Illumination (The Penton Vampire Legacy Book 5)

by Susannah Sandlin

  The Illinois driver’s license belonged to a Jason Smith, and the image on the photo matched Idiot’s face. So the guy was either a Tribunal lackey or one of Greisser’s hired fangs. Probably the latter. Greisser was a mean son of a bitch, but he wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t put up with someone like Idiot on his own personal staff.

  The license and the credit cards, Mirren threw in the trash. There were several hundred dollars in the cash compartment of the wallet; he stuck that in his pocket. He was about to toss the wallet in the trash, which got burned at the end of each day, when he noticed a scrap of paper stuck in one of the credit card slots.

  It was a gas receipt from a station near Atlanta, and on the back was scribbled a phone number with the 404 area code. Also Atlanta.

  “Who do you know, Idiot?” Mirren reached in his pocket, pulled out Jason Smith’s phone, and punched in the number. No name came up on the screen, so it wasn’t one of the man’s regular contacts unless he, like most of the Penton residents, camouflaged his identity and that of his friends. Idiot didn’t strike Mirren as being all that smart.

  “Why are you calling me?” The voice on the other end of the line was curt, annoyed moving toward angry, and heavily accented. A German accent—or Austrian. Mirren would bet his eternal soul it was Frank Greisser. His was a hard voice to forget. “Emergencies only, Herr Smith, so this better be an emergency.”

  Mirren didn’t want his own voice being recognized so he mimicked the mid-range tone and Midwestern accent of Jason Smith as best he could over a Scottish brogue that had lived too long in the Southern United States. “I managed to get my hands on the Slayer’s cell phone. Just wanted to see if I should bring it to you.”

  Greisser didn’t answer for a few heartbeats, and Mirren started counting. If Greisser didn’t speak before he got to ten, Mirren would hang up, just in case Greisser suspected he’d been compromised and was tracking the location. He didn’t want anyone to even suspect this tunnel was back in use.

  The Austrian accent on the other end of the call sounded less tense when he spoke again, just as Mirren’s count reached seven. “I suppose it would be hoping too much to ask if you also captured the Slayer along with his phone.”

  “No, sir. He had that big sword. It was just a lucky break that I got the phone. Big oaf never even missed it.”

  Mirren had never referred to himself as the Slayer—a moniker he hated because it reminded him of a time when he’d been the Tribunal’s paid assassin. And he’d certainly never called himself a “big oaf.” Glory used the phrase often, however, so it felt natural.

  “Have you looked through the contact list? Emails? Anything revealing?”

  “Just code names on the contact list. You want the phone?”

  Greisser snorted. “Of course I want it, you fool. Bring it with you to your briefing Tuesday night at the Marriott. We’ll get some tech people to examine it and see what they can uncover. The meeting begins at eight; plan to be there by seven-thirty.”

  “Will do.” Mirren ended the call with nothing more. The longer he talked, the more likely he was to make a slip. He didn’t want Greisser to know that the Slayer had Jason Smith’s phone.

  Or that the big oaf now knew when and where to find Frank Greisser. He had three days to plan a little trip to Atlanta.

  Chapter 24 * Shay

  Shay stayed quiet as long as she could stand it. “Assuming you’re right and I have to go to Penton for my own safety, what am I supposed to do? Crochet baby clothes?” Nik, sitting beside her in the SUV, glanced at her and she could swear his irises lightened before he looked away. Had she pissed him off? Too bad. “Tell me the truth, Nik. Am I just swapping one prison for another?”

  That wasn’t a totally fair question. Shay knew these were the “good guys,” while Simon and his crew had been anything but good. Her level of freedom didn’t seem to have risen much, though.

  “Only until we can be sure you’re safe.” Nik kept his voice low, but Shay figured every other person in the car could hear. Except for herself, Glory was the only one remotely human, and Shay wasn’t sure about Glory. At least they knew her mate was safe. Whoever this Mirren guy was, Nik cared a lot about him too.

  So let them hear. “And when will I be considered safe—when your little vampire war is over?”

  Cage leaned forward from behind them. “Perhaps I should fill our guest in on what she calls our little war since we’re fighting for the future of an entire race of people, fanged or not.” His voice carried more than a little heat, and Shay’s face heated in return. She’d pushed too far.

  “Don’t feel bad.” Robin spoke from her spot behind Nik. “It was all new to me a few months ago, and to Archer and Glory as well. Let Cage explain it.”

  So Cage Reynolds talked with his oh-so-cultured British accent, and despite her determination to remain angry at being held against her will again—not to mention her own ridiculous attraction to a guy she thought she’d gotten over more than a decade ago—Shay found herself fascinated. As a scientist she studied pandemics and their fallout and prevention. The vampires had been collateral damage in an effective vaccine to treat a human pandemic and, four years later, were only now reaching their crisis point.

  “It flipped the food chain,” she said, mostly to herself, but Cage answered. “It did indeed.”

  Shay thought about Simon and Marianne and how thin they were. Fashionably thin, she’d thought at the time, but maybe not. Even the king or chief or whatever he was, Frank Greisser, had been skinny. The mountainous sword-wielding vampire hadn’t been all that beefy.

  “So, why do you guys not look starved like the vampires in New Orleans?” Shay had only seen Nik and Cage, of course, but they looked plenty healthy. “What is so different about Penton?”

  She heard a lot more, then, about the guy named Aidan Murphy who’d bought up an old mill town before the pandemic, determined to settle there with his followers and their human feeders, or familiars. About how everyone was bonded into the group by blood so that no outsiders could feed on anyone else. Where vampires didn’t have to search for prey and humans didn’t feel preyed upon. About respect. About family.

  “Those aren’t words I would’ve ever associated with Simon and his people,” she said. “There was Simon, and there were the others. He was the boss, except for the German guy.”

  Shay had a horrific thought. “That guy—Greisser. He fed from the young girl named Tina. That doesn’t mean she’s bonded to him, does it?”

  That led to an animated discussion about bonding and mating that left Shay’s head in a spin. Once Glory explained about the mutual exchange of blood in bonding—as in, humans tasted vampire blood, and some kind of vampire marriage resulted—she decided she’d learned enough about vampires for one evening.

  Finally, the conversation tapered off and they rode in silence. Shay wished she had someone neutral to talk to. Did she want to stay with these people? And what about her baby? Surely the war would be over before her due date, because Shay seriously doubted Penton had a midwife or obstetrician.

  Archer pulled the SUV off the road and came to a stop in a wooded area. “Cage, you or Nik better make sure it’s clear before we get everyone out.”

  Nik got up, reached back and hauled Cage up with his remaining arm. “I’ll go with you but I’m too new at this to know what I’m looking for.” He’d admitted he was almost useless as a vampire, and his Army Ranger skills would only take him so far in the world of fangs. Shay wasn’t the only one unsure of her place in the world these days.

  A pang of pity shot through Shay as she watched Cage struggle with his balance in exiting the SUV. Robin was his wife, or mate, and even in the dim light from the dashboard, the pain showed on her face. On impulse, Shay reached behind the seat where Nik had been and wrapped her fingers around Robin’s left hand. The petite auburn-haired woman had struck her as one tough shifter—it probably came with the territory—but she grasped Shay’s hand in return and squeezed.

/>   It hit her then: love transcended species. Anyone who’d ever loved and been loved by a pet knew that. Vampires and shifters might be scary in some settings, but they loved and were loved. They wanted to survive as much as any population Shay had ever visited on her summer mission trips. Maybe they weren’t in need of latrines or drinking water or education, but they were fighting for survival all the same.

  She began to understand them in light of her childhood spent among endangered people. And she hated Simon Landry and Frank Greisser and their ilk even more than when she’d been locked in that warehouse on the riverfront. They had to be stopped.

  Cage and Nik returned. “It’s clear, so come on out. We go in the rest of the way on foot except for Archer. He has a cotton mill building to burn down.”

  “Uh, earth to Cage and Nik.” Glory spoke as the taillights of the SUV disappeared from view, leaving them in near-total darkness from only the barest quarter-moon peeking through a cloudy sky. The air around them was heavy, cold, and damp. “Some of us can’t see in the dark. Not being shifters or vampires and all.”

  Robin laughed. “Poor, silly humans.” She grabbed Shay’s hand. “Nik’s my best friend so I think there are things Shay needs to know about him.

  Shay balked. “Why?”

  Robin laughed again. “You’ll figure it out. C’mon. Straight ahead. Watch for that tree root. Shuffle your feet a little.”

  From deep in the gloom, Nik’s voice took on a threatening tone. “Robin….”

  “Shut up, Niko. You and Cage get Glory to her vampire. She misses him.” Robin started walking, tugging Shay behind her.

  In seconds, Glory and the vampires had pushed past Shay and Robin. Shay tried to walk faster.

  “I could carry you—shifters are strong,” Robin said. “Didn’t think you’d much like the idea, though.”

  Uh, no. “Let’s walk faster. They’ll wait on us, won’t they?”

  “Definitely.” Robin lowered her voice. “Cage will wait. He hasn’t admitted it yet, but he’s going to need me.”

  Shay agreed. “It’s going to be hard for him, I can tell. He’s going to have to learn how to do almost everything a different way, not so different from a combat veteran who’s lost an arm or leg.”

  They walked in silence for a few minutes, with Robin pulling aside limbs and alerting Shay to anything that might trip her. “He’s probably the smartest, most resourceful guy I’ve ever met, even more than Aidan in some ways. He’s a true leader.” Her voice carried like a whisper on the night air. “He doesn’t realize he is still that person. The first daysleep, he begged me to kill him. But I won’t let him give up.”

  “Oh, Robin.” Shay’s heart broke for her. This shifter was destined to be a friend, Shay could tell. She’d never experienced real friendships. She’d had Nik, who left her without even a goodbye. She’d had colleagues. Classmates. Acquaintances. Shay’s assistant had accused her once of having a savior complex—she wanted to fix things and used her capabilities as an excuse to keep people at arm’s length. She sought solutions for people she didn’t know and would never meet.

  Not now. She wanted to fix Cage Reynolds. She wanted to make things easier for Robin and her mate. She wanted Nik to be happy—after he explained why he’d dumped her. She wanted all these people, human and shifter and vampire, to survive.

  She didn’t know how to help them, though. The last three and a half months had taught her what helpless felt like, and she didn’t like the lessons.

  Time to change the subject. “You and Nik are good friends?” How good, she wondered.

  “He’s my best friend. Well, except for Cage, and I’ve known Nik longer.” Robin steered her around a tree stump. “We met as part of a joint human-shifter anti-terrorism team working a bombing case in Houston, and hit it off. He was a plain-vanilla Army Ranger then, really struggling with the psychometry thing.”

  “That’s where he can tell things about a person’s or object’s past by touch?” Shay still wasn’t sure she believed in such abilities. Then again, until recently, she would have said the odds of her walking through a pine forest in Alabama with an eagle shifter were nonexistent.

  “Yep. He had no way of controlling it, so he mostly kept his hands to himself and drank way too much. His father had the same abilities, and committed suicide. Nik was sixteen, and he found his father’s body. It did a number on him and he ran away from home. Lived on the streets for a couple of years before deciding to join the Army.” Robin glanced at Shay. “How do you know Nik?”

  “He was my boyfriend…first love, whatever.” Shay laughed. “We were juniors in high school and I thought he was the one. Until the day he disappeared without a word and never came back.” The truth hit Shay like a vampire bite to the head. “You said he ran away when he was sixteen, after finding his father? That was when he dumped me.”

  “He didn’t dump you; he dumped his whole life.” Robin squeezed her hand. “Knowing Nik, he thought you’d be better off without him. Thought he was doing you a favor.”

  “I had no idea what he was going through.” Shay’s past rearranged itself with these new insights, crushing any anger she held toward Nik and replacing it with empathy.

  “Yeah, well, my friend Niko doesn’t share much,” Robin said. “When he used his powers to help out on that case in Houston or here in Penton, he’d pay for it—headaches, nosebleeds, barfing. Like I said, he drank way too much. After we met, he realized he could touch shifters and not get much from us. And he got nothing from vampires, which is why he wanted to live in Penton.”

  “But then he was bitten by some shifter and they had to turn him vampire to save him?” Shay had overheard that much of Nik’s story.

  “Yes.” Robin walked in silence a moment. “Nik has been through a lot, so don’t you hurt him.”

  Shay laughed, then gasped as she tripped over a root and staggered to stay on her feet. “How could I possibly hurt him? He’s a vampire.”

  “Only for a few days, a month if you count the three-plus weeks he was unconscious and we thought he was going to die. He’s vulnerable. He doesn’t know how to be a vampire yet, and I’m afraid he’s going to get in situations he hasn’t learned how to cope with. And you can hurt him because he cares about you.”

  Shay made a scoffing noise, but Robin interrupted her. “I’m serious. I know that look vampires get. He might not know it yet, but he’s falling for you. If you don’t feel the same way about him, put a stop to it.”

  She didn’t say or else, but Shay got the message. Nik Dimitrou had a fierce champion in this eagle shifter but could Shay hurt him? Not likely.

  By the time they got to what looked like a long-abandoned greenhouse, the others were nowhere in view. “Aidan’s former hobby, before war got in the way,” Robin said, leading Shay along a row of shadowy plant silhouettes. Before they reached the end of the row, a shuffling noise sounded from the back corner, and a shaft of light poured out of a square opening in the ground.

  “About time you two showed up.” Nik’s head appeared in the opening. “We were about to send out a search party.”

  “Stick a sock in it.” Robin stopped at the opening. “Help Shay down the ladder. She’s pregnant and she’s had a long day.”

  More like a long four months.

  Nik’s head disappeared from the light but his voice sounded from below. “It’s easiest to get on your stomach and lower your legs down. I’ll get your feet in the rungs.”

  Thank God Shay’s pregnancy had only begun to thicken her waistline. Belly down was not a good position for a pregnant woman, even with the littlest baby bump. As soon as her legs dangled through the opening, a strong arm wrapped around her waist, and another guided her right leg so that her foot hit the edge of a ladder rung.

  Shay climbed down into a square room whose concrete and steel she barely noticed because in front of her, standing next to Cage Reynolds, was the biggest man she’d ever seen. He stood at least six-eight or nine and had to carry almo
st 300 pounds of muscle. His hands, the size of Granny Underwood’s best china dinner plates, were wrapped around Glory’s waist. Glory was about the same height as Shay, and she looked like a little person next to the behemoth. She didn’t look scared, though.

  Nik pulled her aside so Robin could climb down the ladder. “This is Mirren Kincaid, Glory’s mate and head of security for Penton. Believe me when I say that you want to be Mirren’s friend. Say hello to Shay, Mirren.”

  “You giving the fucking orders now, Zorba?” The enormous vampire scowled at Nik, and Shay had to clap her hand over her mouth to stifle a snort, just in case he wasn’t kidding. Zorba?

  Nik looked annoyed, not frightened. “Would you follow them if I did?”

  Mirren ignored him. “Let’s go. Nik and Glory and Shay. Cage, you and Robin get some rest and plan patrols for the next day or two. And I want Krys and Will both to look at that arm as soon as you come out of daysleep tomorrow. Krys is awake and moving, and Will has some ideas to turn you into some kind of robotic super-vampire.”

  “What kind of ideas?” Cage’s eyes lit with animation, the first real emotion Shay had seen from him since the warehouse fight.

  “You’ve heard all I know about it. Talk to Will.”

  The big vampire turned and used several keys to click through multiple locks before opening a heavy steel door so well concealed in the etched wall patterns that Shay hadn’t noticed it.

  Shay followed Nik into a tunnel beyond the door and they waited as Mirren locked it behind them. “It’s a good thing that Krys is awake.” Nik took her hand, and Shay let him. “She’s not an obstetrician but she is an internal medicine doc.”

  “Why is she here?”

  “She’s Aidan’s mate, and has been very sick. But if she’s up, she can at least check you over and make sure the baby’s okay.”

  Mirren turned to look at her. “You want this kid?”

  Well, the big man didn’t mince words. “I didn’t get raped like the other women did. I had a stupid weekend fling. Now, I know it was a setup but I still put myself in that situation. I didn’t want it at first—a baby didn’t fit into the plans I’d made for myself.”