by Sierra Dean
I could have visited Keaty or Mercedes. I probably ought to have called Tyler and given him a status update, now that I was technically an asset of the US Government.
Instead of any of those things, however, I found myself wandering to Chelsea to an old rent-controlled apartment owned by the Council. It had once belonged to Brigit, when I couldn’t handle being her mentor and her roommate. But after her death it had remained in the possession of the Council, which had come in handy when I brought in another wayward vampire in need of a home.
I let myself into the foyer and was rifling through my purse to find my extra keys, when a loud crash overhead drew my attention.
Since the apartment building was populated primarily by elderly folks and a few lucky families, there could have been any number of explanations for the sound. Yet something about it made my blood run cold. It felt wrong. I jogged up the stairs to the fourth floor and down the hall to Brigit’s—I couldn’t stop thinking of it as hers—apartment.
The door was ajar, and someone inside was yelling.
Drawing my gun and disengaging the safety, I pushed the door open with my toe and raised the weapon, prepared to place two rounds in a chest or head if need be.
Nolan Tate, my vampire-slaying protégée, held a slim, seventeen-year-old-looking vampire around the throat and appeared ready to kill at the drop of a hat.
I hadn’t seen Nolan in months, not since Brigit’s death. The two had made an unlikely couple, but he had loved her more intensely than I’d realized. After she was killed, he bolted, and I hadn’t seen him since. Now he seemed hell-bent on trying to choke the life out of Sutherland, and the vampire wasn’t showing any signs of a struggle.
“Nolan, put him down.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“He lives here.” I had my gun trained on Nolan, but my finger was nowhere near the trigger, and the muzzle was aimed at his collarbone rather than his heart. If I was forced to shoot him, I didn’t want to kill him.
“He can’t live here. This’s Brigit’s ’partment.”
So I wasn’t the only one letting a dead girl maintain ownership of things in the living world. Good to know.
Nolan, whose skin was normally a beautiful caramel color owing to his half-black, half-Hispanic parentage, looked downright peaked, his complexion turning an ugly, sallow green.
“Nolan, put my father down, please.”
And there, with that magic word, I managed to get through the fog of his grief and give him something he could understand. His attention shifted from Sutherland to me, and he must have done the same double take two or three times, trying to process the connection.
Yes, Sutherland looked younger, still as fresh-faced and innocent as the day he died. But there was no mistaking the family resemblance. Nolan had never met my mother, but I was as much Sutherland’s daughter as I was hers. And given that neither my father nor I could spend any time in the daylight, the similarities were magnified by our shared pale skin and light blond hair.
Nolan let go of Sutherland, and my father didn’t even bother touching his neck. He wandered past Nolan and sat back on the couch like nothing had ever happened.
It would be a gross understatement to say Sutherland wasn’t all there.
He was fucking nuts.
But not the kind of crazy that went out on killing sprees, which was why he was allowed to live on his own, outside the watchful eye of the Council. He talked to himself, and what he said generally didn’t make a lick of sense, but it was hard to expect more when his sire, Theo, had turned dear old dad against his will and then sent him off to murder his own family.
That sort of thing will mess a teenager up permanently.
“He’s your…” Nolan kept staring at the other man, who still maintained some baby fat in his cheeks. The only thing that gave Sutherland’s true age away were his eyes, which looked desperate and haunted when he focused long enough for me to see them. Normally he shuffled around staring at the floor.
I wondered sometimes if he’d been saner before The Doctor got hold of him. I was irreparably fucked up thanks to my ten days underground, but Sutherland had been there for weeks. Maybe he’d been able to hold a conversation before then. Now I was lucky to get complete, coherent sentences from him once or twice a week.
I clicked the gun’s safety back on and reholstered it, closing the door behind me now that the threat was over. No sense in making a public spectacle of our private matters.
Nolan picked up a lamp that had fallen to the floor, which was probably the source of the crash I’d heard. He ran a hand over the stubble on his shaved head and gave me a sheepish half-smile.
“I’m real sorry,” he said apologetically. I’d missed him and his goofy accent. For some reason when Nolan spoke he forgot to begin or end his words properly, leaving the letter A off words and dropping consonants willy-nilly. When he drank, I needed a translator to understand what he was saying.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“’Salong story, ya know?”
I was familiar with the concept of long stories. I had one or two of my own. “Can you try giving me the CliffsNotes? I’ve been worried about you.” Though I hadn’t done anything to track him down beyond calling him and leaving several texts, it didn’t mean he hadn’t been in my thoughts. I was all for needing time to heal after a tragic loss, but I had my fears that Brigit’s death might have been too much for Nolan to handle.
It relieved me to no end to see him standing five feet away from me, looking no worse for wear.
“I had ta get ’way. Get my shit t’gether.”
“And is your shit together now?”
“’S’muchas it’s gonna get.”
“Have you stopped to see Keaty yet?” Prior to Nolan bailing, he’d been working with Keaty at the PI firm that still had my name on the masthead. “I know he could use an extra set of hands around the office.”
“Not yet. Gonna go t’morrow. Stopped by Shane’s, but he’s got a girl now.”
Ah yes, Siobhan. The pint-sized Irish archer who was ninety percent attitude. I hadn’t seen Shane in a few weeks, but I was glad to know he was making things work with his ladylove. It wasn’t like he was going to find another girl who believed in vampires, could kill demons, and thought his faux-rock-star getup was sexy.
Okay, to be fair, any woman with eyes and a functioning sex drive would probably be attracted to Shane’s, er, packaging. But Siobhan was the perfect match for him.
“No crashing on his couch, then.”
“Nah. I came ’ere ’cause I wasn’t sure where else ta go. Then I saw yer…dad? I freaked. Sorry.” He turned to Sutherland. “Sorry.”
“What for?” My father blinked up, glancing to Nolan then me. “Secret, who’s your friend?”
Perhaps it was for the best not to remind him my friend had tried to kill him not two minutes earlier. “Dad, this is Nolan Tate. He and I go way back.”
“It’s a pleasure.” Sutherland returned to staring at the blank television set.
Nolan’s eyes pleaded for an explanation, but what could I say? I didn’t have the energy or desire to review the story of what had gone down in California, and was there an easy way to tell someone your absentee vampire father was a bit…unhinged?
“He’s had a hard twenty-four years,” I said.
That might be the best way to explain a lot of things.
Chapter Twenty
Nolan couldn’t stay with me. Even with Desmond out of the equation until Lucas could fix him—well hopefully not fix him—I still had Holden to contend with. Technically only Desmond lived with me, though he and Holden both had their own apartments. But now that Desmond and Holden had come to their tense agreement regarding my relationship to them both, I was seeing the vampire in my domain a lot more often.
And since he knew I was back in the city, I would surely be seeing him once I found my way back to Hell’s Kitchen.
It wasn’t that he’d view Nolan
as a threat, but I didn’t think it would be fair to put my young sidekick in such a tense situation.
He couldn’t stay with Shane, and I didn’t bother suggesting he crash on Sutherland’s couch. I’d been amazed Nolan had accepted Brigit for what she was, considering his distaste for most vampires. He wouldn’t be so flexible when it came to my dad.
So, in spite of his claim that he’d visit Keaty the next day, we found ourselves standing in front of a brownstone with Keats & McQueen painted on the front door. My one-time home beckoned with the kind of warmth one can only get from a place they don’t have to live in anymore.
“Should’ve called first,” Nolan grumbled.
“Please. You think he’s sleeping? No. Keaty doesn’t sleep.”
“’E might be mad.”
“At you?”
“Yeah.”
The truth was Keaty probably was mad. He hated unreliable people, and Nolan had been the dictionary definition of unreliable when he’d skipped town. There was no sense in playing the dead-girlfriend card, because as far as Francis Keats was concerned, vampires weren’t people. Mourning Brigit would mean the same to him emotionally as mourning a dead goldfish.
Considering he was one of the only humans in my life, Keaty was easily the most detached from his humanity. It made him a great partner, an excellent teacher, but absolute crap as a substitute father figure.
Not that my real dad was doing much better.
“He’ll be fine. Just ring the bell.”
Nolan, ever dutiful, did as I requested, and a few moments later the front door opened.
If I were to imagine the perfect sociopath, a no-nonsense killer for money, I don’t think I’d picture Keaty. I might think of a guy in full flack gear, maybe with scars from a stint in a war zone somewhere.
Keaty had no scars, at least no physical ones. His hair was dark blond and cut in a short, tidy style that would have served him equally well on a battlefield or in a boardroom. Sometimes he wore wire-rimmed glasses, but he’d removed them before coming to the door. I could make out the indent of the plastic feet where they’d been resting on his nose.
“McQueen.” He nodded at me. If he was surprised to see either myself or Nolan, it didn’t show. “Tate. You back from your vacation?”
“Uh. Yessir.”
“Good. Room’s still upstairs. Hope you don’t think I’m paying you for all those weeks you were gone. We have a case I’m expecting your full assistance on. I’ll break it down for you in the morning.” He held the door open to let a befuddled Nolan pass him. “Secret, could you please wait in my office?”
I’d known fear in my life. I’d been bruised, beaten, tortured, shoved through dimensions and made to wear uncomfortable heels while doing a lot of it. But few things could terrify me like Keaty’s we need to talk tone.
Nolan looked visibly relieved to learn I was the one in trouble tonight rather than him. Suddenly I felt like we’d just been busted by our father for stealing his car, but I was the one getting yelled at because I was the oldest.
I trudged down the hall to Keaty’s office, and a minute later he announced his arrival by quietly shutting the door. I didn’t glance back at him, choosing to wait until he took his seat across the desk from me.
Nothing in his expression had changed, which notched my anxiety up a few points. If he at least looked mad, I might be able to appropriately steel myself, but this whole nonchalant lack-of-emotion thing put me more on edge.
“I trust your trip to Paris was…fulfilling.” He opened the top drawer of his desk and slipped a newspaper towards me.
It was a Parisian periodical, written in French—of course—but even with my relatively rusty grasp on the written language, I could work out what the front-page article was about.
Corps décapité découvert dans le metro.
Headless body found in metro.
“Of course what the article fails to mention is how the body turned to ashes the moment they brought it out into the sunlight.” He took the paper back and replaced it in the drawer. Did he have a scrapbook somewhere to commemorate all my fuckups? He might need more than one.
“I killed Peyton.” I hoped he might see the silver lining in the whole thing.
He looked moderately impressed, but only for a nanosecond. “I’m glad you were able to clear your plate of one pest, but at what cost? This isn’t the most subtle way you could have gone about it.”
There was no sense in drudging up the details of everything that had gone down that night in the sewers. Keaty would think I was making excuses, which would be true. “It was either kill him there or lose him, maybe forever. I wasn’t about to let him slip through my fingers.”
“You found him once.”
“And it took me months. I needed to finish him, and I did. End of story.”
“What do your Tribunal partners have to say about this?” he asked.
My internal alarms started sounding at the mention of my two Tribunal counterparts, Juan Carlos and Sig. I had made every effort to avoid them since my return from California, but there were certain aspects of the position that made avoidance impossible. Among them, our regular disciplinary meetings.
I felt sorry for any vampire whose punishment fell to me during those sessions, because I had been extra cold due to my lack of desire to be there.
“I only got back into the city a few hours ago. I haven’t been to see the Tribunal yet.”
I still hadn’t adjusted to the whole Sig situation. Sig, the Tribunal’s leader, was also my…something. My father’s sire’s sire. Which meant his vampire blood was what lit the undead spark in me. Which made all the times he’d hit on me really fucking creepy. He didn’t view it as a family connection in the traditional sense, but that didn’t keep me from getting squicked out by the idea of us sharing blood.
Basically, he was my great-great-grandfather, but in the vampire world there was nothing to forbid you from screwing your family. Figuratively and literally.
I’d never been bothered by the idea of sires bedding their vampire children. I knew Rebecca—Holden’s sire—tended to play bedroom favorites with her creations, enjoying their company until she got bored of them and made someone new.
But now that I was on one side of a vampire family line, I couldn’t get past the idea of Sig and I being related. Maybe it was unbearably Western of me and a glaring representation of the culture I’d been raised in, but there was no way in hell I’d ever flirt with the idea of a roll in the sheets with Sig again.
Yeeeeeuck.
Things had never advanced very far between us, but in the past I’d sometimes found the idea of him appealing. After all, it was hard not to be flattered when a gorgeous two-thousand-year-old vampire lavished all sorts of attention on me.
Now I didn’t know what to think. His motivations were a mystery to me, and if I dwelled on the whole thing too long, it made me dizzy.
So instead of discussing it with him like a rational adult, I avoided him, hoping the whole thing would just go away.
Too bad I’d gone and made a huge mess of things in France. Killing Peyton wasn’t my biggest concern. Peyton was a known rogue, and as a Tribunal leader I had the freedom to issue death warrants on a whim. The much bigger issues at hand were the very public way in which I’d killed him and the fact a dozen baby vampires were running around Paris who knew exactly what I was.
I’d be stunned if the big Secret gossip wasn’t already stateside.
If I could skip town long enough to get my affairs in order, I would come back and face the music like a big girl. But I couldn’t leave Grandmere unprotected in her time of need. Callum could say whatever he wanted about Ben and Fairfax being able to protect her, but I wouldn’t rest easy until Mercy was in the ground.
Keaty was right. I had one problem off my plate, but I wasn’t going to feel a sense of satisfaction until the whole thing was clear, and that meant finding my mother and putting her down for good.
“I think it’s
important for you to take this seriously,” Keaty went on, having given me more than enough time for personal introspection. “You know this won’t go overlooked.”
“There’s no evidence to link me to the crime, and like you said, the article doesn’t mention what happened to the body. Chances are good the authorities will cover it up to avoid the embarrassment of losing a corpse like that.” I made a mental note to call Tyler once I left. He was still working with Mercedes under the guise of being a police officer, but now I knew his real job.
Tyler had been recruited by the FBI to work for a special black-ops division that investigated paranormal entities in the US. Sort of like the X-Files only they were taken very seriously by their peers, and the stuff they worked on was real.
I was willing to bet Special Agent Nowakowski and his partner Agent Emilio LaRoy had international affiliations. They could probably call someone up at Interpol who would be able to sweep the whole mess under the rug. Sometimes it was nice to be a government asset.
“I’ll take care of it,” I assured him.
As to the matter of my secret identity becoming public knowledge? That was something I still didn’t know how to deal with.
Juan Carlos was going to have a heyday. No one had tried harder or pushed as much to find out what I was. He hated me. Hated me. Once he found out I had werewolf blood tainting my already questionable mortality, he would lose his mind. In Juan Carlos’s opinion, the only thing worse than a human was a werewolf. So what would be worse than a half-human vampire? A half-werewolf vampire, naturally.
Sig had kept me protected from Juan Carlos this long, but could he keep me safe now?
“You seem very sure of yourself.”
“I did what I had to do. I’ll make sure things don’t spin out of control.” Only a few years ago I wouldn’t have been able to make such assurances. When I’d been a mere bounty hunter for the Council, I had feared their retribution at every turn. Now that I was on the Tribunal itself, I was damn near untouchable.
I was going to put my power to use for as long as I still had it.