Allegiance (The Penton Vampire Legacy)

by Susannah Sandlin

  Nik knew the instant Shawn decided to talk. Her shoulders drooped inside the billowy fabric of Cage’s shirt. Her fingers, clutched into such tight fists the knuckles had whitened, relaxed at her sides. Sitting back on her heels at Mirren’s feet, with her head down, she looked like exactly what she was: a supplicant, making confession to the high priest who would decide her fate, whether penance and forgiveness or death.

  She began talking without another prompt. Now that her decision was made, the words seemed to come easily, and Nik listened with horrified fascination at a glimpse into a world so corrupt he found it hard to imagine it existed in tandem with his own.

  She never knew her contact’s name, only that he’d found out she was a shifter who’d racked up enough gambling debt to be vulnerable. He made her an offer, and she took it.

  “Coyotes are loners; we don’t travel in packs or even keep in touch with our families, so I didn’t have anyone to go to. And he did a great sales job.” She shook her head. “I was so stupid. God. All I could see was the picture he painted. I’d be immortal, and I’d be rich. I’d be able to walk in sunlight like a shifter but have the strength and longevity of a vampire. In return, all I had to do was come here, take orders.” She took a deep breath. “It didn’t quite work that way.”

  “No shit,” Robin said. She’d crawled in Cage’s lap, and they held each other, listening, the horror in their faces mirroring the others. Glory was crying—whether for Shawn or for the sorry state of affairs in general, Nik wasn’t sure. Shawn had been selfish and stupid, but she was paying for it.

  “Did you start the fire?” Nik knew the answer to that question but wanted to gauge her response.

  “Yes. A bottle of some flammable liquid was left for me; my contact said to take it to Cage’s room, open it, light it, and get the hell out.” She stared at the floor. “I didn’t know Hannah was in there. I swear.”

  “I notice you didn’t worry if I was anywhere in the house.” Cage’s face had shown a little pity, but that was gone.

  “And the construction site—did you sabotage that?”

  This time, she looked surprised. “N-no. I wouldn’t even know how to sabotage a construction site.”

  Nik believed her. If Fen Patrick had worked in third-world countries doing dirty mercenary jobs, he probably would know how to weaken a brick wall.

  “The only other thing I did was leave the drugs for Mark Calvert. I knew Britta would be blamed for it.”

  Mirren again: “Did you ever see your contact?”

  “No, and his number never showed up as a recall option. I had to wait to hear from him.” Shawn paused. “He had an accent, though. German, maybe?”

  “Fucking Frank Greisser,” Cage muttered.

  Mirren looked at him and gave a single nod. “Tell us how they changed you, and what you can and can’t do.”

  “Wait.” Glory pulled a spare chair from against the wall and dragged it to a spot in the room that was more conversation spot than interrogation spot. She held out a hand to Shawn. “Up you go.”

  Shawn looked at Mirren, who gave another slight nod. Nik had never seen him not give Glory her way, although he was glad Shawn was cooperating. If she hadn’t, he wasn’t sure even Glory’s plea for mercy would carry much weight.

  The unexpected kindness finally broke through Shawn’s resigned calm, and she cried for a few minutes before taking a deep breath. Mirren and Cage just stared at her, while Nik and Robin both had to look away.

  “Once I agreed to do it, a vampire came to me. I never knew his name. He was young, handsome, and when he began feeding from me I thought I’d gone to heaven. I’d never been fed from before. He said it was . . . powerful, feeding from a shifter.”

  Mirren blinked at that, and Nik figured that’s what he’d had a taste of when he bonded Robin. Shawn had taken him halfway to heaven earlier tonight, and while he hoped he’d turn her down if the opportunity arose again, he couldn’t make any guarantees. On the other hand, he could probably find a female vampire who’d deliver the same results without his losing an ear.

  But that thought brought up an interesting question. “If Shawn is bonded to Will, why didn’t he know she was being disloyal and warn us?”

  “Will’s been out of range since long before the fire,” Cage said, and then turned back to Shawn. “How were you turned?”

  “He turned me the usual way, I guess,” Shawn said. “He drained me to the point of death, and then began to feed me his blood until my body changed enough to accept it. I was sick for months before I started to level off to what’s become normal.”

  She turned back to Mirren. “To answer your other questions, I can’t go out in sunlight anymore,” she said. “I can’t eat solid food, yet I’m so damned hungry all the time. I smell it, I crave it, but if I eat it, my body rejects it. Blood’s the only thing that keeps me alive, but I hate it. Seems like I’m always starving and always sick and always angry.”

  “Even when you’re a coyote you can’t go in the sun or eat?” Robin leaned forward.

  Shawn shook her head. “No. It’s kind of the worst of both worlds. I don’t know how another person might react . . . Wait, you said there’s another one like me here? A shifter turned vampire?”

  Mirren raised his gaze to meet Cage’s. “Find Fen Patrick. Now.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Robin was surprised to see Nik still up when she and Cage returned from their failed mission to find Fen. They’d run into Mirren as he hauled Shawn, still with duct tape in place, to the silver-lined room down in the old Omega facility. It was their most secure site. Afterward he planned to meet Glory at the lieutenants’ daysleep space.

  She’d expected to have the living room all to Cage and herself, but there Nik sat, wide awake at 3:00 a.m.

  “You should be asleep.” She did her mother-hen thing that always annoyed him, feeling his forehead with the back of her hand. His bandages still looked good except the wound on his ear had bled through.

  The thing that really worried her—whether Nik had taken in enough shifter DNA through his bites to turn hybrid—was something that Nik hadn’t considered yet. She didn’t plan to mention it unless he did, but she’d sure as hell be keeping an eye on him.

  Cage came from the kitchen with three glasses and a bottle of Mirren’s private stock of scotch that he kept under the sink. So sue her, she’d snooped. She grinned at him. “Does our host know you found his secret stash?”

  Cage smiled but not very convincingly. “Do I care?”

  “Brave words, big man.”

  Her attempts to cheer him up hadn’t been successful all evening. Not when he’d first learned the suspicions about Fen. Not when they’d scoured all of Penton trying to find him and had come up empty. Especially not when they’d revisited the space under the greenhouse, although it had surprised her to learn how claustrophobic he was.

  Nik had sucked down his scotch way too fast but had finally stretched out on the sofa, so she propped a hip on the arm of Cage’s chair, hoping he’d invite her to join him. He finally snaked an arm around her waist and pulled her onto his lap. Who’d ever have guessed her stuffy British vampire was a snuggler? A good one.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  He’d been resting his cheek against her hair, stroking her leg, lost in thought. Now, he pulled back and gave her half of her favorite old cocky smile. “It worries me that you’re asking permission. You usually don’t.”

  “It’s something I figure you won’t want to answer.”

  He laughed and kissed her forehead. “Ask away. I reserve the right to plead the . . . whichever amendment to the US Constitution protects me from incriminating myself.”

  “The fifth.”

  “Right.”

  She settled back against his chest. “You’re this really together guy, you know? Calm. Steady. Know how to handle yourself.
”

  “You make me sound like a fucking cocker spaniel.”

  “I’m serious.” She elbowed him in the ribs. “So where’d the claustrophobia come from? And those scars on your legs.”

  “Those are big questions, love.”

  She didn’t blame him. There were things she didn’t want to talk about, either. Maybe, if this all ended and they could see what they had together, they’d both open up. And if they didn’t, she was okay with that. She’d never been a happily-ever-after girl; she wasn’t even sure she believed in that capital-L Love for herself. She’d always been grateful for the small moments of happiness in her life, and Cage gave her that without knowing it.

  They sat in silence awhile; Robin thought she could sit like this forever.

  “I was turned vampire during the war.” Cage’s voice was soft, whether from not wanting to wake Nik or because he was so lost in the past, Robin wasn’t sure. She kept her mouth shut, something most people didn’t realize she knew how to do. She could listen when she wanted to.

  “I was a psychiatrist, had a practice in London that was disrupted by war. When war’s over, people have time to sort out their problems; when war’s in progress, no one has time. So I signed up.”

  “The British Army?”

  He chuckled. “Oh no, that would have been too safe, wouldn’t it? I was SOE—the equivalent of today’s black operatives, I suppose, working directly under Churchill. We were placed undercover in occupied territory. Don’t know how many of us there were—we weren’t encouraged to fraternize. I was airdropped into occupied France and worked as a radio operator for the resistance. There were about six agents in my unit.”

  She didn’t find it hard to imagine him in that kind of environment—loving the excitement of the subterfuge, the intellectual chess match of outwitting the enemy. Until things went wrong.

  Her breath caught. Claustrophobia. Scars. “You were caught.”

  He didn’t answer for a while. “The Gestapo found us—I don’t know how. We were taken to Fresnes, a prison south of Paris where the SOE captives were held. I was locked up for a year.”

  Cage’s voice had grown monotone, as if the only way he could tell the story was to withdraw from it. She wanted to stop him; she never should have asked him to tell this. But she remained silent.

  “All of us were tortured. The only time I left my solitary cell during that time was to visit the interrogation chamber. Later I learned others fared worse than I—teeth and nails pulled out one at a time. Public hanging by piano wire to make death as slow and humiliating as possible. Water torture—modern warfare has invented nothing new. I had a guard who enjoyed knives and carving neat, tidy lines into skin.”

  Robin tried to imagine what he’d been through, how he survived, but her little life had been so tame compared to his. Filled with its own torture, but not like this. “How did you escape?”

  He smiled. “One of the guards took a fancy to me, I suppose. We were being transferred to a prison camp in Germany, herded onto a cattle car in the middle of the night, and he pulled me aside and dragged me into a shed behind the train depot. I was weak and thin. I thought he was going to shoot me and actually hoped he would. Instead, he turned me.”

  They sat a while longer. It seemed insufficient, but she meant it: “Thank you for trusting me with that.”

  “Aren’t you sorry you asked? At any rate, that’s my sad, woeful tale of how I get rather undone in tight spaces.”

  And why the sight of Britta, tortured, had probably haunted him.

  Robin shifted in his lap until she sat facing him, her knees wedged between his thighs and the chair arms. She ran her fingertips over the lines of his face, the long lashes that rested on his cheeks when he closed his eyes to feel her touch, the straight nose, full lower lip, stubble more blond than brown.

  She thanked him the only way she knew how—with a soft, sweet kiss. Which didn’t stay sweet or soft for long as she lost herself in the sweet tangle of tongues, and his big hands roving up her back.

  “I swear to God if you’re going to have more hot monkey sex, don’t come anywhere near this sofa or I’m telling Mirren. And give me a minute to leave the room.”

  Robin collapsed against Cage’s chest, laughing. “Niko, you voyeur.”

  “So not true. Cage has nothing I want to see.”

  She kissed Cage again, a kiss she hoped was full of promise, and got to her feet. She tossed him a throw pillow and pointed at his lap. “Might want to hide that.”

  He groaned and put the pillow over his face instead. “You are evil.”

  She did the mama-hen thing with Nik again. He didn’t seem to have a fever, which was good. Of course, Krys had pumped him full of antibiotics when she stitched up his ear.

  “Help me sit up.”

  Robin went behind the sofa, reached over, and pulled Nik upright by grasping his shoulders. “You want me to help you to your room?”

  “No, I want to talk.”

  “We’re consenting adults, Niko.” Robin sat on the sofa next to him and gave him her most innocent smile. He didn’t return it. “Oh, serious talk.”

  “I remember you telling me shape-shifters are born and not turned like vampires, right?”

  She nodded, pretty sure her boy had figured out the thing that most worried her.

  “When we had that case in Houston, we were told three bites from the same species would turn a human into some monster-hybrid. Or was it three bites from the same shifter?”

  “Same shifter.” Robin looked at Cage, whose stricken expression told her this was all news to him, and he grasped the horrific possibilities.

  “I have five bites. Six if you count the fact that she ate half of my ear. What’s going to happen to me?”

  Robin didn’t have an answer, and that was answer enough for Nik. “Shit. If I turn into some freak like we saw in Houston, you end it if I don’t have the guts.”

  “Nik, don’t talk like that.” She wouldn’t kill him. Couldn’t. Ever.

  He reached out and grasped her wrist, pulling her to him. “Promise me, Robin. I don’t want to live like that.”

  “It will be done,” Cage said. “I’d feel the same way. But don’t ask Robin to do it. It would kill her. Ask me.”

  Nik nodded. “Consider yourself asked.”

  “Done.”

  Well, wasn’t male bonding just too sweet? Robin fought back tears. If she lost Nik, she didn’t care what fate Mirren recommended for Shawn Nicholls. Robin would kill her.

  “But don’t write your own obituary yet,” Cage said, getting up to pour himself another scotch. “We’re not dealing with an ordinary shifter. From her description of what she could and couldn’t do, Shawn had more vampire traits than shifter after her turn. And vampire bites won’t turn you into anything except maybe a blood whore.”

  “What’s a blood whore?” So many things about the vampire world that Robin didn’t know.

  “A human who gets addicted to the high from being fed on by a vampire. There are always a group of them hanging around wherever there’s an active vampire population.”

  She didn’t like the sound of that, and she didn’t want Cage feeding from anyone else. Oh, Nik was okay because she knew neither of them found it comfortable. But not another woman. She would have to trick him into feeding from her somehow.

  Every girl needed a project.

  “So how will I know?” Nik asked. “You keep checking for fever. If I have a fever does it mean anything?”

  Robin’s biggest job was going to be keeping Nik preoccupied, so he wouldn’t obsess. “If you have a fever, it means you have an infection,” she said slowly. “Cage is right—Shawn is more vampire than shifter now. If”—she held up a finger—“and I mean if you’ve been changed, the first thing you’re going to notice is your hair. It might change color or fall out or turn
straight. Shawn’s hair is about the color of a coyote, so my guess is your hair would start changing color.”

  Nik looked like he’d swallowed a raw eel. “Have you ever seen a Greek man with blond hair?”

  “Give me a break. You’re from New Orleans. The closest you’ve been to Greece is that island where they make Tabasco sauce.”

  “It’s not an island; it’s a salt dome.”

  “If you two don’t mind.” Cage shook his head. “Have you ever heard of anything like this, Robin? What would happen, for instance, if instead of turning a shifter into a vampire, they tried to hybridize a vampire into a shifter?”

  She couldn’t imagine any outcome where that would be a good thing. “I don’t know, but it sounds like somebody’s doing really fucked-up science experiments, and I’ve gotta wonder why.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Matthias drove with the window rolled down all the way, relishing the cool night air on his fevered cheeks. He hated the South, but tonight even the godforsaken pine-scented mountains of south-central Georgia smelled like freedom.

  The trip had gone more smoothly than expected, even though Frank’s grand promises of walking in daylight and eating food hadn’t panned out. At least Matthias could live on vaccinated blood, even though it tasted like shit.

  Oh, he was still angry. He was still starving. The aromas of food still spurred the hunger to rage and beckon, making his fury more bitter. But his strength was returning a little more each day, and he’d adapt. He’d always been good at adapting.

  And once he took care of tonight’s order from Frank, delivering the deathblow to Penton, he’d return to Europe and show Frank Greisser how effectively one of his genetically enhanced monsters could kill.

  Matthias had arrived in Atlanta at dawn and spent daysleep in a space arranged by the oh-so-clever Herr Greisser, who had a rental car waiting for him at dusk.

  In the trunk was a high-powered sniper rifle and directions to a private range where he could get used to the feel of the weapon, gather his strength, and wait for tomorrow night’s phone call that all the plans were in place.