Secret Unleashed: Secret McQueen, Book 6

by Sierra Dean

  Dedication

  My great thanks to Eric Domond and Julie Walsh for their help with Secret’s French translations.

  To the incredible staff at the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. I’ll never forget that weird and wacky estate.

  Catriona Churman and Jessica Groopman, for their enthusiastic suggestion of the creepiest places for villains to hide out in San Francisco. That warehouse scene is all for you two.

  To Christoph Waltz. Because you titillate and terrify me in equal measure.

  A weird thank you to Fall Out Boy for “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark” which got more than its fair share of listens during the writing process.

  Always and forever to Sasha Knight and my mother Jo-Anne MacLennan. You two are my biggest fans and champions, and I wouldn’t be anywhere without your love and belief. I can’t think of two greater women to have in my corner.

  Chapter One

  In the paranormal world there is no such thing as witness protection.

  Which meant if someone in the supernatural community was in trouble, they had to turn to their own kind for help. Werewolves hid within the safety of the pack; vampires had such a vast network of sycophants, aides and supporters they could hide anyone without too much effort.

  But who was going to hide a half-vampire/half-werewolf who was being hunted by both monsters at the same time?

  That was the problem I’d been presenting to my friends and colleagues for three months, and we’d yet to come up with a good solution. I was the proverbial hot potato, and I was running out of people to catch me.

  Part of the issue was I didn’t want to hide. I wanted to fight, and more than anything I wanted my damned life back.

  Unfortunately for me the head honchos—the bossy vampire elite—said I was too important to put myself at unnecessary risk. As far as I was concerned any risk was necessary if it meant getting back what I’d lost.

  I didn’t have the most normal life to start with, but having it taken away from me was making me pretty cranky.

  Well…crankier than usual. Which was saying something.

  I sat in a grubby living room, pizza boxes strewn over the coffee table and dirty socks leading a trail to a makeshift bedroom made from a sheet hung off the ceiling. The space took bachelor living to a whole new, disgusting level.

  Yet a radiant young woman was sitting cross-legged in a dingy, secondhand armchair, staring at me uncertainly.

  “You’re Secret McQueen?”

  I gave her a once-over. She was light-skinned with an explosion of freckles over her cheeks and shoulders, and her copper-red hair was pulled back in a braid. The dress she wore might have been stylish in the mid-nineties but had long since dated itself. I wasn’t sure if she was wearing it to be hip or if she genuinely had no idea it was tacky.

  Ugly to be trendy, that was a thing with kids today, right?

  “I am,” I answered her.

  “I expected you to be…scarier.”

  I arched a brow at her and glanced down at what I was wearing. Jeans, knee-high black leather boots, a demolished leather motorcycle jacket and a pink shirt that read Little Miss Trouble.

  Maybe the shirt was diminishing my badass bounty hunter vibe a bit.

  But the SIG P226 in my lap and the katana I’d put on the table should have balanced it out. I mean, what’s scarier than a chick with a gun and a sword?

  “I’m sorry, who are you?”

  “Siobhan O’Malley.” She reached forward and offered me her hand, which I shook.

  “And how do you know Shane?” I’d come because Shane Hewitt—vampire council bounty hunter—was going to be my newest babysitter for the week. I’d been shuffled from house to house, apartment to apartment, back and forth across New York City for three bloody months.

  The logic was: if the bad guys couldn’t find me, they couldn’t kill me.

  Initially it had been suggested I be shipped out of New York altogether. While I understood it was the most realistic way to keep me safe, I wasn’t about to spend whatever was left of my life—however short it might be—on the run. In New York I had connections, people who could help me if shit hit the fan. On the run I’d be on my own. I had put my foot down and said if I was going to die, I wanted it to be on home soil.

  I should have been more specific and said I wanted home soil to be my own Hell’s Kitchen apartment, but it was too late to make those distinctions. My apartment was too obvious a target, even with its supernatural safeguards. When everything had gone sideways, my mother had shown up there hell-bent on killing me as I walked outside.

  Mercy hadn’t killed me, obviously, but every damn day I wish she had. Because instead of taking me out, she killed my best friend Brigit, and it was my fault. The guilt I felt when I killed someone was something I’d learned to live with. Guilt over someone dying in my stead was something I didn’t know what to do with.

  I’d have given anything, my life included, to bring Brigit back. But in spite of all the magic hidden in the world, there was no resurrection spell or potion to turn back time and make the dead undead again. She was gone forever.

  And I was alive.

  In this dodgy fucking apartment.

  “I saved his life. Then he took my virginity so I didn’t have to be sacrificed to a giant fae who looked like a devil horse,” Siobhan said, sitting back in her chair.

  “Oh.”

  “Standard boy-meets-girl story.”

  “I was going to tell you to stop boring me.”

  Siobhan smiled. “Do you want something to drink?”

  Unless Shane had a stash of bagged blood in his fridge, she wasn’t going to offer me anything I needed at the moment. “No thanks. Do you know where Shane is? He was supposed to meet me after sundown.”

  “Hunting.”

  “How much did he tell you?” I asked. She knew about fae, so she couldn’t be too ignorant, but I wanted to watch what I said until I figured out how in the loop she was.

  “About?”

  Oh Lord, where to begin? “Everything.”

  “You mean about the vampires he hunts for the council? Or how you’re his boss, which makes you one of the three members of the Vampire Tribunal? That sort of thing?” Siobhan looked at her nails like she was bored.

  “What are you?” I rephrased, changing my tactic. She was human—my nose told me that much—but no human I’d ever met would be so cavalier in talking about the council and vampires.

  “Druid.”

  “A…what?”

  She took a blanket off the back of the armchair and draped it over her head like a cowl. “Drooo-id.”

  “As in…Stonehenge and human sacrifices and dancing naked by the light of the moon?”

  “The naked moon dancing is more of a Wiccan thing.”

  I had a witch for a grandmother. I could attest to the truth of Siobhan’s statement. Unfortunately. No one needs to see a woman pushing seventy years of age getting jiggy in her altogether to celebrate the coming spring.

  “What does a druid do in New York?”

  “I guard a fairy gate.”

  My eye twitched. It was an involuntary response, but I tended to react poorly to the word fairy these days. “There is only one fairy gate.”

  She raised her hand and made a peace sign, holding two fingers apart. “One in the fae realm, one in ours.”

  Interesting.

  “So you’re the guardian of a magical gateway to another world, and you’re sleeping here?”

  Siobhan didn’t bother looking around the room. She evidently didn’t need another glance at the apartment to know what I was alluding to. “A messy home full of affection is bet
ter than a grand house filled with people who don’t care about you.” Her smile hadn’t faded, but it had lost some of its joy. There was sadness in her words she seemed all too accustomed to.

  “You love him?” I hadn’t thought of Shane in romantic terms during the time I’d known him. He was handsome enough if you were into the whole scruffy bad-boy thing, but he was also my underling. It’s hard to think of someone as sexy when you had control over their life.

  “Love’s a funny thing.”

  Oh yeah, it was a laugh riot. “If by funny you mean something only an idiot would participate in…then yes.”

  “I hear you’re quite the idiot.”

  I laughed, probably for the first time in a month. Being called an idiot had never felt so good. “Yeah, you could say that.”

  The front door swung open with a crash, cutting our laughter short. Siobhan and I pivoted, her hand going for a baton on the coffee table, while I chambered a round in my gun and aimed it at the new arrival.

  Shane stepped through the entrance, completely soaked by blood and holding a machete. There was a feral glint in his eyes, and I wasn’t sure he noticed I had a gun aimed at his head.

  “Shane?” Siobhan put the baton back on the table. “What’s wrong?”

  He acknowledged us then for the first time. “Secret?” He shifted his attention from his diminutive lady love over to me. “You’re here?”

  “You drew the short straw this week, remember?”

  He might have looked confused, but it was hard to tell with the blood coating his skin and clothing. “Is your gun loaded?”

  “Yes.” When did I ever carry an unloaded weapon?

  “Good,” he said. “I need your help. We have to go kill something.”

  Kill something. Music to my ears.

  Chapter Two

  Since Shane didn’t bother cleaning the blood off himself before we left the apartment, I had to assume whatever we were hunting was a baddie of the biggest variety.

  I wasn’t keen on Siobhan tagging along, but Shane didn’t tell her to stay home, so maybe she could hold her own. Far be it for me to assume a girl, especially a small one, couldn’t kick butt in a fight.

  We skirted the block Shane’s shitty apartment complex was on, and Siobhan and I followed the bloodstained hunter down an alley and through a minefield of moldy cardboard boxes. Between the puddles and the stench I was relieved I’d opted for boots that evening instead of open-toed heels.

  “Where are we going?” I jumped sideways when one of the boxes groaned. A scraggly homeless man swore at me and fixed the wall of his Frigidaire palace.

  “It went this way.” He pointed at a nearby building, an apartment identical to Shane’s own, but this one appeared vacant. Leave it to our quarry to pick an abandoned building for its lair.

  The shittier the digs, the happier the monster.

  Shane wasn’t waiting for us. He ducked under a peeled-back section of chain-link fence and vanished around the back corner of the building.

  “He’s gotten faster,” I observed.

  “He had to.” Siobhan moved ahead of me, following Shane’s route.

  I’d vanished for three weeks over the summer, time lost in a fae realm, and though three months had passed since then, I was still learning how much I’d missed during that time. I didn’t know what had happened to Shane and Siobhan, and I was only getting snippets of what had occurred in the lives of my other friends, but I wasn’t too fond of being in the dark about things.

  It made me feel like a shitty friend and a bad ally. Whatever Shane had experienced to make him a stealthier fighter, I hadn’t been around to witness it. And what if things had gone the other way? What if instead of adapting, he’d failed?

  We might not be besties, but he’d been around for a lot of crappy stuff that had gone on in my life, and he’d toughed it all out. I’d go as far as to say we were friends. Friends with a weird working relationship.

  Anything less than friendship and I probably wouldn’t have followed him into the dark unknown. But he was part of my life, and was willing to keep me in his house at his own peril. Plus he’d promised we’d get to kill something.

  I checked the safety of my gun and made sure it was off before crouching low to the ground and ducking under the fence.

  Shane was halfway up a rusted fire escape, and my gaze traveled past him over the brick wall of the building. A shattered window ten floors up was his most likely destination. Siobhan clambered after him, and I brought up the rear. Shane paused outside the broken window and waited for us to join him, holding a finger to his lips to signal for us to be quiet.

  I wanted to point out that three grown adults standing on the fire escape of a condemned building was just an accident waiting to happen, but my complaints would have to remain silent.

  From inside came a sound I was all too familiar with: a young girl crying. The pitch of her voice was all I had to go on since she wasn’t saying anything, but from that alone I knew she had to be very young. Possibly a child.

  What did it say about my life that listening to a child crying in fear was the norm? A messed-up one, is what.

  Since I’d been living in relative hiding, I also didn’t know what warrant Shane had been working on that would have resulted in this situation. I was allowed into the council headquarters under strict supervision, and only when absolutely necessary.

  One of the threats on my life was from Alexandre Peyton, a rogue vampire who’d been locked up by the council for over two years, chained in silver and starved to the point of emaciation. He hadn’t been a fan of me to begin with—our history of trying to kill each other went waaaay back—but now he would stop at nothing to see me dead.

  And the last place he’d been seen was in the council headquarters. So he knew his way around the lower passages, and he knew the Tribunal chambers. If he was somehow still hiding there, or knew a way to get back in, I wasn’t protected in the place that should have been the safest for me. Which was the only reason I wasn’t being locked in there permanently.

  Sig, the two-thousand-year-old Tribunal leader and my boss of sorts, had a few ideas about where I should be, but ultimately had yielded to the babysitter notion.

  Babysitters and a perpetual shadow.

  Somewhere in the alley, Holden Chancery would be watching. Sig could have selected from a hundred different vampires to watch over me, but we didn’t know who we could trust these days. Peyton was beguiling and had enlisted aid from other vampires in the past, so it wasn’t out of the question he might have help on the inside.

  Holden was trustworthy.

  He was the only vampire aside from Sig himself who I knew without a doubt wanted to keep me alive. Sig found me…amusing. He was interested in me as a sort of pet project, but I knew he cared about me in a weird, twisted way. My death would upset him. It would inconvenience him. And Sig didn’t like to be inconvenienced.

  Holden was different. He’d once been my key into the vampire council, and now I was his superior. But that wasn’t what made him loyal. Holden loved me. He’d told me as much, in front of my boyfriend no less.

  It might not have been ideal, but it meant he could be trusted because no matter what happened, he wouldn’t let the woman he loved die. Holden would sacrifice himself to protect me, so Sig had chosen him as my guard.

  I scanned the alley, looking for any out-of-place shadow, but he was too good to be easily spotted. I couldn’t see him, but I felt his presence, and it comforted me.

  The crying from inside the building, however, wasn’t comforting at all.

  “Who are you chasing?” I asked.

  “Grendel,” Shane said matter-of-factly, then ducked through the broken glass.

  The name meant nothing to Siobhan, apparently. She shrugged and went through behind him. Ignorance was bliss in her case, because I knew all too well who Grendel was.

  The Grendel. The namesake of the monstrous beast in Beowulf was not a demonic creature, at least not in t
he traditional sense. Grendel was a medieval warlord in his living years, a ferocious killing machine with no sense of honor or morality. Then he became a vampire.

  Something most people don’t understand about vampires is that they aren’t made evil by the vampire infection. When they shuffle off the mortal coil, they don’t become smarter or more beautiful, and the change doesn’t make them wicked.

  Vampires were just immortal versions of the shitty bastards they were in their human life. Or the lovely wonderful people, if that were the case. But in my association with vamps, I tended to think most of them started life as pricks and ended it the same way. Thomas Hardy once had a character say, “I was born bad, and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad in all probability.” Tommy had unwittingly summed up vampires in a nutshell.

  And Grendel had been born the worst of the worst.

  If history held true, he had a penchant for flaying his victims alive. Removing their skin and picking them apart piece by piece until their insides fell out.

  He was also a vigorous fan of the rape in rape and pillage.

  My heart sank as I thought of him in there with some poor, innocent girl. Why was it the worst kind of monsters focused on the sweet, sunny little kids?

  “I’m sorry, they sent you after Grendel?” I climbed through the damaged frame, avoiding shards of broken glass as I stepped onto the patchy floor within. Boards of plywood crisscrossed over gaping holes where I could see through to the lower levels of the apartment building.

  A scream echoed through the walls, rattling upwards into the ceiling and falling again, quieter. She was still screaming in fear and not pain, which was a small comfort. Anguish had its own unique sound, and it was one I was becoming increasingly familiar with.

  Shane was edging across a rotting two-by-four, and Siobhan was nowhere in sight. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “No offense, Shane, but hunting Grendel isn’t a job for a human.” As foolhardy as I could sometimes be, I wouldn’t have gone after the warlord vamp on my own, let alone send a single human hunter after him. “Did you piss off Juan Carlos?”

  The third Tribunal Leader, a Spanish conquistador, tended to hold grudges, especially against me. When I’d been the bounty hunter in Shane’s place, I was often assigned some impossible hunts, usually because a certain someone wanted to do away with me. Was he punishing Shane now, since he couldn’t take it out on me?