A Secret to Die For (Secret McQueen)

by Sierra Dean

  “There’s not a lot to be happy about right now,” I reminded the wolf.

  Bradley gritted his teeth, clearly wanting to argue more about this but not able to disagree with me since I was his queen.

  For the time being, Morgan was out of the way and not being a pest. If things changed and she ceased to be helpful—or proved to be a liar again—I’d have no problem putting her down myself. At least I’d be rid of her once and for all. My determination not to let any of the bad guys walk away would extend to her if she crossed me.

  The old, gentle Secret was gone. I had often tended to look for ways to let people go. I made sure if it was possible for them to live, they did. Even those I should have killed when the opportunity presented itself had somehow gone on to see another day.

  I’d learned my lesson, though.

  If it seemed like someone shouldn’t go on breathing, they probably shouldn’t. And I would be all too happy to extend that courtesy to Morgan. But for now I was saving my bullets.

  It took a couple hours for everyone to return, but eventually the lobby was full and rowdy with noise as people discussed everything they’d encountered and seen during their treks through the city. We had pinpointed all but one of the necromancers, which to me was a victory. If we were able to kill twenty of the twenty-one remaining necros, the final one wouldn’t be able to hold the spell all by himself. Once the bodies had fallen, it would be a simple matter of hunting him down and dispatching him once and for all.

  “We leave the bar until last,” I said. “It has the highest concentration of them, and we’ll need everyone on hand. But we need to remember that as we kill these pricks, the others are going to figure out what’s going on. I don’t know how their magic works, but I know they’re working together, so when one goes down, the others are picking up the slack. They might not have noticed it when I killed the first one, but they’ll definitely figure out something is up when a dozen or more are dead. We have to strike all at once if we can, otherwise we give them the opportunity to get away.”

  Most people nodded their agreement, while others waited for me to go on, already looking worn down and exhausted from the events of the night.

  “We’re going to split up into four-person teams. At least two vampires and no more than one human per team.”

  “Offensive,” Cedes interjected, but she was smirking, making it obvious she was pulling my leg. A little levity was a nice change from the gloom and doom hanging over everyone else.

  “Who’d you rather go with? Tyler or that guy?” I pointed to a huge vampire sentry we’d enlisted. He was at least a head taller than all the others around him, and wore an expression of steely anger.

  Cedes chuckled and let me go on.

  “I want everyone to understand how serious what we’re about to do is. We are going into a fight against some very, very powerful people, and they will be expecting everything we might throw at them. I don’t know what other kind of magic they have. I do know some of their guards will be the risen, so try not to focus too much energy on the hired muscle. Some of it will go down once you’ve killed the necro. The rest seem to have been trained to commit suicide to evade capture, so things get significantly easier once the main necromancer goes down. Work together as a team. Trust the people you’re with.” I paced the room, radiating nervous energy, needing to hear these words myself as much as the others did. “There is no guarantee of safety. When you leave here, you might not come back. If you want out, this is your last chance to say so. I won’t hold it against you.”

  Some of them glanced around to see if anyone else was volunteering, but no one budged an inch. They were serious and focused, and though none seemed pleased by the situation at hand, they also didn’t show any signs of running away.

  “You all know what you have to do. We can’t coordinate a signal, so I want everyone to head to their targets. Ninety minutes should be enough time to get in place.” Checking the clock on the lobby wall, I added the appropriate amount of time. “At eleven thirty, we attack. Make sure at least one person on every team has a watch, and set them to lobby time, okay?”

  A chorus of grim okays came back at me.

  “Good luck.”

  We were going to need it.

  Being the coordinator of this whole shebang gave me the added benefit of selecting my own team. I didn’t want to bogart all the brains and muscle, but I did want to keep the people I cared about close to me.

  Desmond, Holden and Sutherland rounded out my crew. Since I didn’t officially count as a vampire, I’d added my father to fill out the quota I’d established for the others. If I’d brought everyone I wanted to keep an eye on, my team would be twenty people, and that wouldn’t qualify as playing fair. I had to trust the other teams would keep my loved ones safe.

  Genie had given me a crushing hug before we left, and I’d shared similar loaded embraces with Cedes, Nolan and Tyler. These people were my family. I’d sworn they were mine in front of the vampire council, and now I was sending them out into the great unknown.

  I tried not to think of how many might not return at the end of the night.

  “Keep yer eyes up,” Nolan said, playfully cuffing me on the chin. “You’ve still got some lessons t’ teach me.”

  Sig had offered me a friendly pat on the back, but it was Lucas who seemed the most afraid to let me out of his sight. He’d said little about the Morgan situation, but it didn’t escape my attention how he’d put her on a team with Juan Carlos.

  Before we left, Lucas waited until I was alone and pulled me aside. He appeared ready to make another appeal for me to stay behind, but in the end he just hugged me. He held me close until my mouth was overwhelmed with the taste of cinnamon, and then said, “See you soon.”

  See you soon.

  I held on to those words, repeating them in my mind as I watched the people I knew and cared for leaving the lobby—this time with a goal to kill. I tried to memorize every face and name. While some were just characters in the periphery of my own story, there were others who mattered more than I could ever properly tell them.

  I wanted to say goodbye, but it felt like a curse to do so.

  Instead I thought, See you soon, see you soon.

  Like a touchstone in my mind, I turned those three words over and over until they lost all meaning individually, but the phrase remained true.

  We’d come back here.

  We’d all come back.

  Nothing else was acceptable.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Though the necro site Holden and I found was nearby, it wasn’t the place we’d been assigned. Since we hadn’t done the appropriate recon, Sig and Lucas had insisted on going. I don’t know if it was because they thought they were stronger than Holden and me, or because they believed they were better prepared for surprises, and I didn’t ask. Arguing was just a waste of time at this point.

  My team pulled the unfortunate task of dealing with the necro holed up in Belvedere Castle in Central Park. The groups were assigned based on locations at least one of the team members had scouted. Desmond’s duo had been the ones to find the castle, so we followed his lead into the park.

  I wasn’t used to yielding command, but I didn’t have a hell of a lot of choice in the matter this time around.

  “It’s like they flipped through a guidebook of New York and chose their hideouts based on the most popular tourist traps.” I stuffed my hands in my jacket pockets and picked up my pace so I could stay between Holden and Desmond. Sutherland was a few feet back, stopping every couple of minutes to stare absently at something before carrying on.

  He wouldn’t be much help in the actual fight, but at least I knew what to expect from him. Putting him on any other team would create an unnecessary weakness for them, and I couldn’t leave him behind. He might actually prove to be handy in the end. Stranger things had happened.

  We approached the castle from the trails, rather than coming across the Great Lawn. While this meant we didn�
�t get any advance views of our target, it also kept us out of sight. Any guards on the castle’s observatory decks would have a great view of the entire lawn and the picnic areas surrounding the pond. From our approach angle, we’d be protected by the forest’s leafy trees until right before we reached the castle.

  There were far fewer bodies in the park than I’d expected. Compared to the overwhelming number clogging up the streets and tripping over themselves on the sidewalks, the park was almost empty by comparison. This was both better and worse in some ways.

  Because there were fewer of them, it also meant they took us by surprise more often. We’d be moving along at a good clip until one of the risen would stagger out of the trees and stop in front of us on the sidewalk. We only had to engage one once, when it lunged for Holden and refused to yield its grip.

  My sword proved its value when I cut the thing’s arms and head off in quick succession before it had a chance to bite the vampire. Holden was less thrilled because he’d had to abandon his suit jacket in order to get the dead hands off him.

  Once we reached the path marked for the castle, we slowed down, not wanting to be surprised by either a body or one of the necro’s living men.

  “How many did you see?” I asked Desmond.

  “At least four watching the exterior, two on each of the decks. No idea how many were inside, but it smelled like there were more.”

  Holden’s mouth twitched. I knew he was fighting the urge not to make a dog-related joke about smelling for humans, so I quickly went on. “Were they armed?”

  Desmond must have noticed Holden’s reaction because he gave the vampire an unimpressed glare before continuing. So much for their truce. I guess now that Desmond and I were engaged, they weren’t going to pretend to be nice to each other anymore. “Looked like semiautos. Not sure what kind exactly. But they seem comfortable with them, so that’s something.”

  That was something.

  I’d never visited Belvedere Castle before. There were a great many touristy places in Manhattan I hadn’t had the opportunity to explore because their hours were mostly limited to daytime, or their overabundance of visitors. I didn’t like being surrounded by people. It made me uneasy and tested the boundaries of my control too much. I probably could have come to these places after hours—breaking in wouldn’t be difficult—but I tended to respect the laws and limitations. Plus, what would there be to see in an old castle when it was closed? It wasn’t like they kept anything valuable or important on hand.

  Valuable.

  The word nagged at me, but I ignored it, seeing no relevance to our current situation. “You been here before?” I asked, not caring which one of them answered.

  “School field trip when I was a kid,” Desmond said.

  “Anything we need to know about it? Secret passages?”

  He laughed. “Not so much. But there’s only one stairway, and it’s narrow as hell. Like, claustrophobic narrow.” He stared at me meaningfully, knowing how I felt about enclosed spaces.

  “Great.”

  “Which also means if anyone is coming down, we’re pretty screwed about hiding.”

  “Double great.”

  “Perhaps you can call up your Spider-Man and have him scale the walls,” Holden suggested, not showing any sign of whether or not he was being serious.

  He had to be kidding.

  Right?

  “I assume Peter Parker is busy tonight,” I replied.

  “Then I guess the teeny-tiny stairwell will have to do.”

  I wondered how hard it would be to climb the walls. I didn’t relish the idea of getting stuck on the stairs with any of the necro’s men coming down. It would turn into a stone-walled shooting gallery pretty quick, and with us stuck in the middle, I didn’t see it ending well.

  Desmond, apparently seeing how uneasy I was, added, “The rock face isn’t ideal for climbing.”

  “Not ideal isn’t the same thing as impossible,” I countered.

  “We’re not scaling the walls.”

  “Buzzkill.”

  Holden glanced at his watch. “Thirty-five minutes.”

  “Do we want to stick it out here or go around, see if maybe there’s a better access point?” I hazarded a quick glance behind me to be sure we were still alone. I didn’t like how exposed the path was. We were quite close to a major road, and several of the other park paths branched off nearby. If I could have something at my back, I’d feel more secure.

  Hard to find a protected corner in the middle of a park, though.

  I settled for leaning against a tree. Sutherland was close by, staring up into the night sky like a stargazer, except there were no stars to see. The purple-orange smoke and cloud cover was as dense as ever. The smoke was actually becoming so bad the air had a permanent hazy quality to it that made every breath feel thick and unclean.

  “I think this is our best bet. There’s nothing around the other sides that will give us access, and if we’re quick and quiet when we get in there, we shouldn’t have to worry too much about getting stuck on the stairs.”

  I grimaced. Unless one of us learned to fly in the next half hour, there was no getting around the shitty access issues.

  “Have you seen the Pleiades?” Sutherland asked, his voice dreamy. “Seven sisters. Seven? Hard to imagine, isn’t it?”

  “What’s he talking about?” Holden stopped clock-watching and got up from his crouch, moving towards Sutherland. “You can’t see the Pleiades from here.”

  “I can see lots of things from here.”

  “Like what?” Holden’s gaze darted back at me, his eyes asking more questions than I could possibly dream of answering. When Alice fell into Wonderland and the Mad Hatter told her, We’re all mad here, I imagine this was the world Lewis Carroll was writing about. But Sutherland took the cake for madness.

  “Everyone is moving like chess pieces, but the board is much too big. The queen is unprotected. She needs her seven sisters.”

  Okay, now he was starting to freak me out. He was speaking like someone in a dream—and I was no stranger to receiving weird messages in my dreams. But this was really happening, and no matter how much I might wish it were a nightmare, it wasn’t.

  “Dad, which queen are you talking about?” He couldn’t mean me. I only had one sister, and I was about as protected as I could possibly be. Yet who else could he be referring to?

  “Shooting stars. Here they come.”

  “What—?”

  The roar of engines cut me off mid-question. Holden grabbed Sutherland and yanked him off the path, dragging him into the trees, and Desmond and I followed. A moment later six motorcycles sped down the path, their headlights cutting perilously close to exposing us. Their engines rumbled like angry giants, and continued to do so as they idled in the clearing near the castle.

  “This can’t be good,” I whispered, slipping past Desmond and weaving my way through the trees. I’d use the noise as cover to let me get closer, but the second the engines cut off I’d have to stop moving. They might only be human, but there was no way to hide the crunch of fallen leaves underfoot.

  I got within a few feet of the trees nearest the castle, finally able to see the structure itself, though I couldn’t make out the new arrivals. Their headlights were aimed at one of the stone walls, and all six of them remained on their bikes.

  I almost jumped when Desmond touched my back.

  Holden and Sutherland were a little ways away, my father sitting down in the moss, holding up individual leaves to investigate their patterns. He started constructing piles of them in a wide circle around himself like he had with the papers at the vampire council headquarters. As long as he kept quiet, he could build himself a leaf fort for all I cared.

  He’d known they were coming.

  Maybe he had better hearing than us. Holden probably would have heard them too if he hadn’t been busy asking Sutherland questions.

  I didn’t want to assume my father was a psychic, or some weird vampire fort
uneteller. If there was a way to limit the amount of bizarro stuff my family was capable of, that would be awesome. So I wrote it off as a fluke and pushed thoughts of the seven sisters out of my mind.

  But why choose the Pleiades of all constellations? It was an awfully specific thing to start muttering about.

  No. Bad Secret. Focus on what’s important.

  Yes, right. Task at hand and all that good stuff.

  I dropped to my hands and knees and shuffled forward. If anyone were to look over in our direction, I didn’t want to be standing right in their line of sight. After what seemed like eons of waiting, they cut their motors one by one, and again the sounds of silence reigned.

  The lead biker removed his helmet, and I recognized him as one of the twins at the bar. Lars or Sven, the blond Scandinavians. Lars set his helmet on the seat of his bike, and the other five gang members lifted their visors but stayed seated.

  “Oy. You up there.” He didn’t sound like he was from Norway. I was disappointed my version of his backstory was so far off. This guy might have stumbled in from the Jersey Shore given his horrific accent. “Go get Bill.”

  Bill.

  Bill?

  Were we seriously here to kill a necromancer biker named Bill? Fuck me running, this night kept getting better and better. Now I wasn’t sure if Lars would be named something hideous like Jim-Bob or something else far less exotic and romantic than what I’d concocted for him. I liked my version of events better, because the real-life truth was shaping up to be such a disappointment.

  The armed guard on the first deck disappeared, and for several minutes nothing happened. A bustling drew my attention from the group of bikers towards the castle entrance, where a rotund man was huffing his way down a short flight of stairs. One of the armed guards followed him, but the other had returned to his post again.

  “Whatdya want?”

  “Marcela sent me to make sure you’re taking all necessary precautions to safeguard yourself. The girl may not have returned yet, but Marcela wants us all to be prepared.”