Omega (22 page)

Old chap, my ass.
Matthias didn’t buy it for a second. Simmons had thrown in his lot with Murphy; Matthias’s only consolation was that vampire law was on his side this time. His second call had been to Tribunal director Frank Greisser. The Austrian vampire, ancient and powerful despite looking like a thirtysomething ski instructor, had promised disciplinary action against the UK delegate.

A knock on the clinic door interrupted Matthias midpace. “What?”

Shelton stuck his ugly head in the door. “I have some news, sir.”

Matthias sat behind the desk and waited for the man to sidle in. His face and neck were scored with raw, seeping wounds, and he wore a loose shirt that wouldn’t touch his torso more than necessary. A little punishment with a silver-laced whip had been administered to remind Shelton that keeping tabs on Tribunal representatives was more important than playing with that little boy he kept locked up in the other clinic office.

“What do you want? I’m busy.” He had to get busier. Frank Greisser was an ally, but he’d told Matthias a lot of the Tribunal members were growing restless. The way he’d come into Penton by force and by fire, causing so many deaths, hadn’t sat well with a lot of their delicate sensibilities. The sympathy for Murphy and discontent with Matthias was growing. It would limit how hard Frank could be with Edward Simmons, and it meant if Matthias didn’t produce results soon, the Tribunal could pull its support.

“We caught a couple of breaks.” Shelton sat in the chair facing the desk, gasped when his back touched the chair, and scooted up to sit on the edge of the seat. Matthias smiled. Nice
new invention, that silver whip. He hoped to be trying it out on William very soon. Or maybe he’d let Shelton do it.

“Go on.”

“One of our scouts scented Cage Reynolds last night, using his backpack we found in the collapsed tunnel under the greenhouse. He was farther away from Penton than where we’ve been looking. We didn’t find a hatch to their hiding place yet, but maybe we should fan our patrols farther out?”

Matthias smiled.
Finally
. “I’ll take care of it. Anything else?”

Shelton pulled a sheet of paper from his shirt pocket. “The man from Atlanta you hired to track down Aidan Murphy’s financial holdings finally found some activity at a small bank in southern Georgia. Place called Whigham. There’s a sizable account under a corporation name headed by a Mark Calvert—that was one of the names on your list.”

Matthias leaned forward. Melissa Calvert had never identified her relationship to the Penton resident named Mark, but his intelligence had identified him as Murphy’s business manager. “Excellent news. You have the account numbers and the name of the bank?”

Shelton nodded, wincing as he reached out to lay the report on Matthias’s desk. “Need me to handle it?”

Other than patrolling the woods, Matthias wouldn’t give Shelton Porterfield more than a janitorial job to handle at this point. “I’ll do it myself. Go back on patrol.”

“May I…May I feed first?”

Oh, poor Shelton was missing his little boy. “Not today, Shelton. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe not. And you don’t want me to find you cheating.”

As soon as Shelton shuffled back into the hallway, Matthias made three calls.

The first was to the human security guy he’d hired to bring in a search dog earlier. They’d let the mutt get a whiff of Cage Reynolds’s backpack and see where it led.

The second call went to a colleague in California with ties to the farming community. Farmers knew about pesticides. Matthias’s patrols also had uncovered a spring not too far from where the men had scented Cage. He’d thought it was too far away from the Penton scathe to be used as a water source, but maybe not. A little poison in the spring might make things unpleasant for the humans if they were drinking from it. Sick humans would have to be brought out for treatment.

The final call went to a man at the Securities and Exchange Commission who’d become a bit of a blood junkie. He was a prime candidate for blackmail, and Matthias had been waiting for just the right situation. He could have that bank account frozen due to a pending SEC investigation by close of business tomorrow.

The next time one of the Penton crew tried to go shopping—and they would, because humans were needy creatures who needed much in the way of food and shelter—they’d be in for a surprise.

A
nother daysleep gone, and as he drove the latest soon-to-be ex-Penton citizens out of town, Will reflected that his leg finally felt normal again, except for a slight limp. Dr. Slayer said he’d be doing the gimp routine until they broke his bones yet again and reset them properly. A limp wasn’t such a bad thing.

He stopped the pickup at the corner of Eighth and Orchid in a suburb of Opelika. “Welcome home, such as it is.” The wooden house, painted white with black shutters, screamed generic. Which made it a perfect safe house. It blended with every other white house on this block, which sat among other blocks full of white houses, all full of indifferent neighbors.

Still, he slid from behind the wheel and scented the air before escorting his vampire companion and the young couple who were his familiars to the door. Will had taken several humans out of Omega because they wanted to leave, but this was the first scathe member who’d been asked to leave, and it weighed on him. Why should they have to abandon the home
they’d made in Penton when all they’d done was try to live peacefully?

The Tribunal needed taking down. The way of life that had worked for vampires since…well, since eternity…didn’t work in this postpandemic world. Men like his father couldn’t accept that they no longer sat at the top of the food chain. If someone reasonable—someone like Aidan—didn’t prevail with a better way to live, they all were going to starve or gradually kill each other off in a war of attrition.

Jeff Jackson had managed the superette in Penton almost from the beginning, and his wife, Leslie, had helped out at the office that kept the public services up and running. They’d been fams for an older vampire named Alexander for years. Even if the remaining Penton scathe remained intact, they were losing three valuable members of the community. But Leslie’s health had never been great, and Will couldn’t blame them for wanting out of Omega.

“I know you have to do it, Will. Let’s go inside and get it over with.” Alexander clapped him on the shoulder and led the Jacksons inside the house.

“It” was a memory wipe. Once he’d proven to Aidan he could do them, it left Aidan free to work on other things, and Will could wait until his charges were in a safe place before altering their memories. Alexander would remember his fams, and they would know him. But none of them would remember Penton, which was just a freaking shame. Nor would they know the tired young vampire who was bidding them good-bye.

Before heading back to Penton, he made another stop for supplies at the big-box building supply in Opelika, searching the aisles for something to patch a leak in the air-filtration system. It was probably their most important system. Unless the
air pumps kept chugging, they’d have bigger problems than Matthias.

The same girl as before, Cindy, worked his checkout line, and she gave him a flirtatious smile while running his items through the scanner. Will found himself comparing her to Randa, who suddenly had become the standard by which he judged women. He suspected they’d all fall short, but he didn’t want to think about the reasons too closely.

“That’ll be forty-five dollars even.” Cindy nodded at him. “I remember you from before. How’d that project go?”

“It’s a work in progress.” Will swiped his card through the machine and stared at the word
DECLINED
blinking on the little screen.

Cindy shrugged. “No big deal. Try it again—sometimes it’s fussy.”

Same thing. Will had a bad feeling about this. He also had a problem. They’d all shut down their private accounts when the issues with the Tribunal began, figuring Matthias eventually might strike at the Penton scathe financially.

“Do you have a check or cash with you, or another card?” Cindy looked as embarrassed as Will felt.

“Sorry, Cindy.” He reached across the counter and grasped her wrist, smiling broadly so the guy behind him in line, fidgeting over the delay, would only think Will was a guy slowing down the checkout line by flirting with the clerk. As soon as Cindy made eye contact, Will rolled her mind. He’d paid her; she’d given him his receipt already; the cash register had malfunctioned; she was about to wish him a good evening.

He released her hand, and she blinked a couple of times before handing him the bags. “Thank you, sir. Come back and see us.”

Probably not.

Will drove to a Starbucks a few blocks away and settled into a far corner with his laptop. He’d brought it to see if Randa’s brother had updated his Facebook page, but now he had other business.

He needed to talk to Aidan, but he’d never figured out a way to get a cell signal in Omega. It was too far underground.

You’re an idiot for a master vampire. Talk to him in your head.
There were geographic limitations, and Will was a good forty miles from Penton, but he closed his eyes and focused on his connection to Aidan. He felt it—like an invisible cord running between them. But his attempts to talk to the man went unanswered.

Gonna have to do this the hard way.
He accessed the bank where the Penton finances had been moved to, a tiny little independent in Whigham, Georgia, where Glory had been born. Matthias must have hired some tech wizard to track this down, because he couldn’t imagine his father taking the time to learn how to use a computer, much less learn how to hack into financial information.

No surprises. He couldn’t access the account. If Matthias had managed to get it frozen, no way he’d be able to hack in without a lot of time, which he didn’t have.

Will sat back, watching people drink overpriced coffee, chatting, laughing, without a care. Damn it, they needed money. Not a lot, but enough for emergency supplies and, especially, gasoline for the generators. If the generators went down, the lights went out. If the lights went out, the humans wouldn’t be the only ones in a panic.

Will looked at his watch: 11:00 p.m., still early. He’d left Omega shortly after rising, wanting to get his errands run so
he could get back to Omega and help with the new activities. Well, OK, and see Randa again. He could still smell her on his skin, and waking from daysleep next to her was beyond sexy.

It might have to wait, though. He needed to pay a visit to Penton.

Ninety minutes later, he parked the truck in its usual spot but headed away from the Omega entrance. He moved fast, stopping to scent every few minutes. He’d learned from patrolling with Randa that his new master skills had given him an enhanced sense of smell, so he had to assume he had an advantage over most of the hired fangs out here.

Which is why he wasn’t going after Matthias for money. His father was a master vampire, but Will would bet none of his minions were—Matthias wouldn’t risk anyone being stronger than him.

Most vampires were old-school. They didn’t want the hassle of trying to mainstream their businesses with humans, so they kept a lot of cash on them. In this case, the Penton scathe’s ability to mainstream had backfired on them and tied up their funds.

Will had always wanted to be Robin Hood.

Whenever he scented a vampire, he began tracking. The first one he came across was walking down the long street where the mill village had stood. The fool stopped at the burned-out shell of every house, probably looking for any signs of Aidan or his scathe. Most of the village was in ruins, though. Their own people had burned it in an attempt to flush out Aidan’s psychopath brother.

The vampire looked about forty in human years but didn’t strike Will as having been turned very long—or maybe he was just an idiot. For one thing, he walked down the middle of the
street, not trying to stay in shadows. True, the streetlights were out, but the moon illuminated enough for a vampire to see. For another, when he stopped to look at a house, he stayed in place and didn’t check the basement spaces, which is where a vampire who wanted to hide would go.

If this was the caliber of Matthias’s help, Will had more hope for the future. Too bad he and Aidan and the other scathe members couldn’t just kill them all, but it would bring the Tribunal down on them in a big way. Mirren had been right about that.

Will moved faster than Dumbo the Vampire and caught up with him on the fourth house. When the guy stopped to look for lights, he missed Will slipping up behind him, slicing his throat with a silver-coated blade, and lifting his wallet. The guy would heal, but he’d hurt. And it would be a few hours before he’d be talking or singing.

In two hours, Will had collected more than a dozen wallets. He didn’t stop to look at them, but stuffed them in every available pocket.

At 3:00 a.m., he headed back to the parking lot and threw the wallets in the bags with his air-filtration supplies. He’d gotten to the edge of the tree line nearest the Omega entrance when he scented another vampire. No, make that two.