Absolution

by Susannah Sandlin

  Glory tried to pull away, an involuntary moan rising in her throat, but the grip that held her was unyielding. “But you’re a doctor?” Vampires couldn’t be doctors, could they? And Krys had a kind face and brows wrinkled in concern. She didn’t look scary.

  “Shhhh. Lie back down. That’s a long story, but I guarantee nobody here’s going to hurt you. Let me tell you what I know.” Krys stood up and gently swung Glory’s legs back up to rest on the clean white sheets. Clean. Everything was so clean, except her.

  Glory’s gaze slid to the door, then to her surroundings. On television, hospital rooms always surrounded patients with steel furnishings and stiff linens and beeping equipment. This bed sported a carved headboard and all of the furniture except the rolling tray had been constructed of wood instead of steel, as if someone wanted to make the room less institutional. Even though the sole window was covered with eggshell-colored blinds, she could see out enough to tell it was nighttime. “Where did you say I was?”

  Krys perched on the edge of the bed. “Penton, Alabama, near the Georgia state line. Mirren Kincaid brought you here.”

  Glory frowned. “Mirren.” An image came to her of an impossibly tall man, hungry silver eyes, a vampire. “He was supposed to kill me.”

  Krys laughed, and Glory saw a fash of fangs. The woman really was a vampire, and if she hadn’t been afraid she’d fall over, Glory would’ve been tempted to try and run. She’d gone from one vampire captor to another.

  “Obviously, he didn’t kill you,” Krys said. “In fact, from what I understand, Mirren refused to leave that awful place without you.”

  “I don’t understand.” Glory rubbed her eyes, ran her hands through her tangle of hair, and grimaced. Nasty. God, what she’d give for a shower.

  Krys seemed to understand her expression. “Why don’t you see if you can stand up? If you’re steady enough, I’ll take out the IV and you can get in the shower. My friend Melissa’s about your size. She brought some clothes for you. Then we can talk.”

  What did female vampires wear? Glory glanced at Krys’s forest-green sweater and jeans. Nothing weird about them. The vampires who’d taken her had all been men, rich men with a taste for tailored suits or cashmere and wool.

  The doctor helped her sit up and then stand. She wobbled a little at first, but steadied as Krys removed the IV needle, swabbed the puncture wound with alcohol, and covered it with a Band-Aid. “Melissa’s another vampire?”

  Krys laughed. “No, she’s my mate’s fam—his human familiar, or feeder, but also our friend. Her husband is my fam. I’ll explain it later. Believe me, it’s all pretty new to me too.”

  Good, because Glory didn’t have a clue what the woman was talking about. With Krys’s help, she walked slowly to the door nearest the window, which led to a small bathroom with a tub and shower, simple pedestal sink, and toilet. A wooden cabinet on the wall next to the door was filled with folded towels and washcloths.

  “There’s soap and shampoo in the shower,” Krys said, walking around her and turning on the water, testing the temperature a few times before facing her again. “Do you think you can handle it, or you need help? I don’t mind.”

  “No, I don’t want…” She didn’t want another vampire touching her. Not that this woman acted anything like Sir—Matthias. Glory shuddered at the name. Was he here somewhere? Would he show up and hit her again, or drug her, or give her to one of his friends? “I think I can manage.”

  Krys smiled, and her expression was kind. “Just call if you need me. Glory, I know this is hard for you to believe after what you’ve been through, but you’re safe here. Matthias Ludlam—the man who locked you up—is no friend to anyone in Penton.”

  Glory wanted to believe her, but hadn’t Sir said the same thing? That she’d be safe? Until he realized she wasn’t going to tell him what she could do. Heck, she didn’t even know for sure what all she could do, except it had always been her secret.

  As the shower beat hot water into her muscles and she washed away the grime of the last month, or however long it had been, bits of memory began to surface. She remembered the big vampire…what was his name? Mirren? She remembered him feeding from her and it being totally different—pleasurable, gentle, even though she’d expected him to kill her. She had expected him to keep feeding until she had nothing left.

  Glory soaped her hair for the third time and stepped under the warm fall of water, letting it cascade over her face and heat her skin. She didn’t remember leaving the barred cell or coming here, but she did have vague memories of this room and other people coming and going. How long had she been here?

  She also recalled being in Sir’s little room and how her muscles had ached and her head had pounded while she waited for another shot. She didn’t feel that now—she felt like herself. Matthias had gotten her hooked on something, she was sure of it. But how had she gotten off the drugs? Or was it just a matter of time before the withdrawals and cravings started again?

  As if in concert with the return of her memories, she staggered with a wave of nausea. Only one thing would help it, but she wouldn’t let them give her anything. She’d get through this; she’d been through worse.

  Once her fingers had shriveled from the water, she dried herself off and toweled as much moisture as she could out of her hair. The thought that she felt human again made her stifle a shaky laugh despite the drug-craving burn that had taken up residence in her veins. She might be the only human within miles, for all she knew—except for that Melissa person who’d given her clothes.

  Krys had laid the folded garments on the edge of the sink, and Glory put them on, moving slowly. The stonewashed jeans were a little big in the butt and the soft blue sweater a bit snug in the bust, but they were so much better than what she’d been wearing, and they smelled freshly laundered. She wondered what happened to her old clothes and who had undressed her. Better not go there. Too creepy.

  Finger-combing her hair, Glory stared at her refection in the small mirror over the sink. Her hair had grown below shoulder length, her dark eyes were rimmed with darker circles, and her ribs were visible—that was a first. The Vampire Abduction Diet: It’ll Suck the Pounds Right Off.

  She bit her lower lip, but a giggle still escaped. She’d always laughed at the wrong time, but she had to laugh about crap like this, or it would kill her, right?

  OK, time to face the vampire doctor, ask some questions, and more importantly, get some answers. Squaring her shoulders, Glory opened the door leading back into the hospital room and stopped, a wave of chill bumps racing over her skin. Her lungs threatened to close on her and refuse to let her draw breath. Krys was still in the room, but there were three men with her, all big, all studying her like a bug in a jar. Were they all vampires?

  Her gaze came to rest on the tallest, leaning against the wall in a corner. Mirren. She remembered his height, his broad shoulders, and the tattoos on his neck, but his face had lost some of the gaunt, haunted expression she’d seen in the cell that night. Now, instead of a starved monster, he resembled a half-starved warrior, with a strong mouth, gray eyes, a dark moustache and goatee, and shorter black hair than she’d remembered. Black pants. Black sweater. He looked like he should be wearing armor and putting a beat-down on vicious barbarian hordes or something. Vampire, Glory. Remember. He might have saved you from the other place so he could kill you here.

  And she was staring a hole through him. He’d cocked his head and raised one eyebrow without a hint of a smile. What a total grump. She didn’t smile at him, either.

  A blond-haired man, almost pretty and young enough to pass for a college student, stood in the doorway to the hall and barked out a laugh. “Mirren, you can’t make her blink. I think you’ve met your match.”

  “Shut it, asshole.” Mirren kept his eyes on her.

  “Ignore them. They have the manners of cavemen, I swear.” Krys bustled over and slid an arm around Glory’s waist, easing her from the bathroom door and toward the bed.

&nb
sp; “No, not…” Glory balked. Being on a bed surrounded by might-be vampires was too much like the nightmare she’d just lived. “I can stand.”

  The remaining man, maybe one of the most handsome guys Glory had ever seen, rose from a chair and dragged it toward her. “You can sit here—we’ll stay on the other side of the room, OK? Nobody touches you against your will here. I just need to ask you some questions.”

  Glory pondered that for a moment. She’d probably do well to keep her mouth shut, but that had never been one of her assets. Just the opposite. One of her teachers used to call her Motormouth. “Yeah, well, I have a few questions myself. Who are you people? How did I get here? When can I go home? What do y’all want with me? How long have I been here?”

  Yeah, she was defnitely feeling more like herself. She couldn’t keep her mouth shut. “Are you all gonna feed off me and pass me around from person to person like those other vampires? Because, I’m telling you, just go ahead and kill me now. I’m not going through that again. Like I told him”—she pointed at Mirren, whose brows had risen higher, and she could swear the edge of his mouth twitched like he was on the verge of a smile, which might crack his face in half since it didn’t look like he used that expression very often—“I don’t care anymore. If you’re going to kill me, just do it already.”

  The handsome man studied her with eyes that were such a light blue they were almost startling against the deep, rich chestnut-brown hair that reached his shoulders. “I’m Aidan Murphy, and let’s just say I’m the unoffcial mayor of Penton, the town you’re in. I meant it when I said nobody touches you here against your will.” He glanced at Mirren, then at the pretty boy in the doorway. “Why don’t the rest of you leave and let me talk to Glory alone?”

  Glory gave Krys an imploring look. “Please don’t go.”

  Krys smiled and patted her arm. “It’s—”

  “I’ll talk to her.” Mirren’s deep, rumbling voice sliced through the room like a cutter ship, leaving silence in its wake. “The rest of you, get the hell out.”

  There was a long, awkward pause.

  Glory’s gaze met Mirren’s. He’d saved her. He clearly wasn’t in league with Matthias and his crew, because they’d had him locked up too. He might look scary as all get-out, but he felt like safety to her.

  “Glory?” Krys squeezed her hand.

  Aidan Murphy and the blond-haired guy stared at Mirren like he’d grown an extra head.

  She nodded. “You can go. I’ll talk to Mirren.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Mirren struggled to reconcile the scared ragamuffn junkie he’d fed from in Matthias’s basement with the fierce woman—fierce, beautiful woman—standing in the middle of the hospital room, watching Aidan, Will, and Krys file out with suspicion all over her face. The only resemblance was her runaway mouth and a little touch of jitters that remained in her movements.

  “You just going to stand there?” She made no attempt to move, so he motioned to the chair Aidan had left.

  “ Are you?”

  She propped her hands on her hips and pinned him with the same expression she’d given him before, when she came from the bathroom and first spotted him. She’d captured him with her eyes as surely as Matthias had tied him with silver. She was defiant, almost daring him to prove what a son of a bitch he could be, and yet connected to him somehow.

  Shrugging, Mirren dropped into the chair, shifting to ft his bulk into it comfortably, stretching his legs out in front of him. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Your move.”

  Glory glanced at the door as if she might make a run for it, but when she ran a hand through her damp hair, Mirren realized it was all bravado—she was shaking. He hoped to God she didn’t start crying. He didn’t volunteer for crying.

  Maybe it was the drugs, though. She’d had a rough time of it. “Withdrawal pains coming back?”

  “What were they giving me?” Glory shuffled to the bed and sat on it, facing him. She pushed up the sleeve of the blue sweater—the blue sweater that showed off what would be a beautiful figure if it had a little more meat on it. He wrenched his eyes from her curves to the track marks on her arm, a few of them still raw, red puncture wounds with bruising around them.

  “Heroin.” Mirren leaned forward in his chair, watching as her face registered fear, then anger. Either she really hadn’t known what they were pumping into her or she was a better actress than he’d ever encountered. “You’d never done it before Matthias got hold of you?”

  “No!” Her voice quavered, but it was definitely from anger, not fear. “I’m getting over it, right? I used to ache and have fever and chills when that man was late with the shots.” She shuddered. “Shelton.”

  Yeah, well, Shelton was probably locked in the silver cell himself right now for letting Will get the slip on him, but Mirren didn’t have any sympathy for the man. “Aidan and I have been helping you through the withdrawal. The drugs are out of your system. What’s left is the psychological need—that takes a while, but if you can remember it’s mental and try to distract yourself, I’m told it helps.”

  Mirren watched Glory trace the scars on her inner arms; then her fingers rose to feel the scar tissue at her neck where those bastards had ripped her skin. The idea of it uncovered a rage inside him that he hadn’t felt in over a century. Somehow, this girl brought out the cold anger that belonged to the Slayer, and that made her dangerous.

  Glory frowned at him. “What did you do, you and…what was his name? Aidan? He was the guy who said he was the mayor? Can a town actually have a vampire mayor? And how did you help me through the withdrawal?”

  Nothing wrong with the woman’s tongue. Mirren gave her a terse rundown of the past week. He and Aidan, being the only two master vampires in Penton, had kept her enthralled at night until the worst of the withdrawal had passed. Krys had stayed with her every night, and during the day, Aidan’s familiar, Melissa, had watched over her.

  It was a procedure they’d repeated many times over the last few years, Mirren told her. A lot of the human familiars of the Penton vampire scathe had been rehabbed from Atlanta’s free clinics. They were less likely to be vaccinated because they rarely had regular medical care. The vampires would help them get clean of drugs or alcohol, then give them the choice of staying in Penton or leaving. Those who wanted to stay got a vampire sponsor, were blood-bonded, and settled in. If they wanted to go home, they got their memories scrubbed and were taken back for a second chance and no drug or alcohol habit.

  Sort of like a Betty Ford Clinic, with vampires instead of therapists and doctors. But before they could think of letting Glory go home, Mirren wanted answers. “Tell me what happened. Start at the beginning. Where did Matthias find you?”

  “He came in the Circle K where I work as a night clerk, in Roswell, north of Atlanta. He was buying cigars. Make that where I used to work. I’m sure they’ve fired me by now, not that it was any great job.” Glory leaned back on the pillows and closed her eyes, and Mirren had a fash of how she might look stretched out in his bed, with that silky black hair spread across his pillows, across him.

  He jerked his gaze away from her. Idiot. He was obviously suffering from the aftereffects of being starved for a month. A quick trip to one of his favorite Atlanta specialty clubs was in order, and soon. A little rough music, a little rough sex, and he’d quit fantasizing about Circle K store clerks.

  “I remember feeling weird after he left, but I swear I can’t remember what he said to me. The next thing I knew, I was in his car. Then another blank, and I was in that room and he was biting me.” She rolled onto her side, facing Mirren, and curled into a ball. Probably how she’d spent a lot of the last month. “When can I go home?”

  Well, that was the freaking question of the day, wasn’t it? She could identify Matthias, maybe where he lived, might have overheard something she didn’t even realize was important. Matthias hadn’t scrubbed her memories—he’d counted on Mirren killing her. Which led to another issue.


  “I’m guessing Matthias didn’t just want you for sex or feeding. He wanted you for your powers. You need to tell me what you can do and how much he knows.”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it. Her lips tightened. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Mirren slid his chair closer to the bed. Yeah, he was being an asshole, trying to intimidate her. Not that it worked. She just gave him a mulish look. “Stop with the bullshit,” he told her. “You have some kind of psychic ability. I could feel it when I touched you back in that cell. Aidan felt it from a few feet away without laying a hand on you when we brought you in. I’m betting Matthias could too, which is why he took you. He’d have wanted to use you.”

  “I didn’t tell him a thing.”

  Mirren studied her. Stubborn wouldn’t help her survive if Matthias wanted to find her. “I can enthrall you and force you to tell me.”

  Glory smiled, and Mirren saw a challenge in her eyes, but no fear. “I know what enthrallment is—it’s what they’d do to me in that other place when they wanted me to shut up. I’d have big holes in my memory. So you go right ahead and try it, big man. Matthias couldn’t make me tell him anything when he enthralled me, and neither can you. Matter of fact, if you and your buddy Aidan did that hypnosis thing on me to help me get off drugs, then I bet y’all tried to make me tell you already. And I didn’t tell you a thing, did I?”

  Mirren scowled. No, she hadn’t. And, yes, he and Aidan had both tried to question her while she was enthralled to help her through withdrawal. Aidan wrote up her ability to resist as either some kind of psychic fluke or a strong mental constitution; Krys had been resistant to enthrallment before Aidan had been forced to turn her vampire, although the woman still gave him hell about how many times he did it.

  Maybe little Gloriana Cummings had a Georgia drawl and worked in a convenience store, but she was smart and fearless. They’d do well not to underestimate her.