Grave Secret (15 page)

She tried to pull away, but my hand was locked on her upper arm, and I squeezed. Harder than I normally would have when handling a human. Carla squealed. Maybe I should have felt bad, but I didn’t. There was zero remorse to be had.

“He’s not for sharing,” I said coldly.

Holden snorted.

When I released Carla, I figured she would stay away. The threat of violence is usually enough to keep people from doing stupid things. But I must have underestimated how badly she wanted to have a romp with Desmond. The second she was free of me she turned to him, rose on her toes and planted a firm kiss right on his lips.

I was too dumbfounded to react. For a moment, so was Desmond. His eyes widened, and she must have slipped him the tongue since he sputtered, coughed, and used both hands to push the overeager hostess away from him.

My cheeks flushed with rage, and I could feel the heat of my temper throbbing in my ears. Holden must have been able to sense my anger because he took hold of one of my wrists and gave a small squeeze. I didn’t like to acknowledge he could physically overpower me, but we both knew he could if it came down to it. That knowledge helped center me, and I refocused my anger.

“He tastes funny,” Carla said, wrinkling her pert nose.

“He tastes like werewolf,” I told her. Funny that she could tell what Holden was on sight but hadn’t the faintest fucking clue she was jamming her tongue into a wolf’s mouth.

Carla looked as though I’d slapped her with a fish—dumbfounded and insulted. I thought she might start wiping her tongue off on her sleeve. Disgust was apparent on her face, and it gave me a perverse gratification. Apparently she had no issues dealing with fae, an order that included such creatures as ogres and trolls, but kissing a werewolf was
icky
.

Fine by me, it meant she could keep her grubby fae-loving hands off my guy.

“Just tell us what we need to know and we’ll go,” I promised her.

Chapter Twenty-One

As luck would have it, Carla didn’t know anything.

It would have been discouraging, but since she was so amped up to get rid of us, she was willing to take us to her fearless leader. She wove through the club a few feet out of our reach, giving us time to have a look at our surroundings. There was no music playing, but the room didn’t feel quiet without it. Something else took the place of the ambient noise, but I couldn’t place my finger on what it was. A white-noise hum making my insides feel warm.

Nothing creepy about that.

Throughout the large space were low velvet couches where twenty-somethings sat together in rapt discussion, totally oblivious to the magic blanketing the entire space. How blind did they have to be not to notice they were elbow-to-elbow with creatures who simply shouldn’t exist? A lot of fae had very convincing glamour in place to make them look human, but they weren’t all experts at it. Here and there were “people” who were too impossibly beautiful to be real.

I spotted a famous television actress at the bar, the star of a popular show about spoiled, rich New York teens. She threw her head back, gold hair glimmering as she laughed, and I didn’t miss the eerie white glint in her eyes.

Yeah, she was
totally
human.

The three men lavishing drinks and attention upon her were fooled, but I wasn’t. Fae, and a lot of other supernatural creatures, loved the draw of the spotlight. Since they could achieve whatever human appearance they wanted, it gave them an unfair upper hand in the fame game. The main problem was how quickly they got bored of it. The work, not the attention. A lot of famous overdoses and unexplained deaths were the result of a fae getting tired of playing a certain role.

I hadn’t thought much about it until I’d met Calliope. The first time you come face-to-face with Marilyn Monroe and have the mystery of her death spelled out, you are suddenly willing to believe anything is possible.

Fae don’t care about death, unless they are the cause of it. They don’t understand the fallout it has for humanity because they don’t appreciate the limits of mortality. Some, like Calliope, were true immortals. An eighty-year lifespan seems laughable to someone who was born at the same time as the solar system.

Humans were fireflies to true immortals. Fun to watch and play with, but ultimately disposable.

I didn’t want to believe Calliope felt like that, but I knew she didn’t think about things the same way I did. If she had killed the boy, I wondered if it even registered to her that she shouldn’t have.

I watched the blonde actress a moment longer and pondered what sort of
True Hollywood Story
would be told about her short life in three or four more years. Natalie Wood still had my favorite. Maybe this girl would find a way to one-up the queen of Hollywood exits.

Turning away from the group at the bar, I went to follow my party but stopped abruptly when I walked almost directly into a small, delicate woman. She was so compact she made me feel burly. And though she had a glamour in place, something about her felt unsettlingly familiar to me. The woman did not smile at me or try to pretend at pleasantness.

“You,” she said, her voice high and light but loaded with accusation.

A man, tall and spindly and just as shockingly beautiful, came to stand beside her. Their light features and wide eyes were a mirror of each other, and there was no way to ignore they must be related.

I still couldn’t place them, but a shiver thrilled through me, a warning that I should move on.

The small woman got a hold on my wrist before I could jerk away. Her skin was cold, but it felt like she was burning me.

“I remember you,” she whispered. “You tainted it.”

Tugging my arm free, I took two steps back. “What are you talking about?”

But I’d heard those words before. At a different fae club, one where these two hadn’t bothered hiding what they were. They’d had white hair then, and skin the color and radiance of pearls. Their eyes had been inhumanly wide and round. I could see all that now, glimmering under the surface of the lie their faces projected.

I’d been carrying my katana then, and the woman had freaked out about it, claiming I’d tainted the blade. Later I discovered it was bad form to kill vampires with a fae-wrought blade. It wasn’t like I
knew
that at the time. Regardless of my ignorance, this chick had been offended.

She moved towards me again, but this time I saw it coming and dodged her grasping fingers.

“Don’t touch me,” I warned.

She withdrew her hand and sank into her brother’s waiting arms. “She yelled at me.”

Was this girl for real?

Holden came around the two fae to find me and eyed them warily. “Did you get lost?” He kept his gaze focused on them even though his words were directed at me.

“Just ran into some old…friends,” I replied.

He placed his hand between my shoulders, guiding me around the watchful fae siblings. “What was that all about?” he asked once we were out of earshot.

“Don’t worry about it.”

We caught up with Desmond and Carla, the woman standing well out of arm’s reach from the werewolf. Neither of them looked terribly happy about being left alone with the other.

“It would be appreciated,” Carla began, “if you wouldn’t speak to the patrons while you’re here.”

I pursed my lips and gave her a cold glare. “
They
stopped
me
.”

Carla rolled her eyes. “Let’s keep moving.”

We followed her to a narrow hall where she pointed to a door marked
Private
and then vanished as quickly as she’d originally appeared. I was too pleased she was gone to worry about how she’d disappeared so quietly. I moved away from the men to knock, but before my knuckles fell, the black door jerked open.

I pulled my hand away before I accidentally knocked on the face of a small, grizzled Chinese woman. She was four and a half feet tall at best and leaned on a knotted wood cane, staring up at me with shiny, beadlike eyes. She reminded me of my great-grandmother
La Sorciere
. Having a scary nameless witch as your maternal figurehead made it easy to respect wee, ancient-looking women.

If this woman was in charge of a fae club, she had power. She definitely wasn’t human.

She smiled, showing a dark mouth with mostly missing teeth. “You’re looking for someone, I understand?”

That she knew why we were here when Carla hadn’t stuck around to explain our presence only solidified my opinion she was a force to be reckoned with. Since neither Desmond nor Holden had butted in to take charge, I figured they must have sensed her power too.

Great, a sass-mouthed hostess they were willing to deal with, but a pint-sized fae with no teeth was all up to me. Thanks, guys.

I smiled back but had trouble holding the gesture.

“Don’t hurt yourself, dear. That looks frightfully unnatural on you.” She stepped backwards into her office, leaving the doorway empty. I dusted my jaw off the floor and followed her in with the two men hesitant at my heels. “Close the door,” she continued, “and I’ll tell you all about Kellen Rain.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

The owner’s name, or at least the one she wanted us to use, was Gia. She got right down to business, which I liked about her. “Your friend was here,” she told us.

I nodded. That much we already knew. “Where did she go after she left here?”

Gia’s smile had a faintly condescending quality to it. “You’re asking the wrong question.”

I glanced over my shoulder to Holden and Desmond, hoping they might be able to offer me the
right
question, but both of them looked equally confused.

“You said she was here.”

“I did, and she was.”

“What we need to know is where she went.”

“No,” Gia replied, giving her head a small shake. “What you need to know is where she
is
.”

“That’s what I asked.” I was getting impatient and didn’t want to sit here and argue semantics. This woman had the answers regardless of how I phrased my questions. She knew about Kellen, and that was what I needed her to tell me. When she said nothing, I added, “Where is Kellen?”

“Gone.”

Desmond gave an exasperated sigh, which told me he was feeling as happy about this game as I was. “Gone where?” I needled, trying to keep the ball rolling.

Gia opened the top drawer of her opulent desk and removed a black ledger. She thumbed through the pages until she found what she’d been searching for and held the book out to me, waiting patiently until I took it from her steady hand.

“The left page is Miss Rain’s debts.”

Though the items listed were written in Chinese, the numeric value of the debts was written in standard numerals. The numbers were large, and they took up the full left-hand page. The tally at the bottom was a number over seven figures, which I found staggering.

It had also been crossed out with a red pen and the number zero had been added beside the strikeout. “It shows here her debts were paid.”

“No, my dear. It shows there her debt has been absolved.”

“I don’t understand.”

“One does not simply
pay
debts here. Favors are exchanged, services rendered. These things are often done with promises of great wealth or treasures.”

“Kellen had the money to pay for this.” I pointed to the massive number. “Even if she didn’t, her family would have. Why are you making it sound as if she couldn’t live up to her end of the bargain?” A cold chill had set up shop at the base of my spine and was steadily fanning out through my body. I didn’t like where this conversation was going.

I’d never had to deal with the mob or debt collectors—not the kind who broke limbs instead of taking away your television, anyway. My experience was only in movies, and the way Gia was saying Kellen’s debt was
absolved
sounded a hell of a lot like a euphemism for
sleeps with the fishes
to me. But killing Kellen would be senseless. She was loaded, and to the Rain family the amount she owed would barely be a drop in the bucket. It might make Lucas mad to pay it, but it certainly wouldn’t ruin them.

“She promised something other than money,” Gia said. “And she couldn’t deliver.”

“What did she promise?” Holden asked before I had the chance.

“She promised herself. Kellen fell in with a fairy named Brokk who trades in pure happiness. But happiness like that comes at a cost, and Brokk has his requests. The time came where she had to fulfill, whether she liked it or not.”

I went rigid in my seat, and Gia’s gaze shifted from Holden to me. She smiled again, and this time I didn’t feel any of the friendliness or warmth she’d previously forced into the gesture. Now it was just as cold and empty as the people who frequented her club.

“Who is the fairy she owes a debt to?” My voice squeaked as I spoke.

“A member of the court of the fairy king.”

I knew enough about the high fae to know this was no laughing matter. If werewolf royalty was archaic and a pain in the ass, fae royalty was on a whole other planet of absurdity.

A literal other realm.

“She made a promise to a fae?”