Redemption (The Penton Vampire Legacy) (39 page)

Aidan. Krys closed her eyes and wondered how soon he would awaken, and whether he’d know what had happened to her. She thought about what he’d said about concentrating and communicating mentally. She didn’t know if he could hear her in his daysleep, or if he could hear her at all, but she began a mantra.
Jerry is traitor. I’m at the mill. Second floor. It’s a trap. Don’t come alone. Jerry is traitor. I’m at the mill...

She might die tonight. The odds were pretty good, her scientist’s brain told her. She just hoped that somehow, some way, she’d get a chance to take Owen with her. Killing his brother might bother Aidan more than he’d admit. To her own surprise, she realized it wouldn’t bother her at all. She just had to be vigilant and smart and look for an opening.

The room grew darker. Krys could barely make out the outline of the door, and what light did filter through the window was coming from the streetlight.

She shivered, not from the cold of the room but from the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

I
n the hour before twilight, Aidan dreamed for the first time in four hundred years.

He sat at a rough-hewn wooden table across from Abby, at their little farmhouse outside Kinsale where he worked fourteen-hour days to scratch out enough food to feed them and five-year-old Cavan. Owen had joined them, as he often did, regaling them with stories of his adventures.

“It’s soldiers we need,” Owen said as Abby cleaned off the table. Cavan had finally nodded off, and Aidan had deposited him in the small corner bed.

Owen was fired up. “Red Hugh is marching Ulstermen to meet the Spaniards. They’re coming to help us. You’re the best blade fighter in the county, Áodhán. Help us kill the English, and you won’t have to waste away on this cursed farm.”

“It’s only cursed to you.” As the eldest, Owen had inherited the small family farm. He hadn’t wanted it, but to Aidan it was everything. His own land to work. His own home.

Owen was insistent. “Look at your son. He deserves better than having his
da
slave under the bonds of an Englishman.”

The boy’s dark hair, so much like his father’s, reflected light from the hearth fire. Aidan couldn’t help but agree: his son did deserve better.

Aidan pulled his wool cloak tighter around himself and huddled closer to his fellow soldiers. January had blown in cold and wet. Hunger gnawed at his guts, and today’s march had seen a rough pebble finally work its way into the sole of his boot. He’d torn off part of his long, filthy shirt to wrap his feet, but he couldn’t feel them anymore.

Next to him, Owen stirred. “A hunt. It’s what we need, Brother. We must find something to eat. Otherwise we’re going to die out here.”

And then where would Cavan and Abby be, if I let myself die of hunger out here in the countryside while the Spaniards wait in Kinsale?

He nodded and unwedged himself from the cluster of men around him, the
kern
, the foot soldiers. “Keep your arse still,” the man next to him mumbled. He never opened his eyes, and Aidan and Owen slipped out of the pile and into the dense woods behind the small clearing.

The rest of Red Hugh’s men were scattered, sick, hungry, freezing. Every day they came across the bodies of those who had died along the way and been left to feed the buzzards.

Aidan felt inside his cloak for his skean, its blade sharpened, and he and Owen slipped silently across a broad field toward another wooded area. Moving helped warm him, and even if
they didn’t find food, he was glad they’d left the huddle of their defeated countrymen.

Kinsale lay less than a day’s ride southeast, and Aidan imagined he could smell the sea from here as he and Owen headed for the trees near the river. Animals would come to the river to drink, and then they would eat.

The brush ahead of them stirred, and they locked gazes before moving ahead quietly across the wet ground.

Three figures emerged from the brush, and the brothers froze. “Friend or foe?” Aidan asked.

A woman’s voice: “Neither friend nor foe, and yet both.” Aidan and Owen looked at each other. A woman, out here? And a Spaniard, from the sound of her.

Then the strangers were on them. Aidan heard Owen hit the snow-packed ground a second before he did. Then a sharp pain at his throat wiped out everything but the lethargy that held his limbs to the ground, the pull at his neck and another at his arm, the fire of pain through his veins, and the sound of his heart hammering in his ears. Then blackness, then awakening to a thirst like he’d never known.

Aidan stared from the back of the cave where he’d recently awakened for the night, sensing the rising moon. He ached with hunger. He rolled off the flat rock on which he’d rested, crouching near the rear wall and moving a small rock away from its resting place.

He added a mark to the series of scratches in the rocky dust of the cave’s floor. His calendar. He’d been gone from Abby and Cavan for a year now, as near as he could tell.

They lived by night, this small scathe led by Daire and the Spaniards. Vampires. They fed on soldiers and prostitutes and unwitting passersby in the nighttime alleys of nearby Cork. Owen thrived on the hunt, the power, and the blood. Aidan wanted to go home. What would happen if he returned now? Would Abby help him learn to live with this curse, find as normal a life as he could? Or was it too great a risk?

He slipped outside under the moonlight, drinking in its shadows and illumination.

“Time to hunt, Brother.” Owen stood behind him, throwing his cloak over his shoulders—a much finer cloak than any Murphy had ever owned. He’d learned to pick his targets among the wealthier patrons of the Cork brothels, and had amassed a fine wardrobe. Aidan still wore the rough wool cloak that Abby had made for him when he joined the ragtag army, her touch woven through every fiber.

“I think I’ll try a new district tonight,” Aidan said. “I’ll let you know if it’s worthwhile.”

Owen laughed. “Suit yourself, Brother. I like a bit of fun with my food.”

A bit of rape before murder, more like
. Aidan left his brother behind and headed for the farm.

Abby cried when he arrived, and even though Aidan had fed from a drunkard at a pub not far to the north, he fought the hunger when he looked at her. Hunger to feed and hunger for sex.

Cavan had grown inches. Aidan could tell by looking at his small form curled in the same bed as before. He still looked like his
da,
with his dark, tousled hair.

Aidan struggled for the words to tell Abby what had happened, but when he did she laughed at him. “I’ve missed your jokes,” she teased. “But that’s more a tall tale worthy of your brother than you.”

She’d kissed him then; had cut her lip on his fangs, and had been forced to believe. She’d been afraid, had pushed him away.

“You’ll kill us all,” she said. “You should have stayed with your new kind. Cavan and me, we’ve mourned your passing and now we’ll have to mourn you again.”

He began cleaning out the root cellar to give him a safe day space, sure that he could change her mind when she got used to the idea. He could do farm work at night, could feed from her. They could figure it out.

But Owen had followed him, and he made enough noise to wake Cavan when he swept into the room, just as he’d done so often before. Only this time he was hungry for more than Abby’s stew.

“Da!”
Cavan rushed toward Aidan, who’d followed Owen inside. He knelt and reached for his son, but Owen waylaid him. “No greeting for your uncle, then, Cavan?”

Abby screamed as Owen moved to bite, and Aidan looked from her to Cavan to Owen, frozen. He lunged for his son.

He’d done exactly as Owen hoped. He’d saved the boy, thinking his danger the greatest. He’d snatched Cavan away from Owen, taken him outside, and told him to hide. By the time he returned, Owen held Abby’s limp form in his arms, his mouth at her throat, and a knife at her breast.

“I’ll drain her and you’ll turn her,” Owen gasped, blood—Abby’s blood—dripping from his chin. “She can love both of us now.”

Owen had loved Abby first, but Abby had chosen Aidan. He’d always known that his brother was jealous, but he hadn’t known how deeply or how far he’d go to have her.

“Let her go, Owen. She wants no part of our kind. We’ll both leave her, go back to Dublin.” Maybe there was still room to reason with him. Abby might survive if she got help.

Owen gave him a macabre and bloody grin. “She might love me more now, Brother. You might have been a better man; I’ll give you that. But I’m a better vampire.”

Aidan finally rushed him, lunging to place himself between Abby and the knife, but Owen had easily sidestepped him and plunged the skean hilt-deep into his wife’s chest. He lowered Abby, near death, to the floor, and dragged the sharp knife over his own wrist to feed her.

But Aidan had seen the revulsion on her face when she learned what he was. She wouldn’t want it for herself, wouldn’t want Cavan to grow up among them. He threw himself at Owen and pulled his own skean, holding it to his brother’s throat. But he couldn’t do it. He remembered the wild, carefree big brother he’d loved, and knew that killing him wouldn’t make Abby love a monster.

Owen had run away, leaving Aidan to gather Abby in his arms, touch the face he’d loved so much, smell the hay and the wildflowers and the earth that made up her world. He could have tried to turn her and hoped she’d accept it. Instead, he let her die.