Omega

by Susannah Sandlin

  Correction: if one lived in the underground bunker outside Penton known as Omega, where what was left of Aidan Murphy’s vampire scathe and their bonded humans had been forced to flee after his father blew up half the town.

  He did a quick inventory as he unloaded the flat cart and piled supplies in the back of the beat-up black pickup that belonged to one of the Penton humans. His own wheels, a sweet cream-colored vintage Corvette, was too conspicuous to drive around in these days, and most of the town’s vehicles had been blown to smithereens by one of Dear Old Dad’s minions three days ago when they’d torn through Penton like Sherman burning Atlanta.

  Of course, to be fair, Will had done a fair share of the burning himself. He’d torched his own home and all those belonging to the Penton lieutenants. No point in leaving anything Matthias might find instructive or incriminating.

  Their escape hadn’t exactly been well-timed and leisurely—thus, his shopping trip.

  Plywood. Nails. Screws. Lots and lots of batteries. Two more generators. More filters for the air-cleaning system. Every fluorescent lantern in stock, in case the generators failed. Soundproofing panels for the generator room. Those noisy, noxious things were even causing the vampires to have headaches, so acoustical tiles on walls and ceilings would help.

  Ninety-eight people had gone into Omega. Some of them were in for the long haul, but most of the newer scathe members and familiars were having second thoughts now that they’d had a couple of days to realize what living underground really entailed.

  Aidan had met with Will, Mirren, and the other lieutenants last night to plan an exit strategy for all but their core group.

  Moods had been bleak, and everyone agreed they had to start wiping memories and getting people out of there a few at a time. They couldn’t go en masse. Most of the people in Penton had lost their vehicles, and retrieving the ones left in town was too risky. Besides, Matthias would have the roads out of Penton watched, as well as the streets of Atlanta, looking for an influx of new vampires and bonded humans. But they could take out a few at a time, put them in transitional safe houses owned by the Penton scathe, and make sure they didn’t remember anything that would play into Matthias’s hands.

  The Penton scathe would be easy to identify, being pretty much the only well-fed vampires around these days. Aidan’s peaceful community of vampires and their willingly bonded human familiars had been perfect until their numbers grew large enough to threaten the Tribunal and their old ways of doing things.

  Now, thanks to Will’s father and a bunch of trumped-up charges, they were all in a clusterfuck nobody knew how to escape. Some of the newer scathe members would leave, and he couldn’t blame them. They’d joined the Penton community to live peacefully, not end up in a war with the vampire ruling body. But the lieutenants like Will would stay with Aidan, no matter what. Penton was worth saving and rebuilding. They just had to figure out a way to survive.

  Will had designed the Omega facility with three access points. The entrance from the community center basement had been destroyed by the first of Matthias’s bombs, killing a lot of people who’d been gathered for a town hall meeting. The second, located in the sanctuary of the Baptist church downtown, was known to the townspeople but had been well camouflaged, unless one knew where to look. But how many people Matthias had looking was the big question. Will had sensed patrols around Penton as he went in and out for supplies. The old bastard himself might be in town.

  The third Omega access point, with a location known only to the lieutenants, was the safest. It was an earth-covered, locked hatch just beyond the tree line behind an automobile plant about ten miles east of Penton, just across the Georgia state line near West Point. A variety of cars could be parked in the lot without attracting attention since the plant operated multiple shifts. He’d brought out a trio of the Penton humans tonight. The vampires to whom they’d been bonded had been killed in Matthias’s attack, and they’d elected not to stay.

  The four of them had traversed the tunnel in a battery-operated cart, gotten into the scathe-owned pickup truck parked in the factory lot among the vehicles belonging to the automotive workers, and then Will had driven them to Opelika. The scathe had a safe house in this city of about a hundred thousand. The former Penton citizens could live there until they decided what to do. At least it was safe so far, and Matthias was less likely to be watching here. He’d expect them to run to Atlanta, where there was a more organized network for vampires.

  Aidan had wiped the humans’ memories of Penton, but the scathe’s leader was so torn up and guilt racked over losing his fam that he hadn’t done a thorough job of it. Melissa had been Aidan’s familiar for at least five years, and she’d died right in front of him. In front of them all, on the orders of his father. Mark, her husband and Aidan’s business manager, had been injured in the attack and taken unconscious into Omega, but now he was asking for his wife and demanding answers.

  And if all that wasn’t enough to make Will feel like one guilty asshole, he didn’t know what it would take.

  Aidan was going to have to pull his shit together, though. One of the humans tonight, Ethan, had begun asking questions about when it might be safe to move back to Penton and if they could come back and visit their friends when the fighting was done. At first, Will had thought he’d have to haul Ethan and his wife back to Omega and have their memories re-wiped.

  But the damnedest thing had happened. He’d done it. He’d been able to scrub Ethan’s memories himself, operating on instinct. He’d enthralled the guy and concentrated hard, replacing Ethan’s real memories with a set of false memories Will had devised on the fly. He’d tested and retested him to make sure it worked. Now Ethan didn’t even remember Will, much less Penton.

  Will didn’t know what that meant. Only master vampires did shit like that, and he was no master vampire. How did one become a master vampire, anyway? Something to ask Aidan before taking the next people out of Omega. If he could do the memory scrubs, it would make things easier on Aidan and Mirren, the real master vampires.

  Will pulled out of the parking lot and saw a neon ice-cream cone on a sign at the mall across the street from the interstate entrance. He pulled in the lot and went inside a shop so bright and self-consciously cheerful it hurt his eyes. Mirren’s mate, Glory, liked to eat stuff the big guy could taste when he fed from her—turns out the six-foot-eight killing machine formerly known and feared in vampire circles as the Slayer had a serious sweet tooth. Of course, he’d probably beat the shit out of Will if he knew Glory had told him.

  He didn’t bother to study the signs on the glass counter front, but ordered a pint of each flavor, enough to give all of Omega’s humans a sugar buzz. The unexpected purchases sent the shop’s small night staff—unfailingly polite college kids from a nearby university—into a frenzy of dipping and packaging.

  He loaded the last boxful of pint cartons into the truck cab and, on his final trip out of the store, noticed a small display of American flags attached to cards.

  “It’s a fund-raiser for my fraternity—they’re musical cards.” One of the store employees, a tall, thin boy wearing a navy-and-orange T-shirt with a tiger on the front, plucked a card from the stack and opened it to a rousing military tune. “The money goes to support the families of the servicemen and women at Fort Benning.”

  Fort Benning, Georgia, about thirty miles from here—where Will’s partner on security detail, Randa Thomas, had gone through basic training before getting shipped off to Afghanistan. Her mortal life ended, not at the hands of a soldier, but a vampire. Aidan had told him Randa’s whole family was tied into the US Army, and Will owed the woman an apology for ditching her a couple of times in the last few weeks.

  Well, OK, he might even have knocked her out once. She was such fun to torment he couldn’t help himself, but he didn’t want her to hate him. Maybe the card would mend some fences and help them work together better.

  He picked up one of the cards. “How much?”


  “Whatever you want to donate.” The kid smiled. “Most people give a dollar or two.”

  Will handed him a twenty and took a card, then, on impulse, caught the boy’s gaze and rolled his mind, replacing his memories with the idea that Will hadn’t made any other purchases.

  When he broke eye contact, the boy shook his head and blinked a few times. “Uh, could I help you with something else?” He looked at the twenty-dollar bill in his hand and frowned.

  “No, thanks.” Will smiled on his way out of the store. This new trick could come in handy. He didn’t like the idea of enthralling anyone or altering minds, but it could prove useful in an emergency.

  He thought about it on the thirty-minute drive to the auto plant, pulling into the edge of the lot nearest the encroaching woods. A few seconds after he turned off the truck’s engine, five dark-clad figures slipped away from the tree line. He recognized Mirren Kincaid because, well, it was hard to disguise six foot eight inches of vampire massiveness, even dressed in black on a dark night. The others had to get closer: Aidan, with the grim smile that hadn’t reached his eyes since Melissa died; Cage Reynolds, the new lieutenant who’d come from England not long before all the shit hit the fan; and a couple of lower-ranking scathe members.

  “If you guys can get all this, I want to look around town a little before I go back to Omega. I’ll bring what you can’t carry—ice cream needs to go first.” They began loading boxes on the back of the John Deere Gator cart they kept parked in the back of the parking lot under a tarp, near the equipment shed. So far, no one had managed to steal it.

  “Why the hell’d you buy ice cream?” Mirren hefted one of the big cardboard boxes the kids from the creamery had given him from their storeroom, then took a second. The former Tribunal executioner was not only big, but strong.

  “The treats are a good idea.” Cage’s voice was quiet with its clipped British accent, but it carried authority. “It’ll cheer up the humans, and we need to do what we can to keep them from going stir-crazy.”

  Will didn’t know much about Cage—as with all the lieutenants, Aidan chose who got into the inner circle, and he’d never erred. He and Cage were sharing a room in Omega, but they’d hardly been in it except for daysleep. If they had to stay underground long, though, he had a feeling he’d get to know Cage Reynolds quickly enough.

  He agreed with the guy about keeping the humans happy. Without them, the vamps would have to leave Omega as well and hit the streets in search of food. They were all out of practice at hunting, even if they had the desire. One of the reasons for founding Penton in the first place had been to avoid that predatory shit and shield their bonded humans from hungry vampires growing increasingly desperate.

  Plus, he noticed Mirren might be grumbling about ice cream, but he also was the one carrying the boxes rather than sticking them on the Gator. Will couldn’t help himself. “I have it on good authority that a certain oversized vampire has a sweet tooth and it’s virtually turned his mate into a diabetic. Ice cream’s for you and Glory, big guy.”

  Mirren speared him with a glare from eyes the color of storm clouds, but Will grinned at him. After a second, Mirren turned and headed toward the tree line with his load of ice cream, but not before Will caught the edge of a smile. Glory, a Muscogee Creek woman with telekinetic powers, had come to Penton under bad circumstances—rescued, along with Mirren, from Matthias’s compound in Virginia. She had a straight-talking, spirited nature that had tamed the Slayer, much to everyone’s surprise—especially Mirren’s.

  Will scoured the parking lot and surrounding areas while the others loaded up materials and blended into the shadows. Someone, probably Mirren, would return the Gator to the parking lot once it was unloaded.

  Aidan was last, hefting the remaining generator to carry in by hand. “Be careful out there. And don’t be surprised if you see Randa—she’s patrolling.” He frowned and paused, looking like something else was on his mind.

  Will might be getting the ability to roll humans’ minds, but he couldn’t read the mind of a master vampire, and it wasn’t like Aidan to be indecisive. “What’s up? Anything in particular you want me to look for?”

  Will planned to visit the densely wooded area behind his former house and dig his spare laptop out of its hiding place. If Aidan needed him to handle something else, though, the laptop could wait.

  “This is going to sound weird, but it’s about Melissa.” About the same height as Will’s six feet, but with long dark hair and blue eyes that grew downright icy when he was hungry or angry, Aidan had retained a hint of his native Irish accent. “I know she died. I heard her neck snap, for God’s sake. But I swear a trace of my bond to her is still there, and it shouldn’t be. It blinked out when she died, but it came back. It feels different and it’s faint, but I swear I feel it.”

  Aidan rubbed his eyes. “I know this is nuts, but…keep an eye out for her, you know?”

  Will pondered the nature of blood bonds, at least what little he knew of them. He’d performed them with a lot of Penton’s humans—well, OK, with a lot of Penton’s women, since all the humans had to be bonded to a scathe member. He’d never been close enough to any of them to have that kind of emotional connection, however, even with his fams. He couldn’t feel any ties to his current feeder, Olivia. The fact that he still thought of Liv as a feeder and not a familiar probably spoke volumes.

  In other words, this bonding issue was way outside his wheelhouse. “What do you think it means?”

  Aidan shrugged. “Don’t know. Probably just wishful thinking. But…oh, holy hell, forget it. Just be careful out there. My guess is that Matthias has stayed close. He has to be trying to figure out how we all escaped and will be waiting for one of us to resurface. Don’t play into his hand.”

  No problem. A run-in with the dad from hell was not on Will’s to-do list.

  After Aidan disappeared into the hatch entrance to Omega and the lock clicked, Will jammed on a black hat to camouflage his blond hair and loped toward Penton. It was after midnight, and Matthias’s patrols would be sniffing around.

  He stopped frequently, scenting the air for vampires or humans, and picked up his first whiff of eau de vampire about a mile from downtown, or what was left of downtown after Matthias had tried to blast it to hell.

  He stopped and scented the air again. Normally, all he could distinguish was whether something warm-blooded nearby was vampire, human, or animal. But he knew there were two vampires nearby; one belonged to the Penton scathe, and one didn’t.

  What the hell was going on? He was suddenly able to alter memories, and now he was able to tell not only that vamps were nearby, but what scathe they belonged to? This was not normal. Maybe he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and his senses had become heightened in advance of a total shutdown. If so, he wished he’d go ahead and get it over with so he could quit freaking himself out.

  He ignored both vampires and skirted to the back of the street, where the burned shell of his house still smelled of smoke and ash after three days. Aligning his position with the oak tree twenty feet behind what was left of his chimney, he paced forty steps into the woods.

  A thorny bramble draped over a small scrubby bush pricked his fingers when he pulled it back. Grasping the trunk of the bush, he eased it from its loose grasp in the soil, exposing the top of a metal box.

  The loud click of a cocked pistol preceded the cold press of steel against the back of his head by less than a second.

  He inhaled, annoyed. A rookie mistake. He’d gotten so engrossed in his task he’d let someone slip up on him.

  Vampire.

  Penton scathe.

  Female.

  Freaking Randa.

  “If I were your father, I’d already have the silver spoon back in your mouth, Willy. He’d have you trussed up like a rodeo calf by now, hauling you back to wherever it is he lives when he’s not terrorizing innocent people.”

  Will Ludlam was the kind of guy Randa Thomas had hated as a human
, and she didn’t like him a bit more as a vampire. Less, in fact. Not only was he a spoiled rich boy, he was now a virtually immortal spoiled rich boy. He had probably been a blue-chip jock in school with a 4.0 GPA and a string of girls trailing his every step.

  Plus, he annoyed the hell out of her. The consummate smart-ass.

  “No, if you were my father, you’d have slit my throat—not enough to kill me, but enough to make sure I couldn’t fight back.” His voice was soft, calm. “Then you’d hand me over to your sadistic freak show of a second-in-command, Shelton, who would play with me until I couldn’t take it anymore. Only when I was good and broken would you return the silver spoon to my mouth.”

  Good God, would any father really do that? Will didn’t really sound as if he were joking. Randa relaxed her stance for only a split second before the world tilted and she hit the ground, landing on her back, with Will stretched out on top of her in a full-body press. And he had her gun.

  “Damn it.” She pushed against him, but it was like pressing on bedrock.

  He propped on his elbows and grinned down at her. His hat had fallen off in the scuffle, and the moonlight glinted off his hair, making it look silver instead of a naturally streaked blond. And he had dimples, as if God hadn’t already rewarded him with enough in the looks department.

  “And if I were my father, you would be dead. Or worse. Believe me, with Matthias, there’s always much worse. Give up?”

  She squirmed some more, but froze when she realized he was getting turned on by her movements. There was definitely more of him pressing on her than there had been a few seconds earlier.

  He laughed, a white glint of teeth in the moonlight. “Oh, don’t stop moving, sweetheart. This is getting more and more interesting.”

  Yeah, she could feel exactly how interested he was getting. She felt a very un-vampire-like flush of heat as he wedged a knee between her legs. Damn it. She clenched her teeth at her body’s betrayal—which he’d be able to sense. She hated being a vampire; there was no sense of privacy. “Get. Off. Me. Now.”