Redemption (The Penton Vampire Legacy)

by Susannah Sandlin

  Owen felt Lucy pull away, but he had no plans to stop. Would she let him drain her human? He opened his eyes to see if she looked upset, but she’d turned her back and walked to the window. Well, then. She was willing to let him die.

  Danny’s legs collapsed beneath him, but Owen held him upright, closing his eyes again and feeding deeply. He felt the man’s pulse weaken, his heart fluttering like a hummingbird’s wings. When he was gone, Owen dropped the body to the floor with a thud and swayed from the rush of being sated for the first time in a while. The girl he’d drained before his meeting with Aidan had been so used up, she’d barely slaked his thirst.

  “We’ll need to get rid of him,” Lucy said, still facing the window. “Somewhere Aidan won’t find him. With me cut off from the scathe, they’ll just assume he left Penton.”

  “They’d let him do that? Just leave?” Owen felt drunk with the glut of blood. If he hadn’t been starving, he’d never have been able to finish a human male off in one feeding. Even then, he suspected that the guy had some kind of heart problem or he wouldn’t have buzzed so fast.

  Lucy turned back to him with the face of someone who’d suddenly aged. “He’d been an alcoholic for years. Lost everything he had. We helped him shake the habit, hoping he’d want to stay on with us. But if he wanted to go back to Atlanta, Aidan would let him.”

  Owen grimaced. “Aidan’s too soft.”

  Lucy didn’t answer. Owen still didn’t think he could trust her, but he was beginning to really, really wish that he could.

  Krys jammed the iPod buds into her ears and relaxed on the sofa, listening to soft acoustic music with a Celtic lilt, one of Aidan’s additions to her song list. It was almost seven, and the hours just after sundown had become her favorite for reasons that she didn’t want to examine too closely.

  Five nights had passed since the big vampire unveiling. Amazing how fast she’d eased into a routine once she’d agreed to stay for a month. She’d get up at eight, shower and dress, and find her breakfast tray on the floor by the time she’d dried her hair, always with an Atlanta newspaper alongside it. Lunch came at noon, then dinner at six—usually with a fresh flower laid atop the container. Sometimes it was a rose, but more often it was an enticing bloom whose name she didn’t know. Somebody had exotic taste in flowers.

  She’d go stir-crazy if she had to live this way forever, but she believed Aidan when he said it was only for a month and, truth was, she had nothing to go home to except a lot of debt, a crummy apartment, and an endless parade of nights in whatever emergency room or clinic she eventually landed in.

  So in the quiet, empty hours, she read from one of the books Aidan had brought her, worked crosswords, and thought about her life, including a lot of the crap she usually avoided dwelling on for very long. How had she never realized that every goal she’d set for herself, every plan she’d made, had revolved around her father—getting away from him, staying away from him, trying to get past the head games he’d played with her?

  The last time she’d lived under his roof, she’d been seventeen and just a few days out of high school. She’d kept her acceptance letter from Auburn University, and her scholarship notification, hidden in her room for months, but somehow graduation had made her feel brave; her impending freedom had brought an unfamiliar happiness.

  “I got accepted at Auburn. I start in August,” she’d said at the family dinners her dad always insisted on having. “I think I want to major in biology.”

  Her mother’s face had brightened, and Krys had had a fleeting hope that her dad would be happy for her. He didn’t say anything except a noncommittal “Hmm,” and then ate his dinner in silence. Before the meal ended, he’d risen from the table, gone to the counter to pour himself another drink, and blindsided Krys with a punch to her left jaw. If he’d been sober, he would’ve broken it. Instead, she’d hit the floor and protected her head against his kicks. All he ever said was, “You ain’t going nowhere.”

  When he’d staggered out of the kitchen, Krys pushed herself to a sitting position and saw her mom still seated at the table. Her voice was soft. “Reckon you better plan on getting a job ’round here.”

  It had taken seventeen years, but Krys realized then that her mom would never come to her rescue, never defend her, and maybe even needed her to absorb some of her dad’s wrath. That night Krys had stuffed the few clothes she owned into a pillowcase, climbed out the window, and found her way to a shelter. The only time she’d seen her dad since then had been after her mother’s suicide, at the funeral.

  She had let his criticism and bullying define her. Now it felt as if her life had been stripped bare, and she wasn’t sure who Krystal Harris was or what she wanted, except that it couldn’t be a life defined by another controlling man.

  Which made her fixation on her kidnapper—her vampire kidnapper—even more ridiculous. She waited for Aidan Murphy to show up every night as if he had been God’s chosen, and then practically fell over herself trying to coax a smile or a rare laugh out of him. Somehow she’d gone from being the victim to worrying about the guy who victimized her. Seeing him not as a monster but as a good man who worried about the people for whom he felt responsible. She’d grown able to read his moods, from the tightness around his eyes that meant he was worried about something to the stiff set of his shoulders when he was stressed.

  You are a great big cliché, falling for your abductor. Your vampire abductor, who could snap your neck with one hand or drain all the blood from you and make you enjoy it.

  Stockholm syndrome, that’s what it had to be.

  She no longer doubted that he was a vampire. Watching Mirren’s procedure had stamped out any misgivings. Medically speaking, he should be dead. He’d been virtually drained of blood, his already slow heartbeat growing erratic. But the loss of the magenta fluid dripping into the bag hadn’t made him weak—only stronger and angrier and more desperate.

  She hadn’t wanted to watch him feed, so she’d left the room. The whole idea gave her the heebie-jeebies. When she had gone back to check on him, he’d dropped into a sleep so deep she couldn’t rouse him, then he’d come by at sunset to issue a halting thanks, looking as big and scary as ever. Science—the belief system she’d built her whole worldview around—had failed her. One more gigantic chink in life as she’d planned it.

  A haunting song called “The Taming” had ended and another was about to begin when she heard Aidan’s knock, even under the earbuds. Her heart sped, and she hated that he’d know it, know how her body reacted to him whether she wanted it to or not. But there was nothing she could do about it, except maybe keep her thoughts on something like chemical equations. But then again, chemistry was part of the problem, wasn’t it?

  She pulled the door open to find him peering at her from behind an oversize cardboard box. “May I come in?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “What if I said no?”

  “You’d be really sorry to have missed out on all these books.” He wasn’t nearly as good at hiding his feelings as he thought he was, and Krys read the strain behind the small smile. Something had happened.

  She took the box and set it on the floor beside the coffee table, trying not to grimace at its weight, while Aidan took his usual spot on the sofa. Instead of claiming the armchair or the far end of the couch, she sat next to him. She’d been prepared to be bitchy and victimlike tonight, but one look at his face brought out the need to help him instead. “What’s wrong? I can tell you’re upset.”

  He grunted, slouched down so that his head was even with the sofa back, and closed his eyes. “Just been a helluva night already.”

  She wanted to soothe him, so she sat on her hands to keep them to herself. Touching him might be soothing for him but it would take her mind to places it didn’t need to go. “Talk to me about it. I mean, really, who am I going to tell?”

  He swiveled his head to look at her. She could tell he wanted to talk, was measuring her ability to understand, maybe, or to empathize. At first
she thought he wasn’t going to answer.

  “Mirren and I tried to follow another of my lieutenants tonight—you met Lucy, right?”

  Krys nodded.

  “She’s shacked up with my brother, Owen. They move every day, so we haven’t been able to find them. But she’s with him. She could’ve let us know where they are so we could put an end to this, but she hasn’t.”

  Krys struggled to piece together the bits of information she knew or had overheard. “But Lucy was the mate of the doctor Owen killed. It doesn’t make sense that she’d join up with him.”

  Aidan stared at the fire. “I don’t think she’s sold us out, or Owen would have made a move already. She’s just being stupid. But she went too far. She—” He stopped. Krys stared at his profile as he focused on the fire and wanted to smooth away the worry lines. She rested her hand on his arm without thinking, and he reached to twine his fingers through hers.

  “What happened?”

  His jaw muscles twitched. “She let Owen kill her familiar, a guy named Daniel. Helped him. He’d been fed on by two vampires. Mirren and I found his body in the woods behind the mill village.”

  “It couldn’t have been somebody else? Maybe Lucy wasn’t involved.”

  Aidan shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. He was bonded to Lucy, so the only way another vampire could feed from him is if she broke their bond. She lured him to her and then she and Owen bled him out.”

  He dropped her hand, got to his feet, and began pacing like a trapped animal. Ironic, since she was the prisoner here—but maybe she wasn’t the only one. He seemed caught in a web that she didn’t understand.

  “I didn’t want to move against him until I knew where our Tribunal stood—that’s the vampire lawmakers. Now I’m thinking we should take him out—if we can ever find him.”

  “He’s your brother. Could you really kill him?” Krys shuffled the bit about vampire lawmakers aside to ponder later. She hadn’t thought about there being such a large vampire population that they needed organized leadership.

  Aidan sighed. “He’s not leaving me any choice. Plus, he’s not really my family, not anymore. Mirren’s my family. Will, Mark, and Mel. Hannah.”

  Krys understood that distinction all too well. Her father was blood but he was not family. She sat in silence while Aidan stared into the fire as if it might have answers.

  “You should use your humans to do it,” she said, thinking.

  He turned from the fire and frowned. “What?”

  “Send your humans out to hunt Owen and his vampires during the day—seems to me they’re your greatest advantage. They aren’t controlled by the sun and can hunt during the day when there’s no danger Owen will be skulking around, and could even kill them with very little risk.” She couldn’t believe she’d advocated murder, but she’d learned a long time ago to look life square on and do what needed to be done. The stakes here were high. “I saw how out of it Mirren was the other day. He was totally vulnerable.”

  Aidan shook his head. “We can’t ask our fams to fight our battles for us.”

  Being a vampire hasn’t kept you from being a stubborn man. “Why not? Listen, you say the people have a good life here. I’d think they would want to protect it—protect you—especially since there’s virtually no risk to them. And besides that, they’re the ones getting attacked. Owen seems to be afraid to come after you directly. Let them defend themselves.”

  Aidan stared at her. “But...”

  She wanted to laugh at the perplexed look on his face but stifled it, picking up the gold and purple orchid that had been on her dinner tray and cradling its fragile bloom in her hands. “Just think about it. You have to admit it’s a good idea if you decide not to wait for your...sheriffs, or senators, or whatever you called them.”

  He grinned at her. “Tribunal. And yeah, I’ll think about it.” His gaze slid to the flower and then back to her face. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  Her heart leaped at the idea of leaving this room under her own steam for a change, and she jumped up before he could change his mind. “Where are we going?”

  “I want to show you something. You’ll need a coat.”

  Krys pulled her jacket from the closet—the first time she’d used it since her so-called job interview—and slid it on over her sweater. Instead of turning left toward the clinic access tunnel, Aidan headed right, taking her hand in his again, his warm palm against hers, strong fingers enveloping hers like a glove.

  “I didn’t realize there was an exit on this side.”

  He glanced down at her, slowing his pace so she didn’t have to jog to keep up with him. “Daniel’s body is up at the clinic. I don’t want to go back in there tonight.”

  They walked in silence for a moment, and Krys could practically feel the guilt radiating from him. “You aren’t responsible for what Lucy did, you know.” They’d almost reached the end of the hallway, and she couldn’t figure out where they were going—it looked as if it ended in a solid wall.

  He gave a bitter chuckle. “Thanks for trying to make me feel better, but I am responsible. I recruited Daniel. I brought him here. I might as well have killed him myself.”

  Krys tugged him to a stop. “Look, I grew up with this abusive son of a bitch for a father who made me feel like every bad thing that happened was my fault and exactly what I deserved. But you know what I’ve realized? People make bad choices, and sometimes stuff just happens. You aren’t responsible for somebody else’s choices or for random acts of the universe. You might be stuck cleaning up the mess, but that doesn’t make it your fault.”

  He stared at her. “That’s the first time you’ve mentioned your father except to say you were estranged.”

  Krys laughed—her turn to sound bitter. “Yeah, well, he’s not worth talking about. I’ve had a lot of time to think since I’ve been here and you know what? I’ve let him define my whole life without realizing it. And I want to be more than that.”

  Something intense flared in his eyes, and her heart thudded as he slid a palm up her arm. “Do you realize how extraordinary you are? I—” He paused, then shook his head and started back down the hall. “Come on, let’s walk.”

  Damn. She really, really wanted to hear the rest of that sentence. But he’d reached the end of the hallway, pressing a tiny button in the corner of what looked like a dead end. A panel covered in the same design as the wall whirred and slid open wide enough for them to ease through single file.

  “What is this?” Krys shivered as they stepped into a concrete tunnel and the panel slid closed behind them with a soft click.

  “Escape hatch.” He grasped her hand again and they walked along an upward-slanting concrete tunnel with masonry walls and harsh industrial lighting overhead—everything painted gunmetal gray. “Hang around vampires long enough, and you’ll learn we’re a wee bit obsessive about making spaces where we’ll be safe. Like you said, Mirren was vulnerable that day when he was in his daysleep. We’re all vulnerable. So we come up with elaborate ways to create safe spaces. Then we devise equally elaborate ways to escape from them.”

  Krys laughed, and he squeezed her hand.

  “You know what that laugh does to me, don’t you?” His voice teased, and she felt a wicked stab of need shoot straight through her. He tugged her against him and lightly grasped the back of her neck with his free hand. “It makes me want to do this.”

  He angled his head for a kiss, but this was no soft brush of lips. His mouth was hard and searching. God, but the man could kiss. She probably shouldn’t...oh, what the hell.

  She snaked her arms around his neck and molded her body against his. His hard arousal, pressing between them, was like an electrical jolt to her brain. “Wait.” She stepped away from him. God, his eyes were almost white. “I’m not—I don’t think—”

  “Shit.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath and chuckled. “Sorry about that. You test all my control, you know?”

  She couldn’t speak for his con
trol, but he sure tested hers. He’s a vampire. He’s your kidnapper. He is not long-term relationship material. She needed to keep reminding herself of that.

  Aidan’s thoughts were tangled as he and Krys climbed the stairs out of the sub-suite tunnel into an abandoned house on the eastern edge of Penton. Her common sense and quick grasp of the situation with Owen (and hardheaded assessment of how to take care of it) had bulldozed him. Hell, just being within three feet of the woman bulldozed him.

  His body ached when he was with her, ached with the need to touch her and be touched by her. He knew now that his attraction to her wasn’t driven by hunger anymore—if it ever really had been. He wanted her, and only her. She wanted him too, but was it real? If she were free to leave tonight, would she stay with him, or would she run away?

  He didn’t have the guts to find out. Owen’s threat made a good excuse for keeping her here, but in truth, he couldn’t bear to let her go. Not yet.

  “What is this place?” She looked around the darkened room, illuminated only by shards of light coming through the unshuttered windows from the street outside.

  “Just an abandoned house we use for the escape hatch.” He shifted the floor tiles around to camouflage the opening through which they’d just climbed. “There are lots of empty houses here, so we try to put a few of them to use. Don’t want to tear them down in case we need them, although I don’t see our population ever getting back to the size Penton was when the mill was active.”

  They walked into the cold night air, and Krys stopped and took a deep breath, looking up at the stars and around her. Watching her, Aidan felt a stab of guilt. He missed the sunlight so badly, and yet he’d even taken away her freedom to breathe fresh air.

  “Come on, I want to show you something.” They walked along the empty street, crossed a couple of backyards, and finally edged a wooded area that led into his own yard.