Absolution

by Susannah Sandlin

  “A girl.” Cal put his head in his hands, as if he could already feel it separating from his neck. “I was supposed to hang around, eavesdrop, see if I could hear anything about a new human woman who might’ve come to town in the last week. If I found her, the guy said I could have her as long as I completely drained her and brought proof to the drop tomorrow—a…an ear. She has a small birthmark on her ear, shaped like a heart. I bring the ear, I get the money.”

  A thick gray rage filled Mirren’s mind. People always describe anger as hot and fiery, but true rage was cold and merciless. Matthias had hired this fool to come here and kill Glory.

  He walked behind Cal and placed his left hand on the man’s shoulder. His voice was soft. “You aren’t going to make that meeting tomorrow, Cal.”

  Mirren pulled the knife blade across the vampire’s throat before he could answer. Two more strokes and it was done.

  Sometimes, one didn’t need a sword to take a head. Rage and a good, sharp knife worked just fine.

  A half hour before dawn, Mirren left Aidan’s house and drove home. He’d given a complete report, including an account of the beheading and burial of the unfortunate Cal. He had to give Aidan credit—he didn’t finch or chastise him even though Mirren had realized, once the anger had died down enough for reason to surface, that sending Cal back to Atlanta with his memories wiped might have had the same results. Even if Matthias had managed to find Cal again, he wouldn’t know anything. On second thought, memory wipes on other vampires didn’t always work, and Glory’s life was too valuable to risk.

  Mirren had killed his share of vampires since he’d left the life of the Slayer behind, but it had been emotionless, methodical, clean. He’d almost begun to hope the cold killer mind-set had disappeared, that living in Aidan’s scathe all this time had finally quieted the anger and violence that was his legacy. He’d outlived the time he was meant to live in. The very same qualities that had made him a good mercenary warrior and executioner had made him a pathetic excuse for a man.

  He parked the Bronco in front of his house and studied the light seeping around the living room blinds. Surely Glory wasn’t still up. He didn’t want to see her after what he’d done.

  He paused with his keys in his hand. Maybe he should go to another one of his daysleep spaces. Each scathe member had multiples in case one was compromised. He’d put his keys back in the ignition when the porch light came on and the front door opened. Glory stepped out, still wearing his damned shirt, silhouetted against the light of the stone house.

  Damn woman. He’d really be a jackass if he left now, so he eased out of the Bronco and shut the door behind him, hoping to get past her as fast as he could.

  “You’re still up.” He walked up the steps and waited for her to go in ahead of him.

  “I wanted to wait up for you, to ask you a question.”

  Must be some damned question if it was worth staying up until five in the morning. “What’s that?”

  “I wanted to ask—oh my God, you’re hurt.” As soon as they entered the house, she’d zeroed in on his bloody T-shirt. He looked down at it. Damn. Maybe it was gray instead of black after all—blood wouldn’t show up on black, and he could see the dark blotches. Of course, the blood splashed across his shirtfront wasn’t his; the blood soaking into his forearm, however, was.

  “Take that shirt off.”

  “No.” He edged past her and sank into the armchair. “It’s not my blood.”

  “Take the shirt off, Mirren. Prove it’s not yours.”

  Aw, fuck. She had her hands on her hips again. If he’d known she was such a bossy woman, he might’ve strong-armed Will into sponsoring her.

  He stood up and pulled the shirt up to his neck with a dramatic flex of muscles, baring his chest—which had no blood on it except a light smear that had soaked through the fabric. “Satisfed?”

  Her gaze lingered on his chest, and Mirren felt her breath quicken from four feet away. His quickened in response, and this was not the time to be thinking about what it would feel like to have her hands on him instead of her eyes.

  “Take it off completely.” When Glory looked back up at him, her eyes were not as lust filled as he’d expected. In fact, they had a suspicious cast. “I want to see your arm.”

  Mirren gritted his teeth. This little human would not stand in his living room, in his house, and order him to take off his shirt. He should just go downstairs and leave her to her day. Except, his feet didn’t seem to be moving.

  She walked to him, and he flinched as she placed a palm on his chest over his sluggish vampire’s heart, which had somehow decided to keep pace with hers. “Your heartbeat is faster than it was earlier. Why is that?” She didn’t wait for him to answer but slid her hands up his chest and over his shoulders, as if to avoid frightening a balky animal with a gentle touch. That wasn’t too far off the mark, but he seemed helpless to stop her.

  Moving slowly, she tugged the shirt over his head, and he let it drop to the floor. “Oh, Mirren. What have you done?” Glory lifted his left arm, frowning over the acid burn in the shape of a small heart. It was still raw and oozing dark-magenta blood. “Did somebody do this to you, or did you do it to yourself?”

  He pulled his arm away from her. “I did it.”

  “Sit down.” She left for the kitchen, and he had an urgent impulse to run like hell. Some slayer he was. Again, his feet didn’t seem to work. The faucet turned on, then off, and she came back into the room where he stood rooted to the spot like he’d been planted in deep soil.

  “Sit down, I said. On the sofa.”

  God help him, he sat, and a resolve spread through him. She had to know what he’d done, what he was. She had to know she was in danger from Matthias and from him. And he only had the little time left before dawn to explain it.

  She sat next to him, her bare knees brushing his thigh and drawing his attention to all that smooth, tan skin.

  “Ow—shit. What are you doing?” She’d covered his acid etching with a cool, wet cloth, putting pressure on it.

  “It’ll get infected if you don’t clean it.” She lifted the cloth, stared at the heart shape, turned the cloth over, and pressed it again.

  “Vampires don’t get infections.”

  She frowned, removing the cloth and tracing her fingers along his arm. “What did you use? You’re making another tattoo, aren’t you?” Her gaze followed the line of his left arm, covered by dozens of the scored tattoos, then slid down his chest again. No heat in her eyes this time. Her examination was purely clinical and made him want to squirm.

  He thought about pushing her aside and going downstairs. It was none of her business. Absolutely none. “Acid pen. It’s the only thing that our skin can’t heal. I fill in the ink later.”

  She nodded slowly. “What do they mean?”

  He hesitated. For some perverse reason, he wanted this woman to keep thinking he was the hero type, the protector she imagined him to be. But it wasn’t fair to either one of them, and the only way to stomp out that delusion of hers was brutal honesty. “Each drawing represents a life I took. Someone I murdered.”

  He waited for the revulsion, or the fear, or at least what he’d secretly begun to think of as Glory-speak, that nonstop ramble to which she was prone. Instead, her expression was serious, but not scared.

  “You killed someone tonight, then?”

  He studied her expression and—there—he saw it. Concern. Worry that he’d hurt her, kill her too. That the rage would take over and he wouldn’t know what he’d done until it was over. “I d id.”

  “Did he deserve it?”

  He’d been waiting for her to run away, not ask him another question. “What?”

  “Did. He. Deserve it? Did he need killing? What did he do—or she?”

  “He.” Mirren frowned at her. Had Cal deserved to be killed? He didn’t think in those terms, not once his training took over and his hands seemed to operate independently of his emotions. “I guess…I don’t kno
w. Who gets to decide that?”

  She nodded slowly, still with that serious depth in her eyes. “What did he do?”

  “He came here to kill someone I…care about.” Mirren studied the tats on his chest. Each one a kill. A reminder to own what he was and what he’d done. For many, many years, he’d killed for money, and he had a lot of dirty money that Aidan had invested and turned into even more. Had each of those people deserved to die? He didn’t know. They were jobs. Names, addresses, and descriptions on a pouch full of gold, or cash, or whatever currency was in favor at the time.

  But Cal had come here to kill Glory. To mutilate her body. “Yes, he deserved it.”

  “Then stop beating yourself up about it. What’s the signif cance of the heart in relation to this guy tonight who deserved to be killed?”

  The heart represented her, although he hadn’t thought of it consciously when he did it. The drawings always came by instinct, and his instinct had called on the shape of her birthmark. And it represented something else—how far he’d go to keep her safe. “It’s just a shape.”

  “I doubt that.” She looked at him steadily. “Who did this man come here to kill, Mirren? Was it me?”

  He felt the world go grayer, the anger blotting out color again, anger at himself this time. She had to know. “Yes. He never learned you were here, so you haven’t been compromised. But if you want to leave, I’ll take you somewhere tomorrow.”

  She curled up on the sofa and watched him with an expression that was solemn but not judgmental, her warmth spreading through him, easing the anger, filling him with a strange feeling he thought might be hope, not that he had much experience with it. “I want to stay here.”

  He opened his mouth to argue, to tell her she should go, to tell her what a selfish bastard he was to endanger her because he liked the feel of it when she touched him. But all that came out was, “Good.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Dawn came too soon. Glory never had the chance to ask Mirren about her other visitor of the evening, Hannah—or Hrvesse, as she was called in the language of her people. Their people. Even on the Creek tribal lands in Georgia, Glory had never before met anyone who was 100 percent Muscogee.

  The midmorning air was already turning warm, and Glory held her face to the sunlight as she walked eastward the half mile from Mirren’s house to downtown Penton. She’d fallen asleep on the sofa, with Mirren beside her watching some shoot-’em-up and stroking her leg with his injured arm propped on her lap. She didn’t think he’d even been aware of it, but somehow she sensed her touch calmed some of the restless self-hatred he carried with him. Maybe one way she could help him was simply being there.

  He thought of himself as such a monster, such a dangerous man. Well, she had seen monsters. She’d felt the hands and fists of dangerous men during her month with Matthias. She’d met bad vampires, and Mirren Kincaid wasn’t one of them. The person that Mirren was most in danger of hurting was himself.

  The warm light soaked into her skin through Melissa’s lightweight sweater, which she’d washed out by hand the night before and hung over the shower rod to dry. A tangle of honeysuckle somewhere nearby filled the air with its rich, sweet perfume.

  What must it feel like to know you could never again walk in sunlight? To never again eat a meal prepared by the hands of a loved one? How did you figure out a way to savor each day when the days stretched before you without limit? It was a life she couldn’t imagine, and in some ways, it seemed a wonder to her that they weren’t all monsters like Matthias, where power was the only currency that meant anything anymore.

  Finally, Glory got to the edge of the small downtown area, where one of the first buildings she reached was the Penton Superette she’d spotted the day before. Pushing open the door, she stopped and soaked in the first impressions. It was no different than any small-town grocery, similar to the one in her own little hometown. Narrow aisles, bright lighting, produce lining the right side of the store and dairy on the left. No bottled blood on the shelves or big Band-Aid or iron supplement displays. She stifled a laugh at the idea of a supermarket that catered to vampire familiars.

  “May I help you?” A middle-aged man who might as well have manager stamped on his forehead approached from the small office and customer help desk off to the left side of the door.

  “I’ve just moved to Penton and wondered if you had any jobs open?” Glory had found a stack of hundred-dollar bills on the kitchen counter this morning, weighted down with a house key and some hunk of metal that might belong on a motorcycle. No note. Just the assumption that she’d take it. After stewing over it a few minutes, Glory had peeled off one of the bills, found a scrap of paper on which she wrote an IOU to replace it with, and stuck the rest in a kitchen drawer.

  Mirren might not understand her need to support herself, but for all his street-smart, tough-guy attitude, he knew very little about women. Or at least that was Glory’s take on it. Not modern human women, anyway. She didn’t know how old he was in vampire years—she’d rate his human age at early thirties—but he didn’t give off a modern vibe despite his penchant for electronics.

  “I’m Jeff Jackson, the manager.” The man, slight of build, balding of head, and wearing a nondescript white shirt, dark pants, and striped tie, offered Glory a hand to shake. “You must be absolutely brand new; I haven’t seen you around. Who’s your sponsor?”

  OK, how weird was that? It was like an AA meeting, multiplied to the size of a town. Glory introduced herself, adding, “My sponsor is Mirren Kincaid.”

  Jeff’s eyebrows took a northward hike, and Glory remembered Melissa’s comment that Mirren had never sponsored anyone before. Oookay. Maybe she should have lied and given Will’s name—according to Melissa, Will had sponsored about a third of the women in Penton.

  “I heard Mirren had a new person.” Jeff smiled. “His former fam, Jennifer, worked here, and her position’s still open.” He gave her a sheepish grin. “Not a very exciting job, I’m afraid. Stocking shelves. But it’ll get your foot in the door, and when something else opens up, you can be first in line.”

  Glory smiled—stocking shelves was the perfect job to enable her to do what Hannah had asked last night. “Sounds great. I’m used to working retail, and I’m not afraid of a little heavy lifting.”

  Three hours later, she had a pleasant ache in her shoulders from cutting into boxes of canned goods and carting them to the appropriate shelves. In the stockroom, where she lucked out and was able to work alone, she used the box cutter to open the cartons, then focused on each can, trying to move it telekineti cally to the cart. When the cart was filled, she’d let her mind relax during the rote movements of stacking the cans on the store shelves.

  At least four shoppers had stopped, introduced themselves, and offered the same appraising reaction when she said Mirren was her sponsor. She got the impression her new roommate—well, sort of roommate—had sold the rest of Penton on his tough-guy act. They hadn’t seen the side of him she had—the side that liked the smell of stew and watched old John Wayne movies in the wee hours before dawn. She realized the only reason he’d let her so far into his life was that she’d been forced on him, but she liked the way it made her feel to know these things about him, as if she were special somehow—but not in a freak show way.

  When she began her experiments, she could only lift a single can out of the box before getting distracted by a sound from the store or a stray thought slipping into her mind. As soon as that happened, the green beans or English peas would crash to the concrete floor. Thankfully, only a couple of cans had gotten dented. If she had to spend her whole paycheck replacing damaged inventory, she’d never pay Mirren back.

  But Hannah had convinced her that she had to learn to control her talents. She’d said Glory had some role to play here, and Glory believed her. She believed in Hannah’s “touch” because she knew the truth of her own.

  The girl had arrived around midnight, knocking softly on the front door. Glory had been curle
d up on the sofa, watching back-to-back episodes of Rawhide and trying to figure out the mystery that was Mirren Kincaid, at least when she hadn’t been marveling over an extremely young Clint Eastwood. She’d had no idea he got his start as a TV cowboy.

  Will hadn’t been gone long, so when Glory heard the knock, she assumed he’d forgotten something. Instead, she opened the door to a smiling child.

  “You’re here!” Hannah’s black eyes sparkled, and Glory had felt a jolt of recognition. She and little Hannah could easily be related—the same black hair, dark eyes, high cheekbones. Glory’s skin was lighter, but they could still be sisters.

  Glory had embarrassed herself by demanding why the child was out so late alone and then realizing the girl was a vampire. Whoever would turn a child should have his fangs ripped out.

  Like Glory, Hannah was the descendant of a Creek medicine man, and Glory was excited to finally meet another person who had talents that couldn’t be explained away by science.

  “Maybe your father was my ancestor—we could be distant cousins or something,” Glory said. She liked the symmetry of thinking she and the young girl—well, young in human years—were related.

  Hannah laughed. “Maybe. My father might have had other children after I was taken away. That’s something my visions don’t tell me. But I would like to have a cousin.”

  They’d never know for sure. Granny had held the Cum mings family history in her head, and by the time Glory was old enough to want to know about her heritage—and her gift—Granny had died and taken the lore with her.

  Glory’s parents were all about business, about moving ahead and never looking back. They’d pulled themselves out of what they saw as the quicksand trap of the tribal lands and gone to college. Her dad was an accountant near Macon. Her mom joined the Junior League. It was a great disappointment to them that their only child turned out to be someone they couldn’t parade at the country club for fear she’d lose control and draw the wrong kind of attention to them.