Allegiance(10)
She knew he’d spent a lot of time in military duty; she had wondered how he’d managed that as a vampire. He couldn’t exactly operate in the normal armed forces and be unaccounted for during daylight hours. A willingness to take night duty would only carry a soldier so far.
Fen kept mentioning night raids and forays into foreign villages, however, all of which had apparently been filled with free-flowing alcohol and available women. Finally, Melissa couldn’t stand it any longer. “Exactly whose army were you in?”
Of course, it was Fen, not Cage, who answered: “Our own army, darlin’. Cage and I were what you’d call soldiers of fortune. We had dozens of names, dozens of passports, and for a price you could hire us to do the dirty work you didn’t want to be associated with. Guess I’d still be at it if regular meals weren’t so scarce.”
Mercenaries, then. Melissa raised her gaze to the rearview mirror and caught Cage giving Fen a narrow-eyed look through green eyes that shone silver with annoyance.
“Sounds like perfect work for an adrenaline junkie like Cage.” She smiled into the mirror, hoping it told him that his past didn’t matter. People changed. Mirren was proof of that. Good grief, she herself was proof of that. A year ago, with Mark at her side and as Aidan’s familiar, she couldn’t have imagined being a vampire herself. After she’d been turned she became afraid of hurting Mark, rejecting him because she knew he’d ultimately reject her. “Well, an adrenaline junkie psychiatrist.”
Fen laughed. “Well, I think he gave up head-shrinking after the POW camp, right, Cage? Something about learning what evil lurks in the hearts of men, or some rubbish as that?”
Cage had been in a POW camp? Melissa glanced in the rearview mirror again and found Cage looking out the window, his face set into rigid lines, the occasional lights of an oncoming vehicle flashing across a countenance both grim and haunted.
Fen seemed to realize he’d crossed a line and changed the subject to the weather, and then to how living in the States—first Wilmington, North Carolina, and then Savannah and Atlanta—had compared to Dublin. He chattered so much Melissa wanted to scream. On the other hand, he required little response and had filled up that horrible silence following his gaffe.
Melissa had always thought of Cage as compassionate but invincible. But the man she’d glimpsed in the mirror just now had been set upon by ghosts, and they weren’t friendly ones.
While her thoughts wandered, Fen had moved on to babbling about a raid into a jungle encampment in Nicaragua, during which Cage had been stabbed and had, apparently, ripped out several rebels’ throats with his fangs—thus the necessity of explaining his true identity to Fen. Cage contributed a few details to embellish the tale, but Melissa thought his facial expressions were revealing: amused at first, but when Fen got to the throat-ripping part, annoyed again.
Maybe Fen would be fun to keep around Penton after all. It might be the only way she’d ever learn about the man Cage had been before arriving in town with his worn old traveling trunk plus box after box of his favorite small cigars. Even if, as she suspected, they didn’t have a future as a couple, she really, really wanted him as a friend.
All conversation ceased when the few working streetlights of Penton came into view. She tried to imagine how it must look to a stranger. Burned-out shells of buildings, heaps of construction rubble, and, overseeing it all like a dying god of industry, the hulk of the long-closed cotton mill.
Melissa stopped the car in front of the new communal house where Aidan and Mirren were supposed to be waiting. She’d resigned herself to the loss of any remaining chance to talk to Cage alone before dawn.
She popped the trunk and Cage got his luggage out. Mirren’s bulk filled the doorway, waiting on them. The hostility practically rolled off him in visible waves when Fen bustled over to introduce himself. Mirren and Aidan had wanted to bring Cage up to date on Omega Force before daysleep, but not in front of a stranger.
Before joining them, Cage leaned in the car window. “I’m sorry we didn’t get the chance to talk, Mel. We need to . . .”
His voice trailed off, but she knew what the rest of that sentence should be. We need to settle things between us. “I know. Tomorrow night, maybe.” She looked back at Mirren and Fen. “I don’t know why, but I have a bad feeling about that guy. I’m not sure we should trust him.”
Cage looked past her at his old acquaintance, whose nonstop prattle was likely putting Mirren in a homicidal mood. “Don’t worry, love. I never fully trusted my old pal Fen when he was human. I surely don’t trust him now.”