Keeping Secret: Secret McQueen, Book 4 (3 page)

Not that anyone was going to get to see me in it at the rate my vampire ward was dragging her ass to get ready.

The vampire in question popped her head out from her bedroom door, her blonde hair still pinned up in hot curlers. My eyes bugged when I saw how far removed from good-to-go she was. I swear I could feel an artery swell in my temple, throbbing loudly with the threat of bursting at any minute. Oh please, let me die of an aneurism. Then I wouldn’t have to kill her.

“Seriously?” I croaked.

“No, no, no.” She waved her hand dismissively at me, batting away my irritation like a cat with a toy. Then she stepped out of her bedroom to show me she was fully dressed in a pretty cornflower-blue dress. She looked like every pretty, perky Midwestern girl-next-door cliché I could think of. But more than that, she was fresh-faced and beautiful. As she pulled the rollers out of her hair, I couldn’t help but let out a laugh. “What?” she asked, her gaze drifting down to her dress as though the outfit was the source of my mirth.

“Your hair.” I pointed to the thick, bouncy curls now forming where the rollers had once been.

“What about it?”

I ran a hand through my own hair, stick straight from an earlier stop at the salon. My hair was naturally a mess of thick, loose curls, much like those Brigit had created for herself. Her typical style was straight and glossy. We looked like twins who had decided to swap roles for the night. Once she had taken out all the rollers, it was uncanny how similar she looked to me, even from my less-than-objective perspective on things.

“You want to pretend to be me for this stupid party?” I asked, only half kidding.

“Secret, I love you and all, but there isn’t enough money in the world to make me want to
be
you.” Her long lashes fluttered innocently, but there was a flash of fang in her smile, giving her the appearance of something predatory.

My baby vampire was really settling into her new life. It had only been a year since she’d been forcibly turned into a blood-sucking fiend, but she was taking her new status in stride. Although she’d once hated being an undead American, it seemed as though she was starting to relish it more and more with each passing month. I wish I could accept my vampiric heritage as well as she did.

“You ready?” She slung a purse over her shoulder and tapped an impatient toe as though I’d been the one dragging ass this whole time. The great thing about Brigit was no matter how hard she tried to look serious or menacing, she could never fake it. In a moment she was grinning and giggling like a preteen.

“Let’s get this show on the road.”

Central Park West would never
not
remind me of the shitty prime-time soap opera that once bore the same name. My
grandmere
had loved the cheeky show so much she used to tape it weekly, which was how I’d stumbled across it years after it aired and before I moved to the city itself. Parked outside the shiny monstrosity of an apartment block where my future sister-in-law lived, I couldn’t help imagining people cheating on their spouses and sleeping off midday hangovers within the bowels of the complex. Rich people didn’t tend to want for material things, so they spent most of their time wanting attention instead. When they didn’t get that, well…shit met fan.

The reputation of one Miss Kellen Rain was a prime example of attention whoring gone wrong. Although I now knew her personally, I still got a sick sort of voyeuristic pleasure from reading about her exploits in the weekly gossip columns. From burning down the bar of an Italian bistro in the West Village, to having sex in the turtle pond in Central Park, there was never a shortage of rumors. The turtle-pond rumor had been made even more humorous, given Kellen’s reaction when I asked her about it.

“Please,” she’d said with a dramatic eye roll. “Do you have any idea what kind of bacteria is in that pond? Not to mention the turtles.
Ugh
. I have a shapeshifter predisposition. As if I’d risk getting bitten by a turtle and becoming some bizarre Ninja Turtle freak.” At that point I had made a comment on the lady protesting too much. “Well, I
did
have sex in the park…but in the castle, not the pond.”

That was Kellen Rain in a nutshell. Unapologetic and somehow totally loveable.

She had also missed the memo on bridesmaids not overshadowing the bride at wedding-related events. When she bounded past the building’s doorman, even he did a double take, and I’d never seen the man so much as blink before. In spite of the brisk mid-April weather, Kellen was wearing a slinky gold dress dripping with flouncy fringe. She looked like a Bond girl. Or a stripper from the ’20s.

Once she had clambered over Brigit into the tiny backseat of the BMW, which was barely a backseat at all, Kellen put an elbow next to each headrest and perched her smiling face on both hands. Only when the car door slammed did the doorman shut his mouth and come out of his stupor.

“Subtle ensemble, Kel.” I shook my head, unable to be genuinely irritated. Between Brigit and Kellen, I was in danger of losing my killer edge. They were making me soft, at least when the attacks involved charm.

“You look like a chandelier,” Brigit added, but the awe in her voice was all it took to know she wasn’t being rude.

Kellen, who had heard every possible derisive comment and cruel barb, seemed taken aback by the young vampire’s compliment. She blushed. “Thanks, Brigit. You look pretty too.”

I revved the engine. “All right, all right, enough. Have either of you two ever driven on the highway with a vampire in a sports car?” My two bridesmaids exchanged nervous glances in the rearview mirror and fastened their seat belts in a hurry. I flipped my straight hair over my shoulders and gave a wicked chuckle. “Smart girls.”

And with that, I peeled out of the parking spot with enough burning rubber to make Steve McQueen proud to share a name with me.

Chapter Five

Under normal circumstances, the trip to Lucas’s mansion in Upstate New York should have taken over an hour. Google Maps would tell you so, anyway. The narrow two-lane highway wound like an asphalt snake through a towering hall of pine and bare-branched oak. Every time you passed another car you took your life into your own hands, risking oncoming traffic around the next tight curve in the road.

Whenever I drove from the city to Lucas’s sprawling country estate, the looming darkness of the trees made me nervous. The dark can hide so many evils, I was hesitant to let my eyes linger on the tree line because my overactive imagination could formulate any number of potential attacks from within.

I never expected the road itself would be the thing I should fear.

The first blow was so sudden I thought I’d run something over. But as my gaze darted to the rearview mirror to see what poor fox or badger I might have killed, the previously unseen car behind me turned on its brights. The glare of the lights flashed in my eyes, rendering me momentarily blind. As the fist-sized spots of light swam in my vision, the car struck us again. This time the BMW bucked and I lost control of the wheel, swerving into the oncoming lane, which remained empty by some miracle.

Kellen let out a startled shriek and held on to my headrest. I got myself together, blinking away the blind spots, and swung the car into the proper lane, overshooting by a hair and sending a wave of gravel arcing backwards when I hit the shoulder.

I jerked the wheel back from the edge of the road and jammed my foot down on the brake, forcing the car into a sudden spin and making my tires scream as they burned a trail of hot rubber across the cool spring blacktop. When the car came to a halt, steam was rising off the cement and my BMW was headlight to headlight with a black Corolla. Possibly the least distinctive car imaginable.

Kellen squeezed my shoulder, reminding me I was not alone in this hellish game of bumper cars.

When I looked to my right at Brigit—just a quick shift of my gaze since I didn’t want to take my eyes off the car in front of me—the young vampire was wide-eyed but wore a vaguely excited expression. Kellen, on the other hand, was threatening to break my collarbone with her death grip.

“What do they want?” she asked, her voice high and trembling. “What do they want, Secret?”

I shrugged off her hand, trying not to be cruel about it. My future sister-in-law was terrified, and my being flippant wasn’t going to help anyone.

“I don’t know,” I replied honestly. “Do you want me to get out and ask?”

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t a
nice
response, but in perilous situations I have a bad habit of overindulging in sass, so all things considered it was politer than I would have been normally.

Kellen didn’t seem to be fazed—she was too busy being scared out of her mind. “No,” she said. “No, please don’t.”

The Corolla revved its engine. My stupid brain was reminded of the scene in
Footloose
where the two boys decide to play chicken using tractors. It was all I could picture as the black car edged forward.

“Ladies,” I whispered, shifting the car into reverse and letting up on the brake a fraction of an inch. “Hold the fuck on.”

I did my best to press the gas pedal right into the floor, and the car responded by growling and shooting backwards at a breakneck speed. The Corolla was left in our dust as I sped around a curve, but our reprieve was short-lived when the familiar lights slid past the bend like a luminous worm.

There was a secondary flash, quick and bright as lightning, and then my windshield gave a wheeze and a bullet tore through the interior, past all three of us, and out the rear window. I expected the safety glass to crack and shatter into a million tiny squares, but instead it seemed to move out of the way of the projectile, leaving a puckered hole in both windows and trailing spider-web cracks around the entry and exit points.

Kellen screamed loud and long. Brigit, who no longer needed breath to live, let out a gasp and braced her hand against the dash.

I rolled down my window, and a howl of cool April air blasted the interior of the car as we continued our frenzied pace along the highway with only the dim red lights of rear bulbs to guide us. I could see in the dark, but with headlights shining in my eyes and a car going backwards at almost sixty miles an hour, I was tempting fate on a scary level.

“Bri, my gun.”

“Where?”

“There’s one in the glove box.”

She didn’t need to be told twice. The glove box was open and the gun loaded and in my waiting palm before I had a chance to say
please
.

“I need your foot.” This time I had to take my gaze off the road to look at her because I wasn’t sure she’d understand what I was asking for. She was shaking her head emphatically even as she shifted in her seat, moving her legs from under the dash.

“You can’t.”

“What are you talking about?” Kellen piped in, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Don’t worry,” I told them both. “I know what I’m doing.”

It never ceased to amaze me, but whenever I used those words, people were stupid enough to believe me. And I think every time I said it, I hadn’t the faintest idea in hell what was going to happen next.

Brigit stopped shaking her head and Kellen sat back in her seat, muttering what sounded like the Lord’s Prayer. Good. If God was listening, we could use a little divine intervention for what I was about to do.

“On the count of three,” I instructed Brigit. She nodded her mute acceptance.

The window was rolled all the way down, and my hair whipped across my face. The whole left side of my body was alive with goose bumps, but my rage was so focused I couldn’t feel the cold.

“One.”

I undid my seat belt and let it wind itself up with a loud whir. “What are you doing?” Kellen asked. When I didn’t answer, she turned to Brigit. “What is she doing?”

“You really don’t want to know. Like really,
really
.”

I ignored them both. “Two.”

Letting up on the gas, I slowed the car just enough I figured we might not die in a horrible fiery wreck in the next second. Then I met Brigit’s gaze and smiled with forced hopefulness. She looked as grim as I felt.

“Three.”

Chapter Six

With the gun still in my hand, I shifted the stick back into drive. Using my left hand, I spun the wheel a full rotation before dragging myself out the open window. Brigit, true to her word, had managed to place her foot on the gas pedal, and we started to gain speed the second I was in my new position.

I hooked one heel on the upper curve of the steering wheel and wedged the arch of my foot on the lower portion, giving me an anchor within the car and also the ability to keep steering. Brigit could keep the gas going, but she couldn’t read my mind.

Now that the car was facing forwards again, I had to turn backwards to see our would-be assailants, and I had no intention of letting them follow through with whatever they had planned. Another burst of light and a loud crack preceded the arrival of the next bullet, but I kicked my foot slightly and the car veered to the right. A lock of my hair, newly severed, flew off and into the dark. I righted the car and then returned fire.

The first bullet was a direct hit, and the other car had a properly designed windshield because it shattered the instant the bullet struck, raining small pellets of glass all over the interior of the cab. The shards glistened in the light of the moon and my taillights, making them look like polished bits of bloody ice.