Omega (The Penton Vampire Legacy)

by Susannah Sandlin

  “You sure they’re going to be alive after being buried this long?” Aidan had no experience with buried vampires, but Mirren insisted they’d live.

  “Positive.” Mirren hauled out another piece of a splintered support beam. “This was a favorite Tribunal torture technique back in the good old days. Didn’t kill the prisoners; just freaked the shit out of them.”

  Aidan shook his head. He loved Mirren like a brother—hell, he loved Mirren better than the sad excuse for a man his brother had been. But he didn’t want to know half of what that vampire had done in his life, first as a Scottish gallowglass warrior and later the Tribunal’s best executioner—or worst, depending on which side of the torture one sat on.

  “We found ’em!” One of the scathe members stuck his head out of the opening to the steel door. “We’ve got feet—looks like she’s on top of him.”

  “Bloody miracle they didn’t kill each other.” Aidan led the way into the opening and watched while three scathe members dug furiously, gradually unearthing Will and Randa.

  “Doesn’t look like they were fighting.” Mirren arched an eyebrow, and Aidan chuckled before moving alongside them. Will’s arms were wrapped tightly around Randa’s waist, but he could see angry red welts in four or five spots across her back through her shredded shirt. Will had a similar mark on his cheek, and his left leg was…Holy hell, it was bent about six inches above the ankle, in a place legs weren’t supposed to bend, in a direction they weren’t supposed to bend. This was no minor injury.

  He sent a mental message to Krys to meet them in the makeshift medical room they’d set up and gently pulled Will’s hands away from Randa’s waist. He shifted her enough to get his arms underneath her knees and shoulders and roll her into his arms, avoiding her injured back.

  “Mirren, get Will. Watch out for that left leg. Krys is meeting us at the med room.” He pushed through the piles of debris and waiting people. Liv, Will’s feeder, was standing at the edge of the group, eyes red and puffy.

  “They’ll be OK.” He passed her, then paused, turning back. “Hang around, Liv. They’ll need to feed—see if you can find another feeder too.” Healing sapped a vampire’s strength, even a brand-new master vampire’s.

  Mirren wasn’t far behind him, carrying Will and barking orders. The man’s idea of multitasking. “Don’t leave a fucking millimeter of open air in that hole,” he barked at the scathe members lined up to work. “Fill it in, and then solder the steel door closed. And do it fast.”

  Aidan turned the corner and saw Krys waiting in the open doorway to the med room. Her dark-auburn hair was pulled back, and she had her doctor face on, dark-brown eyes serious as her glance flicked across Randa. She stopped Aidan just inside the door and leaned over to look at Randa’s back. “Put her on her stomach.”

  Mirren had arrived with Will. “Where you want him?”

  Krys stopped in the middle of pulling on exam gloves to look at Will’s leg. “That’s a bad one. Put him in the bed across from Randa. I’m going to need your help setting that leg, both of you. See if Glory can do nurse duty and get them cleaned up.”

  Mirren stood with his hands planted on his hips. “Why can’t Liv do it? She’s their feeder.”

  Aidan had been leaning against the wall beside the door, watching the exchange with bemusement. He knew exactly what Mirren was balking at.

  Krys had been gently trying to get Will’s left shoe off but straightened up and narrowed her eyes at Mirren. “Liv’s too emotional. Glory won’t mind. What’s your problem?”

  “He doesn’t want Glory giving Will a sponge bath, or something like that.” Aidan grinned, and Krys deepened her doctor glare at Mirren.

  “Aw, fuck me. I’ll go and find her.” Mirren strode out of the room, scowling.

  “He’ll probably get less possessive after they’ve been mated a little longer. It’s all new to him.” Then again, maybe not. Aidan watched Krys cut off Will’s sweater and run her hands over his abdomen, feeling for internal injuries. He wanted to growl at her, but refused to act like a Neanderthal. “What do you think?”

  “Will’s leg was broken, obviously. Badly broken. The explosion happened right before daysleep, so I’m guessing it healed in the only way it could, given the way he was pinned down.”

  Holy hell. The scenario gave him the shudders. “Can you fix it?”

  “He needs an orthopedic surgeon who’s also savvy about the vampire world—in other words, something that probably doesn’t exist.” Krys took her scissors to Will’s pants leg, cutting up to midthigh and pulling the fabric away from his skin. “We don’t even have access to an X-ray machine down here. The only thing I know to do is to have one of you hold him down or tie him with silver while the other breaks his leg again. We’ll secure it as straight as we can and pray it re-heals in some way that at least lets him walk again. Once we get out of this mess, we can break it again and set it properly.”

  Damn it. Matthias’s latest strike against them might have maimed his only son, but Aidan found it impossible to enjoy the irony. He didn’t know the details of the suffering Will had endured at his father’s hand, but it had scarred him. That Will had come out of it with enough mental toughness to become a master vampire—the major prerequisite for a master—was no minor miracle.

  He took a deep breath and nodded. “We’ll do what we have to. What about Randa?”

  “I think she’s OK except for those places on her back—Will’s got one on his face. What hit them?”

  “My bet’s on a projectile grenade.” Mirren had returned and rumbled from the doorway.

  Glory eased past him, eyed Randa’s back, and stopped next to Krys. “What do you need me to do?”

  “We need to get them out of these clothes and clean them up. Once I cut out these…projectiles, or whatever they are, the wounds will need to be sterilized. Those injuries should heal by themselves after that.”

  “I’m on it.” Glory twisted her shoulder-length black hair and secured it in a loose pile on her head before turning to her mate. “Mirren, honey, vampire-o’-mine. You cannot stand in the door and scowl. Make yourself useful.”

  Aidan didn’t give Mirren time to provide whatever colorful epithet he was about to spew out. “We need silver-laced rope to tie Will down when we rebreak his leg, just in case he comes to. We need a board that will work as a splint. We need regular rope to secure his leg to the splint. Can you find that?”

  “Why don’t you use duct tape?” Glory looked up from where she was using Krys’s scissors to finish cutting off Will’s pants.

  There was a long silence as everyone looked at Glory. She shrugged and went back to cutting. “Just a thought.”

  “It’s a damn good idea,” Aidan said. “There should be some in the room with the generators.”

  Mirren gave Aidan one final heated look, grumbled something under his breath, and disappeared down the hallway.

  Aidan turned to Glory, eyebrows raised. “Did he just tell me to go fuck myself?”

  The skin around her black eyes crinkled with laughter. “I’m going to have to work on my mate’s attitude, I think.”

  “Yeah, good luck with that.” But Aidan smiled. Mirren was mostly hot air with the people he liked, not that anyone was going to share that with him.

  By the time Mirren returned with the supplies, plus Hannah, they’d managed to get both patients undressed and modestly covered. Krys sat in a chair next to Randa’s bed, leaning over her with a scalpel and pair of oversized tweezers. Glory stood beside her with a bloody cloth.

  “This brings back old memories.” Mirren set the supplies inside the door. During the attack by Aidan’s brother back in January, he’d been shot with buckshot that had been scored and tainted with vaccinated human blood. Poison, in other words. Krys had dug it out of his back in much the same way she now worked on Randa.

  Krys glanced up at him. “Yes, I cleaned you up, and you flashed fangs at me. Nothing was ever the same in my life after that.”

>   “I do what I can.” Mirren leaned against the wall next to Will’s bed. After staring down at him a moment, he sat on the edge of the bed and ran his fingers along Will’s misshapen calf. “I think there are three breaks in here.”

  Krys clinked the last of the steel projectiles from Randa’s back into a metal tray and turned to look at him. “How can you tell?”

  Another souvenir from his mercenary days, Aidan was sure. “Let’s just say I’m guessing he’s had some experience with broken bones.”

  Understanding dawned on Krys’s face. “Ah…gotcha. Do you think you can rebreak the leg in the same places?”

  Using a pillowcase to keep it from burning his hands, Aiden picked up the silver-laced rope from where Mirren had dropped it inside the door and began to uncoil it. “We’re going to try.”

  While Glory finished cleaning Randa’s back, Krys came to watch them tie Will to the steel frames of the bed. “How long you think they’ll be unconscious?”

  Mirren looked up. “I don’t know, but since they’re also trying to heal wounds, they might not wake up before daysleep. Especially Will. Which is probably a good thing. I wouldn’t want to be awake for this. But we’re tying him down just in case.”

  Once they had Will secured, Aidan took his mangled leg by the ankle and nodded at Mirren. “You’re on.”

  Sitting in a chair beside the bed, Mirren again ran his fingers along the length of Will’s leg from knee to ankle. Once. Twice. A third time. His eyes were closed, his face frozen in concentration. Finally, he stopped at a point a few inches above the ankle and quickly snapped the bone in the opposite direction from the way it had healed. Will’s foot and ankle flopped loosely, secured to the rest of his leg only by skin and muscle and tissue.

  Will groaned and tried to thrash, but the ropes held him.

  “Oh my God.” Glory turned away. “I can’t even look.”

  “That was the worst one of the breaks—the other two aren’t both leg bones, but just the smaller one.”

  At Mirren’s direction, Aidan slid a hand underneath the new break to support it while Mirren snapped the fibula in two more places. Krys, meanwhile, had retrieved the board. “Slide it under his leg gently,” Mirren directed. Aidan helped him lift Will’s leg and then settled it onto the board. If they situated the top of the board behind his knee, it reached to his ankle.

  While Mirren held the leg in place, Aidan used the duct tape to secure the leg to the board. “Remind me not to be around when we pull this tape off. That might hurt as much as the break.”

  Krys made quick work of removing the steel projectile from Will’s cheek and cleaning the wound. “Now, prop the board on a pillow to elevate his leg a little, and until they wake up, that’s all we can do for them.”

  Aidan glanced at his watch—3:00 a.m.—and they hadn’t done any patrols tonight. He was supposed to meet Cage at 4:00 to see if he’d made any progress with Matthias.

  Aidan looked up when he heard a light tap on the door facing and was surprised to see Mark Calvert, on his feet and out of his room for the first time. “Liv said they might need to feed. I told her I could do it.”

  Krys shook her head. “You don’t—”

  Aidan put a hand on her arm and squeezed. “Thanks, Mark. I’m sure of it. Krys will, even if Will and Randa don’t wake up.” The quicker he could get Mark involved in the goings-on of Omega, even in this small way, the less time he’d have to dwell on everything he’d lost.

  Hell, at least Aidan had his little weird trace of a bond with Melissa that survived for some reason, and he took comfort in it even though he knew it was a shadow bond. Like he’d heard of people who’d lost limbs, yet still felt them.

  He’d planned to tell Mirren about it and see if he’d ever heard of such a thing, but it would have to wait.

  For now, he had to focus on Matthias and see what his British spy had to tell him.

  Cage had been walking around downtown Penton with Shelton Porterfield for five fricking hours, and the only thing of interest he’d learned was that Matthias was on a quick trip to New York on Tribunal business and that Shelton was a sick, sadistic pedophile.

  Oh, wait. Redundant.

  Finally, Shelton had suggested a threesome with his little teenage blood whore back at the clinic, and Cage saw an exit.

  “Told you, boys don’t do a bloody thing for me.” Cage stopped at the clinic parking lot. “I think I’ll join the patrols, fan around the outskirts of town, and see if I can catch wind of some of the Penton crowd.”

  Shelton took a business card from his pocket and handed it to Cage. “This has my cell number on it. If you find anything, call me and I’ll handle it.”

  The front of the card identified Shelton as manager of a limited liability corporation in Virginia. No doubt one of Matthias’s many fronts. The man had apparently been a successful business attorney in his human life and kept up with all the latest loopholes.

  “I will certainly do that.” Cage pocketed the card and walked south, back toward downtown and the opposite direction from the remaining Omega entrance. He wanted to be well out of Shelton’s scenting range before he looped around town and went to his 4:00 a.m. rendezvous with Aidan.

  He turned it into a two-hour maze of a trip, arriving at the meeting point a few minutes ahead of schedule. He didn’t want to risk Aidan being caught outside, so he located the hatch, unlocked it, and climbed down the long drop ladder into the exit room.

  “You get the hatch closed and locked behind you?” Aidan stepped out of the tunnel from Omega just as Cage reached the bottom ladder rung.

  “Yeah, I didn’t want to take a chance on having you caught outside.”

  Aidan turned on two of the fluorescent lanterns, setting the concrete-and-steel-lined room awash in soft light and shadows. If Matthias found this hatch and dropped a grenade, at least its effect would be limited.

  He dropped heavily to the floor and leaned against the wall. “Talk to me.”

  Cage sat on the ground and propped his back against the opposite wall. Aidan looked tired. “First, I heard the explosion but didn’t find out what it was until afterward. Who was on guard duty? How many were killed?”

  “Will and Randa were in the exit room and got the door closed before the grenade went off, so nobody in Omega was killed. They’re both injured, but alive. Will was able to direct me to their location—it ended up caving on them, but we dug them out.”

  Cage processed that. “How was Will able to tell you where they were?”

  Aidan gave him a weary smile. “Young Will is our newest master vampire in training. I think he’s surprised as hell by it, but I’m not. He’s stronger than he’s ever given himself credit for. Probably had to be strong to survive Matthias and then have the guts to get away from him.”

  Cage suspected Aidan had no idea of the extent Will had suffered under Matthias, but that wasn’t his story to tell, at least not right now.

  What was his mission to reveal was what he’d seen of Penton and of Matthias’s setup—before he dropped his real bombshell. Once he heard about Melissa, Aidan would have trouble focusing on anything else, or at least that’s how he’d react in Aidan’s place.

  “I think Matthias has anywhere from twenty to forty vampires fanned out around the woods, waiting for us to make the next move.” Cage cracked his knuckles. “My guess is that they’re on the Tribunal payroll, at least temporarily. Not a scathe, as near as I can tell, but all hired fangs. None of the ones I came across, other than Shelton Porterfield, were blood-bonded to Matthias.”

  Aidan shook his head. “I’d hoped he didn’t have that many with him. Any idea what his strategy is?”

  The strategy least likely to get Matthias’s hands dirty, as near as Cage had been able to tell. “He figures if we’re all underground and they can find our other exits—he’s sure we have at least one—then his people can just wait with no risk to themselves and pick us off one by one as we try to come out. So they’re actively looking for t
he other exit hatch. So far, they haven’t moved far enough out of town to get near the one we have left.”

  “We’re working on a new exit, but it’s slow going, and we had to stop work to dig Will and Randa out,” Aidan said. “This soil is packed clay, and there’s no place for us to put the displaced dirt. Question is, how many people can we slip out of Omega at a time without attracting attention? Do you think you can get yourself assigned to our exit area?”

  “Probably.” If he went back undercover. He hoped Aidan was ready for the rest of his news. “There’s something else you need to know. It’s about Melissa.”

  Aidan stilled—that lack of breath and movement only vampires could achieve. The man’s blue eyes lightened with emotion. “I knew it. Damn it, I knew something was off because I could still feel my bond to her. She’s alive, isn’t she?”

  Now it was Cage’s turn to stare. He knew Melissa was Aidan’s fam and had been for several years. Their bond had to be strong, or else it was a master-vampire thing. Cage wasn’t sure.

  “Apparently, as soon as Matthias had his guy snap her neck, he had another drag her off and turn her. She made it through the transition. She’s vampire, Aidan. And Matthias has her bound and gagged in one of those suites beneath the clinic.”

  Aidan was on his feet and halfway up the drop ladder before Cage caught him around the ankles and jerked him back down. They both landed in a heap on the floor, and Aidan landed a punch to Cage’s jaw before he got himself under control. His face was contorted in anguish and fury.

  “How did I not know? I should have known.” He ran his hands through his hair. “What has he done to her? I swear, if he has raped her or let that SOB Shelton Porterfield near her…”

  Cage’s laugh was bitter. “Oh, she’s not Shelton’s type. She’s female and an adult.”

  He rubbed his jaw and felt for broken teeth. Aidan had been a powerful man as a human farmer back in early-seventeenth-century Ireland, Cage figured, and he was no lightweight as a vampire.

  “Sorry about that.” Aidan flexed and unflexed his fist. “I won’t lose it again. Tell me about Mel.”