PRAISE FOR THE PENTON LEGACY
Absolution: Winner of the 2013 Holt Medallion award for paranormal romance
“Fast paced and filled with well-developed characters. Redemption is the first book of The Penton Legacy, and readers will anxiously await the sequels!”
—RT Book Reviews, 4 ½ stars for Redemption
“This is a must read for vampire fans. Fans of authors like Kresley Cole and Jeaniene Frost should really enjoy.”
—Parajunkee Reviews on Redemption
“Absolution is a fun and fast-paced read loaded with well-developed characters and believable, fully realized settings. This is one of those rare sequels that almost outshines its predecessor.”
—RT Book Reviews, 4 ½ stars for Absolution
“I loved this book. Absolution has officially cemented Sandlin’s Penton Legacy as one of my favorite new series this year.”
—She Wolf Reads on Absolution
“This series continues to ratchet up the drama and this reader hopes that Hollywood will take notice.”
—RT Book Reviews, Top Pick, 4 ½ stars for Omega
“I love when an author gets me so caught up in the tale and characters that reality slips away, and Sandlin manages this every time. I cannot wait to see where she takes this series next!”
—The Caffeinated Book Reviewer on Omega
ALSO BY SUSANNAH SANDLIN
Storm Force
The Penton Legacy
Redemption
Absolution
Omega
The Collectors
Lovely, Dark, and Deep
WRITTEN AS SUZANNE JOHNSON
Sentinels of New Orleans
Royal Street
River Road
Elysian Fields
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2014 Susannah Sandlin
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle
www.apub.com
ISBN-13: 9781477823316
ISBN-10: 147782331X
Cover design by Kerrie Robertson
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014900301
Dedication
To Dianne, who, as always, reins in the melodrama. Cage thanks you.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
EPILOGUE
Preview: Lovely, Dark, and Deep
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
Movement from above. Unfamiliar voices. The dreams always began this way.
A shaft of light would pierce the darkness. Heavy boots would descend the steps. The gleam of a sharpened sword would rivet his attention until his gaze rose to the face of the man who bore it. The Slayer, Mirren Kincaid. The man who’d come to kill him.
In the dreams, Matthias Ludlam always met his final moments not with brave defiance but with humiliation, pleading for mercy from the man whose life he’d tried to destroy.
Each day at dusk, as Matthias came out of another daysleep, the dream would reach the same end. Kincaid would smile, and the blade would fall.
He had spent the past three months thinking of little else. Tonight, finally, could be the night the dream became real. The muffled thumps that drifted down from above were real enough, sounding as if an army were marching heavy jackboots across Matthias’s kitchen at the top of the stairs. His meticulous marking of time on the wall of his cell told him he still had one day before his execution, and he felt absurdly resentful that they’d even rob him of an extra day in which to brood about his fate.
His sluggish vampire heart sped up at the sound of keys rattling in the locked door at the top of the stairs. Every two weeks, always on a Wednesday, a silent brute of a vampire guard would accompany a human in and allow Matthias to feed—enough to keep him conscious and aware of his surroundings, but never enough to satisfy. Never enough to kill the gnawing hunger that burned his gut and further frayed his nerves.
But today was not Wednesday, nor was it his week to feed.
The voices were not familiar—but then again, his keepers rarely spoke. Never answered questions. Never responded to taunts or threats or pleas.
The last words he’d heard spoken to him—“Your death sentence has been issued, you sonofabitch”—had come three months ago, delivered by that British turncoat Cage Reynolds. He’d taken Reynolds into his inner circle and paid for it dearly. With a cadre of human soldiers, Reynolds had shoved Matthias down the narrow staircase into the basement of his own Virginia estate. He’d thrown him into the silver-lined cell Matthias had constructed for his own enemies. And Reynolds had pronounced the Tribunal’s sentence for Matthias’s so-called crimes.
Since then, Matthias had spent his nights in darkness, and during daysleep he dreamed. Oh, how he dreamed. Of killing Reynolds. Of dying at the hand of Kincaid.
A shaft of light penetrated the eternal, damnable darkness of the basement, followed by the click of the overhead light switch. Squinting against the harsh glare, Matthias held his breath, waiting for Kincaid’s heavy boots to come into view. Then the sword. Then the smile.
But it was a stone-faced behemoth with a clean-shaven head and a diamond embedded in one of his fangs. Matthias had never seen him before. Nor did he know his companion, a big, ugly, lethal-looking vampire; knives hung in scabbards on each hip and a rifle had been slung by a strap over his shoulder. A nice match to the big automatic that Stoneface wore in a shoulder holster. They expected trouble.
“Stand away from the door.” Stoneface pulled a set of keys from his pocket and dangled them from one finger. “We have a field trip planned.”
So they weren’t going to kill him here. Matthias stepped back, relieved that if he had to die, at least it wouldn’t be in this dungeon of his own making. He’d locked up his son, William, here throughout the boy’s early days as a vampire, hoping to starve or beat or whip him into submission, for all the good it had done. He’d kept that bastard Kincaid prisoner here for a month, starving him and keeping him locked in silver chains that burned his skin, hoping to coerce him into joining Matthias’s organizat
ion. Until William rode to the rescue on his proverbial white horse and took Kincaid back to that backwater town of theirs in Alabama.
Penton. Matthias wished he’d never heard of the accursed place.
“Where are you taking me?” Matthias didn’t struggle when Stoneface pulled his arms behind him and snapped his wrists into cuffs—silver, judging by the sting on his skin. They wouldn’t hurt him; just burn like hell and render him as weak as a human.
“Shut up and walk.”
Matthias paused, causing Big and Ugly to lower the rifle.
“You could at least tell me where you’re taking me. It’s my execution, after all. Is it Kincaid? Are you taking me to that godforsaken rat’s nest in Alabama? Has the Tribunal hired Kincaid to perform one last execution for them?”
Bad enough to die looking at Kincaid’s smirk. Worse if his own son William stood by and watched.
Faster than Matthias could track the movement from behind, Stoneface jerked a cloth bag of some kind over his head and shoved him toward the stairs. A shoulder-first crash into the side of the stairway was the only thing that kept him from hitting the floor.
“I can’t breathe.” The overwhelming fear that had haunted him since his arrest kicked into hyperventilation territory. “I’m going to pass out. Take off the hood. Please.”
Rough hands took his shoulders and pushed him forward until his toes bumped the bottom stair. “Keep moving. I don’t give a shit if you ride to your final destination conscious or unconscious. Either climb out or we’ll carry you out.”
Weakened from hunger and with his hands cuffed behind him, Matthias took the stairs slowly in order to keep his balance. Once he’d calmed, he realized he could breathe. In fact, he could see the area around his feet, and some light permeated his hood, which had probably begun its life as a pillowcase.
At the top of the stairs, the air-conditioned cool of the kitchen stroked his body, offering such relief he wanted to cry. It also made him more aware of the sweat that coated him under the once-white silk shirt that now stuck to his chest like cheap gray paper, and of the grime and stench of three months spent in the same clothes.
The air-conditioned relief lasted less than a minute. He might not have been able to see his surroundings, but Matthias knew this house well. This estate outside Fredericksburg, Virginia, had been his favorite among the half-dozen properties he held around the world—properties that, ironically, would be inherited by his ingrate of a son as soon as he died. He hoped William would choke with guilt every time he spent as much as a penny of the money he’d rejected for most of his life.
Stoneface and Ugly guided him out the west entrance of the house, through the door nearest the basement cell. Matthias could still visualize it perfectly. Once he’d stumbled off the step and regained his balance on the smooth pavement, he gasped rich lungfuls of fresh air that smelled of recently mown grass. The hint of coolness told him autumn would soon end the humidity of another long Southern summer. This one had seemed longer than most.
“Stop here.” Ugly’s hand remained on Matthias’s shoulder, but Stoneface stepped away. A jangle of keys preceded the unmistakable click of a car trunk being unlocked.
By God, enough was enough. If they thought he’d go quietly into the dark again—into a coffin on wheels—they had the wrong vampire.
“Fuck. You.” Matthias twisted away from Ugly and aimed his head in the solid mass of muscle somewhere to the north of Stoneface’s feet—all he could see—and butted him with the rage he’d kept bottled up for months. Stoneface fell with a grunt and Matthias propelled himself on top, scraping the man’s cheek open with his fangs—the only weapon at his disposal.
He spat out the blood. “Fuck you if you think you’ll lock me in there. Grow some balls and just kill me here.”
A sharp, sudden pain in his upper back riveted his attention away long enough for Stoneface to shove him aside and Ugly to jerk him to his feet. Ugly had stabbed him, the sonofabitch. During the scuffle the pillowcase had come off Matthias’s head, and he swayed, the floodlights of the driveway blinding him for a few seconds before dulling to gray as if they shone through a filmy screen.
He scarcely had time to think “silver blade” before one of his tormenters shoved him from the side; he had no option but to roll into the trunk. He’d barely jerked his feet inside before the trunk lid slammed shut and he was again in darkness.
The next couple of hours, or maybe it was three or four, passed in a series of jolts as the vehicle—a rough-riding sedan—bounced his head against a wheel well and sent a dull, throbbing ache skittering through his nerve endings. Rolling to his side helped the pain from the stab wound, but it put his nose in closer proximity to the reek of old oil and the car’s rubber tires rolling on asphalt that was still warm from the day’s sun.
Matthias had drifted into a dull-witted stupor—the state in which he’d spent most of his waking hours, the last three months—when the vehicle jolted to a stop. It sent him rolling face first, a rug burn from the industrial-grade carpet scraping his right cheek.
Before he could roll onto his back and put his legs up in anticipation of taking a healthy kick at his tormenters, the trunk lid popped open. He had a brief view of a clear black sky dotted with stars before Big and Ugly leaned in, stuck meaty hands under his armpits, and dragged him out of the vehicle.
Matthias looked around him at the black mounds of starlit hillsides. “Where are we?” It was too mountainous for Penton, but it had that same earthy smell of pine and moldering leaves.
“Where you end your life,” Stoneface said, and Matthias was pleased to see that the results of his fang work, the man’s bloody new trench of skin and tissue, had yet to heal. “Or start a new one.”
The headlights of an approaching car shone from below their stopping place several seconds before it crested the hill into view and came to a stop in front of the sedan. Matthias squinted to see inside the silver SUV, his heart speeding up as Stoneface’s words sank in. “What do you mean, start a new life?”
“You’ll see.” Stoneface threw the keys to the handcuffs in a clump of leaves to Matthias’s right and walked to the passenger-side door of the sedan. Ugly had already slid behind the wheel. Stoneface looked back. “You have fucked things up for a lot of people, Matthias Ludlam. Tonight was just a job, but if I ever lay eyes on you when I’m not on the company payroll, I will tear out your fucking throat.”
He got in the vehicle with a slam, Ugly cranked it up, and they pulled away, leaving Matthias to face the mysteries ahead.
Perhaps by “start a new life,” Stoneface had meant a rebirth in the heavenly realm, or whatever afterlife one believed in. But Matthias suspected that maybe, just maybe, he’d gotten a reprieve.
And where there was a reprieve, there was the chance for revenge.
CHAPTER 1
Cage Reynolds sighed in relief when the 727 began its descent to Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Vampires and long red-eye flights made bad companions, even if the vampire in question wasn’t claustrophobic. An unexpected delay that trapped a plane on a runway after sunrise would lead to a very public frying.
Frying publicly in the midst of a planeload of humans would truly suck.
Now that he’d arrived on American soil, Cage let his thoughts travel to Penton, Alabama, his ultimate destination. He’d gone there six months ago to gauge if master vampire Aidan Murphy’s idea of a scathe community that could weather the current “vampire apocalypse” could work in Cage’s native London.
He’d fled like a coward three months later with way more baggage than he’d bargained for, including friends—a scarce commodity for a nomad—and a woman who’d awakened in him a compassion so alien he thought he’d lost it a century earlier.
Penton had gotten complicated.
If Cage had learned anything in his seventy-five years as a vampire, it w
as this: keep things simple. Caring hurt. Loving killed. The fight—that was what filled the empty spaces of a life that stretched on too long. The adrenaline rush of besting an enemy, of taking down a despot, of feeling a power so strong it filled those voids in his deadened heart.
Now? Melissa Calvert, a human turned vampire barely three months ago, held his future in her small, fragile palm.
When Aidan had called and asked him to return and help shore up security before the upcoming Tribunal elections, Cage had leapt at the chance, even though the idea of facing Melissa again set his heart thumping—whether out of fear or guilt, he wasn’t sure.
All he knew was that he’d found her being held captive, had saved her, had let her transfer all of her gratitude to him, had let her call it love. He’d planned to fuck her and flee; that was his MO, after all.
He’d fled, all right, his reawakened conscience bristling after having done no more than kiss her. Somehow she’d reached inside and touched him. Appealed to the part of him that had been a psychiatrist in his human life. Burrowed past the thick outer shell of the soldier of fortune he’d become since being turned. Brushed gentle fingers against the nerve endings still raw after Paris.
He wouldn’t think about Paris.
So here he was again, moving toward Penton—only this time he hoped to stay. To finally make a home for himself. If Melissa could forgive him. If she accepted his admission that he’d fucked up by letting her care for him, for allowing her to think they had a future. He loved her, but not in that stay-with-me-forever kind of bond that vampires instinctively formed when they met their intended mate.
Cage Reynolds was not a bond-mate type of vampire. And Melissa Calvert was not a casual fuck-buddy kind of woman.
If she accepted the truth and didn’t poison the rest of the town against him, then maybe Cage the Wandering Boy could finally stop roaming. God knew there was enough drama in the vampire world these days to keep even the most jaded adrenaline junkie happy. Starvation. Civil unrest. Political intrigue. Penton was a veritable oasis in that desert of chaos, now that Matthias Ludlam was out of the picture; once Aidan took a seat on the Tribunal, maybe other places could follow Penton’s example.
Allegiance (The Penton Vampire Legacy) Page 1