Allegiance (The Penton Vampire Legacy) (5 page)

Mark sighed. This line of thought was depressing. He climbed to his feet and set the half-empty water bottle aside. “Let’s finish off that wall. You want top of the ladder or bottom?”

“Better give me bottom.” Max looked up at the wall, which had grown to about ten feet in height; Mirren wanted twelve. “I have longer arms to hand stuff up.”

“Yeah, make the shorter guy do the dangerous work.” Mark headed around the wall and positioned the ladder and makeshift scaffolding at the corner. Last night they’d checked all the places where the brick veneer was anchored to the building’s frame, so it should be quick work to finish off the wall.

He might even have time for a shower before Aidan got up and wanted his dinner, so to speak.

Rob’s voice sounded from down the hill. “I think it’s a rule for short guys to take the worst jobs.” He crested the rise and walked across the leveled-off construction site, waving the clipboard with one hand and holding a six-pack of Coors and a white paper bag in the other. “I got Glory’s interpretation of the specs. We can go over them tonight—we’ll need more supplies. Let’s get that wall finished and help Max drink his beer and eat a sandwich before Mirren gets up and bitches about what all we did wrong.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Mark climbed to the top of the extension ladder while Rob and Max piled bricks on a pallet and raised them via a pulley system—something Will had rigged up when constructing the Chow House and the living spaces. Digging a trowel into the concrete mix, Mark plopped a pile on the top layer of the wall, spread it evenly, and wedged a brick into place.

The work was hot and slow, but mindlessly relaxing. By the time they reached the midpoint of the wall, he found he could release that knot of gnawing pain in his chest that had resulted from too much thought about Melissa and too much talk about Cage.

Finally, Mark placed the next-to-last brick in place. One more in the middle section, and he’d have to move the ladder to do the south end. “Wait, I think something’s gotten mixed in the concrete; this one’s not squaring up.” Something about the brick hadn’t set right. He looked down at Max and Rob. “Did you notice any irregularities in the last bunch of bricks we picked up?”

Rob shook his head. “We checked them when they came in.”

“Pull that one off,” Max said, “and I’ll hand you one from the new shipment stacked on the other side.” He disappeared around the corner.

Mark removed the brick and set it back on the scaffolding. “Pull the platform back down, and see if you can tell what’s wrong with that one. If one’s bad, there’s probably more.”

“Got it.” Rob grasped the rope and untied it from its mooring, lowering the scaffolding platform.

A wave of dizziness almost made Mark lose his balance. Too much heat, physical work, and being up on the ladder. Everything swayed.

“Move! You gotta move! It’s coming down!” Max’s voice seemed to come from far away, and Mark had only a fleeting moment to think
the whole fucking wall is collapsing
before he was thrown off the ladder, watching his world literally turn upside down before going black.

  
CHAPTER 4
  

S
omething wasn’t right. Just past dusk, the air around Penton should smell of warm pine clinging to the last rays of sunlight, nocturnal animals creeping from beneath rocks and brush, pungent night-blooming plants opening their petals to welcome the cooling air.

Mirren Kincaid paused outside the communal house he shared with his mate, Glory, and Melissa Calvert. The air was soaked with unease, as if something bad were about to happen. Everyone should have been celebrating, after the news spread that Matthias Ludlam would finally be going to meet his maker. Yet the streets lay quiet and deserted.

Whatever had happened, he needed to deal with it instead of babysitting the new Omega team members due to arrive within the hour. Mirren had a bad feeling about them, too. The colonel had been cagey about Ashton and Dimitrou, only saying that Mirren and Aidan should keep an open mind and let themselves be pleasantly surprised.

Mirren hated fucking surprises. In his experience, they were rarely pleasant.

He had a feeling what he scented in the night air wouldn’t yield any pleasant surprises, either. Mortar. Dust. Blood. Nothing pleasant about it.

“Something’s wrong at the job site.” Aidan Murphy took two steps at a time as he descended the staircase of the communal house across the street. Krys trailed behind him, pulling the large rolling suitcase that had served as her medical kit while they’d been stuck in the underground bunker Omega during the siege.

She’d been a human doctor before being turned earlier this year; unfortunately, her skills had been needed to treat a lot of vampires, too, including Aidan.

Aidan nodded toward Mirren’s old Bronco. “Better take that. All I got from Mark’s thought patterns was that something went down at the construction site. Mostly, it’s a muddle. There’s blood scent on the air, though.”

“That there is.” Mirren looked at the sky and wouldn’t have been surprised to see a scroll roll back and the Four Horsemen come riding through, spreading pestilence and death before them like floodwaters.

Penton couldn’t get a fucking break—and they were supposed to be the good guys. Though Mirren hadn’t grown used to thinking of himself as a good guy; he’d spent too many years wallowing in self-recrimination and guilt. He’d reached peace with his past, though. Glory had made him understand that his history could only haunt him if he let it.

But damn, Penton needed a stretch of heaven, not more apocalypse.

They all climbed in the Bronco, and Mirren drove up Cotton Street past the half-burned husk of the old textile mill. Mark’s blood bond to Aidan had given them a heads-up to disaster before, reinforcing their policy of bonding all residents to one of the master vampires. It was damned helpful. “You got a zing from Mark, but what about Rob and Max the Asshole? Aren’t they with him?”

“They’re both bonded to Will, and he’s out of range, so I don’t know.” Aidan ran his hands through his hair—an old habit that didn’t work quite as well since he’d cut it shorter, to better fit in with the puffed-up bureaucrats on the Vampire Tribunal. Meg Lindstrom, the US vampire rep, planned to step down and had nominated Aidan to take her place.

Aidan didn’t want the job, but as usual, he was putting his overdeveloped sense of responsibility before his desires. In nine days, it would be official—as long as the Penton supporters on the Tribunal continued to outnumber the haters. Aidan thought he could help the vampire population weather the pandemic vaccine that had made human blood poisonous to them. He had a lot of ideas; a Tribunal seat would give him the influence he needed to put them into action.

“Think this has anything to do with the vote coming up?” Mirren asked. “I mean, that old Austrian sonofabitch Frank Greisser is not going to just sit back and welcome you onto the Tribunal without doing something to hurt you or keep you in Penton or skew the vote.” Or all of the above.

“We definitely can’t rule it out.” Aidan stared out the window at the burned ruins that constituted pretty much all that remained of downtown Penton. “Whether it’s the Tribunal or just buzzard’s luck, we need to find out what’s wrong and do damage control so people don’t freak out. Then we’ve gotta speed up the rebuilding efforts, even if it means hiring human crews. We need places for people to live and work before this town can really recover.”

The idea of bringing in humans made Mirren’s muscles twitch, but Aidan was right. They’d been licking their wounds for three months. It was past time to get Penton on track. No reason Mark couldn’t supervise human crews, especially with the Rangers helping.

He pulled the Bronco in front of the last community house before the turn to the job site and leaned on his horn. Might as well have a little more muscle. Plus, their resident psychiatrist probably knew all kinds of damage-control mind games.

“Good idea.” Aidan motioned to Cage, who had stepped into the doorway of the house he’d moved into with Hannah and Max—and now, Fen Patrick. “Might be nothing, or it might be another Penton clusterfuck. In which case we’ll need him.”

Before Cage cleared the porch, Fen followed him out. Mirren’s first instinct last night had been to lock the guy in their silver-lined room back in the old Omega underground facility. He’d suggested it, in fact, and had even gone to retrieve the key. Glory had guilt-tripped him until he reluctantly agreed to have Cage babysit the guy instead.

But some long-lost buddy, suddenly turned vampire, shows up in town at the same time Cage happens to be returning? Rotten fish weren’t the only thing that smelled like shit.

Cage turned and spoke to Fen, who shrugged his shoulders, flashed his smarmy grin, and went back inside. Mirren got the sense that Cage didn’t trust the man, either, which made Mirren think more of the shrink, even if he was an Englishman. Aidan wanted Fen under surveillance, though, which was easier to do if they let him stay in town, under their noses.

“What’s up?” Cage slid into the backseat and gave Krys a hug. “The air smells like open house at the blood bank.”

Aidan filled him in on what he knew. “It might not be serious, but any bad news at this point can shake people’s confidence. Everyone’s nervous.”

“I think people are wondering if we should’ve come back and tried to rebuild this soon,” Krys said. “If we lose any more feeders or familiars, we’ll have to start recruiting again. We probably shouldn’t have let Shawn and Britta come in, although I like both of them. And now, Cage is back, and Fen.”

Cage nodded. “Yeah, two more sets of fangs to feed. Pity I couldn’t have brought a feeder or two with me from London, but Edward wouldn’t allow it. Things are worse there than here. Who are Shawn and Britta?”

Mirren hadn’t formed an opinion on the Penton scathe’s two newest members. They’d come together, both newish vampires who’d tracked Aidan down at the Atlanta community clinic where he volunteered and scouted for fams.

“Both of them moved to Atlanta from Mobile, thinking it would be easier to find feeders there, but it wasn’t,” Aidan said. “They seem okay. Still too early to tell.”

The two new women were under surveillance, too, although they’d relaxed it in the last week or two. There wasn’t enough manpower to watch everybody.

As badly as he wanted Penton to be the way it had been before the siege, Mirren had wondered if they should even try to rebuild before the whole pandemic vaccine crisis was resolved. No one trusted the Tribunal members to keep the vampire population calm and at peace in exchange for the humans setting up the blood bank and keeping their mouths shut.

Colonel Rick Thomas didn’t trust the Tribunal members who weren’t Penton allies, either, or he wouldn’t have parked this many of his Ranger operatives in town. Rob and Max, and the two new guys due in tonight, were now full-time Pentonites, whether they liked it or not.

Aidan filled Cage in on the rebuilding status, and Mirren had to admit he was glad to have the man back in Penton—as long as he kept his psychoanalysis bullshit to himself. They needed every experienced fighter they could get, and Cage had a cool head under pressure. They might not be at war since they’d defeated Matthias and forced the Tribunal bullies to back down by bringing in the Rangers, but he wouldn’t exactly call it peacetime, either.

“Aw, fuck.” Mirren spotted the construction site at the top of the hill and sped up. The work site was illuminated by three floodlights, and a heap of brick-filled rubble was visible even from a distance. “Looks like the whole east wall came down. They’d almost finished bricking that one.”

He slammed the truck to a halt, slinging white nuggets of loose gravel across the parking lot. Aidan, Krys, and Cage jumped out before he had the key out of the ignition.

Mirren popped the hatch to retrieve Krys’s medical kit, stopping to study the site and the woods behind it. Max stood upright and looked uninjured, judging by the way he waved his arms around as he talked to Aidan. Fucking drama queen. Mark sat off to one side with his head propped on his bent knees.

Pausing beside the Bronco, Mirren scanned the wooded area behind the job site, looking for anything out of place. It had become habit to suspect Matthias of being behind anything bad that happened here, but Penton had other enemies on the Tribunal—not the least of whom was Director Frank Greisser. He wanted both Aidan and Mirren dead. They’d challenged his ability to lead and had “fomented rebellion” by advocating a partnership with bonded humans as a way to survive the pandemic crisis. After Aidan’s power play of bringing human military personnel into vampire affairs, Greisser had been forced to throw Matthias to the wolves and pretend an alliance with the Penton scathe. But things weren’t over. Mirren could feel it.

He sensed no unbonded vampires lurking around, however, so he walked up to the site where Aidan, Krys, and Cage knelt next to the pile of collapsed brick.

Aw, fuck.

From the parking lot, the heap of bricks had camouflaged the body lying underneath. Rob Thomas looked like he’d been at ground zero when the wall collapsed, and Mirren could tell by one look at the guy that he was dead or dying. That much weight didn’t land on your head without breaking something unfixable.

He skirted around where Krys knelt next to Rob, trying to talk to him, and approached Max and Mark. “Mark, you okay?”

“Just had the wind knocked out of me. Give me a minute and I’m good.” His blond hair was caked with blood around his right temple, but it had already dried. “Rob’s in bad shape, though.”

“Yeah, he is. Start talking, Max.”

Max looked back to where Cage and Aidan were trying to talk to Rob while Krys ripped away clothing to assess the wounds. If Mirren knew he was dying, Krys knew it, too. He guessed that as a doctor she had to at least go through the motions.

Max and Rob had been best buddies since college and throughout their Army tours, so he would cut the guy some slack—as long as he didn’t revert to smartassery. “What happened?”

“Hell, I don’t know.” Max stuck shaky hands in his pockets. “Mark was having trouble with one of the last bricks, so I went over to get a new one off the stack that came in yesterday. When I turned around, the whole wall was coming down on them.” He looked down, but not before Mirren saw tears.

Aw, fuck me.
He was not the Mother Teresa of vampirehood, by a long shot. He didn’t know what to say to a guy watching his best friend die. “Focus,” he said. “The anchors holding the wall to the frame must have come loose.”

As soon as he said the words, Mirren realized how ridiculous that scenario was. One anchor could come loose. Two? Not outside the realm of possibility, although unlikely. But not all of them. “You sure all the anchors on the construction plans got put in? No shortcuts?”

“No way.” Max took a deep breath and turned back to Mirren. “We even checked them before we left the site last night, Rob and me both, ’cause we knew we’d be adding that last section today. They were solid. No way fifteen anchors came loose.” He looked around again. Aidan and Cage were talking to Krys, who held her hands to her face. Max’s voice softened to a whisper. “No fucking way.”

Which meant sabotage—and Mirren didn’t have a clue who the saboteur might be, although his first thought went to Fen Patrick. Everyone else, even Britta and Shawn, had gone through one of Will’s background checks. They’d all turned up clean. He should’ve locked Fen up himself. Although he couldn’t imagine Cage would have left the newcomer unguarded long enough to be able to come to the job site and screw with the anchors. How could Fen even have known about the construction project when Cage didn’t know himself?