“Let me train with you, and then let Matthias try coming after me again.” Melissa’s voice came out stronger and more sure than it had in months. “It’s time we stop hiding and rebuild our lives.”
“Don’t even think that—you know better than anybody what Matthias is capable of, and you don’t want him coming after you.” Glory’s brows met in a frown, but Mirren nodded slowly—once down, once up.
“Mel’s right,” he said, laying a hand on Glory’s knee. “And it’s just the thing our old friend Melissa Calvert would’ve said. I was beginning to wonder if that fire was ever gonna return. Welcome back.”
Melissa stared at him. Mirren had considered her fiery? Aidan had used that word for her, too. When Matthias’s hired hand had cut her throat, and then she had turned, she’d lost herself. Until now, she hadn’t realized how much.
She’d been wandering around in confusion and self-pity long enough. Too long.
“Will you let me train with you?” Determination replaced doubt, and it felt damned good.
Mirren nodded. “Not with the lieutenants, not yet. But I’ll work with you tomorrow night.” He looked down at his mate. “You need some training, too, Glory. Even though you have the telekinesis, you need basic self-defense training—whatever humans are taught. Dimitrou should be able to help with that.”
“One more thing.” Melissa wasn’t the only Calvert Matthias might go after. “You need to warn Mark. Getting at him is a good way to get to the rest of us, and he’s vulnerable during the day.”
Matthias might have to spend his days as zonked out as the rest of them, but he likely had humans on his payroll.
“That’s Ashton’s job,” Mirren said, and paused a moment before adding, “In the meantime, I want you and Cage with the lieutenants. Tomorrow night we’ll figure out how to find Matthias, and how to rebuild our city.”
Melissa nodded. “Does Cage know where to go?”
Mirren shook his head. “Didn’t get a chance to tell him, so we’ll wait till he gets back.”
That, she could handle. “Tell me, and I’ll wait on him. I need to talk to him anyway.”
She wanted to see Cage alone, to see if her newfound backbone made her consider him in a different light.
One thing was for sure. Penton’s recent string of bad luck made more sense now that she knew Matthias was out there, pulling strings like some evil puppet master.
Mirren handed her a napkin, on the back of which he’d sketched out a simple map. “Memorize that, and then throw it in the fire.”
Taking a deep breath, Melissa studied the drawing. “The lieutenants’ daysleep space is under the old Quik Mart between here and LaFayette?”
At Mirren’s nod, she tore the napkin in shreds and threw the pieces into the fireplace, watching as they blackened and disappeared into soot.
“There’s a four-digit lock that gets you into both the first and second levels. The combinations are different.” Mirren gave her the numbers and made her repeat them back to him until she’d mastered them. “We change the numbers every day. Find me or Aidan to get them. You sure you want to wait for Cage?”
Almost as badly as she wanted to take a shower. “Sure. He should be here soon—I left him sitting in a mud puddle in front of the burned house with that Nikolas guy. They can’t stay there forever.”
“I like Nik,” Glory said. “He seems quiet but, I don’t know, competent. And then, of course, there’s—”
“Ro-bin Ash-ton.” Mirren drawled out the name, and Melissa would swear he almost smiled. “What a fucking menace.”
“F-word. Show me the money.” Glory held out a hand and Mirren, grumbling, pulled a roll of bills out of his pocket and handed her a five. “That leaves me with four credits. Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck.”
“Funny, foul mouth; this is buying me a car.” Which was ridiculous, because Mirren had as much money as God. He and Aidan both did, thanks to Mark’s investment genius. He could buy her a dozen cars—but Glory wouldn’t take what she hadn’t earned.
“Mel, I’m guessing you haven’t met our other new Omega team member yet?” Glory smiled, too.
No, but now she was intrigued. “Not yet, why?” Melissa reclaimed the corner of the adjacent sofa. “Something about him I need to know? Or, wait, Robin, you said? The other Army person is a woman?”
“Not Army,” Glory said. “She’s a shape-shifter recruited to be part of the Omega Force team in Houston, although I think the colonel made them go through a special version of Ranger training, right?” She looked at Mirren, who nodded with that unsettling half smile.
Mirren distrusted newcomers on principle; Melissa had never known him to find one vaguely amusing. In fact, only Glory—and Will Ludlam, although Mirren probably wouldn’t admit it—consistently amused him. “She’s some kind of eagle,” Glory said. “Weird, huh?”
Not as weird as they were acting. “What are you not telling me? Mirren Kincaid, come clean.” Melissa had seen through the big guy’s rough exterior a long time ago, and thanks to being Aidan’s familiar, had mostly gotten to know him through Aidan’s eyes. He didn’t intimidate her for a minute. “What’s so funny about Robin Ashton?”
Mirren made a big show of stretching before standing up, a broad spread of long arms and packed muscle beneath his short-sleeved T-shirt—there was a lot of him to stretch. “She’ll show up here soon enough and you can draw your own conclusions. Maybe you can train with her.” He held out a hand to Glory. “Come on, woman.”
Glory’s face came alive when she looked at Mirren, and Melissa’s sense of emptiness returned as if on cue. She missed the easy intimacy she’d had with Mark before she was turned. Funny how she had forgotten it until now, when he wanted to move on. Now that she’d pushed him away until she no longer had to push, it came back to her.
Glory wished Melissa a good daysleep before heading down the hallway to the back door, but Mirren remained a second longer, looking at her with an expression she couldn’t interpret.
“What is it, Mirren? I swear, you’ve been acting weird since I got here. Weird even for you.”
One side of his mouth quirked up—the normal version of the Kincaid smile. “Decide what you want, Mel. And that’s all I got to say on the subject.” He turned and disappeared down the hallway. In a couple of seconds, Melissa heard the back door open and then click shut again.
Well, that was oblique.
Except the more she thought about it, the more sense his comment made. She hadn’t discussed with them the conclusions she’d reached about her relationships, so Mirren and Glory probably thought she still was torn between Cage and Mark.
That question, she’d finally answered. The one that remained was whether she could get over Mark. Until tonight, when he’d hinted that he and Britta were getting close, the possibility that he might love someone else hadn’t occurred to her. Until tonight, she’d taken for granted that if she ever decided to try again with him, he’d be there. It had been unfair to him and naive of her.
Until tonight, she’d thought she could walk away from Mark first to spare herself the agony of his eventual rejection. Now, she wasn’t so sure. The thought of him with someone else tangled her heart in knots. He was still a part of her; she’d just been too fearful to admit it.
Melissa shuffled down the hall into the back bedroom on the left, pulled out clean jeans and a sweater, and stopped at the drawer of lingerie. She usually didn’t bother with the sexy stuff anymore; it wasn’t like anyone saw them. But tonight . . . well, tonight everyone was tired, but at dusk tomorrow, maybe she and Cage could figure things out and lingerie might help.
She wanted him to see her as a woman, not a pathetic newbie vampire who needed him as a security blanket. Unless he saw her as a woman, whole and healthy, neither of them would know if they were together because of natural attraction or because she was needy and he had a savior comple
x.
And women who wanted to attract a man didn’t wear old university sweatshirts to bed.
Opening the drawer of the utilitarian wooden chest, identical to the one in every community house on the block, Melissa fingered the sheer dark-blue fabric of a negligee, closing her eyes as she remembered the first time she’d worn it. She’d liked the black one better, or even the red one, but she’d bought this color because Mark loved the way she looked in it. She’d worn it no more than fifteen minutes before he had slid the straps off her shoulders and left it in a heap on the bedroom floor.
The memory was enough to give her an empty, aching feeling that only a man could fill. Or love.
Oh no, you’re not trotting down that corner of memory lane tonight. Melissa shoved the negligee back in the drawer and slammed it. In the adjacent drawer were T-shirts, and she picked out a paint-stained dark-green crewneck that had been stretched into shapeless comfort. The only memories associated with that shirt were the long hours of painting community house bedrooms. Just thinking about it made her shoulders ache.
She stuffed the sweatshirt into a small bag with a couple of days’ changes of clothes to keep in the daysleep spaces, and then walked down the hall to the nearest of the three bathrooms they all shared.
Pig-Pen—the dirty guy in the Peanuts cartoons who was perpetually surrounded by a cloud of dirt—had nothing on her. She stripped off her mud-spattered clothes and threw them away; washing wouldn’t get out the red-clay stains. Turning on the shower, she let the water pelt her fingers until it was as hot as she could stand it.
She stood under the spray with her face turned up, wishing the rivulets of hot water could wash away not just the iron-red mud but most of the last year.
At least she started out thinking that. But without the last year, Melissa would never have met Krys or Glory—and Aidan and Mirren had found such happiness with them. She wouldn’t wish them the loss of that happiness; plus, she’d made the best friends of her life. She would never have met Cage if he hadn’t come to study Penton for Edward Simmons.
But Hannah would still have her fam-parents, whose deaths at Matthias’s hands had sent her into a tailspin none of them knew how to handle. Without the last year, Will would still be whole. Penton would still be a peaceful place to live. She wouldn’t be a vampire.
She’d still be with Mark.
By the time she climbed out of the shower, dried off, and dressed, she’d taken the circumspect view. No way to change the last year, so she might as well appreciate the good things that had happened and not dwell on the bad.
A low rumble of voices reached her as soon as she opened the bathroom door into the hallway. “Cage, is that you?”
“In the common room,” he called out.
She ran her fingers through her towel-dried hair, all the primping she had time for.
“Mirren said you need to—”
She’d glanced in the kitchen doorway in passing, and now backed up to look in again. A young woman stood in front of the open refrigerator, eating a chicken leg and staring at the shelves.
She wasn’t completely naked. A grimy garment that looked like a man’s shirt was tied around her waist, but her small firm breasts were standing at attention from the chill of the fridge.
“What, you’ve never seen a naked woman before, either? How does that work when you’re in the shower?” The woman reached in and pulled an apple from the crisper, and turned to Melissa, apple in one hand, drumstick held up like a club. “I’m Robin. You must be Melissa. Thanks for helping Niko, in case he didn’t think to say so.”
Robin edged past Melissa and sat on the nearest sofa next to a bare-chested Nik, whose shirt had apparently been donated. She held the apple out to Nik. “Here. Eat. Man can’t live by bourbon alone.”
Cage sat on the opposite sofa, facing them. He’d watched Robin cross the room and seemed to pull his gaze from her—or her perky little mammaries—way too slowly. “Hi, Mel.” Finally, he looked at her, blinked, and smiled. “A shower sounds like a grand idea.”
Well, wasn’t that just . . . impersonal. “Wish I’d known you were coming so soon, I’d have waited to shower with you.”
Cage’s eyes widened to mossy green orbs, and his focus shot over to Robin, chewing on her chicken leg and staring right back at him.
“You’re doing her?” Robin leaned back and gave Melissa a slow head-to-toe visual inspection.
Melissa felt like the tall, fat, and gawky wallflower at the prom. She propped her hands on her hips and waited for Cage’s answer.
He looked from one to the other, and then to Nik, as if his new best buddy could provide an answer. Nik shrugged and bit into his apple.
Cage ran a soot-covered hand through his hair. Melissa didn’t think she’d ever seen him wear it down, but it was a good look for him. Better than the one he wore on his face, which she would describe as deer-in-headlights. “I, ah . . .”
Melissa had never seen her calm British lieutenant this rattled, so she put an extra swivel in her hips as she crossed the room, sat next to him, and slid a hand from his knee to the top of his thigh, where an interesting bulge rested. And stirred. “Cage and I are very good friends,” she told Robin, adding a sugary smile to emphasize just how good.
Nik bit into the apple again, its crisp crunch filling the awkward silence of the room. Melissa stared at Robin with a “you can flaunt your tits all night but he’s leaving with me” look.
Robin just grinned. “Fang-girl’s getting territorial, Cage. And back in the car, you practically promised to introduce me to shifter-vampire sex.”
Nik choked on his apple and collapsed in a fit of coughing.
“I’ll get you some water, mate.” Cage practically leapt off the sofa and propelled himself into the kitchen. When he returned, he handed the glass to Nik but remained standing.
Robin laughed. “You okay, Niko?”
“Go to bed, Robin.” Nik wiped tears from his eyes, and Melissa wasn’t sure if it was from choking or laughing or the aftereffects of the fire.
“You coming with me? I had my heart set on not sleeping alone tonight.”
Nik closed his eyes and seemed to be counting to ten. “Go to bed, Robin.”
Okay, this girl was way over the top. Melissa began to understand Mirren’s amusement by her—except she was a loon, not an eagle. And Cage was acting like a bashful tween boy seeing breasts for the first time since infancy.
“I, uh, think I’ll go and take a shower.” He looked at Melissa, at Robin, at the floor. His voice sounded strained and oh-so-British. “Right, then. Off I go.”
“You’ll need to come with me afterward, to daysleep,” Melissa called after him. “Aidan wants us in the lieutenants’ space from now on.” She looked at Robin. “Both of us.”
Was that a look of irritation flashing across Robin’s face for a split-second? If so, it was replaced soon enough with a smile. “I don’t want him when he’s sleeping. I want him wide awake. So sweet dreams, my fangy friends.”
With that, she finished off the last bite of her chicken leg, tossed it into the kitchen trash, and ran her fingers across Cage’s ass on her way past him down the hallway, where he remained frozen halfway between the common room and the bathroom.
The door to one of the back bedrooms closed with a firm click, which seemed to bring Cage out of his stupor. “Right,” he mumbled, turning to walk down the hallway. “Shower.”
Melissa turned to Nik, who watched her with narrowed eyes such a dark, liquid brown they looked almost as black as his hair.
“What?” she asked him. “You have something to say?”
He studied her a few seconds. “Only that this could get really messy and I don’t want to see Robin get hurt.”
Like that was possible. “I think Robin can take care of herself.” Melissa studied him in return. Were he and that naked litt
le jaybird involved? “You seem possessive of Robin, protective even. But not quite jealous. I can’t quite figure you guys out.”
He wrapped his apple core in a napkin and threw it in the trash. “I could say the same about you and Cage Reynolds.”
CHAPTER 14
Matthias slammed the cheap hotel phone receiver back onto its base. Another accident in Penton, but only a partial success. The real target, Cage Reynolds, had survived.
“It was not a total failure, mein Freund,” Frank had told him in that oily politician’s voice that got on Matthias’s last nerve. By God, when all this was over, he’d add Frank Greisser to his elimination list. It was a long list.
Not a total failure, no. The little girl Aidan Murphy kept with him like a mascot had been injured, as well as at least one other scathe member. Frank had yet to get more than a cursory report from whomever he had on the inside.
That person wasn’t doing a very good job, if Frank’s only requests of Matthias this time were to explain the relationship between Melissa Calvert and Cage Reynolds and provide background on Mark Calvert.
Why did anybody care who fucked whose wife?
Matthias startled at the loud knock on the door. No one knew he was here except Frank, and the Tribunal director—as he’d so smugly boasted on the phone—was lounging in a posh New York hotel suite, awaiting the Tribunal vote on Aidan Murphy’s nomination in only a week.
The knock sounded again, followed by a rough, deep voice. “Herr Ludlam? It is Wolfgang, the hotel manager. I have something for you, a gift sent by Herr Greisser.”
Matthias considered not answering. He hated to be paranoid, but better paranoid than dead. Still, while Wolfgang did bring a bag of unvaccinated blood for him after each daysleep, however much Frank paid for that service, it was not the same as feeding from a live human. Perhaps this was a human feeder.
Matthias opened the door a crack and then pulled it open wider. Wolfgang was not alone, and the person next to him was definitely human—disappointingly, a man. But Matthias wasn’t in a position to be choosy.
Allegiance (The Penton Vampire Legacy) Page 13