Secret Lives (Secret McQueen Book 9)

by Sierra Dean

  “You shouldn’t listen in on other people’s conversations, you big snoop.”

  “Then you shouldn’t loudly have those conversations outside an open door when you know full well I can hear you.”

  “Bah.”

  “Do you need to stop at your house for anything, or can we go directly to the airport? Your husband was kind enough to give me the use of the pack’s jet.” Ah, so he hadn’t even needed to get a special flight. Desmond’s plane was outfitted the same way as the supernatural-friendly airlines, as Des had found it financially beneficial to have a plane he could rent to the vampires from time to time. I wasn’t aware the Tribunal was included in his frequent flyers club.

  “You talked to Desmond?”

  “For once he seemed more than happy to help me with something.”

  I’m sure he was thrilled, considering it meant bringing me back to the city earlier than expected. That poor jet was getting a lot of mileage on it in recent months. The nice thing about using I plane I owed was it meant I didn’t need to explain bringing my sword along with me. Bonus.

  “I can’t believe you plotted with my husband to get me back to New York. Is Sig even missing, or are you in cahoots with his plan to make me move their permanently?”

  Holden rolled his eyes. “Yes, Desmond and I are known for our incredible capacity to craft sneaky plots together. As if I could keep you there after you learned the truth about our lie, anyway.”

  He had a point. Dammit.

  “So Sig is really missing, and Desmond was just kind enough to give you our plane for free?”

  “I suspect his motives might have been to get you home a few days sooner than usual, but he knows this is a business call. I believe he suggested I keep my cold, dead hands to myself.”

  I snorted. “That sounds about right.”

  “As if I would stoop to forcing myself on a lady.” He shook his head as he pushed himself up from his chair. “Now, do you need anything, or can we go?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  New York, New York.

  The Big Apple. Manhattan. The city of a thousand names and a million stories, and the place I called home.

  The problem was, every time I returned to the city, it felt less and less like home, and more and more like a piece of my history. Especially after the trip here sixth months ago when my mother had tried to kill my sister and me in the memorial building that bore Lucas’s name, it was very difficult for me to feel warm and tingly whenever I came back.

  Everywhere I looked in New York was somewhere I’d nearly died, or a place someone I loved had taken their last breath.

  Yes, it was also filled with people I cared about deeply, but the ghosts were all around me, and they were starting to get to me. Maybe that was the real reason I was so cagey about coming back here for good. Los Angeles was my human life—it represented my fresh start. New York was darkness, death, and all the things I had tried to put behind me.

  The town car that met us at the airport navigated easily through the crowded streets, and the reflection of neon and skyscraper lights dazzled brighter than any stars could have.

  I probably should have asked Holden to take me to see Desmond first, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot of time before sunrise, so it was best we went directly to the Tribunal.

  Desmond might pout about it a little, which was his right, and I was sure we’d have a fight about it, but that was something I was willing to deal with. I was home early to do a job, and I wanted to find Sig as quickly as possible so I could turn my attention back to the whole Belphegor mess in L.A.

  The car dropped us off in front of the council headquarters, a majestic-looking building that closely resembled Grand Central Terminal from the outside.

  There’d been a time when the inside, with its beautiful green stained-glass panels that mimicked the light of the afternoon sun through leaves and the stunning vintage black-and-white-tiled floor, had wowed me.

  They were impressive still, absolutely, but after hundreds and hundreds of trips through the lobby towards the imposing wooden doors on the opposite side, the mystique was sort of lost on me now.

  Wardens scattered out of the way as Holden came through the doors, everyone doing their best to look busy or simply remain unseen as the pair of us made our way to the entrance to the Tribunal’s chambers.

  The wooden doors took us to a curving stone stairwell where the walls and steps were always the slightest bit damp. No longer having the same reflexes, and having melted away the treads on the bottom of my boots, I took each step cautiously, worried I might slide my way down instead of entering with my usual grace and charm.

  Holden didn’t bother knocking as we made our way into the chamber at the bottom of the stairs. He was, of course, allowed to come and go as he pleased.

  All three throne-like seats were empty, something I wasn’t used to seeing.

  The seat in the center was Sig’s, and Holden was standing in front of me, but I guess I was expecting Surly McJerkface to be sitting sullenly in his usual spot, waiting to give me a dirty look the second I came through the door.

  “She came,” said a voice behind me.

  I turned and came face-to-chin with Juan Carlos, the third member of the Tribunal.

  Juan Carlos had once been a Spanish conquistador, and before he became a vampire, someone had sliced part of his face open. The wound had healed but left his lip in a permanent snarl.

  There was also the fact he really hated me, so his looks were never particularly soft or pleasant when aimed in my direction.

  That I was here to help find Sig would be even more of a sore spot. The last time Juan Carlos and I had let our animosity towards each other boil over, the truth of his hatred had emerged, and hoo boy had it been a giant honesty bomb. I’d figured out that the reason he hated me so much was because he was jealous of all the attention Sig paid me.

  Because he loved Sig.

  And it wasn’t a warm, fuzzy, feel-good love. It was an I was raised to be a masculine man who loves women, and my love for another man has made me resent him and hate myself over the course of several centuries kind of love.

  I was a convenient outlet for him to pour all that hatred into.

  Everyone seemed to be getting along decently well since the truth had come out, so maybe it wasn’t as big a deal as I’d thought it would be.

  Sig was probably pretty accustomed to people being in love with him.

  I didn’t mean that to say he had an enormous ego—though he was almost ethereal in his beauty, so who would blame him—but his particular vampiric gift was making those around him feel peaceful and easy.

  Being around someone who had that effect on you might make you think you loved them. It was the same effect Desmond had on me, and at various times in my life, so had Holden and Lucas. Love makes the hard times feel a little bit easier.

  In Sig’s case, he just did it naturally.

  Without him here, I wasn’t feeling particularly calm or peaceful, especially not with Juan Carlos standing in biting range. I took a few steps back to widen the gap between us.

  “I’d say it was a pleasure to see you, Juan Carlos, but it really isn’t.”

  “The feeling is mutual. My only solace in life is knowing now that you’re mortal, you’re bound to do something to get yourself killed soon, and then your blight will be wiped from the face of the earth.”

  “You old sweet-talker.”

  “Before the two of you start scratching at each other’s eyes, could we get to business, please? Secret was gracious enough to leave her duties on the West Coast to help us, so the least we can do is offer her some hospitality.”

  “You say that like she isn’t here every other week sticking her nose in our business in the name of government safety or some such nonsense. This is hardly a rare visit.”

  “Wish they were rarer.” We glared at each other in mutual distaste.

  Where Tyler and I playfully sniped at each other out of friendship, this was
more of a hatred that would have led to one of us making an attempt on the other’s life if we were given the opportunity.

  Honestly, of all the Tribunal Leaders to go bad—Arturo, Daria, many more before them—couldn’t Juan Carlos have been a rogue too? I would have taken that hit on for free.

  Hell, I would have paid them to let me take Juan Carlos down.

  The cold, dead look in his eyes told me he was thinking similarly unkind things about taking my life.

  “When was the last time you saw Sig?” I asked him, deciding it might be in my best efforts to just switch to professional-investigator mode so I could get out of here faster.

  “On Monday we had our weekly meeting with the middling bounty hunter you left us, gave him the appropriate warrants, and discussed Tribunal business. We were not planning to meet again until Wednesday, and when Holden and I arrived, Sig was nowhere to be found.”

  It was now Friday, which meant Sig could have been gone for five days.

  “Did anyone see him after Monday?”

  “We’ve asked everyone we could reach, and it seems like the last person to speak with Sig directly was Shane Hewitt,” Holden said.

  Shane was the middling bounty hunter Juan Carlos had referred to, and to the man’s credit, he had been serving as the council’s hunter longer than I’d held the job. I had helped train him to replace me when I’d taken on the role of Tribunal Leader, and he’d done a decent job and even early in his career had shown the promise of getting better.

  He got a lot better when he’d met Siobhan O’Malley, a druid, whose life he had managed to save. The pair was now happily married and had a tiny future bounty hunter of their own, a three-year-old boy named Caleb.

  This was dangerous work for a human, and a human with a family at home at that, but Shane made it work, and with Siobhan and her insane skills with a bow and arrow to back him up, I felt reasonably secure they’d both live a lot longer than the typical life expectancy for someone in this job.

  “When did Shane speak to him?”

  “They had a private meeting on Tuesday, according to Shane,” Holden told me. “They met to discuss the warrant we had issued, and apparently Sig asked Shane not to act on it for the time being.”

  Oh, now we were getting somewhere.

  “So out of the blue Sig asks for a death warrant to be retracted and then goes missing.” I looked meaningfully from Holden to Juan Carlos and back again. “I’m assuming you’ve investigated the vamp the warrant was for?”

  “Believe it or not, Secret, the vampires we issue warrants for aren’t usually too keen on coming to visit us so we can ask them questions. Most likely because they know we want them dead.” Juan Carlos was apparently sick of standing and trailed over to his throne, taking a seat so he was several inches above me.

  Petty.

  Holden could have done the same, but instead he wandered across the room to collect an envelope. It was made of a familiar heavy cardstock, and when he handed it to me, my pulse kicked up a few notches. I glanced at him warily. These were the official death warrants for vampires issued by the Tribunal.

  “Don’t worry,” he said with a smile. “My name isn’t in it.”

  Once upon a time Sig had given me an envelope that did have Holden’s name in it, and let me tell you, that had been quite the mystery to unravel in and of itself. At the end of the day, I was still nervous about these stupid envelopes though, sure that no good could ever come of opening one.

  I broke the seal and opened the flap, and on the thick card inside was the name Davos Kent.

  The name was utterly meaningless to me, and I gave Holden a confused look, hoping to get some better insight.

  “Kent kidnapped and murdered two young women who were members of a vampire fan club. He lured them in with the promise of making them vampires, which of course is now perfectly legal, but when all was said and done, he didn’t bother to give them his blood. They were found at the High Line Park several weeks ago.”

  As someone who worked in the field of supernatural crimes, the public disposal of two bodies murdered by a potential vampire attack had not gone unnoticed by me or my office.

  The High Line Park double murder was on our radar, but there had also been a rash of killings over the last five years by humans trying to lay blame on vamps. We had assessed the crime scene reports and sent it back to the NYPD with the verdict that this had been a human killer.

  The girls had lost barely any blood, which was not indicative of a real vampire killing. Once a vampire bit with the intent to kill, there was no stopping the frenzy.

  Now Holden was telling me I was wrong.

  Those girls had been killed by a vampire. I felt a sting of guilt in my belly. We had looked at that file as a group, and every single person on the team had agreed it wasn’t a real issue. We’d passed the buck.

  It made me wonder how many times over the last five years we’d gotten it wrong. How many times had we shifted blame or fingered an innocent individual?

  How much good were we actually doing?

  I gave my head a shake, chasing off the unwelcome thought. We were helping, I knew that much for sure. We saved lives every damned day.

  Even the human police didn’t get things right all the time, and they’d been dealing with this shit a lot longer than my unit had.

  Everything had gotten so much more complicated with supernatural beings hitting the mainstream. It was as if humans forgot overnight about all the insanely horrific bullshit they’d been doing to each other for thousands of years, and suddenly wanted to pin the blame for everything bad in their life on monsters.

  I got it, I did. It was easier to believe a creature out of a horror movie was responsible for the evil and injustice in the world. But I’d looked into the eyes of a monster before, the one who haunted my dreams even now, the man who had taken me to the very brink of my own humanity and threatened to push me over the edge.

  I’d seen the face of evil, and it had been human.

  So, while I understood how nice it was to have a convenient scapegoat, at some point people had to realize that good and bad came in many forms, and just as there were bad vampires, there were bad humans, and they were all capable of doing terrible things to each other.

  “Davos has a history of this kind of behavior, I’m afraid,” Holden continued. “We traced his roots back to Georgia—”

  “The country, not the state,” Juan Carlos interjected.

  “Yes, and it appears he spent several centuries relatively unchecked in the Soviet Union and pre-Bolshevik Russia running around killing women.”

  “If this is where you tell me one of his aliases is Rasputin and you think perhaps the princess Anastasia is a vampire, I think I’m going to need a drink.”

  Holden smiled, probably because I’d made a cultural reference he knew. “No. Not every vampire is famous, you know.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Tell that to the vampires. This one over here had a New York Times bestseller written about his exploits only last year.”

  “That was unauthorized,” Juan Carlos protested, but I sensed a hint of pride in his tone. The book in question, The Immortal Life of the Spanish Beast, had spent three weeks atop the nonfiction bestseller list, and there was talk of it being turned into a Broadway play or a film within the next year. Juan Carlos was an honest-to-God star now.

  I got to spend my time on CNN arguing with talking heads in Washington and rednecks who thought vampires en masse needed to die sight unseen. Sometimes the talking heads weren’t much better than the rednecks.

  Personally, I’d take a thousand vampires over a single politician.

  There was a reason Tyler didn’t let me on the talk show circuit very often. I had a lot of trouble keeping my opinions to myself.

  I had once told that annoying blonde woman who yelled about true crime all the time that just because a child had a werewolf for a parent didn’t mean they were being raised by wolves, and she might want to take her perfectly c
oiffed head and stick it up her ass the next time she spoke about pack culture in such a derogatory way.

  Tyler hadn’t let me go on TV for about a month after that.

  Desmond bought me a diamond necklace.

  The clip still made the rounds on YouTube, and someone had made a gif of my over-the-top eye roll. That got a lot of play on Twitter even to this day.

  “This guy was real dyed-in-the-wool vampire serial killer, then?”

  “Was,” Holden said grimly. “Still is, if the High Line murders are any indication. It’s the first time we’ve seen him make a move like this on American soil, and certainly the first time he’s done it since the reveal. Your team thought it was a human killer, and I can’t blame them. He certainly made it look like a human copycat. But one of our wardens is from Tbilisi. She recognized the signature right away. Always two girls. Always dumped in public.”

  I fanned myself with the card and thought about this. The warrant was absolutely called for. Davos Kent needed to die. But what did that have to do with Sig? And why would Sig have Shane hold off on the kill almost immediately after it had been issued?

  I needed to get my hands on the file we’d sent to the NYPD to get the details of the murders again, and I wanted to talk to Shane about how Sig had behaved the last time he saw him.

  I was here to find a missing vampire Tribunal leader.

  Might as well take down a murderer while I was at it, for old time’s sake.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The longer I was in the city, the further down the list my own husband dropped in order of importance for visits.

  First I’d had to stop to see the Tribunal. Now I had to slot in a visit to see my BFF, Detective Mercedes Castilla of the NYPD. I wanted to see Shane and Siobhan as well, but considering it was already dawn, I could probably push that a few hours.

  I sent Desmond a text to let him know I would be at the apartment soon but needed to see Cedes first. The indicator told me he read the message, but the lack of little dot dot dots told me he wasn’t planning to reply.