Allegiance(6)
“How did the fam situation sort itself out?” Cage kept his voice casual, but he saw Melissa’s fingers tense around the leather steering wheel. Not a good sign. She didn’t answer until she’d gotten the car out of the airport traffic glut and reached the freeway feeder road.
“We’re short on fams.” Melissa had been Aidan’s familiar—a bonded human feeder and also a close friend—before being turned by Matthias and his lackeys, who’d hoped to use her against Aidan.
“When you say you’re short, how short? Has Aidan begun recruiting in Atlanta again?” Their Irish-born master vampire had a clever system, taking unvaccinated addicts or abuse cases and rehabbing them with enthrallment and counseling. Once they were clean and sober, they could move to Penton as a familiar, or he’d alter their memories and help fund a new start for them wherever they wanted. “How many of the fams left?”
“It wasn’t just fams; scathe members left, too.” Melissa took the exit for I-85 South and settled back as they left Atlanta traffic behind and cruised through the suburbs toward Penton, about eighty miles to the southwest and just across the Georgia-Alabama line. “We’re down to about twenty-five scathe members and ten humans, so fams are doing double and triple duty.”
She glanced over at him. “I think there are some new people coming tomorrow night who can be feeders, but until then you’ve been assigned to Max. He was the only one in the town’s inner circle without three to feed.”
“Bloody hell.” Max Jeffries was one of Penton’s resident Army Rangers. He’d joined the Penton Omega Force team and had butted heads with Cage from the day he arrived until the night Cage left. “Does he still think he can best a vampire in a fistfight?” Because Cage might have to refresh Max on a few facts of life.
Melissa laughed. “Judging by the cuts and bruises he’s always covered with, I’d say he’s still trying. Mirren will have to fill you in on that. He’s going to help with the training.”
They’d moved out of suburban traffic, and the interstate highway stretched before them like a gray ribbon illuminated by the sedan’s headlights. The dark outlines of pine forests buffeted each side of the highway, deserted at 2:30 a.m. except for the occasional big-rig truck hightailing it toward Montgomery and points west.
The headlights’ high beams caught a flash of white in the woods to their right, and then a second flash.
Cage leaned forward. “What the hell was that?”
Mel hit a switch on the driver’s-side door, and all the locks clicked shut. “Open the glove box. Mirren sent you a present.”
Cage opened the compartment cautiously—the big Scotsman distrusted Cage on a number of levels. One, Mirren had been a Scottish gallowglass warrior living in Ireland when he was turned vampire four centuries earlier, and he considered Englishmen high on the satanic scale. Two, Cage had been the newest, and thus least trusted, of Aidan’s lieutenants in Penton. And three, Cage had been, in Mirren’s colorful phraseology, a “fucking brain-shrinker.” Never mind that he hadn’t shrunk a brain professionally in decades.
On the other hand, Mirren Kincaid would be any psychiatrist’s dream study—except Cage figured there was a high probability at any given moment that the oversized oaf would wield his circa-1600 sword and start lopping off heads, starting with the brain-shrinker’s.
So he stuck his fingers in the compartment with a delicate touch lest something cut, latch onto, or bite them. Instead, they brushed across the cold, polished steel of a shape he recognized: a Colt .45 semiautomatic, both Mirren’s and Aidan’s weapon of choice. He approved; the gun was big and heavy, and it fit well in a man’s hand.
Not comforting that he needed a weapon for a ninety-minute automobile ride, however. “So, what exactly did I see in the woods out there?”
“We call them vampabonds. Vampire vagabonds. The numbers have really picked up in the last month.” She gave a halfhearted laugh. “It’s gotten worse since some yahoo in Montgomery got the bright idea of offering one-dollar bus fare from Atlanta. Now, they blend in with all the humans on the late bus and can get here cheap, with air conditioning and Wi-Fi along the way.”
Cage confirmed that the gun had a full cartridge and scanned the woods and fields they sped past. “These vampabonds—are they looking for food or for Penton?”
“Both. Some are heading for Penton, hoping Aidan will take them in and let them stay, thinking it’s an easy way to get unvaccinated blood. Some are just moving farther into the rural areas, hoping to find humans they can feed from.”