by Sierra Dean
“Pretty sure something like that would qualify as vintage now and probably cost more than if I did buy you a brand-new one, but you do you, buddy.”
With Shane in tow I knew sweet-talking at the front desk wasn’t going to fly. It looked like I was trying to bring my drug dealer into the hotel with me. I made a beeline for the concierge and plopped my official FBI badge down on the desk in front of him.
He glanced up at me, clearly eager to help.
“I’m Special Director Secret McQueen, and this is my associate Shane Hewitt. We’d sincerely appreciate you skipping over the part where you pretend there aren’t any apartments in the building, and buzz us up to Ingrid’s floor. We are looking for her assistance in an ongoing missing person’s case.”
The man held up the badge like he was checking to confirm I hadn’t gotten it out of a box of cereal. I pulled a business card out of my pocket and slid it across the counter to him.
“This is the direct line for the office of Daphne Miller, the director of our New York field office. She can confirm I am who I say I am, and have approval to work on any investigation that merits my special skill set.”
Bless his heart, he actually called.
After Daphne had assured him this wasn’t a very thorough con, the concierge took Shane and me to the elevator and rode with us to one of the top floors of the hotel.
A poorly kept secret in New York was that most of the poshest hotels in the city also had permanent apartments in them. Some people liked to have the amenities of a hotel while maintaining their own personal space. Lucas had lived on three floors of the hotel he had owned. Ingrid had been living at the Plaza for over fifty years.
I was more of an apartment gal, but I had also only recently been so rich I could consider doing something as bonkers as living in a hotel.
Being able to afford living in New York at all felt like something I deserved a merit badge for.
When we got to the private entrance for Ingrid’s apartment, I knocked and waited a full minute before trying the handle. I was surprised to find the door unlocked. Ingrid might have the security of hotel staff surrounding her at all times, but she was still too smart a woman to leave her front door unlocked in a city like this.
Any crazy motherfucker could just walk right in.
I proved that by stepping into her foyer.
“Ingrid?” The lights were blazing, and my nerves were immediately ajangle. This wasn’t right at all.
The concierge made a move to follow us, but out of instinct I said, “Please wait there, sir.”
“I’m not supposed to let anyone in unattended. Especially if the owner isn’t present.”
“I’m going to ask you for your own safety to stay where you are. Do you have a phone with you?”
He nodded. I don’t think he’d been expecting my question.
“Can you please have it ready?”
“For what?”
I rounded the corner out of his line of sight, and my heart dropped directly into my shoes.
In the bright overhead lights, the smears of blood that lined the walls and floor maintained a faintly red hue, though it was obvious at a glance that they’d been left to dry for quite some time.
“Fuck me running,” I said.
Shane came up behind me and stopped dead in his tracks. “Sweet Jesus.”
It was just so much blood. More than a person could lose and still go on living, I would imagine.
“Sir, I’m going to ask you to call the police now.”
“Aren’t you the police?” He had come farther into the room, enough to catch a glimpse of the apartment over my shoulder. His face was instantly rendered an ashen white. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
He scuttled out of the room, fumbling with the phone in his hands, and I could barely make out his stammered pleas to 911 when he got to the hall.
I sidestepped a dried smear of blood on the marble hallway floor and followed the trail farther back into the apartment. Blood was everywhere. It was such a grim scene of horror I had already steeled myself, expecting to find Ingrid’s exsanguinated body at the end of it, like a macabre pot of gold.
Only, Ingrid wasn’t here.
I checked the bathroom—the most likely place someone would leave a corpse this messy—but the tub might have been the only thing in the whole apartment not stained red.
There was no sign of her in the bedroom, the living room, her office, or kitchen.
Whatever had happened to Ingrid, her body wasn’t here.
Which meant she could have actually have survived this.
But no way she would have walked out of here on her own two feet after a bloodbath like this. And if someone had dragged her out, surely the security team would have noticed.
I sat on the edge of her couch on a somewhat-clean section and silently surveyed the room, taking in every last splashy red detail.
I think it was safe to say I’d figured out what would pressure Sig to withdraw his warrant on Davos.
The only problem was, now I had two missing people to find instead of just one.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“What do you mean you want me to fly Harold to New York?” Tyler asked me.
“I thought my request was pretty clear.”
I was lingering in the hallway outside Ingrid’s apartment, while a dozen different specialized crime scene techs, including two from our New York FBI office, processed every inch of the scene, looking for any clues that might indicate what had happened to Ingrid.
It was still hard to imagine she could have survived something that left behind so much blood, but I had to hope at least a little bit of it might have belonged to Davos’s men, or whoever had been sent here to take her out.
Which was what I had to assume their mission was.
Kidnap or kill Ingrid, because she might very well be one of the only people alive Sig cared enough about to make him change his mind on the hit against Davos.
“I’m not going to overnight a demon to you, Secret. And when are you coming home? We’re dealing with an epic-sized pool of bullshit here. We could use your help.”
“Not having a vacation here, Tyler. The shit has flowed east, and there’s plenty of it where I’m standing too.”
“I still don’t know what any of this has to do with Harold. I also can’t believe you’ve got me calling him Harold. It’s ridiculous. Now that he looks human, people are acting like it’s totally normal to have him around. Lily and the rest of the techies in the lab are having regular conversations with him. I swear to God if I’m not careful, I’m going to go down there one day and they’ll have the door wide open.”
“Would that really be the worst thing?”
“He’s a demon.”
“And I was a werewolf-vampire. What’s your point? Just because he’s a demon doesn’t necessarily mean he’s totally evil.”
“Secret, I want you to repeat those words again, slowly. He’s a demon. Demons by sheer definition are evil.”
“You’re prejudiced.”
He groaned. “I don’t have time to deal with this right now. Why do you want me to send him out there?”
“Because we have a unique but also equally motivated group of vampires out here trying to summon demons, and I’ve got some dead bodies and my own near-kidnapping to show for it.”
Tyler was quiet for a long time. “It would make my life a lot easier if you could possibly go more than a week without someone attempting to kidnap or kill you, you know.”
“I don’t want people to do those things to me, but it seems to be a byproduct of the job.” I peered back into the apartment where one of the officers was questioning Shane. Mercedes was busy dealing with the Davos mess, so we were at the mercy of the nearest responding precinct. They had also called Daphne to confirm I was really an FBI agent, and I was wondering if I needed a more serious haircut for people to take me at my word.
No, I probably needed testicles before that was going to be a g
iven.
No respect, and I was a divisional director, for crying out loud. Maybe that was part of the problem. Perhaps if I told people I was just an agent and not a director, they would roll with it. The fact I was younger than thirty and co-running a supernatural division might have been hard to swallow for lifelong beat cops.
“So this is a more widespread issue, then?”
“Yeah, I caught sight of that symbol again last night, so this has something to do with Belphegor. If you could get the research team to look at that more closely, it would be helpful. Like, what’s his deal? Why would a bunch of vampires be interested in bringing him up, specifically?”
“We suspect it might have to do with his chosen sin being gluttony. I think the vampires figure if they get him on their side they’ll be able to glut themselves on the blood of humanity? But that’s just a theory.”
“You need to do more research,” I suggested.
“I’ll add it to my to-do list.”
“Right under send Harold to Secret, right?”
“Okay fine. I’ll send Emilio out there with Harold, with the caveat that you’re back here within seventy-two hours.”
“I’m not sure I can promise that.”
“You’re going to have to. I’m giving you three more days, and not an hour more. I’m not kidding when I say we have our hands full here, and there aren’t a lot of other options. Don’t let this go to your head, but I need you.”
I schooled myself, not wanting my genuine pleasure to come through too obviously. “Aw shucks, Novak.”
Novak was a name from Tyler’s detective days, given to him by a bunch of cops who couldn’t quite wrap their tongues around Nowakowski. It had stayed with him even in his permanent move to the FBI. Mostly because I kept using it.
“Suck up to me later.”
“I’ll make a note.”
He ignored me and said, “I’ll get them out as soon as I can, but can you try to keep out of trouble in the meantime?”
“I can try.”
“Why do I even bother asking?”
I grinned, then had to remember to sober my features when I walked back into the apartment. The phone call had been a nice reprieve from what was happening here, but now that I was faced with the Jackson Pollack of crime scenes, my tummy did another unpleasant flip-flop.
If Davos had done something to Ingrid, it certainly explained Sig’s sudden about-face. He would do anything to keep her safe. Hell, I had known Desmond less than a decade, and I would lay down in traffic for him. Sig had been with Ingrid for seven hundred years. It didn’t matter that they weren’t a couple. Any relationship forged over such a long period of time was beyond the scope of imagining. She knew him better than anyone would ever know him, and vice versa.
That was love no one in the human world could understand.
And Davos had used it against Sig.
It was despicable and brilliant. No one else was stupid enough to go quite so far, and Davos was going to end up dying for it, but he was scheduled to die anyway, so this had given him the extra time he needed.
And now I knew what he needed that time for.
He was preparing to open up another gate to Hell, because he didn’t know the West Coast already had, and if he was anything like the other zealots I had met in my life, he didn’t care if he died, as long as he stayed alive long enough to get the job done.
That was some messed-up dedication. I’d salute the guy for it, but I wanted to cut off his head instead.
Knowing his motivation and what he’d done to turn Sig, I had to figure out what had happened with Ingrid.
I was betting he was counting on seven-hundred-year-old human servant blood to pack one hell of a punch when it came to a demonic sacrifice.
Provided she had any blood left.
“Special Director McQueen?” One of the detectives, a guy named Hughes, I think, was lingering nearby, obviously trying to given me space but running out of patience.
“Yes?”
“Can you explain for me what it was Ms. Müller did for a living?”
“It wasn’t a job, the way you think of it. She was the daytime servant for one of the most powerful vampires in the country.”
“What does that entail?” He didn’t sneer or make any glib remarks about the servant part, which I gave him credit for. Some folks were quick to judge and misunderstand how this society worked.
“She took care of his business during the daylight hours. Sort of like a personal assistant. As a result of her work with him, they formed a bond that allowed her to remain mortal but live alongside him.” I explained her age and what type of work she did for Sig. I also told him this was likely the work of a vampire who had been taken into custody by another detective the previous night.
I suspected we weren’t going to get much out of Davos now that he was locked up, but if I played my cards right, maybe I could manipulate him into oversharing.
He wanted to open a gate to Hell, and he certainly wouldn’t be able to do that from inside a cell. If he believed the rest of his cronies were going to fuck everything up, then I might be able to get him to spill the beans on what they’d done with Sig and Ingrid.
It was a long shot, but it was all I had.
Harold would be a big help. Having an actual demon on hand to goad Davos and tell him how badly he was screwing everything up would go a long way.
I hoped.
Otherwise I’d just asked for a live demon to be shipped across the country to me, and there was a solid chance this might go terribly wrong for me, as most of my worst ideas tended to.
After I answered a few more of the detective’s questions, he handed me his business card in case I thought of anything new after the fact and let Shane and me leave.
Once we were outside, Shane begged off, giving the classic, “I need to go home and relieve Siobhan so she can sleep” line. A likely story.
So I was alone again, with several hours to kill before Harold and Emilio would arrive, and it was daytime meaning there was no point in going to see Davos yet. Which, of course, left me wondering what the fuck I was supposed to do with myself.
I decided to head back to the bar from the previous night, hoping Davos and his crew might have been stupid enough to leave behind some clues, or maybe the cops had overlooked a clue that would tell me what Davos’s people had done with Sig or Ingrid.
Honestly, I wasn’t expecting to find anything useful, but I couldn’t stand around twiddling my thumbs. There’d been a point in my life where I had sort of wandered around looking for trouble, and stumbling my way into a good fight was all that mattered to me.
I wouldn’t say I’d gotten wiser in my old age, but I’d learned to love the investigative aspect of what I did. I wasn’t a detective, but I did solve crimes for a living these days, and seeing the fruits of my mental labor was often as rewarding as punching someone really, really hard.
Almost.
I wasn’t too far from the club, just a short walk. Since it was a beautiful sunny day, I might as well walk through Central Park, rather than around it.
The Plaza was right near the corner of West 59th and 5th Avenue, and from the front of the hotel I could easily spot tourists snapping photos of the iconic glass cube that served as the entrance to the Apple store. Behind the cube was what had once been the flagship FAO Schwartz toy store with its famous floor piano from the movie Big. I was grateful to have lived in the city when the store had been around.
It was strange to realize how quickly the city could change around me. It seemed like sometimes I would leave for a few weeks on a trip and return to find a dozen new restaurants opened, and a beloved old institution had shuttered its doors.
A sense of loss and sadness filled me.
Would there come a day when I no longer recognized the city I’d lived in my entire adult life?
FAO Schwartz had found a new home, but it wasn’t quite the same as it having its place on 5th Avenue.
I thought ab
out the Rain Hotel and how it had been such a dominant part of SoHo before it came down, and about all the pieces of the New York skyline that were no longer there. The fall of the Towers, the rise of their replacement.
New Yorkers were a resilient people—they had learned long ago to roll with the punches thrown at them, even if it meant they had to accept some pretty bizarre shit along the way.
New York had handled the reveal of supernatural creatures better than a lot of other cities. Probably because it wasn’t a shock to the system so much as it was, Well, that explains a lot.
They were one of the first cities to develop a symbol for showing which businesses were friendly to those of the otherworldly persuasion: a sticker shaped like a drop of blood with a howling wolf silhouetted inside. Not exactly all-inclusive—the fae were especially pissed at being left off—but it was a nice gesture and went to show how many places in the city were welcoming of the supernatural.
I jogged across 59th and entered the park near the General Jose de San Martin monument, a green-hued statue of a general astride his horse.
The park was in its glory. It was late April, and the buds had burst into small green leaves, so even though the air had the faint chill of winter to it, if the breeze kicked up, the sun beating down and the green overhead held the promise of spring’s arrival.
The cherry blossom trees were exploding with soft pink flowers, and though they weren’t as prevalent here as in Washington, they were plentiful enough to make the whole park magical.
Five years later and I was still amazed by how much I had missed in the daytime.
Living my life in the nighttime had its perks. I knew all the best late-night dining spots—though I’d unfortunately needed blood to survive—and I had learned to navigate in the dark, without fear of the nasty things that could make life miserable for others.
Walking in Central Park in the daylight was a trip. The colors were so damned vibrant, they made my heart sing. What made a green that green, or a sky so blue? It dazzled me, even after all this time, and I couldn’t believe I’d spent most of my life without this.
