Something Secret This Way Comes: Secret McQueen, Book 1 (17 page)

Lucas, too, was reminded of the vampire’s presence and Holden’s reason for being at my home in the first place.

“I’ll leave you to your business.” Lucas leaned in so his lips rested against my ear. Holden would still hear him, but the illusion of privacy was enough. “I’m relieved you’re safe after last night. I’m sorry you were put in danger. I know it put you in an unusual situation…” God, I wish having my life in peril was unusual. “Anything that happened as a result is understandable. Emotions were running high, after all.” He stepped back and nodded.

Had he just
pardoned
me for having sex with Desmond?

My face flushed and not from embarrassment. I was enraged. My choice to sleep with Desmond had been made logically. Well, as logically as a decision can be made with someone’s tongue in your mouth. And what’s more, it was made at least in part because of a metaphysical connection Lucas himself had alerted me to. I balled my hands into fists. Of course I didn’t want him to be mad about it, but would he expect Desmond to forgive him if he, Lucas, had been the one to bed me first? I doubted it.

He frowned and arched a brow. My anger must have confused him. Hell, it confused me. Didn’t I want him to be okay with it?

“Just go.” I indicated the open door. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Desmond smirk, a flash of humor so quick it was almost imaginary. At least someone found this situation funny. I suppose it wasn’t often anyone blew Lucas off.

I wanted to smile back, but it would ruin the effect of my incensed and unceremonious dismissal of the king.

After the werewolves left I felt like a fog had lifted from my senses, and I was able to see and think more clearly. Just being near them threw me off my game, and I was going to need to find my sea legs with this soul-bond thing if I had a hope in hell of surviving in a relationship. I couldn’t handle being so out of sorts.

I sat in the armchair Lucas had just occupied and stared at the vampire on my sofa. “What are you doing here? Sig gave me his orders. The Tribunal doesn’t expect me to have captured Peyton yet, so what do you want?”

“Aside from getting you in trouble with your wolves or catching you
in flagrante
?” It was apparent he found the situation hilarious, but I wasn’t laughing. “I came to help.”

I considered Holden to be my friend, and most days I liked him a hell of a lot. He was a great ally but was usually only around when it benefited him. I leaned back in the chair, watching him carefully. I didn’t think he was lying.

“Secret.” His voice was tight with impatience, which was a rarity for a vampire. “I know things have been, for lack of a better word,
strained
between us since my bicentennial.” That wasn’t a sentence you got to hear every day. “But we’re still the people we were when Sig assigned me to you.”

I laughed at him. If I was the same person I had been six years ago, I would be dead by now. The Secret of six years previous was a dim-witted sixteen-year-old with only the vaguest idea of how to keep herself alive.

“Okay, maybe not the exact same.”

“I get what you’re trying to say. Don’t strain yourself with the niceties. They aren’t your strongest gift.” I looked out the small window to the street outside. Feet passed by in a rush. Human lives without the slightest clue of the strange world existing all around them. How many of them would Peyton kill before I stopped him? “I really could use your help.”

“Any ideas of where to start?”

“I have one. But you’re not going to like it.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

“I don’t like this,” Holden agreed.

We were standing in front of the seventy-sixth precinct police headquarters. It was a squat, ugly, concrete building made of two rectangular floors of offices and interrogation rooms, and a basement level for holding cells. The police cruisers were parked in a fenced lot behind the building.

“I told you.” Starting up the stairs, I turned to look at him. “You don’t need to come in. But
trust
me when I tell you no one in here is going to have a goddamn clue what you are. They’re all human. Very, very human.”

Begrudgingly he followed, hesitating at the entrance before walking in. An exhausted young woman sat at the reception desk and gave me a look of contempt when I cleared my throat in front of her. She softened when she saw Holden, and one of her hands flew up to fix the errant strands of her hair. As usual he appeared to have stepped out of a
GQ
article on making looking good appear effortless. An article he could have written once upon a time.

“How can I help you?” She ignored me completely.

I tried to draw her attention back to me by saying, “Detective Mercedes Castilla, please.”

“Who should I say is here?” Now that she was looking at me again, all the friendliness leached out of her voice.

“Secret McQueen.”

The girl rolled her eyes, believing it was a poorly constructed alias. I was getting pretty irritated with people who thought my name wasn’t real. I was going to have to thank
Grandmere
for taking my mother’s note literally when it said
keep her a secret
.

“And you?” She nodded to the vampire.

“Holden Chancery.” He smiled, flashing fangless brilliant white teeth at her. She met his eyes and became a lost cause. He had her enthralled in an instant.

“Of course.” Her voice had a dreamlike quality, totally entranced. If he told her to cluck like a chicken, she would do it. I’d seen baby vampires do some truly awful things once they discovered how to enthrall humans, but Holden had never been one to abuse the thrall for kicks.

The girl used her desk phone to announce us, then sat there grinning at Holden like a dog who had executed a new trick for the first time. Pitiful.

A few moments later Mercedes descended the stairs behind the desk and waved for me and Holden to follow her.

I had lied when I told him no one in the building would know what he was. Judging by the cold stare Cedes fixed him with the instant we sat down at her desk, she’d recognized straight away he wasn’t human.

“Cedes,” I said, a warning tone in my voice, “this is Holden.”

She was familiar enough with the work I did to recognize the name of my liaison. It didn’t do anything to make her like him, though. Mercedes hated vampires almost as much as the werewolves did.

“What brings you to my humble establishment?” She leaned back in her desk chair and pretended Holden wasn’t there. “I was hoping the next time I saw you it would be over cocktails and you’d be giving me the dirty details about Lucas Rain.”

Holden made a sniggering sound that I tried to ignore.

“You know the girl, the one who said she was saved from a…” I lowered my voice, “…vampire?”

Cedes focused on Holden with a glare tainted by accusation, then looked back to me. She was a beautiful woman, but her job had etched her face with a shrewd, knowing patina that aged her more than necessary. She had almost-black eyes, and her dark hair was curly the way mine was not, with tight untamed coils. Her skin was honey bronze, but too many hours indoors without natural sunlight made it look sallow. The dark bags under her eyes and minimal makeup told me she was working hard on something. I just hoped it was something that could help me.

“Yeah, her name is Brigit Something. Stewart or Samuels. Something Anglo. Are you admitting you’re the one who saved her?”

“Off the record?”

“Sure.”

“It was me.”

“Yeah, I knew that.”

“I need to know if anything has seemed hinky since it happened. Anyone reporting attacks from similar assailants? Any bodies showing up looking a little
pale
?”

“You want to know if I suspect any vampire activity?” Her voice hushed. “Isn’t that really more your box of crayons, Secret? What’s going on?”

“I can’t tell you. The fewer details you know the better. But you’d be helping a lot of innocent people if you could tell me everything you know.”

Her face was grim. She laced her fingers together and leaned back. “Some big bad on his way?”

“Big bad is already here.”

Exasperated, she directed her full focus on Holden. He met her eyes, but to his credit didn’t use his powers on her.

“Now you listen to me, you pretty boy mosquito, because I’m only going to say this once. I don’t care how old or powerful you are. If anything,
anything
happens to this girl here, I will find a way to rip your pulseless heart right out of your chest.
Comprende
?”

Without missing a beat he coolly replied, “Detective Castilla, your Secret is safe with me.”

She blinked with surprise, and I groaned. “God, Holden. How long have you been waiting to use that line?”

“About three years.”

“And in three years you couldn’t find any room for improvement?”

“I like a good pun, what can I say?”

“Terrible.” I shook my head.

Cedes, in spite of herself, was unable to keep from smirking at his awful one-liner. She might not like him, but he had done his best to endear himself to her without stooping to mind tricks, and I appreciated it. With the exception of Keaty, Mercedes was my only human friend.

“Please, Cedes.”

“Okay. One of our undercover vice officers has been hearing that a lot of the girls are afraid to go with new johns. From what she’s been hearing, there are rumors about some handsome john who pays girls double or triple the normal rate, but after they leave none can remember what he asked them to do or why they were paid so well for it. Same rumor mill says a few of the girls haven’t come back at all. We had an anonymous call to come get a dead body, but when we got there it was gone. And we found a dead girl a few blocks away from Central Park. She was totally drained, but it was the fucking weirdest thing. It looked like she’d been ripped up by a wild dog before she was killed.” Her eyes were all too knowing. “Since we don’t know of any wild dogs loose in the city, you could say we’re a little mystified.”

I swallowed hard. A girl drained of her blood meant a vampire was involved. The girl being ripped up was something different, though. I knew of monsters that might tear their victims limb from limb for kicks, or demons who would remove a person’s bones to suck out the marrow. I’d once heard Keaty mention a bog fae who used ribbons of human skin to make its clothes. But in the city, there was a much more likely option.

Werewolf.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The limited number of plausible options to explain the girl’s strange and ghastly demise circled inside my head as Holden and I walked side by side into the night. Her being killed by a demented human was possible but on the very bottom of my list. How sad is it that in my world a human killer would be the best-case scenario?

My most fitting approximation of what happened was the girl had been attacked by a werewolf and left for dead. A vampire following the scent of blood and suspecting an easy kill had found her and drained her. Shitty way to die—presumably killed by one supernatural beastie and then killed for real by another.

Some people have no luck.

“What’s on your mind?” Holden must have thought I’d stewed long enough.

“I’m thinking if someone is taking these girls, it isn’t Peyton himself. But anyone from the council wouldn’t be stupid enough to leave so much evidence. Whoever is taking these women must be a rogue working for Peyton.” Alexandre was too smart to leave a trail or be out in the open, so he would have other rogues doing his dirty work—vampires loyal to him and his ideas.

“And the girl attacked by wild dogs?”

“Fluke? Just a really unlucky woman.”

“Hmm.” He didn’t look convinced. Honestly, neither was I.

“We need to talk to Keaty. See if he’s heard anything significant from his sources. Mercedes gave us a good starting point, but we need to know if anyone less human has heard something that could help us. If we find out who, or what, is picking up these prostitutes, maybe it will lead us back to Peyton.”

“And you believe Mr. Keats will be able to assist us with this better than the council?” Holden remained unconvinced.

“Keaty has access to things and people the council can’t get to. It’s the reason you guys trusted him to do your dirty work to begin with. It’s also the reason he was allowed to bring me to you.”

Holden’s mouth fixed in a grim line, but he didn’t argue. He knew I was right. Keaty had friends in places both low and high, well, mostly low. But those contacts might be what we needed to find Peyton and whoever was feeding on the prostitutes.

I hadn’t been to the office in two days, which wasn’t all that strange. Keaty kept up the business end of things and only had me come in for non-council jobs when he needed an extra pair of hands. Since he hadn’t been required to kill rogues for the council in six years, it left him time to explore a variety of other unusual cases. It was those unusual cases that had taken me to Albany and made me kill a young werewolf. I was definitely beginning to see how every action had a consequence.

Keaty’s office was a cross between that of a Dashiell Hammett private detective and an NYU literature professor. I let us in through the fogged glass door with a quick tap to announce our entry. He would have already heard my key in the front door of the brownstone. Centered in the room was an antique oak desk, with no computer or any modern convenience in sight. Behind him was a window that looked out on a brick wall. To the left and right of the desk were two walls stacked floor to ceiling with old worn books that had no discernible cataloging system. There was an ashtray on the desk and a bottle of scotch behind it. The story the room suggested was a web of carefully manufactured lies. Keaty was nobody’s fool.

He wasn’t wearing his glasses today, so he showed no physical signs of weakness. When it came to physicality, it was important to him to feel equal to those he hunted. You don’t earn a reputation like the one Keaty had by flaunting your humanity. In the supernatural community Keaty was a ghost story, the kind that changed with every telling but was somehow always true. I knew too well he was not an invisible killer swooping in and stealing lives, just a gifted man who was skilled at his job. It was one of the reasons I tried to distance him from the monsters I dealt with. Eventually his luck would run out and something would kill him. I’d keep that from happening for as long as I could. Kind of karmic payback, considering he was the one who’d saved me from death to begin with.