A Bloody Good Secret: Secret McQueen, Book 2 (22 page)

“Thanks.”

Ingrid shrugged one shoulder, dismissing my grumblings. “The problem is, he doesn’t fit the profile you already established.” She held one palm out flat, offering me something invisible. “We know the vampire responsible must have a daytime servant, yes?”

“Yes.”

She held out her other empty palm. “Juan Carlos does not.”

Well, that put a damper on my accusation. “Are you sure? Could he have one and no one knows?” Ingrid was shaking her head through every word. “Not even a Renfield?”

“No.” The period at the end of the sentence was so matter-of-fact it wouldn’t allow for argument. That was that. She could sense my disappointment. “I’m no friend of Juan Carlos, believe me. I wish he were guilty on many levels. But he chides Sig and Daria for having daytime servants. He calls us their
daylight wives
.” Her lip curled.

“Man, I’d love to hear what he calls me behind my back.”

“Half-breed wh—”

Desmond choked on a laugh, and I raised my hand to stop Ingrid before she could finish. “Rhetorical.”

In the silence that fell, a tinny, muffled version of “Free Fallin’” did its best to make things that much more awkward. Tom Petty sang while I scrambled for my purse and tried to find my cell phone.

I quieted the ringer with a sheepish smile and looked at Desmond, who seemed a little surprised by the ring tone choice. Ingrid appeared to have never heard the song before. I didn’t recognize the number on the caller ID screen.

“Sorry,” I said, and stepped out of the living room to answer the call. “Hello?”

“McQueen?” It was a gruff, unfamiliar male voice, strained with worry. In the background I heard someone shout, followed by the sound of something smashing. “It’s Jameson.”

The voice matched up in my head with a visual of the burly vampire hunter from Bramley. Judging by the ruckus in the background, it would seem like he had found himself in a bit of a bind.

“What’s wrong?”

“We stumbled on a nest. We thought it was only one vamp, but we got here and it was a fucking ambush.” Another holler and more breaking glass. “Noriko vanished, and someone’s got Nolan.” There was a long pause and I strained to make out any sounds, thinking the line had gone dead.

All I needed to hear was that Nolan was in trouble to decide I would go. I don’t know what it was about the kid, but I wanted to keep him safe from the big bads going bump in the night. He deserved better than my life.

But he’d have to live if that was going to be possible.

“Jameson?”

“We need help.” There was a crackle of static on the line.

“Where are you?” More silence. “Jameson, where are you?”

I heard a low breath inhale, followed by the kind of laughter that sends chills into every corner of your body. A voice, neither male nor female, barely human, clucked into the phone. “Jameson can’t come out to play,” it said. “But if you’d like to join him…” It let the open invitation linger.

Son of a bitch. My mind was arranging fractured memories of a vampire who had twice very nearly been the death of me. The voice on the other end of the phone did not belong to Alexandre Peyton, but the coldness of the laugh and the demonic pleasure it took in evoking terror was the same.

Vampires like this were the reason I had a job. Demented nutjobs who were so scarily confident in themselves they believed they were really unkillable.

“I’d rather play with
you
,” I said, my hand reaching instinctively to my back to make sure my gun was still there.

The vampire didn’t know what to do with that. There was a pause filled with nothing but the eerie clucking and the sound of an oft-unused tongue sucking air at the back of a throat, learning how to work again. Finally it spoke. “Play with us.”

“I will.”

“We are where the fun has gone to die.”

I shivered. “Care to vague that up a bit for me?”

It clucked loudly, annoyed. “Where the midway lights no longer shine and the carnival games are no longer played.”

That narrowed things down for me. I had a pretty solid idea of where the voice meant. The abandoned amusement park near Rhinebeck, about two hours north of the city. I’d been reading about the plans to convert it into a garden park or any number of other ridiculous things, but much like all abandoned property, no conclusions were easy to reach.

I, for one, wished every abandoned property would be torn the hell down. They create perfect dwellings for vampires, and I was not too fond of walking into dark, spooky places with lots of good hiding spots.

I sighed. “Leave the good prizes until I get there.”

In the living room, I was a little surprised to find they hadn’t sat in silence waiting for my return. Desmond was leaning forward on the sofa, talking animatedly about Roman architecture, and Ingrid was defending him to the death about the merits of the Gothic style.

Capturing Desmond’s attention, I nodded towards the door. “I’m sorry to leave so soon, Ingrid, but something has come up. Please see that Sig gets Holden’s journal.”

Desmond met me at the entrance and politely shook Ingrid’s hand a second time. “Pleasure to meet you, Ingrid.”

“You as well.” She smiled at him, then turned her focus to me. “Holden won’t be safe until we can prove someone else was responsible. Sig will believe the evidence, but in order to have the council respect his annulment of the warrant, someone else will need to stand accused.”

“So, even though I found you evidence to clear him…”

“You still need to find out who actually did it.”

I had been worried about that since she’d taken the book. “Can’t I blame Juan Carlos and call it a day?”

“Would that you could, Secret.” She held the door open and let us out. Before she closed the door, she offered me a business card made of the same stiff material as the warrants Sig issued me. On it was her first name and a 212 area code number.

Leave it to Ingrid to score a 212. She’d probably had it since seven-digit dialing still existed in Manhattan. In the living room, Mozart played on. Ingrid existed simultaneously in several centuries and seemed to feel comfortable that way.

“What’s this for?” I asked.

“For whatever you need.” She rested her head against the half-open door. “I’ve been told I am responsible for ensuring your needs are met.” She didn’t explain any further, but she didn’t need to.

Sig had told her she had to do anything I asked.

“Just get him the book,” I said, and slipped the card into my pocket, along with my phone. I hoped I wouldn’t ever have cause to use it.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“I’m dropping you off at the apartment,” I told Desmond once the valet had returned with my car. He began to protest, which I knew he would. “There’s something I need you to do for me, and I don’t have time to argue about it. Please.”

Mollified, he climbed into the passenger seat, and while we drove he waited patiently for me to give him his assignment. I chose to stay silent until we were almost back at the apartment before I continued.

“You need to call Lucas. He needs to ask Jackson who the man was who helped him kidnap me. Then you need to find that man and tell him if he doesn’t pay reparation to me, I will find a goddess to make sure the rule of three comes to bite his witch ass with a vengeance.”

“What. The.
Hell
?”

“Just trust me.”

He opened the car door and looked over at me. “Do you actually know a goddess?”

“Half-goddess.”

He got out and walked around the car to my side, leaning against the window and fixing me with a hard look. “Look. I appreciate that this time you aren’t sneaking out and leaving me passed out on your living room floor, I really do. But, if I ask you where you’re going, will you tell me?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you going?”

“To save three sad-sack vampire slayers from the scariest-sounding vampire I’ve ever had the displeasure of speaking to. At an amusement park. In Rhinebeck.” There was more to it, but I didn’t have time to explain my gut feeling about the vampire on the phone being linked to the dead elders. I wasn’t sure why, but something inside me told me the two things were connected.

Desmond straightened. “My life would be so much simpler if I thought you’d made that up.”

“Your life would have been a lot simpler if you’d decided to date Kellen Rain instead of me.”

He frowned, but I couldn’t tell if it was because he was surprised I knew about Kellen’s former love for him, or if he’d been oblivious to it. I regretted saying it, like so many things I’d said recently, and grabbed his hand before he could leave. “Desmond?”

“Yes?” He looked down at me again, his face barely concealing the concern.

“I’ll be fine.”

His tight smile didn’t reach all the way to his eyes. “I know you think so.”

“But if I’m not…”
Oh hell, let’s just throw all caution to the wind
. Honesty was a contagious disease. Once you started telling people the truth, it was hard to stop. “If not, I want you to know—”

“Say it when you come back, Secret.”

“But…”

He squeezed my hand, brought it to his lips and dusted my knuckle with a kiss. “I need to call a wolf about a witch. And you have a heck of a drive ahead.”

“Clearly you’ve never driven on the highway with a vampire.” I revved the engine for good measure, which brought a smile to his lips, but it was a smile I’d seen before. Without taking more time than necessary to dwell on Desmond’s sad smiles, I pulled away from the curb and into the dark.

It felt like I was going back to Lucas’s estate. The drive north from the city with its tree-lined highways and alien appearance reminded me of the trip to his mansion. Instinct told me I should take the detour, go out of my way and get the pack. What was so great about being pack protector if I couldn’t get the pack to help me when I needed it?

But the moon was dangerously close to full, and judging by what had happened with Desmond the previous night, the wolves weren’t at their most stable. The last thing I needed was a bunch of moon-drunk werewolves going nuts, exploding out of their skin and ruining all my chances of saving Nolan.

As I drove, I thought more about the connections between my investigation into Holden’s innocence and the arrival of the vampire slayers into my life.

It couldn’t be coincidence that Noriko had found Nolan and me outside of Havana the same night I discovered the truth about Holden, and now everything coming together with a nest of rogue vampires out in the middle of nowhere. There was no way it was a fluke. I didn’t know how Jameson and Noriko were involved, whether their intent was pure or not, or if they were being played to get to me. Noriko had attacked me at Havana because she believed I was a vampire and endangering Nolan. But there was more to it than that.

Like, how had she known to find me there?

Something wasn’t adding up. Once all the dots were connected in some messy Rorschach disaster and all the t’s dotted and i’s crossed, things might not look much clearer but someone would be found guilty and someone would be dead. I was hoping both would apply to the same someone, and dead wouldn’t apply to me. But my job didn’t come with a long-term health insurance plan.

Eventually I’d come up on the losing end of a fight. My close encounter with Peyton in the spring had proven that.

So I was without the pack, without Holden, and hanging on to a wing and a prayer, so to speak. If Desmond couldn’t get Jackson to help him contact the witch, I was screwed. If the witch didn’t understand what I needed, I was screwed. Not since the Clinton administration had anyone been as hypothetically screwed as I was.

I pulled onto an old road in bad need of repair. Why anyone had built an amusement park near Rhinebeck was beyond my comprehension. Rhinebeck felt like
Connecticut: the Sequel,
with its rambling farm-style houses that were well overpriced for the average farmer, quaint antique shops and old country charm. It was where middle-aged city-goers came to stay at a bed-and-breakfast and watch the leaves change color in the fall. No one wanted to come to Rhinebeck to ride a Ferris wheel and eat corn dogs and stale popcorn, at least not all the time. The Dutchess County Fairgrounds were a popular August attraction, but someone had thought having an amusement park three seasons out of the year was a brilliant plan.

When New Yorkers crave a taste of their youth, they go to Coney Island, not Rhinebeck.

The Rhinebeck Amusement Park closed eighteen months after it opened, and that had been three years ago. Most of the rides were auctioned off to traveling amusement shows or placed in storage for use at the Dutchess County Fair each year. It was a huge story in the papers for an entire summer.

What remained was a ghost town.

It had been featured the previous fall in a photo spread for
Vogue
—models in Alexander McQueen and Gucci draped over rusting metal bumper-car pavilions and in doors of haunted houses. Patrick Demarchelier had done the photography and it had all been
trés chic
.

I drove the BMW under an unlit neon archway, which had once announced
Amusement
in bold pink and orange letters, but no one was laughing now. The parking lot was unkempt and sprawled long and dark in every direction. The pavement had begun to crack from disrepair, and grass cropped up through the crevices.

A ten-foot-tall chain-link fence wrapped around the entirety of the blackened park, and beyond it were the handful of reminders of what had been before. The husk of the Ferris wheel, which no longer had its passenger buckets, was an eerie iron wheel against the purple blue of the night sky.

The haunted house sat off the midway a few paces, recessed from the fun and looming with sinister promise. My money was on it for the nest’s home base. Vampires love clichés, and nothing was more clichéd than a haunted house. It was a beautiful mockup of an old Victorian home, and it reminded me a great deal of the Addams family mansion. Which was probably intentional.

I parked the car next to an early nineties red Jeep Cherokee that had seen better days. This had to be Jameson’s car because there were no other signs of life in the parking lot. When I shut the engine off and killed the headlights, I took a moment to adjust to the quiet and let myself drink in the scenery.