Absolution Read online

  “Whatever you want, forget it,” Mirren said. “You don’t have big enough balls to break me.” At six foot eight, Mirren knew that, even behind bars, with hunger lightening his gray eyes to silver, at least thirty pounds dropped off his frame, and his hands tied behind his back, he was stronger than the bureaucratic peacock in front of him.

  “We’ll see, won’t we?” Matthias pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead, then pulled a folding chair to within a few feet of the cell bars. “Look, Kincaid, you were the best hunter the Tribunal Justice Council ever employed, and you know it. We want you back. Your talents are wasted in that Alabama backwater with Aidan Murphy. It’s only a matter of time before he goes down. You don’t have to be destroyed with him.”

  Matthias wanted Mirren to tie himself to the Tribunal again? That would never happen, even if they left him here until his body dried to skin-covered dust and fangs due to lack of blood.

  Mirren grinned at him, chuckling when Matthias flinched. “Sure, Matthias. Let’s talk.” He kicked the foot of the long bench, shoving it toward the front of the cell, then sat facing Matthias. “What is it you want me to do for you? I am hungry, true enough. A favor for food—isn’t that how you want to play it?”

  The older man (but younger vampire) fiddled with the cuffs of his starched white shirt and tugged his suit coat sleeves down. “That’s a beginning. Tell me the size of Murphy’s organization in Penton. How to infiltrate it. Its weak links. Tell me about my son.” Matthias leaned forward in his chair. “Kill Murphy and bring William back to my own scathe, and you can have any damned thing you want.”

  Well, the man didn’t ask for much, did he? “We can talk about it. Let’s start small. Give me a feeder, and I’ll answer a couple of questions.”

  Matthias smiled. Pompous bastard. “You’re hardly in a position to bargain, Kincaid. Answer a couple of questions, and I’ll consider giving you a feeder.”

  “Ask and I’ll consider answering.”

  Matthias’s teeth would be ground into nubs if he grew much more agitated—a sight Mirren would pay to see.

  “How big is the Penton scathe, and how many humans?” he repeated.

  Mirren gave an exaggerated sigh, putting on the heaviest of the hybrid accent left from his childhood in Scotland and youth in Ireland. “Pity, it was. Lost most of our scathe and humans after someone sent an assassin to kill Aidan. Of course, it went the other way, so it did.”

  Matthias leaned back in his chair. “Ah, yes. I heard a rumor that Aidan’s brother tried to join the scathe and was killed—heard nothing about him being an assassin, though. His name escapes me…” He turned to Shelton. “Do you remember?”

  “Owen Murphy.” Shelton had moved to lean against the wall nearest the stairs. Mirren figured he’d hop up them like a rabbit at the first sign of trouble, the asshole.

  “Right. Owen, that was it.” Matthias turned back to Mirren. “So he was killed, was he? And did the Slayer do the killing? Or have you lost your stomach for it?”

  Mirren clenched and unclenched his fists in their ropes behind his back. What he wouldn’t give to rip this vampire’s head right off his body—if anyone deserved to meet the Slayer, it was Matthias. And the man could feign innocence all he wanted. Someone had been behind Owen Murphy’s attack on Penton, and Mirren’s money was on the jackass sitting in front of him.

  “I snapped Owen’s neck like a matchstick.” Mirren smiled at Matthias’s raised eyebrows. “But it was Aidan who ripped out his heart—even after you supplied Owen with enough vaccinated blood to kill half the vampires in the Southeast.”

  Matthias crossed his arms and scoffed. “You should be careful about making such accusations, Kincaid. The way I see it, you’re at my mercy, so you might not want to agitate me. Wouldn’t you say that’s right, Shelton?”

  The toady bobbed and nodded like the puppet he was. “Right, Boss. Whoever controls the food holds the power.”

  Mirren had learned a lot about body language over the years, and Matthias was jumpy. Jumpy like a man with something to hide. He’d supplied Owen with that poisonous blood, all right, and the psychopath had used it to almost kill him and Aidan both. Mirren couldn’t prove it, but it felt like the truth.

  Matthias was going to meet his final death soon. It might not be today or tomorrow, but Mirren would see him destroyed.

  “You never answered my question,” Matthias said. He rose and started pacing. “How many are left in the Penton scathe?”

  Mirren shrugged. “Six or seven vampires; about the same number of humans. Your son took off at the first sign of trouble. He’s a bloody coward.”

  When Mirren had left on his ill-fated, do-gooder trip to North Carolina, the scathe had numbered more than fifty vampires and well over a hundred humans. William Ludlam wasn’t Mirren’s favorite person—he was a smartass like his father. But he was dead loyal to Aidan. Mirren couldn’t fault him on that.

  Matthias stared at him a moment, then folded his chair and propped it against the wall. “As of last week, William was still in Penton, so you’re lying. Stay here a while longer without feeding, and then we’ll see how cooperative you are. Bon appétit.”

  Mirren tracked the movement as two pairs of shiny black lace-up shoes ascended the stairs until they were out of view, then nudged the bench back against the cell wall. Stretching out on his side—he could just ft on the bench if he curled his legs up—Mirren closed his eyes and sent his mind along the slender threads of his blood bond to Aidan, making sure it was still there.

  As master vampires, both Mirren and Aidan could communicate mentally with each other, as well sense the presence of the others, vampire and human, who were blood-bonded to them. But the ability had geographic limitations. Aidan would know Mirren was still alive, but he wouldn’t be able to track him.

  Still, Aidan or one of his people would find Mirren eventually. When he did, Matthias Ludlam was going to suffer.

  CHAPTER 2

  Glory Cummings cracked her eyelids at the sound of the door opening then closing. Surely someone was bringing her a shot. It had been eight hours since her last injection, and she couldn’t stop shaking. Her back ached. Her legs hurt. She was freezing one minute, burning up the next. She’d never touched drugs, even when her high school classmates were experimenting—certainly nothing that came in a syringe. How had everything gotten so screwed up?

  She struggled to a seated position on the dirty mattress in the otherwise empty, windowless room that had been her home for…God, how long had it been since she’d been taken? That middle-aged man who had come into the Circle K had brainwashed her or something before he’d taken her. She didn’t even know her captor’s name; he would only tell her to call him Sir, “out of respect for her betters.” He came by every night and asked her questions, or drank from her veins, or gave her shots of something that buzzed her

  out so much she didn’t care when he passed her along to his friends so they could feed as well.

  His vampire friends.

  Glory whimpered when Sir came into view accompanied by the one called Shelton—the worst of all her so-called “betters.” Shelton liked to knock her around and call her names before he drank from places she didn’t even know she had veins. So far, they hadn’t raped her, but she kept waiting for it, expecting it.

  She still believed there was a God, even now, but she had to wonder what awful thing she’d done to end up here with these monsters.

  Shelton was silent today, moving clinically as he tied off her left arm, thumped around for a vein, and shot her full of sweet relief. The room spun, and she fell back onto the mattress with a moan. Now if they’d just go away and let her escape into her high.

  “Leave us, Shelton.” Sir pulled a chair next to the mattress, looking down at her with an expression that said very clearly how disgusting he thought her. Yet he’d taken her, hadn’t he? Because of what she could do? Or what he thought she could do?

  “This is the last chance f
or you, Gloriana Cummings.” Sir crossed his legs and folded his arms across his chest. “If you want to live through the night, I’d suggest you tell me what powers you have. If you tell me, if you work with me, you can have a very prosperous life—certainly better than anything you’d ever have working at a convenience store in godforsaken Georgia.” He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees.

  Sir wore a sweater vest over a crisp white shirt with dark pants. Neatly cut salt-and-pepper hair and warm brown eyes gave him the appearance of a college professor or a businessman, not a vampire and the meanest man Glory had ever met. He could pimp her blood to his friends all he wanted; there was nothing she could do about that. They could feed from her. If they wanted to rape her, she wasn’t strong enough to stop them. Sir could even kill her if he wanted. She might welcome it at this point.

  But the one thing he wanted most from her, she’d somehow been able to withhold. The secret of her powers. Even when he did that trance/hypnosis thing to her that left her with big gaps in her memories, she was able to keep it inside her. She knew that to be true because he kept asking.

  Unfortunately, between the drugs and the trances, she hadn’t been able to call on her skills to help herself, even if she’d had a better idea how to use and control them.

  “How many times do you need to hear me say this? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her words came out slurred, even to her ears. But the pain was gone, the shaking stilled. Her brain might have gone the way of an omelet—stirred up and fried—but she would not tell him about her gift. Or her curse, depending on how one looked at it.

  She’d always figured it would get her killed. But not like this. She could never have imagined this.

  She watched dispassionately as Sir stood and aimed the sharp toe of his shiny shoe at her belly. She wished she could pretend not to feel it, but she instinctively cried out and curled in a ball when the impact sank deep enough to reach the pain center of her buzzed-out brain. She managed to spit out two agony-racked words: “Screw you.”

  “I’ve wasted over a month on you, and I’m out of patience. Get up.”

  Glory was still trying to process what “get up” meant, exactly, when Sir grabbed her arm and jerked her to her feet. She stumbled against him and braced herself for another blow, but he propelled her toward the door. Was he letting her go? Or just taking her to the slaughterhouse?

  In one of the abrupt mood changes she seemed to be having lately, she clutched her ribs and snickered, wondering what a vampire slaughterhouse might look like—a French boudoir, maybe, with lots of red things so all the blood didn’t show up.

  I’m so stoned. The thought made her giggle more.

  “Stupid cow.” Snarling, Sir gave her a hard thrust between her shoulder blades that propelled her down a fancy-schmancy curved staircase. Only her grab at the wooden rail kept her from tumbling down headfirst. At the bottom of the stairs, he herded her to the right through a room full of antiques, finally stopping in a kitchen. Not just a kitchen. A sparkling confection of tile and natural woods and stainless steel that Glory would love to explore. Fancy magazines she’d read in her downtime at the Circle K featured kitchens like this.

  “Where is that blasted key? Shelton!”

  While Sir dug in his pockets and waited for Shelton to come trotting to the aid of his master, Glory stared into the kitchen, everything clean and sparkling. For the first time since the day after she’d been taken, tears threatened. She loved to cook, had been working that crappy Circle K job to earn the money for culinary school. In that deep part of her she was almost afraid to acknowledge, she dreamed of someday opening a restaurant. Nothing fancy. Something in a small town with friends who came in and a cast of regulars. It had always been a long shot, that dream. Now, it seemed impossible.

  Her attention was drawn back to Sir by the rattling of keys as he unlocked a door and opened it to a dark stairway. He flipped on a wall switch, revealing a steep set of wooden stairs that led downward to a basement.

  Sir prodded her in the back. “Go. You won’t tell me what special abilities you have, so I’ll get some use out of you another way.”

  Glory took a hesitant step, then another.

  Sir followed her. “You’re going to feed my very special guest, who hasn’t eaten in a long time. He’ll probably kill you, but at least you’ll have accomplished something with your miserable life. You’re going to remind the Slayer how very much he used to enjoy killing.”

  Glory grasped the handrail to avoid falling headfirst down the stairs from his rough shoves. “Wh…what do you mean?” Fear and dread dug their way into her consciousness and began to clear her brain fog. She felt fully sober for the first time since they’d begun drugging her, even though she knew it had to be a temporary adrenaline rush.

  Glory stumbled at the bottom of the steps, and Sir grabbed her by the neck of her dirty sweater and shoved her toward the bars of a cell that took up the width of the room. After more rattling of keys, he opened the cell door and shoved her inside, closing it and locking it behind her before she could turn around.

  Sir banged on the bars of the cage with the big gold signet ring he always wore, the one with the L engraved on it. “Dinnertime, Slayer.”

  “Wait!” Glory grasped the bars of the cell as Sir turned to leave. “You can’t leave me down here alone.”

  He smiled at her before resuming his climb up the stairs. “You’re far from alone, dear. Turn around.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Will Ludlam shuffled the deck of cards for the tenth time and shot a dark glance at the redhead in the armchair across the room. Randa Thomas sat ramrod straight, like she always did, with that indecipherable expression on her face, like she always wore. She might as well have a board up her butt.

  “Stop staring at me, you spoiled brat.” Her voice was that of the hard-assed, ex-military woman she had been before being turned vampire five years earlier. “It’s not my fault Aidan’s making us work in pairs. And will you, for the love of all that’s holy, stop playing with those cards?”

  Will shuffled them again with exaggerated slowness, then rapped the deck against the coffee table to straighten them, taking care to make as much noise as possible. “No problem, Verandah.” He chuckled at her compression of lips over his favorite nickname for her. It wasn’t his fault her parents had given her a name like Randa that begged to be bastardized.

  With Mirren missing and more starving, rogue vampires wandering the countryside in search of rural-dwelling humans who were less likely to have been vaccinated, Aidan had insisted his lieutenants partner up. Randa was newly promoted. Will loved women on principle, but he could honestly say this one might be capable of souring him on the whole gender. She had a way of looking at him, speaking to him, that made him feel like nothing more than a spoiled rich boy.

  Randa Thomas was a ballbuster, and Will liked his balls just the way they were.

  They waited in the large office of the Penton clinic, where Aidan had called a meeting of the lieutenants. Randa wasn’t the only new one. Tanner James, who shared Will’s love of all things tech, would have been a much better partner for him, but no, Aidan had paired Tanner with Hannah, their resident psychic. He was on patrol tonight with a new scathe member, so Hannah would be coming alone.

  “Everybody’s late.” Randa glanced at her watch. The woman had checked the damn thing ten times already, but Will decided not to point it out.

  Then he changed his mind. “Not everyone lives and dies by the clock like you, honey.” He picked his cards up again and started shuffling.

  Randa’s eyes narrowed at the word honey. “The world would be a better place if they did. And if you call me—”

  Her tirade over his use of the sexist endearment, which they both knew had been meant to piss her off, was cut off by Aidan’s arrival.

  Will laid the cards aside and frowned at his friend. No, Aidan was more than a friend. He’d given Will a job, a home, and a f
amily when he’d met him ten years ago in Atlanta. Before that, Will had stayed on the move for two decades, trying to stay a few steps ahead of his manipulative bastard of a father. Until moving to Penton, Will had always kept a bag packed. As soon as Matthias showed up to smush his son back under his thumb, Will would move again.

  Stress lines had taken up residence on either side of Aidan’s mouth. He’d almost died at the hands of his psychopath brother last month and had to turn his mate, Krys, vampire after she suffered a fatal injury at Owen’s hands. Now, Mirren had been missing over a month. Will couldn’t figure out how to help.

  “Still nothing from the big guy?” He pulled his chair near the oversize desk Aidan had sat behind, moved another one forward for Hannah to use, and left Randa to fend for herself. He smirked when he heard her pulling her chair across the wooden floor to form a semicircle in front of Aidan.

  “I know he’s alive, but he’s out of communication range. Holy hell, what a cluster.” Aidan ran his hands through his shoulder-length dark hair. He’d let it grow longer since hooking up with Krys because she liked it that way. Mated males did stupid shit like that, which was one more reason Will was determined not to become one. That and the fact that there were too many beautiful women in the world to limit himself to one. Plus, one never knew when a woman might turn into the tight-assed shrew like the one he’d been forced to take as a partner.

  The door to the clinic office opened, and Hannah skipped in, bringing a smile to Will’s face. That kid was the only vampire he’d ever met, including himself, who never operated with any agenda other than what was written on her face. Maybe it was because she’d been turned vampire before she’d learned any kind of artifice as a human, or maybe it was because Aidan had taken her in and protected her from the paranoid world of vampire politics.

  Hannah’s psychic abilities gave everybody the creeping willies now and then, but Will was always happy to see her.