The Secret Guide to Dating Monsters: Secret McQueen, Prequel

by Sierra Dean

  The Columbia was one of several upscale hotels that popped up around New York from time to time. This one was owned by the Rain family and had been designed around the concept of the Canadian province of British Columbia. The walls were lined with redwood tree trunks, and light was filtered through dappled green sconces to give the impression of sunlight through tree leaves. The lobby floor was Plexiglas over river rock, with fresh water flowing under guests’ feet. Instead of music there was the ambient noise of babbling water and birds.

  It made the wolf in me very, very happy.

  My vampire half, on the other hand, was suspicious of even fake sunlight.

  I’d managed to convince an off-duty bike messenger to sell me his empty travel tube, which hid the katana perfectly. It’s amazing what you can get when you show a little cleavage. Or offer to pay twice the value of what something is worth.

  Now I was carrying a concealed weapon and brimming with murderous intent. I’d missed a call from Tyler while negotiating with the bike messenger, and since we’d already reached the hotel, I couldn’t call him back. What could I say if I did? Sorry, Detective, I need to kill someone quickly, but once that’s done, can we get to the smooching?

  I doubt he’d appreciate that.

  Holden hung back, lurking in the fringes and doing what vampires do best by being completely unseen in a room filled with people. The lobby was a mix of real guests and tourists who wanted to photograph the now-famous lobby. I couldn’t do Charlie in down here, so it looked like I’d need to go to his room after all.

  I was probably the only woman alive who was pouting about going to Charlie Conaway’s hotel room.

  Striding up to the front desk, which was made of driftwood set between two totem poles that rose up to the ceiling, I threw my shoulders back and gave the clerk a wide smile brimming over with ditzy charm.

  “Hi!” I inched closer and fixed him with a meaningful look. I might not have been able to enthrall humans, but if I focused hard enough, I could be more persuasive than usual. “I’m here for Charlie Conaway.”

  The clerk smiled in a knowing way and winked for good measure. It was then I realized my phrasing made me sound a bit more professional than I’d meant. If blushing was more than a fleeting rarity for me because of how much blood it required, I would have felt my face heat up then. As it was, I accepted this was what it took to get me past the gatekeeper.

  Not to mention, if Charlie’s victims were under the thrall, they would have used similar possessive language. I probably wasn’t the first, but I would be the last.

  “Penthouse Three.” He nodded towards the elevator bay, whose doors were rescued barn wood instead of typical gold. “Just take it to the top.”

  Holden met me at the elevator doors but stayed silent until they shushed closed behind us.

  “Who is Charlie to you?” I asked, breaking the quiet lull.

  He stiffened. Getting a physical reaction out of him was a sure sign I was on the right track. I’d suspected his attitude tonight had to be the result of something more than professional interest in my contract. The almost giddy behavior, juxtaposed with bouts of surliness, made me wonder what the two vampires meant to each other.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter. I’ve never seen you so moody before. I’ve never seen you happy before.”

  He smiled. “You’ve seen me happy before.”

  I stared at him, not needing words to make my point.

  “I’ll confess, most of my amusement was from throwing a monkey wrench into the gears of your night.” His smile was more honest this time. The way he said monkey wrench was a dead giveaway of how old he was, because even the passé slang sounded forced.

  “Jackass,” I countered. Holden always seemed miffed to hear a lady swear, so I tried to do it as often as possible around him.

  “He’s not for you, Secret.” He was referring to Detective Tyler.

  “He could be.” I was offended. Who was he to decide who I could or couldn’t be with?

  “Remember Gabriel?”

  After I recuperated from feeling like he’d sucker punched me in the gut, I said, “Gabriel isn’t a marker for every human ever.” I played with the strap over my shoulder so I didn’t have to look at him. It was a low blow, and he had to know he’d struck a nerve.

  Gabriel Holbrook had been my live-in boyfriend once upon a time. He’d moved out over a year ago, after living with me for only three months. We dated for almost a year overall, and I had loved him. But how can you love someone when you have to repress everything about yourself that comes naturally? He’d known I was hiding something, and it got to be too much for us both.

  He left, and I hadn’t seen him since.

  “You can’t have a relationship with a human. It puts us all at risk.”

  My sadness filtered away, replaced with hot rage. “The council doesn’t get to tell me who I can and can’t date! I am not one of you, and they’ve made that perfectly clear.”

  “If Tyler finds out what you are, we’d need to wipe his memory. And you would be punished.” He wasn’t angry, not rising to meet my tone. He was just telling me the cold, hard truth. “If his memory couldn’t be altered…”

  “I know.” It didn’t need to be said. If Tyler’s mind was too strong to be fooled, he’d be killed. And I would be to blame.

  The elevator gave a cheerful ding, announcing our arrival at the penthouse floor.

  It opened on a secondary lobby, which consisted of a long hallway, dimly lit, with carpet that looked like grass. On each side of the hall were two doors, marked PH1, PH2, PH3 and PH4. If memory served from what I’d read in the Times article about the hotel, behind each door was a foyer and small sitting room, and an elevator which would take guests to their appropriate penthouse level.

  I was reaching for the bell on PH3 when we heard something move behind the door. It wasn’t Charlie—this person was too heavy and the footfalls louder and less deliberate than I knew his to be. There was the noise of scuffling heels on marble floor, a muffled scream, and then the unmistakable sound of vertebrae snapping. I was frozen to the spot, realizing with cold horror I’d just heard a girl die less than two feet away and hadn’t been able to stop it.

  An instant before the door swung open Holden grabbed me and backed me up against the entrance to PH2. My eyes widened with surprise, and I tried to ignore the sudden discomfort of the travel tube digging into my back where it was sandwiched between the wall and me. I hadn’t felt or seen Holden move. In one breath I was one place, in the next I was on the opposite side of the hall with a vampire pressed against me.

  I had opened my mouth to speak but was silenced when I saw a huge, bald vampire, who looked like every bodyguard cliché, exit the door for PH3 with a limp, lifeless girl propped against him. I wanted to get a better look at her, but Holden had a different plan in mind that I was not made privy to until it was in action.

  His hand cupped my chin and forced me to turn away from the vampire before the hulking mass realized he’d been seen. Holden didn’t express anything with words, because the other vampire would hear what was said in such a narrow hallway. Instead, my vampire looked me in the eyes with a pleading expression that tried to help me understand what he was up to. I didn’t know what he was planning, but I got the subtext—don’t fight it.

  Then his mouth was on mine.

  For a moment, from sheer surprise, I tried to pull back. But Holden was a vampire and much stronger. He held me still with one hand. After that, I accepted there was more to his plan than kissing me and let myself yield to it.

  He kissed me with the deliberate precision of someone who had learned to kiss over the course of two hundred years. When someone kisses you so brilliantly, you can easily forget who and where you are, and what brought you there. It wasn’t long before I surrendered to his efforts and melted against the movement of his mouth.

  It began as a decoy kiss, just lips on lips. But when he sensed I was no long
er fighting him, his mouth forced mine open, and he growled as my tongue tentatively brushed against his. He buried his hand in my hair, dipping my head to the side and exposing the smooth line of my neck. This was second nature for a vampire, where sex and blood went hand in hand. But if we were doing this to pretend we were just a frisky couple, unable to wait until we were through the door, we couldn’t behave like vampires. We needed to be human about this.

  I bit his lip.

  He retaliated by shoving me hard into the door, using the full line of his body to keep me pinned. My mouth opened, a shocked groan attempting to escape, but he kissed me harder and more enthusiastically than before. I put my hands on his shoulders, my fingernails raking upwards from his shoulder blades, dragging him closer to me.

  In response, his hands skimmed the edge of my hips and down to my thighs. His knee moved between mine, nudging them apart and inching the hem of my dress higher. He grasped hold of me, and I gave a little hop so he could lift me the rest of the way. With my body still pinned against him, I snaked my legs around his waist. His kisses began trailing down my neck, and in spite of our efforts to be normal, his fangs were exposed and grazing over my skin.

  Ding.

  The elevator swished closed, and the bald vampire and his corpse were gone.

  Holden’s exploring kisses stopped at the sound, and I froze, wide-eyed and painfully aware of my precarious position. I stared at him, and his pupils were dilated and glossy black, overwhelming the usual chocolate brown of his eyes. He put me down and was on the opposite side of the hall before I’d had a chance to smooth out my dress.

  “Sorry,” he said, his voice raspy and his fangs still out. “I needed to mask my smell, or he’d have known what I was. If I was with you, it wouldn’t be so obvious.”

  I was too dizzy to speak. I just nodded mutely and kept playing with the hem of my dress so I didn’t have to look at him.

  “I wouldn’t have bitten you,” he added.

  Forcing a weak smile, I felt my face flush with warmth. Worry over him biting me wasn’t the problem. The problem was I’d wanted him to.

  “You can’t come in with me,” I told him. “I need to do the rest alone.”

  We both regarded the now-quiet elevator, remembering the dead girl who had just been taken away. Had she seen the real face of Charlie Conaway? Did she make it within an inch of escape only to have her neck snapped?

  My grip tightened on the strap of the travel tube. If she had only made it through the door, we could have saved her.

  I shook myself and stood tall. Holden was waiting by the elevator now, watching me guardedly. Whatever he was thinking, it didn’t show on his face.

  “Be careful, Secret.”

  Under my thumb, the bell for PH3 chimed.

  “I’m always careful.” It smelled like a lie, even to me, but it was too late to turn back now. The penthouse door opened at the same time the elevator door shut. Holden was gone, and Charlie was standing in front of me without a shirt on, a big smile on his face.

  “You’re just in time.” He stepped out of the doorway, giving me a small entrance, but I still had to brush against him to get inside. “We’re going to have some fun, you and I.”

  “Yeah,” I said, my eyes adjusting to the gloom of the darkened foyer. He shut the door, and I was alone in the dark with him. “It’ll be to die for.”

  Chapter Six

  I had to remind myself that for the time being I was just a fan. And a fan, to Charlie, was a lamb being led to slaughter. He had one behemoth of a guard out disposing of a body, and another was waiting next to the elevator. I needed to know what else I was up against before I could spring into action.

  “Wow. It’s so dark in here.”

  “Is it? I hadn’t noticed.” All the better for the vampire to see you with, my dear.

  The guard ignored us as we waited for the interior elevator, and Charlie was already in full-on skeezy superstar mode. He had pressed himself against my side and was trailing his fingers up and down my arm. I couldn’t get over how cold he was. Vampires are not warm creatures by any stretch of the imagination, but they were rarely this icy. Their usual temperature, for lack of a better comparison, was that of a room-temperature corpse. Slightly cool, but by no means cold.

  Charlie was so cold goose bumps rose over my skin wherever he touched me. He seemed to take this as growing excitement on my part and leaned in closer to lick my earlobe. “What’s your name?” he enticed, his hands exploring the easily accessible parts of my body.

  I kept repeating in my head, not yet, not yet, not yet, kill him now, no, not yet, not yet, not yet. I tapped my fingers against my leg, growing progressively more impatient with the elevator. Once I knew how many more men he had, I could take care of business. I eyed the stony bodyguard who was only a few feet away, wondering where Charlie had found such huge men. Until I knew how many others there were like him, I had to be…

  “Jessica.” I picked the most common girl name I could think of. Something a little less memorable than Secret.

  “Pretty.” He probably hadn’t even heard me. His voice trailed away from my ear and down my neck. His creepy, cold hands bumped against the tube I was carrying. “What’s this?” The flirty overtones vanished. His voice was both curious and suspicious.

  “Oh. I brought my poster from Blood Love 2. I was sort of hoping you might sign it. You know. Later.” False modesty hung all over my words. “If that’s okay.”

  He laughed, and the sound was almost pleasant. “Sure, Jennifer. Anything you want.”

  “Jessica.”

  “Mmmhmm.” He was leaning back in for my throat, but the elevator opened.

  My neck had been saved by the bell twice in one night.

  I needed that luck to hold out a bit longer.

  Penthouse Three looked like every other expensive hotel room I’d ever seen. Sure, there were touches that made it fit the theme of the Columbia, like photo wallpaper depicting the shore of the British Columbia coast. All the colors were muted browns and grays, and the bedposts were made of the same driftwood as the lobby desk. But it was still a big, fancy version of an apartment, and the size felt like a mockery of my own living quarters. I sort of resented it.

  The most impressive thing about the room was the full wall of windows, which had a doorway out to a balcony spanning the whole length of the room. The windows must have had light-safe panels that expanded to cover them during the day. Dangerous for a vampire, sure, but the nighttime view was incredible.

  “Wow,” I said with genuine bedazzlement.

  “You like that?” He looked past me and out the window, as if it was the first time he’d noticed the view.

  “It’s amazing.” My gaze drifted from the window, and I cast a searching glance around the room, trying to see if we were alone.

  There was a vampire sitting on a couch in the living room, and he was pretending not to notice me, which seemed to be the primary job of Charlie’s men. The guard who’d come up on the elevator with us had vanished from sight, but I could still feel his presence lurking nearby. That made two in the room, and a third off running a gruesome errand.

  Four vampires. I’d seen worse odds.

  “Can we go outside?” I asked. Alone on the balcony was where I wanted him. I could deal with the guards once Charlie was dead. If he was like most rogues, the guards would be new vampires, tied to him. Rogues liked to avoid partnering with established vampires because it almost always led to a power struggle at some point. If they created their own sect, they got to maintain control. This worked well for me because newborn vampires were cocky and stupid. They relied too much on their newfound strength, which made them much easier to kill.

  He was brushing tendrils of hair off my shoulder, sweeping his fingers over my skin. I wanted to kill him, if only so he would stop touching me.

  “Sure.” He hooked a thumb under the strap of my dress. “Let’s do that.” He pulled me towards the door, using the garment as a leas
h. This was too taxing for my dress, and as we reached the glass doors, the strap snapped.

  Reflexively, my hand shot up to keep the dress in place, but it proved unnecessary. It was so tight, the straps were ornamental. The dress wouldn’t go anywhere unless it was unzipped, and even then I was pretty sure it would need to be surgically removed.

  “Oops,” Charlie said, but he didn’t sound sorry.

  “That’s okay.” I forced an airheaded giggle, while inside I was cursing him and his ham-fisted boorishness. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Outside, the air was cool in spite of the August heat. This high up, the wind forgot about summertime rules and did whatever it wanted. I was glad for the distraction from Charlie’s cold touch.

  “Look at the view!” I stepped away from him and up to the glass barrier wall.

  “I’d rather look at you,” Charlie cooed. Ugh. I swallowed the wave of nausea that rode over me.

  The balcony was perfect. If I killed him here, then coaxed both guards out, I could leave their bodies for the sunlight. Vampire blood turned to ash in daylight the same as their bodies did. Unfortunately, it didn’t work that well if it had already soaked into walls and carpets. I did most of my killing outside if I had a choice, because the Tribunal wasn’t always happy about sending cleaning crews to take care of the messes I made. Even if it was their mess to begin with.

  Charlie was behind me, and with expert hands he began removing the tube from my back.

  I spun around. “Let me,” I directed and took it off myself, half unscrewing the cap when I leaned it against the wall.

  Now that I was facing him, Charlie took it as an open invitation to move in closer. His hands were at the hem of my dress, and he looked me right in the eyes.

  “Anything I want.” He repeated the directive from earlier.

  “Anything you want.” I tried to make my tone as zombified as possible, without sounding too much like a vampire slave. People too transfixed by the thrall became puppets to their master’s whim. Vampires called them Renfields. I called them depressing.

  His roving hands twined around my back, finding my zipper. This position also placed his mouth precariously close to my exposed neck. The temptation to snack early must have proved to be a bit much for the vampire. His sharp fangs raked against my clavicle, and with the lightning-fast precision of a rattlesnake, he bit down.