Deep Dark Secret (16 page)

“He’s probably halfway to Jersey by now,” Shane added.

But he wasn’t. I could smell fresh blood with a strong vampire taint to it. Not only was the vampire no longer running, he was lying in wait for us. Too bad he’d tried to hide behind an alarmed vehicle.

“If you play nice, I’m in a position to help you.” I wasn’t used to promising aid instead of dealing out threats. It felt strange. Not that I had any intention of helping The Greek, but as long as I didn’t make anything official, he didn’t need to know I was full of shit.

“I don’t think—”

I shushed Shane by placing my fingers over his mouth. His lips were dry and his breath came out hot against my hand. He didn’t argue again. I sniffed the air, a gesture more attuned to my werewolf half than my vampire one, but it did the trick. The scent of blood was stronger up ahead. It had to be fresh blood, because once blood aged I had a hard time picking up on it. This was so ripe it might as well have been an open vein in front of my nose.

Creeping forward with Shane at my side, I came up next to the car where the smell was the strongest. A smear of crimson stained the door handle. If we’d been chasing a human, his breath would have fogged up the glass inside, but there were no other signs of life inside the car.

Shane reached for the door, his gun drawn, but I stopped him.

“This doesn’t feel right,” I said.

“What’s wrong?”

I stepped back, pulling him with me, and a second later the answer flattened us both to the ground. Injured or not, this vampire wasn’t planning to go down without a fight. He’d smeared his blood around the car, then hidden across the street and waited.

Clever bastard.

Fear and pain had gnawed away at him, and now that he had us down he was going for the kill, no questions asked. His fangs were out and his eyes had given over to the oily black of a blood-frenzied vampire. My own survival instinct kicked in, and my face shifted to mirror his own, fangs springing forth so fast I nicked the skin of my lip.

Shane was gawking at me with wide-eyed terror. He’d seen me week after week at the Council, sitting next to Sig, but until now he clearly hadn’t thought of me as a real threat. It’s amazing how far a pair of fangs will go to convince someone you mean business.

Sadly, they did nothing to faze the vampire on top of me who was gunning for my throat.

“A little help,” I grumbled.

Pinned to the street, I couldn’t get my gun angled for a good shot. Shane staggered to his feet, fumbling for his own weapon. I wondered—not for the first time—how he’d lasted as long as he had up to this point without being killed. Maybe it was a little performance anxiety, having to show his skills in front of his boss.

I didn’t care as long as he helped get the massive, three-hundred-pound, feta-scented vampire off my chest. I kneed The Greek in the groin, but either his testicles were so unimpressive I missed them, or he was so deep in his frenzy he hadn’t felt the attack.

“
Shane
, any time now.”

Snapping out of his shock, Shane raised his own weapon and fired without hesitation. The bullet glanced off the vampire’s shoulder and bit into the asphalt beside my head. That was a little too close for comfort. My pulse kicked up, and my anxiety blossomed. I needed to get this meaty man-mountain off me in a hurry, before Shane’s next shot took me out.

I pushed at the wriggling mound on top of me, but the vampire was made of hard, immobile fat. He didn’t budge. Snarling, he dove for my neck again, my hammering pulse an obvious target for his predatory instinct. I slammed my palm into his nose, shattering the bridge backwards. If I’d hit it at a better angle, I could have driven the bone into his skull. It would have killed a human and dazed a vampire. Instead he kept coming for me; the only difference was now I was covered in his blood.

Shane fired again, and the vampire jerked. He’d scored a direct hit, but not anywhere lethal.

My survival instinct kicked up a notch, and the street turned a hazy red color as my eyes lost their focus and my senses shifted away from the human and into something different. My arm hurt, which made no sense since the vampire hadn’t bitten me, and it being pinned between us shouldn’t cause me pain. The bones adjusted, realigning themselves. It felt like my hand was being broken and put back together.

I cried out in pain and shoved all of my frustration, hurt and rage into the stomach of the vampire.

He stopped fighting and fell backwards.

When the red cleared from my eyes, I could see him clearly. He was sitting in the middle of the street with his stomach split open in a series of ragged red lines. They looked like claw marks. His hand was pressed against them, and when he pulled back to stare at his bloodstained fingers, the rips on his stomach sagged, then tore, spilling his entrails all over the asphalt.

What?

I clambered to my feet and yanked the gun out of Shane’s hand, firing the remainder of the clip into the stunned vampire’s head. When the crater of his skull was reduced to a fine pulp of pink mist and his body sagged to the ground with no hope of rising again, only then did I look down at my own arm to assess the damage.

What I saw almost brought me to my knees.

My hand wasn’t broken. At some point while I’d struggled with The Greek, my adrenaline had overwhelmed the veil of control I’d kept over my werewolf side since I was a baby. Instead of a human left hand, I was looking at a hideous amalgamation of a human hand and a wolf paw. My fingers were shortened, and the skin had changed to a light gray color. A fine smattering of coarse hair covered my hand, ending abruptly at the wrist. But the claws were the biggest shock. An inch long and curved, they were dark black and covered in skin and blood.

I
had split the vampire open.

Even as I watched, the pain reawakened in my hand, and everything shifted back to normal. It had taken mere seconds, but watching it felt like a lifetime.

Shane looked away from the dead vampire. He hadn’t seen a thing.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I nodded stupidly, still staring at my hand. I guess I had inherited something from my mother after all. She was one of the few shapeshifters I’d ever met who could complete selective form-shifts without being under the influence of the full moon.

My hands trembled as I picked up my gun from the cold ground.

“You need to call the Council. Get them to send a clean-up crew.” I was already jogging away.

“Wait, where are you going?”

I didn’t answer. I needed to get away from there and back to somewhere safe and warm and normal before I threw up.

Brigit Stewart had an amazingly normal apartment for a dead girl.

My hands were still shaking when she buzzed me up, but at least they were human hands. The question of how I’d been able to shift only one part of my body, and shift it back, was beyond the scope of my understanding to answer. If my mother wasn’t a homicidal maniac bent on killing me, she’d be the perfect person to ask. Unfortunately, she wasn’t an option.

Yet another question to ask
Grandmere
when I got around to calling her.

I let myself into Brigit’s living room and was surprised to find a familiar young man sitting on the couch looking both pleased and guilty.

“Hi, Nolan.”

Nolan Tate smiled, flashing his perfectly straight white teeth at me. He was a good-looking kid. A unique blend of Spanish and African-American traits gave his skin a coffee-and-cinnamon coloring. Nolan was more than just attractive, though. He was also a sweet, good-natured guy, and my immediate reaction to him was to keep him protected and safe.

Yet here he was, alone with a vampire.

“Hiya.” His grin broadened a little more.

“What are you—?”

Brigit emerged from her bedroom wearing a tank top and a pair of lacy panties. She waved at me, her megawatt smile showing no signs of embarrassment, and ducked into the kitchen. When she returned, she handed Nolan and I each a cold beer in spite of the frigid temperature outside, and skipped back into her bedroom.

“Uhh.”

“So,” Nolan said, ignoring my stunned reaction. “What brings ya here?”

“What brings
you
here?” I countered.

“I think dat’s sorta obvious.” This time he had the decency to blush.

Brigit came back in wearing a pair of faded denim jeans. She plopped down next to Nolan on the sofa and snuggled against his side. I wanted to point out to them that when they’d first met, Brigit had enthralled him and bitten his neck open. But I wasn’t really in a place to throw stones at their relationship choices, considering the giant glass mansion I lived in. Instead, I cracked open the beer and took a sip. It tasted rank and skunky, as most beer did.

“I have a job for Brigit.”

“Ohhh.” She clapped excitedly, like I’d just told her my American Express and I were taking her on a no-limit shopping spree. “Do I get to bite someone?”

If her excitement over bleeding another person fazed Nolan at all, he didn’t show it. The guy had spent way too much time with me and Keaty. I leaned against the closed front door and took another swig of the beer.

“No,” I replied. “But you might need to convince a few city officials they didn’t see anything.”

She shrugged, the delight fading from her face. Compared to some of the other tasks I’d had her perform, it was a little bit low on the excitement scale.

“Whatcha want me ta do?” Nolan asked.

I hadn’t plotted out a role for my new protege, considering I hadn’t expected him to be here. That didn’t mean he would be useless to me, though. A fresh pair of eyes might be just what I needed. Especially considering how shaken up I still was after the whole claw incident.

“You and I are going to look at some dead bodies.”

The Medical Examiner’s office was in the financial district a few blocks north of City Hall. It was a shade prettier than some of the buildings around it, but that only meant the building was a little older and maintained some of the old brick charm its neighbors never had. It still had the cold gray dullness most municipal buildings did.

Since there was no warmth involved in what went on inside, nothing but the misery radiated onto the exterior surfaces. In the same way a plain building used for happier purposes, like a daycare or a charity headquarters, would look much warmer and more inviting.

Empathetic magic was a funny thing, something even the most mundane of humans were impacted by.

This building didn’t need any wards or magic spells to tell passersby it wasn’t a fun place. The structure screamed of pain and death. There were a lot of angry souls here, coming and going, waiting to be avenged. I wasn’t a big fan of ghosts, and I wasn’t thrilled about going somewhere we were almost sure to find them.

It was like being afraid of snakes and walking into the reptile house at a zoo.

But it wasn’t the ghosts I was here to see. I’d only ever met one who’d been of any use to me, and she was long gone. The rest of them were mute specters, glaring indignantly and rattling their proverbial chains. They gave me the willies. No, I was here for the bodies, not the spirits.

“Cheery place,” Nolan said.

“Tell me about it.”

“It’s not so bad,” Brigit chimed in, always trying to be the silver lining, no matter how black the cloud. “I mean…the…uh…” She screwed up her face and stared at the building, attempting to find the indefinable thing that might make it redeemable. Given enough time, she could find something nice to say about Mussolini, even if it was just that his name rhymed with fettuccine. “The doors are awfully pretty,” she concluded.

The doors
were
a nice touch. Big, dark wood, they were intricately carved with depictions of angels on one side and devils on another. Quite a fancy statement piece for a place where bodies got diced up into their component bits.

I sent Brigit in first so she could convince the desk clerk we were expected. Given my success with Gabriel earlier in the evening, I might have been able to do it myself, but Brigit could turn the thrall on and off like a light bulb. She’d been a vampire less than a year, and she was already proving to be a natural at being undead.

A few minutes later she stepped back through the doors and waved us in. The desk clerk smiled at us like we were old friends. He was a plump, blond man with patchy red skin, but his smile was the warmest I’d seen all night.

“Have fun, y’all.” His head bobbed like he was agreeing with his own statement.

Brigit patted him on the cheek as we passed and slipped his magnetic keycard out of his front pocket. My little ward, a grownup. Made my heart glow with a peculiar sort of pride.

Beside the elevator bay was a black board with white letters on it announcing which offices and departments were on which floor. The main autopsy bays and body storage, more politely called “Processing” and “Morgue”, were located on the second basement level. I knew a few morgues around town where they’d started storing bodies on the higher levels, in better-lit rooms. Those were favorites of the vampire council, because any dead vamps who ended up there turned to ash come daylight.

I wanted to see if there was anything on these girls that might indicate something otherworldly had killed them. Anything other than Gabriel. It wasn’t common for me to cross my fingers and hope a vampire had killed someone, but at least if that was the case, swift justice was at my disposal. I wouldn’t even need to make a phone call to issue the warrant. That power was mine now.

We rode the elevator down, and I tried to ignore Brigit and Nolan’s cutesy whispering and playful touching. I couldn’t wrap my head around the two of them as a couple. The door opened into a sterile white hallway that reeked of ammonia and bleach. Our shoes squeaked on the floor as we moved, it was so clean. There were four doors, one on each side of the elevator, and a matching one across the hall from those. Each was marked with a number and a chart on the door to indicate the bodies held within.

“We’re looking for Fitzpatrick, Keller and Ferris,” I informed them.