Allegiance (The Penton Vampire Legacy) (9 page)

She turned back to him, the flash of anger gone now, her features relaxed into the face he’d loved, only maybe a sadder version. “Guess I’ll go back to Mirren’s and see if there’s any update on Rob. Aidan was going to call the colonel and break the news to him.”

“Send word if you hear anything.” Suddenly, Mark’s games seemed childish to him. Their friend lay in the clinic morgue, and because of Penton’s fucked-up politics, they probably wouldn’t even be able to give him a proper funeral with military honors and folded American flags. “It should have been me, not him. He deserved better.”

“I’m sorry about Robbie. But I’m glad it wasn’t you.” Melissa paused at the door and looked back. “And for the record, I’m not with Cage.”

  
CHAPTER 8
  

R
obin Ashton couldn’t remember when she’d had quite as much fun as in her first few hours in Penton. Who’d guess a bunch of old vampire dudes in Alabama could prove so entertaining?

Mirren Kincaid was a big, ancient, grumpy—and did she mention big?—piece of work. She couldn’t wait to yank his dick a little more. Maybe a lot more.

Knocking alpha males off their pedestals made for delicious fun. It was tiring, though, especially after a six-hour flight . . . without an airplane. Thankfully, Nik had arrived early and stashed some clothes for her in the woods. Mirren really would have freaked out if she’d emerged from the piney backwoods naked. She had the distinct impression that in the dictionary of life, Mirren Kincaid’s photo would not illustrate the entry for “enlightened male.”

Curling up in the backseat of Nik’s SUV, Robin left Nik and Cage to get acquainted while she pretended to nap. Through her shuttered eyelids, she looked out the window at the few details she could see of Penton, illuminated either by moonlight or from one of the infrequent bursts of working streetlights. She saw lots of rubble, charred support beams, skeletons of buildings with bits of wood and masonry stretching into the dark sky like clutching fingers.

That Matthias guy had done a number on Penton; there wasn’t much left. It hadn’t occurred to her that she wouldn’t be able to buy clothes here. Until she could get to a shopping center, maybe she could borrow something from the little vampire girl Hannah, whose psychic abilities Cage had been discussing with Nik when they left the construction site.

And if she ever ran into him, she’d string up the nutjob who’d thought it appropriate to turn a little girl into a vampire, psychic skills notwithstanding. She wouldn’t just string him up; she’d hang him by his nuts from a tall building and leave him to dangle in a stiff breeze until something fell off. Even bloodsuckers should have some standards.

She’d already known about Hannah, of course. The colonel had given both Nik and her dossiers on the major players in Penton. Nik had been cautiously excited—only Nik could be both cautious and excited at the same time—about meeting another person with psychic powers, even a young vampire girl.

Thanks to the dossiers, Robin also knew that humans and vampires alike had been brought here by Aidan Murphy, who’d begun buying up the property in this little half-horse abandoned mill town even before the pandemic vaccine had made the blood of vaccinated humans deadly to him and his followers. Aidan had amassed too many acolytes, their reports said, giving the Vampire Tribunal—a bunch of predatory old farts, from the sound of it—an excuse to hunt him down. There was also some kind of personal vendetta involving one of Aidan’s senior people and the guy’s father, who happened to be on the Tribunal. Will Ludlam, son of Matthias the Lunatic.

Messy stuff. Then again, families usually were. She knew that all too well.

On paper, Aidan Murphy looked like a saint, rehabbing addicts and forming a little commune out in the wilderness—not so different from what her hippie parents had done back in Texas. Those would be the tie-dye-wearing parents who thought it would be funny to name their two eagle-shifter kids Robin and Wren.

In the flesh, though, Aidan Murphy had been inscrutable. Frosty-eyed and silent, that one. Kind of the way she’d expected all the fangaroos to be. She’d been pleasantly surprised to find Mirren lived up to his grizzly-bear rep. But Robin had the distinct impression, from the way those intense blue eyes followed her movements, that not much escaped Aidan Murphy’s notice. He might be a saint, or he might be dangerous. She’d withhold judgment. The colonel liked him, and she liked the colonel. For now, that was enough.

Which brought her back to the only other vamp she’d met so far. Cage Reynolds was intriguing; his dossier had hinted at broad military experience but mostly off-the-grid stuff, which probably meant he’d been fangs for hire. His human military service, back in World War II, was sealed so tightly within the archives of the British Army, even the colonel’s connections hadn’t been able to get at it. What kind of guy had sealed records seven decades after his supposed death?

He was magnetic, for sure. Hell, all the vamps she’d seen so far were fuckworthy, even the grizzly. Their physical beauty probably helped them lure unsuspecting humans into offering up veins. Would her blood taste different from that of a non-shifter? She’d like to experience feeding a vampire at least once. Of course, she might feel differently after she’d actually seen the fangs; so far, they’d all proven skilled at hiding them.

Still, Cage managed to come across as calm and competent without being arrogant. Maybe his training as a psy-fucking-chiatrist helped. He probably overanalyzed everything. He’d stood back and smiled as she sparred with Mirren, and he definitely gave off a sexual vibe when she talked to him. She could tell when a guy wanted her, and he wanted her whether he knew it yet or not. Cage was cool like Aidan; she couldn’t imagine him getting over-the-top excited about anything. Yet his face revealed more emotion than that of his boss, or scathe master, or whatever the vamps called their alpha.

Yep, Cage Reynolds had a certain
je ne sais quoi
, as her latte-drinking friends back in New Orleans would say.

Make that former friends. Or, rather, current friends living in her former city. She’d been injured during her first and only Omega Force mission when a psychotic wolf-shifter threw her out a third-floor window down in Galveston, Texas. The off-kilter fall had broken her wing.

Which meant she’d been forced to seek out her family’s healer.

Which meant he’d ratted her out to her family and they’d managed to discover where she lived.

Which meant she had to literally fly the coop again.

When the colonel asked who’d be willing to transfer to the Penton team, she’d volunteered in a wingbeat—even if it meant working with blood-sucking freaks.

Still, Cage Reynolds was an intriguing freak.

In the front seat, he and Nik had been doing that odd, circular bonding dance that straight men did. Guys never said what they thought—human guys, shifter guys, and, apparently, fanged guys. They’d never say,
Hey, you’re cool. I like you. Let’s hang out
. Or
Hey, you suck ditch-water. Get out of my face or I’ll rip your balls off
.

No, they’d do exactly as Nik and Cage were doing, making small talk to see what they could read into the other’s answers. Jumping to conclusions. Never saying what they meant.

“How’d you end up in Penton?” Nik asked, which Robin translated as “Where are your loyalties and what are you looking for?”

“It started as a way to scout out Aidan’s idea of a human-vampire community, to see if we could replicate it in the UK,” Cage said, establishing himself as a team player. Then he parried back a question to Nik: “Why would you volunteer to get mixed up in this project?”

Nik hesitated at this one, and Robin knew he was grappling with how honest he should be. His answer would set the tone for this friendship—and whether he’d admit it or not, Nik needed friends who wouldn’t judge him or try to use his gift. Robin’s gut told her Cage could be one of those kinds of friends, so it was her duty to nudge Nik along.

“He can’t read stuff off us,” she said, catching Nik’s frown in the rearview mirror as she sat up and leaned between the front seats. “If he touches a person, he—”

“Robin, zip it,” Nik snapped. “You have the brain-to-mouth filter of a parrot.”

“Parrots are highly intelligent birds.” She reached up and squeezed his shoulder. He was a good guy, her Nik. Too bad they didn’t have more sexual chemistry—but then again, she’d learned that lovers were a hell of a lot easier to find than friends, and Nik was her best friend.

She patted his shoulder. “What I was saying before I was interrupted is that Nik can do the same thing with people that he does with stuff like the bricks back there. He can touch somebody and get strong flashes of their history—like bad or embarrassing things. The shit people try to repress. And he doesn’t have control over it; he can’t decide who he can and can’t pull stuff from.”

“That would be . . . horrid,” Cage said, frowning. “What about with shifters and vampires?”

“He can only read shifters if we’re really upset or emotional, or have completely let our guard down and let him in.” Robin thumped Nik on the ear when he shot her another glare over his shoulder.

“What about vampires, Niko?” Robin asked. She thought Nik was going to break his jaw one of these days from grinding those pretty white teeth together.

“How the hell would I know?”

“Exactly.”

She might as well annoy Cage too. Robin pulled the ponytail he’d tied his hair into, then grabbed the leather cord and jerked it off. Unbound, his hair fell to his shoulders and was the color of her lightest feathers when she shifted into her golden eagle form. Most of her feathers were dark reddish-brown, the color of her hair, but her wings had tips of golden brown like Cage’s mane, which was soft and fine as silk, but thick, with just a touch of curl.

He shifted around to face her. “Have a hair fetish, do you, little bird?”

“Ooh, flirty.” And sexy as hell. Maybe this one was more dangerous than Aidan Murphy, at least for her. “So, even in this light, I can tell your eyes have gone kind of silvery green. That means you’re pissed off at me?”

Anger and hunger, the Vampires 101 dossiers had said. That’s what would cause their eyes to lighten. “Or do you need a blood transfusion?”

Cage shifted to look at her more closely, and she had a foreign urge to squirm under his examination. His eyes had lightened even more, and she couldn’t decide if it made her want to fuck him or fly away.

“Guess it’s not too soon to start your lessons in the ways of the vampire,” he said, his deep voice taking on a silky quality that caused her heart to do a stutter step. “Three things will cause a vampire’s irises to lighten.”

Well, she knew two. “Yeah, yeah, anger and hunger. What’s the third one?”

He reached back and stroked a finger along her jawline. “Arousal, little bird.” Then he turned back around and laughed. “You’ll have to decide which one applies to the present situation.”

She didn’t hear Nik laughing, but his shoulders were moving up and down suspiciously, so she thumped him on the ear again for good measure. “Well, never mind about me; back to Nik. Let him touch you—unless you have secrets you want to keep.”

Cage swept his fingers through that silky hair, which gave him a kind of reckless-rogue look. Then he held his arm out in front of Nik. “There’s some ugly shit hiding inside this skin, but go for it.”

“Is ‘go for it’ secret vampire code for ‘get that predatory eagle-girl away from me’?” Nik glanced back at her with a look that said they’d be discussing all of this later. Good. He was awfully fun to fight with.

“Oh no, I can handle the eagle girl.” Cage, on the other hand, didn’t look at her at all, and she considered that comment a challenge. “I was offering to let you touch me—on a purely professional basis, of course—to see if you can read anything off vampires. Oh, and take the next left, third house on the right.”

Nik brought the SUV to a stop in front of a long, narrow building that reminded Robin of the modified shotgun houses back in New Orleans, especially the new rows of buildings erected after Hurricane Katrina. But this was bigger, and obviously a new construction, identical to a half-dozen other houses scattered along the block, all painted white. Bo-ring. At least in New Orleans the houses were all painted different colors, from pastel to garish.

Nik hadn’t moved, so she squeezed his shoulder again, gently this time. “Go ahead and try. It’s just us here, and you need to know what to expect before you meet more fangaroos.”

Cage twisted in his seat, and she wished the light were better out here so she could see his expression. “Fangaroos?” He laughed, which transformed his features from hard planes to drool-worthy, and—oh, holy pelicans—she saw fangs. She’d known he had them, of course, but it had been theoretical up to this point.

“How sharp are those things?” She leaned over the back of the seats to get a better look and stretched a hand toward Cage’s face. He caught her wrist in his grasp, forcing it toward his mouth slowly as she tried to pull it away, his gaze fixing her like a butterfly on a pinboard.