Redemption (The Penton Vampire Legacy) (2 page)

N
ever tick off a starving vampire. Aidan Murphy guided his BMW along the dark-as-midnight country road with his left hand and shook the makeshift bandage—a bar napkin—off his right. The puncture wounds had healed.

What a waste of time.
Since the pandemic vaccine had made human blood poisonous to his kind, he’d held dozens of meetings like the one he’d just left, interviewing prospective scathe members for Penton, a tiny ghost town on the edge of nowhere that he’d bought up after life became dangerous for his scathe’s unvaccinated humans. A place where his people and their human familiars could live in peace.

Aidan had founded Penton on the idea that humans were the equals of vampires. Respect them for keeping you alive, he preached. Treat them as family. Don’t act like monsters. But vampires were growing desperate. Hungry predators suddenly considered his quiet Alabama community of vampires and bonded, unvaccinated humans to be the vampire equivalent of a midnight buffet in the Garden of Eden.

And he usually told them the same thing: Sorry, but foxhole converts never keep the faith. One of the SOBs hadn’t liked his answer tonight and took a plug out of his hand. Like that was going to convince him the guy would fit in.

Aidan!

At the shock of the voice echoing through his head, he jammed a foot on the brake, simultaneously trying to control the car and listen to the frantic mental SOS. His tires squealed when he jerked the steering wheel into the skid, sending the car spinning across both lanes of the deserted blacktop. It finally jolted to a stop in a shallow ditch, nose-first.

His forehead cracked against the driver’s-side window hard enough to spiderweb the glass and shoot stars across his vision, but the blood trickling its way down his temple barely registered.

Mark was in trouble.

Shit.
What the hell had happened?
The mental cry for help faded, taking the images with it: a blood-coated knife, a wet parking lot, a Dumpster, and his brother’s name:
Owen
. Now he was alone in his head again, alone in his car listening to the tick-tick-tick of the cooling engine, an owl hooting in the thick woods next to the road, and the rustle of pine needles as a cold wind blew away the last of the January rain clouds.

Owen had attacked again, and not just anybody. Mark was his business partner, his friend, and the husband of Aidan’s human familiar. They were his family, more than Owen had been in a long time. And he couldn’t lose another family member.

Unconscious doesn’t mean dead, idiot. Stop the pity party.
Resting his head against the smooth leather seat, Aidan closed his eyes and unleashed his mind to search for Mark, sending psychic
tendrils along the blood bonds that the humans and vampires of his scathe shared.

Finally, a spark. Mark’s mental signal was no more than a faint pulse, but Aidan was able to get a fix on a location: the abandoned Quikmart outside Penton.

God. Damned. Owen.

Aidan gripped the wheel in frustration, and then pulled his fingers away before it cracked. He needed to tear something apart, to turn his rage at his psychotic brother into broken glass and twisted metal. But it would have to wait. First he had to reach Mark.

He shifted his car into neutral, wrenched the door open, and slid out, his boots sinking sole-deep in rusty clay. The rains had finally stopped after soaking the Southeast for the weeks since New Year’s, and the night air washed over his skin, crisp and clear. A doe ran from the dense woods and paused to stare at him, lifting her nose to scent the breeze before bounding away. There were no other signs of life in rural Chambers County, Alabama, tonight, which was good. The last thing Aidan needed was an audience.

Mud sucked at his feet as he stepped back to view the car’s position: nose in the muck, tail a couple of feet off the pavement. Pulling would be easier than pushing.

Aidan lifted the back end of the car, eased the wheels out of the mire, and dragged it onto the asphalt. Scrounging a couple of shop towels from his trunk, he wiped the blood off his face. The wound had already healed. Then he wiped mud off the headlights before tossing the towel aside.

After stomping the crud off his boots, he slid back into the car and turned the ignition, frowning when the Bimmer rattled and died on the first try.

He growled in frustration. “Start, or I swear to God I will send you back to Germany in pieces.”

Another crank and the engine caught, sputtering and finally humming. He let the car idle a few seconds, slung mud off his tires, and sped south toward Penton.

Mark was OK—he had to be. Aidan couldn’t bear to think about how losing his friend would change things. Between starving vampires wandering into town from urban areas like Birmingham and Atlanta since the pandemic and the attack on the town’s doctor last month, people in Penton were already jumpy. And holy hell, but he couldn’t imagine trying to tell his familiar that her husband had died.

No, Mark had to be alive, which meant Aidan needed to consider his options.

The nearest hospital was almost forty miles from Penton, and a 911 would prompt too many questions. Even if he took Mark in, how would it look: a man with fangs hauling a stabbing victim into a small-city ER? The local deputies would pin every unsolved crime in the last month on him, right before they threw him into Lee County lockup to fry at sunrise.

So a hospital was out, and thanks to Owen’s attack last month, Penton no longer had a doctor. Which left one option, and it went against everything Aidan believed in.

A bitter laugh escaped him, echoing through the car.
What the hell is one more thing to feel guilty about?

He snatched his cell phone off the center console and speed-dialed Mirren, his second-in-command. Normally he would contact him mentally, but Mirren also might be behind the wheel, and nobody would profit if both of them landed up to their fangs in a ditch.

Mirren answered on the second ring, his deep voice muffled. “What’s up, A?”

“Mark’s been attacked. He’s by the old Quikmart south of town, and I’m about twenty miles out now. He’s unconscious.” Not dead. Not going there.

“Shite. Want me to get him?” Like Aidan, Mirren had been gone from Ireland for so long that it took stress or shock to evoke the brogue.

“No, I need you to drive up to LaFayette.”

The crunch of boots on gravel crackled over the phone connection, followed by the slam of a truck door, the rumble of an engine, a screech of tires. Mirren’s voice cut through his thoughts. “Know who did it? One of Owen’s scathe?”

“Owen himself. He must’ve scented my bond on Mark.” He kept his voice neutral, not wanting Mirren to know how badly this had rattled him. The big guy knew some of the history between Aidan and his brother, but not all of it. Nobody knew that story, and nobody would.

Aidan had avoided his brother for four centuries, moving across continents and finally settling in one of the smallest, most remote outposts imaginable. Until he’d run into Owen in Atlanta last month. His brother had called it a coincidence, that meeting, but Aidan knew his brother and knew that nothing happened by chance where Owen was concerned. It wasn’t too long after that the town doctor was murdered, his throat slashed, the Gaelic word for “brother” carved into his chest, and his body left in the middle of Main Street.

Mirren muttered a curse, jarring Aidan back to the present. “What d’you need me to do in LaFayette?”

“The woman I hoped to recruit as the new doctor is coming into Penton for an interview tonight.” And getting Krys
Harris to agree to a nighttime job interview had taken some tap-dancing.

“Yeah, so?”

“I’m going to flag her down and get her to help Mark—even enthrall her if I have to. Go to LaFayette and check her out of the hotel, get her luggage, take it to one of the sub-suites beneath the clinic. We can’t let her leave Penton, not with Mark hurt and Owen on the attack. We’ve got to have a doctor.”

Mirren was still on the line, but he hadn’t responded. The car’s tires screeched in protest as Aidan took a curve too fast, and the back end shimmied before the rubber settled onto the pavement. “You got an opinion, just say it.”

“This has the makings of a grade-A cluster. Of all the stupid shit we could do, forcing this woman to stay in our town is capital Stupid.”

Aidan’s chuckle lacked humor; he couldn’t argue with stupid. He hated what he was about to do. “This isn’t a democracy, Mirren. Unless you’re going to challenge me as master of this scathe, do it. Then get to the Quikmart with your truck—we’ll need it for Mark.”

Aidan ended the call and ripped off the headset. He tried to focus on the road, but couldn’t exile the ghosts that rattled around inside him whenever his brother got within spitting distance. Owen had cost him everything that mattered once, and now it looked as if he was trying to destroy Penton. Which bloody well was not going to happen.

K
rystal Harris pulled to the shoulder of the two-lane road—
highway
was too grand a word—and punched the button to turn on the old green Corolla’s dome light. She counted to five before thwacking it with the heel of her palm, and a dim light blinked as if considering her demand. It stayed on—this time. The car was a dinosaur, but it was a paid-for dinosaur.

She dug a folded Alabama road map from beneath her briefcase on the passenger seat, smoothing the creases to make sure she hadn’t driven past Penton, which she suspected was no more than a wide spot on a narrow road. She didn’t want to get lost out here in the boonies.

Yep, County Road 70. The highway to Penton just
looked
like the express lane to nowhere.

A gust of wind rocked the car, sending icy air around the loose door seals. Maybe the chill of this night was an omen that she
should
take this job if they offered it, just so she could buy a more respectable form of transportation. Still, doubts nagged at her. What kind of clinic conducted a job interview at
nine p.m.? She should never have agreed to it, but the Penton Clinic administrator had waved big bucks in front of her huge college and med school debts, and she’d trotted after them like a donkey after a carrot.

“You had the goody-two-shoes idea of practicing rural medicine, plus you’re already here,” she chided herself, clicking off the overhead and pulling back onto the road. “And you’ve gotta admit, this is
rural
.”

Another omen, and not a good one: she was talking to herself. Out loud.

A couple of miles later, her headlights illuminated a battered wooden sign covered in peeling paint: Welcome to Penton, Alabama. Founded 1890. Population 3,275.

Twenty years ago, maybe. Krys had done her Penton homework, and that was the boomtown population, when the mammoth East Alabama Mill still churned out threads and batting. It had wheezed its final belch a decade ago, and the town had suffered a slow death by attrition even before the pandemic. The most recent listing Krys found online estimated a population of three hundred. She was surprised they could afford to hire a doctor, much less pay a more-than-competitive wage.

But this was what she wanted, right? A place to practice medicine and be her own boss, to find a community where she could belong? After growing up in Birmingham—the wrong side of Birmingham—she hated the grime and crowds and noise of the city.

Lost in thought as she approached the outskirts of town, she thought she saw an animal in the road—a deer or a bear, maybe—God only knew what wildlife lived out here. But it was a man. He wore a long coat that flapped in the wind and was backlit by a lone streetlight in front of an abandoned
convenience store. She’d have blown past him if he hadn’t moved into the middle of the road when the glare of her headlights hit him like a spotlight.

He stood with his hands in his pockets, feet planted apart, watching calmly as she floored the brakes. The Corolla’s old tires squealed, stinking up the air with the smell of hot rubber and stressed brakes.

Good Lord. Was he nuts?

She got the car stopped and took a deep breath, hands frozen to the wheel, her muscles jittery from the aftershock. The man walked around and tapped on her driver’s side window, motioning for her to lower it. Krys’s foot hovered over the accelerator, indecisive. Should she drive on and get the hell out of here?