Absolution (20 page)

The last thing he wanted to do was sit and have a war council.

He felt amped, like he always did after a ragefest. Taking a woman, and taking her hard, would smooth the edges off his restlessness, but he didn’t want to think about the only woman he wanted, the one waiting in his daysleep space. He could never let his violence touch her, but what had he been thinking, letting her in his private living quarters? Good God, he’d even let her see how he got into the stairwell.

He was a freaking idiot where that woman was concerned, and it had to stop. Tonight.

“We’ve got some things to go over apart from what just went down.” Aidan sat behind that big desk like he was the sheriff of Dodge City, rounding up his posse.
Better him than me.

Hannah frowned at Aidan, her dark brows bunched like they always did before she said something creepy. “You talked to people on the Tribunal. Something happened to Will’s father.”

Will sat up straight. “Somebody whacked the old bastard?”

Mirren shifted his gaze to Will. Had the news really been about Matthias’s death, he wasn’t sure Will would be so blasé about it. For all his insistence on how much he hated Matthias and all the man had done to ruin his family, Will
was
Matthias’s son. Blood ties sometimes ran deeper than people realized.

“Nothing that drastic,” Aidan said, nodding at Hannah. “But I did talk to Renz Caias. He’s coming down to talk about a couple of issues, but he wanted to let me know something about Matthias that impacts all of us. Will, your father has been thrown off the Tribunal’s Justice Council for hiring Owen to attack us in January and using the council to advance his own agenda.”

Will grinned. “Poor old Dad.”

Mirren almost smiled himself. About time the evil bastard got taken down a notch, but he was still a part of the Tribunal, and he still had allies. “There’s a downside to that news,” he said. “Matthias will really be after us now.”

“Exactly.” Aidan leaned back in his chair, and Mirren followed his gaze to one of the primitive oil paintings on the office wall. The town’s former doctor, murdered by Aidan’s brother, had pulled them from his own collection. Mirren thought he might like them if he could see the colors. They weren’t polished, but they had heart and energy. Like he was a flipping art critic.

“Renz said Matthias didn’t take losing the council seat well,” Aidan continued. “He’s hired a bunch of people to do investigative work—probably to cover his tracks before Renz can collect any more dirt on him. And he said something else.” Aidan looked at Mirren.

“ Yeah?”

“Renz has put a motion forward to remove Matthias from the Tribunal altogether, if not bring him up on charges. He’s trying to prove he supplied Owen with tainted blood to use as a biological weapon.”

Good for Renz. Mirren didn’t trust him, but Aidan did, so he kept his mouth zipped.

Aidan got up and began pacing. “He overheard the head of the Tribunal warning Matthias that Renz was coming after him, telling him to tie up any loose ends.” He waited a few moments, frowning at Mirren. “And as you and Will have already pointed out, Glory Cummings is a loose end.”

Shit.
“So you want me to take her out of here, somewhere they can’t find her?” Suddenly, Mirren felt the ache of every wound on his body. It had to be the injuries, right? Couldn’t be that the thought of never seeing Glory again made him tired. And pissed off.

Maybe he should leave with her, take them both so far off radar that no one would find them. Christ, how could he even think of leaving Penton for a woman? Proof she needed to go.

He cleared his throat. “I think Will should take her somewhere—he needs to lay low too.” Just saying those words hurt his gut as if another silver blade had been shoved in it.

He saw Will’s sharp look from the corner of his eye but wouldn’t acknowledge it.

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say, and I’ve heard you say some stupid shit.” Aidan stopped in front of Mirren.

Mirren stared at the floor and didn’t answer. Aidan could go all apeshit over a woman if he wanted. Mirren couldn’t. He wouldn’t.

Aidan shook his head and returned to the desk, its chair squeaking in the awkward silence. He leaned forward and propped his elbows on the desk. “Let’s table that for right now. I think, until we learn more from Renz, we should keep up the patrol schedule we have. Once Renz fills us in on Matthias, and where the Tribunal stands in all of this, then we’ll reassess.”

“We have to finish Omega soon.” Hannah’s clear, high voice silenced the room.

Mirren stifled a groan. Omega was their shelter of last resort, a new space they’d built deep underground about ten miles out in the country beneath an automobile manufacturing plant near the Georgia state line. It was big enough for about a third of their people plus supplies for a year.

“What’s the status?” Aidan’s voice was calm, but his eyes had lightened with stress, which made Mirren feel a little better. Misery loved company, and clearly Aidan didn’t want to go into Omega, either. Nobody in his right mind would. If they had to take that step, moving the whole town underground, it meant the shit had gotten very, very deep. Claustrophobia raised its ugly little head every time Mirren thought about living in a hole in the ground.

“Let me get at the computer.” Will changed places with Aidan, and he frowned in concentration as he tapped the keyboard. He shifted the monitor until it faced the room. “Here’s what we have, as of two days ago when these shots were taken.”

Mirren leaned forward, squinting. It resembled a concrete box. “Tell us what we’re looking at.”

Will nodded. “This is the bare bones. The structure’s done. Ventilation system is almost complete. We’ve already moved in a shitload of nonperishables for the humans into storage areas that don’t have to be finished out. The waste system is about halfway done, and the water lines have been run—there’s a natural spring not too far from the site, and we’ve tapped into it.”

“The question is, how soon do we need to be done?” Will addressed his question to Hannah, and Mirren realized that, of all of them, Will was most at ease with the girl’s gifts. If he’d settle down, Will would be better for Glory than Mirren could ever be. So why did the thought of him leaving with her make Mirren’s head feel like exploding?

Hannah fiddled with some pink fluffy thing with a white cat face on it, her version of a purse. “We will need it. I don’t know when, but it could be soon,” she said softly. “I can see trouble ahead—and death.”

“Whose death, Hannah?” Aidan’s voice conveyed the same hesitation Mirren felt. Did they really want to know which of them might not live long enough to see Omega finished?

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.” Hannah punched her cat purse, her mouth in a frustrated pout, and Mirren wondered, not for the first time, how she stood it. The visions. The knowing—and yet not knowing. Aidan had told him Glory was practicing her own skills at Hannah’s urging, and he was glad. He didn’t know how they might come in handy, but if she could learn to control them, she might be able to protect herself better than most of them could.

“Tell me what you need to get Omega done fast.” Aidan turned back to Will, who began tapping the computer keys again.

“If you’re comfortable doing that many memory wipes, we can run crews in two full shifts instead of two half shifts,” he said. The human work crews involved in Omega had agreed to have their memories modified after each shift. If they were caught or decided to leave, they’d never be able to divulge the location—or even the existence—of the last-ditch shelter. “We’d need to schedule the shifts so one shift ends as we’re coming out of daysleep and the other as we’re beginning day-sleep—that way, one of us is always available to do the memory scrubs.”

Aidan nodded. “Do it. Let’s get it finished—or at least habitable—as fast as we can. If we don’t need it soon, we can take the extra steps to make it as comfortable as possible for our fams. If we do need it soon”—he stared at the computer screen—“comfort doesn’t matter, does it?”

Will shut down the laptop and stood. “I’m going home to get the schedules worked out, then, and see who our best workers are to add to the second shift.”

Hannah rose too, and Aidan took the chair behind the desk again and said, “Mirren, you stay.”

Aw, fuck me. He’s going to talk about Glory.
Mirren wanted a shower. He wanted to work his tats. He wanted to watch a movie and wind down before his daysleep. He did not want to get all warm and fuzzy with Aidan.

So he’d change the subject. “It’s a bad idea for Lorenzo Caias to come here. Talk to him on the phone, or meet him in Atlanta. We don’t need him seeing any more of Penton than he already has. I know he’s your friend, but he’s still Tribunal.”

Aidan’s face took on what his fam Melissa called his Irish pig farmer expression—stubborn and unwilling to be moved.

Mirren didn’t care. “You of all people know it’s a bad idea, A. He met Krys when she was human and knew we took her against her will in the beginning. He can’t see her as she is now, your vampire mate.”

Aidan’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t give in. “I trust Renz. He’s never done anything to make me doubt him. Just the opposite.”

The man was too sentimental where that bureaucrat was concerned. “If Matthias or any of his allies gets wind that we turned Krys vampire, it’s all the excuse they’d need to come down on us like a brick shithouse,” Mirren said. Once the food supply started growing short, the Tribunal had outlawed turning new vampires. It had been the only way to save Krys after Aidan’s brother had broken her like a china doll. Matthias had set the whole fiasco in motion, but the Tribunal wouldn’t care.

Aidan pulled his hair out of the short tail and ran his hands through it. He might as well be the poster child for stressed, exhausted vampires. “I’ll keep Krys away from him. We’ll meet at the municipal building instead of my house or here at the clinic. That good enough?”

“Only if when he asks about the human doctor who was living here, and he will ask, you tell him she died. Technically, she did.”

“Agreed.” Aidan speared him with eyes of blue ice. “Now, about Glory.”

Shit.
“Will needs to take her out of here.”

“No, she stays.” The pig farmer was back. Mirren hated that freaking pig farmer.

“Why the hell should she stay? This isn’t her fight. We can hide her far enough away that Matthias can’t find her.” And where Mirren couldn’t find her, either. She raised feelings in him he didn’t know how to handle, didn’t want to handle.

“Hannah says she’s important to whatever’s going to happen here.” Aidan’s voice softened. “She’s important to you too, if you’d stop being such an asshole and admit it.”

Mirren didn’t answer. What could he say?

“You’ve taken her as a fam, yes?”

Mirren crossed his arms over his chest and grunted.

Aidan grinned at him, the smug jerk. “So here’s your job. Figure out a way to keep tabs on her. And I mean twenty-four/ seven, even during daysleep.”

The man had no idea what he was asking. Mirren couldn’t control that woman. She’d walked a half mile into town and found herself a job her first day out of the hospital. Aidan could send him to kill Matthias. He could order Mirren to put an army together to take down the whole Tribunal. But not this. “How the hell am I supposed to keep tabs on her during the d ay? ”

Aidan rose from the chair and walked to the door. “I’ll get Mark and Mel to take Glory duty during daylight hours. You can figure out how it will work. The rest of the time, she’s all yours.”

“Fuck you,” Mirren said to the empty doorway.

CHAPTER 19

G
lory lay on the sofa in the rec room, thinking about Mirren. She’d gotten into his private space in the subbasement, but hadn’t felt right plundering through his stuff. Other than confirming that he was a slob when it came to everything but his movie collection and his motorcycle parts, she hadn’t learned a thing.

No, that wasn’t quite true. She had found something. An acid pen, lying on a drawing table. She’d bet it was what he used to etch the elaborate tattoos. He had a talent for drawing. She’d seen sketch after sketch, and not just tattoo art. Still lifes and even portraits. But he used his artistic ability to punish himself—and had been doing it a long time, judging by the amount of ink on his body. She didn’t get the sense the tats were a source of pride for him, but a reminder of what he saw as the sins he’d committed.