Something Secret This Way Comes: Secret McQueen, Book 1 (25 page)

From somewhere in the room I heard my mother laugh. “I should have killed you when you were born. I don’t know why I gave you to my idiot mother.”

Hearing her use such contemptuousness for the woman who had raised her and taken in her unwanted baby, the woman who had been the only light of kindness in my childhood, stirred something hot and angry in me. Rage proved to be a temporary distraction from the pain.

“Not dead yet.” My vision swam and the threat of blacking out was almost realized before I resisted the urge to slip back into the dark tides of inertia. If I didn’t find something in me that could fight back, I would die here and become nothing more than a fading afterthought to those I loved.

I didn’t know if I loved Lucas or if I loved Desmond. I didn’t know what Calliope meant when she told me I would be the center of more than one love triangle, or if I loved anyone at all. What I did know was if I bled to death beneath the Orpheum, I would never get a chance to figure out who I loved. I would never see Keaty again or stand next to Holden in my tiny kitchen.

I would never run through the woods of my
grandmere’s
property or feel the sweet, tingly allure of the full moon in my blood.

If I didn’t fight back now and find some part of me willing to live, I would never do anything at all ever again.

With my mother across the room and Peyton occupying himself by telling me how little I mattered, my body had started fighting the injury. With a sensational amount of suffering on my part, muscles pulled themselves together, blood clotted where it once ran free and inch by inch the bullet was forced out, until it fell silently into a pool of my congealing blood. The surface wound was slower to heal, but I could feel it knitting itself, pore by pore, back into a smooth whole. I was, for once, glad to be so covered in blood. They wouldn’t notice right away that I was no longer leaking.

Fate had smiled on me. If I hadn’t taken Brigit to Calliope’s, I might have avoided this mess, but I also wouldn’t have fed. The blood I had taken at Calliope’s was probably the only thing that had kept me from dying, and now it was singing through my body, burning a path of energy and strength as it went.

Every part of me was attuned and hyper aware. I felt whole again, more awake, and I could appreciate my situation more completely.

Once I could feel things other than the gaping hole in my side, I was able to register something hard digging into the small of my back right where Lucas had touched me in my dream. It took me a fraction of a second to realize that it was my second gun.

They must have dragged me into the bedchamber after Marcus shot me, because if they’d lifted me they wouldn’t have missed it. They had removed the blade and bullets from my boots, but they hadn’t turned me over and looked for a second weapon. All I needed to do now was wait for the right moment. Soon Peyton would stop belittling me, grow weary of the games, and want to feed, and that would be easier if I was sitting up.

That’s when I’d make my move.

Until then I needed to focus on what he was saying and act like my pain kept me teetering on the edge of delusion.

“Not dead yet,” I repeated, this time a little louder.

“She’s got a lot of you in her.” Marcus laughed. Mercy didn’t seem to think it was so funny.

“She is nothing like me.”

“You’ve got that right,” I said under my breath, but loud enough they all heard it. “Thank God.”

“God? You think God had anything to do with an abomination like you?” Her anger was palpable. I could only imagine what she felt, but from what I knew of her history, I could piece some of it together. I was a living, breathing reminder of her first love, of a more innocent time, and of his death. I reminded her of him with the color of my hair and the infection in my blood. Everything about me assaulted Mercy McQueen with memories she didn’t want, and it made her blind and weak with fury.

Apparently my mother’s greatest weakness was me, but not in the way of most mothers. It wasn’t her love for me that made her weak; it was her hatred.

“I think…” I faked a gasp for air, “…that God tested you and you failed.” I laughed, short and merciless.

No one else seemed to see the humor.

“If you don’t finish her soon, I’ll do the job for you,” Mercy said to Peyton.

“That won’t be necessary.” His words were polite, but his tone was full of loaded threats. Mercy’s face, the beautiful face genetics had seen fit to pass on to me, understood what was unspoken, and she sat next to Marcus.

“Good dog,” I said. It almost sent her barreling across the room at me, but Marcus grabbed hold of her and kept her in a sitting position.

“Ah…” Peyton shifted his focus back to me. “There is still a little of the Secret I know and love in there.”

“Secret,” Mercy huffed, her tone incredulous. “What kind of name is Secret? Who names someone that?”

“You. You told
Grandmere
, in your letter.”

“I did
not
tell her to name you Secret.”

“You said
keep her secret
.
Grandmere
couldn’t think of anything else so she took it literally.” The sentence was rather full, so I coughed at the end for several seconds, then moaned.

“That batty old witch.”

“Like you could have done better.”

“I was going to name you Harmony.”

I laughed so loud it took them all aback. Even Peyton’s expression was quizzical. “I think
Secret
suits me a little better when you really think about it.”

“I don’t think about it. I don’t think about you. He’s right. No one will miss you when you die, not even your mother.”

“I have no mother.”

“I wish that was true.”

“As touching as this familial bonding session is,” Peyton interrupted, rolling his eyes, “the junior Miss McQueen and I have some unfinished business to attend to, and I’d rather like to get it underway while she’s still plucky enough to
really
enjoy it.”

“You bit me once.” I fixed my eyes on his. “I hope you remember it well, because it won’t happen again.” A note of challenge hardened my words, and I counted on him rising to the dare.

“You seem very sure of that.”

“Doesn’t really matter what I think, does it?”

I was no longer faking my pain, but no one seemed to notice. Tension was simmering to a boil between me and the redheaded vampire. To an outside viewer I looked profoundly outmatched, and my death should have seemed certain.

But I had learned a long time ago at the hands of this same vampire, no death is one hundred percent certain. Not until it’s all over and someone’s a pile of ash, or someone else no longer has a pulse.

And I was counting on still having a pulse when this was all said and done.

As for Peyton, I no longer cared what the Tribunal wanted. He would die tonight.

“You think you can kill me?” I said with a defiant sneer. “I’d like to see you try.”

“Insolent girl!” The humor was fading with every syllable. I was getting to him, and that’s what I had been counting on.

Peyton grabbed a fistful of my hair and used it to pull me up with him as he rose to a standing position. After lying on the ground for so long it took me a moment to get my footing, and that’s when he went for my throat. I made a decision then, and I could only hope it was the right one.

Instead of escaping Peyton, I pulled the gun from the back of my pants and pointed it in the opposite direction. As the vampire’s fangs punctured my artery, I started with a full clip and emptied half of it into Marcus Sullivan’s head. I pivoted my eyes in time to see him fall dead at my mother’s feet, surprise still etched on his face.

“Guess you’re not the queen now, bitch.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

The moment Marcus’s death registered with my mother it felt like a dozen things happened at once. Too much was taking place simultaneously for my brain to process most of it, and my vision had begun to swirl.

I turned the gun on my mother but before I could shoot, Peyton’s fangs sank deeper into my neck, undeterred by the previous gunfire. As his teeth dove farther he must have severed a nerve because my whole arm went limp and my hand fell open against my will. The gun clattered to the floor, leaving me unarmed and helpless. Peyton’s hands splayed across my back, and he used my sagging frame to his advantage, dipping me backwards in a way that would have looked romantic if he hadn’t been sucking my blood.

With my eyes rolling back I could see the empty antechamber and wondered, for the first time, what had happened to the unconscious guards. The mountainous corpse of the head guard was still slumped on the floor, but none of the others remained. I didn’t want to dwell too long on what might become of werewolves who’d failed to protect their alpha and his vampire partner. Before I had time to further ponder their absence, my mother let out a loud, anguished scream and hurled herself onto Peyton and me.

In her short flight across the room her hands transformed. The fingers disjointed, twisting and shifting with sickening crunch-pop noises I could hear over her shrieks. Her nails elongated and became claws. It was with these deformed appendages that she attempted to lash out at me from on top of Peyton’s back. Those monstrous hands, I knew with perfect clarity, had been the same ones she had buried into my neck that night at the Chameleon.

The weight of the two of them brought us all crashing to the ground. Peyton was locked on to me in a feeding frenzy, like a shark maddened by the scent of blood, only he was attached to me at the neck, drawing out my life one swallow at a time.

My mother was shrieking and growling, slashing at whatever she could reach. Peyton’s back was being torn to bloody ribbons, but he no longer seemed aware of anything except for feeding.

Pinpoints of light appeared in my vision, and they danced and shimmied all across the room. One of my mother’s swipes hit me across the face, and her claws opened the skin of my cheek, but I was in shock from having lost too much blood. It felt like something wet and breezy that stung my face.

“You killed him! You killed him! You killed him!” Her words were jumbled together, repeated over and over until they no longer had any meaning, and she was just making impotent, pained noises.

I opened my mouth to make a quip back at her, but a bubbling, gurgling sound came from the base of my throat instead. If I couldn’t be a smartass, chances were good I didn’t have much time left. Mind you, if I could still think about being a smartass, perhaps I wasn’t a lost cause just yet.

As my vision started to taper out and my hearing became more tinny, I swore I heard someone shout my name.

“Secret!” It sounded like Lucas.

This had to be a sure sign time was running out. Hallucinations couldn’t mean anything good.

“Secret!” This time louder, closer, more adamant. It seemed too real to ignore, but with a three-hundred-year-old vampire latched onto my neck, I didn’t have the luxury of turning to look.

Rolling my eyes to the side, I imagined I could see a large group of people crowd into the room.

“Huhhhh.” I was trying to say
hi
in a last-ditch attempt at my lunatic form of humor, but it came out as a sort of death rattle. “Oh,” I added, when I realized the words were not what I wanted them to be.

Snarling echoed through the room, but more masculine than the sounds my mother had been making.

“Get the wolf.” This voice was so familiar my pulse quickened with relief, which only caused Peyton to clamp down harder.

“Hol…” I stopped trying to talk and gurgled a scream as Peyton buried his face into the open wound of my neck, and his teeth grazed bone.

Holden moved faster than the werewolves and was already grabbing for Mercy before Dominick, Desmond and Lucas had crossed the antechamber. Lucas was still growling as they surged forward and fell onto the writhing mass of pain on top of me. The four of them had all swept in so quickly I was only half willing to accept they were real.

With Desmond and Lucas so close I expected I’d be able to taste them, but I couldn’t and it chilled me.

Lucas edged past Holden, ripped my mother off the pile and hurled her at the far wall, where she collapsed onto the floor in a heap, not moving. Desmond and Holden were trying to pry Peyton off me without success. He had bitten me down to the bone and wasn’t showing any signs of letting up.

I locked eyes with Desmond, and in that moment the whole tableau froze. The look on his face was so much more tormented than it had been the night at the club. His expression made me think I was as good as dead, because no one looked at you like that if there was hope. In spite of the fact we were staring right at each other, he was giving up. He looked defeated, crushed and totally hopeless. It broke something inside me.

“No.” It was the one word I was capable of saying no matter how bad things got. My brow furrowed at him, and I tried to shake my head, but I couldn’t for obvious reasons. “No.” My voice may have been small, but the look in my eyes made my point for me.

Desmond released the breath he’d been holding and turned back towards Holden and Peyton. Holden was using all of his strength to drag Peyton off, and I could feel the skin of my neck tearing looser and separating from bone as they struggled. If they continued on this course, my neck would be ripped wide open by the time they succeeded in pulling him away.

“You mustn’t yank him like that.” A female voice, clipped, with an unidentifiable accent. It was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “He’s locked on to her. If you continue, you will only succeed in killing your half-breed friend.”

Lucas recoiled, but Holden was less compliant.

“Warden.” This was said in a warning tone that carried commanding weight. She was addressing Holden by his title, his low rank, which implied she was superior to him. “You
will
release the rogue.”

Holden hesitated, but he let go of Peyton. It was only then Peyton seemed to become aware there was anyone aside from me in the room with him. He unhinged his jaw and raised his head from my neck to look around. His face was smeared and dripping with my blood.