Allegiance (The Penton Vampire Legacy)

by Susannah Sandlin

  Whose fault was it that the tease no longer worked? Not his.

  No wallowing. Right. Too bad, because he was really good at it.

  “Thanks for your help. I’m going to sleep now.” Mark rested his head against the pillows and closed his eyes. Her scent was everywhere, inviting him back into the pity party he’d promised to boycott.

  He opened his eyes at the sound of a chair being dragged across the floor. “I thought you left.”

  “I’m going to stay until you fall asleep.” Melissa reached across the foot of the bed and tugged off his socks before moving to fiddle with the drawstring of the loose pants Krys had brought to the clinic and helped him climb into. “I’ll help you get undressed. You’ll be more comfortable. You never like sleeping with anything around your legs.”

  The idea of her undressing him led to all kinds of mental images. She’d ease the loose pants over his hips, and her arm would brush across his bared skin. He’d inhale the scent of her as she leaned over to tug his shirt over his head. Maybe her beautiful breasts would be within reach of where his mouth . . . would never go again.

  Mark closed his eyes and flayed his flaring libido into submission with the only thing he could come up with that was guaranteed to push her away. “I guess it’s time we talked about getting a divorce.”

  Melissa stopped fussing with his pants and sat hard on the chair. He’d laugh at her stricken expression if he didn’t feel like crying himself.

  She looked at the floor for ten seconds, then twenty. Mark knew because he was counting, waiting for the eruption of glee or horror or acceptance—some kind of reaction. He honestly wasn’t sure what to expect, but he steeled himself. If she was going to look relieved that he was moving aside for her to be with that pompous British shrink, he wouldn’t want to show how much it hurt.

  No wallowing.

  “Mark, you can’t mean that.” When she finally looked up at him, one of the tears that had pooled in her hazel eyes spilled down her cheek.

  Yes. Something fierce and gleeful unfurled in his gut, something that whispered she still loves you in his mind before he slammed that mental door shut. He wasn’t rolling over that easily. “How is Cage, by the way?”

  Melissa’s posture stiffened, and she wiped away the telltale tear. “This isn’t about Cage. It’s about—”

  “Stop it.” Oh, hell no. She wasn’t going to start spouting that crap about special vampire chemistry and mating bonds and how her heart didn’t remember him. He’d seen that look on her face at the mention of divorce. She loved him. Her mind might not acknowledge it, but her heart remembered.

  “But you just don’t understand. I’m not—”

  “I understand plenty, Mel. I understand that you’re a vampire. I understand things have changed for you.” Mark shifted on his pillows, ignoring the threatening shard of heat that shot into his hip. “I understand that you want Cage Reynolds to keep you warm at night while I hang around in the wings hoping for a crumb of kindness or a shred of attention.”

  He paused briefly at the stricken look on her face, the wide eyes, the hurt. But he’d held it in too long, and once he’d begun, he had to finish. “But I’m done with the drama, Mel. I can’t do it anymore. I love you, but I won’t beg you to love me back. You want your vampire version of Dr. Phil? Go for it. Be happy. I don’t have to watch it.”

  He should feel better now that he’d said his piece, but the way her knuckles had turned white as they twisted in her lap, the slight quiver of her lips, the way she swallowed hard to audibly bury her grief—all it did was make him feel like he’d kicked his dog. Or stuck a knife in the woman he loved, and then twisted it hard.

  Mark closed his eyes again, suddenly drained. Whatever burst of energy had fueled his rant, it was spent. “Just go, Mel. I can’t do this anymore tonight.”

  He didn’t open his eyes when the bed dipped to his right, or when her hand came to rest on his.

  “You’ve changed.” Her fingers twined with his, and damned if they didn’t feel as if that’s where they should be. “Have you met someone else?”

  Huh? Mark opened his eyes and searched Melissa’s face for some sign that she was joking. But she looked as miserable as he felt, and some spiteful, petty part of him wanted to hurt her just a little more.

  “Not really. I’ve been a feeder for Britta Eriksen since we split into the community houses. It’s been . . .” He paused for effect and bit back a smile at the way her eyes narrowed and the vertical “opinion line” etched itself between her brows. “It’s been nice.”

  Nice was a good, utilitarian, all-purpose word. It could mean nice like a sister, which was an accurate description of his relationship with Britta. Or it could mean nice like a man and a woman engaging in a meaningful bit of blood-fueled foreplay.

  “Nice.” Melissa frowned harder, and Mark’s inner demon-child danced again. She might not admit it, but she was jealous. “What do you know about that woman?”

  Quite a lot, actually. Britta had been in Penton only a month, and he’d been her feeder from the outset. “I know she’s got a great sense of humor and can make me laugh. She likes movies. And she’s sexy.”

  “That hair’s dyed, I can tell.” Melissa stood up and pushed the chair back against the wall next to the closet door, looking around the room. Her gaze paused on each piece of furniture as if it might reveal secrets about what went on here when he and Britta were alone. If his dresser could talk, the tales it’d tell would be boring as hell.

  She turned back to him, the flash of anger gone now, her features relaxed into the face he’d loved, only maybe a sadder version. “Guess I’ll go back to Mirren’s and see if there’s any update on Rob. Aidan was going to call the colonel and break the news to him.”

  “Send word if you hear anything.” Suddenly, Mark’s games seemed childish to him. Their friend lay in the clinic morgue, and because of Penton’s fucked-up politics, they probably wouldn’t even be able to give him a proper funeral with military honors and folded American flags. “It should have been me, not him. He deserved better.”

  “I’m sorry about Robbie. But I’m glad it wasn’t you.” Melissa paused at the door and looked back. “And for the record, I’m not with Cage.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Robin Ashton couldn’t remember when she’d had quite as much fun as in her first few hours in Penton. Who’d guess a bunch of old vampire dudes in Alabama could prove so entertaining?

  Mirren Kincaid was a big, ancient, grumpy—and did she mention big?—piece of work. She couldn’t wait to yank his dick a little more. Maybe a lot more.

  Knocking alpha males off their pedestals made for delicious fun. It was tiring, though, especially after a six-hour flight . . . without an airplane. Thankfully, Nik had arrived early and stashed some clothes for her in the woods. Mirren really would have freaked out if she’d emerged from the piney backwoods naked. She had the distinct impression that in the dictionary of life, Mirren Kincaid’s photo would not illustrate the entry for “enlightened male.”

  Curling up in the backseat of Nik’s SUV, Robin left Nik and Cage to get acquainted while she pretended to nap. Through her shuttered eyelids, she looked out the window at the few details she could see of Penton, illuminated either by moonlight or from one of the infrequent bursts of working streetlights. She saw lots of rubble, charred support beams, skeletons of buildings with bits of wood and masonry stretching into the dark sky like clutching fingers.

  That Matthias guy had done a number on Penton; there wasn’t much left. It hadn’t occurred to her that she wouldn’t be able to buy clothes here. Until she could get to a shopping center, maybe she could borrow something from the little vampire girl Hannah, whose psychic abilities Cage had been discussing with Nik when they left the construction site.

  And if she ever ran into him, she’d string up the nutjob who’d thought it appropriate to turn a lit
tle girl into a vampire, psychic skills notwithstanding. She wouldn’t just string him up; she’d hang him by his nuts from a tall building and leave him to dangle in a stiff breeze until something fell off. Even bloodsuckers should have some standards.

  She’d already known about Hannah, of course. The colonel had given both Nik and her dossiers on the major players in Penton. Nik had been cautiously excited—only Nik could be both cautious and excited at the same time—about meeting another person with psychic powers, even a young vampire girl.

  Thanks to the dossiers, Robin also knew that humans and vampires alike had been brought here by Aidan Murphy, who’d begun buying up the property in this little half-horse abandoned mill town even before the pandemic vaccine had made the blood of vaccinated humans deadly to him and his followers. Aidan had amassed too many acolytes, their reports said, giving the Vampire Tribunal—a bunch of predatory old farts, from the sound of it—an excuse to hunt him down. There was also some kind of personal vendetta involving one of Aidan’s senior people and the guy’s father, who happened to be on the Tribunal. Will Ludlam, son of Matthias the Lunatic.

  Messy stuff. Then again, families usually were. She knew that all too well.

  On paper, Aidan Murphy looked like a saint, rehabbing addicts and forming a little commune out in the wilderness—not so different from what her hippie parents had done back in Texas. Those would be the tie-dye-wearing parents who thought it would be funny to name their two eagle-shifter kids Robin and Wren.

  In the flesh, though, Aidan Murphy had been inscrutable. Frosty-eyed and silent, that one. Kind of the way she’d expected all the fangaroos to be. She’d been pleasantly surprised to find Mirren lived up to his grizzly-bear rep. But Robin had the distinct impression, from the way those intense blue eyes followed her movements, that not much escaped Aidan Murphy’s notice. He might be a saint, or he might be dangerous. She’d withhold judgment. The colonel liked him, and she liked the colonel. For now, that was enough.

  Which brought her back to the only other vamp she’d met so far. Cage Reynolds was intriguing; his dossier had hinted at broad military experience but mostly off-the-grid stuff, which probably meant he’d been fangs for hire. His human military service, back in World War II, was sealed so tightly within the archives of the British Army, even the colonel’s connections hadn’t been able to get at it. What kind of guy had sealed records seven decades after his supposed death?

  He was magnetic, for sure. Hell, all the vamps she’d seen so far were fuckworthy, even the grizzly. Their physical beauty probably helped them lure unsuspecting humans into offering up veins. Would her blood taste different from that of a non-shifter? She’d like to experience feeding a vampire at least once. Of course, she might feel differently after she’d actually seen the fangs; so far, they’d all proven skilled at hiding them.

  Still, Cage managed to come across as calm and competent without being arrogant. Maybe his training as a psy-fucking-chiatrist helped. He probably overanalyzed everything. He’d stood back and smiled as she sparred with Mirren, and he definitely gave off a sexual vibe when she talked to him. She could tell when a guy wanted her, and he wanted her whether he knew it yet or not. Cage was cool like Aidan; she couldn’t imagine him getting over-the-top excited about anything. Yet his face revealed more emotion than that of his boss, or scathe master, or whatever the vamps called their alpha.

  Yep, Cage Reynolds had a certain je ne sais quoi, as her latte-drinking friends back in New Orleans would say.

  Make that former friends. Or, rather, current friends living in her former city. She’d been injured during her first and only Omega Force mission when a psychotic wolf-shifter threw her out a third-floor window down in Galveston, Texas. The off-kilter fall had broken her wing.

  Which meant she’d been forced to seek out her family’s healer.

  Which meant he’d ratted her out to her family and they’d managed to discover where she lived.

  Which meant she had to literally fly the coop again.

  When the colonel asked who’d be willing to transfer to the Penton team, she’d volunteered in a wingbeat—even if it meant working with blood-sucking freaks.

  Still, Cage Reynolds was an intriguing freak.

  In the front seat, he and Nik had been doing that odd, circular bonding dance that straight men did. Guys never said what they thought—human guys, shifter guys, and, apparently, fanged guys. They’d never say, Hey, you’re cool. I like you. Let’s hang out. Or Hey, you suck ditch-water. Get out of my face or I’ll rip your balls off.

  No, they’d do exactly as Nik and Cage were doing, making small talk to see what they could read into the other’s answers. Jumping to conclusions. Never saying what they meant.

  “How’d you end up in Penton?” Nik asked, which Robin translated as “Where are your loyalties and what are you looking for?”

  “It started as a way to scout out Aidan’s idea of a human-vampire community, to see if we could replicate it in the UK,” Cage said, establishing himself as a team player. Then he parried back a question to Nik: “Why would you volunteer to get mixed up in this project?”

  Nik hesitated at this one, and Robin knew he was grappling with how honest he should be. His answer would set the tone for this friendship—and whether he’d admit it or not, Nik needed friends who wouldn’t judge him or try to use his gift. Robin’s gut told her Cage could be one of those kinds of friends, so it was her duty to nudge Nik along.

  “He can’t read stuff off us,” she said, catching Nik’s frown in the rearview mirror as she sat up and leaned between the front seats. “If he touches a person, he—”

  “Robin, zip it,” Nik snapped. “You have the brain-to-mouth filter of a parrot.”

  “Parrots are highly intelligent birds.” She reached up and squeezed his shoulder. He was a good guy, her Nik. Too bad they didn’t have more sexual chemistry—but then again, she’d learned that lovers were a hell of a lot easier to find than friends, and Nik was her best friend.

  She patted his shoulder. “What I was saying before I was interrupted is that Nik can do the same thing with people that he does with stuff like the bricks back there. He can touch somebody and get strong flashes of their history—like bad or embarrassing things. The shit people try to repress. And he doesn’t have control over it; he can’t decide who he can and can’t pull stuff from.”

  “That would be . . . horrid,” Cage said, frowning. “What about with shifters and vampires?”

  “He can only read shifters if we’re really upset or emotional, or have completely let our guard down and let him in.” Robin thumped Nik on the ear when he shot her another glare over his shoulder.

  “What about vampires, Niko?” Robin asked. She thought Nik was going to break his jaw one of these days from grinding those pretty white teeth together.

  “How the hell would I know?”

  “Exactly.”

  She might as well annoy Cage too. Robin pulled the ponytail he’d tied his hair into, then grabbed the leather cord and jerked it off. Unbound, his hair fell to his shoulders and was the color of her lightest feathers when she shifted into her golden eagle form. Most of her feathers were dark reddish-brown, the color of her hair, but her wings had tips of golden brown like Cage’s mane, which was soft and fine as silk, but thick, with just a touch of curl.

  He shifted around to face her. “Have a hair fetish, do you, little bird?”

  “Ooh, flirty.” And sexy as hell. Maybe this one was more dangerous than Aidan Murphy, at least for her. “So, even in this light, I can tell your eyes have gone kind of silvery green. That means you’re pissed off at me?”

  Anger and hunger, the Vampires 101 dossiers had said. That’s what would cause their eyes to lighten. “Or do you need a blood transfusion?”

  Cage shifted to look at her more closely, and she had a foreign urge to squirm under his examination. His eyes had li
ghtened even more, and she couldn’t decide if it made her want to fuck him or fly away.

  “Guess it’s not too soon to start your lessons in the ways of the vampire,” he said, his deep voice taking on a silky quality that caused her heart to do a stutter step. “Three things will cause a vampire’s irises to lighten.”

  Well, she knew two. “Yeah, yeah, anger and hunger. What’s the third one?”

  He reached back and stroked a finger along her jawline. “Arousal, little bird.” Then he turned back around and laughed. “You’ll have to decide which one applies to the present situation.”

  She didn’t hear Nik laughing, but his shoulders were moving up and down suspiciously, so she thumped him on the ear again for good measure. “Well, never mind about me; back to Nik. Let him touch you—unless you have secrets you want to keep.”

  Cage swept his fingers through that silky hair, which gave him a kind of reckless-rogue look. Then he held his arm out in front of Nik. “There’s some ugly shit hiding inside this skin, but go for it.”

  “Is ‘go for it’ secret vampire code for ‘get that predatory eagle-girl away from me’?” Nik glanced back at her with a look that said they’d be discussing all of this later. Good. He was awfully fun to fight with.

  “Oh no, I can handle the eagle girl.” Cage, on the other hand, didn’t look at her at all, and she considered that comment a challenge. “I was offering to let you touch me—on a purely professional basis, of course—to see if you can read anything off vampires. Oh, and take the next left, third house on the right.”

  Nik brought the SUV to a stop in front of a long, narrow building that reminded Robin of the modified shotgun houses back in New Orleans, especially the new rows of buildings erected after Hurricane Katrina. But this was bigger, and obviously a new construction, identical to a half-dozen other houses scattered along the block, all painted white. Bo-ring. At least in New Orleans the houses were all painted different colors, from pastel to garish.