Redemption (The Penton Vampire Legacy) (16 page)

“Oh yeah, those green pigs are
so
dead.”

Aidan raised his eyebrows at Will, who lounged in one of the clinic office chairs with his iPad. The man loved his toys.

“What are you doing? Who has pigs?” For Aidan, computers were business tools for making spreadsheets and cruising investment sites, but Will was forever coming up with something new to play with.

“Angry Birds.” Will slid his finger across the screen. “Your birds shoot slingshots at green pigs and—”

“Shut it.” Mirren stretched a long arm from his spot on the sofa and snatched the tablet, punching the off button.

Will trained golden-brown eyes on him. They crinkled at the corners as he grinned.

“Heard you got taken down by an itty-bitty girl, big man, and you look like something a dog vomited. Had to have the sexy new doctor pick buckshot out of your ass?”

Aidan watched them from behind the desk, his eyes following the arc as Mirren pelted one of Doc’s old paperweights at Will’s head with enough force to cause a concussion in the average person.

“I am late.” Hannah stood in the doorway, holding the glass paperweight she’d caught midflight. With her fuzzy pink sweater and striped hoodie, she looked as if she should be headed to a playground, not a vampire war council at midnight.

Hannah had been with Aidan for over a century—longer than any of the others had. He’d found her with a scathe of bloodthirsty vamps outside a Muscogee Creek village just south of here in the 1830s. The small scathe had slaughtered her village, but turned Hannah and her medicine man father in order to use their skills. Her father had died, but Hannah had survived. Aidan had killed her vampire maker on principle—for turning a child—and had taken her with him. Still pissed him off.

She closed the door behind her, dragging a chair to sit next to Will. With Aidan at the desk, it put them in a rough circle.

“What can you tell us about Lucy?” Aidan studied Hannah’s face, trapped forever in childhood but so often turned solemn with the burden of her second sight.

She closed her eyes, frowning in concentration, and then looked up in surprise. “Mirren’s sick.” She swiveled to face him. “You’re hiding it.”

Aidan grimaced. “Damn it. I knew something was wrong. Spill.”

Mirren glared at Hannah but couldn’t sustain it against the child’s concerned scrutiny, so he glared at Aidan instead. “Couple of dizzy spells. Nothing major.”

“And you couldn’t feed.” Hannah’s black eyes were steady.

“Could too,” Mirren grumbled. “Just didn’t keep it down.”

Will shed his languor and sat forward in his chair, shoulders tense.

Aidan swore. Damned idiot. Mirren was the color of yesterday’s snow, and his pupils looked like saucers. “No point in talking to you, so I’ll ask Hannah.” He shifted his gaze to the girl. “How bad?”

She slid off the chair and walked to Mirren, who watched her approach with a look of alarm. Aidan and Will exchanged amused looks. Hannah’s psychic abilities made them all uncomfortable sometimes, but she scared the hell out of Mirren, and he’d avoid her when he could. Aidan figured the big guy was afraid that Hannah could see into his head and know everything he’d done as the Tribunal’s infamous Slayer. Even Aidan didn’t know that full story, and Mirren wouldn’t talk about it.

She pressed a small palm against the center of Mirren’s broad chest and closed her eyes. The silence in the room was heavy.

“You’ll be really sick if we don’t help you. We can take some of your blood out and people will give you more to put back in. Krys can help because you might wake during daysleep.” She nodded and almost skipped back to her armchair, her job done. “Then you’ll be well.”

The muscles of Mirren’s jaw tightened. “Shite. I’ll be damned if I—”

“Stuff it.” Aidan stared him down and turned to Will. “Set up a little donor party in the sub-suite across from Krys about three. That gives us time before dawn. Make sure both of Mirren’s fams are there till he’s down for the day, and a couple of other donors are on standby.

“And you”—he pointed at Mirren—“shut the bloody hell up and be there by three.”

Mirren slumped back on the sofa while Will called Melissa with instructions.

“Now let’s talk about Lucy,” Aidan said, turning back to Hannah. “Can you tell us what she’s up to?”

Hannah shook her head and looked at the floor. “I tried to see, but I can’t. Only that she’s in trouble.” When the girl raised her eyes again, they shone with unshed tears. Usually only the newest vampires were still able to cry. Aidan didn’t know if the rest of them didn’t because they were vampires or because they’d just seen too damn much.

“Did Lucy screw us?” Will asked, his voice hard-edged. “Is she helping them?”

Hannah shook her head. “I don’t know.” Her clear, high voice shook. “Only that in here”—she touched her head, then her chest—“she hurts and she’s angry.”

Aidan remained silent, the heft of the others’ fear and anger an almost physical weight. He remembered a time after Abby
died when he’d been so crippled by grief that his body moved around but his brain had shut down. Hell, he’d lost days, gaping chunks of time he couldn’t account for. Maybe he’d underestimated how deeply Lucy had loved Doc. Now that Aidan had experienced even a small dose of those mating instincts—if that was really what was going on with Krys—he knew that he probably
had
misjudged Lucy’s sense of loss. But he couldn’t take chances.

His eyes met Mirren’s. “Until we know her intentions, she can no longer be considered scathe.”

Mirren examined a spot on the carpet, and Will studied his nails. More tears from Hannah. The five of them were tight. No matter how angry they were at Lucy, removing a lieutenant from the scathe meant cutting her bonds to all of them. He’d help her if he could, but he had to put the town first.

“Close the circle, then shut down all your bonds, not only to Lucy but to your fams and scathe members,” Aidan told them. “We’ve got major shit to discuss.”

Mirren and Will stilled while Hannah walked the four walls, trailing a small hand on the chair rail and chanting softly. The air pressure rose as her psychic wards tightened around the room like a cinched belt.

Her job completed, she perched on the sofa and looked at Aidan with bright eyes.

He smiled at her. She knew exactly what he planned to say, of course. “I had Mark working on some land acquisitions last year. Picked up a lot of acreage twenty miles east of town, right on the Georgia line. It’s mostly wooded except for a big, abandoned factory.”

Will retrieved his iPad from the coffee table and called up a map, settling himself on the sofa between Mirren and Hannah
so they could both see it. “It’s out by that old textile plant,” he said, holding the screen out so everyone could see.

“Right,” Aidan said. “Will has been sending crews in for several months now to excavate new safe rooms beneath the largest warehouse. Their memories are erased at night—with their permission, of course.”

Will zoomed in on the site. “It’s a big space, and the excavation is almost done but nothing is filled in except rudimentary structural supports.” He pointed to a satellite image of the metal warehouse, surrounded by dense woods. “There’s nothing around it for miles. Once we get the spaces ready and don’t need to get in and out as often, we’ll remove the access roads and move enough plants and trees in for camouflage. No one will be able to tell there was ever a road. You’ll only be able to see it from the air.”

Mirren leaned back on the sofa, and Aidan saw him wince as his back hit the cushion. They couldn’t take action against Owen till the big guy was a hundred percent.

“Does Lucy know about this?” Mirren asked.

“No,” Aidan said. “We’ve been taking our time until now, but with Lucy out of control, we need to ramp it up. I’d like to have at least a large basement-level safe room finished and fitted within three weeks, plus a sizable storage area. Then start individual suites in the subbasement the following week. Is that doable?”

Will thought for a moment. “Yeah, I think so. Depends on how many suites you want to have ready and how finished you want them.”

Aidan hesitated. He was tempted to soft-pedal this “shelter of last resort,” but these were the people who’d have to help run it. “We need to house all of the scathe members, plus as many
of our familiars as are willing to go. Assume no one will be able to go topside for six months, maybe longer.”

Will settled the iPad back on his lap. They all stared at Aidan.

“Omega,” Hannah said softly. “That’s what you call it.”

“It’s Plan Z, only for those who want to stay in this scathe if the Tribunal moves against us,” Aidan said.

“How long you been thinking about this?” Mirren asked. “Has it ever been done before?”

Aidan shook his head. “No, but vampire society’s never been in this position before. Near as I can tell, human doctors think the blood anomaly caused by the vaccine will disappear with the next generation, and things will get back to normal. But that could be too late for our kind.”

Will moved back to his armchair, shaking his head. “There’s already been rumors of black market auctions in some of the bigger cities, with vampires selling unvaccinated humans to the highest bidder. It’s just gonna get worse.”

Aidan looked at Hannah. “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t see if we will need Omega for certain, but I can’t see that we
won’t
need it, either.”

“We have more than a hundred unvaccinated humans here in Penton, and these are people we care about.” Aidan leaned forward in his desk chair. “At some point, even if it isn’t Owen or the Tribunal, some group is going to try making a move on us. We either break up the town, or we figure out a way to keep all our people safe—even if it means going underground for a while.”

The room was silent for a few moments, the ticking of the wall clock abnormally loud in the stillness. Finally, Will spoke. “What else will we need?”

“If we have to take the whole town underground into Omega, it could be for a long time,” Aidan said. “We’ll need plenty of storage for food, and facilities for air circulation and waste disposal—anything our fams require. And medical facilities for both us and our people.”

And a doctor.
His mind flashed to Krys, and he pushed aside a wild desire for her to be the one. He was a selfish bastard even to wish that kind of existence for her, not that he’d really wish it for any of them.

Will chewed his lip and stared at Mirren. Finally, he nodded. “OK, we can do it. But what you’re talking about is going to take at least five or six months, even with double crews and bare-bones facilities. Can we sit here that long, letting Owen pick us off like bloody sitting ducks?”

Aidan gave him a grim smile. “No. That’s our next order of business—what to do about my brother.”

S
he needed a hiding place. Krys couldn’t believe she’d slept till almost four in the afternoon, but then again, she’d had a little help getting to sleep, hadn’t she?

For once, she wished her memory weren’t quite so sharp. In fact, a case of amnesia would have been fabulous. But there was no mistaking recollection for dreams this time. Mirren had bared fangs at her—fangs! His wounds had healed as she watched. His eyes had lightened from gray to silver. And then Aidan had put her in another trance, she guessed, because everything went blank, at least until she’d awakened to find him sitting beside her, promising to come back tonight. And tonight was almost here.

One part of Krys’s mind kept putting a word out there for her to gnaw on—
vampire
—but the other part, the scientist, knew vampires were horror tales, fantasies. She hadn’t been allowed to go to movies when she was a teen, but she’d sneaked in her share of Anne Rice and Laurell K. Hamilton novels. That
was fiction. Obviously she’d had some kind of psychotic break, and it was no wonder. She’d been kidnapped, after all.

She ignored the dinner tray someone (
a vampire?
) had slid through the slot about five, and didn’t bother to pound on the door or yell. She wanted them to ignore her. And in case they didn’t, in case Aidan came tonight, she needed to be ready to hide—or to fight.

She eyed the closet door, wondering if crawling inside would trigger a panic attack. Nerves skittering, she crossed the room and pulled the door open, only to have her sense of reality slip again. Her heart skipped at the sight of the clothes hung neatly on the rod—her clothes from Georgia. She’d been alternating the same two outfits for days now. Had it been four days? Five? Six? Now
all
of her clothes appeared to be here, as if they expected her to stay forever.

She fingered the sleeve of her favorite sweater, ran shaky hands along the rough denim of her jeans and skirts, skimmed her eyes over the shoes lined neatly along the closet floor. She looked at the dresser with trepidation, walked to it, and pulled the top drawer out an inch. Folded sweaters. The other drawers were filled with socks or underwear or T-shirts, all neatly folded.

Someone had cleaned out her apartment, or at least all the clothes. Someone who didn’t plan to let her go home ever, despite his charm and phony sincerity and beautiful blue eyes.
Eyes that lighten just like Mirren’s did.