A Bloody Good Secret: Secret McQueen, Book 2 (2 page)

I shivered when his tongue flicked against the pad of my thumb.

“You won’t kill me,” he said matter-of-factly.

“I have to.” I began to withdraw my hand, but he caught my wrist.

“You.
Won’t
. Kill. Me.”

There was a flash of fang in his words, and a deep chill curdled my insides. He did not release me and instead used the advantage of his superior strength to draw me towards him. With his one hand still in my hair, he forced me to look him straight in the eyes.

I was immune to the vampire ability to enthrall their human victims, known as the thrall, but it felt like that was what he was trying to do. Of all vampires, Holden knew of my immunity the best, so I wasn’t sure what his intentions were. I swallowed hard, and he pulled me closer so our bodies pressed together. My skin felt hot where it touched his.

“I need you, Secret,” he whispered against my lips. I shivered again, but this time it wasn’t from fear.

“Where
are
you?”

“I’m safe, for now.” He trailed his fingertips down my left cheek.

“I can’t come home.”

“You have to. I need you.”

“If I come home, Sig will make me kill you.”

“Will he?” He had his mouth hovering over mine, his lips brushing the oversensitive surface of my own, bringing a new wave of heat over my body. I was having trouble breathing, and he was moving his hands towards my lower back.

“As far as Sig’s concerned…” I trembled, “…it’s you or me.”

A smile curved his mouth as his tongue traced the outline of my lower lip. “It won’t be me,” he promised.

Then, with a movement so fast it lasted less time than my alarmed gasp, he dropped his head and sank his ready teeth into my exposed neck.

Chapter Three

“Secret Merriweather McQueen! You put that in a glass this
instant
.” My
grandmere
snatched the old-style glass milk bottle from my hand.

“It’s blood!” I exclaimed, reaching out to reclaim my breakfast. “You want me to put blood in your nice glasses?” Of course, this question was ridiculous on many levels. After sixteen years under her roof, I knew that was exactly what she wanted.

“It wouldn’t be the first time, baby,” she said, practically reading my mind. She was holding the bottle aloft while she rummaged through the cupboards. It was quite the spectacle, seeing my petite grandmother with a bottle of blood grasped in her hand, and keeping me at arm’s reach while she searched. Considering I had the physical strength to take the bottle by force, the situation was all the more comical because I did nothing to fight her. It was like a rabbit telling a bear to hang on for a second while the rabbit got him a plate.

She found what she was looking for and, with a satisfied grin, plunked a glass down on the counter.

I gave her a horrified look.

“You’re kidding me. How is
that
…” I pointed to the offending object, “…more civilized than drinking it from the bottle?”

She had found an old Sesame Street cup, depicting The Count. His cartoonish fangs beamed at me, and I read the writing on the side which proclaimed,
One… One Glass of Milk!
I wanted to stab myself in the face with the broken shards of my dignity.

Grandmere
filled the glass with the bottled blood—pig, based on the small mouthful I’d tasted—and handed it to me.

“I raised a lady.”

I let that one go, because I didn’t want her to know how far off base she was. I cursed like a sailor, slept with boys I wasn’t married to, and was sort of soul-married to two werewolves in a bizarre, polyandrous, metaphysical mess. Plus, I drank my blood straight out of the fridge back home.
Lady
was hardly the first word that came to mind when I described myself. But there was no point in telling all this to my
grandmere
, who I loved more than any human alive.

“It’s
blood
,” I reminded her again, more insistently. “In a toddler’s drinking glass. This is
insulting.
”

“Drink it from that or don’t drink it at all.” She put her hands on her hips and gave me a stern stare down, which let me know she wasn’t fooling around.

I picked up the glass with a little
harrumph
and knew my pouting wasn’t going to faze her. It probably only reminded her of the teenager I’d been when I ran away six years earlier. A lot about me had changed since then. I’d grown up, gotten harder and meaner. In many ways I was the most world-weary twenty-two-year-old in history. But I still knew how to laugh.

She sat down at the kitchen table and picked up a small box that had been left there. Something hard rattled inside when she shook it back and forth.

“I have something for you.”

I placed my empty glass in the sink, and before she had a chance to remind me, filled it with soap and hot water and washed it out. Blood was a bitch to clean once it dried. With the glass now in the drain rack, I sat in the chair across from her.

Grandmere
put the box back on the table and slid it across the wood until it was in front of me. I took off the lid, and inside was a necklace made from a blood red, striped stone with a band of gold flecks running down the middle. It was set with simple gold wire and hung on a gold chain.

I raised my eyes and gave her a questioning look. She was a witch, and witches didn’t give away stones without a specific reason.

“It’s tiger’s iron,” she explained. “It wards against evil magic.”

I laughed. “Am I expecting to run into a lot of evil magic out here?” The strange wolf flashed to mind, and my laughter died away. “
Am
I?”

“Never hurts to protect yourself, baby.” Her halfhearted smile said she wasn’t telling me everything.

Taking her hands in mine, I gave her a comforting squeeze. “Thank you.”

“Let me help you put it on.” She was up from the table in a flash, with the necklace already in her hand. For a senior, she sometimes exhibited supernatural speed.

Her rush to have me guarded against evil made me feel more anxious than anything. She pulled my hair off my shoulders, and for a moment she hesitated. My heart stopped, because in spite of how impossible it would be, I worried she might see Holden’s bite mark from my dream on me.

Talk about a guilty conscience.

Grandmere
clasped the necklace, and the stone hung around my neck with a foreign weight. It was a big pendant, roughly the same width as an oyster shell. The color was disconcerting, making it look like there was a splash of gold-infused blood over my heart. I held the stone up, and the gold winked at me under the kitchen lights.

“It’s pretty.”

She let my hair down and placed a kiss on top of my head. “I won’t keep you. I know you had plans tonight.”

Drinking at a dive bar with a bunch of surly farmers. Some plan. I didn’t argue with her, though. I got up from the table and went to the back door to find my shoes, still fiddling with the necklace. From the kitchen,
Grandmere
cleared her throat. Seems she had decided to say everything on her mind after all.

“Secret, sweetie, you know I love you, right?”

“Of course.” I stopped what I was doing so I could get a better look at her as she spoke. She was staring out the kitchen window over the sink and didn’t turn to face me when I came back into the kitchen.

“Then try not to take this the wrong way.”

I raised a questioning brow.

“Baby, I think it’s time you went home.”

I made the walk to the bar without any supernatural encounters, but this time I was prepared for them. In spite of the necklace to ward off evil, I felt better when I was armed. My Sig 9mm was tucked in the waistband of the black shorts I was wearing. I’d covered the weapon with my yellow tank top, which had just enough give to camouflage the gun. I’d tried to make the casual ensemble into a coordinated outfit by wearing matching yellow flip-flops, but my tangled blonde curls were in a messy bun on top of my head.

The Elm Tree was a slim two-story building whose front window was decorated with neon beer adverts, and whose main sign misleadingly referred to it as a
hotel and bar
. When I walked in, my flip-flops smacked against the sticky hardwood floor like a sloppy kiss, announcing my presence as the only female in the room.

Howard, the sweet, lumberjack-sized bartender, looked up from the beer taps and smiled at me. At least I assumed he smiled because his bearded cheeks moved in an upward direction.

“McQueen,” he acknowledged, his voice so rough he might have been swallowing crushed rocks every night.

I loved that no one here called me Secret. To the men of the Elm Tree, who admired machismo and masculinity above all else, there was no need to call me anything but McQueen. Sharing a name with Steve McQueen, King of Cool, gave me an instant pass with these guys, and that suited me fine. I sidled up to the bar and sat next to a man known only as Bear. He weighed about three hundred pounds and stood almost six-foot-eight whenever he found use for his feet. He had a beard so grizzled it made Howard look clean cut.

“Bear,” I said with a nod.

“McQueen,” he replied into his half-empty pint glass.

I’d often hoped part of Bear’s size and appearance was due to genuine ursine shapeshifter DNA. Having never met or even heard of a were-bear, I longed for a story to share with Lucas and Desmond when I saw them again. Selfishly, I also wanted to know I wasn’t the only freak in Elmwood. Alas, in three months I hadn’t gotten the slightest hint of a supernatural trigger from him. He was as human as they came.

“Rickard’s,” I requested to Howard, who was already filling a glass for me, tipping it to avoid a heady draught. He slid it down the bar to me, partially because he loved minute attempts at flair bartending, and more so because he knew I’d never miss. “Thanks.” I held the drink in one hand and surveyed the room via the large mirror behind the bar.

“Hey, Howard?” I asked. He turned his too-kind eyes towards me. “Who’s the crew cut by the jukebox?”

Considering I spent almost every day at the bar, even the irregulars were known to me, along with most of the gossip about the town and surrounding area. I also knew all about the summer forecast for wheat, canola, flax and sunflowers—mediocre to superb, depending on the number of drinks in the farmer doing the predicting.

There wasn’t a face that passed through the bar I didn’t recognize, or so I’d thought.

Next to the jukebox on which Bruce Springsteen was singing “Thunder Road” sat a man in his mid-thirties. He had an olive complexion, thick black eyebrows over dark black eyes, and his hair was cut short.

“He came in yesterday, took the same booth until close, then left. Came back again soon as we opened tonight. Odd fella.”

All-night drinkers were not so unusual here, so for Howard to single this man out as odd gave me an uneasy feeling. I sniffed the air, but all I got was the ripe scent of Bear’s armpit sweat and the lingering smells of booze and testosterone. I watched the man in the mirror until he shifted his glance and our eyes locked in the glass. For one long, breathless moment we remained in that stare, until he looked away. My heart was pounding, which was not such an easy feat. His expression had been so smug and unflinching. Something was definitely wrong.

I stared into my beer, my skin suddenly cold and beaded with uncomfortable sweat. The way he had stared at me set off every alarm in the book, and there was a nagging feeling in my bones that I needed to find out what was up with this mysterious stranger. When I turned back to the mirror to check on my scary new friend with the crew cut, my breath caught in my throat.

His booth was empty.

I spun around in my chair, pulse hammering. He wasn’t anywhere in the bar. I took a five out of my pocket and put it on the bar.

“Thanks, Howard.”

“Leaving already?”

“Yeah, sorry,” I said, already halfway out the door. “Thanks.”

Outside, the air had grown colder and the town had gone to sleep for the night. A cool breeze ruffled the short hairs at the back of my neck as I stood on the empty road in front of the Elm Tree.

“Where are you?” I asked to myself, listening for any trace of movement. On cue, I heard the soft crunch of gravel coming from the path behind the bar. I hesitated for a moment, knowing it couldn’t be so easy. But I had to know who he was. I followed the sound to the back of the bar and took the path as it sloped down a hill to Howard’s storage shed.

The shed was on the edge of the forest, but even with my ability to see in the dark, I couldn’t discern anyone in the trees.

I walked all the way up to the shed, then stopped. I rested my hand against the rough barn-wood exterior of the small building, hoping to feel the vibration of someone hiding behind or within, but there was nothing. Just like in the woods the night before, all traces of my quarry had vanished. The air smelled heavy with ozone and anxious peat.

Rain was coming.

Closing my eyes, I concentrated harder. I heard the rumble of thunder still miles away but approaching as steadily as a Hun raiding party. I could smell night blossoms turning their hungry faces towards the sound. One by one, crickets and cicadas stopped singing so they could take shelter.

I looked into the blackness of the woods. On a branch, a large barn owl with heavily lidded eyes turned his head to me. I almost dismissed the bird, until I realized he was staring at me.

Staring with a cold, unflinching glare.

Icy fear began at my toes and spread through my whole body in seconds. I wanted to run. Running was the only instinct I understood, but when I tried to move, I found myself frozen in place. My eyes widened with the horror of understanding, and the owl kept its focus on me.

“
Who
,” the owl said.

My pulse sped up and blood screamed behind my ears until all I could hear was my body’s panic. Without warning, I was bombarded by the fragrance of wolf. The same smell I’d chased the night before. It was so close I should have sensed it sooner, but it seemed to appear out of nowhere, without warning. The wolf was right behind me, but being frozen as I was, I couldn’t turn to face him.