fangs and all. But he had given up on begging for any attention she might toss his way like a stray bread crumb.

His supply of pity and empathy for her situation had expired. After all, he was the one who’d been dumped on and avoided like a walking cancer. He’d been willing to give her space and try to win her back, until he heard Cage Reynolds was returning to Penton, possibly for good.

No more Mr. Nice Mark. If she wanted that smug English sonofabitch, she could have him.

“Earth to Mark.” Rob slapped him on the arm with the clipboard.

“Sorry, what’d you say?”

“Got anything else that needs to go to the Chow House?”

Mark looked around the job site and took a quick inventory. “We could use a few more bottles of water. Max sweats it out faster than he can drink it.”

“Fuck you.” A disembodied voice rumbled from the other side of the wall, within the wooden framework of the building in progress. “Forget the water. Bring me a six-pack and one of Glory’s subs.”

Rob saluted the brick wall and grinned at Mark. “Got it. Be back in a half hour or so, unless Glory’s too busy to interpret Mirren’s secret code and I have to wait on her.”

Mark watched him descend the hill into downtown Penton, where a long wooden building had been erected at the site of the old barbecue place that had been bombed earlier in the year by Aidan’s psycho brother. His late psycho brother.

All that mess seemed like a million years ago, not nine months.

The Chow House had been Will’s idea, as had the communal houses that gave them all places to live while rebuilding the rest of the town.

Eventually, if they could get Penton back up and running, they’d all reestablish their own homes. For now, those doing the rebuilding needed places to live and eat. Six communal houses with lighttight spaces beneath them sat at the site of the old mill village.

A block away was the Chow House, where Glory oversaw the preparation of three meals a day for any among the few remaining humans who wanted to stop by—at least until an hour before dusk, when she went to greet her rising vampire. And here, at the site of the former community center, the new Omega Force training facility would overlook it all.

“We taking a break?” Max rounded the corner from the other side of the wall, wiping sweat off his face with the front of his camo-patterned Army Rangers T-shirt.

Mark handed him a bottle of water and took the last one for himself. “Yeah, might as well. We just need to finish this wall, and it’s all ladder work. Going to be a slow go. We need to get Mirren’s instructions deciphered before we work on the back wall.”

Max looked at the red bricks stacked neatly on the concrete pad inside the building’s framework. “Be easier if we could bring some real brick masons in here. One of us could oversee things and they’d never have to know about the”—he fluttered his arms in a poor imitation of bat wings—“big bad vampires.”

“We talked about it.” Mark stepped over a couple of extra two-by-fours and sat on the nearest pile of bricks, stretching his sore back muscles. Old back injuries and construction made unhappy bedfellows.

At least there was shade inside the rectangular framework. “Too risky to bring in brick masons, though. Even if they didn’t find out about the vamps, they might be curious about the town.”

“I guess.” Max took a swig of water. “Now that you mention it, I’m not sure I’d know what to say when they asked why the town looks like an atomic bomb went off on Main Street. Or who lives here in this heap of destruction. Or how it is that a guy named Aidan Murphy, who no one outside Penton has ever seen, owns everything.”

Mark knew that answer; he’d brokered every last real-estate deal. Aidan owned Penton outright, down to the last pinecone and cracked sidewalk.

Max sat on the concrete slab and stretched out six-feet-three-inches of muscle and alpha male. Mark had never considered himself a slouch in the physique department, but Max and Rob both made him feel like an eighth-grader in remedial gym class. Max’s dark hair had grown out a little from the buzz cut he’d had when he and Rob had first arrived in Penton—but not much. He still looked like an Army Ranger.

Three months ago, Max and Rob had slipped into town at night with the colonel, trying to figure out how this combined Ranger-vampire antiterrorism team might work. Max currently sported only one fading bruise, on his left cheek—but with Cage back in Penton their sparring would probably pick up where it had left off.

The thought of Cage Reynolds gave Mark a headache.

“Where are things with the Omega Force?” Mark took a sip of water and screwed the cap back onto the bottle. “I heard there are some new team members coming in. Does that mean you guys will get to do something besides build houses and training facilities? That’s gotta be frustrating.” As frustrating as it was for an investment analyst to be building houses and training facilities.

Max finished off his water and rolled the plastic bottle between his palms. Fidgeting. The guy always needed to be moving. “The colonel was so anxious to get the project rolling he put a team together in Texas back in July. They’ve already handled a case—that bombing last month in Houston. Their team leader and a couple of others are out of commission for a while, so two of them are coming here.”

“How’d they get up and moving so fast?” The whole vampire-Ranger thing had been dreamed up here as a way for the human special-ops people to help the vampires survive the pandemic crisis without outing them to other humans. In return, the Penton vampires would train to help on counterterrorism maneuvers. Only the Houston team had already wrapped up a case while Penton’s team was, well, laying brick.

Max shrugged. “They had people in Houston already trained and available. I had to be moved off active duty, plus we have all that vampire political shit to deal with. Vamps can’t train during the day, and I think most of that Houston team were shape-shifters, so it was easier.”

He groaned and flopped on his back, pouring the rest of the bottle of water on his face. “Who even knew there were such things as fucking shape-shifters? How does that work? If one bites me, will I turn into a duck or a weasel or something?”

“Hell if I know.” Mark hoped at least one of the new Omega Force members was human. Being a feeder for three vampires sucked—pun intended. Aidan fed first thing after sunset; his mate, Krys, fed before Mark went to bed; Britta Eriksen, a woman who’d moved to Penton a few weeks after the big showdown with Matthias, fed before sunrise, as soon as Mark woke in the morning. He’d filled the top of his dresser with bottles of iron supplements purchased on his last supply run to Opelika.

Penton needed fresh blood, literally. “Reckon shape-shifters can feed vampires?” He thought about Max’s “duck or weasel” comment. “What kind of shape-shifters are they?”

“One is a human, a Ranger. The other is . . . Hell, I don’t know what he is except a shifter of some kind. I guess it could be any kind of animal. Mirren just read us the memo up to a certain point and stomped off, cussing.” Max laughed. “Hard to believe that of Mirren, I know.”

They sat in silence a few moments before Max sat up. “You know, I’ve been thinking. What other monsters are living out there that we don’t know about? The more I think about it, the freakier it is.”

Mark shook his head. “Nothing would surprise me anymore.”

If vampires and shape-shifters were real, other myths and legends could be real as well. After all, Glory was telekinetic, and Hannah, the Penton lieutenant who’d been turned vampire at age eleven or twelve, had visions. Premonitions, he guessed they’d be called. “Well, whatever the other guy is, I hope he can feed vampires. After a while, even orgasmic sensations get old.”

“I hear you. I have to feed Cage Fucking Reynolds, and if ever I didn’t want anybody giving me a happy hard-on, it’s that British asshat. My only consolation is that he hates it as much as I do.”

Mark’s laugh sounded bitter, even to himself. “Better you than me.”

“Ah, yeah. Sorry.”

How much did Max know? He was Hannah’s feeder, too, and Aidan did his best to keep Hannah away from the uglier sides of life in Penton—like when a man’s wife got turned vampire by a sociopath and decided she no longer wanted her human husband. Judging by the apology, Max knew plenty.

Great. Everyone probably considered him a pathetic loser. Or maybe they blamed Melissa, which would be appropriate. And he felt like a pathetic loser, which pissed him off even more. Thank God Aidan had the good sense not to ask him to be a feeder for Cage Reynolds. He’d have to just drain his own blood into a glass and let the man drink the old-fashioned way.