by Sierra Dean
“I know.”
“When this is over, can we just stay in bed for a week?”
He gave me a grim smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes, and after a much-too-long pause said, “Sure.”
There was a lot to unpack in both the silence and the response, and I almost needled him for answers, but the expression on his face told me now was not the time. When the right time would be I couldn’t begin to say, but I’d let it slide for now.
Still, it added a whole new knot of worry to the already building ball of turmoil in my gut. Something was up with him, something he wasn’t willing to share with me. I thought of all the messages he’d been getting over the last week and suddenly my guilt was replaced by a fierce stab of worry.
Was there something serious he wasn’t telling me? There had to be.
“We’re here,” Secret said.
I hadn’t even felt the plane start to descend, and it felt as if we had barely even left the tarmac in Louisiana, and yet sure enough when I looked out the plane’s window there was the sparkling skyline of New York City spread out beneath us like a glittery map.
The last time I’d been here, the world had been ending.
It was so strange to see it now, looking as if those events had never happened. Everything had changed that night. The dead had risen, secrets held for millennia had been revealed, and the woman sitting ten feet away from me had given up her very life to make sure everything was set right.
Now she, and the man who had died to save me, were both alive and seemingly well, and we were returning to the city where they’d both once died. For Secret, it was a literal homecoming. She and Desmond lived in New York, and she commuted every other week to work with the FBI task force in Los Angeles.
That was, when she wasn’t running all over hell’s half acre hunting down the creepy monsters and creatures who wanted to upset the tenuous new balance we’d found with humankind.
She had a lot of frequent flyer miles.
I caught her staring out the window, her fingernails nervously tapping on the seat arm. She was clearly as worried about Desmond as I was about whatever Wilder was keeping from me.
We had a lot more in common than just our names.
“He’s going to be okay,” I said.
“I know,” she replied too quickly. “Nothing can happen to him.”
To the casual ear her words might have sounded like her saying he was too well protected for anything to happen, but I knew what she really meant. Nothing could happen to Desmond because it would ruin her. She was saying it to the universe, demanding a promise that the indifferent cosmos would never make good on.
Nothing would happen to Desmond because she wouldn’t let it.
Part of me wondered if the presence of Lucas was making her worry. Fate had returned one husband to her doorstep. Would it try to take away the other out of spite.
Secret chewed on her lower lip and shifted uncomfortably in the very comfortable chair.
“Nothing will happen to him,” I repeated back to her.
She nodded, but I wasn’t sure she’d believe me until she laid eyes on him.
For some reason I thought of Santiago, of how he’d looked the moment Deerling’s blade went through him, and in my mind, Santiago’s face became Desmond’s.
I swallowed hard.
Good thing I wasn’t psychic, or I might be worried.
Chapter Thirty-one
“I told you to go home,” Secret burst out furiously as we exited the plane.
Desmond Alvarez, her husband, and the werewolf King of the East, was standing at the bottom of the plane’s stairs waiting for her, wearing a giant I don’t give a fuck smile.
He was a beautiful man, with a dark copper complexion and even darker near-black hair. His violet-hued eyes twinkled merrily as he scooped her up into his arms and planted a kiss on her lips. Clearly her fury had fallen on deaf ears.
“You tell me to do a lot of things, Secret, I have to learn to pick and choose.” He pressed another kiss between on her furrowed brow as he set her back down.
“Your life is in danger,” she countered.
“My life is always in danger.”
I tried to hide my smirk but it was impossible. These two were so perfectly matched it served her right for marrying him. Now she could see how irritatingly bull-headed she could be.
“I hate you so much.” She stood on her tiptoes to kiss him, then ran her fingers through his hair, pushing it back off his forehead.
“I hate you, too.” He grinned and the intensity of it could have powered the city for a decade. Even I felt weak in the knees.
The mood shifted drastically the moment Lucas emerged from the plane and joined us on the tarmac. Silence as thick as molasses settled over the tarmac, and Wilder and I both took a few steps back, knowing this scene had nothing to do with us. I sort of felt guilty for watching it.
Lucas and Desmond both stared at each other, and I couldn’t tell what was going through either of their heads, when their faces gave nothing away.
Finally, Desmond said, “Is it really you?”
Lucas glanced down at himself like he wasn’t entirely sure, then nodded. “I think so.”
Then in an instant, Desmond cleared the gap between them and wrapped his arms around Lucas in a fierce bear hug. Tears twinkled in Desmond’s eyes and he didn’t seem to care in the slightest that we could all see him crying.
He held Lucas back at arm’s distance, taking him in, looking the blond man over from top to bottom, like he might find something to suggest he was an imposter. “I don’t know how this is possible, but goddamn, man, I’m glad to see you.”
“You got so much uglier while I was gone,” Lucas said.
Desmond let out a big belly laugh and hugged his friend again, this time Lucas hugged him back just as hard. “I’m glad being dead didn’t make you less of an asshole.”
“God, are you two going to make out?” Secret asked.
“I feel like that might have solved a lot of their relationship problems,” I whispered to Wilder.
“I heard that you little witch,” she said.
“We all thought it might happen at one point or another,” said a slim blond man I hadn’t even noticed up until then.
Dominick Alvarez, Desmond’s bodyguard and younger brother, was standing next to a sleek black town car, clearly he’d been waiting patiently for this little display to end, but I’d opened the door for him to get his own jibe in.
Dominick was slight of build, being only about the same height as Secret, but he was also muscular an radiated an undeniable I’ll mess you up vibe. Small, yes, but he would wreck you in hand-to-hand combat. It’s what made him such a good bodyguard. His unassuming stature made everyone second-guess him.
I knew all about that.
“You ready for shit to hit the fan?” I asked him.
“Girl, do you see the family I was born into? I’m never not ready.”
I smiled. He had a way of making everything feel like a joke, and from anyone else it might have been annoying, but Dominick was skilled in making people around him feel immediately at ease in his presence. He soaked up worry like a tree turning carbon dioxide into oxygen.
I was glad he was here.
“Has there been any sign of Mercy yet?” Wilder asked, turning the conversation in a more pragmatic direction.
Desmond disengaged from his hug with Lucas and returned to Secret’s side. He continued to cast sidelong glances at his best friend, and for the first time since Lucas’s return I realized just how much the dead king had meant to Desmond. I’d been so busy wondering what it meant for the eastern packs I never stopped to consider what it might mean for the man leading them.
I knew then that Desmond didn’t care about the throne or titles.
He only cared that Lucas was alive again.
I wished Mercy’s return could have been that for me and Secret instead of the deadly burden it had become.
“
We’ve had wolves patrolling the city since Secret called to tell me, but so far no one has spotted her. Knowing Mercy I doubt she’ll make an appearance until she’s good and ready,” Desmond said.
“And in the meantime we’re going to go back to the apartment,” Secret said. “Where it’s safe.”
Desmond scoffed. “Do you honestly think your mother is going to let us sit tight and wait out the storm? She is the storm. No. If we go into hiding she’s going to do something to drag us out, and personally I’d rather just make myself easy to find as opposed to putting anyone else at risk.”
Secret stared at Desmond like she didn’t even know who he was, and I for one was stunned by the level of thought he’d been able to put into this when he had only found out about Mercy’s return mere hours earlier.
“I liked this better when I was the one who made the plans,” she said.
“If your plan had been any good I’d have let you roll with it.” Desmond grinned.
She narrowed her eyes at him but it was obvious even from across the tarmac that she wasn’t really mad.
“Okay so we put ourselves in harm’s way. Does anyone have a good suggestion of where the center of the target might be?” I asked. “We can’t just wander the streets of Manhattan all night hoping trouble finds us.”
“Actually, I’ve found that method to be very effective in the past,” Secret said.
I rolled my eyes. “I think we might want to find something obvious, somewhere she’d be bound to seek us out. Your place now doesn’t work, you didn’t live there when Mercy was alive. We need to go to where she’d know to look for you.”
There was a moment’s silence as we all thought of this. Secret had plenty of places she’d spent time in the city when Mercy had been alive, and it was hard to say which of them our mother would gravitate to first.
Secret swore under her breath.
“What?” I asked.
“I know where she’ll go.” She sounded angry, as if furious with herself for not coming to the conclusion hours ago. “My old apartment.”
“But that means…”
Secret nodded grimly.
“She’ll find my dad.”
Chapter Thirty-two
When Secret had moved out of her old Hell’s Kitchen apartment and into a new place with Desmond, her old digs hadn’t gone to waste. Since it had already been outfitted with a vampire in mind, she’d used it as a new home for her vampire father Sutherland Halliston.
Sutherland, who Secret had rescued during a particularly dark period in her life, wasn’t… well, he wasn’t altogether there. He was a nice enough guy, who looked permanently seventeen – the age he’d been when he impregnated Mercy, and then subsequently been turned into a vampire. Apparently, when you’re turned into a vamp and try to murder your pregnant girlfriend, you get a little unhinged in the process.
Sutherland’s sire had been a rogue, who had abandoned the boy to his own devices. Needless to say, it had gone very poorly. He hadn’t been the same since, and was a bit messed up in the head even now.
He wasn’t dangerous, and he’d been permitted by the vampire Tribunal to live on his own among humans, but he was a bit touched.
I wasn’t altogether sure how a meeting between him and Mercy would play out. Or, in fact, what Mercy would do when she saw him. Would she try to kill him for his part in creating Secret? Would she be happy to reconnect?
I wasn’t sure my mother knew what happiness was anymore. Her only joy came from feeding her spite.
We all hopped into the town car and headed towards Secret’s old place. The city had changed significantly since I’d last been here. We passed new bars and restaurants, some with vampire and werewolf themes, others that had stickers on their doors beneath the rainbow flags that indicated they were LGBTQ friendly. The new ones showed a full moon with a drop of blood inside, the symbol that told patrons the establishment was open to supernaturals.
More often than not places were open to us these days, mostly because it was impossible to tell at a glance when someone was or wasn’t a supe, but it was nice to see places making an effort to openly embrace us.
There were days I wished we were still a well-kept secret, but now that the coffin lid was open, so to speak, we couldn’t just climb back inside and pretend to be storybook creatures anymore.
We drove past the place where Lucas’s enormous hotel Rain had once stood, the place he had died. The place Morgan had almost killed me. A park was in its place, with a building that housed a memorial to all those who had died during the necromancer assault on the city.
Lucas stared at it as we went by, the trees adorned with lights and a fountain trickling in the middle.
The last time he’d been here, it had been a luxury hotel, and it had been on fire.
I had no way to imagine what was going through his mind right now.
“Whose idea was the park?” he asked quietly, after we were past it.
“Mine,” Desmond replied.
“Would have been a better investment to build a new hotel,” Lucas countered.
Desmond smiled softly at him. “No one wants to stay at a cursed hotel, buddy.”
“Everyone wants to stay at a cursed hotel, are you kidding me?” He glanced over at Desmond. “Did you fuck up the Columbia, too?”
“No, it’s still one of the top-rated hotels in the city, calm down.”
“Just want to make sure I left my empire in good hands.”
“I sold the Red Sox,” Desmond admitted.
“Yankees-loving traitor, I should have known.”
“I made sure they built a memorial beer porch at Fenway with your name on it, though, so you’re welcome.”
Lucas thought about this for a moment, then nodded. “I guess that’s good enough.”
“You two are fucking weirdos,” Secret declared.
The car pulled to a stop in front of her apartment before any of us could reply, and Dominick was able to secure a place out front, which made me believe he must have sold his soul to a demon at some point, because no one alive could find street parking here that easily on the first try.
A light shone from the lower window of the little yellow apartment building.
Secret stood in front of the place for a moment, taking it in. I had to wonder how often she made trips out here to visit Sutherland. Based on the way she was looking at the building, I had to assume it wasn’t all that often.
She made her way to the little gate that blocked the basement steps from the street and she stood on her tiptoes to move a brick from the steps up to the main floor apartment, where she removed a key.
“He forgets his all the time,” she explained. “We had to hide one outside.”
After letting herself into the entry door, she put the key back where she found it, then showed us in. There was a small foyer between the outside door and the one into the apartment, but the apartment door had been left unlocked, which I suspect she’d known it would be.
Secret knocked lightly before letting herself in. “Sutherland, it’s Secret, I’m coming in with some people, okay?”
Inside the apartment, a lamp had been left on, but there was no one sitting in the living room, and aside from the hum of the fridge in the tiny kitchen, the whole place was utterly silent.
It looked different from what I remembered. The walls were still painted a soft, buttery yellow, Secret’s favorite color, but it had definitely been redecorated to suit Sutherland’s more eclectic style.
The walls, which had once been sparsely adorned in paintings of sunflowers, had since been replaced with posters of movies that were only popular—if they were ever popular—in the mid-eighties. Big Trouble in Little China next to Dreamscape beside Romancing the Stone and Star Wars. Rather than having these framed, they’d just been stuck to the wall with Scotch tape.
Where a normal lazy teen might have stacks of dishes left around the place, Sutherland was at least a bit tidier. There were no glasses of dried blood on t
he coffee table, thankfully, but there were clothes draped over the back of the loveseat, and a stack of BluRay discs had been left next to the TV, which was on and showing a Netflix home screen.
Secret automatically started to pick up the dirty clothes, kicking a pair of sneakers back towards the front door.
“Sutherland,” she called out. “It’s Secret.”
She made her way into the bedroom with an armload of clothes, which she deposited in a hamper, then she kicked the bed. I was able to watch the whole thing because the apartment was so small I was already half way to the bedroom the minute we’d all stepped through the door.
A groaning voice joined hers in the cramped bedroom, which was probably too small for the queen bed in it. “G’way.”
“Jesus.” She kicked the mattress again. “What kind of self-respecting vampire is still in bed in the middle of the night?”
“Shhh,” Sutherland replied, before pulling his blanket up over his head.
“Now way in hell am I letting that fly, bud. Get your ass up or I’m leaving you here to die and don’t think I won’t.”
He mumbled something I couldn’t quite hear, and she snorted at him, then a moment later sheets rustled and the two of them joined us in the living room.
Sutherland was handsome, looking like one of those fresh-faced young actors you might see in a drama on the CW where he was from the wrong side of the tracks but fell in love with a nice girl from the Palisades or something.
I’d watch that.
He was pale, of course, he hadn’t seen sunlight in almost thirty years, but he didn’t look sick or gaunt the way some vampires did. He looked shiny and youthful enough he had likely fed within the last twenty-four hours. I suspected Sutherland had no real problem finding people who would be willing to let him feed on them.
There’s a reason you don’t see a lot of ugly vampires out there, and it’s evolution. Pretty vampires get what they want more easily, they can feed more readily, and honestly, pretty people just catch the attention of other vampires more readily.
Vampires are kind of shallow.
