Redemption (The Penton Vampire Legacy) (12 page)

“My brother’s a brawler. Likes a good fistfight, he does—don’t worry yourself.”

He watched until Anders’s form bled into the dark outline of the woods behind the house, then turned back to the girl hunkered on the cracked linoleum, her back against the scarred wood cabinets.

“What’s your name, darlin’?”

She blinked, her eyes unfocused. She’d been enthralled so many times that she’d never completely recovered. He’d seen quite a few like her, especially since the pandemic. Too many vampires feeding from too few unvaccinated humans. “I’m Cathy,” she said, frowning as if she had to think about it. “Catherine.”

“Catherine, you don’t have much bloom left, do you? Come to me.” Owen held out a hand, and she let him pull her to her feet. With his index finger, he lifted her chin so she looked into his eyes, and then tilted her head to the right.

“Someone’s been careless with you, my little Catherine,” he said, running his fingers lightly over the mass of scar tissue on her neck. She moaned and slid her arms around his waist.

He turned her head to the left. “Much better here. Doesn’t really matter to you, does it, love?”

He kissed her, and she whimpered. Pain or pleasure. Whatever.

“Shh,” he said. “You’re going to have a special evening. I need to be well fed tonight, and you’re going to do that for me. Doesn’t that please you?”

“Yes,” she whispered, a tear sliding down her cheek.

When he left the house an hour later, heading through the woods to meet Anders behind the mill, he dumped her body in a thick stand of pines. He hadn’t fed so well in months.

P
lain, long-sleeved navy T-shirt under a Kevlar vest. Shoulder holster with Colt .45. Guns weren’t the weapon of choice for vampires, but Aidan and some version of this pistol had been together a hundred years.

Big and heavy, the Colt fit his hand. Annoying but lightweight, the vest protected his vulnerable chest area. Basic lessons from Mirren 101.

Aidan slipped a kukri knife into a custom-made sheath on his right thigh, its curved steel blade coated in silver. He picked up his leather jacket, reconsidered, and threw it back on the chair. Let Owen see that he was armed.

Acoustic Celtic music—or what modern musicians thought of as Celtic music—played on the sound system in his private living room, which took up most of his home’s original basement. He’d just pulled his hair into a ponytail and closed the hatch into his subbasement bedroom suite when the intercom on the wall buzzed.

Grabbing his cell phone and sliding it into his pocket, Aidan ignored the intercom, jerked down the ladder, and climbed into the kitchen, making sure the intricate pattern of slate tile that camouflaged the opening slid back into place.

He opened the door as Lucy leaned on the buzzer again. Annoyed as he was with her, he had to grin at her choice of combat attire. Petite and curvy, she wore a feral smile and a skimpy red leather dress. Red pumps with ridiculous heels. This was the Lucy he’d known when she first joined his scathe. They’d been lovers for a while, but their temperaments clashed. She was impulsive, dramatic, and adventurous, and considered him a tense, moody bastard. Imagine that.

Lucy had become almost domesticated since meeting and bonding with Doc as her mate. Aidan wasn’t sure her reversion to her old type was a good thing.

“Nice shoes. Let me guess—you’re going to seduce my brother and lead him out of town by the balls.” He stood aside to let her in, glad she’d gotten his message to get there early. They needed to talk before meeting Owen.

Aidan had chosen his four lieutenants not only for their loyalty but also for their individual strengths. All four were blood-bound to him, and every other vampire in Penton was bound to one of them. Once a vampire was bound, no betrayal could go undetected.

Mirren was a tactician and a brutal fighter if he needed to be. Will’s tech skills matched his ability as a lateral thinker—if he ran up against a brick wall, he’d find a way around it to get things done. Hannah’s psychic abilities and Native American magic guided them in making decisions. And Lucy—well, until recently, Lucy had been his most well-rounded lieutenant. She had the social skills to troubleshoot any problems in town
and the fighting skills to take on opponents like Owen if necessary—if he could get her to focus.

“Have you missed me?” She wrapped an arm around Aidan’s neck and pulled him close enough to nip his chin with her fangs, then licked the dot of pale blood that welled up. “Yum. You’ve fed tonight. I’m surprised your little Melissa would leave Mark long enough. Or maybe you tasted our new doctor? Will says she’s
hawt
.”

“I have a substitute feeder for a few days.” He led her into the living room, where she settled into one of the brown leather armchairs. Krys was not a subject he planned to discuss with Lucy—ever. Even after she’d mated with Doc, she took way too much interest in Aidan’s love life. Besides, Krys was a prisoner, not a lover. Something he needed to remember.

Lucy crossed her legs and stared at him, waiting. He recognized the stubborn look. She’d shown up when she was told to, but that would be the end of her accommodation. He’d already cut her more slack than anyone else would have gotten, as Mirren was fond of reminding him.

“Oh, you’ve gone all gloomy and brooding.” Lucy narrowed her eyes at him. “Get it over with. Let me have it. What did I do?”

“Damn it, Lucy, you’re being careless.” Aidan shook his head and sat in the armchair facing her. No point in sugarcoating it. “Every time you’re careless with securing one of our safe rooms or flout a rule, you jeopardize all of us.”

He crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. “You left the town hall meeting footage looping through the TV in the sub-suite you got ready for Krys Harris. It makes easing her into this community that much harder. She’s asking about things she shouldn’t know.”

Lucy met his gaze with stubborn silence.

“The Tribunal’s watching what we do here,” he said, getting up to look out the window. “We have one chance to prove that this type of community will work. Otherwise, they’re liable to consider this scathe a threat because of its size. They won’t only shut us down. They’ll make sure no one else can build a place like this again.”

He turned and gave her a sharp look. “You want to go back to the way we lived before, sneaking around on the fringes of society? Especially now, when there’s such a shortage of humans to feed from?”

Lucy stared at him, green eyes burning in her pale face. “Sorry.”

She didn’t look it.

“Look.” Aidan sat back down, his tone softer. “I know how hard it’s been for you since Doc was killed.”

Lucy’s jaw tightened as she stared at him, but finally her gaze broke and she dropped her eyes, hiding her face behind a curtain of shiny hair. She and Doc had been together a decade, and his death had taken her edge just when Aidan needed her to be sharp.

“You don’t know a damned thing, Aidan,” she said, eyes still downcast. “You keep everyone in your life stuffed into neat little boxes. You don’t ever let it get messy by caring too much.”

He glanced at the antique gold band with Abby’s name inscribed inside that he wore around his left wrist. He knew more than she thought. About self-hatred, about blame, about emptiness.

“Lucy, in a lot of ways you’re my best fighter,” he said. Mirren was stronger and more ruthless, but nobody ever underestimated
him. Lucy surprised her opponents with speed and strength and smarts. “I need your head in the game.”

She nodded and looked up. “I chose a new familiar this week. That will help. New guy you brought in from Atlanta last month named Daniel.”

Aidan remembered him. A baby-faced architect in his forties whose taste for alcohol had stripped away his job, family, and his life savings. He’d been too tanked to worry about getting the pandemic vaccine. “How’s he doing?”

“Good. He’s gotten past that depressed stage where he only thinks about the life he’s left behind, and he’s starting to see how good life can be here. I think he can help me do the same thing.” Lucy uncrossed her legs and leaned forward. “I really am sorry. I’ll pull it together. I promise.”

Aidan wanted to believe her, but he’d asked Mirren to keep an eye on her anyway. This was no time to take chances. “OK then. Ready to meet my brother?”

She grinned. “I can’t wait.”

Aidan stepped into the clearing in the woods behind the old mill, getting a close look at his brother for the first time in a couple of months. A light frost had settled on the ground, and the cold wind rattled the pine branches around them.

An unexpected stab of pity struck him. Owen’s skin had the flush of a recent feed but he’d clearly been starving. He was three years older than Aidan was, and once he’d only been twenty pounds lighter. Now it looked more like fifty or sixty pounds. He was even thinner than when they’d met in Atlanta. He’d cut his reddish-blond hair short and spiky, accentuating
prominent cheekbones that made him look gaunt in the shadows cast by the mill parking lot lights behind them.

The brothers met in the middle of the clearing, a cleft chin and pale eyes the only evidence of shared blood.

“You’re looking prosperous and well-fed, little brother.” Owen’s accent was only two months removed from the Dublin slums if Will’s research could be relied on, and it usually could.

“Really, Owen? You want to make small talk?” Aidan’s senses revved. The frigid air played across his skin, and he smelled the rotting layer of fall leaves beneath the frost and the musky odor of small animals trailing through the woods.

“Tsk tsk.” Owen grinned, looking more like the carefree brother Aidan had once idolized. “You weren’t always so impatient, Áodhán. Were you keen on the message I sent last night with your handsome little human? Didn’t think you liked boys, but I guess even old vampires can form new habits.”

“How are we going to resolve this?” Aidan kept his voice controlled, his expression bland. The days when Owen could intimidate him were long past. “What will it take for you to get the hell out of here? There are plenty of rural areas in this country where your scathe can find unvaccinated people to feed from without bothering mine.”

Owen stopped a few inches away. “Still and all, why should I have to round up a herd of stray cattle when you have a ranch here for the taking?”

Aidan slipped a hand to his thigh and fingered the handle of the curved blade. “You can’t feed from my people. They’re all bonded to a scathe member and here by choice. They’re of no use to you.”

“Only while you’re alive. Besides, you’re splitting hairs, Brother.” Owen looked past the clearing toward the mill. “You
think your little lambs are here by choice? It’s all the same, whether you bind them in chains, screw with their minds, or keep them because of some feckin’ form of hero worship. You always were a bloody idiot when it came to humans.”

“My people know they can leave whenever they want.” An image of Krys popped into his mind, but he waved it aside. Plenty of time later to focus on his own hypocrisy.

“Our
people
are vampires.” Owen stuffed his hands in his pockets and took another step toward Aidan. “The humans are dinner. At best, pets. If your asinine little experiment works here, we’ll all have to live like farmers. Some of us love the hunt—it’s what we were made for.”

He was fighting for the good old vampire lifestyle? Not likely. “What are you really after, Owen?” Aidan searched again for that glimpse of the brother he remembered, the one he’d idolized as a boy. “Why after all these years? We’ve hurt each other enough.”

Owen looked at the ground. “You think anything’s ever enough to make up for Abby?” He raised his head, his eyes like pale marbles in his gaunt face, his voice soft. “You might have been married to her, but I was the one who loved her. In the end, it was me.”

Aidan’s fury swelled like a rogue wave and crashed through his body, red-hot and explosive. His voice cut like steel through the night air. “Don’t even say her name after what you did. You set things in motion, and it cost me everything. Every goddamn thing that mattered.”

Why had he ever thought Owen would be open to reason? After all these years, Abby’s death still ran like a gulf between them, and there was no bridging it.