by Sierra Dean
“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.
“Ew,” I said, and the room spun, making me wonder how everyone managed to stay standing. I tried to raise my hand to cover my throat but found none of my limbs would do what I wanted them to. Paralyzed by blood loss, all I could do was lay there and watch the theater of the absurd unfold around me.
Someone new came to stand over me. She had gold-toned skin and thick, straw-blonde hair, with eyes so green I thought she was part cat. The eyes were what gave her away, too even and calm to be genuinely human. Ingrid. Sig’s daytime human servant.
She gave me an appraising look, appeared to be satisfied with my place among the living for the time being and turned to whoever else she had with her. Snapping her fingers twice, she indicated the bewildered vampire on top of me.
“Alexandre Peyton, you are to be requisitioned by the vampire Tribunal and held for investigation and punishment based on the charge of abandoning the laws of the council and attempting to expose the secrets of vampire society to the general public. Do you acknowledge and accept this decision?”
He snarled at her. I’d never seen a human address a vampire in such a cavalier and condescending manner. Ingrid obviously believed she had no reason to fear Alexandre Peyton and was making sure he knew it.
“I take your lack of response as acceptance. There will be hell to pay should the Tribunal’s pet not survive. Sig is especially fond of the half-breed. He won’t like it if she dies.” She cocked her head to the side. The expression on her face was that of a Harvard scholar speaking to an insolent puppy who had just peed on her rug.
From behind her a collection of vampire wardens descended on us. They jostled me against the hard concrete floor as they grabbed Peyton and pulled him off me. He began to thrash like a hooked fish when he realized Ingrid wasn’t just speaking out her ass.
“Take him to the Tribunal,” she said, her voice monotone and bored. When they had removed him from the room, she looked at me again, then cast her gaze to the three werewolves and the remaining warden, Holden.
“Someone may want to give her some blood. She’s not looking well. I suspect she wouldn’t be too picky, given her situation.” What she meant was that any healthy vampire would have rejected werewolf blood outright. As smart as Ingrid was she didn’t know anything about me other than what the council did, that I was half-vampire. Her dismissive title of half-breed was more accurate than even she was aware.
“Warden,” she said to Holden, “you will come with me.”
“No.”
The room shifted and I felt my whole body getting heavier. Everything was quieter and people’s voices were taking on the slow, drowsy quality of a broken tape recorder.
“She’s my responsibility. I won’t leave her. She’s my responsibility.” He was kneeling by my head, stroking my blood-soaked hair.
“This won’t escape the Tribunal’s notice.”
“They made this decision for me.”
She snorted and left without another word.
“Someone needs to help her,” Holden said, presumably to the wolves, though his eyes never left mine.
“How?” This from Desmond.
“She needs blood.” Lucas sat next to me, clamping a hand over my shredded neck. It took several seconds before I noticed his touch.
“Like an IV?” Dominick was still hovering nearby.
“No.” Holden shook his head. “No, she needs to drink blood.”
“Why?” Dominick asked. He was the only one unwilling to accept the obvious answer.
“Vampire.” It was my last word before everything went dark.
Chapter Thirty-Six
When I woke up it wasn’t from any kind of prophetic dream or restful self-indulgence. I came to in the back of a moving car, only somewhat aware of my head being in someone’s lap and that same someone stroking my hair.
“Where…?” I began to ask, but my throat felt as if I’d been swallowing broken glass and I couldn’t say anything more.
“Shhh,” was the response.
I looked up and saw a bandaged wrist, and beyond that the drawn, tired smile of the wolf king.
“Lu…”
“Shh,” he said again, more insistent. “The vamp—” He stopped himself, grimacing. “Holden told us we need to take you somewhere. Desmond says you can see the Oracle, so we’re taking you there.”
After a tentative pause I touched the bandage on his wrist, relieved I was able to move my hand well enough to do so. I knew what it meant, what Lucas had done for me. He’d given me his blood so I could live. But it also meant he knew the truth now, or at least a variation of the truth as he chose to understand it.
“Sorry.” I made the word a complete sentence and gazed at him with heavy sadness. How could he look at me the same again? I was sure I would lose him and Desmond both when this was all over. It made my chest feel tight at the thought of going back to the lonely life I’d had before their romantic complications mucked everything up.
“It’s okay.” He brushed my hair back from my face. “I’m keeping my promise.”
I didn’t know what he meant, but I wondered if he must be referring to the dream I’d had when I was dying, which made me wonder how much truth there was to my dayti
me reveries. If Lucas and I really had shared a dream and that’s how he’d found me, there was more to this soul-bond…
My head swam, overwhelmed by too many thoughts happening at once.
I smiled and he returned it, but neither of our expressions was happy. I drifted out again and when I awoke he was gone.
This time I was in a bed not my own, and the golden light of morning draped across the comforter. On instinct I recoiled from the light, but it didn’t take long to realize it wasn’t burning me.
It took even less time to realize every single bone in my body, every inch of skin, every joint and muscle was awake and screaming with pain. I had been in fights before, and I had been left in bad shape, but never in my life had I knocked on death’s door twice in one evening only to have him send me away both times.
I’d be overjoyed by the knowledge I was alive if I wasn’t so painfully aware of it.
“You’re up!”
The cheeriness of this voice was almost as bright as the artificial daylight and hurt nearly as much. I winced in the direction of a chair next to the bed.
“Brigit?”
“Hi!”
The blonde vampire was perched next to my bed, radiant in a cobalt blue sundress, her hair long and straight, held back by a sapphire-colored headband. Even as a vampire she looked like she should be spending the day on a beach in California. It pleased me to see her looking so happy, but I couldn’t focus on it for long. My body hurt too much.
“Calliope?”
“Yes.” Brigit understood the unspoken question, confirming I was at Calliope’s mansion. “Holden brought you in. He was with the wolves. The cute one you were with when I came here and another one. He was cute too.” She grinned, flashing her pageant-queen teeth at me. “They couldn’t come in, you know the rules.”
“No wolves.”
“Right. It’s really too bad. I mean, I like Calliope and all, but you’d think in a place that can adjust to the needs and wants of those who live here, there might be a cute serving boy or two.” She flipped her long hair over her shoulder.
