Omega (27 page)

The Thomas house where Randa’s grandparents had lived was the only stable home she’d known—she’d described her childhood and youth as a series of army bases all over the country, interspersed with a year here or six months there with her paternal grandparents, who’d died before she was deployed. Her dad had moved here when he retired, probably because it was near Fort Benning and he could still be around the army even if he wasn’t in it anymore. At least not in any official capacity.

The redbrick ranch house anchored the end of a cul-de-sac in a gently aging middle-class neighborhood full of mature oak trees, broad lawns, and SUVs. Will drove to the end of the circle, rounded it, and retraced their path to park in front of 23 Spruce Street, facing out. In case they needed to leave in a hurry.

Randa got out of the truck and squared her shoulders. Will’s heart broke a little as she assumed a facade she’d gradually relinquished over the past couple of weeks: the tightened jaw, the hardened eyes that challenged whatever they saw, the rigid back that wouldn’t bend in a strong gale. In a matter of seconds, she’d once again become Randa Thomas, the tough-as-nails soldier, and that step backward made Will hate the man
they were preparing to confront for making her feel she couldn’t be strong and still be herself.

Maybe Rick Thomas had more in common with Matthias than he’d thought. But Randa believed her father to be a fair and honorable man at heart, which Matthias wasn’t. And if Rick Thomas sold his daughter short, Will had two knives and a pistol within easy reach.

They didn’t talk as they followed what seemed like an impossibly long set of paving stones to the front door. Randa looked at Will, and he nodded. She rang the doorbell.

Its ring seemed to echo through the house beyond. A dog barked inside the door. A man’s voice calmed it. The fall of footsteps grew louder. The outside light clicked on, making Will blink. The door opened, and for a moment, it was as if the world had stopped.

Richard Thomas, US Army colonel (retired), was a tall man in his late fifties, dark hair turning silver at his temples, a strong jaw, broad shoulders, rigid posture. Will tried to see Randa in him. Maybe the slightly upturned nose, the shape of her mouth, the hazel-green eyes.

Eyes that were wide and staring through a storm door at what must surely seem to him a ghost.

“Dad?” Randa’s voice shook. “It’s me.”

He cleared his throat, and Will saw him blink several times—tears? “What kind of fucking joke is this? It’s not funny.”

Randa looked down, then back up. Her voice was trembling but clear. “I was in Kabul in 2009 on a night patrol when I was caught in a botched ambush. My body wasn’t ever found because, obviously, I survived. I was born on March fifteenth, 1984, in the Fort Benning infirmary. I just learned that my twin brother…” She stumbled, paused, continued. “I just found
out that Rory died of a similar cancer to the type that killed our mother when we were two years old.”

The colonel made no move to open the door. His face was the color of chalk, but his voice held steel. He flicked his gaze at Will only once, but Will would have bet his Robin Hood take that if he made a move, the man would be ready.

“Anybody could’ve found that information,” he said. “What do you want? You have thirty seconds to give me a reason not to call the police.”

A voice came from inside. “Everything OK, Dad?”

Will put a hand on Randa’s back to steady her as the door opened wider and another man stood next to her father. Younger, taller, more muscular, tanner. A medium-sized dog—a boxer, Will thought—began whimpering and scratching at the door. The dog might do more than anything to convince them this was really Randa. The younger man stepped closer to the storm door. “Holy shit. Ran?”

Randa swallowed so hard Will could feel it in his palm as he rubbed small circles on her back. “Hi, Robbie.” She took a deep breath. “Dad, it’s really me. I’m sorry to spring this on you, but what can I say to convince you this isn’t a scam?”

The colonel seemed incapable of speech, so Robbie answered. “What did I give you for your sixth birthday?”

Randa smiled. “A turtle you’d named Colonel Thomas. I took it to show-and-tell in Miss Michaels’s first-grade class.”

“My God, Randa.” That finally broke through the armor. The colonel fumbled with the lock on the storm door, threw it open, and wrapped his arms around his daughter. He won points with Will by not trying to stop his tears, or hide them.

Will felt like an intruder or a voyeur, but he wasn’t going to do the polite thing and sit in the truck while the Thomas
family had its reunion. He wasn’t letting Randa out of his sight. So he stood and waited.

Finally, Randa turned and motioned him inside. “Dad, Robbie, this is my friend Will—William Hendrix.” They’d agreed to play it safe on the last names as long as possible, and since Will had been a Jimi Hendrix fan back in his human days, this had been one of his frequent aliases.

The colonel studied Will an uncomfortably long time before finally reaching out a hand to shake. “Thank you for bringing my daughter home, Mr. Hendrix. I would ask you to stay, but Randa needs to be with her family. You understand we have a lot of catching up to do.”

Will gave him the most guileless smile in his repertoire—the just-an-innocent-guy, aw-shucks smile. The colonel didn’t smile back. “Sorry, sir, but Randa asked me to come with her and I need to stay.”

“Ran, are you in some kind of trouble?” Robbie was giving Will the evil eye now.
Terrific
. The dog was jumping so high he could almost lick Randa on her chin.

“Will needs to be here,” she said. “He can help me explain where I’ve been and what happened to me. And don’t call anyone else yet. The conversation we’re about to have is need-to-know only, and Robbie, I hate to ask you this, but I need to talk to Dad alone.”

Randa the soldier had reappeared, and Will was glad to see her. He’d been squelching a fear—so deeply he hadn’t put it into words or coherent thought—that she might forget why they were there if she got overwhelmed by family and the tantalizing prospect of resuming a seminormal life. Once again, he’d underestimated her.

Robbie wasn’t happy. “Ran, whatever’s wrong, I can help.”

She pulled him into a hug, and Will had a flash of insight into the Thomas family dynamic. She’d been the only girl in a family of dominant men who weren’t challenging her to compete with them, as she’d grown up thinking. They’d half smothered her trying to protect her. She might resent them for it, but Will certainly couldn’t hate them for it.

After some discussion, Robbie finally agreed to go but got Randa’s cell number.

Once he was gone, the colonel closed the door and locked it behind him. He pointed them toward the dining room table, where he and Robbie appeared to have been playing cards. Two beer bottles sat opened and half-emptied.

The living room they’d passed through spoke of comfortable middle-class roots. Early American furniture, lots of oak, oval braided rugs on shiny wooden floors. The eat-in kitchen wasn’t modern, but it was comfortable.

Will gathered the cards and stacked them on the edge of the table, and they all took chairs. The house was tense, quiet, awkward.

“I’m sorry to do this, but do you have your identification? Both of you?” The colonel didn’t make assumptions or accept things at face value, and Will respected that. Those were traits that would come in handy should he decide to help them.

Will pulled out his wallet and his beautifully faked Alabama driver’s license for William Hendrix and handed it to the colonel. It showed the address of what was in reality an empty lot in Montgomery.

“I don’t have a current license anymore, but I have a few things.” Randa had anticipated her father asking for proof of identity, and she pulled out the items she’d had with her when
she managed to get herself smuggled out of Afghanistan. Military ID, dog tags, her old Georgia driver’s license, and a scarf that had belonged to her mother. Her dad would recognize it, she had said, and she’d been right. He took it from her and fingered the blue wool.

“Rory had one just like it, except it was tan,” Randa said softly. “We used to fight over who got to keep the blue one.”

The colonel nodded, and when he looked up, his expression said he believed her. His face softened when he looked at her, and Will knew that Rick Thomas loved his daughter. He might not have known how to raise her, but he loved her. That would help.

“Where have you been? I don’t know where else to start. Why didn’t you tell us you were alive?”

Randa sighed and looked at Will, who nodded his encouragement.

“I wasn’t killed in that ambush.” Randa’s voice rang like a small stone in a deep well as the quiet, empty house seemed to swell around them. “I was abducted. Taken by a man, or what I thought was a man.”

“Why weren’t there hostage negotiations? Why didn’t your CO know about this? I’ll have someone’s job…” Rick pushed his chair back, obviously ready to wage war against whatever military screwup accidentally reported soldiers dead.

“Dad, sit down. It’s not what you think. The person who abducted me wasn’t human. He was…He was a vampire.”

The colonel’s face registered surprise, but quickly morphed to anger. “What kind of joke is this? How dare you come in here, rip our hearts open again when we just buried your twin brother, for God’s sake, and pull some kind of sick, freakish…” He turned furious eyes to Will. “You’re behind this, aren’t you? You have smart-ass written all over your face.”

And Will thought he’d left his inner smart-ass at home.

He grinned at the colonel, making no attempts to hide the delicate, curved fangs that extended about an eighth of an inch below the rest of his upper teeth. The Penton vampires could mainstream well enough to pass for human, but it was by choice. Will could vamp it up as well as the next guy.

Rick’s face hardened. “So you have fake fangs. You think I don’t see all kinds of shit with these kids who think they want to be soldiers? Or who do things like have fake fangs implanted to pretend they’re vampires? All that proves to me is that you’re a sick freak.”

Man, what a sweetheart
.

“Dad, it’s true. I wouldn’t have believed it either. But that’s who attacked me in the alley in Kabul. He was a local. He dragged me into a small house, and he turned me into one of them. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t come home because I was afraid I’d hurt you accidentally. I thought it was kinder to let you think I’d died.”

Randa stood and walked to her father. “I want you to look at my eyes. They change color when I’m stressed or…or other things. They should look silvery because I was so nervous about coming here tonight.”

She sat next to him, and after a hard glare at Will, Rick turned to look in his daughter’s eyes. Her face wasn’t visible from Will’s angle, but the colonel saw something he didn’t like. He shoved himself away from the table with enough force that Randa was startled. Her chair toppled, dumping her on the floor, where she sat blinking up at her dad. He stood over her with clenched fists and frightened eyes.

Will was on his feet without thinking, moving to stand next to Randa. He reached down and helped her to her feet,
then stepped within biting distance of the colonel. “Sir, it took a lot of courage for your daughter to come here tonight. I can tell you love her, but you need to accept what she’s telling you. She needs your help—
we
need your help. But only if you can accept what she is.”

“Or what?” Rick met Will’s gaze, then looked down.

“Yeah, my eyes get all funny too. It also happens when we’re angry.”
And hungry or sexually aroused
, but he wouldn’t add that. “Now sit down and let us tell you a few things about vampires. Nobody’s threatening you, but we’re not here to
be
threatened, either.”

The colonel sat hard, took a sip of his beer, looked at the bottle, and then drained it. Will went back to his chair and shoved Robbie’s unfinished beer across the table to him. Randa set her chair upright and gave Will what he hoped was a thank-you look and not an I’m-going-to-chew-you-a-new-one look. He wasn’t sure.

“Randa.” The colonel reached out a hand, and Randa placed hers in it. His fingers curled around hers. “Is this the God’s honest truth? You swear it?”

She nodded. “I swear on Rory’s memory.”

“Then explain it to me.”

W
ell, at least nobody had been shot yet. No blood. No broken bones. Randa hadn’t been forced to put on a show of feeding from Will—or worse, feeding from her father. She’d go sunbathing before that happened.

But now, here they sat, and he was waiting for an explanation. “Vampires are real, but they—we—work hard to keep our identities secret.”

“Why?”

She’d forgotten her father’s annoying habits of treating conversations like interrogations. But this might be easier if he asked questions and she answered them. “Will can tell me if I’m wrong because he’s been turned a lot longer than me, but I think the feeling is that humans would feel threatened and try to kill us. That we’d end up in a war. That it would stir up more problems than it would be worth.”