Redemption (The Penton Vampire Legacy) (9 page)

She flicked a fingernail under the edge and peeled it off, unveiling a tiny round bruise. A needle mark. Someone had given her an injection. Had Aidan drugged her? That would certainly explain her uncharacteristic (slutty) behavior. But no, she sort of remembered him
taking
blood, not injecting her. Maybe he wasn’t the Godfather. Maybe he was Frankenstein.

Panic faded to numbness. This was rural Alabama, for God’s sake, not exactly a hotbed of freaky abductions. Crime here most often involved domestic abuse fueled by a lot of alcohol.

There had to be a rational explanation. Krys stood and pulled a pair of jeans and a sweater from the hangers, then looked around the room, trying to inject a smidgen of logic. She crossed to the dresser, opened the top drawer, and found the rest of her clothes, the neatly folded panties and socks. Great. Someone had handled her underwear.

She changed her clothes in the small bathroom after looking around for video cameras. The idea of cameras was no crazier than waking up in a strange bed, locked up after
a night of hot almost-sex with a stranger who’d probably drugged her and left her in this room that was...underground, maybe? No windows, and it had a cool, muffled feel. Now that she thought about it, when she’d shouted and pounded on the door, there had been no echo or vibration. Her voice had been absorbed into the room. Definitely a basement.

Running shoes and clean clothes dulled the fear and made way for anger. It seeped into her muscles like liquid fire, energizing them. Who the hell did Aidan Murphy think he was, anyway? Maybe he
was
a freakin’ mob boss. God knew that monster-size Mirren Kincaid would be a good enforcer. She should have run over Aidan last night and kept driving.

Or at least she thought it had been last night. She looked around and spotted her watch on the bedside table. Two p.m. She’d lost almost twelve hours.

Krys paced, trying to turn the anger into something she could use. She walked the edges of the room, looking for vents. Heroines in suspense movies always climbed through vents to escape their kidnappers. But the only vents she could find were the size of a prescription pad and located in the ceiling.

That damned son of a bitch, with his blue freaking eyes and silky, dark hair. She’d like to snatch every strand of it out of his head. And inflict some pain a little lower, too.

While her mind ranted, she kept her hands busy. Put her dirty clothes and dress heels in the empty suitcase. Threw the torn pantyhose in the trash can. (Make that the ornate, expensive-looking trash can.) Stuffed the contents of her purse back into the shoulder bag and hung it off the edge of a chair. Brushed her teeth. Brushed her hair.

Finally, her restless gaze fell on the TV. She punched buttons on the front but nothing happened, so she jerked open the nightstand drawer.

Bingo.
No Gideon Bible, but there was a remote.

She aimed it at the TV and flipped channels. Not a big selection. Ellen DeGeneres held court on one channel; a TV judge chastised moronic criminals on another; a soap opera ran on a third. She recognized the show as
General Hospital
, which her coworkers liked to watch in the break room. The main character was a mob boss named Sonny, and he had dark hair and dimples. Krys hoped somebody would shoot him.

Running on the fourth and final channel was what appeared to be local-access footage filmed with someone’s flip-cam, complete with bad lighting and uneven sound. The fuzzy picture showed a large room filled with people, all sitting in folding chairs turned toward a dais. Facing them from behind a long table on the raised platform sat three figures.

Krys frowned and moved closer to the screen as she recognized Mirren Kincaid sitting on the left and Aidan in the middle. A striking, black-haired woman sat to Aidan’s right.

A man in the audience asked a question, and Krys strained to catch it. She raised the volume as Aidan spoke into a microphone.

“Jerry, I can’t tell you how many there are.” His voice was deep and masculine, and the sound of it sent a shiver through Krys, the memories of last night replaying—as if she could forget.

Shaking aside the memory, she focused on the video. “My brother Owen or the members of his scathe are the ones who killed Doc,” Aidan was saying. “I don’t know how many of them there are. They can’t feed from you because you’re all bonded
to one of us, but they’re still dangerous. We don’t want to start a full-scale war without knowing if Owen’s acting alone or if there’s someone more powerful backing him. In the meantime, we’re setting up security patrols and asking you to not go out alone at night.”

Krys frowned, trying to make sense of it. What was a scathe? Feeding, bonding, precautions, war. And Aidan had told her the former doctor, if that’s who “Doc” was, died in a hunting accident. She felt like a tourist lost in a foreign country where everyone was chattering in a language she couldn’t understand.

The town hall meeting, or at least that’s what Krys decided it was, lasted about an hour, then the screen went blank and it started over. Must be playing in a loop, making sure the good people of Penton were warned about...something. She watched it again, but the combination of poor sound quality and unfamiliar subject matter made it impossible to follow.

She turned the volume down but left the set on while she did another futile round of beating on the door. Her throat ached from yelling, and her stomach rumbled from hunger. What the hell was she going to do?

She noticed a brown bag sitting on the floor next to the coffee table and picked it up hesitantly. It didn’t tick or explode, so she opened it and found a box of vanilla wafers, a can of nuts, and a six-pack of bottled water. There was also a note, written on a plain square of paper in a small, looping script:
Someone will bring more food soon, and I will be there tonight to explain. I am sorry. —Aidan

Yeah, he’d think
sorry
once she got her hands on him. Except the thought made her remember where her hands had already
been
on him. Good God in heaven.

She took the nuts and a bottle of water and checked to make sure they hadn’t been opened. Who knew—poison wasn’t out of the question.
Tonight
, he’d written. Guess a kidnapped doctor wasn’t important enough to take up time during his busy workday.

The nuts were too salty, but Krys forced down a handful while she flipped through the TV channels again. Was the reason Aidan couldn’t talk to her until tonight the same reason he couldn’t interview her during daylight hours? And some interview that had turned out to be.

She crawled back on the bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to construct an explanation that made sense. Sometime later, a sudden rattling woke her from a half doze, and she rolled off the bed so fast that she tripped and fell hard to her knees.

A tray came sliding through the slot at the bottom of the door, and Krys scrambled toward it, yelling. It shut with a clang and the click of a lock, and no amount of pushing would budge it.

“Help me!” Krys scrambled to her feet and pounded on the door. “I know you’re out there. Let me out of here, damn it! You can’t lock me up like this, Aidan Murphy!”

Nothing. Not a sound.

Her breath came in ragged bursts as she slid to the floor, but she gritted her teeth and swiped away the one stray tear that had escaped down her cheek. She was a survivor. Her first seventeen years had been spent with a father who used ridicule and belittlement, and occasionally his fists, as weapons of control. She’d escaped and made a life for herself, and no small-town psychopath was going to take it away. She was smarter than that. Smarter than he was. She had the bully-survival technique down. She just had to stay calm and let it play out.

He was feeding her, so he wanted her for something and it had to be more than sex. Eventually he would show his hand.

In the meantime she was frustrated as hell and screamed as loud as she could. She hoped Aidan “Godfather” Murphy heard her.

A
idan’s eyes flicked open at sunset, exactly 4:49 p.m., and his first thoughts were of Krys. Whether she was more frightened than angry. How much she remembered. What to make of the hunger she’d raised in him—not just hunger for sex or blood, but a bloody mating call, at least as he’d heard it described. Had to be a fluke.

The room was cool and quiet as he rolled onto his side and reached to click on the bedside lamp. He stretched out muscles tight from too many hours without movement, and ticked through the things that he needed to do before sunrise, trying to push thoughts of Krys to the back burner. Now was no time to get distracted.

First on the agenda: breakfast. He might have shown a little more intestinal fortitude last night if he hadn’t neglected his feeding. Instead, he’d acted like an asshole. Lesson learned.

He picked up the cell phone on his nightstand and speed-dialed Will. His lieutenant’s clipped blue-blood accent sounded alert as he launched into a spiel before Aidan could utter a word.

“Yes, the doctor’s apartment has been vacated. No, I haven’t delivered her pathetic belongings to storage—it was almost dawn when I got in. That human needs a serious style makeover, by the way. And yes, I intend to finish getting her affairs in order tonight. Anything else?”

“There’s always something else, Sir William.”

Accent on the
Sir
. A standing joke between them. Where Aidan had been a dirt-poor Irish farmer, Will was a product of his highbrow Yankee upbringing. He’d been turned in his early twenties by his father, Matthias, to ensure him an eternal acolyte. Will had the expensive tastes of early New York high society, but he didn’t share his father’s taste for power and manipulation. He’d thumbed his nose at Matthias and wandered the world until finally joining up with Aidan five years ago.

“This Irish peasant needs a donor,” Aidan said. “Got somebody you can assign me for a few days? Mark needs to heal, and I want Melissa free to take care of him.”

Will snorted. “Please. Women will be opening their veins outside my front door when they learn the great Aidan Murphy needs sustenance. Hold on.”

Grimacing, Aidan heard the click of computer keys and waited. The last thing he had time for was a woman with social ambitions, especially a human.

While Will looked through the possibilities, Aidan slid out of bed and ran his hands through his hair.

The gesture brought the image of Krys back to him, the way she’d looked at him with that mixture of vulnerability and desire. Back burner. Right.

He realized now that her inhibitions had been lowered by the enthrallment, but it wouldn’t have changed her basic
personality. She was both fiery and vulnerable, a combination that intrigued him and brought back memories that he hadn’t indulged in for a long time. Since Abby died all those years ago, he’d kept his relationships simple: blood from humans, friendship from his fams and lieutenants, and sex that scratched an itch—vampires only. Love was a distraction that ended up hurting everyone.

“I have a possibility here, sister of a familiar.” Will clicked more keys, jarring Aidan back to the present. “She’s here with her husband. I assume you want a donor already in a relationship so you don’t have to disappoint some poor girl deluded enough to think she can make you love her. Or I could send you a guy.”

Aidan grunted. “Somebody in a relationship is good. I have enough drama from my psychotic brother. Last thing I need is a woman who thinks she can save me from myself. And no guys.” He might not have sex with his fams, but some intimacy was unavoidable and guys just didn’t do it for him. He’d fed from Mark a couple of times in an emergency, but it hadn’t been comfortable for either one of them.

He took a quick shower and dressed in a pair of black wool pants and a pale blue cashmere sweater he’d never have picked for himself—he didn’t much care what he wore, so he let Melissa shop for him. He wasn’t sure exactly what she meant by calling him a “vampire Ken doll,” but it had to be bad because it amused her so much.

By the time Aidan made his way through the drafty parlor of the 1930s mansion, he sensed the human at the door—pulse too fast, adrenaline pumping. The young woman gave him a tentative smile when he greeted her, and he pretended not to notice when she tripped on the threshold and blushed.

He remembered interviewing the woman, Jessie, when she and her husband requested permission to move to Penton. One of his scathe members had taken both of them through drug detox by keeping them enthralled, then went through counseling with them to make sure they knew what was expected of them in Penton and that they understood that a drug or alcohol relapse would mean a wiped memory bank and a short drive back to the streets of Atlanta.

In other words, standard operating procedure for Penton. Except for bonding to the scathe, she’d never fed anyone.

He considered enthralling her, but decided against it. She needed to see firsthand what feeding was like. Until she and her husband became fams, which would put them off-limits to other vampires, she was expected to feed any scathe member who needed it.

He raised her arm to his lips and licked gently along her inner wrist to anesthetize it, then kissed it, an acknowledgment of the gift she gave him. Her body tensed and jerked as he bit down, but within moments she sighed and relaxed. He closed his eyes at the pleasure of sinking fangs into flesh, at the deep rush of salty-sweet sustenance, and the gentle rhythm of feeding as he drew from her vein. He’d fed for a few moments before realizing it was Krys’s face looking back at him in his mind, her vein he wanted, and her body his hard-on wanted to visit.