by Sierra Dean
Tyler hadn’t loved the idea of me continuing to let Harry roam freely, but since he’d more than proven himself in New York, he had been acting as my protégé since we’d gotten back to Los Angeles.
The team here was going to need someone they could rely on if I decided to move back to New York permanently.
Which was still a big if, but I was inching closer and closer to it every day. Desmond and Holden were right, it was time for me to go home, and the past month had shown me there was plenty of bad to be fought no matter where I went.
Harry’s knee jostled anxiously.
“Stop that.”
“We’ve been here for hours even though it’s daylight. Vampires don’t come out in the day, genius. I’m bored,” he complained.
“And I’m annoyed, but do you notice how I’m not strangling you, even though I want to? Also, vampires sometimes have people do their work for them, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“Drink more coffee, McQueen. You’re mean without it.”
“Don’t tell me what to do, Sirruner, I know how to dispatch your kind.” We mock glared at each other across the center console, but he grinned first.
“It’s not nice to threaten a demon with their true name, you know.”
“I never promised to be nice to you.” I sipped my coffee, and we both smiled. “One of those donuts better be chocolate glaze.”
“Or what? You’ll send me back to Hell?”
“Worse,” I said. “I’ll make you do all the freeway commuter runs for the next month.”
He groaned dramatically then handed me a chocolate donut.
I just managed to finish licking the last of the glaze off my fingers when a big white truck rolled up and parked in front of the blood bank across the street.
Three vampires jumped out of the back, wearing white balaclavas.
I set the donut down on the dash and checked my weapon. “You ready for this, rookie?”
“Lady, I spent seven thousand years flaying humans alive. You think a couple vampires are going to scare me?”
I winked. “Don’t damage that body. I like this one.”
We got out of the car and headed into the night.
Thanks for reading Secret Lives! I hope you enjoyed the return of Secret McQueen and her crew! Rest assured this won’t be Secret’s last adventure!
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Can’t wait to start another Sierra Dean book? Wondering how Lucas came back to life? Pick up Black-Hearted Devil, the third Genie McQueen novel. Keep reading for a sneak peek.
Black-Hearted Devil (Genie McQueen #3)
Chapter One
I’m not sure how most people would react when their once-beheaded mother returns from the dead, but I ran.
My mission had been grim but simple: dig up my mother’s head and give it to Beau Cain as payment for services rendered. What I hadn’t counted on was finding her makeshift grave empty.
What I really hadn’t counted on was turning around to find the formerly dead Mercy McQueen standing behind me, head planted firmly on shoulders, telling me what a naughty, naughty girl I’d been.
Frankly: fuck that.
I took off running into the trees, the sound of her laughter crackling like wood in bonfire, echoing in my ears as I tried to put enough distance between us to feel safe again.
How much distance would that be? I wasn’t sure I could run all the way to Australia.
I had some experience with encountering nightmares when I was awake. For over a year the specter of a burned woman had been appearing to me at very inconvenient times, doing her part to convince me I was losing my mind.
Except I knew she was real because I could smell her.
If there was one sense a werewolf learned to trust implicitly, it was their sense of smell. And much like that charred ghost, I’d smelled my mother with such clarity the scent of her was in my nostrils even now.
She had been real.
How she had been real was another question entirely, but one I hadn’t been about to stick around and quiz her on. I had literally seen her head in a box after my sister cut it off. That was a complicated enough story on its own. We didn’t need a second chapter.
Yet there she’d been standing only a few feet away from me, and her head had been perfectly in place.
Her laughter grew quieter but no less chilling as I ran.
There was one kind of death no one came back from, and that was beheading. Vampires couldn’t heal themselves, werewolves couldn’t, fey couldn’t. I knew of no single being that had the ability to reattach a severed head.
If I’d been a scientist, perhaps my mother’s return would have been exciting. An unexpected opportunity to learn about supernatural reanimation. But as it was, I knew what a monster she’d been in life. There was a reason Secret had lobbed Mercy’s head off in the first place, and it was better for all of us if that bitch had stayed dead and buried.
She wasn’t a ghost. The smell was a big tip-off there, but so were the words she’d spoken. Not the content of them, so much, but the fact she could speak at all. Ghosts had no lungs—they were dead, after all, and had no corporeal parts—so they couldn’t speak.
So, she couldn’t possibly be alive, but she also wasn’t a ghost.
My mind was racing almost as fast as my legs were. I barely noticed the dried branches lashing at my face and bare arms. It might have been early November, but I had planned to be digging, and werewolves tended to run warm at the best of times. I hadn’t needed a sweater.
Now I was being scraped up, and I was covered in a thin sheen of sweat, making the cold air cling to me. I’d had to go deep into the woods on my uncle Callum’s property to find the place my aunt Savannah had put Mercy. No one had wanted to keep her anywhere near the house.
Was this why?
Had they known this was a possibility?
After a few minutes of breathless headlong running, I broke through the denser brush of the woods and hit a small creek that circled the rear of Callum’s property. Under normal circumstances I might have gone a few feet up the shoreline to find the little footbridge. Instead, I didn’t even slow down. I charged through the shallow stream and up the other side, barreling through the old trees that hung heavy with Spanish moss.
As soon as I saw the lights of the compound, I let out a little cry of relief.
Almost there.
A circle of small cabins were built up at the back of Callum’s palatial plantation mansion, each simple building painted a different bright color. Only a handful had lights on—they weren’t always occupied, but rather served as temporary housing to pack werewolves in need—but the lights at the pack bar, The Den, were blazing bright.
I made a beeline for the wood-slat building, the sound of laughter and music rolling like a fog over the lawn towards me.
Then someone grabbed me from behind.
I hadn’t heard anyone coming, hadn’t smelled anything. I’d been so totally focused on getting back to Callum and the other wolves I had barely believed it was possible she might actually be following me.
I screamed, and spun around, fingers curled into the human approximation of claws. Wrenching myself free of my attacker’s hold I swiped at their face, making sharp contact.
“Ow,” a man’s voice said. “Jesus fuck, Genie.”
I froze.
A man’s voice.
Wilder’s voice.
“Oh my God.” I held his chin in my hands, and he jerked away, not surprisingly. A thin line of blood trickled down his cheek from where I’d gouged him below the eye. “I’m so sorry.”
“What the hell?” He touched his cheek gingerly, and looked at the glimmering red liquid on his fingers.
The wound would heal in minutes, but that was really beside the point.
“I’m so sorry,” I repeated.
Being in his presence, in spite of my maiming him, put me at ease in a way I couldn’t articulate. All the tension and terror that had driven me through the woods melted away, leaving me sweaty and trembling, but with a real sense of I’m safe now coursing through me.
Wilder Shaw, my sometimes bodyguard and recently my all-the-time boyfriend, was exactly the kind of man you’d want by your side in a fucked-up scenario like this one.
He must have seen something on my face—perhaps the horrifying dread I was feeling—because his annoyance at being attacked quickly dissolved and his hands went to my cheeks, cupping my face.
It wasn’t until that moment that I realized I was crying.
“Genie, what happened?”
Under different circumstances it probably wouldn’t have seemed all that strange for someone to be crying after they returned from their mother’s grave. This was hardly what I would call normal circumstances, however, and Wilder knew full well that my relationship with Mercy hadn’t been a close or loving one.
Plus there was that whole being terrified thing. My heart must have been beating a hundred miles a minute, and he was close enough there was no doubt he could feel it, and that he could smell the fear coming off me.
Werewolf senses made it hard to keep stuff like that hidden.
Not that it mattered right now. I was in no state of mind to pretend everything was okay. Everything was definitely not okay.
“M-Mercy,” I stammered. “I went to get her skull for Beau, and… her grave was empty.” Beau, being Beau Cain, a man who had done me a pretty massive favor, but like all his other favors it came with a steep price tag.
“Someone took her head?”
I shuddered. “No.”
“I don’t understand.” He’d moved his hands to my shoulders, rubbing the bare skin on my arms. I was completely covered in goose bumps and no matter what Wilder did I couldn’t shake them.
“She’s alive.”
He stopped rubbing my arms.
For a moment, he was so still the only motion I saw was the wind ruffling his dark blond hair. “Sorry, what?”
Now that I’d said it out loud, it seemed to remind me she was still out there, and even though I hadn’t heard her chase me, that didn’t mean she wasn’t making her way here as we spoke. Something had brought her back, after all.
If Mercy McQueen had returned from the dead, she had a little more than haunting on her mind.
Also By Sierra Dean
Secret McQueen
The Secret Guide to Dating Monsters
Something Secret This Way Comes
A Bloody Good Secret
Secret Santa
Deep Dark Secret
Keeping Secret
Grave Secret
Secret Unleashed
Cold Hard Secret
A Secret to Die For
Secret Lives
Genie McQueen
Bayou Blues
Black Magic Bayou
Black-Hearted Devil
Rain Chaser
Thunder Road
Driving Rain
Highway to Hail (2019)
Misfits & Mayhem
A Low Down Dirty Shane
Boys of Summer
Pitch Perfect
Perfect Catch
High Heat
Dirty Slide (2019)
Dog Days
Autumn
Winter
Spring
Summer
The Complete Dog Days Saga
Other Works
Chasing Kings
Night Moves
We Don’t Need Another Hero
Off the Map
About Sierra Dean
Sierra Dean is a reformed historian. She was born and raised in the Canadian prairies and is allowed annual exit visas in order to continue her quest of steadily conquering the world one city at a time. Making the best of the cold Canadian winters, Sierra indulges in her less global interests: drinking too much tea and writing urban fantasy.
She’s also a book lover (of course!), obsessive collector of OPI nail polish and the owner of way too many pairs of shoes. You can usually find her spouting off Kroll Show references or imagining what her wedding to Richard Madden will be like (hopefully not red).
Find her online at http://www.sierradean.com
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Black-Hearted Devil (Genie McQueen #3)
