Cold Hard Secret (Secret McQueen)

by Sierra Dean

  Desmond grabbed me and hauled us both to our feet a moment before the big gray wolf lunged forward. It landed where I’d been crouched, its teeth bared and saliva dripping down like it was rabid. The creature’s eyes were practically black from how wide the pupils were blown.

  I lifted my sword and backed Desmond and myself against the barn so we wouldn’t get any more nasty sneak-attack surprises. Desmond, smooth as hell, unfastened one of my holster snaps and withdrew a gun before I’d even noticed his touch.

  “Do you know how to use that thing?” I asked.

  He leveled me with a condescending glare that would have made Holden proud. “Please.” He tucked the gun into the back of his jeans and armed the shotgun with a satisfying shunk sound. It was a smart move on his part to grab the pistol. He only had so many rounds with the shotgun, and once he was out of ammo, he’d need a backup. Clever.

  “Fine. But watch the shell casings. They’re silver, and they come out hot. If they touch you, you’ll get double burned.” I’d learned this lesson the hard way a few times out in the field and didn’t want him recoiling with shock when the metal hurt him.

  Last thing I needed right now was a distracted wingman.

  The wolf’s ruff stood on end, and he growled ferociously at the pair of us. I could smell a second one but hadn’t spotted it yet. If I could smell it, Desmond wouldn’t need a heads-up.

  “Over there.” He angled the gun towards the other side of the barn, and a cinnamon-colored wolf burst out of the grass, skidding to a stop a few feet from us, matching its partner’s menacing snarl. What the hell was going on? It wasn’t a full moon, yet I had two werewolves in all their furry glory snapping at me. Were they, like Mercy and myself, able to change forms at will? Or was it something more sinister?

  Desmond kept his gun trained on the new arrival, and I returned my attention to the gray wolf. A voice at the back of my head was nagging for me to listen, but I was otherwise occupied with the task of keeping Desmond and me alive.

  Again.

  Dry grass crunched to my left, and I swung towards it with my sword raised like an axe, ready to split a new attacker in half. Holden recoiled, almost backing into the wolf, before correcting his course and stepping away from both me and the animal.

  “Whoa, there.” He raised his hands in surrender while his gaze darted between my sword and the wolf.

  I lowered the blade and took a steadying breath. “Goddammit, Holden, I could have cut you in two.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “I hate to interrupt, but could you two perhaps focus on the issue at hand?” Desmond sounded both peeved and uneasy at the same time.

  “Do you want a weapon now?” I asked the vampire.

  He sneered.

  The wolves, and not just Desmond, had grown weary of our chatter, because the gray one leapt at Holden, teeth flashing in the moonlight. The vampire was prepared for the assault, grabbing the wolf by the loose fur around his neck and hurling him into the field like a big, scary discus. The wolf let out a yelp when it crashed to the ground.

  Holden, Desmond and I turned our attention to the remaining wolf. The voice I’d tried to silence earlier was raging at me louder than ever now, and as Desmond aimed the shotgun at the wolf and his finger moved towards the trigger, my inner nag broke through.

  Don’t, it screamed. Don’t kill them.

  The scene froze before me like a pause button had been hit on the world. The wolf was snarling and raging unlike any werewolf I’d previously encountered, and I’d met one or two in my time. Even when they were preparing for battle, a wolf would be a rational, logical creature. Sure, their logic might not make sense to a human, but it was still present.

  Then I realized what was wrong with them.

  My gaze darted to Desmond, his finger hovering over the trigger. My heart leapt into my throat as the connection suddenly made sense.

  “STOP,” I screamed, afraid to grab him in case he fired by accident.

  His finger twitched away from the trigger in an instant, and I braced my hand against Holden’s chest to keep him from leaping for the animal.

  “What the hell, Secret?” Desmond asked. “I had a perfect shot.”

  “These aren’t Mercy’s wolves.”

  “What?” Holden and Desmond asked this question in almost perfect unison.

  The gray wolf had recovered from the flight Holden had sent him on and limped back into the clearing, still raring to go for the kill. But my brain wouldn’t accept that these wolves were the enemy.

  I looked between the two advancing animals and said, “Ben?”

  The gray wolf went rigid, his snarl fading momentarily and his near-black eyes focused on me in a new way.

  “Oh, goddammit. That’s my fucking brother.”

  “How?” Desmond demanded.

  “You should know better than anyone else,” I replied.

  “But how could Mercy have the same stuff Peyton gave me?”

  We hadn’t had a chance to talk much about his experience with Peyton while we’d been separated.

  “Mercy and Peyton go way back. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d been willing to share with her if they thought they could screw me over twice as many times.”

  Desmond lowered the shotgun, and I kept my sword ready but in a less threatening position. I wasn’t ready to let my guard down yet. Knowing who the wolves were didn’t make them any less likely to attack us, and I could already tell my inner wolf wasn’t feeling motivated to help us in this situation.

  I didn’t think it mattered too much, since these wolves wouldn’t respond to her the way Desmond did. She was a queen, but not their queen. And she didn’t have the mate trump card to play.

  Maybe I could try a little familial love to get through.

  “Ben?” I spoke directly to the gray wolf, nodding towards Desmond so he would keep an eye on the cinnamon-colored one. “Hey, Ben, it’s Secret.” I let the blade touch the ground and stooped into a crouch. By lowering myself to his level I wouldn’t seem as threatening. I also made myself more of a target, but I’d take this one step at a time. I couldn’t ignore my own instincts, either. Though I dropped my stance, I made sure to stay above him, and I never dropped my gaze from his.

  I might be trying to keep the peace, but I was also royalty. Ben might be a prince, but I was a goddamn queen. I outranked him, and I didn’t care what kind of drugs he’d been doused with, any wolf would respond to authority. So what if my inner wolf didn’t want to come out to play? I still had a hand to play here.

  “Ben, I know you’re in there. Listen to me. It’s your sister. I know you’ve been given something, and—”

  He growled.

  “That’s enough,” I snapped. “Listen.”

  The growl cut short, and he glanced at the other two men as if he might prefer to take his chances with them.

  Fairfax, in his wolf form, was noticing the change in Ben’s behavior as well because he’d stopped baring his teeth at Desmond and was now whining nervously. Wolves, pack animals that they were, reacted to the actions of those around them. I just needed to get one of them to stand down and the other would follow suit.

  “Okay.” What now? I gnawed on my lip and started to lift out of my crouch.

  Big mistake.

  Ben gnashed his teeth together and lunged at me, his full weight colliding with me and knocking me back into the wall of the barn.

  “Well then,” a voice overhead rang out. “Now we’re having some fun.”

  I stumbled to the ground, and the last thing I saw before Ben’s teeth blocked my view was my mother looking down from the exterior door of the barn’s upper loft, smiling like a maniac.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  I’d never punched a werewolf in the throat before.

  Evidently it worked just as well as doing it to a human. Ben yelped and rolled off me, rubbing his snout into the ground and wheezing like he’d been tasered.

  Damn, a taser would actually be a rea
lly good idea for nonlethal confrontations.

  Since I rarely had to consider nonlethal means of defending myself, it had never occurred to me to invest in anything else, but I made a mental note to visit Leary Fallon, my weapons guy, when I got back to New York to see if he might be able to hook me up with something.

  If I got back to New York.

  That was a big qualifier right now.

  I undid the snap on my remaining holster, withdrew my pistol and without hesitating I disengaged the safety, loaded a bullet and fired directly at my mother’s head.

  If she’d been human, she’d be dead.

  Alas, she was a werewolf, and a wily one at that. She must have figured out what I was up to within the milliseconds it took for me to complete the action, and she darted back inside the barn. I half-expected her to be cackling like a cartoon villain, but she was quiet once she vanished.

  Holden helped me to my feet and observed, “Guess we know where she is now.”

  The gunshot had done double duty in making my mother disappear and spooking Ben and Fairfax. The two wolves were a good ten feet back now, their ears perked up on high alert as they danced from paw to paw.

  “So much for our nice, quiet approach, eh?” I mused.

  “You’ve been back in Canada for three hours, and already you’re dropping eh-bombs?” Desmond teased, tracking the movements of Fairfax with his shotgun.

  “Shush.” Since it no longer mattered if we were being stealthy, I turned my sword on the padlocked door, slicing through the metal links of the chain with no effort. The chain and lock fell in a metal heap at my feet. I briefly considered bringing the chain along, since it might be a useful weapon in hand-to-hand combat, but thought better of it. The weight would be cumbersome, and if Mercy had used silver as an added bonus, I’d be in for a nasty surprise when I picked it up.

  I slid the door open, and it shrieked in rusty protest. Once it was ajar, the distinctive odors of a barn wafted out to greet us. It must have been years since anything alive had called the barn a home—the owls, mice and other squatters notwithstanding—but still the pungent odor of pig manure and sweet straw filled the air. Some things didn’t vanish with time, they just became less obvious.

  Beneath the animal scents was the distinctive cooper tang of blood. So much blood even I could pick it up without a problem. But this was old blood. My spirits lifted slightly, hoping this meant there was still a chance of finding Grandmere alive.

  And in one piece, I amended.

  “Are we just going to leave them out here?” Holden asked, indicating the two wolves.

  “Do you have a better idea? Should I ask them to sit still while I rig up some collars and leashes from the leftover tack in here?” We were far enough out of town I wasn’t worried about the wolves making a break for Elmwood. They were obviously more interested in hunting us than looking for an alternative snacking option, and besides that, wolves wouldn’t gravitate towards populated areas. I didn’t care what they’d been dosed with, they wouldn’t make a run for town.

  Holden seemed to be considering my question because he was staring at the two wolves with a consternated expression.

  “Holden.” I held the door open, and Desmond ducked under my arm, keeping his weapon raised. “They’ll be fine, trust me. We’ll deal with them once we’ve found my grandmere. They aren’t going anywhere.” It wasn’t like him to show anxiety over many things, but I think he might have had unresolved issues with werewolves.

  We’d once been held captive by a pack of wild werewolves in Louisiana called the Loups Garou, and they’d kept us in a pit where we both nearly perished from exposure. We escaped, sure, but I think he had some werewolf-related problems after the fact.

  Together, Holden and I had walked away from quite a few near-death situations. I could honestly say, after all this time, the adage what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger was total bullshit. There were plenty of things that could nestle inside you like a sickness and dismantle you piece by piece, even if people still thought you were alive. Fear was a disease I’d caught while in captivity, and I wondered what Holden had come away with.

  “Come on,” I urged.

  He gave them one last look and followed us into the barn, where I slid the door firmly shut behind us, keeping the wolves on the other side of the barrier. They might find a way in, or they might lie in wait for us outside. Either way we hadn’t seen the end of them yet.

  Inside, the barn was enormous.

  It had looked plenty big on the outside, but even the façade didn’t give me a good grasp on how large the interior space would be. Along one wall was a series of stalls with straw covering the floor in patches and metal gates with latch locks. The manure smell was strongest there, which led me to conclude the pigs must have lived in those pens.

  The size and layout wasn’t as bad as I’d been led to believe it would be from various magazine stories and documentaries I’d seen snippets of on TV. Buck Syler’s pigs lived a pretty luxurious life by comparison. Until they had to cross the barn, that is.

  Buck, it seemed, preferred to slaughter his pigs the good old-fashioned way. A metal slab platform was set in the middle of the floor, and on either side were two slop drains. Overhead, a long hose hung from the ceiling, rigged to a series of other tubes. There was a holding cage next to the slab, and off to the side a dozen meat hooks hung behind a plastic curtain.

  Then a sick thought seized me. This setup wasn’t for the pigs. The whole layout was designed specifically for him to make it easier to kill women. The ghosts came then, though not the way I expected them to. It wasn’t really ghosts I was seeing, but rather the macabre living truth of the space. Spectral versions of the past overlaid the present, and I could see the bodies of women—some still wriggling with life—dangling from the metal hooks. I could see a woman laid out on the table, her skin peeled back from the muscles of her legs and arms, but only in small patches, as if she were a living version of the gameboard in Operation. Inside the holding cage another woman—naked and shivering—watched in horror and waited without hope of escape.

  I gagged and shut my eyes, grinding the heels of my palms into the sockets, willing myself to go blind rather than continue to see these things. This was the first time I’d had a flashback to something that wasn’t out of my own experience. Yet seeing the gruesome fates of these women brought up my memories, so when I opened my eyes again, it wasn’t Buck Syler operating on the woman, it was The Doctor.

  He looked up at me and grinned, his smile unnaturally wide as though his cheeks had split open, and suddenly I could see all of his teeth at once. I wanted to get the hell out of this place.

  “Ten…nine…eight…” I breathed deeply, keeping my counting quiet. Not that whispers mattered much, since both Desmond and Holden were accustomed to this panic routine by now. “Seven…six…five…”

  The ghostly images began to fade, and one by one the hooks were just hooks, the table was just a table, and the cage was once again empty. These weren’t real ghosts. They were the ghosts of ghosts.

  “Four…three…two…” The room returned to its former bleak self, and I let my breath out with a shuddery, “One.”

  “You okay?” Desmond asked.

  “Yeah. Just…saw some things. That’s all.”

  “Ready to keep looking?” Holden gave my shoulder a squeeze, but the smile he offered me didn’t quite reach his eyes. Had he seen it too? “I’d like to get out of here quickly, if we can.”

  “That makes three of us,” Des answered. “She was looking down from a loft upstairs, but the chances of her sticking around there are slim to none. You think she made a break for the main house?”

  “I didn’t hear the other door open,” I said.

  Holden glanced around the main room. “When I was out front, I noticed a broken window. She could have climbed through there, but we still would have heard some of the glass breaking.” He edged away from the pigpens, evidently put off by the smell. “I can’
t get a read on your grandmother, but the scent in here is pretty repugnant. If she’s hidden somewhere, I might not be able to tell.”

  So there was a method to this madness after all. I could call my mother many things—crazy, fucked-up, horrible, murderous, worst woman on earth—but I couldn’t call her stupid. She’d thought this through, beyond just a simple kidnap and kill. Sending Grandmere the warning, that had only been the first step. Mercy had to have planned this for months, knowing exactly what location to use, one that stank of death and was set apart from any other people. She hadn’t missed a move.

  Her level of preparedness made me exceptionally nervous. This wasn’t revenge on a whim. She knew what she was doing, and that put me at a decided disadvantage because I was the unprepared one.

  I was a lot less sure of our chances here than I had been crossing the creek. Things could get bad really fast, and we were in the thick of it. There was no backing out.

  Though I would have died here and now if it meant saving Grandmere’s life.

  I had a choice to make.

  We could continue to comb the barn and the whole Syler property for signs of Mercy and her men, and likely stumble into any number of traps or treats they’d laid out for us. Or…

  “Mercy.” I clanged my sword against the rusty steel surface of the butcher’s table, making an awful clanging echo through the barn. “You dumb bitch. You want me dead? Come and get me. Such a big, brave queen, isn’t that how you sold yourself to your idiot henchmen? What kind of queen cowers when her enemy comes around, huh? If you’re so tough, show me your ugly goddamn face.” I spit on the floor for good measure. In for a dramatic penny, in for a pound, right?

  I looked back to the boys, and Desmond was cringing, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe what I’d done. Holden seemed completely unsurprised. He crossed his arms and quirked his head to the side, listening as the echo of my rage petered out and vanished altogether.

  When silence reigned again, I pulled my sword off the table, making sure to grind the blade against the metal so it screamed out in loud frustration. The blade wanted to be fed, and the weapon and I were of a single mind. Soon it would drink its fill, and we would both be satisfied.