Allegiance (The Penton Vampire Legacy) (18 page)

She sat up and settled next to him, hugging her legs to her chest. “It was pretty funny—last night was the first time I’ve really had a chance to talk to him since he got back. I went in ready to let him down gently and tell him there was no future for us, only to find out he’d wanted to tell me the same thing.”

Mark looked for any sign she was glossing things over or holding something back, but she met his probing look without flinching. She’d never been a good liar, and he doubted that had changed just because she was a vampire. Although she’d certainly lied well enough to push him away all these months, and he’d obviously been willing to believe her.

“Plus, I think Cage is interested in Penton’s newest wildlife—that shape-shifter.”

“Robin?” He tried to imagine the fiery little woman he’d met at the site of the fire being with the cold-as-ice Cage Reynolds, and couldn’t do it. “Talk about an odd couple. And speaking of odd”—he pointed at her pants—“what’s with the track pants? You started jogging in your spare time?”

She laughed. “Hardly. But Mirren’s going to help me learn to defend myself—not like for Omega team work but just basic skills.” She stretched out alongside him and propped on one elbow. “I’m tired of being afraid, and the only way I can get unafraid is to learn how to take care of myself. Go ahead. Tell me I’m nuts.”

He thought it was a great idea. “Do it. If I can get this back healed up again, I’ll be right there with you. We don’t need to learn how to be killers, but we do need to learn how not to be victims. When are you training?”

“No set schedule—the lieutenants are meeting first. And, um . . .” She blushed, and he enjoyed the sight. After she’d been turned awhile longer, she wouldn’t have enough human left in her for the pink to fill her cheeks. “I’m supposed to . . . you know.” She tapped a finger on one of her fangs. “The word
feed
sounds so . . . impersonal.”

“It’s okay. I want you to.”

She took a deep breath before reaching out to grasp his arm.

He pulled it back. “Not like that.” He rolled his head to the side, baring his neck to her. No one had ever fed from his neck; he’d thought it too intimate and he’d always been a feeder, not a familiar.

“Are you sure? I’ve never done this.”

“Aidan never fed from you this way? I mean, you were his fam a long time before he met Krys. I always figured you . . . you know.” He turned back toward her. He’d always wanted to ask her but feared getting the outraged expression she had on her face now.

“Seriously? No way. You’re my first.”

He liked that. He also liked when she maneuvered to sit astride him, giving him a hard-on that ignored his insistence that they take it slow. It only knew want. It only knew now.

She laughed and moved on him just enough to give him some delicious friction.

He groaned. “Damn, woman. Did you miss that memo about taking things slow?”

“Yep, missed it totally.” She lowered her mouth to his and kissed him, a soft brush of lips, sans fangs. She nicked him a little when she moved her mouth along his jawline, and sighed when she touched her tongue to the cut.

“You know how teenage guys don’t last long in the foreplay department?” she asked.

“I’ll have you know that I . . . ah.” She sucked his earlobe into her mouth, and he felt the scrape of a fang, then the rush of the vampire mojo.

Melissa raised her head, and Mark wished he could keep the image in his mind forever. Her hazel eyes had lost focus, her breathing had grown heavier, her lips parted. She looked like a woman who’d just been fucked within an inch of her life, and still had energy to spare. “I wasn’t talking about you; I was talking about me.”

“What do y—”

She lowered her head and bit, a sharp knife-edge of pain followed by the sensation of floating, like a cocaine buzz and an orgasm unfurling in his body simultaneously. Who the fuck needed drugs?

With every pull at his throat, another wave of pleasure washed over him, and when she reached down and began stroking him while she fed, he thought if he were to die tonight, he could die happy.

Or not so much. “Oh man, that’s harsh.”

She’d pulled away and snuggled against him. “I’d finish that off, but you really don’t want these inexperienced fangs down there. My hands are pretty talented, though.”

Which she was proving to him. “Uh-huh.”

Eloquent, but it’s all he could manage.

“Plus, I don’t think your back could handle what I’m going to do to you once you decide we don’t have to take it slow.” She gave him a hard squeeze to prove her point.

Damn back. It felt okay right now, although he was overstimulated in other areas.

Except the image of the amber bottle came back to him, and he knew he was one oxy high from ruining whatever it was they’d begun tonight.

“Wait, Mel.” She began nuzzling at his neck again. “Seriously. Wait.”

Something in his voice must have sounded different, because she rolled off him and sat up. “What’s wrong? Your back?”

If only. “Go to the dresser, open the top right-hand drawer and look under the socks.”

She smiled until she saw his expression, then got up and padded to the dresser. He was glad her back was turned so he couldn’t see her face when she found the bottle. He heard it rattle, and then the long silence began.

She was wondering if he’d stolen them. How many he’d taken. He couldn’t blame her; it had been his pattern, after all, so he steeled himself for her anger.

When she turned around, though, she looked confused. “You haven’t taken any of these, or I would’ve been able to tell when I fed.” She studied the bottle. “It’s a generic prescription label, too. Krys wouldn’t have given you oxy—where did they come from?”

Struggling with the gravity that wanted him to remain on his back, he used his arms to push himself into a sitting position. The back twinges were fainter; maybe the vampire high had staved it off for a while. “I found it sitting on the dresser when I got in tonight. I’d been over at the Chow House with Nik Dimitrou. I know it didn’t come from Krys. She had to think hard about giving me freaking ibuprofen.”

Melissa returned to sit on the bed. “You think someone deliberately set them there who knew your history and wanted to get you hooked again?” She rolled the bottle in her hand, shook it, examined it again. “Anybody have keys to this house except you and Aidan and Krys?”

They looked at each other as one answer dawned: Britta.

Without a word, Mark got up, slipped into his shoes, and followed Melissa toward the front door. They didn’t need to discuss what came next: they had to talk to Aidan.

  
CHAPTER 18
  

N
ik hadn’t been this tired in recent memory. He’d been worse off after slogging through waist-deep mud and muck during Ranger School survival training. His muscles had hurt worse after his last tour of duty in Afghanistan when his unit got pinned in their mountain outpost for forty-eight hours. But after the having the lining of his lungs seared, keeping vampire hours, keeping human hours, and now approaching vampire hours again? Something had to give.

Robin had fared better—not just because she was a shifter and had better physical tolerance, as much as it annoyed him to admit that, but because she was a professional napper. Leave the woman in silence for more than a minute, and she’d be asleep.

Tonight, though, she was nowhere to be found, and if he were a betting man, he’d wager a paycheck she was soaring somewhere high above Penton. Flying relaxed her, cleared her head, helped her think. He’d also wager a paycheck she was thinking—at least a bit—about Cage Reynolds.

And about the three chunks of blue glass. He’d found them on his bed, no note or anything. She’d be too cautious to leave his drawing lying around. He decided to take a nap before picking them up and using his Touch, however, because training time would be coming up soon and he’d be back on the vampire clock.

He’d spent the afternoon running Mark Calvert around town to tend to Penton business. The town might be in ruins, but it still had utility bills to pay; a burned house whose electricity needed shutting off; and a couple of small work crews of humans to check on, making slow progress hauling off the rubble of what had been, a year ago, a thriving little vampire-human community. He’d even taken Mark to pick up the mail; everyone kept post office boxes in the nearest town, LaFayette, ten miles down a road to nowhere.

Nik used the back of his hand to shove the glass pieces aside and stretched out on the brown-and-green patchwork quilt. The longer he lay there with his eyes closed, the stronger the pull grew to pick the damned things up.

Shit.
He rolled over and looked at them, steeled his mind for whatever might be headed its way, and wrapped his fingers around the largest chunk, grasping it in his fist. An image flashed behind his closed eyelids: a canine—the one in his drawing, but it wasn’t a wolf. Smaller, maybe a coyote, with a yellowish coat and cream underbelly. What made it stand out was its muzzle, not carrying the bottle but coated in blood. Blood dripped from its mouth, colored its bared teeth red. He didn’t just see it; he felt it. It was hungry, but more than that it was angry. So, so angry.

He released the chunk of glass onto the bed and waited for his mind to clear before picking up the second. Where the first one had been the size of a large marble, this one was more like a button. From it came only the vision of a soundless explosion followed by a rush of flame, the image of a smoke-filled room, the struggle to breathe, the urgency of escape.

Nik tossed that one off the edge of the bed in his frenzy to get rid of it, and he lay panting for a minute, waiting for his heart to find its normal rhythm, for his brain to remind his skittering nerve endings that it was a memory, and not even his memory. He was safe. He would not burn. Whoever, or whatever, had been with this glass in the fire hadn’t been so sure.

One piece of glass remained, and he prayed he’d either learn more or get no images at all. Drained of energy, he slid his hand along the quilt, its texture soothing to his fingertips, its fabric bringing only a brief glimpse of Glory’s sweetness and nothing more.

Okay, last one.
He raised his fingers and dragged the piece of glass to him, groaning and curling into a fetal position as its sensations hit him.
God, make it stop. The burning sensation, the thirst. The horrible, horrible thirst because nothing will go down, nothing will cool the veins and arteries as they dry up, empty out, refill with acid. He had to stop it, had to stop, had to stop, had to—

“Nik!”

Someone pried his fingers open, and as suddenly as the mental assault had begun, it ended. His mind cleared, and all he could do was curl up tighter and let the tears come.

“Bloody hell, do I need to call Krys? Do you need a doctor?” The bed dipped as someone sat down, and Nik opened his eyes to see Cage, mumbling and fumbling with his cell phone.

“Don’t call Krys. Give me a minute.”

Cage looked at him, brows drawn together. “Hang on, then.”

He disappeared and came back in a couple of minutes with a washcloth. “Here, you have a nosebleed.” He shoved the cold, saturated piece of green terry cloth into Nik’s hands and reached behind him to erect a mountain of pillows. “Move back and elevate your head, pinch the bridge of your nose. It’ll help slow it down.”

Nik had been down nosebleed highway before, and he did as Cage suggested. The cloth was cool against his nose and upper lip, and he closed his eyes and finally began to relax. It was done, but he didn’t know what the hell to make of what he’d seen.

It was easy to say what he hadn’t seen: a face, an identity.

When he opened his eyes, Cage was studying the pieces of glass. “Where’d these come from?”

“Your bedroom at the burned house, I think.” Nik took a final dab at his nose, found no red smears on the washcloth, and set it aside. “Robin and I went through the house today, and we think that’s where it started.”

“So I was the target?”

Nik shrugged. “Maybe, or maybe it’s coincidence.”

“My room’s in the center of the hallway, so that’s not likely.”

Nik agreed. “Go in Robin’s room and see if there are any drawings lying around—she likes to stick stuff under her pillows. It’s what I got from the house, before she found the pieces of glass.”

Cage got up and headed for the door but stopped halfway.

Nik smiled. “Don’t worry, she’s not here. Probably out flying around somewhere.”

“Right. That does make it simpler.” Cage disappeared, and Nik heard him in the room next to his, walking around.

He returned holding Nik’s sketch pad and flipped through it. “You’re quite the good artist.”

“Look at the last one in the pad.” The coyote whose skin he’d inhabited briefly.

“A wolf? No, too small. Another dog, or is it a jackal?”

“Jackal, I think, or coyote.” Nik watched Cage as he processed the meaning of it, his frown deepening. He looked at the piece of blue glass in his palm and back at the drawing. “Can shifters take on more than one form?”

Nik groaned. “God, I hope not. But there could be two different shifters hanging around.”

“Fuck. How can strange jaguars and jackals be running around Penton without us seeing them? A bloody jackal ran in my house? Why didn’t that useless piece of dogflesh Barnabas bark or something?” He jerked out the leather cord tying his hair back and ran his hands through his hair. “Well, maybe we can get some answers.”

“Maybe Robin can come up with some theories. I haven’t known her all that long, but her pattern seems to be that when she flies a long time she’s either after somebody or thinking through a problem.”

Cage quirked an eyebrow. “After somebody as in a criminal?”

Me and my big mouth.
Nik knew about Robin’s little vigilante program to reform domestic abusers, but that wasn’t his story to tell, and even he didn’t know why she did it except that it had something to do with why she was on the run from her family in Texas.

“Yeah, you know, like this guy in Houston that did the bombing last month—she tracked him all over eastern Texas and western Louisiana.”

“Right.” Cage pursed his lips and gave Nik a perceptive look. The man saw too much, and Nik’s hesitation in answering gave him away. “Anyway, I had Hannah in mind, for answers. I came here hoping to feed, but I don’t think you’re up to that. Maybe you could meet Hannah, though. Talk to her.”

Nik sat up, pleased that the room spun only a few seconds before coming to a halt. “I’d like to meet her, actually. Other than my dad, who wouldn’t talk about it and advised me to wear gloves all the time, I have never met another person with psychic abilities. Tell me about her—and I’m okay for feeding. I know you guys are short on feeders.”

Cage stood up. “We’ll see—Hannah needs it more than me. I’ll fill you in before we walk over. She’s at Aidan’s house.”

For the next few minutes, Nik heard the capsule version of Hannah’s story, most of which he’d already learned from the colonel’s dossier. What hadn’t been there were the more recent events—mostly that her familiars, an adult couple who were feeders as well as parental figures, had been killed by Matthias in his siege of Penton. How she’d been withdrawn since then.

“I thought she was pulling out of it when Max settled in here—she liked him, although I have no idea why because he’s a total arsewipe,” Cage said. “She had Max and she had the bloody dog. Now that Max is gone, she hasn’t spoken to anyone. I thought she might talk to you if you spoke to her about your abilities.”

“She has visions of the future, right?”

Cage nodded. “They aren’t like yours, where they’re tied to touching a person or object. They just come to her in pieces. I’d hoped to work with her eventually to see if we could figure out how to let her access them when she wanted and avoid them when she didn’t. But things got too crazy too fast.”

While they’d been standing on the porch and talking, Penton had slowly come to life around them. The vampires were out and about, and Nik saw the blonde vampire he’d run into the night of the fire, Shawn, leave the house two doors down—halfway between Mirren’s house and the burned-out hulk of his own. She was accompanied by a young, dark-haired woman. She waved when she saw Nik and Cage.

“You met Shawn the night of the fire, right?”

Nik nodded. “I think she inherited me as a feeder, or the other woman, Britta—not sure which.”

Cage laughed. “It’ll be more pleasant than with me, no doubt.”

“Yeah, about that.” Nik liked the Brit and all, but he really didn’t want to get a hard-on from having the guy suck on his forearm. That was fucking warped. Maybe that effect had been exaggerated. All he’d done with Mirren was relax. “Am I gonna, you know . . . uh . . .”

“Want to fuck me?” Cage smiled. “No, I don’t think so. And if you do, keep it to yourself, right?”

“No problem.” Nik never would’ve believed it, but shifters were downright simple compared to vampires. Blood. Sunlight. Silver reduced their strength. At least Robin just sprouted feathers and flew around.

They walked across the street and up the steps. Cage unlocked the door and led the way to the room Hannah had taken in the front.

He knocked, but there was no answer, so he tried the doorknob and opened it.

Someone had tried to make the room cheerful. Exotic flowers sat in a bright blue vase in the corner, and colorful pillows had been tossed on chairs and on the bed.

“Where—” Nik had started to ask where Hannah was, but Cage put a hand on his arm and jerked his head toward the corner.

God, she was tiny. He knew she’d been turned at twelve and that on some level she was still twelve, but he’d expected her to look more vampirish. She was smaller than Robin and looked like a little kid.

Cage patted him on the back and stepped back into the hallway, leaving Nik alone with the girl. She sat wedged into the corner, a big, wrinkled mass of reddish-brown fur filling her lap.

Nik walked over and sat cross-legged on the floor facing her. “Is this Barnabas?”

She nodded and ran a small hand over the dog’s head and down the length of a floppy ear. Bloodshot eyes opened and looked at her adoringly.

“He loves you. Look at that expression.”

She cocked her head and scratched under Barnabas’s chin before looking up. Her jet-black eyes widened, and her mouth opened to form a small O.

“You’re the one. The one who’s like me.”

Nik nodded. “My name is Nik—Nikolas. I’m sort of like you. I can see things in the past, where you see the future, right?”

Hannah smiled, and the difference it made in her face was remarkable—and horrifying. She looked even more like a little kid. Nik was glad Aidan had killed the monster who stole her childhood and the life she should’ve had. “Maybe we can work together and learn to use our gifts better. I could use some help.”