Secret Unleashed sm-6

by Sierra Dean

  He ripped the arrow out, taking a large chunk of skin and flesh with it, and hurled it back at Siobhan with staggering force. Still, an arrow thrown isn’t the same as an arrow fired, and she easily deflected it with her bow.

  Heeding my previous instruction, she took her opportunity and ran for the girl. Shane and I responded quickly, leveling our weapons at Grendel and keeping steady watch in case he tried to attack Siobhan. It wasn’t a question of if he attacked, but when.

  The moment the druid had her arms around the girl, Grendel swung for them both. Shane fired first, the bullet snagging Grendel in the wrist and making him jerk back before he could swipe at Siobhan. She must have known she wasn’t going to get another lucky break because she held fast to the fallen girl and dragged her out of easy squishing range.

  Shane chambered another bullet, and Holden stepped in front of the other women, blocking Grendel’s path to them. “Take the girl and get out,” he instructed Siobhan.

  The redhead glanced towards Shane as if unsure she wanted to leave him, but the sobbing child beside her took precedence. Siobhan helped the girl to her feet, and they ran from the room. Hopefully to safety.

  Grendel’s henchmen, the pitifully normal-sized vampires, had been frozen in mute stupidity up to that point. They must have assumed no one in their right minds would fight their boss, giving them a slack job. Now they weren’t sure what to do about us and were slow to retaliate.

  The first to act—a gray-haired vampire who looked like he’d stumbled out of a Crocodile Dundee movie—barreled towards me at full speed. Apparently they’d already stopped dismissing me as the weakest link. So much for our advantage.

  I pivoted my gun from Grendel to the charging vampire and fired three rounds into his head. Precision aiming was tricky enough when a human was running towards you, but with a vampire there was the added difficulty of their preternatural speed. My first shot glanced off the side of his scalp, making him turn his head. The next two lodged into his skull above his ear, fanning a cloud of pink mist into the air as he fell.

  Vampires could heal most things, but two 9mm silver bullets into the brain wasn’t one of them.

  With one of their comrades down, the other two guards were less gung ho to run wild into the fray. Basically, they were the worst guards ever: slow to act and only out for their own protection. Where did Grendel find these guys, Spineless Cowards ’R’ Us?

  One of them lunged for the door, intent on making a getaway. Shane fired at him, landing a shot in the vamp’s shoulder, sending him spinning backwards into Grendel’s arms. The warrior vampire had evidently seen his minion make a break for it and was none too thrilled. Grendel raised the guard into the air as if he weighed nothing, then brought him down hard onto his knee, cracking the vamp’s spine.

  The broken vampire howled in pain, but the injury wouldn’t kill him. It would take him out of the mix for a while as the fractured bones healed, though, giving us one fewer foe to worry about.

  Grendel stepped on the vampire’s head, crushing his skull beneath big shit-kicker boots as if it were a grape.

  So…that guy was out of the picture completely then.

  “Jesus,” Shane said.

  “I know. Try getting that out of your boots after,” Holden replied.

  When Grendel stepped back, there was a red smear on the floor with fragments of scalp and brain matter now taking the place of the man’s head. In spite of my many years being exposed to some of the most revolting things imaginable, I fought back the urge to gag.

  “I will do this to one of my own,” Grendel bellowed. “What do you think I will do to you?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I muttered. “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. You know what? You’re not a giant. You’re just a big, smelly vampire. And do you know what I do to vampires who go rogue?”

  “Kneel before them,” he suggested.

  “Kneel?” I arched a brow and contemplated his choice of words. “Not a bad idea.”

  I fired two shots into each of his kneecaps in rapid succession. Grendel roared, and this time there was no disputing the anguish in his tone. I’d hurt him. He crashed down and landed on both knees, bringing the clamor of his wailing to greater heights.

  I’d never been shot in the knee, but I had experienced the agony of having a fresh wound exploited, and given how he was writhing on the floor, he enjoyed the experience as much as I had. Adding insult to literal injury was the fact he was squirming around in the liquefied brain matter of his former colleague.

  “You have two choices as far as I see it,” I told him, though I doubted he was listening to anything other than his own squalling. “Either I kill you here and now—and I am fully vested with the power of the Tribunal to make those decisions—or you let me bring you in.”

  “I’d rather—”

  “Be mindful…this is one of those situations where you want to be careful not to say I’d rather die. I’ll take it literally.”

  He fell silent. A normal man might be breathing hard through his nose, trying to keep from hyperventilating, but since Grendel didn’t need to breathe he chose to scowl darkly at me instead.

  “They will lock me up, and then what? A year from now, maybe two, someone will make a mistake and I will be free. And I will come for you. That is, if you’re not dead by the hand of another.”

  Everyone fell silent, but my heart throbbed and my pulse was as loud as a bass drum in my ears.

  “What did you say?” Holden ignored the presence of the final guard, positioning himself between Grendel and me. “What did you say?”

  Grendel laughed, but the sound was strained and cut short. “You might as well kill me, you foul borborygmite, because if you let me go, I’ll kill you. And if you take me to the council instead…someone else will find you.”

  Holden took the gun from Shane—who was still too stunned to do anything—and aimed it at Grendel’s forehead. The warrior vampire rolled onto his back to relieve the pressure on his knees and looked at us both upside down.

  “You going to shoot me? I know you, Holden Chancery. I know you.”

  “Oh do you? Did you ransack my village in its youth?”

  Grendel snorted and struggled to get into a sitting position, wincing the whole way up. The three of us took a step back, and the remaining guard danced uneasily from foot to foot. After seeing what had happened to the other men he probably wasn’t going to make a break for it, but he also didn’t seem keen to rush to Grendel’s aid.

  “You’re the trained dog, aren’t you? The bitch’s bitch.” Grendel spat on the floor. “You know something, though? I have bitches too. And mine are better trained.”

  I started to remind him two of his bitches were headless, undead organ donors now, but the body at my feet started doing something most peculiar.

  It beeped.

  More than beep, though, it started to make a rapid succession of chirping noises like an electronic bird. The same noise was emitting from the corpse next to Grendel. And when the remaining guard started to beep as well, he wet himself.

  Kneeling, I ripped open the buttons of the dead vampire’s shirt and spread the lapels wide. Strapped across his chest were two crisscrossed black bands with packets of beige putty and a few colored wires centralized over his breastbone.

  I stumbled back and switched my aim from Grendel to the corpses and the living guard, and back to Grendel. I didn’t know who I could shoot right then to make this situation less of a mess, but I wanted to shoot something.

  “Are those…?” Shane voice drifted off when he realized what was strapped to the guards.

  “Bombs.”

  That explained why the guards were so useless. They weren’t guards at all. They were a fail-safe.

  “Grab him,” I shouted to Holden as the reality sank in. “He knows something about Peyton.” All his glib one-liners about other people taking care of me meant something. He might not know where Peyton was, but I had a feeling rogues knew more a
bout each other’s habits than they let on. And if Grendel knew anything about Peyton, we needed to keep him alive.

  Holden stepped over the body and tossed Shane’s gun back to him. The vampire hunter bobbled the catch, bouncing the gun between his hands until he got a hold on it and re-aimed it at Grendel to cover Holden.

  The chirping was getting faster and functioned as a literal reminder of how little time we had left to escape. I was grateful we’d sent Siobhan out with the girl. The building wasn’t stable to begin with, and once these guys became vamp-pyres, the whole thing would come down on top of us.

  Holden grabbed Grendel under the arms and started dragging him towards the exit. With Grendel’s legs useless, Holden was stuck hauling at least three hundred pounds of red, squirming, vampire weight. Grendel didn’t want to go easily, but he wasn’t fighting hard enough to be stopped.

  He wanted to live.

  “Help him,” I told Shane.

  As they wrestled the massive vampire towards the exit, I kept my gun trained on the remaining guard. His pants were soaked with urine, and he looked frightened and desperate.

  “Can you take it off? Without blowing?” I asked.

  He shook his head, bloodstained tears welling in his eyes. I didn’t want to feel sympathy for a rogue vampire. He’d made some stupid life decisions to bring him to this point, and part of me felt like he deserved what he was getting.

  But the human part of me—a part that didn’t actually exist physiologically—couldn’t just leave some poor crying bastard to die by explosion.

  I lowered my gaze to my gun then back up to the vampire. “Do you…? I mean…do you want me to…?”

  He nodded.

  I fired two shots into his head, and he crumpled between his fallen comrades. He would have been dead either way, but at least now he didn’t need to learn what it felt like to be blown up.

  Now if only I could avoid the same experience.

  The first explosion went off as I reached the main hallway. I was lifted off my feet and thrown into the metal doors of the elevator bay. I hit the floor in a daze, a dented impression of my body showing in the age-faded bronze.

  Small bits of debris fell around me, the larger chunks having been blown farther away. A haze of dust hung over the hallway, which combined with the force of hitting the wall, made me unsure of which way the exit was. I got to my feet, trying to smell fresh air, but my nostrils were full of plaster dust and exploded fiberglass.

  If this building was full of asbestos, my lungs were going to be properly fucked for a few days.

  “Secret.” Holden’s voice echoed down the hall, helping me figure out which way to run.

  I was four feet from the door when the second explosion rocked the apartment complex. This time I was blown into the front doors, cracking the old lead glass into a spider-web pattern. Unfortunately for me the doors weren’t the kind to open out, so the explosion didn’t expel me from the building, it just hurtled me into the solid barrier of the door.

  More rubble rained down, the larger chunks not missing me this time. I covered my head, tucking myself in against the wooden door as the huge bits of concrete and iron half-buried me. I fumbled for the door handle and managed to crack the door open wide enough to drag myself through.

  Holden was waiting on the opposite side, prying the door open wider and hauling me out with rough hands under my armpits. He had me down the front steps by the time the third explosion went off. This one was larger than the others, or perhaps the structure had been so compromised a hard sneeze could have taken the place down.

  We were knocked down by the force of the blast. I fell flat onto Holden, and he rolled me over, bracing his arms on either side of my head and burying his face beside my neck. Huge boulders of concrete pummeled the ground around us. Judging by the way Holden’s body moved and the tense grit of his jaw against my cheek, some of the pieces must have been landing on him.

  When the sky stopped falling, Holden sat back on his heels and helped me to my feet. I was still wobbly from being tossed around like a rag doll, and my jeans were torn in both knees. Probably elsewhere, too, because my backside was experiencing a new breezy sensation.

  Shane and Grendel were nowhere in sight, and I was hoping it meant Shane had gotten some vampire assistance. If the wardens—as they often were—had been trailing me from a distance and monitoring my app activity when I’d called Holden, they wouldn’t have been far away when things went down. With their speed and training, they could have easily met Shane outside and helped cart off Grendel before I’d had a chance to escape.

  I had to hope that because police sirens screamed closer, and red-and-blue lights ricocheted against the tall brick walls. As cops spilled into the alley, the last thing I wanted to do was explain why we had a seven-foot-tall monstrosity of a man with his knees blown off held captive.

  I raised my hands above my head, favoring a sore ankle by standing tilted away from Holden. He lifted his own hands, the sleeve of his blazer ripping loose as he muttered, “This was a thirteen-hundred-dollar suit.”

  Chapter Five

  Detective Mercedes Castilla had bigger hips than me—and longer legs—but I’d rather borrow her spare jeans instead of a pair of unknown origin from the lost-and-found box.

  At least I knew any stains on Cedes’s jeans were from coffee.

  Judging by the triumphant sneer on Barbie the Receptionist’s face when I’d been dragged into the police station, she would have liked nothing more than to see me wearing a pair of baggy sweats abandoned by a homeless guy. Barbie had never been my biggest fan.

  In spite of the fact the fallen apartment building was in Brooklyn, Holden and I ended up at the seventy-sixth precinct of the NYPD. Just my luck. Luck in this case was equal parts honest luck and being totally screwed.

  Lucky because I got to borrow jeans from my human best friend.

  Shitty break because of the pair of disapproving eyes and sternly crossed muscular arms seated across the desk from me. Detective Tyler Nowakowski was shaking his handsome, stubbled jaw at me.

  “You know…for someone trying to stay under the radar, you’re doing a piss-poor job of it,” he said.

  Blessedly, Mercedes and Tyler were both aware of what I was—all of what I was—and happened to be under my protection. In a fun turn of events, they were also both now protecting me. I think Tyler enjoyed being the hero for once. He was the manly sort, and was probably tired of me being the one to save him.

  I was pretending to ignore him by looking at the giant hole underneath the pockets on my former pants. “I’m sick of ruining my favorite pants.”

  “Secret. Focus.”

  I dropped the jeans into my lap and met his gaze. His thick black eyebrows were knit together, and he was showing me his most impressive stern-detective face. “Don’t look at me like that.”

  Tyler’s desk was set at the back of the room, giving us the illusion of privacy. Holden had been taken to an interrogation room by Mercedes, and since the other rooms were in use, I was being debriefed by Tyler at his desk.

  “You really brought down the house this time, didn’t you?”

  “Oh har-frigging-har, Detective Comedy.”

  “Mind telling me what happened?”

  “Do you want the actual version or the on-the-record version?”

  He frowned, his nose wrinkling more than Samantha on Bewitched, and finally he sighed and uncrossed his arms. With his elbows propped on the desk, he waved both hands at me and said, “Tell me the truth first. We’ll deal with what I put in the report later.”

  “I was helping Shane hunt a rogue. Rogue had his goons wired up more than the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. Goons went boom.” I mimed an explosion with my hands.

  “I take it that was the CliffsNotes version.”

  I nodded.

  “Do we have to worry about this rogue?” He said rogue like the word was in a foreign language.

  “I blew out both his kneecaps. I think
the wardens have him under control.”

  “You think?”

  “Best I can tell you without being able to check with the council.” I folded my ruined jeans and dumped them into the wire trash bin next to his desk. Two hundred dollars into the crapper. No big deal.

  “You know I can’t just let you walk out.”

  “You know I can post bail.”

  “You’re going to have to. You and the pretty-boy vampire are in some serious trouble this time, Secret, and not the kind he can voodoo-eye his way out of.”

  “That voodoo he do?” I said with a snicker. “Voodoo-eye? Seriously, Detective Tyler?”

  “What do you call it?”

  “The thrall. Enthralling.”

  “How poetic.”

  “You’ve been on the receiving end. It’s effective.” I propped my feet against his desk and tipped my chair back, trying to see if I could get a glimpse into the interrogation rooms. The staff had gotten wise to the view, though, because the small windows were covered.

  Tyler whacked my toes with a manila folder. “Could you at least pretend to respect me?”

  I dropped my feet, the wooden chair clacking loudly on the tile floor, echoing through the mostly empty room like a gunshot. The few people seated nearby flinched, and one guy gave me a dirty look.

  “I do respect you.” I avoided the nasty gaze and held my hands over my heart in mock horror. “Do you want to hear the official version of the story? I thought of it in the cruiser on the way over.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be dazzled.”

  “Okay…fade in, damaged midtown apartment complex…”

  “If you say the word asbestos to me, so help me God, I will kick your tiny ass from here to next month.”

  “Uhhhh…”

  “You were going to say asbestos, weren’t you?”

  I smiled sheepishly. “Maybe.”

  “Asbestos won’t make a building collapse.”

  “I’m sorry, did I miss the secret structural engineering degree in your past?”