Omega

by Susannah Sandlin

  Randa stared at Will, and she saw her own confusion mirrored in his raised eyebrows and slightly parted lips. Mirren stopped pacing to watch.

  “Who the hell is Richard?” Will pulled his hand away from Hannah.

  She smiled up at Cage. “It worked! Do you think it’ll work every time?”

  He ruffled her hair and laughed. “I don’t know, love. But it’s worth a try. I imagine it’s one of those things that will get easier as you do it more.”

  Randa gave them an exasperated look. “Uh, excuse me, but who is Richard?”

  Hannah wrinkled her brows, which would have been cute if she hadn’t just laid the salvation of Penton at her and Will’s feet. Plus Richard’s, whoever the hell he was. “I don’t know,” she said, then smiled. “But Aidan’s back.”

  The mystery of Richard was forgotten for a while as Aidan filled them in. “It’s a mixed bag,” he said. “Good news, bad news.”

  “First, the money. Matthias has pulled in favors and had the SEC freeze the Georgia account. But Meg is going to get some of her tech people to pull funds out of one of our overseas accounts. So we should have money”—he looked at the cash spread out on the table—“make that more money, in a couple of days. We might have to risk sending a human out to pick up a card she’ll leave for us in an Atlanta lockbox to access the funds.”

  Mirren finally settled into a chair. “What about Matthias?”

  Aidan looked at Cage. “As soon as you got Melissa out, Matthias came down like a brick shithouse on Edward Simmons.”

  “Figured as much,” Cage said. “Edward and I knew that was a possibility. I doubt he’s intimidated.”

  Aidan chuckled. “Far from it. He seems to have become our most open supporter, which has given Meg the balls to step up as well. Matthias still has the overt support of the Tribunal, mostly because so many are afraid of Frank Greisser, but it’s starting to turn our way. We just have to hold on.”

  Aidan had no ideas about Hannah’s vision, either, but as if by unspoken agreement, Randa remained in the conference room with Will after everyone else had left. Mirren returned to his work on a new exit, still hoping to use Glory’s telekinesis to move the dirt. Cage stood watch in the exit room. Aidan went to talk with Mark, trying to decide if they dared send him out during the day to help with the finances.

  Will closed the door and sat across the table from her. “What do you think?”

  Randa didn’t have a clue. “What is it we can do that the others can’t? Why would we be able to come up with a solution to this whole mess?”

  She had been raking it over in her mind while Aidan filled them in on the Tribunal. “Obviously, your claim to fame is that you’re Matthias’s son, but I don’t see how to use that in any way that would involve you and some guy named Richard. I don’t have any direct ties to Matthias or the Tribunal—he’s only seen me that one time, right before everything fell apart and we had to go into Omega.”

  Randa rubbed her eyes. The air-filtration system had gotten dust in it, and Will had been planning to fix it tonight. The common room sounded like a TB ward, what with all the rattling coughs from humans and vampires alike.

  Will channeled his inner Mirren and started pacing. “I think the key to whatever Hannah thinks is supposed to happen centers on this Richard person, but I swear to God, I don’t know anybody with that name. Do you? A Rick or a Rich or a Ricky or a Dick? And if you tell me I’m a dick, I’ll be highly insulted.”

  Randa barked out a laugh. She knew one Rick, but there was no way it was him. “The only Richard I know is my father, and no way is he the answer to our problems.” Her smile faded at Will’s thoughtful look. “What?”

  “Tell me about your father, Ran. I know he’s a military guy—a colonel, right?”

  “Right. He’s a retired colonel. He still keeps his finger in the military, but he does it through a private security firm.” She held her fingers up like quotation marks when she said private security firm. It had been a running joke between Rory and her. Dad would go missing for weeks at a time after they’d been grown and out of the house, then make up nebulous business excuses for his absence. “Why? What could he have to do with this?”

  She could practically see Will’s brain sorting, cataloging, and testing theories. “Think about it. If your dad’s the only human either of us knows named Richard, it has to be him. We’re in Omega virtually all the time now, so we aren’t likely to meet any new humans.”

  Randa was getting a bad, bad feeling about this. She missed her dad and her brothers. She’d always wished she could let them know she wasn’t dead, even though she couldn’t imagine them in her life on any regular basis. But how could a retired army colonel help them?

  Will continued to pace and repeated his request. “Tell me about your father.”

  “Will, what are you thinking?” She picked up a sheet of paper off the table and began shredding it, just to give her something to do with her hands besides wring them. “How could my dad have anything to do with this?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ve learned to trust Hannah’s visions. They’re usually half-formed but rarely wrong. Don’t forget, she was the one who forced me to focus on how to get Mirren away from Matthias month before last.”

  Yeah, Randa remembered—Will had knocked her unconscious long enough to get out of town without her tagging along or following. That had been a real low in their relationship, and a month ago, if anyone had told her Will Ludlam would be the last person she thought of before daysleep and the first upon awakening, she’d have decked them.

  “What do you want to know?”

  Will took the seat across from her again. “You said your dad runs a private security firm. What does that mean?”

  Good question. “Once all of us kids grew up and either enlisted or moved away from home, Dad retired from the army and started hunting down some of the guys he’d commanded over the years, mostly Army Rangers. Real hard-asses. They all teamed up.” She pushed away the pile of shredded paper she’d amassed in front of her. “They spend a lot of time in Europe and the Middle East doing special missions—or at least that’s my interpretation of it.”

  Will scratched his chin, drawing Randa’s attention to that talented mouth. She’d sure rather be doing something besides discussing her father. “So they’re kind of like one of those special-ops teams in the movies?”

  She laughed. “I think so. That’s my guess, anyway. He and his buddies—talk about a pile of alpha males. Although, by the time I was turned, he’d already gotten old enough that he seemed to stay more on the strategic end of things, not running actual missions, or at least he was home more. Remember, I’ve been gone five years, and Dad certainly never confided in me or Rory—we were the babies. My older brothers might know, especially Robbie since he was a Ranger, but maybe not. It’s Dad’s MO to keep his business locked up tight. He’d say it was to protect us, but…” She shrugged. “Maybe he really is doing private security in Brunei, but I’m thinking not so much. My guess is he’s doing contract work for the military.”

  “I have a little experience with military guys,” Will said. “A vampire can’t exactly go through boot camp, but I’ve taken evening training classes with some guys who had military backgrounds.”

  Randa hadn’t known that, but it explained a lot about how Will handled himself under fire and knew how to move undercover. She tried to imagine her father and Will having a conversation and couldn’t do it, but it might be interesting. Or ridiculous. Or deadly.

  “What does your dad believe in?”

  She had to think about that one. Randa and Rory had been toddlers when their mom died, so the only household she remembered was the one with Rick Thomas in charge. Everything was a drill. Chores. Activities. Every minute accounted for. Spur of the moment was a foreign concept to be beaten down and annihilated.

  She resented it when she was young, chafed against it as a teen, and strived to earn his respect as a young adult. Now, with some forced
perspective, she realized he’d simply been using the only coping methods he knew when suddenly faced with raising a bunch of kids as a single father with a demanding career. Not the duty he signed up for, but also not one he’d ever tried to avoid. He’d send them away to live with their grandparents when he was deployed, but he’d always collect them and take them home, wherever home was, as soon as he returned.

  “Well, the thing he always preached to us growing up was personal responsibility—you know, own what you do. Go to bed every night without regrets. Defend those who can’t defend themselves, even if it’s hard. You know, the usual stuff.”

  Will smiled and reached across the table to twine his fingers through hers. “It doesn’t sound that usual to me. In fact, he kind of sounds like the anti-Matthias. You know, screw whoever you can before they screw you first, blame others whenever possible, and exploit a weakness when you see it.”

  “Will, what are you think—”

  A disturbance in the hall interrupted, and Krys stuck her head in the door, her voice higher than normal and definitely on the shaky side. “Do you know where Aidan is?”

  Will was on his feet before the words were out, and Randa was right behind him. She’d never seen Krys anything but cool and in control. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m not sure. Two of the fams were sick yesterday, now it’s eight. I mean, really sick. Whatever it is, I think it’s spreading.”

  While Aidan talked to the sick humans who’d filled up the medical ward, forcing Melissa and Mark into a regular room, Will pulled Mirren and Randa into a corner of the common area.

  “We need to cover Omega—every inch of it,” Will said quietly. “Scent every room. See if anything comes up funky.”

  Mirren’s gaze traveled across the people sitting around the open space, relaxing on sofas, playing cards, watching videos, not yet aware that they could be in trouble. “Don’t be a drama queen, junior. Might be a cold or virus or something.”

  “Not possible.” Will lowered his voice when one of the fams gave them a curious look. “We’ve been down here long enough that any kind of virus would have already shown up. None of the humans have been outside, and vampires can’t carry human viruses. I guess it’s possible that I brought in some bug on my clothes, but I’m guessing it’s environmental. I’m hoping it’s nothing more exotic than mold in the air ducts, but we need to be sure.”

  They split up, and Will first went to the room where the air-filtration system had been built. It pulled air from the outside through a long underground pipe that, if found, wouldn’t lead anyone back to Omega without a lot of digging. He went ahead and repaired the filter, but couldn’t scent anything wrong with it.

  Same with waste management. All systems working.

  As soon as he opened the door to the water-filtration room, the fumes hit him. His eyes stung and the insides of his nostrils burned. He’d set up the system to feed from a spring he’d found not too far from the Omega entrance, pumping it in, then running it through a filter similar to the ones people put on their faucets, only bigger.

  The filter was still operating, but the water intake from the spring gave off some kind of noxious aura. Will stuck his hand in the reservoir and brought a palm full of water to his nose. Didn’t smell different, and if he hadn’t shut himself in with the big reservoir tank, he probably wouldn’t have noticed it. He shut the water system down and stuck his head back into the hallway.

  “Randa!” He saw her at the end of the storage corridor and motioned for her to come, then moved aside to let her inside the water room.

  “Gah. What is that?” She blinked rapidly and walked to the reservoir.

  “Don’t know. Didn’t you say one time you took courses on biological weapons?” The last thing Will wanted to do was spread panic. A simple contamination from animal shit would be less alarming than what he feared.

  “Yeah.” Randa stuck her finger in the water, rubbed her fingers together, and lifted them to her nose. “Turn down the lantern a minute.”

  Will reached to where he’d set the fluorescent lantern on a shelf and turned it to half-light. The water in the reservoir glowed an eerie blue-green, as if one of Will’s hippie high school friends had put a black light or lava lamp in the bottom. “What the hell is it?”

  “Not sure.” Randa propped her hands on her hips and stared at the reservoir, her lips pursed. “There’s a class of chemicals that have a luminescent effect in water, and they’re all very poisonous. Some are pesticides that are highly regulated, which would be my guess.” She turned back to Will, frowning. “They don’t occur in nature.”

  Back in the meeting room again, behind closed doors, only Krys had joined the lieutenants this time. Will thought she looked mad enough to spit.

  “We have eight people who are extremely sick,” she said. “They’re all heavy water drinkers. Another dozen are showing symptoms. There’s not much I can do for them other than treat the nausea and diarrhea and give them plenty of water—bottled, of course. Can they survive? I don’t know.”

  Cage and Hannah had stayed in the common room with the fams and other scathe members, trying to maintain the facade that everything was fine except for a pesky virus making the rounds. So far, no one had realized there was no way to introduce a virus into a closed community like Omega.

  Will looked out the door to make sure everything remained calm. Melissa and Mark had come into the common room together for the first time and were being treated like celebrities. Everyone in Penton loved both of the Calverts, and people’s genuine excitement over seeing her again would probably do Melissa as much good as her presence was doing for them.

  Inside the meeting room, attitudes ranged from angry to grim. Mirren leaned against the wall in his favorite spot, looking like a human grenade. Aidan was as pale as the sick people.

  Will sat at the table next to his open laptop. He’d been scrolling through lists of files stored on his hard drive, pretending to look for some type of chemical database. Just to use up nervous energy.

  “Is there any way to filter this stuff out?” Aidan asked.

  Will stopped scrolling and dropped his hands into his lap. “Short answer? No. Whatever it is, it’s getting through our filter system. We can try running it through a second or third time by hand, but I don’t think it’ll help. If the chemical goes through the first time, why wouldn’t it go a second or third?”

  Aidan nodded, his expression unreadable. “What about a different kind of filter?”

  Will shrugged. “We already have the top-of-the-line commercial filters. There are probably specialized ones, but without some kind of water testing, we don’t know what we’re looking for.”

  Aidan pushed his chair back, drumming his fingers on the padded arms. “That means it’s strictly bottled water for bathing and drinking. How long can we hold out?”

  “We have enough for a couple of weeks if people are conservative.”

  Krys cleared her throat. “Another thing to think about. We can’t feed from these people who are sick. Even if we’re immune to it, which I assume we are, they need all their strength to fight it. I’d say we feed every other day, at most, from the ones who aren’t sick. We can take some nourishment from each other between times.”

  “Mirren, come with me to talk to the patients.” Aidan stood and wrenched open the door into the hallway. Krys got up to follow him, but he turned to stop her. “Stay here, mo run,” he whispered, and kissed her.

  Will watched them leave, his eyes narrowed. They were up to something. No one took Mirren Kincaid on a visit to cheer the troops.

  Randa began gathering the wallets that were still spread across the table, throwing them back inside the plastic bag from the home-improvement store. “Throw these away?”

  “Maybe you should save them.” Krys sat in the chair Aidan had vacated. “A few have IDs, and you never know if we might need them with the Tribunal down the road.”

  Will had started thinking about Randa’s father a
gain. What would the man do if he found out his daughter was alive, but had been turned into something he believed didn’t exist? Would he kill her? Try to protect her? Shut her down before she could even explain? He wondered…

  The door flew open, and Glory slipped inside, gasping for air as she tried to cry and talk at the same time. The woman was practically hyperventilating. Will slammed the computer lid and stood up. “What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

  “You have to stop them.” She looked from Will to Randa before grabbing Krys’s hand. “Aidan and Mirren are going after Matthias just after daysleep. I overheard them planning it. They’re too outnumbered, and if they kill him, the Tribunal will come after us.”

  “What?” Krys propelled herself from the chair, headed for the door. Will stopped her.

  Shit. Will knew they were up to something, but this was nuts. “Wait, Krys. Slow down, Glory. Do they know you heard them?”

  “N…no. They’re in one of the supply rooms.”

  Damn it. They hadn’t gone through all of this just to have Aidan and Mirren go down the for-the-greater-good highway. Taking out Matthias would do nothing but buy them a little time, get help for the sick humans, and make things worse in the long run. At best. “Hold on a minute. Let me think.”

  He walked to the entrance of the common room and got Cage’s attention, then motioned for him to join them. They were going to need his smarts and maybe his muscle.

  Once Cage and Will were both inside the closed meeting room, Will turned back to Glory. “Tell us exactly what you heard.”

  She sat next to Krys and swallowed hard. Will was struck again by what an odd thing love was. This sweet-natured little human had tamed the big, bad former Tribunal executioner, and Mirren didn’t seem to mind a bit.

  Only, now that he looked at her closely, she looked…damn. “Glory, truth now. Are you sick?”

  Krys wrapped an arm around her when she closed her eyes and nodded. “How bad is it?”

  “Just a little nausea, but Mirren walked in when I was throwing up. God, you should have seen his face. I’ve never seen him scared before. He got Aidan, and they shut themselves in one of the storage rooms to talk. I followed them.”