Omega

by Susannah Sandlin

  Will lowered his head and, damn him, inhaled deeply, with his face pressed against the side of her neck. Her carotid artery also thumped in a very un-vampire-like cadence. She waited for the sarcastic comments to start.

  Instead, he lifted his head and looked her in the eye. She could swear his heartbeat sped up, although it was hard to tell over the pounding of her own. Well, this was damned awkward. He blinked and opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again.

  Well, that was one good thing. Will had been stricken dumb, at least for a moment.

  Finally, he rolled off her, rose to his feet, and held out a hand. “Come on, help me dig my computer out of the dirt, and let’s get out of here.”

  Avoiding his eye, she batted his hand away and got to her feet without anything near his gracefulness. She might as well not be embarrassed by her reaction to him. He was sex on a stick and he knew it, with his just-wavy-enough hair and dimples and brown eyes the color of antique gold. And if he ever forgot it, there were plenty of women in what was left of Penton to pump up his ego, or anything else that might need pumping.

  Including her Omega roommate, Olivia, a human who’d been Will’s familiar for a few months and obviously wanted to be a lot more. If Randa had a pint of unvaccinated blood for every time Liv had mentioned Will’s name in the past three days, she’d have enough to feed for eternity.

  They knelt on opposite sides of the metal box and had it unearthed after a couple minutes of digging. “Why is your computer buried, anyway?”

  Will wiped off the loose dirt and tucked the box under his arm. “It’s my backup. I updated it every few days and reburied it in case we ever had to leave in a hurry and I couldn’t get to my primary computer. It contains all the diagrams for Omega and underground Penton. I knew I could probably get back to retrieve it even if something happened to the house.”

  He looked at the blackened shell of his home, a jagged outline in the moonlight. “You know, like if I had to burn it down myself, computer and all, to keep my dad from finding it.”

  Randa felt a stab of sympathy for him, then shook it off. A quick roll around on the ground didn’t mean she should forget what a brat Will Ludlam was. As the only girl growing up with four brothers at a string of army bases across the country, she knew brats. “We need to take a look in town first—before I spotted you, I thought I saw movement around the clinic.”

  “Yes, sir, Veranda, sir.” Will stashed the metal computer case beneath a pile of brush and covered it up.

  Asshole. Randa stalked along the tree line, not looking to see if he was behind her. He could fend for himself.

  Silently, they took side streets into what was left of the small downtown area. “Wait a second.” Will put a hand on her shoulder and jerked his head toward the remains of the Penton clinic. “Damn, he is here.”

  A middle-aged man in an expensive-looking suit, thin, with salt-and-pepper hair cut stylishly short, left the clinic and got into a late-model silver sedan in the parking lot. “That’s Matthias. We should go in and see what he left behind,” Will whispered. “The clinic office is in the undamaged side of the building. I bet he’s using it.”

  “You do what you want. I’m going to follow him—he’s driving toward downtown.” Randa began moving away, then looked back at Will. “If I get a good shot at his head, I’m going to take him out. You OK with that? Even though he’s your father?”

  Anybody would balk at murdering a parent, even a bad parent, and a large-caliber head shot directly into the brain—the only way a bullet could kill a vampire other than multiple close-range shots to the heart—made a gory mess even if you didn’t know the person. It would be better if Will went back to Omega and left Matthias to her.

  He moved closer and softened his voice. “My father deserves whatever he gets, but Aidan and Mirren have made their position clear. If we kill Matthias, it’s the same as declaring open war against the Tribunal. They’ll come down here with an army, and we won’t stand a chance. We need to leave him in place while we come up with a strategy to swing the Tribunal to our side.”

  Randa wasn’t buying it. All her training—and, hell, her whole life had been training—told her that if you wanted to kill the snake, you took off its head. She closed the distance remaining between her and Will.

  She expected him to back off, but he stood his ground, his brown eyes lightening to a tawny gold as she found herself inches from his face for the second time tonight. She kept her voice low. “You sure that’s all there is to it? He is your father. It’s understandable if you don’t want to kill him. Go back to Omega and let me do what I was trained to do.”

  Will’s whisper was fierce. “You weren’t trained to handle the likes of Matthias. Don’t ever, ever underestimate him. And if you think I’m going to get all sentimental over the possibility of some father-son reunion, you’re full of shit.” Will’s gaze held hers for a moment, then dropped from her eyes to her mouth.

  Randa felt his heart speed up, kicking up hers to beat in sync. This was so not going anywhere. It had to be the stress.

  “Stop that—I’m not one of your women.” Randa spun away, not wanting him to see her eyes, which she suspected had lightened as much as his. Life was screwed up enough right now without getting the hots for the Penton playboy.

  “That’s the God’s truth.” Will pushed his way past her, and she followed, happy to leave the conversation behind. She’d met a million guys like Will Ludlam. Cocky. Arrogant. Ready to fight the whole Afghan rebel army single-handedly. One look at the results of a roadside bomb always took the wind right out of them. Admittedly, Will was better looking than most, but he knew it, and arrogance never stayed pretty for long.

  They moved silently into downtown Penton, until Will stopped so suddenly in the alley beside the superette that Randa crashed into his back. She looked around the empty street, listened, sniffed the air. She got nothing; Will was just trying to annoy her.

  He grabbed her elbow when she stepped around him, and jerked her back. “Wait. He’s coming this way.”

  “Who’s—” A crunch of gravel sounded from down the street, and Randa looked toward the destroyed municipal building a block to their west. Matthias and a man with white-blond hair and a cruel mouth walked down the middle of Main Street toward them. They took a turn into the Baptist church. How had Will known they were coming so early?

  “Give me a diversion so I can see what Matthias is up to.”

  Randa’s first instinct was to tell Will to create his own diversion, but she sucked it down. Whether she liked him or not, Aidan had made them a team, so it was important for them to work as a team. “OK, I’ll circle behind the municipal building and make some noise. Who’s the guy with him?”

  “Shelton Porterfield, who seems to have been promoted to second-in-command.” Will glanced back at her. “Buy me a few seconds, then get to the outlying Omega entrance—I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”

  She wasn’t sure why Aidan put so much faith in Will. He had great fighting skills, but he joked around too much. And as he’d proven by leaving her behind a few times—including once when he’d left her unconscious on his living room sofa after a blindside—he wasn’t a team player. In her experience, rogues got people killed.

  Aidan did trust him, though, and they’d been together a long time, long before Aidan had established Penton. If she bitched about Will too much and forced Aidan to choose, she’d lose.

  She needed Penton more than Penton needed her, and at least she had the sense to realize it. The scathe’s situation might suck right now, but Randa didn’t know what she’d do if Aidan made her leave. Living here was the closest to normal she’d felt since she’d been turned vampire, even with the town under siege.

  Randa locked gazes with Will for a couple of heartbeats before slipping back into the alley and taking a circuitous route around and behind the municipal building, avoiding the church grounds. She crouched in the trees behind the old city hall and waited a few second
s, but sensed no movement nearby.

  Her military-issue pistol slid smoothly from its shoulder holster, and she took aim at a bit of exposed metal in the wrecked rebar. Three quick shots echoed through downtown, and in seconds, Shelton Porterfield stepped out of the church door, scented the air, and raced toward her.

  That was her cue to leave. Randa holstered the pistol and ran into the woods. The day had been a warm, humid one for late March. She could still feel the heat collected in the trees and rocks as she passed them, zigzagging erratically in case Matthias’s companion tried to track her. Every half mile, she’d find something with a scent—a dead possum in one spot, an abandoned carton full of soured milk in another—and kick it across her path to muddy the trail.

  It took an hour, but the remote tunnel entrance finally came into view. She started to move aside the brush that camouflaged the hatch, but decided to delay going underground as long as she could. Even after five years, she still got tired after a run like that, and the fresh air helped her recuperate faster. Plus, the less time she had to stay in the hole, the better. It was a well-equipped hole, but still a hole. Will had said to wait for him, so she’d wait.

  Randa sat on the ground and leaned against a tree trunk, stretching her legs out, still amazed at how quickly her burning muscles repaired themselves. What a waste it had been, all those hours she’d spent in the gym and on the track before she’d been turned. She’d pushed herself hard to keep up with her brothers and convince her dad that Colonel Rick Thomas’s daughter had the stuff to make it just like his boys. She didn’t think she’d ever succeeded in convincing him.

  Then, wham. One wrong turn in a Kabul alleyway, a flash of fangs, two or three days of horrific pain and growing thirst, and everything changed. Her view of the world. Her idea of what it meant to be physically strong. Reality.

  Randa inhaled the scents of sap and bark, closed her eyes, and, unwillingly, turned her mind back to Will. She’d never admit it to him, not under threat of being staked and left in the sunlight, but she’d wondered more than once what it would be like to be with him. Well, maybe not him specifically, but another vampire. She’d avoided intimacy of any kind since she’d been turned. It felt too predatory to take a human lover, plus she was afraid she’d hurt a human guy. She still couldn’t gauge her own strength.

  And yet the male vampires intimidated the hell out of her. If they weren’t alphas before they were turned, they sure as hell were afterward. Even someone like Aidan, for whom violence was a last resort, had scary strength and skills and wasn’t afraid to use them.

  She’d grown up surrounded by big, pushy men, and they both turned her on and put her on the defensive—a really screwed-up combination. And nobody intimidated her more, and put her more on the defensive, than Will Ludlam. She realized that she acted like a raving bitch around him, but that’s how she reacted to people who were in danger of getting too close.

  Maybe she was afraid she’d be attracted to him enough to act on it, and he’d reject her.

  Or worse, he wouldn’t reject her, and she’d learn she was just the latest among his million conquests.

  Or, God forbid, he’d get attached, and she couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. Not to him. Not to any vampire.

  She just flat-out didn’t want to be a vampire. But the alternative was being dead, and she didn’t want that, either.

  Still, she wondered, if it could be just one night, with no consequences and no ties, what might it be like to take on Will Ludlam?

  Until tonight, she’d been convinced he wasn’t attracted to her. She went out of her way to not play up her looks—an important self-preservation tactic in the army. Minimal makeup, even now when the vampirism had made her hazel eyes greener. Shoulder-length red hair in the casual pileup she’d always worn in the military because she could fit a hat over it.

  Tonight, though, Will had wanted her. She’d wanted him. They both knew it. The problem was, Randa wasn’t sure what to do about it.

  Maybe if she ignored it, it would go away.

  Will crouched beneath the stained glass window depicting a shepherd tending a flock of sheep on a green hillside and waited until he heard Randa’s shots, followed by the footsteps of that sorry SOB Shelton racing toward the municipal building ruins to check out the noise.

  Matthias was still inside the old redbrick church—something Will’s suddenly enhanced sense of smell told him without looking.

  If he could scent the old bastard, did that mean Matthias could scent him as well, or would he just assume Will had been in that building at some point?

  He didn’t plan to hang around any longer than necessary. He wanted to see what the old man was doing and then go back to Omega and charge his laptop, maybe feed before dawn. Nothing more entertaining, though. Liv was rooming with Randa, of all people, and that killed his libido as far as Liv was concerned, for reasons he didn’t want to think about too deeply.

  Getting a hard-on courtesy of Randa tonight had shaken him. Talk about dangerous liaisons. His ego couldn’t deal with both his father and a woman with bigger balls than him. A man had to have limits.

  As soon as he was sure Shelton was well gone, Will risked a peek through the window, squinting between the legs of a particularly corpulent sheep. Matthias seemed too occupied to scent him, so Will stood upright and pressed closer to the glass.

  His father paced around the church sanctuary, pausing every few steps and cocking his head as if listening for something, then scanning the floor around him. A chill stole across Will’s shoulder blades. Was Matthias looking for a hatch? Had he found out about Omega?

  Surely not. He might have pieced enough of it together to figure out they’d escaped underground, though. Matthias was smart, as he’d certainly told Will often enough. It was usually followed by a diatribe about Will’s stupidity.

  Matthias would have realized all the Penton people had disappeared too fast, and he could easily have unearthed at least one of the subbasement hatches while combing through the buildings. It was a logical leap to assume there was an underground escape route, and the church was the last place Matthias had seen any of the Penton scathe.

  He was likely on a fishing expedition and nothing more. Will had designed the hatch to lock beneath the edge of one of the heavy old oak pews, with a lever from below to move the pew in case they needed to climb back out from below. But so far, Matthias hadn’t gone anywhere near it.

  He was still too close, though. The tunnel beneath the church needed to be filled in with dirt and packed tight. With Matthias in Penton, any coming and going would have to be done through the remote hatch into the Georgia woods. Maybe they could start tunneling a new exit in case the fail-safe was compromised, at least until they could get everybody out that wanted out.

  Matthias raised his head and stared toward the window. Will froze, holding his breath as his father frowned and scanned all the windows in the outside wall. “William?”

  Shit. Will forced himself to remain still. If his father heard movement, he was as good as caught.

  “Matthias, I couldn’t find anything.” Shelton pushed his way in the front door of the church, and Will took advantage of the diversion. He eased away from the church building and moved quickly from street to street, ducking in and out of shadows and avoiding other vampires, making as little noise as possible. He scented quite a few now but none from the Penton scathe.

  It was only a couple of hours until dawn, so they were all coming in to find lighttight daysleep spaces. Will was tempted to hang around and try to get a head count, but he didn’t want to risk getting stuck outside Omega at daybreak.

  He slipped through the woods behind the remains of his house, retrieved his computer from its hiding space, and loped back to the Omega entrance. He slowed at a familiar scent and paused at the edge of the clearing, watching Randa as she sat with her back against a pine tree, her knees propped up and her head resting on them.

  If she’d been human, he would swear she was crying. But this
was Randa. Ms. Army-Navy-Air Force-Marines. Armor-plated Randa, who lived duty and mission, rules and regulations. Still, she’d only been turned four or five years and had come from a big family—as least that was what he’d gathered from Aidan. Maybe there was a human beneath the robot; she’d sure felt human lying beneath him tonight.

  Oh, wait. Not going there again. Ever.

  Randa never talked about anything personal. Will didn’t know where she’d grown up or how many brothers or sisters she had. They’d been so busy pushing each other away and trying to one-up each other, as hard and fast as possible, that those introductory chitchats never took place.

  She finally sensed him and raised her head. No, she hadn’t been crying, but her hazel eyes were dark pools despite the brilliant lights the moon played off that amazing dark-red hair. If she’d still been human, there would have been tears.

  Will stepped out of the shadows and dropped to the ground next to her, stretching out on the pine straw. It wouldn’t kill him to be nice for a change, give the woman a break—unless she started being bossy or argumentative, which was guaranteed to bring out his inner smart-ass.

  The cool, damp air was weighted with the approaching dawn, and no other vampires or humans stirred nearby. Just moonlight and an unhappy partner. He pulled the card he’d bought from inside his jacket pocket and handed it to her. “You OK?”

  He waited for the sarcastic answer, and she opened her mouth as if to provide it. Instead, she rattled the small paper bag and pulled out the rumpled card. When she opened it, a tinny version of “Halls of Montezuma” echoed through the forest, and she slammed it shut.

  “What the hell is this?” Randa’s voice sounded strangled, and at first, Will thought she was angry—until she burst out laughing. “That’s the most awful thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Hey, I bought that especially for you, soldier.” He laughed too, and it felt good after all the stress of the last three days. Hell, the last three months.