Absolution (27 page)

M
irren glanced at his watch for at least the dozenth time in the past half hour. He knew the Omega plans were important. He knew that he and Aidan needed to see what progress Will was making. He knew their future might depend on it.

But how many computer images could the man call up for them to see?

Hundreds, apparently. Waste management. Drainage. Ventilation. Pantries for food and water purifcation. Moisture control. Temperature control. Every freaking bit of minutia imaginable. Mirren would almost slit his own throat to shut out the drone of Will’s voice.

He needed to see Glory. The more the night dragged on, the more he thought she might blame herself for the mating fiasco, or maybe even be afraid of what he’d do. She’d pushed his buttons on purpose, true enough. But he could’ve stopped it at any time. And, now that he’d kind of gotten used to the idea, maybe having a mate wouldn’t be such a fiasco, after all. Except, he had to break the woman of that nonstop talking.

Well, after they talked about it. How stupid was that?

A sudden pain shot through his head, and he stumbled back from where he and Aidan had been watching the computer screen over Will’s shoulder. Mirren had trouble drawing a breath. Glory was in troub—

“Something’s off—we’ve gotta get to Mirren’s.” Aidan was already halfway to the ladder leading out of Will’s basement by the time Mirren got to his feet, his lungs feeling like they’d been crushed under the tires of an eighteen-wheeler.

“Move it, Will.” He pushed Will’s ass out of the hatch above him and brought up the rear. Will stopped once they’d reached the hallway and knelt to lock the panel back in place. Mirren grabbed a handful of hair and pulled him to his feet. “Now, goddammit. Leave it.”

They raced to Aidan’s car, with Will taking the backseat. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked, feeling in his pockets and pulling out a folding combat knife. “You tore out half my hair.”

“Don’t know.” Aidan’s voice sounded strangled. “I got a mental call from Krys to get to Mirren’s place; then she pulled energy off me, which means she’s injured. Had something to do with Renz.”

Aidan gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white, and it took everything Mirren had inside him not to break one of those knuckles. Aidan had trusted that bastard Renz, had let him come to Penton, and these were the results. They should never have left him alone at the clinic. He’d given in too easily when Aidan suggested taping Glory’s accusations of Matthias and keeping her in Penton. That would mean giving up control, and no Tribunal member ever gave up control.

But an
I told you so
wouldn’t help. It wouldn’t help the fear rising in his chest like a dragon awakened from a thousand years of sleep—fear was beaten out of the gallowglass as soon as they began combat training as children, and he barely recognized the emotion. They were warriors, expected to fight as warriors and, if needed, to die. And he’d been a good warrior, a constable, a fearless giant leading his men into battle.

Except, now, he wanted to cry out to someone for help. To ditch this feeling of helplessness and replace it with something he understood—a sword, a battle-ax, a gun.

The pain throbbed in his head, and he rubbed his temples again. Did that mean Glory had a head injury? “Why does my head hurt? Vampires don’t have headaches.”

Aidan looked at him with eyes full of worry. “Do you feel your bond to Glory? Close your eyes and imagine it reaching from you to her. You should feel it stretching from your chest like a rubber band pulled taut.”

Mirren shut his eyes and leaned his head against the headrest, visualizing Glory—her independent spirit and humor and warmth. Sure enough, the cord was there. He had to concentrate to feel it, but it was definitely there. “That means she’s OK?” He hated the whining hopefulness in his voice. Hated it.

“It means she’s alive.” Aidan took a curve fast, wheels squealing against the pavement. They lurched to a stop a block from Mirren’s house.

“Mirren, you’re our tactician. How do we play this? We know Renz is in town—maybe at your house. His human driver, who’s also his fam, was with him, since he takes the guy everywhere. If Renz had more people with him when he came to town, I don’t know about it.”

Mirren rubbed his eyes, willing himself to relinquish the focus on his bond to Glory. Tactics. It was just another battle operation. “Cover all the entrances to my house,” he said. “We don’t know how much lead time they had on us, but hopefully they’re still there.”

He refused to think they were too late, that Renz had taken Glory and maybe Krys too. “Aidan, you go in the front,” he said. “Will goes in the back. I’ll come from below, using a private entrance.” This entrance reached through an earthen tunnel stretching back into the woods. Not even Aidan knew it. “Keep it as quiet as you can. Renz will know we’re coming, but his human might not, and he might not be able to tell how many of us are out here.” He thought about pulling in Randa and Tanner, but numbers weren’t the problem—time was. Every second counted.

They split up, with Aidan keeping low to cover the front approach to the house and Will running wide before disappearing behind the far end of the long white structure. Mirren ran with the speed of his human upbringing and the silence of his vampire nature, dodging fallen limbs with sure-footed strength until he reached the closest camouflaged tunnel entrance in the woods behind the house, one of three.

Brush and limbs left scratches on his hands as he tossed them aside, and he pulled a thumbnail loose digging the cover to the tunnel out of the hard-packed winter soil. He wiped the blood on his shirt, then threw the cover back, leaping feetfirst into the hole and not bothering to pull the tunnel entrance shut behind him. If something had happened to Glory, he didn’t care about safe spaces. He’d be going to war.

Running through the tunnel that had taken him six months to dig, working alone in the hours before dawn ever y day, Mirren kept part of his mind on his bond to Glory, making sure it was still there. The rest of his mind assessed his weapons. Faolain was in its scabbard in his private suite, but this tunnel went into the side of the basement, and he didn’t want to waste time going to the subbasement to arm himself. His .45 was still in his shoulder holster where he always carried it. He’d grab a couple more blades from the basement, and it would have to be enough.

He’d like nothing better than the satisfaction of snapping bones and tendons as he tore Lorenzo Caias’s head from his scrawny neck. He might box it up and mail it to Matthias Ludlam.

Mirren’s sluggish heart pounded harder than he remembered it doing since he’d been turned four centuries ago by an Irish foot soldier irate at being rejected from joining the gallowglass.
The bond is there. She’s alive.
But the pain in his temple cut like jagged glass, and he felt a drain in his limbs that had to mean she was pulling strength from him. She was hurt.

He willed more power into their bond as he raced up the ladder into the main level of the house and met Will in the hallway. Together, they eased on either side of the door to the living room.

“She’s not here.” Aidan spoke in a fat voice, not looking up from the spill of auburn hair trailing over his lap and pooling on the floor beside him. He cradled Krys in his left arm, the fingers of his right hand pressed into the ground-up mess of blood and fabric that covered her chest.

Not here? Krys is dead?
Mirren looked around, eyes scouring every corner for a sign of Glory, but his attention jerked back to Krys when she coughed.

“Where’s Glory?” Mirren thought Will asked it, or it might have been him. His mind couldn’t understand the broken glass, the cracked lathing behind missing chunks of plaster, the cords and shelving strewn across the living room floor. He tried to make sense of the mess, to find Glory in the debris.

“Glory’s gone. Renz must have taken her.” Aidan rose to his feet with Krys in his arms and gestured toward the sofa. Will wiped all the glass from the cushions so Aidan could lay her down. “She should wake up soon and can tell us what happened. She’s healing.”

But what about Glory? Your mate will heal, but what about my mate?
Mirren couldn’t move. For the first time in his life, his training had failed him. His strength, his tactical skills, his taste for violence—what good did it do him when he couldn’t help the one person who mattered?

Krys coughed again, and her eyes fashed open, focused on Aidan, then shifted to Mirren. “Help me sit up.” She struggled to a seated position with Aidan’s help and started to talk.

Mirren usually welcomed the hour before dawn. It was a quiet time he always saved for refection. No one would ever accuse him of being a deep thinker; he knew that. But this was his time of accounting for the day as he put it to rest. Had he behaved honorably? Had he fought to the best of his ability? If he had acted dishonorably, had he atoned?

Now he sat with the acid pen, his chosen tool of absolution. It vibrated in his palm, its buzz accusatory and shrill, calling for its burn on his skin. He couldn’t do it.

Not because his art had failed him. He could put small bleeding hearts all over his body.

And not because he didn’t need to atone. He’d failed to keep Glory safe, plus he’d let her care about him, maybe even love him a little. He loved her more than a little, he realized now, but he didn’t blame himself for that. How could he not love her? She was full of life and spirit and joy, even after the things Matthias had done to her.

No, he couldn’t mark himself, because he knew she wouldn’t want him to, simple as that. When he found her, he wouldn’t face her covered with new badges of blame. If he didn’t find her, his life was forfeit. Again, simple as that.

Krys had told them the whole ugly story, including how Glory had saved her by raining down Mirren’s monster TV on top of Renz’s head. Mirren felt a rush of pride at Glory’s spirit, although she’d paid for it dearly when Renz had choked her, then knocked her out with one of Mirren’s own motorcycle gears—the source of his ongoing headache was her possible concussion.

They’d called Hannah in, then Tanner and Randa, trying to figure out a strategy. It all felt surreal, this planning, this discussion of tactics. As if the person they were devising a rescue for had no more meaning than a simple bounty of war or combat spoil. Not the woman who’d shown him the man he could be, the one he’d given up on ever becoming until he’d met her.

Now, it was time to go into their daysleep, and Mirren’s only consolation was knowing that Renz, too, would have to bow to the limitations of their kind. Wherever he was, wherever he had taken Glory, he’d be as powerless to act during daylight hours as the rest of them. Because of his age, he could move around a little earlier than dusk and stay up a little later than dawn, but he still couldn’t move outside a lighttight space.

They’d decided to send Tanner and Randa north to Virginia to keep tabs on Matthias, just in case Renz decided to jump sides now that he knew Aidan had faunted Tribunal law by turning Krys. It was hard even for Mirren to imagine Matthias and Renz as allies, but vampire politics had created odder alliances.

Will had spent most of the night, and would resume tomorrow night, computer-hacking his way behind Lorenzo’s financial dealings, searching for clues to where he might have taken Glory. There was no point in just going for the sake of going. They needed an idea of where to start looking.

Hannah was waiting to see what Will found out, and would try to use her psychic mojo to guide them. So far, she could tell them only what Mirren already knew—that Glory was alive.

Aidan was taking care of Krys, and Mirren tried not to feel a stab of jealousy that his best friend’s mate was safe, while his was in the hands of a power-mad bureaucrat with no respect for human life.

Everyone had a role to play. And all Mirren could do was wait.

CHAPTER 26