A Secret to Die For (Secret McQueen) (16 page)

I just hated that it meant we weren’t anywhere near being friends.

We might never get there, either. Because friends sure as hell didn’t kiss each other like that.

A thump brought my attention back around to the fire escape, with my gun up and armed, ready to shoot whoever or whatever was scaling up the ladder. A duffel bag had come first, coated with dust and blood, but what came next practically knocked me on my ass.

“Still getting around, I see,” she said, brushing some rust from her black jeans before she stood upright, smiling with no small amount of venom.

Her hair was different, short now like Audrey Hepburn’s
Roman Holiday
pixie cut, though judging from its messy appearance I was betting it had been shaved at some point and was now starting to fill in again.

Her look might have changed, but the smug superiority hadn’t gone anywhere.

“Morgan?”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Morgan Scott.

Werewolf, and at one time Lucas’s third-in-command.

Of course, that was before she hired assassins to kill me and managed to shoot Desmond at my wedding ceremony. I thought I’d seen the last of her when she’d been exiled to Siberia, but apparently it was impossible to keep a bad bitch down.

Another fine example of why being merciful got me nowhere.

I kept my gun up, not trusting her for a second. “What are you doing here, Morgan?”

“Nice to see you too.” She picked up her duffel bag and slung it over her shoulder, then untucked an old Ruger handgun from her waistband.

What
was
she doing here? There was no way she’d come because she heard what was happening. Getting into the city had to be damn near impossible at this point, and flights anywhere in the vicinity of New York were likely being rerouted to other states. We’d only been able to land because we got in so soon after shit hit the fan.

No, Morgan must have already been here.

Or she came with them.

Given her all-black ensemble and the new shorter do, seeing her as a biker’s old lady wasn’t a hard stretch of the imagination. And I trusted her so little, my brain latched on to the idea of her being one of the bad guys and wouldn’t let go.

“Simmer down. I’m not here to finish the job.”

It took me a moment to realize she was talking about her assassination attempt. “It didn’t go great for you last time, did it?”

“Yeah, but I’d like to point out you’re not surrounded by a legion of werewolf bodyguards this time.”

“She wouldn’t need them,” Holden added, his voice cold with malice.

“Of course not. Not with a big scary vampire by her side.” She rolled her eyes, completely unmoved by his apparent threat.

“
What are you doing here?
” I repeated, my voice edging towards shrillness. I had prepared myself for a great number of contingencies to happen tonight, but bumping into a werewolf who ought to be in Siberia was not a worst-case scenario I’d thought of.

“I’m here to help.”

“Like fucking hell you are. Caught the first flight into JFK when you saw the news on CNN? No, tell me the truth, or I hedge my bets and assume you’re guilty of something. You usually are.”

“Okay, okay. Jesus, nice to see you’ve mellowed out since the last time I saw you. So, there’s a chance I didn’t come
just
to help.”

“Probably because you’re one of
them
.”

“Wow, dramatic conspiracy theory much?”

“The simplest explanation is almost always the right one,” Holden said. Nice to see he’d been thinking the same thing. “Seems a little suspicious you would happen to show up the exact same time as the necromancers.”

Her eyes went wide, and her mouth opened slightly. “Man. Suddenly all this stuff makes a
lot
more sense. I didn’t think necromancers were real.”

“What did you think all the moving corpses were then?” I asked.

“Zombies. What the hell else would I think when the streets are packed with
walking dead people
.” She gave me a look that suggested I was the stupid one here.

Seriously, did no one know zombies weren’t real? Was I the only one who paid attention to what other supernatural critters populated our world? People could have saved themselves a lot of headaches and trouble if they took the time to know what was real and what wasn’t. Zombies? Horror-story fodder. Necromancers? Totally a legit thing.

But either she was a phenomenal actress, or she didn’t know about the necros.

I knew she was a liar, but I didn’t think her acting chops were good enough to fool me.

“If you’re not with them, you’re in the city for something else.”

“Truth is…” She looked away and fidgeted. “I’ve been back for about three weeks.”

“Excuse me?”

“I split from the Siberian pack, found transport back to the US and hitchhiked from Alaska, of all fucking places. Not the most fun trip I’ve ever had, but here I am.”

“Why would you come back here? When Lucas finds out—”

“I’ll make my appeal to the king when the time comes. But last I heard you two weren’t exactly joined at the lip anymore, know what I mean?”

“And you think he’ll ask you to jump right back in his bed?” I rolled my eyes at her. “I don’t care how cute you think you are, he still values trust over a hot piece of ass.”

“Trust was what landed him on the cover of
Us Weekly
with that skanky actress?”

I’d almost forgotten about Lucas’s relationship with Willow Chalmers, starlet of the year. The incredibly tense dinner Holden and I had shared with them wasn’t a memory I wanted to revisit too often.

“You seriously came to win him back? That’s pathetic.”

“I came to be a part of my pack again. It has nothing to do with my relationship with Lucas. I have other reas—”

“Oh my God, enough.” I holstered my gun and held my hands up in defeat. “I will do whatever it takes for you to shut the hell up. If that means trusting you, so be it.”

“Shooting her is also an option,” Holden suggested.

It was, but I didn’t have a surplus of bullets I could go around wasting.

“We’ll take her back to the hotel and see what His Majesty has to say. If he wants me to shoot her, I’ll gladly oblige. But I’m not going to lie, another able body with a gun isn’t a bad thing right now. You know how to use that thing?” I asked her.

“I shot you once, didn’t I?”

“Not quite.” I gritted my teeth and thought of Rio’s fluffy kitty belly and Christmas lights at Rockefeller Plaza. I focused on anything other than the tangible memory of Desmond’s weight falling on me after he took the bullet Morgan had meant for me.

On the plus side, I was getting better at controlling my panic attacks.

There might be hope for me yet.

“You’ve got to be pretty happy about this,” I told Holden.

“Why in God’s name would I be happy about this?”

“Because there’s no way in hell I’m running into a necromancer den, guns blazing, with this psycho bitch tagging along.”

He gave me a thin smile, then looked at Morgan. “In that case, welcome to the team.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Three other teams were waiting in the lobby when we returned.

Nolan and Rebecca had found a single necromancer with only a handful of guards holed up at Grand Central Terminal. Bradley and Merlin had come up empty-handed, but Chuck and a sentry named Yara had found two necros together in the New York Public Library by Bryant Park.

Seemed the theory we’d been running on held some merit. They were favoring older stone-and-brick buildings near subway lines. It was smart. They could avoid street travel and not have to interact too much with the bodies they were controlling. With the power out they’d be able to move freely through the subway tunnels and gain access to most major points around the city.

I felt a sense of dread, imagining what might have happened to the civilians trapped below. If they posed any kind of risk for the necros, what was to keep the bikers from killing off full carfuls of innocent people?

Best-case scenario, people had managed to force their way out of the cars early, before the gang had set up shop. If they’d gotten above ground and escaped, my worry was for nothing.

I could imagine few things in the world worse than being trapped in a subway car. And that was saying something considering the depth and breadth of my imagination.

I realized Holden and I hadn’t even done any recon on our target. We’d confirm there
was
a necromancer in the building we scouted, but we’d gotten so distracted we forgot to see how protected he was.

I wanted to blame all that on Morgan, but I also had to take our impromptu make-out session into consideration.

At least we’d found one of them, though.

Morgan hopped up onto one of the check-in desks and set her duffel bag beside her. She kicked her feet out cheekily like a bored schoolgirl. The only things missing were some pigtails and snapping pink bubble gum and the effect would be complete.

“Lucas isn’t going to be happy about this,” Bradley commented, speaking about Morgan like she wasn’t there.

That was how banishments worked in werewolf society. Once a member of the pack was exiled, the wolf was effectively dead to the pack. I suspected if Morgan spoke directly to Bradley, he would do his best to pretend he couldn’t hear her. It was going to make things both comical and depressing when the rest of the pack returned.

What was she thinking, coming back? If she tried to ask for solace from any of the other three kings, she’d have a better chance being welcomed. Though most would have turned her away out of respect to Lucas, she might at least have been treated like she was alive. Coming here was the absolute worst choice she could have made.

Not only would the pack not receive her with open arms, she’d also defied Lucas’s banishment order. At the time he’d considered it a kindness to send her away rather than kill her. Perhaps this time around he wouldn’t be so nice.

“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.