Aidan looked at Mirren, then at Randa. “Tell us about him.”
She blew out a breath and began to talk. She probably told them more than they needed, including her own rocky history with him. She talked about Richard Thomas the colonel, the father, and—as much as she could—the man.
When she finished, that awful silence filled the room again. Will reached over and squeezed her hand.
Aidan rubbed the nape of his neck and tilted his head toward one shoulder, then the other. The crack of taut tendons filled the room. “Hannah, can you see anything else? Can you see an outcome?”
The girl shook her head and leaned against Cage.
“Randa, you understand that if your father reacts badly, we might have no choice but to either wipe his memories or defend ourselves?”
Randa closed her eyes. She’d been thinking about little else. About whether she could live with it if they had to kill her father. Ironic that she’d asked a similar question of Will not so long ago. She was gambling that her father loved her enough, and that he was fair-minded enough, to step away from his black-and-white world of absolute good and evil.
“I understand.”
“They go alone.” Mirren’s rumble cut through the room. “Randa and Will. Go to the colonel and get him used to the idea that vampires exist. Tell him you need help, but not our location. Not our names. If you decide you can trust him, he has to agree to come here, to Omega. Aidan and I have to approve everything.”
Randa swallowed hard and nodded. “And if he doesn’t agree to that?” Her father was used to leading, not following. Especially not following a type of being he didn’t know existed and wasn’t likely to trust.
“Then you know your options.”
Clouds obscured any moonlight that might have otherwise reached the rural two-lane highway that stretched across East Alabama toward Columbus, Georgia, where Colonel Richard Thomas made his retirement home. After slipping out of the Omega exit one at a time just after dusk, Will drove the pickup he’d been hauling supplies in, Randa rode shotgun, and the literal shotgun was wedged into the storage area behind the seats. They didn’t plan to take it to their meeting with the colonel, but then again, being prepared never hurt.
The digital clock on the truck’s dashboard read 7:30 p.m.
They’d spent most of the previous night talking with Aidan and the other lieutenants, especially Cage, about possible scenarios and psychological reactions the colonel might have, not only finding out his daughter who died five years ago was still alive, but that she was a vampire. It would be a lot to take in.
Afterward, Will and Randa had returned to their room and made love with a frantic, frenzied urgency, neither of them saying what Will knew was true for both of them: If this went badly, they might not have another chance to be together, to feel their skin heat with the friction of their movement, to taste, to touch, to love.
If this went badly, even if they survived, their relationship might be tainted.
If this went badly enough, Will might even have to kill Randa’s father, and she might not be able to forgive it, even though she understood the necessity of it.
Will had been shocked that Aidan and Mirren agreed so readily to approaching a human for help, even with the colonel’s connection to Randa. He had gone into that meeting prepared to argue, and the fact that both senior leaders of the scathe considered it a viable option without hours of debate told him how close they were to giving up.
Damn it, he wasn’t ready to give up. Before finding Aidan and helping him get Penton established, Will had spent decades on the move, avoiding his father, never settling down anywhere for very long, determined to never again get sucked into a life of recriminations, self-hatred, and fear.
He’d found a life he wanted to fight for and maybe somebody he wanted to share it with. That realization caused him to swerve out of his lane, and he pulled the steering wheel sharply to straighten their path. Ending up wrapped around a tree in Nowhere, Alabama, wouldn’t help matters, but hell, when did Randa and future become intertwined? Yet thinking about what she faced, confronting her father with some hard truth, made him fear losing her, if not to death, then to a family and a life with which he couldn’t compete.
“Would you watch where you’re going? Jeez.” Randa braced an arm on the passenger door. “Pull over and let me drive. Get your head out of your ass.”
Or maybe he was being a sentimental twit. The woman was seriously bossy. “Have you figured out what you’re going to say to him?”
Randa groaned, banging the back of her skull against the headrest. “No. Maybe knock on the door and see what he says? You got any better ideas?”
“Well, there is one thing that might help.”
She gave him a narrow-eyed look that radiated suspicion, even through the darkness of the truck’s cab. “What?”
“Let’s stop at an all-night salon or something in Columbus so you can get your hair back to its real color.” He liked the short haircut now that he’d gotten used to it. It suited her. But he wanted his redhead back. “It might make it easier for your dad to believe it’s really you.”
“I hadn’t even thought about it.” She ran her hands through the tangle of loose waves. “Good idea, but there’s no such thing as an all-night salon, not in Columbus, Georgia, anyway. Look for a drugstore or a Walmart.”
Once they got near the bridge that crossed the Chattahoochee River and took them from Alabama into Georgia, Will spotted a superstore and pulled the truck into the mostly empty lot. “You got cash?”
“Yeah, I took some from your Robin Hood stash. Need anything?”
Sure he did. Clean water. No pandemic vaccine. Matthias to disappear in a cloud of dust. World peace. “I’m good.”
While Randa shopped for hair dye, Will tried to visualize his worst-case scenario. The colonel wasn’t likely to haul off and shoot them—he was too well trained and, if Randa was any indication, too disciplined. The hardest thing they might face initially was getting him to believe it wasn’t some kind of twisted scam.
Dye must have been easy to shop for; Randa was back inside of fifteen minutes. “Bombshell Bronze,” she said, holding up the white plastic bag. “Let’s hope it doesn’t turn into Passion Fruit Pink or Oragutan Orange.”
Turns out Bombshell Bronze was sexy as hell. Randa had locked herself in the bathroom as soon as they’d roused a grumbling, sleepy clerk at a small roadside motel and checked into a room at the end of a row of units that had seen better days a few decades ago.
She emerged forty-five minutes later with painted nails, her army T-shirt and khakis, and hair that reminded him how beautiful she was. He wished they had time to hang around the motel so he could show her an appropriate amount of appreciation.
“You ready?” She was practically bouncing off the wall from nerves.
“Let me tell you something first. I…um…you…” He hadn’t been tongue-tied around a girl since his human life at about age sixteen, but he struggled to get the words out. “I just want you to know that…” What? That he wanted to find out what they had when they weren’t injured or running for their lives?
“You want me to know what?” Randa pulled him into a tight hug and laughed. “That you’ll love me no matter how big an asshole my father is?”
He pulled away from her, cradling her face in his hands. “That’s exactly it.” He pressed his lips gently against hers, a sweet kiss full of hope. “Exactly.”
They held each other for a few minutes, needing to leave but not wanting to let the moment pass.
Finally, Will huffed out a breath. “OK, we gotta do this before it gets any later.”
“Right.” Randa dug her cell phone from her pocket and punched a couple of keys. “Just going to make sure he’s home.”
Good thinking. “Will he recognize your number and freak out?”
She shook her head. “It’s a new number that I got—” Her face froze a few seconds before she ended the call. “It was him. He s
ounds just the same. Will, I don’t know if I can do this.”
He took her hand. “You can do it. We can do it.” True, he didn’t have a big role other than providing backup. A lot of this was going to depend on her. All he could do was keep her safe.
The Thomas house where Randa’s grandparents had lived was the only stable home she’d known—she’d described her childhood and youth as a series of army bases all over the country, interspersed with a year here or six months there with her paternal grandparents, who’d died before she was deployed. Her dad had moved here when he retired, probably because it was near Fort Benning and he could still be around the army even if he wasn’t in it anymore. At least not in any official capacity.
The redbrick ranch house anchored the end of a cul-de-sac in a gently aging middle-class neighborhood full of mature oak trees, broad lawns, and SUVs. Will drove to the end of the circle, rounded it, and retraced their path to park in front of 23 Spruce Street, facing out. In case they needed to leave in a hurry.
Randa got out of the truck and squared her shoulders. Will’s heart broke a little as she assumed a facade she’d gradually relinquished over the past couple of weeks: the tightened jaw, the hardened eyes that challenged whatever they saw, the rigid back that wouldn’t bend in a strong gale. In a matter of seconds, she’d once again become Randa Thomas, the tough-as-nails soldier, and that step backward made Will hate the man they were preparing to confront for making her feel she couldn’t be strong and still be herself.
Maybe Rick Thomas had more in common with Matthias than he’d thought. But Randa believed her father to be a fair and honorable man at heart, which Matthias wasn’t. And if Rick Thomas sold his daughter short, Will had two knives and a pistol within easy reach.
They didn’t talk as they followed what seemed like an impossibly long set of paving stones to the front door. Randa looked at Will, and he nodded. She rang the doorbell.
Its ring seemed to echo through the house beyond. A dog barked inside the door. A man’s voice calmed it. The fall of footsteps grew louder. The outside light clicked on, making Will blink. The door opened, and for a moment, it was as if the world had stopped.
Richard Thomas, US Army colonel (retired), was a tall man in his late fifties, dark hair turning silver at his temples, a strong jaw, broad shoulders, rigid posture. Will tried to see Randa in him. Maybe the slightly upturned nose, the shape of her mouth, the hazel-green eyes.
Eyes that were wide and staring through a storm door at what must surely seem to him a ghost.
“Dad?” Randa’s voice shook. “It’s me.”
He cleared his throat, and Will saw him blink several times—tears? “What kind of fucking joke is this? It’s not funny.”
Randa looked down, then back up. Her voice was trembling but clear. “I was in Kabul in 2009 on a night patrol when I was caught in a botched ambush. My body wasn’t ever found because, obviously, I survived. I was born on March fifteenth, 1984, in the Fort Benning infirmary. I just learned that my twin brother…” She stumbled, paused, continued. “I just found out that Rory died of a similar cancer to the type that killed our mother when we were two years old.”
The colonel made no move to open the door. His face was the color of chalk, but his voice held steel. He flicked his gaze at Will only once, but Will would have bet his Robin Hood take that if he made a move, the man would be ready.
“Anybody could’ve found that information,” he said. “What do you want? You have thirty seconds to give me a reason not to call the police.”
A voice came from inside. “Everything OK, Dad?”
Will put a hand on Randa’s back to steady her as the door opened wider and another man stood next to her father. Younger, taller, more muscular, tanner. A medium-sized dog—a boxer, Will thought—began whimpering and scratching at the door. The dog might do more than anything to convince them this was really Randa. The younger man stepped closer to the storm door. “Holy shit. Ran?”
Randa swallowed so hard Will could feel it in his palm as he rubbed small circles on her back. “Hi, Robbie.” She took a deep breath. “Dad, it’s really me. I’m sorry to spring this on you, but what can I say to convince you this isn’t a scam?”
The colonel seemed incapable of speech, so Robbie answered. “What did I give you for your sixth birthday?”
Randa smiled. “A turtle you’d named Colonel Thomas. I took it to show-and-tell in Miss Michaels’s first-grade class.”
“My God, Randa.” That finally broke through the armor. The colonel fumbled with the lock on the storm door, threw it open, and wrapped his arms around his daughter. He won points with Will by not trying to stop his tears, or hide them.
Will felt like an intruder or a voyeur, but he wasn’t going to do the polite thing and sit in the truck while the Thomas family had its reunion. He wasn’t letting Randa out of his sight. So he stood and waited.
Finally, Randa turned and motioned him inside. “Dad, Robbie, this is my friend Will—William Hendrix.” They’d agreed to play it safe on the last names as long as possible, and since Will had been a Jimi Hendrix fan back in his human days, this had been one of his frequent aliases.
The colonel studied Will an uncomfortably long time before finally reaching out a hand to shake. “Thank you for bringing my daughter home, Mr. Hendrix. I would ask you to stay, but Randa needs to be with her family. You understand we have a lot of catching up to do.”
Will gave him the most guileless smile in his repertoire—the just-an-innocent-guy, aw-shucks smile. The colonel didn’t smile back. “Sorry, sir, but Randa asked me to come with her and I need to stay.”
“Ran, are you in some kind of trouble?” Robbie was giving Will the evil eye now. Terrific. The dog was jumping so high he could almost lick Randa on her chin.
“Will needs to be here,” she said. “He can help me explain where I’ve been and what happened to me. And don’t call anyone else yet. The conversation we’re about to have is need-to-know only, and Robbie, I hate to ask you this, but I need to talk to Dad alone.”
Randa the soldier had reappeared, and Will was glad to see her. He’d been squelching a fear—so deeply he hadn’t put it into words or coherent thought—that she might forget why they were there if she got overwhelmed by family and the tantalizing prospect of resuming a seminormal life. Once again, he’d underestimated her.
Robbie wasn’t happy. “Ran, whatever’s wrong, I can help.”
She pulled him into a hug, and Will had a flash of insight into the Thomas family dynamic. She’d been the only girl in a family of dominant men who weren’t challenging her to compete with them, as she’d grown up thinking. They’d half smothered her trying to protect her. She might resent them for it, but Will certainly couldn’t hate them for it.
After some discussion, Robbie finally agreed to go but got Randa’s cell number.
Once he was gone, the colonel closed the door and locked it behind him. He pointed them toward the dining room table, where he and Robbie appeared to have been playing cards. Two beer bottles sat opened and half-emptied.
The living room they’d passed through spoke of comfortable middle-class roots. Early American furniture, lots of oak, oval braided rugs on shiny wooden floors. The eat-in kitchen wasn’t modern, but it was comfortable.
Will gathered the cards and stacked them on the edge of the table, and they all took chairs. The house was tense, quiet, awkward.
“I’m sorry to do this, but do you have your identification? Both of you?” The colonel didn’t make assumptions or accept things at face value, and Will respected that. Those were traits that would come in handy should he decide to help them.
Will pulled out his wallet and his beautifully faked Alabama driver’s license for William Hendrix and handed it to the colonel. It showed the address of what was in reality an empty lot in Montgomery.
“I don’t have a current license anymore, but I have a few things.” Randa had anticipated her father asking for proof of identity, and
she pulled out the items she’d had with her when she managed to get herself smuggled out of Afghanistan. Military ID, dog tags, her old Georgia driver’s license, and a scarf that had belonged to her mother. Her dad would recognize it, she had said, and she’d been right. He took it from her and fingered the blue wool.
“Rory had one just like it, except it was tan,” Randa said softly. “We used to fight over who got to keep the blue one.”
The colonel nodded, and when he looked up, his expression said he believed her. His face softened when he looked at her, and Will knew that Rick Thomas loved his daughter. He might not have known how to raise her, but he loved her. That would help.
“Where have you been? I don’t know where else to start. Why didn’t you tell us you were alive?”
Randa sighed and looked at Will, who nodded his encouragement.
“I wasn’t killed in that ambush.” Randa’s voice rang like a small stone in a deep well as the quiet, empty house seemed to swell around them. “I was abducted. Taken by a man, or what I thought was a man.”
“Why weren’t there hostage negotiations? Why didn’t your CO know about this? I’ll have someone’s job…” Rick pushed his chair back, obviously ready to wage war against whatever military screwup accidentally reported soldiers dead.
“Dad, sit down. It’s not what you think. The person who abducted me wasn’t human. He was…He was a vampire.”
The colonel’s face registered surprise, but quickly morphed to anger. “What kind of joke is this? How dare you come in here, rip our hearts open again when we just buried your twin brother, for God’s sake, and pull some kind of sick, freakish…” He turned furious eyes to Will. “You’re behind this, aren’t you? You have smart-ass written all over your face.”
And Will thought he’d left his inner smart-ass at home.
He grinned at the colonel, making no attempts to hide the delicate, curved fangs that extended about an eighth of an inch below the rest of his upper teeth. The Penton vampires could mainstream well enough to pass for human, but it was by choice. Will could vamp it up as well as the next guy.
Omega Page 19