Redemption (The Penton Vampire Legacy)

by Susannah Sandlin

  Mirren nodded, and then waited a few seconds before heading toward the back of the auditorium with his hands in his pockets. He skirted the room and reached Hannah, whose eyes were unfocused and wild. She jumped when he touched her on the shoulder. Then she nodded and took his hand. They exited the back door, arousing a few curious stares but nothing Aidan had to handle. Most Pentonites thought Hannah was just a cute kid who’d had the misfortune to be turned vampire at an early age.

  The questions from the crowd were fizzling out, so Will handed the mic back to Aidan. “It sounds pretty clear that most of you favor a few daytime hunts before members of the scathe go in for a fight. Right?”

  Scattered applause and shouts of agreement met his question. “You’ll start tomorrow, then. Groups of three or more only. No solos. Stick together. See Tim to sign up on the schedule of places to look.” Aidan paused as Mirren stepped inside the back door and nodded. His face was grim.

  “Everybody head home now and stay in for the night,” he said, keeping his expression neutral. “Don’t go anywhere at night if you don’t have to till this is over.”

  He was beginning to wonder if it would ever be over.

  Krys followed Mark and Melissa to their car as everyone filed out of the community center. Signs for quilting classes, art projects, and community gardens covered the cinder-block walls. Typical small-town stuff. Well, except for the vampires. The only differences were a lack of kids and probably a dearth of red blood cells.

  Mark had cranked the engine before she and Melissa got their doors closed. “Something’s wrong,” he said, peeling out of the lot and attracting a few curious glances.

  “I know, but slow down,” Melissa said, putting a hand on his arm. “Aidan won’t want anybody following us.”

  Aidan’s expression had changed during the meeting, and Krys knew it had something to do with Hannah. She’d been watching the girl during the meeting and she had looked one step short of a seizure.

  “What do you think happened? Hannah got a vision or something?” she asked.

  Melissa glanced back at her and nodded. “Aidan had Mirren take her out of there. They probably went to his house.”

  Krys saw Aidan as soon as Mark stopped the car in their driveway at Mill Trace. He was on his porch talking to Mirren, while Hannah sat on the front steps with her head on her knees. She and the Calverts walked over, with Mark charging ahead.

  “You guys might not want to see this,” Aidan said, not looking up.

  They approached the porch anyway, until Melissa saw something that made her cry out and turn back to Mark. He took one step closer, and then he turned away, too, cursing.

  Her doctor’s instincts kicking in, Krys pushed past them, touching Hannah’s bent head gently as she climbed the steps. A woman lay on the porch, and Krys fought an urge to avert her own gaze. Instead, she tried to absorb it from a clinical point of view.

  The woman had been bound in a silver chain. A crazy road map of bloody cuts stretched across her face and chest, and a splintered femur burst through the black fabric of one pant leg. Definitely vampire—delicate fangs showed below her lips, which had been peeled back in obvious pain.

  “Is she still alive?” Krys knelt next to the woman.

  Aidan’s face was grim. “Depends on what you consider alive. Technically. She’d eventually heal from all the physical damage but the mental...” He shook his head, jaw clenched.

  The cuts looked odd, and Krys leaned over for a better look. Something granular glistened on the ribbons of red crisscrossing the woman’s face. Krys stuck out a finger to pinch a bit in her fingers, but Mirren grabbed her arm.

  “Some kind of acid,” he said. “To make sure her face is scarred. We can’t heal that.”

  Krys felt a chill run through her. What kind of monster would do this? In her head she heard the soft voice and Irish brogue of Owen Murphy. That’s who’d do this.

  “Her name is Lucy, isn’t it?” She looked up at Aidan, and he nodded. The woman had been beautiful. Krys reached out and touched her face, avoiding the acid-laced cuts. “How do you know she’s mentally damaged?”

  “She was talking crazy when I got here,” Mirren said. “Wild. Aidan did his trance number on her when he got here, till we decide what to do.”

  “There’s no deciding. We know what we have to do.” Aidan planted his back against the door facing and stared into the night. Krys wished she could comfort him.

  “Well, shit.” Boots thumped up the stairs and everyone moved back a step to make way for Will. “That’s what Hannah saw tonight? I knew something was up.” He knelt next to Lucy, looking at her with a detachment that the rest of them couldn’t manage. Krys wondered at his background.

  Aidan walked to the edge of the porch, looking out at the night, seemingly unaffected by the cold that had Krys shivering and Mark and Melissa huddled together. Krys moved to sit on the steps next to Hannah, instinctively putting an arm around the girl’s thin shoulders. Hannah leaned into her, and Krys rested her chin on the girl’s head, stroking her hair.

  “Hannah, did you touch her to see if you could tell anything?” Aidan asked. “Is there any way you can find out if she told Owen about our safe spaces? Do you know if her mind will heal?”

  The girl shook her head. “I’ll try it now.”

  Krys frowned and tightened her arm around Hannah. Every instinct left over from her childhood screamed at her to protect the girl. “She’s been through enough. Don’t make her do this.”

  “She’s a vampire, Krys, not a child,” Aidan said, his voice soft. “Don’t ever forget that. In some ways she’s the most powerful of all of us.”

  Hannah pulled herself away from Krys and turned to look up the steps. Moving slowly, she climbed onto the porch and knelt next to Lucy, then took the woman’s hand in hers and closed her eyes. She whimpered once and went still. Krys could see her eyes moving behind her closed lids.

  They waited in silence. After a while Hannah removed her hand. “There’s guilt inside her, but I can’t tell why. Her mind is hard for me to read.”

  “Has her mind been broken?” Aidan looked at Hannah.

  “I don’t know.”

  Aidan closed his eyes and leaned against one of the porch columns. “If she’s been mentally broken, she’ll never come out of it. It’ll never be safe for her to live here again. Plus, she’s already been cut from the scathe. If we let her loose in another city, she could kill aimlessly or even lead problems back to Penton.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Mirren said. He lifted Lucy, chains and all, and left the porch.

  “Wait.” Krys jumped up. “What do you mean you’ll take care of it? You’re not going to kill her before we know for sure she’s not going to recover.”

  Mirren paused and looked at Aidan.

  Krys appealed to him. “Please. Let me try to treat her. You can keep her in the chains until you know for sure.” Krys saw his resolve waiver, and pressed. “Please.”

  She couldn’t stand to see them put Lucy down like a rabid dog. Not without trying everything.

  Hannah slipped one of her slender hands into Aidan’s and leaned against him. He looked down at her and she nodded. “Fine. We’ll try it for a couple of days. But not in one of our regular rooms and not at her house—she’s too dangerous. Put her in one of the secure rooms beneath city hall. A scathe member needs to be with her all the time at night, and a human during daylight hours.”

  Will followed Mirren toward the cars, and then turned back to Aidan. “You realize they knew where to leave the body. Be careful.”

  Aidan nodded, and then looked at Krys. “Where are you living? Did Mark find you a place?”

  She pointed to the house across the street. He blinked, gave Mark and Melissa a pointed look, and broke into a weary smile.

  “Welcome to the neighborhood.”

  Home. Well, house, anyway. Krys sat in the middle of the living room floor of the house on Mill Trace and stared at the sunlight streaming t
hrough the plantation shutters. When she’d come in three hours ago, all her stuff from the room beneath the clinic had been packed in cardboard boxes and delivered, along with boxes of books and personal items from her apartment in Americus. Her two lives had merged, at least physically.

  She’d been too overwhelmed by the night’s events to think much about this new house of hers, but now she sat on the floor and pulled a box open. Who had touched her things, meager though they were? From what she knew of Aidan’s power structure, she’d guess the job had fallen to Will or one of his fams. He seemed to be the all-around go-to guy in the organization, but Krys just couldn’t get a feel for him. He’d been downright calculating when he looked at Lucy last night, but maybe they didn’t like each other. He did seem devoted to Aidan.

  Boy, he must think your life is pathetic. All she’d managed to accumulate since college was a little bit of cheap furniture, a few clothes, the Dinosaur, and a lot of debt. Now she had the clothes and the Dinosaur, and wasn’t too worried about the debt. She’d gone way off the student-loan collectors’ grid.

  A knock at the front door jolted her out of her brain fog. She could see Melissa through the sidelight window, and smiled as she welcomed her neighbor. No, her friend. She liked the sound of that.

  “Want to go for breakfast before we head to the clinic?” Melissa already wore her Auburn scrubs.

  “Sure.” Krys grabbed her bag and followed Melissa to her car. “Like your scrubs—I went to school at Auburn. Did you? Or are you just a football fan?”

  “I was in the nursing program there.” Melissa cranked the engine and pulled out of the driveway. “Well, at least I was until I got mixed up with an abusive guy. I’m not proud of this, but you might as well know. I struggled with depression and tried to kill myself before I met Aidan at the free clinic in Atlanta.”

  Krys had trouble imagining Melissa in that life, but she herself was walking proof that grim things often hid behind smiling facades.

  The spiky-haired waitress at the cafe, Laurel, recognized Krys. “Here with Mark’s better half this morning?” She laughed and showed them to the same booth. Melissa pulled laminated menus from behind the napkin dispenser and handed one to Krys. “Did Mark make you eat the monster meat meal?”

  Krys nodded. “I swear, a whole herd of animals died for that platter. You know, you really won’t get anemic from Aidan feeding every other day.”

  Melissa rolled her eyes. “Mark just uses that as an excuse to eat bacon.”

  Krys looked over the menu and was glad to see items that didn’t oink, moo, or cluck. “I’m thinking oatmeal sounds good.”

  Their orders came quickly, and Melissa proved to be a nonstop conversationalist, which gave Krys a chance to ask questions about her new neighbors.

  “So you were already with Aidan when you met Mark?”

  Melissa crunched her cereal. “Yep. Been with Aidan five years, and Mark and I have been married almost four. Aidan introduced me to his new business manager, and that was it for me. Knew he was the one.”

  Krys ran her spoon in circles through her bowl of oatmeal. “I hope this isn’t too personal, but I’ve been wondering. Doesn’t it bother Mark that you and Aidan...” If she was going to stay here, she had to get over this aversion to the lingo. “Does it bother him that Aidan feeds from you? I mean, it’s really intimate.” Not to mention that it had made her ridiculously jealous.

  Melissa laughed. “No, it’s intimate but...Aidan’s a good friend. I think he considers me a good friend. That’s all there is, and Mark knows that. He’s been around the vamps enough to know that unless one of them is mated, they really can separate sex and feeding. We’re happy here—or we will be when this Owen situation gets taken care of.”

  There was that word again: happy.

  “While I’m being nosy, can I ask you something else?” Krys fidgeted with the pink and blue sweetener packets on the table, not wanting to look Melissa in the eyes.

  “Shoot.”

  “I still don’t understand why you stay. I mean, at first, yeah. You owe Aidan and all. And you like him. But this”—she looked around—“it’s not real life. I mean, it’s like hiding out, living in your own little country unplugged from everything outside.”

  Melissa was silent so long that Krys finally looked up, afraid she’d made her angry. Instead she looked thoughtful.

  “Let me ask you a question,” Melissa said. “What takes more courage—doing what’s normal and being miserable, or admitting what you need in order to be happy? Here’s the problem. You have feelings for Aidan and don’t want to admit it because he’s a vampire and he kidnapped you and you think you should be scared. Well, guess what? Screw what you should feel.” Melissa took a sip of her coffee. “Sorry, Mark says my brain-mouth filter gets turned off sometimes. I’ve been wanting to give Aidan the same lecture about you but haven’t gotten up the nerve.”

  Krys looked at the pink and blue packets stacked in neat piles across the table and realized that she’d emptied the container. She started putting them back in the plastic holder before Laurel came back.

  “Why would Aidan need that lecture?” She couldn’t deny that she had needed it. Melissa had nailed her whole dilemma in three or four sentences, and now Krys’s doubts seemed stupid.

  “Because Aidan’s a brooder, if you haven’t noticed.” Melissa giggled. “Don’t tell him I said that, either. He’s a good man, but he’ll think things to death and back. He’s so convinced you won’t want to be with him because of the kidnapping and the blood-drinking and all that crap that he won’t even give you a chance to turn him down.”

  Krys leaned back in her chair and stared out the window. People walked past the café, stopping occasionally to look in the window of the little clothing store across the street. All so normal. What Melissa said made sense. If she stripped away what she thought she should feel and what she should do, if she ignored what society would expect her to feel or do, what was left? Aidan and her feelings for him.

  “You were right earlier,” she said, looking back at Melissa. “When I ran away, I wasn’t running from Aidan or even from Penton. I was afraid of what I was feeling. It still scares the hell out of me.”

  Melissa reached across the table and patted her hand. “We all went through that same thing, Krys. It’s hard to throw out what you’re conditioned to believe or how you’re conditioned to react. But weigh that against what you have and see what sticks.”

  When Aidan practically ran out of her room after bonding her, Krys had thought he hadn’t wanted her. But maybe he was just afraid she’d push him away.

  “Still friends? You’re not talking to me.” Worry creased a line between Melissa’s eyebrows.

  Krys smiled. “Friends. Definitely friends. You’ve given me a lot to think about.”

  After breakfast, as Melissa drove to the clinic, she grew quiet.

  “Something wrong?”

  Melissa shook her head. “Just wishing Mark hadn’t insisted on going on the hunt today. I know Owen’s vampires are down during daylight but it still scares me.”

  “I didn’t know Mark had gone with them,” Krys said as they turned in to the clinic lot and parked near the front entrance. “What time are they supposed to be back?”

  “Three, at the latest,” Melissa said. “He’ll come by here and stay till I get off, then we’ll swing by Aidan’s for a few minutes before dinner.” She grinned. “I would invite you to dinner with us, but it’s date night.”

  “No problem. I’m going to start keeping clinic hours every day while I’m here, and this afternoon I’ll just unpack and explore.” Krys stopped as she opened the car door. “Wait. You’re going by Aidan’s because...” She kept tripping over the words. Stupid, Krys. If you’re going to admit how you feel, you need to be able to say it. “Because he needs to feed?”

  “Yeah, he likes to feed as soon as he gets up for the night. You don’t have to be squeamish about it. It’s just the way things are.”


  Krys laughed and hoped her voice was loud enough to camouflage her pounding heart. “I know. I was going to tell you and Mark to go ahead on your date night. I’ll go to Aidan instead and you can both have the night off. I need to be there about five?”

  Melissa’s eyes widened. “Four thirty’s better. Are you sure about that?”

  “Really, I want to.” Krys felt her face grow hot. She wanted him, was more like it. One of them was going to have to finally admit it and take a chance on being rejected.

  Looks like it’s going to be me.

  She was here. Aidan knew before his eyes opened. He didn’t sense Melissa or Mark. Just Krys. Something must be wrong.

  He slid out of bed, pulled on a pair of jeans, and jerked down the ladder in the sitting area outside his bedroom. He climbed both sets of stairs in a rush and lifted the latch into the kitchen, pausing only long enough to sense her in the living room, alone.

  He padded in on bare feet and there she was, standing with her back to him, jabbing at the fireplace with a poker. She’d started a fire, and it was already crackling, sending out warmth that felt like a caress. Aidan didn’t use the fireplace often, but he liked the feel and smell of it. Especially with her in front of it.

  “Krys?”

  She whirled, her hand to her chest, and burst into the throaty laugh that got its usual reaction from his dick. It did its best to stand at attention.

  “God, you scared me. You should be required to wear bells or something so you don’t sneak up on people.”

  He smiled. “Vampires like sneaking up on people. It’s what we do. Where’s Mel? Is something wrong?” Krys was tightly wound, heart pumping color into her face, the heat on her skin infusing the air around her with her light, sweet scent.

  She twisted her hands together. “I told Melissa I wanted to come instead, that you could feed from me. Is that OK?”

  She looked so damned beautiful. Her dark hair fell below her shoulders in loose curls, and she wore a red sweater that tested every bit of his self-control.