The Secret Guide to Dating Monsters: Secret McQueen Story (8 page)

“I’ll make it painless.” The smile on my face gave away how much I was going to enjoy it. I only wished I could make it last longer.

The sword only had to swing once. A vampire couldn’t come back from a beheading.

Chapter Eight

The next night, I found myself sitting on the steps outside of the council’s headquarters with a newspaper in my hands, thanking my lucky stars I was alive. Surviving Charlie and his goons had been the easy part. Facing the Tribunal afterwards to explain why I’d killed three vampires on a subway platform filled with witnesses, well…

I’d rather be neck-deep in hungry rogues than square off against the Tribunal again.

To be fair, they’d gone easy on me given how close I’d come to exposing the truth about vampires to the world. I could have been executed for what I’d done, and one of the three leaders, Juan Carlos, seemed more than happy to watch me die. Thankfully, the two others, Sig and Daria, weren’t in such a hurry to do me in.

They needed to punish me for something, though, or risk total anarchy among the council. They’d charged me with the unlawful execution of three rogues. It was, as charges go, a misdemeanor and a total walk in the park punishment-wise. I got to keep the ten thousand for killing Charlie but owed the council the head value of each of the guards. They had docked fifteen hundred dollars from my bounty, and I’d been removed from active duty for a month.

I tried to be happy about my hefty new bank balance, but I was too mad at Holden to enjoy it. Not only had he missed almost the entire fight, he had done nothing to defend me to the Tribunal tonight. Instead, he’d agreed my actions had been reckless and stupid and that I had put every vampire in New York at risk.

It wasn’t that he was wrong, I was just pissed he hadn’t even tried to take my side.

My phone vibrated, distracting me from my grumpy musings. The caller ID told me it was Mercedes, and I considered not answering.

“Hello?” I said warily, bracing myself for her wrath.

“So, Tyler called me,” she began. She sounded calm enough.

“Yeah?” I didn’t know what Tyler would have told her, because I only knew the truth. I had no idea what Holden had convinced Tyler of when the detective was under the thrall.

“Yes.” Anger laced her tone, and I knew whatever the story was it wasn’t good. “He said you guys were having a great time until you got a business call and just vanished. He said you left him in the restaurant without a word, and even though he tried to call you, you totally blew him off.”

“Oh.” Well, so much for a second date. I was livid. Instead of giving him a story that would have let me still be the good guy, like a friend in the hospital or something, now Tyler was always going to remember me as that bitch who ditched him in the middle of dinner. Awesome.

“Oh? That’s all you can say?”

I was somewhat distracted by that day’s edition of the
New York Post
, which Holden had been kind enough to provide me a copy of. The front-page headline boldly announced the story of a vigilante blonde with a sword who had been terrorizing the subway during the night. Details were foggy, because the only witnesses were people who had run away before the vampires had arrived, and there were no bodies or evidence of any kind to back up the story. The body of the guard in Charlie’s room had already turned to ash thanks to the big, open windows, and the vampires had subsequently wiped the memories of everyone involved.

Sig had seen to it that by tomorrow the
Post
would be printing a retraction, and hopefully by the end of the week it would all be forgotten.

“I’m sorry, Cedes.” I really was. “Something came up.”

“I just don’t know about you sometimes.” She hung up.

I slipped the phone back in my pocket and stood. Sure, things could have been a lot worse. But that didn’t mean I had to like the way they were.

A month to the day after the Tribunal passed judgment on me, I awoke at nightfall with a dead man in my bedroom.

I pulled my duvet over my head and groaned, hoping he would be gone by the time I re-emerged. It was a shame you couldn’t ignore vampires into vanishing, because it would certainly make my job and my life a heck of a lot easier.

“Stop behaving like a child, Secret,” Holden insisted, sitting comfortably in the chair at the end of my bed. “Let’s have a talk, shall we?”

I threw the covers back down but refused to look at him. It had been a month since I’d seen him, and in that time he hadn’t once tried to talk to me. I was also still a little ticked off about the role he’d played in my meeting with the Tribunal. Not to mention how he’d ruined my love life.

“Fine,” I said, inhaling a deep breath. “You want to talk? Where would you like to start? Maybe with why you threw me under the bus with the Tribunal? Or why you haven’t even
tried
to talk to me in a month? Or, hey, why don’t you start by telling me why Charlie Conaway called you
brother
?”

I’d expected him to balk on answering but I was mistaken.

“I told the Tribunal the truth. You did put us all at risk,” he began. I let out a protesting grumble, but he ignored me. “And I haven’t spoken to you in a month because the Tribunal wouldn’t allow it.”

There was a long pause as he made a big show of straightening the white cuffs of his dress shirt. I knew he hadn’t forgotten my last question, because Holden never seemed to forget anything. After the silence dragged on for half a minute, he spoke again. “Charlie called me brother because we were made by the same vampire.” He remained calm and poised, and his body language did not change, even when the topic shifted to something so personal.

“He was older than me,” Holden continued. “He taught me a lot about what it means to be what we are. But that was a long time ago.” He smiled a little sadly, and I knew that was all he was going to say.

He reached into his jacket pocket, withdrew something familiar that filled me with a sense of anticipation and placed it on the end of my bed.

“Is that what I think it is?” After going so long without work, I felt a bubbling of unexpected joy to see one of those envelopes again. I hadn’t realized how badly I’d missed my job.

“It’s been a month. You’re no longer blacklisted for work. Time to get up.” He patted my foot lightly.

“The last time I went hunting I had a Coke machine thrown at me,” I groused, trying not to show my excitement.

“Yes, well.” He stood and offered me a hand. “You also diced up four vampires and convinced the world Charlie Conaway became a recluse after his newest action-thriller failed to find backers.”

“But a
Coke machine
.”

He pulled me to my feet so I was standing next to him. The one thing we hadn’t addressed was our interlude in the hallway outside Charlie’s hotel room. If he wasn’t going to say anything, I figured we must be pretending it had never happened. It had just been one of those things. One of those super-hot, mind-melting, knee-weakening things. Yup, this was me, pretending it never happened.

I picked up the envelope, and we walked out of the bedroom, him a few feet behind me.

“You know what they say,” he said. “If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger, right?”

After breaking the wax seal, I slid the card out and was thankful to not recognize the name. I put it down on my kitchen table and opened the fridge to see what I had in the way of blood on hand.

“They’ll keep saying that,” I replied, pulling out a donor bag of A positive, “until it actually
does
kill me.”

Holden picked up the card from the table and chuckled with genuine amusement. “Well, there’s always next time.”

About the Author

Sierra Dean is a reformed historian. She was born and raised in the Canadian prairies and is allowed annual exit visas in order to continue her quest of steadily conquering the world one city at a time. Making the best of the cold Canadian winters, Sierra indulges in her less global interests: drinking too much tea and writing urban fantasy.

Ever since she was a young girl she has loved the idea of the supernatural coexisting with the mundane. As an adult, however, the idea evolved from the notion of fairies in flower beds, to imagining that the rugged-looking guy at the garage might secretly be a werewolf. She has used her overactive imagination to create her own version of the world, where vampire, werewolves, fairies, gods and monsters all walk among us, and she’ll continue to travel as much as possible until she finds it for real.

Sierra can be reached all over the place, as she’s a little addicted to social networking. Find her on:

Facebook:
www.facebook.com/sierradeanbooks

Website:
www.sierradean.com

E-mail:
[email protected]

Twitter:
@sierradean

Look for these titles by Sierra Dean

Now Available:

Secret McQueen

Something Secret This Way Comes

Coming Soon:

Secret McQueen

A Bloody Good Secret

Some secrets are dangerous. This Secret is deadly.

Something Secret This Way Comes

© 2011 Sierra Dean

Secret McQueen, Book 1

For Secret McQueen, her life feels like the punch line for a terrible joke. Abandoned at birth by her werewolf mother, hired as a teen by the vampire council of New York City to kill rogues, Secret is a part of both worlds, but belongs to neither. At twenty-two, she has carved out as close to a normal life as a bounty hunter can.

When an enemy from her past returns with her death on his mind, she is forced to call on every ounce of her mixed heritage to save herself—and everyone else in the city she calls home. As if the fate of the world wasn’t enough to deal with, there’s Lucas Rain, King of the East Coast werewolves, who seems to believe he and Secret are fated to be together. Too bad Secret also feels a connection with Desmond, Lucas’s second-in-command…

Warning: This book contains a sarcastic, kick-ass bounty hunter; a metaphysical love triangle with two sexy werewolves; a demanding vampire council; and a spicy seasoning of sex and violence.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Something Secret This Way Comes:

I recapped the events of the evening as best I could over the limitations of voicemail. “Hey, Holden, it’s Secret. I killed an unsanctioned rogue in the park tonight. He had it coming. Send the Tribunal my love.”

I was in an all-night café near Keaty’s, waiting for my nonfat no-foam latte while I left the message. The barista behind the counter, who appeared to be about fourteen, gave me a concerned look.

I flashed him my well-practiced innocent smile and said, “My dungeon master.” A spark of revelation lit upon his zitty face. “I just needed him to know the outcome of a campaign he missed.” I winked and took my drink out of his hand while he muttered something about rolling twenties.

It was late spring, and there was still a chill in the air, but the café had seen fit to set up its sidewalk patio a week or so after the snow melted. I pulled my jacket around me, though the cold didn’t really bother me, and sat on one of the wrought-iron chairs. My cell phone was securely in my pocket in case Holden called, but I expected I wouldn’t hear from him right away. I was also in no hurry to go back to the office and talk to Keaty about the state of affairs I now found myself in. I’d told him I was getting a coffee and then calling it a night.

Dawn was only an hour or two away, and there was nothing I could do to change what I’d done tonight. I would have to face the consequences when they came.

I tried to enjoy the hot, bitter sweetness of the latte, in sharp contrast to the coolness of the night, but my mind was reeling from what had happened. It took a lot to scare me, mostly because almost anything that went bump in the night I had killed at some point, but my encounter with Henry Davies had really shaken me.

The unshakeable, calm and centered Secret McQueen had been knocked on her proverbial ass by the impression of a bite mark. Maybe I had been mistaken. There was a chance part of the bite had healed faster or maybe I had been anticipating it so much I had imagined the missing tooth mark.

I prayed that I was wrong. In the six years I had been doing this, the closest anyone had ever come to truly killing me was Alexandre Peyton, and he had promised me that next time we met he wouldn’t fail. If I was right about it being his mark, I was going to need to be on my guard more than usual until things either came to a head or blew over.

As I sipped my coffee I was overcome by an unexpected warmth which had nothing to do with the drink. It was like a humid summer breeze was blowing down 81st Street, only it crawled over my body and into my pores. My mouth felt thick with musky, dense flavor. The sensation was invasive and overwhelming, and what scared me the most was how comfortable I felt with it. I licked my lips and tasted cinnamon.

My latte was vanilla.

It was then, with a ripple of electric pinpricks up my spine, I felt a man pass. He approached from behind me and seemed to be wholly unaware of my presence until he turned towards the café door. He paused before entering, his close-cropped ash-colored hair tousled by the cool night air, and fixed his radiant azure eyes on me. There were two men with him, one on either side—a brunet who was the same height, just over six feet, and another who was my height and blond. The one who was watching me looked as puzzled as I felt, but he snapped out of it after a brief period of stunned silence and took a step in my direction.

“Hello?” he said, the way people do when they believe they already know you and simply cannot place the who and how.

If I’d been on my game, I’d have a snappy shoot-down or roll my eyes and tell him to get lost. I might have ignored him under any
normal
circumstances, because as a general rule I try to avoid men who might try to flirt with me. I did not date, although I had tried once or twice in the past. I had no time or patience for it, not to mention there were certain aspects of my life I could never explain to a human boyfriend.