Secret Santa: Secret McQueen, Book 2.5

by Sierra Dean

  I bit my tongue to repress the urge to ask what he smelled.

  “In there.” He pointed across the street to where a concrete-slab wall rose into a high iron fence.

  I inhaled sharply. Nolan hadn’t been kidding when he said the fae would pick somewhere dark. A sense of foreboding cloaked me in a nervous chill. Behind the fence sat an old red-brick Victorian house with a turret and brown-shingled roof. It wasn’t the house that made me nervous, although old Victorians did give me the willies after I almost died in one, even if it was only a set on an amusement park lot.

  It was what the house guarded that made me tense up.

  Beyond the gates and the house, the heads of stone angels and the points of carved obelisks rose up in dark relief towards the purple glow of the sky. Where the moonlight caught the aged cherubs, their faces were stained with tears from decades of rain, and their features were smoothed down until they no longer looked innocent or protective. The angels all looked on to the expansive graveyard below with blank expressions. Their eyes could not see but could still cry.

  He crossed the street, and I hesitated but followed after a beat.

  The main gate was locked, barring those who might attempt a little late-night hooliganism. It couldn’t bar Holden and me from entering, however. He pulled himself up as though he were weightless, then balanced with his feet between the spikes and offered a hand down to me, helping me up to stand next to him.

  For a moment we stood next to each other on the thin iron band stretching across the fence, steadied like tightrope walkers. His hand lingered on mine longer than need be to keep me from falling. I held my sword and didn’t try to disengage him.

  “Let’s go,” I whispered, then jumped off the fence and landed in the brittle brown grass below. A second later the leaves beside me crunched softly to announce his arrival.

  We rose together, and I got a good look at the graveyard for the first time. Without the fence to obscure our line of sight, the tombstones spanned for what seemed like miles. Across the darkness I saw a sign planted in front of the old red-brick house that read Calvary Cemetery. Well beyond the fields of grave markers, the expressway buzzed with traffic and the sky glowed yellow from the light reflected off the clouds.

  I exhaled a hazy breath, but Holden made no such sign on the night. In spite of the distant noises and the muffled sound of Christmas celebrations from houses nearby, the graveyard was dead calm. The tombstones in front of us were as worn down as the angel faces overhead, and most bore decidedly Irish surnames.

  A chill crept under my skin and knocked at my bones, trying to find purchase in the core parts of my being. Something was wrong here and I didn’t know if it was just the fae. I put my hand on Holden’s shoulder and he jerked. So I wasn’t the only one who felt uneasy here, good to know.

  “Can you still smell it?”

  He nodded tersely. “Even more now.”

  Judging by the flare of his nostrils and the tight, pained expression he wore, something was rotten in the state of Denmark. I didn’t ask because I wasn’t ready to know the response, and Grandmere always told me not to ask questions if I didn’t want the answer. It was the same logic that made me never ponder out loud whether or not my ass looked big in jeans.

  Holden pointed down one of the footpaths that led into the heart of the cemetery. We traversed the uneven ground at a good pace, and I did my best to avoid any broken stone outcroppings or bits of crumbled angel wings that might trip me up. The sheer number of angels meant to watch over the dead gave me the willies. They all looked sad and more than a little foreboding with their wide arched wings and tear-stained cheeks. In spite of the mission at hand I kept looking up and shuddering at their hooded eyes and forlorn mouths.

  Our pace picked up until Holden was moving at a jog, and when I looked back over my shoulder I couldn’t see the entrance gate or the house anymore. The New York skyline, however, was visible between the tombstones and stained-glass mausoleums.

  God this place was creepy.

  When Holden skidded to a stop outside one of the crypts, I almost slammed into him. I steadied myself by pressing one hand against his back, then sliding my fingers upwards so I could squeeze his shoulder. I think I meant to comfort him with the gesture, but it was more for me than for him. I needed to feel connected to something alive, or I would risk being sucked into the darkness. Holden might not be alive, but he was my best available option right then. Better a vampire than whatever lurked in the shadows behind us.

  “It’s here.”

  I didn’t need him to tell me, not anymore. Mingled with the smell of old blood he’d been chasing was a heady dose of the fresh stuff, and I had no problem smelling fresh blood from this close. The building we stood in front of was about ten feet tall and made of aged limestone. It had been designed to look Roman, with two columns leading to a classic peaked roof, with carvings of angry lions and gladiators in the edifice. There were two small windows made from yellow-and-green-stained glass, but what they were meant to depict—if anything—was impossible to tell.

  What set these windows apart from similar ones we’d passed was that they were lit from within. The luminescence was so slight it could have been overlooked if we weren’t standing right outside, but from our position I could discern a faint, flickering firelight making the green glass look like sun-dappled tree leaves.

  Then something inside made a hard scraping sound and I heard a meek whimper.

  Not waiting for Holden to act, I pushed him aside and kicked in the door. The entrance hadn’t been designed to protect against forced entry, and the lock gave way with no protest. There was a small lantern on the floor, which was the source of the light. With Holden and I in the cramped chamber, the light cast a series of jittery shadows against the walls and threw our silhouettes into the dim graveyard, where they danced and shivered in the spaces between tombs.

  We were otherwise alone.

  I sniffed the air again, and the smell of blood was unmistakable. We were in the right place, but there was no fae in sight and no sign of the teens. My nerves felt so jangled and raw I worried I might shake apart then and there. How could we be so close and still not find them? I could smell Penny here, the unmistakable mixture of Love’s Baby Soft perfume and the sweetness of watermelon Lip Smackers. The scent was so innocent it threatened to squeeze all the air out of my lungs.

  That it was mingled with fresh blood made me want to throw up.

  “Penny,” I wheezed.

  Holden pressed a finger to my lips to silence me, but he was gentle and his eyes pleaded for me to not fight him. Personally I didn’t think being quiet mattered. I was certain we’d announced our arrival clearly enough when I’d kicked in the front door. He cocked his head to the side, then dropped to his hands and knees and put his ear to the dirty floor.

  Oh. He’d been trying to listen.

  He beckoned for me to join him, and I collapsed to the floor next to him, our faces mere inches from the huge rectangular slab that must have been someone’s ostentatious final resting place. It also placed me so close to Holden our noses brushed when I lowered my head to listen. Another time, another place, he would have made a comment, but he was totally focused on what he heard below us.

  At first I heard nothing.

  Then I heard a muffled thump and a scrabbling noise, followed by a short cry cut off halfway. They were underneath us, and the sounds let me dare to hope someone was still alive down there. I heaved myself up from the floor and used all my strength to push against the concrete box. I would worry later about what it meant to desecrate someone’s burial site. For now I wanted to be sure no other lives ended here.

  Holden got up and helped me push, and with our combined strength, the tomb slid aside, revealing a gaping hole in the floor. I’d been so preoccupied with getting our obstacle out of the way I hadn’t been prepared for it to move so easily. I stumbled and almost fell into the hole when Holden grabbed me by the waist and pulled me back. In my pani
c I dropped my sword, and it clattered into the dark pit.

  “Shit.”

  Below there was a hiss and a garbled rant that didn’t sound like any human language I’d ever heard.

  Bracing my hand on Holden’s forearm, I looked back at him and said, “I need to go down there.”

  “If you think I’m letting you go down there alo—”

  I didn’t need to hear the rest of his protest to know he’d follow me, so I squirmed out of his arms and jumped into the hole. In some respects it was a blessing in disguise that the sword fell first. Having heard it fall, I could get a rough idea of how long the drop was so I knew it wasn’t going to kill me to jump.

  To be perfectly honest, though, I would have jumped anyway. I have a bad habit of leaping before I look.

  As luck would have it, I landed next to my lost weapon. With my eyes still adjusting to the pitch-black space, I dove for the sword, but something kicked it out of the way.

  “Ewww rune its,” the thing hissed.

  I froze in place. The voice speaking to me was so cold, so inhuman, it made me marvel at how most fae managed to pass themselves off as people in this world. No one in their right mind could do anything but piss their pants when hearing a voice like that. I was not entirely of my right mind so my pants stayed dry, but the rest of me broke out in a cold sweat.

  “Ewww cants beee here.”

  It took me a moment to realize it was trying to speak English.

  “Secret,” Holden called from above.

  “Sort of busy here.” My gaze darted to the left, searching the ground for where the thing might have kicked my sword.

  Though I could see in the dark, it wasn’t quite the same as seeing with the lights on. I could tell there was a creature standing about five feet away from me with its arms limp at its side, but I couldn’t make out any distinctive features. The darkness was too complete for that. Like night-vision goggles, my eyes needed at least a tiny bit of light in order to show me the full picture.

  “Heads up!”

  I sidestepped in time, avoiding Holden’s landing. He’d had the presence of mind to grab the lantern, and when he straightened up, the room was filled with a dim yellow light. We stood side by side, so close our arms brushed, and took a good look at the monster I’d been hunting all over Manhattan.

  Beady black eyes blinked at us, as if the minimal amount of light cast by the lantern was too much for it to bear.

  “Ayyy eww deww thaaaa.”

  Holden held the light higher and thrust the lantern towards the creature. It was hard to refer to it as a creature once I could see it properly. It looked more like an accountant. The thing stood about two inches taller than me, on the shorter side for a man, and had a rounded potbelly and cue-ball head. Its skin had the pallor of a desk jockey whose only tanning option was low-watt office fluorescent bulbs.

  “This is our monster?” Holden asked.

  “Owwwwt,” it demanded. It had fleshy lips that flapped awkwardly as it tried to speak, giving our tubby accountant the appearance of being a drunk tubby accountant rather than just a boring one. “Git owwwt.”

  Get out. That much I understood, though more from the rage in those charcoal eyes than any of the pseudo-words it was speaking.

  “Not without them,” I replied, jutting my chin towards the hole in the wall.

  With the extra light I could see my sword against the wall, but there would be no way to get to it without passing the fae. Behind him I could see a hole with bars and a lock. A pair of hands was wrapped around the bars and a boy’s face was trying to wedge through the space to get a look. It obviously wasn’t Penny, but I recognized the cinnamon skin tone and big brown eyes from one of the school pictures.

  We weren’t too late.

  “Not fur ewww.” The slurring, smacking sound of its big lips moving in an awkward, unnatural way made it hard to understand the words, but I could make out the gist of it.

  “They’re not yours, either.”

  “Mine,” it said, and shuffled towards the door. The pale, dirty face darted back, and I could hear mewling cries from inside the hole.

  What had this thing put these kids through? Had they watched it eat the others and tear them apart? I hoped they’d been spared that nightmare.

  It continued to move farther from us and closer to the teens. I grabbed the knife lashed to my thigh and hoped Desmond had the good sense to buy one suitable for killing, because I wasn’t going to get a second shot at this. I held the knife by the blade with a firm pressure, thanking my werewolf boyfriend for not getting a silver one, then I threw it at the monster.

  Being unfamiliar with the weight of the blade I hit lower than I’d aimed for. Instead of clipping the thing in the eye and penetrating to its brain, the knife sunk hilt-deep into its throat. After that, nothing happened the way I anticipated.

  It didn’t raise its hands to grasp at the knife. In fact, it seemed to take the thing almost a full minute to realize I’d struck it. A minute is an excruciating amount of time when you’re waiting for something to die. Holden and I stood perfectly still, watching it sway and waiting for it to do something about the weapon in its neck.

  Finally it cast its beady eyes downward and noticed my knife.

  “Uhhheww guh.” The lips still moved like it was trying to form words, but with the fresh hole in its larynx the effect was just garbled sucking noises. I couldn’t understand what it was trying to say anymore, but when it started to flop its arms around I was sure I’d managed to piss it off.

  The fae had to use its whole torso to get its arms to flail in the right direction, and that was when I understood it didn’t have any particular control over its limbs. In fact, it didn’t seem like the accountant body was working too well for the fae, which made me wonder if it was a glitch in the thing’s magic, or if the body wasn’t right somehow. Or maybe in forty years under the sludge of the river it had forgotten how to move like a person.

  I edged forward and grabbed for my knife before its puppetlike hands could latch on. I’d barely gotten the handle between my fingers when one of its hands grasped me by the wrist. The hold was tenuous at best, and a good jerk backwards would free me and the knife, but I was so shocked by the coldness of its touch I was stunned into immobility.

  The weight of its useless arms started to drag on me, and before I knew what was happening my new Christmas gift was slicing down the front of the creature’s body like a fish knife filleting a rainbow trout. I jerked back on instinct, stumbling backwards with the knife in my hand until Holden caught me, but I’d begun something that couldn’t be stopped.

  The new seam in the front of the man’s body peeled apart and ripped open more, exposing the red, meaty interior of the body. The skin broke apart inch by inch down his torso all the way to his pelvis, opening like a fleshy jumpsuit. The inside of him was all wrong, though. I’d killed enough things to know there should be guts and gore inside an open human body. The fae had none of that, just a man husk with no fun fruit filling.

  “What the fuck?” Holden held my arm tighter and pulled us back as far as we could go in the tiny space. This room wasn’t meant for three adult bodies, even if one was peeling apart in front of our eyes. That Holden had sworn at all was enough to tell me he’d never seen anything like this before.

  “Guess the old Irish moms in Dorchester never included this part in their story.” I tried to laugh, but it came out as a high-pitched, frightful sound.

  Something inside the husk was having no such difficulty laughing at us. A tinny, breathless cackle emerged from the sloppy shell of the portly accountant, and it was all I needed to hear to know the fae had been acting as a puppet master, controlling the empty skin-suit.

  It took the cake as far as creepy, fucked-up monsters went. And that was saying something considering I’d once been choked by the decaying hands of a vampire ghost. Again I measured our proximity to the sword, but as I debated making my move, the fae decided to make his.

 
; The husk of the body fell to the floor in a boneless heap, and we were left staring at a three-foot-tall tidal fae in its true form. It was a brownish-green like muddy moss and stood on two legs that looked too goat-like to be good for swimming, but the feet were webbed, as were its hands. The fae grinned at us with crocodile teeth in a wide mouth that crossed its whole face. It had two small slits for nostrils and its eyes were amphibious with dark vertical slits set against a topaz iris. It blinked and its eyelids fluttered side to side instead of up and down.

  “Eesss tiiiime.” The black tongue that flicked between its pointed teeth was forked like a snake’s. No wonder it had so much trouble forming human words.

  On my back, Holden’s hand twitched. I squeezed the knife handle until I worried it might crack. When the fae stepped away from the heap of skin it had once inhabited and moved towards us, its webbed feet slapped on the floor. With each step I shuddered. Every fiber of my being begged me to run away, but there was nowhere to go and I wasn’t about to back down from an enemy whose head didn’t even come as high as my cleavage.

  Instead of retreating, I stepped to the left, edging closer to my sword and making sure the creature’s attention stayed on me. I wanted to look back to Holden to see if he understood what I was doing, but I couldn’t take my eyes off my quarry. The fae blinked, its eyelids clicking with each pass. It snapped its teeth at me and hissed.

  “Ewww noooo moooove.”

  “Try and stop me, gremlin.”

  In such close quarters I shouldn’t have been surprised at how easily the thing could reach me, but when it slapped my hand with one of its rubbery, webbed mitts, I was so startled I lost my grip on the knife. It danced across the floor and came to a rest next to my sword. Without a weapon in hand, and needing to ensure it didn’t notice Holden moving in the opposite direction, I leaped for the sword. If I got the knife first, I wouldn’t complain. I just needed something pointy in my hands.

  I hit the floor a foot away from the weapons, and the fae tackled me an instant after I landed. For such a small creature it was shockingly heavy, like a sack of bricks pressing my upper body into the stone floor. Clumsy fingers were digging through my hair, and I didn’t have the luxury of figuring out what it was trying to do. I needed a weapon and I needed one now.