Something Secret This Way Comes: Secret McQueen, Book 1 (12 page)

“Secret and I are soul-bonded,” he announced. The official way in which he said it made it seem like it should be followed by
you may now kiss the bride
. A murmur spread through the room. “She is a McQueen and has a rightful place as a pack leader. However, as we have only just begun to
date
, calling her the new queen is a little premature.” He chuckled, and the wolves politely laughed with him.

This was bizarre to say the least.

“I do expect all of you under my rule to treat her with the respect of a princess being courted by your king.” There was no laughter in his tone, though being called a princess out loud certainly made
me
want to laugh. He was dead serious, and I knew every wolf in the room would respect his wishes.

He looked back to an expectant Genevieve. “The private room, please.”

“Of course.” She led us through the crowded room with such ease she did not so much as brush against anyone else.

I was willing to bet Genevieve always landed on her feet too.

Chapter Seventeen

For dinner we were served plate-sized, blue-rare Kobe beef steaks. They must have each cost more than what a family of five would spend on an average dinner, and they were bloody delicious. Literally. I sat with my eyes closed and sucked the juice from each thick bite of meat. It might not have been as satisfying as fresh, warm blood but my werewolf half was pleased with the offering.

I lingered in the soft red haze that followed a delicious meal, but deep in the pit of my gut my stomach growled for something more. For the time being I would have to ignore that urge and settle for an AB positive nightcap when I got home.

“That was the best steak I have
ever
eaten.” I paused between each word for emphasis.

Lucas put down his napkin and chuckled. “That barely qualified as a steak. That was still a cow.”

“Then it was the best cow I ever had.”

Desmond, who sat at a table near the door with Dominick, smiled with none of his usual stiffness. The smile was so honest it surprised me, but it dimmed the moment he saw I was looking at him.

I couldn’t understand why he hated me so much. Was my simplicity beneath what he expected from a princess or a queen? I didn’t think the same constraints of propriety applied to werewolf royalty as they did to human royalty. Especially if one considered that the Queen Mum was unlikely to strip off all her clothing on a full moon and run wild with her grandsons. I’d known I was a princess less than twenty-four hours, and no one had really explained to me what the expectations were.

Growing up, the only thing my
grandmere
had demanded of me was survival. I’d been born in Southern Louisiana, which is about as south as you can get in the States without a peninsula. She had told Elmore only what she’d needed to about me in order to secure my protection from the pack. I don’t know how much he knew, but it was enough that he respected our privacy and made others do the same. When he died,
Grandmere
knew she could no longer trust our safety so close to the pack. She left her three children, including her teenage son, and we fled the state. In later years, when she explained to me why we had been forced to move, she’d never told me anything about the finer points of how packs were run.

Knowing now that Elmore had been a king and had passed his crown to his barely legal son rather than his eldest daughter—Mercy, my mother—or his middle child, my aunt Savannah, I could see where the unrest would begin.

Grandmere
had taken me first to South Carolina, where we remained until I was four, before deciding this was still too close for comfort. Then we left the United States altogether, to a place she felt would be outside pack law. I spent twelve years of my life in the southern part of the Canadian prairies, living on a fifteen-acre parcel in a large, old farmhouse.

One benefit of this upbringing was that unlike the boggy American South, the soil of the Canadian prairie allowed for houses to have real basements. It meant I had a room in which I could escape from the blistering sunlight every day. The land we owned provided me a place to run freely at night, burning off the pent-up energy someone of my unique genetic mix built up.

Raising me had been difficult for my
grandmere
. She was, however, uniquely capable of doing it. Being the mother of three children who had become wolves, and a powerful witch of some renown, she had knowledge others lacked. A human grandmother, feeding me formula or putting my crib in a light, airy room, would have made mistakes severe enough to kill just by doing what one was
supposed
to do with a baby.

Because my mother, upon abandoning me, had the foresight to leave a note explaining what had happened to me,
Grandmere
was able to brace herself for certain things. She’d already been aware that having any sort of silver near me would be disastrous, but that wasn’t an unusual problem for her since she’d had three werewolves come of age in her home.

It was the vampire blood that made things tricky. It meant I could not be exposed to sunlight and also that I lapsed into daytime sleeps that resembled death, complete with lack of breathing or pulse. Then there was the added difficulty of my lycanthropy being activated in infancy. In my youth and adulthood I had intuitively learned how to suppress the need to change forms. I buried the ability so deep within myself I didn’t know if it was possible anymore for me to shift. It was thanks to the calming effects of my vampire blood this suppression was feasible. As long as I was well fed I never felt the need to go furry.

As a baby that sort of control had been impossible.

My
grandmere
had a very memorable baby photo of me on the mantle of her fireplace. In a crib amid the shredded remains of a sun-yellow jumper and cloth diaper sits a puckish-looking wolf pup, tongue lolling happily, feet much too large for the body. It was only because of this photo I knew I had the ability to change at all. I did not remember the event happening and had no memory of how agonizing the pain must have been for me as a baby.

My
grandmere
said it only happened monthly from my first birthday up until my second. Before I turned one, the wolf inside was too small to force itself out. After that year the vampire in me learned how to put the wolf on a leash.

She knew, too, I needed blood to survive. Not many babies are given pig or goat’s blood in a bottle. Needless to say my upbringing had been unique. None of it, though, had trained me on how to be a princess.

I had, until now, existed on the razor-thin edge of two worlds, part of both and accepted by neither. I didn’t know how to switch from feeling unwanted to being considered among the ruling class.

“I’d say
penny for your thoughts
, but I think I’d have to offer you more than a million to get everything that just went through your head.” Lucas was leaning across the table with a tentative smile on his lips, waiting for me to come back down to earth.

“Sorry.” I was embarrassed to have been caught so lost in thought.

“Where’d you just go?”

“I was thinking about my
grandmere
.” I waited for the confusion that accompanied my French nickname for her, which was something she had insisted upon from her Louisiana upbringing and also something to set her apart from my grandfather’s Irish heritage.

“Is she…?” he hesitated.

“Oh! No. She’s alive and well in Southern Manitoba, probably bitching to herself about the late melt and what it will mean for her peas.” I grinned to myself, picturing her in rubber boots and rolled-up overalls, stomping around in the knee-deep snow and thinking of what type of spell she could use to speed up the melt.

Manitoban winters dragged on for longer than six months at a time, but once they were gone spring was a barely noticeable blip before summer swept in hot and humid. I missed it sometimes.

“She isn’t like us, though?”

No one is like me,
I couldn’t help but think. “No, she’s not a werewolf. She’s a pretty tough witch, though.” I didn’t want to make it seem like she was a helpless old lady. Far from it. Now in her early sixties, she was more active than ever and showed no signs of slowing down.

“And she raised you alone?” He was a little surprised by it. Werewolves, from what I understood, were fans of the
it takes a village
approach to raising children. I’d told him yesterday my
grandmere
raised me, but I guess he’d assumed she had help.

“Because of, uh…” I tried to think of something that wasn’t a lie but wouldn’t tell him more than he needed to know, “…the in-utero trauma that caused my lycanthropy to activate early?” Okay, so I failed to mention that said trauma was my newborn vampire father force-feeding his tainted blood to my mother and turning me into a freakazoid hybrid. Not a lie, really, more of an omission. “My mother was young, only seventeen, and my father was…dead.” Again, not a lie, just a twist on the truth. “She didn’t know how to take care of a baby that wasn’t just a baby. She probably couldn’t have taken care of me if I
had
been normal. She left me with my grandmother and never looked back.” All of that was one hundred percent truth.

Lucas’s face was stony. Even Dominick and Desmond at their own table looked more solemn than they had before. To me this was history. It was like telling someone about Brutus betraying Caesar. Or about the collapse of the Roman Empire. History wasn’t personal, it was just facts about the past. So, in spite of the fact that this history was
mine,
it no longer moved me.

Lucas took my hand, and with his other he touched the side of my face with a soft stroke of his fingers. His hand was hot against my skin, which didn’t surprise me given the raised core temperature of all wolves. “You will never lack for a family again,” he promised.

Sadly, I didn’t think it was a promise he could keep.

Chapter Eighteen

The Chameleon Lounge was more than just a restaurant. While the main floor served as an upscale dining experience, the upper level, buffered by soundproof walls and floors, was a dance club.

Lucas guided me up a staircase at the back of the restaurant with our two D-named bodyguards following close behind us. At dinner, Lucas had mentioned Desmond would be keeping an eye on me, but he made it sound like the normal thing for a wolf-lieutenant to do for a displaced princess. I didn’t pry further, but it seemed like Lucas was assigning me a bodyguard I didn’t need or want.

When we reached the club it wasn’t at all what I expected. The walls were decorated with sophisticated red-and-black damask wallpaper, and every flat surface looked like polished black marble, from the dance floor to the bar to the individual tables.

All the lights were dimmed and covered by beaded black shades. Both the bar and the DJ booth were on raised platforms, while all the booths were sunk into the floor so they had to be stepped down into.

I wondered if the marble floors posed any risk to dancing patrons, but the question was answered when a man grabbed his date’s hand and spun her around three times as if she were a top. She stopped on a dime, dipped backwards and then into his arms again. Weres had enough natural grace to not fear a floor like this.

Genevieve knew how to create a unique and dynamic environment for her customers. As soon as I thought of her I remembered a question dinner had forced out of my mind.

Instead of asking Lucas, I dropped back to fall into step with Desmond. I figured since he’d known about Melvin the wereferret, he’d probably know about Genevieve as well.

“Desmond?” The taste of lime filled my mouth, and I had to swallow it before I could think of speaking again.

“Miss McQueen.” His formality jarred me. I wondered if his coldness had something to do with his orders, if by being aloof he felt he was better equipped to protect Lucas and me. But Dominick didn’t seem to have any problem being nice to me. Perhaps when this night was over, Desmond and I would have a little chat about what exactly his issue with me was.

I carried on with the question I’d been about to ask. “What is Genevieve? I know she’s not a wolf, and she’s definitely feline, but I can’t quite pin her down.”

A laugh punctuated the air behind us. “Ah, and here I thought the idea was that curiosity killed the cat. What, I wonder, did it do to the big bad wolf?” Genevieve was a few feet away, leaning against the bar with a glass of champagne in her hand. Of course it
would
be champagne, and I was willing to bet it was Cristal. Nothing but the best for our hostess. “You are concerned about what kind of cat I am?”

She sashayed over to us on her towering heels. With that added height and the fact I was in flats, she stood much taller than I and stared down at me with a lecherous smile that suited her quite well. Lucas had disappeared into the crowd with Dominick, leaving me alone in Desmond’s company.

“I was just wondering. Not concerned. You don’t smell like any other were feline I’ve encountered.”

“And you don’t smell like the average wolf,” she pointed out, making me swallow hard. “Though I guess that has something to do with the company you keep.” In that one sentence Genevieve proved she was a woman to be respected and feared. She knew much more about what happened in this city than I’d given her credit for. “I must say, standing next to this knight of yours, you two certainly smell alluring together, don’t you?”

I grimaced. Impossible. There was no way for her to know what I could taste from Desmond. He gave me a wary look, as if thinking the same thing. It was the first time I considered what must be happening to Desmond whenever he came near me. If I was really bonded to him the same way I was bonded to Lucas, which still seemed impossible, then how much was he suffering by ignoring it?

I couldn’t help but ask her, “What do we smell like?”

She grinned and tossed her hair over one shoulder. “Key lime pie. It’s on your breath, and it’s not on my menu.”

My whole body went rigid, but I did not reply.

“To answer your original question, Miss McQueen, I am an ocelot. One of only a dozen in the country, and I am their queen.”