Mark had expected a combat-tough Army Ranger like Rob to be a total hard-ass like his father. Colonel Rick Thomas, who headed up the Omega Force project, could out-grouch Mirren.
Rob was cool, though—a lot easier to get along with than their other Ranger-turned-Penton-resident Max Jeffries. Max constantly tried to prove himself bigger and badder than any vampire; as Mark could tell him from long experience as one of Aidan’s closest friends, he was wasting his time. The only way for a human to outfight a vampire was to cheat.
If a human wanted to live among vampires, he had to capitalize on his few advantages—like walking around in sunlight and conducting business during daylight hours.
Something Melissa would never be able to do again.
Mark tried to brush away the thought, but as usual when it came to the subject of his wife, he lost the battle as surely as if he’d been trying to fistfight a vamp.
He hadn’t given up on Melissa; he still loved her, fangs and all. But he had given up on begging for any attention she might toss his way like a stray bread crumb.
His supply of pity and empathy for her situation had expired. After all, he was the one who’d been dumped on and avoided like a walking cancer. He’d been willing to give her space and try to win her back, until he heard Cage Reynolds was returning to Penton, possibly for good.
No more Mr. Nice Mark. If she wanted that smug English sonofabitch, she could have him.
“Earth to Mark.” Rob slapped him on the arm with the clipboard.
“Sorry, what’d you say?”
“Got anything else that needs to go to the Chow House?”
Mark looked around the job site and took a quick inventory. “We could use a few more bottles of water. Max sweats it out faster than he can drink it.”
“Fuck you.” A disembodied voice rumbled from the other side of the wall, within the wooden framework of the building in progress. “Forget the water. Bring me a six-pack and one of Glory’s subs.”
Rob saluted the brick wall and grinned at Mark. “Got it. Be back in a half hour or so, unless Glory’s too busy to interpret Mirren’s secret code and I have to wait on her.”
Mark watched him descend the hill into downtown Penton, where a long wooden building had been erected at the site of the old barbecue place that had been bombed earlier in the year by Aidan’s psycho brother. His late psycho brother.
All that mess seemed like a million years ago, not nine months.
The Chow House had been Will’s idea, as had the communal houses that gave them all places to live while rebuilding the rest of the town.
Eventually, if they could get Penton back up and running, they’d all reestablish their own homes. For now, those doing the rebuilding needed places to live and eat. Six communal houses with lighttight spaces beneath them sat at the site of the old mill village.
A block away was the Chow House, where Glory oversaw the preparation of three meals a day for any among the few remaining humans who wanted to stop by—at least until an hour before dusk, when she went to greet her rising vampire. And here, at the site of the former community center, the new Omega Force training facility would overlook it all.
“We taking a break?” Max rounded the corner from the other side of the wall, wiping sweat off his face with the front of his camo-patterned Army Rangers T-shirt.
Mark handed him a bottle of water and took the last one for himself. “Yeah, might as well. We just need to finish this wall, and it’s all ladder work. Going to be a slow go. We need to get Mirren’s instructions deciphered before we work on the back wall.”
Max looked at the red bricks stacked neatly on the concrete pad inside the building’s framework. “Be easier if we could bring some real brick masons in here. One of us could oversee things and they’d never have to know about the”—he fluttered his arms in a poor imitation of bat wings—“big bad vampires.”
“We talked about it.” Mark stepped over a couple of extra two-by-fours and sat on the nearest pile of bricks, stretching his sore back muscles. Old back injuries and construction made unhappy bedfellows.
At least there was shade inside the rectangular framework. “Too risky to bring in brick masons, though. Even if they didn’t find out about the vamps, they might be curious about the town.”
“I guess.” Max took a swig of water. “Now that you mention it, I’m not sure I’d know what to say when they asked why the town looks like an atomic bomb went off on Main Street. Or who lives here in this heap of destruction. Or how it is that a guy named Aidan Murphy, who no one outside Penton has ever seen, owns everything.”
Mark knew that answer; he’d brokered every last real-estate deal. Aidan owned Penton outright, down to the last pinecone and cracked sidewalk.
Max sat on the concrete slab and stretched out six-feet-three-inches of muscle and alpha male. Mark had never considered himself a slouch in the physique department, but Max and Rob both made him feel like an eighth-grader in remedial gym class. Max’s dark hair had grown out a little from the buzz cut he’d had when he and Rob had first arrived in Penton—but not much. He still looked like an Army Ranger.
Three months ago, Max and Rob had slipped into town at night with the colonel, trying to figure out how this combined Ranger-vampire antiterrorism team might work. Max currently sported only one fading bruise, on his left cheek—but with Cage back in Penton their sparring would probably pick up where it had left off.
The thought of Cage Reynolds gave Mark a headache.
“Where are things with the Omega Force?” Mark took a sip of water and screwed the cap back onto the bottle. “I heard there are some new team members coming in. Does that mean you guys will get to do something besides build houses and training facilities? That’s gotta be frustrating.” As frustrating as it was for an investment analyst to be building houses and training facilities.
Max finished off his water and rolled the plastic bottle between his palms. Fidgeting. The guy always needed to be moving. “The colonel was so anxious to get the project rolling he put a team together in Texas back in July. They’ve already handled a case—that bombing last month in Houston. Their team leader and a couple of others are out of commission for a while, so two of them are coming here.”
“How’d they get up and moving so fast?” The whole vampire-Ranger thing had been dreamed up here as a way for the human special-ops people to help the vampires survive the pandemic crisis without outing them to other humans. In return, the Penton vampires would train to help on counterterrorism maneuvers. Only the Houston team had already wrapped up a case while Penton’s team was, well, laying brick.
Max shrugged. “They had people in Houston already trained and available. I had to be moved off active duty, plus we have all that vampire political shit to deal with. Vamps can’t train during the day, and I think most of that Houston team were shape-shifters, so it was easier.”
He groaned and flopped on his back, pouring the rest of the bottle of water on his face. “Who even knew there were such things as fucking shape-shifters? How does that work? If one bites me, will I turn into a duck or a weasel or something?”
“Hell if I know.” Mark hoped at least one of the new Omega Force members was human. Being a feeder for three vampires sucked—pun intended. Aidan fed first thing after sunset; his mate, Krys, fed before Mark went to bed; Britta Eriksen, a woman who’d moved to Penton a few weeks after the big showdown with Matthias, fed before sunrise, as soon as Mark woke in the morning. He’d filled the top of his dresser with bottles of iron supplements purchased on his last supply run to Opelika.
Penton needed fresh blood, literally. “Reckon shape-shifters can feed vampires?” He thought about Max’s “duck or weasel” comment. “What kind of shape-shifters are they?”
“One is a human, a Ranger. The other is . . . Hell, I don’t know what he is except a shifter of some kind. I guess it could be any k
ind of animal. Mirren just read us the memo up to a certain point and stomped off, cussing.” Max laughed. “Hard to believe that of Mirren, I know.”
They sat in silence a few moments before Max sat up. “You know, I’ve been thinking. What other monsters are living out there that we don’t know about? The more I think about it, the freakier it is.”
Mark shook his head. “Nothing would surprise me anymore.”
If vampires and shape-shifters were real, other myths and legends could be real as well. After all, Glory was telekinetic, and Hannah, the Penton lieutenant who’d been turned vampire at age eleven or twelve, had visions. Premonitions, he guessed they’d be called. “Well, whatever the other guy is, I hope he can feed vampires. After a while, even orgasmic sensations get old.”
“I hear you. I have to feed Cage Fucking Reynolds, and if ever I didn’t want anybody giving me a happy hard-on, it’s that British asshat. My only consolation is that he hates it as much as I do.”
Mark’s laugh sounded bitter, even to himself. “Better you than me.”
“Ah, yeah. Sorry.”
How much did Max know? He was Hannah’s feeder, too, and Aidan did his best to keep Hannah away from the uglier sides of life in Penton—like when a man’s wife got turned vampire by a sociopath and decided she no longer wanted her human husband. Judging by the apology, Max knew plenty.
Great. Everyone probably considered him a pathetic loser. Or maybe they blamed Melissa, which would be appropriate. And he felt like a pathetic loser, which pissed him off even more. Thank God Aidan had the good sense not to ask him to be a feeder for Cage Reynolds. He’d have to just drain his own blood into a glass and let the man drink the old-fashioned way.
Mark sighed. This line of thought was depressing. He climbed to his feet and set the half-empty water bottle aside. “Let’s finish off that wall. You want top of the ladder or bottom?”
“Better give me bottom.” Max looked up at the wall, which had grown to about ten feet in height; Mirren wanted twelve. “I have longer arms to hand stuff up.”
“Yeah, make the shorter guy do the dangerous work.” Mark headed around the wall and positioned the ladder and makeshift scaffolding at the corner. Last night they’d checked all the places where the brick veneer was anchored to the building’s frame, so it should be quick work to finish off the wall.
He might even have time for a shower before Aidan got up and wanted his dinner, so to speak.
Rob’s voice sounded from down the hill. “I think it’s a rule for short guys to take the worst jobs.” He crested the rise and walked across the leveled-off construction site, waving the clipboard with one hand and holding a six-pack of Coors and a white paper bag in the other. “I got Glory’s interpretation of the specs. We can go over them tonight—we’ll need more supplies. Let’s get that wall finished and help Max drink his beer and eat a sandwich before Mirren gets up and bitches about what all we did wrong.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Mark climbed to the top of the extension ladder while Rob and Max piled bricks on a pallet and raised them via a pulley system—something Will had rigged up when constructing the Chow House and the living spaces. Digging a trowel into the concrete mix, Mark plopped a pile on the top layer of the wall, spread it evenly, and wedged a brick into place.
The work was hot and slow, but mindlessly relaxing. By the time they reached the midpoint of the wall, he found he could release that knot of gnawing pain in his chest that had resulted from too much thought about Melissa and too much talk about Cage.
Finally, Mark placed the next-to-last brick in place. One more in the middle section, and he’d have to move the ladder to do the south end. “Wait, I think something’s gotten mixed in the concrete; this one’s not squaring up.” Something about the brick hadn’t set right. He looked down at Max and Rob. “Did you notice any irregularities in the last bunch of bricks we picked up?”
Rob shook his head. “We checked them when they came in.”
“Pull that one off,” Max said, “and I’ll hand you one from the new shipment stacked on the other side.” He disappeared around the corner.
Mark removed the brick and set it back on the scaffolding. “Pull the platform back down, and see if you can tell what’s wrong with that one. If one’s bad, there’s probably more.”
“Got it.” Rob grasped the rope and untied it from its mooring, lowering the scaffolding platform.
A wave of dizziness almost made Mark lose his balance. Too much heat, physical work, and being up on the ladder. Everything swayed.
“Move! You gotta move! It’s coming down!” Max’s voice seemed to come from far away, and Mark had only a fleeting moment to think the whole fucking wall is collapsing before he was thrown off the ladder, watching his world literally turn upside down before going black.
CHAPTER 4
Something wasn’t right. Just past dusk, the air around Penton should smell of warm pine clinging to the last rays of sunlight, nocturnal animals creeping from beneath rocks and brush, pungent night-blooming plants opening their petals to welcome the cooling air.
Mirren Kincaid paused outside the communal house he shared with his mate, Glory, and Melissa Calvert. The air was soaked with unease, as if something bad were about to happen. Everyone should have been celebrating, after the news spread that Matthias Ludlam would finally be going to meet his maker. Yet the streets lay quiet and deserted.
Whatever had happened, he needed to deal with it instead of babysitting the new Omega team members due to arrive within the hour. Mirren had a bad feeling about them, too. The colonel had been cagey about Ashton and Dimitrou, only saying that Mirren and Aidan should keep an open mind and let themselves be pleasantly surprised.
Mirren hated fucking surprises. In his experience, they were rarely pleasant.
He had a feeling what he scented in the night air wouldn’t yield any pleasant surprises, either. Mortar. Dust. Blood. Nothing pleasant about it.
“Something’s wrong at the job site.” Aidan Murphy took two steps at a time as he descended the staircase of the communal house across the street. Krys trailed behind him, pulling the large rolling suitcase that had served as her medical kit while they’d been stuck in the underground bunker Omega during the siege.
She’d been a human doctor before being turned earlier this year; unfortunately, her skills had been needed to treat a lot of vampires, too, including Aidan.
Aidan nodded toward Mirren’s old Bronco. “Better take that. All I got from Mark’s thought patterns was that something went down at the construction site. Mostly, it’s a muddle. There’s blood scent on the air, though.”
“That there is.” Mirren looked at the sky and wouldn’t have been surprised to see a scroll roll back and the Four Horsemen come riding through, spreading pestilence and death before them like floodwaters.
Penton couldn’t get a fucking break—and they were supposed to be the good guys. Though Mirren hadn’t grown used to thinking of himself as a good guy; he’d spent too many years wallowing in self-recrimination and guilt. He’d reached peace with his past, though. Glory had made him understand that his history could only haunt him if he let it.
But damn, Penton needed a stretch of heaven, not more apocalypse.
They all climbed in the Bronco, and Mirren drove up Cotton Street past the half-burned husk of the old textile mill. Mark’s blood bond to Aidan had given them a heads-up to disaster before, reinforcing their policy of bonding all residents to one of the master vampires. It was damned helpful. “You got a zing from Mark, but what about Rob and Max the Asshole? Aren’t they with him?”
“They’re both bonded to Will, and he’s out of range, so I don’t know.” Aidan ran his hands through his hair—an old habit that didn’t work quite as well since he’d cut it shorter, to better fit in with the puffed-up bureaucrats on the Vampire Tribunal. Meg Lindstrom, the US vampire rep, planned to st
ep down and had nominated Aidan to take her place.
Aidan didn’t want the job, but as usual, he was putting his overdeveloped sense of responsibility before his desires. In nine days, it would be official—as long as the Penton supporters on the Tribunal continued to outnumber the haters. Aidan thought he could help the vampire population weather the pandemic vaccine that had made human blood poisonous to them. He had a lot of ideas; a Tribunal seat would give him the influence he needed to put them into action.
“Think this has anything to do with the vote coming up?” Mirren asked. “I mean, that old Austrian sonofabitch Frank Greisser is not going to just sit back and welcome you onto the Tribunal without doing something to hurt you or keep you in Penton or skew the vote.” Or all of the above.
“We definitely can’t rule it out.” Aidan stared out the window at the burned ruins that constituted pretty much all that remained of downtown Penton. “Whether it’s the Tribunal or just buzzard’s luck, we need to find out what’s wrong and do damage control so people don’t freak out. Then we’ve gotta speed up the rebuilding efforts, even if it means hiring human crews. We need places for people to live and work before this town can really recover.”
The idea of bringing in humans made Mirren’s muscles twitch, but Aidan was right. They’d been licking their wounds for three months. It was past time to get Penton on track. No reason Mark couldn’t supervise human crews, especially with the Rangers helping.
He pulled the Bronco in front of the last community house before the turn to the job site and leaned on his horn. Might as well have a little more muscle. Plus, their resident psychiatrist probably knew all kinds of damage-control mind games.
“Good idea.” Aidan motioned to Cage, who had stepped into the doorway of the house he’d moved into with Hannah and Max—and now, Fen Patrick. “Might be nothing, or it might be another Penton clusterfuck. In which case we’ll need him.”
Before Cage cleared the porch, Fen followed him out. Mirren’s first instinct last night had been to lock the guy in their silver-lined room back in the old Omega underground facility. He’d suggested it, in fact, and had even gone to retrieve the key. Glory had guilt-tripped him until he reluctantly agreed to have Cage babysit the guy instead.
Allegiance (The Penton Vampire Legacy) Page 4