Allegiance (The Penton Vampire Legacy)

by Susannah Sandlin

  He was the luckiest sonofabitch on earth. Two nights after he’d been sure death was imminent, he was lying here in his bed in the lieutenants’ quarters with his guardian angel beside him. He rolled over, trying not to groan aloud, and looked at her—really looked at Robin Ashton, without the mouth and the attitude that made her seem twice her size. Without those dark-brown eyes glaring or dancing or heating up, her long lashes were more delicate and sensuous. Her nose turned up slightly, and her impossible auburn hair stuck in every conceivable direction. It might be the sexiest thing he’d ever seen.

  He had no right to be this content, and part of him wished they could stay like this forever. Here in their little cocoon, making love, making each other laugh, fighting. Because he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answers to the questions that were already bombarding his mind. About Aidan. Krys. Melissa. Mirren. All of them. What the future held for Penton.

  Robin moaned and opened her eyes a crack, then all the way. “You’re awake. I mean really awake. The last couple of nights you were . . .”

  “Pretty stupid, I imagine.” He leaned over and kissed her, then kissed her again. “I do remember some things quite well. I believe I fed from you.”

  She grinned. “And I do believe you made me feed from you, sort of.”

  He planted a kiss on her neck, where he’d definitely be feeding from her again at a near-future date. “And then I think we fucked, just before twilight.”

  “Oh, we definitely did that. Twice, I think.”

  He leaned over and took one small, perfect breast in his mouth, then the other. “You realize you’re stuck with me for good, right?”

  She squinted at him, reached over and thumped him on the head. “Don’t think that gives you a free ride to be an asshat.”

  He laughed and lay back.

  “I need to tell you about my family.”

  Cage rolled over and pulled her to him. “It doesn’t matter, unless you’ve got a husband stashed away somewhere.”

  “I don’t have a husband.” Robin sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees. “You really don’t want to know?”

  Cage reached out and took her hand. “I want to know whatever you want to tell me. When you’re ready, I’ll be ready to listen. Until then, it doesn’t matter. We’re what matters.”

  She lay back down with her back to him, and he held his breath, waiting to see if she’d continue. He wouldn’t press her, but he desperately wanted to understand her.

  “My sister Wren is two years younger than me.” Her voice was muffled and had fallen into a soft, Southern twang different from her usual sharply clipped accent. “We lived south of Dallas in a town where there were lots of eagle shifters, and she fell in love with this guy, Kevin, who was the nephew of our Goia.”

  She stopped, and Cage rolled over and pulled her into his arms, holding her, thinking about the strong protective streak she’d shown over Nik and over him. “Things went badly with him?”

  She shifted her head slightly, which he interpreted as a nod. “He beat her. Belittled her. She became this scared, anxious person I didn’t know anymore.”

  He waited, willing her to go on. When she spoke again, her voice was strained, filled with pain. “I killed him, Cage. I went to their house to try to talk Wren into leaving him, and she was unconscious. Covered with blood on the floor of their kitchen. He was sitting in the fucking recliner watching a football game while she bled on the floor.”

  “You were just protecting her, love. That’s what you do.” Cage pulled her against him more tightly and let her cry for a long time. When her body stopped shaking from the force of her sobs, he asked the question whose answer had made Robin the woman he’d come to love.

  “What happened? With your family? With your Goia?”

  Robin rolled onto her back, so she could look at him. “Wren hates me. She defends the bastard, even now. The Goia demanded payment in kind: my life for his son’s.” The tears had started again.

  “But what about your parents?” The sister’s reaction didn’t surprise him; victims of abuse were indoctrinated to blame themselves and not their abuser. That much hadn’t changed from his human days.

  “I broke their hearts.” Robin had stopped crying and now looked simply sad. “If they defended me, they lost their place in our community. It meant too much to them, so I slipped away. They’re duty bound to turn me in if they find me, so I stay on the move.”

  Cage brushed his fingertips across her cheek and kissed her forehead. “No one will ever find you here, little bird.” And if they did, whether it was family or Goia or a posse of eagles, they’d have to go through him to touch her.

  She pulled away from him, and the old fire had returned to her brown eyes. “Penton has to survive. Aidan’s improving, but we don’t know if Krys will wake up, or Britta. We have unfinished business if we’re going to make this a safe home for all of us.”

  He nodded. He’d been thinking the same thing. Now that he was back on his feet and Nik had recuperated enough to drive, they needed to find Matthias. And then he wanted Fen Patrick and the dickhead who’d set all this in motion, Frank Greisser.

  “Nik can help us,” Robin said.

  He hated to ask the guy to use the Touch when he’d barely recovered from his run-in with Shawn. “Nik needs some recovery time, love.”

  Oh yeah, she was definitely back to normal; her jaw was clenched, and her eyes had narrowed. “Nik doesn’t need recovery time; he needs a chance to help. He’s just waiting for you to give him the go-ahead.”

  Which was all well and good, but he wasn’t in charge. “It’s not my call to make.”

  She kissed his shoulder, then slapped it. “Aidan’s out of commission, and until he’s back on his feet, that means Mirren’s running on low batteries. Which, in turn, means that you and Will are in charge.”

  Well, shit. “That is quite a frightening scenario, then. Two half-lame vampires with bossy women by their sides.”

  “Exactly. So move it.”

  First, Cage needed to talk to Will, who’d also been feeling peaked since getting in close proximity to Aidan; their theory was that Cage’s steady diet of shifter blood was somehow making him invulnerable to the bonding energy leach—yet another reason to appreciate Robin.

  He held Robin until she finally fell asleep, then walked down the hallway to find Will sitting with Aidan and Krys, whose room in the lieutenants’ quarters had become a makeshift hospital bay. Aidan had awakened a couple of times, briefly. Krys hadn’t stirred. She was still breathing, though, and where there was breath, there was hope.

  “He wake up?” Cage propped against the wall next to the bed. Aidan’s head was heavily bandaged; the rest of his injuries had healed like a vampire should—fast and clean.

  Will shook his head. “Not yet.” They remained quiet a few moments as Cage tried to figure out how to broach the subject of Matthias.

  “I need to ask you something.” Cage stared at the floor. He didn’t think he could ask permission to chase down a friend’s father and look his friend in the eye while doing so.

  “When you find him, kill him,” Will said. “Aidan is my family. Randa. You. Mirren. He gave up that right a long time ago.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “No.”

  Cage and Will looked at each other, then at the bed where Aidan lay, his one visible eye open and almost pure white. “No?” Cage wasn’t sure if the man knew what he was responding to.

  “You find him, hold him. But don’t kill him. He’s mine.”

  EPILOGUE

  Two Months Later, Outside Lexington, Virginia

  Movement from above. Unfamiliar voices. His dreams always began this way. A different time, a different man, the same dream.

  A shaft of light would pierce the darkness from above. 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 this new version of the dream, Matthias Ludlam begged Kincaid to kill him quickly, to end the damnable hunger that was eating him alive from the inside out. To end the need to feed on what disgusted and sickened him.

  To erase the memories of his final humiliation, when Cage Reynolds—him, always him—had tracked him down in suburban Atlanta and brought him back here, to his own house, to sit. Awaiting what, he didn’t know. He would’ve sworn the cocky Brit was as dead as the Irish farmer whose boots he licked, but somehow, he’d survived.

  Frank Greisser wouldn’t help Matthias now. He’d disavowed any knowledge of Matthias or his whereabouts, Reynolds had gloated. Frank had heard Matthias was performing unspeakable experiments on other vampires; in fact, the newly reformed Tribunal would welcome news on the whereabouts of the despicable Herr Ludlam.

  Matthias hadn’t counted the days of his imprisonment this time. It could be November or January or June. It didn’t matter. All of time centered now on the door at the top of the stairs, where a turn of the knob sent down that shaft of light. A hand flipped the switch and the resulting glow illuminated the dark shadows of his cell.

  Matthias stood and squinted at the boots descending. They belonged, as in his dream, to Mirren Kincaid. The man seemed even more massive now, looking through the bars of the cell where he himself had once been locked up.

  “You’re looking pretty sad, Matthias.” Kincaid quirked one side of his mouth. “What happened to your hair?”

  Matthias flinched. It had fallen out except for a few white tufts. He’d never known what type of shifter DNA he’d been injected with, for which he hoped Frank Greisser rotted in hell with his perverted plan of finding a way for vampires to drink vaccinated blood.

  Hope flickered to life. He’d wondered why they kept him alive, why Reynolds and his human Army friends hadn’t just taken him out when they found him. Maybe there was time for a deal.

  “I can give you Frank Greisser.” Matthias realized he still had a card to play, and it was a big one. “I can tell you whatever you want to know about what he’s been up to.”

  “Can you now?” Kincaid, the insolent lout, walked to the staircase and called to whoever was above. “I think Matthias wants to talk business.”

  Who was up there? Reynolds, probably. He, like Kincaid, was a mercenary at heart. They’d both be willing to bargain.

  And sure enough, Reynolds came down the steps, as haughty and arrogant as ever.

  “I told Kincaid, I can give you Greisser.” Matthias hated the pleading sound in his voice but couldn’t control it. “He’s the one with the power, and the only way you’re going to change the way the Tribunal is handling things is to get rid of him.”

  Reynolds grinned. “You’re talking to the wrong guys, Matthias. Mirren and I don’t make the rules where Penton is concerned.”

  Then who? “William?” He didn’t know whether to be elated or frightened. His son was a mystery to him, always had been.

  “No, Will wanted to be here, but he’s having surgery on those legs you mangled with your little grenade-tossing stunt,” Reynolds said. “The person we pledge fealty to is the one we’ve always followed.”

  “Murphy’s dead.” They were playing games with him now. “So you’d do well to take my offer if you have any hope of getting Frank out of power.”

  They just looked at him for a moment, amused and arrogant, and then Reynolds pulled a set of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door to Matthias’s cell. He didn’t move at first, not sure what game they were playing.

  Finally, he stepped out the cell. Funny how once the silver bars were behind him, the room looked brighter, the world more hopeful. “Does this mean you’re ready to talk?”

  “I am.” The voice came from the top of the stairs. It had a faint Irish lilt. It was the voice of a dead man.

  Holy mother of God. Matthias had never been a religious man, even in his human life, but he felt the heavens and all its angels must be laughing at this cosmic joke.

  “I killed you,” he whispered to the newcomer, who walked down the stairs and came to stand in front of him. “I saw you die.”

  “You gave it a good shot.” Murphy was thinner. A ragged scar, still red and unhealed, zagged from his right eyebrow to his ear. He wore a patch over his right eye, but his left eye was pale and cold and unyielding.

  “I can help you get Greisser.” His voice sounded wild and desperate, even to himself. “I’m a victim, too. He turned me into . . . this.” He grasped a tuft of white hair and pulled. Half of it came out in his hand.

  “I will get Greisser in due time, Matthias.” Murphy took a step closer, and Matthias swallowed hard, noticing for the first time the curved silver blade of the knife in Murphy’s right hand. “I will get him without your help.”

  “I still have contacts on the Tribunal. I can convince them to support you.” Matthias looked down and said the word he’d always said in his dream: “Please.”

  “We’re declaring war on the Tribunal,” Aidan said. “We’ll fight on their terms, on their turf, whatever it takes. You, however, won’t be there to see it.”

  Matthias looked down as Murphy raised the silver blade, the overhead light glinting off its surface.

  In the old dream, Matthias had met his final moments not with brave defiance but with humiliation, pleading for mercy from the man whose life he’d tried to destroy.

  The dream had always reached the same end: his executioner would smile, and the blade would fall.

  Aidan Murphy smiled.

  More from Susannah Sandlin

  Read on for a sample chapter of Lovely, Dark, and Deep, the first book in a new romantic suspense series by Susannah Sandlin.

  CHAPTER 1

  Gillian tripped on the threshold of the ICU doorway, attracting a small flurry of alarmed nurses. By the time she assured them she was a habitual klutz and not a terrorist or the crazed lunatic family member of a patient, she’d eaten up a considerable chunk of the paltry half hour set aside in the evening for visitors.

  Not that Viv knew she was here. Gillian tugged the heavy wooden chair closer to the bed, using her thumb to stuff a tuft of padding back into the ripped mint-green vinyl seat. For the first few seconds, she tried to comprehend the beeping machines and wires and IVs holding her best friend together.

  Not just her friend. Vivian Ortiz was her neighbor and mother figure, dispenser of wisdom and light beer and home remedies to get rid of fire ants. She was also the only other woman Gillian knew who was crazy enough to live in a single-wide trailer at the edge of a wildlife reserve in hurricane country.

  They’d been separated at birth, only in different generations, Viv always said.

  Gillian took her friend’s hand, which looked naked and frail minus its normal assortment of oversized rings, most purchased from one of those TV shopping channels Viv was addicted to. Tears pressed heavily against the backs of Gillian’s eyes. Vivian was warm and full of life, not hot and dry like this husk of skin.

  She whispered the question the sheriff’s deputy couldn’t answer: “What the hell happened?”

  Viv couldn’t answer, either. She could only lie there, her eyes closed, dark lashes resting on her cheeks, her warm olive skin pale against the sterile white sheets under fluorescent lighting. An automobile accident, the deputy had told Gillian after finding her phone number in Viv’s purse and tracking her down. Viv had plowed into a tree not a mile from her trailer, scattering groceries across Highway 24 near the old Rosewood Baptist Church. A one-car accident, the officer said, but a blinding rain had been coming down about the time it happened.

  Vivian was the slowest, most cautious driver Gillian had ever met. They laughed about it, about how Viv said if God meant people to go
fast, he wouldn’t have invented middle-aged women and old men. About how, especially if one of Florida’s afternoon storms was in full force, Vivian’s car could be outrun by a slow-moving gator.

  A bell sounded from somewhere near the two monitors sitting on the desk outside the glassed-off cubicles, announcing the end of the day’s last visitation period.

  A nurse in green scrubs waved at Gillian and pointed toward the door, ready to spend her evening hovering over the monitors, watching to see if Viv or the person in the other cubicle, so old and wrinkled Gillian couldn’t even determine a gender, might need transferring from the county’s little hospital here in Williston to Ocala or even Gainesville. Waiting to see which patient’s condition descended from stable to critical, or rose from serious to stable. These categories didn’t mean much when held up beside a pale face, closed eyes, shallow breathing, and hot, dry hands.

  Gillian stopped in the hallway and dug in her pocket for quarters to plug in the soda machine, giving a startled jump at the buzz of her phone vibrating in her jeans pocket. She didn’t recognize the area code, and the screen read “Private Caller.” Since she was the only licensed nuisance-gator trapper in the county, “on call” was a constant state unless she found another trapper to cover for her. Alligators couldn’t care less that Labor Day weekend was imminent or that Viv was hurt.

  She sat in one of the three plastic chairs in the waiting area and scrambled in her shoulder bag for a pen and pad in case she needed to write down an address, then hit the “Talk” button. “Campbell.”

  “Is this the Gillian Campbell who was on the Noonday Chat show a few days ago?” The man spoke with a deep baritone that had a Southern twang—not a twang from the Deep South or from Louisiana, but maybe Texas or Oklahoma. Jeez-Louise, she hoped he wasn’t some whacked-out stalker.

  “Yes, it is. Can I help you?” His answer to that question would determine whether she ended the call or kept listening.

  “I want to talk to you about that ruby cross, the one your ancestor lost.”