Absolution

by Susannah Sandlin

  The streetcar rumbled and swayed along its electrical path through narrow canyons of tall buildings that seemed to twist in a maze. Finally, it took a sharp turn onto one of the widest streets Glory had ever seen—a street filled with people, shopping, talking, walking in groups, hanging out on street corners. It was well lit, and it was crowded. This was her stop.

  Most of the remaining streetcar riders were also alighting here, next to the sign that read canal Street, and Glory followed the largest group as it crossed the lanes of traffic into the city’s French Quarter. Adrenaline drained from her limbs, and for the first time, she realized how exhausted and hungry she was. What would four dollars buy her?

  Most of the restaurants had menus posted outside, but they weren’t cheap. She spotted a long-haired young man tuning a guitar as he sat on a stool in the middle of a pedestrian-only street, his guitar case open for people to throw in money.

  He wasn’t playing yet, so Glory dug out a quarter and tossed it in his case, hoping he wouldn’t be offended.

  “Thanks.” His voice was soft, with the same accent she’d heard from Thomas. “What’cha want to hear, darlin’?”

  She shook her head. “I’m kind of stranded and wondered if there’s a cheap place to get some food? And maybe a pay phone?” She didn’t know if Penton was so far off the grid that its people wouldn’t have directory assistance, but it was worth a try. Mirren had mentioned getting her a cell phone, but who knew she’d need one this soon?

  The musician studied her a moment, then smiled. “Sure thing. Walk to the river”—he jerked his head to their left—“turn left, and go to Café du Monde. Beignets are only a couple of bucks, and the water is free. Pay phone’s right around the corner.”

  Glory was in serious danger of crying again. People were capable of such monumental cruelties and such random kindnesses. “Thanks.”

  “Wait.”

  Glory had turned toward the river, but stopped at the musician’s voice. He held out a five-dollar bill. “You look like you could use this tonight. Stay safe.”

  Pride fought with practicality for a moment, but practicality won. She didn’t know how she was getting back to Penton, back to Mirren, but she needed any help that came her way. She took the money and didn’t try to blink back the tears this time.

  At the café, she found an empty table surrounded by crowds of laughing families, lovers, friends. Music drifted through the streets from a dozen different places. Ships passed on the river. The air was heavy with humidity.

  It was a place filled with such life that it was hard to imagine Renz and his jaded, elegant place of death was only a few miles away.

  Still, she felt safe among the crowds, so she lingered over the fried doughnuts and water, thinking about how to get home. She propped her elbows on the table and rested her head on her fists. Home? Well, yeah. Penton had become home. She wasn’t sure when or how, but it had.

  Hitching a ride might have been an option at one time, but for all she knew, Renz would have the roads watched. He certainly seemed rich enough. She brushed the powdered sugar off her sweater, exchanged a couple of her dollars for quarters, and made her way around the side of the café. Sure enough, there was a pay phone and public restrooms.

  Muttering a quick prayer, Glory plugged in the quarters and followed the instructions for directory assistance, then asked for Penton, Alabama. She almost fainted when the operator asked for a name. Who was most likely to have a listed phone number? Maybe Aidan’s business manager.

  “Do you have a number for Mark Calvert?” Please, please, please. She waited while the connection clicked, and a computer-generated voice gave a number.

  Chanting the ten digits to herself over and over, she asked to make a collect call, figuring she’d save her quarters if she could. God, please help this work. What if Mark and Melissa were out? What if the number was wrong? What if—

  “Calvert.”

  It was Mark. Glory held her breath while the operator asked if he’d accept charges from Glory Cummings. He paused for what seemed like forever, then, “Yes. Oh my God, yes. Glory?”

  Glory did cry then, all the while she answered Mark’s questions. Yes, she was OK. Yes, she was in New Orleans—she’d been surprised they’d figured that out already. No, Renz hadn’t let her go; she’d escaped.

  “You haven’t seen Mirren or Will yet, have you?”

  Glory’s heart stopped. “What?”

  “Mirren and Will left about four or five hours ago.” Mark said something to Melissa, muffed, as if he had his hand over the phone. “Listen, Mel’s calling Aidan. Will and Mirren should be at Renz’s house soon, if they’re not already. Stay where you are, and I’ll try to reach them. Tell me the number of the pay phone and stay nearby.”

  Ending the call, Glory waited by the phone, sitting on a bench and watching the people walking up and down Decatur Street, all of them happy, busy, caught up in their lives. It was a few minutes past midnight, and the number of people didn’t seem to be thinning out yet. Good thing for her.

  Fifteen minutes passed. A half hour. An hour. A black cloud was growing in Glory’s gut. Mark would have called her if he’d managed to reach Mirren and Will. And if he hadn’t reached them…something had gone wrong.

  Another ride on the streetcar in the opposite direction and she could be back at Lorenzo’s compound in less than half an hour. Her bond to Mirren was intact, but it felt wrong, different somehow. Less like a strong steel cable and more like a frying electrical circuit.

  With a last glare at the silent, stupid pay phone, Glory headed back toward Canal Street at a run.

  CHAPTER 29

  Even with Mirren’s foot heavy on the accelerator and Will’s failed attempts to engage him in conversation, the miles to New Orleans stretched forever.

  “You’ve gotta talk to me, man.” Will turned on the radio for at least the tenth time, and Mirren reached out and turned it back off. “You’re scaring me with that evil Scottish warlord face.”

  “Then don’t look at it.” Mirren should cut Will some slack, but he couldn’t get his head out of that zone. The one he hadn’t indulged in a long time. It was cold there, and black, and he didn’t want to leave it. Whatever was left of the Slayer, he was going to need it tonight.

  Faolain rested on the seat beside him—he’d refused Will’s offer to hold it after also refusing to stash it in the back with the rest of their gear. The weight of its pommel pressed against his thigh, and he imagined it connecting him to all the gallowglass who’d gone before him over the centuries. He was the only one left. The only one of the immortal warriors he and his brothers all thought they’d been in their youth. He’d learned immortality was meaningless if you went through it alone. Alone, it was just a fucking long trail of years.

  His blackest period had been at the end of his work with the Tribunal. For well over a century, he’d rained ax and sword over any miscreant—vampire or human—that the Tribunal had fingered for elimination. He’d removed body parts one at a time until whatever poor sucker he was working on would’ve confessed to being Judas himself. He’d taken women as spoils, blood whores as down payments. He’d never asked one fucking time—not once—if the person he’d been paid to maim or torture or kill deserved it. He got his paycheck, he sated his bloodlust, and he was good at it. The best.

  Then came the child. A human girl, with spun-silk curls the color of honey. No more than six or seven years old, and English. All he’d been given was a name: Clara Stockton. But as soon as he saw her, he finally asked the questions he’d avoided so long: Why her? What had she done that warranted killing?

  She’d been outside when she should’ve been asleep, had wandered into a lane she had no business being in, had seen a vampire she shouldn’t have witnessed, in the midst of feeding—a vampire in a position of power in her small village who didn’t want to be exposed. It would have been such a simple thing to wipe her memory, but paranoia weighed heavily on the vampire world, even then. It was easier
to kill than to cover up.

  Mirren had walked away. Waited until he found a vampire who was close enough to his height to make do and who had a long string of his own murders to account for. Mirren cut out the man’s heart, dressed him in his clothes, and set him on fire so he’d be found with Mirren’s Tribunal ID nearby. His last unprovoked murder. Then he disappeared, wandering, trying

  to work up the courage to meet the sun, coming to the realization that he’d been raised to be a monster long before he’d been turned vampire. That his greatest skill made him nothing any man should want to be.

  Then he met Aidan. Mirren hadn’t believed he could change who and what he was, but he had started to believe he could at least put what he was to good use, for good reasons.

  Glory had made him believe he could change, but she’d been wrong. If he could save her tonight, he would send her to safety. And then the Tribunal would get what it wanted: Mirren Kincaid was going to resume his role as the slayer one more time. Only, it was Lorenzo Caias he was going after. And then he had a battle-ax with Matthias Ludlam’s name carved into its blade.

  “Lots of people moving around in there.” Mirren crouched behind a six-foot shrub against the side of a house at the corner of Foucher and Carondelet, watching the entrance to Renz’s estate.

  Will shifted position beside him. “I’ll say. Looks like he’s having a freaking party.”

  Outside lights illuminated the grounds, and through the ornate iron fence, Mirren could see the stately white house, which was two stories high. Every overhead and lamp in the place appeared to be turned on, and people moved in shadowy pantomimes behind curtains. “Any idea how big his staff is here?”

  Will shook his head. “No clue. Computer records showed a lot of supplies being bought in the week before he came to Penton, though, which tells me he has quite a few humans on staff. Vampires don’t need much in the way of supplies.”

  Good point. Mirren leaned against the wall and peered up and down the street. It was about midnight—they’d made good time despite how long the trip seemed—and most of the people who lived on the adjacent streets seemed to be asleep. Light traffic ran along St. Charles Avenue, and an occasional streetcar rumbled by.

  “Notice the front gate?” Mirren had been studying it for a while, trying to figure out what was wrong with it. “The two parts don’t meet—it’s like something pried it open, or it short-circuited the whole thing right before it closed.”

  Will leaned to get a better angle. “Think it has anything to do with Glory?”

  “Dunno.” Mirren didn’t like going in without knowing where she was or how many people they were facing, vampire and human. But they’d have to roll with it. His connection to her was strong, his headache had gone, but that was as far as his knowledge took him.

  “You better with the gun or the knife?” He and Will needed to split up. Guns were best for frontal assault, and he’d made sure they both had silencers; knives were better for stealth.

  “Knife.” Will clicked open a wicked-sharp combat blade. “Ready when you are. What’s the plan?”

  “Think you can get over the fence on the back side?” At Will’s nod, Mirren pulled his .45. “I stay here, give you a few minutes to get in, then I stroll up front. Take out anybody you see. And Will”—Mirren stopped talking until Will made eye contact—“you understand what I mean by take them out. None of this hog-tie business. Tonight, we kill. Lorenzo Caias is mine.”

  Will paused a few heartbeats, then nodded.

  “Go.” Mirren watched as Will crept from shadow to bush to light pole. He was quick on his feet and graceful. Mirren wished he’d taken the guy more seriously, given him some combat training. Aidan said Will could fight, but he’d never been tested, and Mirren still didn’t think he had the killer instinct.

  Tonight was the night they’d find out.

  As soon as Will disappeared around the corner, Mirren stood up. Stealth was not the way of the gallowglass, and tonight, he was gallowglass and slayer, both.

  With the .45 clasped loosely in his right hand and sliding Faolain out of the scabbard with his left, he walked to the broken gate and kicked it hard enough to push one side askew. If he hadn’t had blood on his mind, the openmouthed gape of the guard nearest the gate when he walked through would have been funny. The .45 destroyed the vampire’s heart before he had a chance to react. Why vampires were too conceited to wear body armor over one of their few vulnerable parts, Mirren would never know, but it made his job easier.

  Even with the silencer, the shot brought plenty of attention, and with a practiced eye, Mirren noted three men running toward him—no, make that four. One of them was Will.

  Trusting his partner to take out the man closest to him, Mirren turned to the others, stuffing the gun into his sash and settling Faolain into a two-handed hold. Only one of the two appeared to be armed, and Mirren felt the punch of a slug hitting the leather tunic. With the gallowglass sheath over the Kevlar, nothing was going into his chest. If they wanted to take him out, they’d have to go for his head, and it was a bad angle for most shooters. Being six eight had its privileges.

  With a grunt, he arced the blade to his side like a baseball bat and sliced through the neck of the first man, then whirled to the second. His voice was feral. “Where is she?”

  “Wait, no, stop.” The man, a human, dropped his knife and raised his hands. “We didn’t know the woman had been taken against her will until Renz had already brought her here, man. Don’t—”

  “Where is she?” Mirren’s voice dipped into a menacing growl as he kept the blade in a two-handed hold. “Start talking.”

  The man dropped to his knees, hands still up. “I…look, I don’t know what happened. But she’s gone—”

  Mirren didn’t remember striking the blow, but the human’s sightless eyes stared at the night sky as he stepped over him and stalked toward the house. Will stood over the third guard—or was it the fourth?—a steady drip of thick red dripping off the blade dangling from his fingers. His brown eyes were fixed on the dead human’s face until Mirren stopped next to him.

  “How do we know he even had anything to do with it?” Will’s voice shook. “He might have been innocent.”

  This was not the time for moral soul-searching questions. “Nobody’s innocent tonight, Junior. Get over it.”

  Mirren left him there to struggle with his conscience and strode to the front steps, where he stopped, drawn to the brick beneath his feet. He knelt and stroked the tips of his fingers across a rough rectangle that was raised a quarter inch above the rest. A foot in front of it lay a swipe of blood and skin and a scrap of denim. He scraped a fingernail across the red smudge and lifted his finger to his mouth. Glory’s blood. He thought their connection was still in place, but she’d been bleeding. Was the bond he felt real, or was he imagining it because he wanted it so badly? How badly was she hurt? What had that guy meant by, “She’s gone”?

  Mirren’s vision darkened, and he took the stairs in two strides.

  Things had gotten suspiciously silent, and he paused in the tile-covered foyer, surrounded by glittering mirrors and glass, rich woods and thick tapestries, his hands covered in the blood of Renz’s flunkies, his tongue aching with the taste of his mate.

  He scented the air. The parlor to his right reeked of human fear. Way too much to be one person. Upstairs were human and vampire, both, at least one of each. First, he’d take out the humans downstairs to get them out of the way.

  But he’d have to make quick work of it because, under the current of vampire, coming from upstairs, he smelled the sweet floral scent he’d come to associate with Glory.

  The staircase was a tunnel surrounded by his cold, black focus as Mirren walked up, senses stretching out. His boot soles fell softly on the wooden steps. The leather tunic whispered with the shift of muscles and tendons beneath it. The pommel of Faolain caressed the knuckles of his right hand. A faint breeze of movement wafted at him from his left at the top of the s
tairs. Someone was lying in wait.

  Mirren rounded the top step with a wide arc of the sword and caught a dark-haired, muscular human male on the left arm as he fired a handgun—a 9mm, maybe. Mirren shook his head as the bullet tore through across the side of his neck and sent a spray of magenta blood over his tunic, letting the pain of it take him deeper into his tunnel.

  “Renz, it’s—” The sharp tip of Faolain’s blade pierced the man’s chest, and he fell with the rest of his warning unspoken. But it had told Mirren what he needed to know. The last human he’d taken out downstairs had confirmed it. No matter what his goddamned bond said, Glory was gone. Now, Renz was going to pay for killing her.

  He shoved the human’s body toward the steps with his boot. It was still doing a bloody tumble when Mirren kicked in the only closed door among those around the second-floor landing.

  Inside was a room in chaos, furniture strewn and broken, a chandelier dangling from a single electrical wire, lamps lying on their sides, shattered glass everywhere.

  Those shards of glass glittered like diamonds beneath the feet of Renz, who faced him with a defant glare, the stench of fear, and a shotgun.

  CHAPTER 30

  Glory was down the steps leading off the streetcar before it lurched to a stop. Her feet were tribal drumbeats as she ran along the sidewalk toward the gate to Renz’s estate, and her prayers echoed in her head to the same pounding rhythm. Her gut still told her Mirren was in trouble.

  The iron gate had been ruined, its right side bent and off its track. The last thing Glory wanted to do was make things worse for Mirren and Will by getting herself caught again, so she peered around the entrance, trying to gauge how many people were around.