A Secret to Die For (Secret McQueen)

by Sierra Dean

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Hadn’t I told myself it was worth any cost?

  I’d made up my mind before hearing Aubrey’s pitch, and now that I knew what he wanted, how could I back down? Maybe I hadn’t agreed out loud, but I’d decided for myself I would do what it took to protect the city and those I loved.

  Aubrey wasn’t asking for me to give up Desmond or Holden. He didn’t want me to sacrifice anyone else. He was asking simply that I give up what was mine and mine alone to give.

  My life for the city.

  One life for everyone else’s.

  It was worth it.

  I slid my sword back into its scabbard and took a deep breath, steeling myself for what was to come. Then I offered him my hand. “Fine. It’s a deal.”

  He stared at my hand then at my face, his expression bordering between serious and euphoric. “Just like that?”

  “It’s not like I can sleep on it. So yes. Just like that.”

  “You understand what you’re giving up?”

  “Not a lot of wiggle room for interpretation on this one. I lose my power, then I spill all my nice clean human blood on your sword. You take my power and my life, plus you get a new toy out of the bargain. That about sum it up?”

  “In brute terms, yes.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  Cocking his head to one side, he seemed to be drinking in my appearance. It was the way I’d looked at people when I thought I might never see them again. But it was also the way I’d seen people stare at beautiful paintings in a gallery, trying to understand the detail hidden within.

  “What a marvelous creature you are, Ms. McQueen. I believe I’m doing the right thing with you.” He nodded, mostly to himself, and smiled again. “Don’t forget, while you may be giving up everything, not even I can rob you of the spark that ignites you.”

  Whatever that meant. Dead was dead. Some inner spark of personality wasn’t going to make me any less gone at the end of the night.

  I wouldn’t tell Desmond and Holden.

  They might appreciate the gesture behind what I was doing, and put in the same position I suspected either of them would make the same choice I was, but I also knew they wouldn’t take the decision well. They’d try to talk me out of it, and when their pleas failed, they’d try to stop me by force. I wasn’t going to be talked down. Telling them wouldn’t soften the blow, it wouldn’t make things any easier on them in the long run, so I would wait. When the time came…I could figure things out then.

  It wasn’t like I’d be around for long after.

  Aubrey grasped my hand, and a shock like a punch rocked through me. My breath was stolen, and as I struggled to get air, the world was once again transformed to bright light, only now it was a soft pink hue like the color of dawn when it’s just hinting at its arrival, before the sun was up.

  I blinked at the sudden appearance of so much light and was now both blind and breathless.

  Though I couldn’t see Aubrey, his grip was still firm on my hand, and I heard him say, “The thing you must remember about power is that it is so much greater than any one individual can contain. Yours was already strong, and now you will truly be a force to be reckoned with. Don’t expect to control the power. All you can hope is not to let it control you.”

  He released my hand, and the light fell back in on itself like a miniature big bang in reverse. There was a silent pop of air pressure releasing in my ears, and then I was standing on the castle steps alone, and everything was as it had been. The world was in motion, and the abrupt return of sound made it all boom like a thunderous roar.

  I covered my ears, still stunned by the shift from one reality to the next. My stomach swam with queasy nausea, and I fought the urge to vomit. Going into a fae time freeze was evidently a lot easier than coming out of one. Apparently cramming twenty minutes of banter and life experience into the span of a second really took a toll on my body.

  I made a mental note to keep freezing time as a last-ditch effort when it came to using Aubrey’s power.

  The door leading up to the first observation deck was wide open, so I assumed Parker’s men had gotten through and were somewhere between here and the top floor. Pulling my sword out again, ignoring my future fate with it, I charged ahead, taking the stairs two at a time.

  Voices on the first observation level told me a few of the men at least had branched off, but the echo of shouting above drew my attention onward. There was nowhere for Desmond and Holden to go for escape if the other men had reached them. They’d need my help before the other lackeys had to be dealt with.

  I bounded up the remaining steps and skidded to a halt in the open doorway where three men were blocking my access to the stone balcony. They were speaking hoarsely to my boys, but sound still had a tinny ring to it, so I couldn’t quite make out what they were discussing.

  It didn’t matter. Parker’s men wouldn’t let Holden and Desmond leave here alive.

  I was prepared to bury my sword into the back of the nearest man when a thought popped into my head. Burn them.

  I wasn’t sure how Aubrey’s magic worked. He hadn’t exactly left me with an instruction manual, meaning this would be a trial-and-error method of adjusting to my newfound abilities. I lifted my hand and thought, Burn.

  There was no magical bolt of energy from my fingers, but the air around my hand shimmered briefly. A moment after I thought the word, the three men were engulfed, burned up from the inside out. The white flames consumed them so quickly I was left slack-jawed behind them, staring at my hand in disbelief.

  As their ashes fluttered to the stone, Desmond and Holden were both standing on the edge of the platform, and neither of them seemed to believe what they were seeing. Desmond glanced over his shoulder to the water, where they must have seen me land only a second earlier.

  “What…?” Holden followed Desmond’s gaze, then looked back at me in quiet disbelief. I couldn’t blame him. I would have thought something was amiss too.

  “Come on. Let’s go.” I waved them towards me while the white-and-black ashes of their former enemies swirled around our feet.

  “How did you—?” Desmond began, but I cut him off.

  “I’ll explain later. Let’s go.”

  They both took a last look over the railing, but evidently didn’t see anything to convince them I was a fraud. I wanted to peek down myself, to find out what had become of Bill’s body, but if Des and Holden weren’t raising any alarms, there probably wasn’t much to see down there.

  Bill and Parker were dead. I had to hope the rest of the teams had been successful as well. If they’d managed to knock out their targets, that would leave only Marcela, her man candy and Parker’s twin, Marty, behind for us to deal with. Three necromancers were no match for the new skills I’d acquired.

  I jogged down the steps with the boys behind me, and it wasn’t until we reached ground level that it occurred to me the narrow corridor of the stairs hadn’t bothered me in the least. Maybe I was running on straight adrenaline at that point, but I hadn’t noticed the cramped conditions.

  The rest of Parker’s men were still busy staking out the first deck, since their buddies hadn’t had a chance to raise any alarm bells before I burnt them up. Lucky for them I was more interested in getting away than testing my new skills.

  “You think you guys can manage the bikes?” I asked, hopping up onto one of the idle motorcycles. The men had graciously left their keys behind. Not for the first time I was grateful for all the things Keaty had forced me to learn. Lock picking was more useful than motorcycle lessons, but they were finally paying off. I silently thanked my mentor, wishing I had a chance to hear him say I told you so one more time.

  “Yeah,” Desmond said, climbing onto his own.

  Holden eyed the vehicles with naked suspicion. Reading his tension, I said, “Get on.” This seemed to make him more apprehensive, but after a moment’s pause he climbed onto the back of my bike. “Hold tight.” In spite of the dire straig
hts we found ourselves in and the limited time offer on my life, the idea of a grown male vampire hanging on to me like a biker bitch was more than a little amusing to me. I smirked and was glad to be facing forward so Holden couldn’t see.

  “Laugh it up, McQueen.” He looped his arms around me, knowing me well enough that seeing my expression was unnecessary. “You’ll get yours some other way.”

  He was teasing, but he couldn’t have known how right he was. My mood went from amused to maudlin in the span of an instant. His arms around me were a physical reminder of how little time I had left with these men. My clock was ticking, only now I could see where time ran out.

  Pushing the thought from my mind, I revved up my engine and Desmond did the same, Sutherland climbing on behind him. The men above us didn’t get an opportunity to get shots off before we pulled away from the castle and sped down the walking paths.

  We stuck to the park for as long as we could, taking advantage of the empty paths that were easier to navigate on a motorcycle than the crowded streets full of abandoned cars would be. But soon we were out of Central Park and back on the main thoroughfares, weaving our way around smoldering cars and piles of refuse in an attempt to get back to Rain Hotel.

  The number of corpses now lying truly dead in the street had gone up tenfold since we’d made our way to the park. Where it had once been difficult to move through the clusters of moving dead, now their bodies littered the streets, well and truly gone. I moved the bike around them as well as I could, but sometimes they were impossible to avoid altogether. I said a silent apology to every dead uncle or friend whose arms and legs I drove over.

  Desmond waved his hand and pulled out ahead of me, angling his motorcycle up onto the sidewalk. Sutherland was staring up to the sky, seemingly oblivious to our situation. I followed Des, and we took the pedestrian route the rest of the way, as far as we could make it with the bikes. When we got within a half mile of the hotel, the streets were once again congested with bodies, these ones still fully active.

  “Shit,” I seethed. I hadn’t been expecting to run into any of the active necros again so soon. I thought we’d have a chance to regroup and go in as a bigger unit.

  Guess I’d get an opportunity to test my abilities again, a lot sooner than anticipated.

  My bike screeched to a halt behind Desmond’s, and Holden tightened his grip on me as we lurched forward. Between us and Rain Hotel, which I could see looming on the horizon, there were close to a thousand of the walking dead. Somewhere in their midst I suspected there must also be the necromancer controlling them.

  “Can we go around?” Desmond asked.

  “I think we’re going to have to go straight through. If we try to make it on foot, they’ll stop us, and there’s no easy rooftop access.”

  “I was worried you’d say that.”

  “I was more worried she wouldn’t say anything, and she’d just go ahead and do it,” Holden added.

  Desmond opened the throttle on his bike and scooted it towards the mouth of the street. A few of the dead had noticed our arrival—hard to ignore, considering all the noise the motorcycles were making—and they’d begun to shuffle their way towards us.

  “Now or never,” Desmond announced.

  “Let’s do it.”

  I picked up my feet and released the brake, letting the bike fall in line behind Desmond’s. The first few dead near us sidestepped the motorcycles. Most of the risen had moved towards the sidewalks, avoiding any of the congestion of streets blocked by cars, which gave us a clear path for the first part of our journey. The farther into the crowd we got, though, the more difficult it became to avoid collisions. Some of the risen attempted to move out of our way but bumped into their slower companions and ended up falling in front of our paths before we had a chance to avoid them.

  We managed to avoid the bulk of their bodies, but a few of the softer, decaying limbs were crushed beneath our tires, making the bikes wobble unsteadily. I’d been fine on the bike up until then, but this wasn’t something I’d been trained to deal with. I started worrying what would happen when the motorcycles could no longer navigate the uneven turf. There were only so many bodies that could collapse before the bikes couldn’t go any farther. They weren’t designed for off-road conditions, and the piling bodies posed something of a rugged-terrain experience.

  I scanned the area around us, hoping for an obvious route, something that would either get us to the hotel or give us a way through the hostile territory. As we continued our slow progress it became apparent we weren’t going to get to the hotel unless I was able to clear us a path.

  Time to put myself to the test and see if lighting up Parker’s men at the castle had been a fluke, or if Aubrey was true to his word.

  “Desmond, stop your bike on three,” I called.

  “Why? What are you planning?” Desmond looked over his shoulder, able to take his gaze off the road because of how slow we were moving. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  Holden snorted, but his grip around my waist eased up, and soon I wasn’t worried about knocking him off if I did—as Desmond suspected—something stupid.

  “On the count of three I’m going to need you to let go, okay?” I said to Holden.

  “Am I going to regret it?”

  I smiled to myself. “Probably. But it’s either you regret it, or we all die. Take your pick.”

  “On three, then.”

  “Smart man.”

  “Only occasionally.”

  I attempted to clear my mind, driving out all the color and distraction, all the eerie moaning from the dead. Instead I singled them out, counting each and every one by passing my gaze over the crowd. I ignored any that had fallen and focused on the ones moving through the street, blocking our way. It was like seeing a thousand grains of rice at once, but instead of an uncountable mass, I understood each of them as an individual. My mind drew an invisible tether between all of them, a thin blue energy I could feel more than see.

  “One.” I angled the bike towards the sidewalk, away from the bulk of the risen. I braced myself as the energy climbed up my skin and made my brain feel like a channel of fuzzy static. “Two.” I wanted to look to either Desmond or Holden and give them a reassuring smile, or tell them this was all going to be fine. But my mouth only seemed capable of forming one final word. “Three.”

  Within my mind the command again was Burn.

  Holden released me, and I braked the bike, bracing my feet on the ground. Ahead of me Desmond had stopped, and he and Sutherland had turned to watch me. The invisible tether in my mind sparked like the fuse on a bomb. My feel for it switched from blue to red, and in less time than it took me to say Three, the bodies were going up like pyres. I was reminded of a barbeque being lit with all the fwoosh sounds sparking to life around me, and with each one a new body was engulfed.

  “Jesus fuck,” Desmond said, raising his hand against the wave of heat that washed out towards us.

  Holden almost fell off the back of the bike but managed to regain his balance.

  Soon the heat from all the burning bodies stung our faces, but I was immobile, my hands lifted to the sky and my skin tingling with the sensation. I was like a revivalist preacher, only instead of screaming about the threat of brimstone raining down on my flock, I was the one lighting fires.

  The bodies continued to go up in smoke one after the other, fwoosh, fwoosh, fwoosh, until we were surrounded by a new sun, one of my own creation, and the light was so bright I couldn’t look directly at it. I was grateful I hadn’t targeted all of them. If I’d lit the nearby fallen bodies, the bikes might have gone up in smoke.

  As the bodies fell in their place, transformed from columns of ash into nothing but dust on the wind, we found ourselves in the middle of an empty street. The cars around us were untouched. Nothing else had been burned.

  Desmond came to his senses first. He glanced around at the destruction—or more accurately at the absence of it. I hadn’t left a single walking body. The
only thing that remained were the few corpses fallen nearby, and none of them were in our path.

  I’d done it.

  “Secret, what happened to you?”

  “I don’t know if now is the best time to talk about it. We’re almost back at the hotel, let’s—”

  From down the block came the unmistakable sound of crackling glass.

  We all looked up in time to see the shiny black tower of Rain Hotel ripple, then the glass exploded outwards, showering down on the street below. The wave of hot air hit us a moment later, and I was pushed back against Holden, who kept me upright. When we turned our gazes back to the hotel, the top stories were all engulfed in flame.

  I wasn’t the only one playing with fire tonight.

  Chapter Thirty

  My pyrotechnic display had nothing on the mayhem now laid out before us.

  “Go,” I screamed at Desmond, grabbing the bike’s handles and opening up the throttle, thankful I’d only stopped it and hadn’t turned it off.

  Logic told me I ought to get the hell away from the explosion as fast as possible. But raw emotion reminded me all my friends were meant to be meeting us at the hotel, and some or all of them might have been there when things blew.

  I sped past Desmond, who was still working to start his engine again, and flew down the block. Holden clung to me, his fingers digging into my ribs as he maintained his hold. Within seconds we were in front of the hotel. A few straggling dead who hadn’t been caught by my incendiary attack or by the explosion were wandering around, but not enough to pose a problem.

  The glass doors of the hotel had been blown to pieces, but the lobby itself was free of fire. “Dad, stay out here.” I shut off the bike and let it drop, running towards the building as a wave of heat rolled out, making me take a few steps back.

  “Genie?” I called out. “Cedes?”

  First there was nothing, then a small, “Secret?” The feminine voice could have belonged to any of my friends, but a twinge in my guts tugged me forwards, drawing me along with a leash of fear. Genie. I assumed the worst, that my sister was trapped beneath a pile of rubble and burned debris.