by Sierra Dean
He nodded his grudging agreement, and it was obvious all of his anger at me had faded away. This was the Tyler and Secret show in a nutshell. Get really mad at each other, then mellow into mutual appreciation. It was the reason we’d been able to work so well together for so long. We shouldn’t work as a team, but we managed to find the perfect balance.
“Where’s Emilio?” I asked.
“He’s in a meeting with the Secretary of State explaining the brass tacks of what went down tonight and how much a risk to national security it poses.”
“And what’s he telling her?”
Tyler got up from his chair, stretching then running his hands through his already messy hair. He was still wearing the T-shirt he’d had on under his tactical gear, but had changed into jeans and a pair of Converse sneakers. He looked like he could be the lead singer in an indie rock band.
“He’s telling them we didn’t have enough advance warning to call in backup, and that we acted on the information we had as soon as we received it. He’s telling them we bypassed protocol for the better good of the nation, and that we hold ourselves responsible for capturing and removing the foreign element that escaped.”
“So he’s lying.”
“This is Emilio we’re talking about. He’s not lying, he’s restructuring the truth for the better good.”
“If he’s out covering our asses, why are you in here griping at me?”
Tyler picked up the folder from my desk and placed it in my hands, the photo of Agent Conrad staring up at me. “Because, Secret, even when it all works out, that doesn’t mean it all worked out.”
Chapter Eleven
I would have to wait until evening to make my visit to the West Coast Tribunal. By the time I got out of the office after the whole demon fiasco, the sun was already on the rise, and I’d lost a whole day to the job yet again.
The smart move would have been to go home, have a hot bath, reapply my burn salve, and sleep until sunset, when the West Coast Tribunal would be open for business. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Even now, five years after I’d gained my humanity, it was difficult for me to justify wasting valuable sunshine.
Gorgeous, buttery sunshine was one of the reasons I spent so much time in Los Angeles, even though my husband and our pack were on the East Coast. It made managing schedules and relationships hard, but over the course of five years we’d learned to make it work, and I’d built certain requirements into my job.
Every other weekend I flew home to New York, and every third week I spent the entire week there. It wasn’t all just fun and hot sex, mind you. I had a job to do within the pack, and also had to keep up my work with the FBI in a visiting position with the New York office.
They loved my former connection to the East Coast Tribunal, because it meant they had an in with the most powerful vampires in New York.
Desmond wasn’t a big fan, since it involved semi-regular visits with Holden, who was now on the Tribunal. Though my romance with Holden was over, he had told me once in no uncertain terms that he would love me until I was nothing but a fading memory to others. So yeah, I could see how my hubs might not like me spending time with a guy who would probably try to steal me away at any opportunity.
Thing is, in a case like that, you have to want to be stolen. I had loved Holden painfully, and I loved him to this day, but I had made my choice, and that choice was Desmond.
Still, jealousy isn’t a logical monster.
I left the FBI building and headed out into the buttery-yellow light of the Los Angeles morning. I could go home, but right now I wanted a coffee, some sunlight, and the sound of my man’s voice.
After pulling out my phone, I ignored a missed call from—speak of the devil—Holden Chancery himself, and dialed Desmond’s cell phone instead. His was the only voice I wanted to hear at the moment. Holden would have to wait, and he was asleep right now anyway, it being morning in New York.
The line rang twice, then Desmond picked up with a deeply sexy sounding, “How’s my girl?”
“Missing you something fierce,” I said.
“You know, you could solve that by just moving home.”
I clucked my tongue at him. This was a long-standing argument between us, and one of the only things that roused real fights. He wanted me to work in New York permanently, and I didn’t think the Los Angeles unit was ready to function without me.
I also didn’t think I was ready to function without Los Angeles.
“Let’s not go there.” I tried to keep my tone light. He gave a small sigh, and I suspected he would very much like to get into it right now, but I would be home in a week if he wanted to make a big deal out of things.
“How’s your morning?” he asked instead.
“Oh, you know, the usual. Just got off work, stopped an apocalypse, unleashed a demon prince from Hell, wearing Tyler’s shirt.”
“Why are you wearing Tyler’s shirt?” Leave it to my husband to start with the really important details first.
“Because mine had a bunch of holes burned in it. From the hellfire.”
“I can’t tell if you’re being literal or hyperbolic.”
In fairness to him, this was a weird job and I was prone to hyperbole. “No, unfortunately it was the literal kind.”
“Wouldn’t Emilio’s shirt have fit you better?” Ah, there we go. He was having fun with this now, bless him.
“Yes, it would have, but he was off covering our asses with the Secretary of State, and I think his office is probably booby-trapped.”
“Care to tell me more about this demon-prince scenario?”
“I’d rather not at the moment.” I walked into my favorite café a few blocks from the office. I was often in here on phone calls, and the barista had learned to go ahead and make my order without waiting. She gave me a friendly nod, slipped an already warm cheese biscuit across the counter to me on a plate, and started making my latte.
I left a twenty on the counter and smiled, then took my biscuit to a table over by the window and sat in a puddle of light like a house cat.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Burned, was briefly worried the jump off the roof might have re-broken my arm, but the dumpster got the worst of it.”
There was a drawn-out pause, then he said, “You know, I haven’t brought this up in awhile, but you said after the thing with your mother we would talk about it again, and I think it’s time.”
“Desmond…”
“No, you need to listen to me for a minute before you just say no. This isn’t about moving home.”
“Well, it sort of is, isn’t it?”
“Secret, you go out there night after night acting like you’re still the same person you were before the necromancers, but you’re not. You had gifts then, and as tough and smart and incredibly capable as you are, you’re only human.”
This was the other fight we liked to have endlessly, and it went hand in hand with the one about me moving back to New York.
“I’m not ready.”
“You’re not even willing to talk about it, and I don’t understand why. Being a werewolf is in your blood. Your sister and brother are both wolves. Your aunt and uncle. Your husband.”
He was annoying me, so I replied, “Both of my husbands.”
It was a low blow and a mean thing to say, but he knew I didn’t want to have this conversation at the moment, so I wasn’t about to let him steamroll me with it.
Desmond wasn’t my first husband.
He was the first person I had married legally in front of a judge, making him my one and only on-paper spouse, but before Desmond there had been Lucas. Lucas Rain was the previous werewolf King of the East, a title handed down through generations of men in the Rain family. Desmond was his best friend and second-in-command, and our entire little three-person relationship had been a never-ending hellscape of drama.
Lucas decided to put an end to my romance with Desmond by marking me as his own, then springing a werewolf wedding
ritual on me when we were visiting my family in Louisiana.
Surprise! You’re a wolf queen now!
Then, when we were planning to get married for real in an expensive and highly publicized wedding ceremony at one of his hotels, Lucas simply didn’t bother to show up.
Of course, it was hard to hold a grudge about all that since Lucas had died protecting my sister and me when a gang of necromancer bikers tried to burn down New York.
And he had remained dead until my sister accidentally cast a spell that brought him back to life four years later.
It was complicated to say the least.
But for the time being, Lucas was in the wind. He hadn’t wanted the responsibility of his pack back and left it all in Desmond’s capable hands. As of today only a small group of us knew he was alive. When he’d last checked in, he was in Argentina somewhere. He sent me a very nice case of wine.
If you think Lucas being alive again made Desmond happy, you’d be absolutely right. He’d missed the man who had been like a brother to him, missed his friend. But Lucas’s return had also dragged a lot of unpleasant memories up about our past relationship, and six months had not been nearly enough time for that open wound to heal between us.
Especially when I poked at it every time Desmond annoyed me.
“Lucas isn’t the reason you refuse to let me change you,” he said.
“Listen to what you just said. Play it back in your head for me.”
He sighed again. “That’s not how I meant it, and you know that perfectly well. I love you as you are, Secret, but being a werewolf is part of who you are, and if you’d let me bite you, your life would be so much easier. You’d be stronger, faster, better equipped to do that job you so love to do.”
“Better equipped to do it from New York.”
That’s where this little discussion came off the rails every time. I knew his heart was in the right place, and I wasn’t really against the idea of being a werewolf again, either. The problem was that once he bit me, I would be a part of his pack. The East Coast pack. And I would be expected to start living up to my role as a member of that pack in blood and not merely by marriage.
The other part was that the second he turned me back into a werewolf, I would be trespassing in Los Angeles.
By being a werewolf royal, I could only be on another king’s property with their good graces and blessing. The werewolf King of the West was not exactly known for his hospitality towards me. He didn’t like that I, a technical werewolf Princess of the South, hadn’t asked permission to stay in Los Angeles, which would have been the appropriate thing to do.
Explaining I was no longer a werewolf hadn’t gone over that well, and he made every attempt to let me know my presence here wasn’t welcome. Which turned into a real pain in the ass whenever the unit needed something from the wolves.
If I let Desmond bite me, the one technicality that allowed me to stay here would evaporate because there was precisely zero chance I’d be allowed to live in L.A. once I went from being technically a werewolf queen to literally one.
So whether Desmond wanted to admit it or not, if he bit me, I’d have no choice but to go back to New York permanently. Which was exactly what he wanted.
And so we went around like this in a circle over and over again, because he wanted me home for good, and I wasn’t ready to be pinned down to one place.
If anyone ever tells you marriage is easy, you have my permission to punch them right in the face.
He must have sensed how incredibly done with this discussion I was, since he said, “I worry about you, is all.”
“I know.”
“And I don’t want you to think this is me telling you you’re not good at what you do. You know I don’t think there’s anyone better out there.”
“I did hear the part where you called me tough, smart, and capable. That was nice.” The barista brought my latte over with a friendly smile and didn’t linger. There was a reason I left big tips here. I leaned my head against the window and was simultaneously warmed by the sun and cooled by the glass. It was lovely.
“See, I can be nice sometimes.”
“You’re nice all the time. That’s why it’s so hard to be mad at you, because then I’m the one who looks like an asshole. It’s like, look at Secret, she has a perfect husband and she’s so mean to him.”
Desmond laughed. “No one says that.”
“You’re right, no one thinks you’re perfect.”
“Oh everyone thinks I’m perfect, don’t kid yourself.”
I smiled and felt better just hearing his voice, which had been precisely what I’d needed out of this conversation. I missed him fiercely and couldn’t wait to be back in his arms a few days from now.
“I made a new friend,” I told him proudly.
“Lady friend or dude friend?”
“I guess dude friend?”
“You…guess? Is this individual gender fluid? I believe you’re supposed to ask their preferred pronouns in that instance.”
I chuckled. “Look at you, being so woke.”
“One of our new wolves is nonbinary. It’s a bit of a learning curve, but I’m trying.”
This was the thing I loved most about Desmond as a pack leader. Some alphas weren’t exactly welcoming to others if they didn’t conform to a very narrow idea of what a werewolf should be, which made it extra hard for gay wolves if their pack was homophobic. There was a lot of naked bonding time with werewolves—it went with the territory. Lucas and Desmond had never cared. If you were a wolf, you were family.
Hearing that other groups in the LGBTQ community were being embraced by our pack was nice, especially now. With supernaturals being a known element, it had to be extra hard to be both queer and supernatural. I was happy Desmond was trying to make at least one part of that easier.
“Tell me about this friend,” he reminded me.
“He’s… I’ll go with he. I’m not sure how gender dynamics work in the demon world.”
“Secret…”
“Yes, I realize in retrospect all of this sounds really weird.”
“Care to make it less weird?”
“Well, it’s sort of a long story, but I was out hunting a demon the other night, and we ended up becoming friends, and I feel okay saying that now, because he helped save all our lives last night, so he’s a good demon.”
“Your new friend is a good demon,” Desmond repeated back to me.
“Harold.”
“The demon’s name is Harold?”
“The demon won’t tell me his real name. He doesn’t want me to have the power to banish him, so he pretended to be Belphegor, one of the seven princes of Hell, but then the real Belphegor got pissed off Harold was using his name, so he was one of the first ones out when the gate to Hell opened, and now he’s in the wind somewhere, so Harold is staying with us. And we can’t banish the real Belphegor even now that we know his name, since we don’t know where he is.”
Desmond skipped over this last bit of information. “Is Harold staying with you or with the department?”
“He’s in a holding cell. I didn’t think it wise to invite a demon to live in my guestroom, even though he is wearing an incredibly handsome man at the moment.”
“Sometimes having a conversation with you is like listening to some really questionably written Supernatural fan fiction.”
“Desmond Alvarez, are you admitting to being a fan of Supernatural?”
“A man needs to do something while his wife is away.”
“Team Dean or Team Sam?” I asked.
“Team Dean,” the barista whispered dreamily.
“Team Castiel,” was Desmond’s reply. “Now go hunt some demons, baby. I’ll catch up with you later.”
“Love you,” I said.
“Love you forever.”
I hoped that would still be a very long time.
Chapter Twelve
It was hard for me, as a human, to see the entrance to the West Coast Tribunal�
��s lair. The vampires were able to use their collective thrall to enchant the places they live and make it almost impossible for curious passersby to see them.
Most people walked right by the council headquarters in New York, but I knew where it was from my days with vampire blood, so I could still find it.
I’d spent significantly less time here in that period of my life, so while I knew where the headquarters were, I still drove around the block four times before I spotted it.
Vampires could never make things easy. At least for humans.
I waited until the sun was fully set to give the vampires a chance to arrive for the day before I headed down, and by the time I finally got there, it was abuzz with activity.
I marched up to the front door of the old warehouse and entered without knocking. I knew it would be open—they’re always open after sunset. It’s not like you can walk right in and be face-to-face with the Tribunal. There are levels and layers and a ton of hoops to get through before you’re in the presence of the truly powerful vampires.
But the council itself was there when vampires needed it, so the doors remain open, like a walk-in clinic. Ready to serve at a moment’s notice.
Two eager wardens were up from their desks within seconds of me getting through the door, my all-too-human blood alerting them as soon as I was over the threshold.
“Good evening, Ms. McQueen, what a pleasant surprise,” a pretty East Indian woman cooed politely. I did not imagine my surprise appearance was pleasant to them at all, but A-plus for keeping a straight face while pretending.
“I need to speak to the Tribunal,” I insisted.
“I’m sure you understand that’s not possible without an appointment,” the other warden, a short male with a tightly trimmed goatee, said. “They’re booked weeks in advance. You’re just going to have to come back another time.” I’d never met this guy before, so I was betting he didn’t understand that if I was here to see the Tribunal, it wasn’t a polite social visit.
“Believe me when I tell you they’re going to want to hear this.” I kept walking towards the elevators that went to the lower levels where the Tribunal had their private audience chamber. I’d been there once or twice, so I could show myself down if need be.