The Secret Guide to Dating Monsters: Secret McQueen, Prequel Read online

  “He’s in Times Square,” Holden told me.

  “He’s where?”

  He didn’t repeat himself. I faced away from him and glanced at the mirror instead, checking to see if my hair and makeup were still passable. I had to admit I was looking pretty foxy. Holden tired of waiting for me and leaned against the counter to my right, fixing me with one of those stares meant to enthrall a human into doing his bidding. He and I both knew vampire mind tricks didn’t work on me, so the expression was just his way of scolding me for my insolence.

  “What?” I snapped, once I got sick of him glowering at me.

  “I just told you where to find your target, and you’re touching up your gloss.”

  “You can’t seriously expect me to go kill the biggest star in America in the middle of Times Square in August. You’re handicapped if you think that’s going to work.”

  “Charles isn’t a fool, Secret. He’s an old vampire, and he knows how the council works. He’s not going to let you get him alone. You have to take your opportunities when and where they arise.”

  “You’re nuts.”

  “If he gets away, the Tribunal will not be pleased.” The translation of this was, you’ll be punished.

  I sighed and rinsed my hands in the sink, out of habit rather than necessity. When I shook the water off, it beaded on the pink granite counter. Someone tried the door, then knocked with a plaintive, “Hello?”

  “One second!” I replied.

  Holden scowled at the interruption. At least he was back to being himself, because happy-go-lucky Holden kind of freaked me out.

  “I’ll go. But I will find a way to get him away from the crowds,” I offered. The vampire made a pft sound, which I resented. “Now get out.” I pointed to the window, and without seeing him move, he was gone. All I heard was the click of the pane closing behind him.

  Chapter Four

  Getting out of the remainder of the date wasn’t going to be as easy as I hoped. If I hadn’t liked Tyler, I would have feigned a headache or just pretended to be tired so I could call it a night. The major difficulty for me was I hadn’t liked somebody this much in a long time, and I wasn’t ready to end our encounter quite yet.

  “Want to go for a walk?” I asked.

  “Sure.” He paid for the check in spite of my attempt to go Dutch. He wouldn’t let me touch the bill, slapping my hand playfully away when I reached for it. “Where do you want to go?” he asked, after the waitress returned his credit card.

  “There’s a great pub just off Times Square.” I saw him flinch, and it wasn’t hard to imagine what he was thinking. Times Square in the summer is a tourist trap of epic proportions. “I promise it’s worth it.”

  It would also have a substantial line. If I timed everything right, I would leave him holding our place while I looked for a bathroom, or some other invented distraction. Then I could run off, kill Charlie and be back before Tyler made it to the front of the line. If I didn’t get too much blood on me, there might even be a good-night kiss in my future.

  I was a genius.

  I was an idiot.

  Tyler had agreed, with little argument, to hold our place in line at McCarthy’s Pub. He’d tried to insist he come with me while I looked for a public bathroom, but I told him not to be ridiculous. I was a big girl, and I’d lived in the city for five years. If I couldn’t go to the bathroom alone by now, I was probably in trouble.

  Getting Tyler distracted had been easy. Finding Charlie, as it turned out, was easier. Too bad Holden had been dead on the money when he’d warned me the rogue wouldn’t be alone.

  Charlie Conaway was standing dead center on the red steps above the TKTS, the discount outlet for Broadway shows, with a crowd of shrill, love-addled girls and a few excited middle-aged men surrounding him on all sides. He was signing autographs and posing for photos, like the good little A-lister he was.

  “Motherfucker.” I seethed as I watched throngs of onlookers surge towards the median to get closer to the excitement. You’d think no one in New York had ever seen a celebrity before.

  Bloody tourists.

  I didn’t have all night to wait for the crowd to die down. I had a date to get back to, and I needed Charlie out of the way if I was going to be able to consider the night a complete success. I didn’t think the Tribunal would accept date night as a viable excuse for not executing the rogue, so I’d have to get close to him and convince him to leave with me.

  Doing my best to amplify my cleavage with the aid of the dress, and giving my hair a quick flip for extra body, I abandoned my typical expression of detached annoyance and replaced it with one of vapid sluttiness. It was a look I’d honed well after years of acting as vampire bait in bars. I hoped an easy target was universally appealing to vampires.

  I also hoped he wouldn’t be able to smell death on me like some could. The werewolf in me confused most noses, so even the strongest vampires didn’t always know I was one of them. They usually wrote me off as human, which I was counting on Charlie doing. Non-vampire paranormals, like the fae or others, sometimes caught a whiff of the vamp in me.

  They said I smelled like death.

  The vampires sometimes said I smelled like a dog.

  I just counted on neither group figuring out why.

  And I was counting on Charlie Conaway being too wrapped up in his own fame to notice me for what I really was.

  I worked my way through the crowd without much difficulty. I might not be able to move with the same stealthy speed as a full vampire, but I’m fast, light on my feet, and I see openings no human would consider going through. By the time someone has realized I’ve brushed past them or bumped into them, I’m already gone.

  Up the steps, there were three teenaged girls between my target and me. He was politely listening while one of them, between gasping sobs, explained she thought they were destined to get married.

  “I love you!” she said, her voice reaching octaves I’ve never heard in the human register. Her friends all squealed in unison behind her, and I wondered if they were protesting or being supportive. If there is any pack mentality that frightens me more than werewolves, it’s teenaged girls.

  Charlie smiled, told her he appreciated the offer but couldn’t marry her, then let her get tears and Lip Smackers all over him while he posed for a picture. Part of me found myself liking him, even if the niceness was an act. When the flash faded from the camera, he surveyed the crowd for the next onslaught and caught my eye instead.

  I was so surprised he’d seen me I almost forgot my act. I brushed my hair back over my shoulder and smiled at him—sly, with just the hint of sex. Human men were suckers for that sort of smile, but it was exposing my neck that I expected would get the most reaction.

  The one-two punch did the trick. Charlie stopped attending to his tween-horde and crossed the bleacher-style riser towards me. It earned me one hell of a dirty look from the girl with a picture of his face on her shirt who he’d been about to speak to.

  “Hi.” His voice was a low purr that somehow managed to carry over the din of the crowd.

  “Hey.” I added a little extra breathiness to my greeting and batted my eyelashes for good measure.

  He fixed me with a probing stare. His eyes were wide and hazel with a lovely bedroom sleepiness to them. I knew instantly what he was doing.

  “You want to meet me somewhere quieter,” he said. It wasn’t a question. He was telling me.

  Cocky bastard assumed he’d enthralled me with one look. I didn’t like Charlie anymore.

  “Yes.” Let him think I was a dumb human sheep. It would make my job that much easier. No one expects their food to fight back. He’d never see me coming. “Anywhere.”

  He placed his hand on my arm and pulled me close, his mouth brushing against my ear. His lips were cold, as was his hand. Even in the humid balm of August, his touch made me shiver. “You’ll let me do whatever I want.”

  Oh, so that was the game he was playing. The warrant was startin
g to make more sense now. Charlie was getting a little overconfident in himself. I was betting there was a trail of bodies the West Coast council had been cleaning up back in California. Pretty dead girls who never got the chance to say no, because he’d had taken away their free will.

  It wasn’t unusual for vampires to feed off unwitting humans. That was the purpose of the thrall, after all. But council regulation dictated the thrall was only for feeding purposes, and not for anything more nefarious. True, the rule wasn’t as well enforced as it could be, but if the thrall were used for a vampire to rape and murder someone? Well, the council couldn’t stand for that kind of behavior.

  “I’ll let you do anything you want to me, baby,” I promised with coquettish willingness. It was all I could do to fight back my fangs and refrain from ripping his throat out in front of all his adoring fans then and there.

  Too bad that wouldn’t have killed him.

  No, I was going to need to decapitate him, burn him or destroy his heart. Don’t let the stake-through-the-chest myth fool you. Vampires aren’t that easy to kill. Sure, it would help slow one down, but if you miss a direct hit to the heart, all it’s going to do is piss the rogue off.

  My weapon of choice was a 9mm handgun loaded with silver bullets I had specially ordered. Silver, while expensive, is a solid investment in my line of work. It’s as effective as poison on a vampire and has the added perk of being lethal to werewolves too. I had to have my clips preloaded for me because I was so allergic to the stuff I couldn’t touch it.

  Silver bullets alone won’t kill a vampire, but if you use them to take out the head or heart, it’s a pretty effective method. Decapitation is messy and unpleasantly intimate. I prefer to blow their heads off from a clean distance and save myself the hassle.

  The bonus is, so long as you can keep anyone from finding the body until sunup, the corpse will turn to ash in the morning light. No body, no crime.

  Charlie ran his hand up and down my arm and bit my earlobe with a playful drag of his teeth. I shuddered, but since he couldn’t see the disgust on my face, he must have thought it was from pleasure.

  “The Columbia Hotel,” he told me. “Meet me in an hour.”

  “Of course.”

  Back at McCarthy’s, I saw Tyler’s head peering over the line, his gaze sweeping the street. He spotted me and waved to get my attention. My timing was impeccable; he was second from the entrance. I made my way up to meet him, but with every step closer I felt my blood grow cold.

  “Son of a…” I cursed under my breath. No wonder he’d been looking for me so diligently.

  “Look who I found,” Tyler began, but I didn’t need him to continue. He hadn’t found anybody. Somebody had found us.

  “Holden.” I spat out his name, and it had never sounded more like a dirty word than it did in that moment. His faux cheeriness had returned, and he was brimming over with barely suppressed delight. He appeared to be taking great pleasure in the mess he was making out of my night.

  “What are the chances?” Holden asked in his best it’s a small world voice.

  “I was wondering that myself,” Tyler replied, his tone tight and the polite smile looking forced. I wasn’t doing a very good job of censoring myself either, because neither of them seemed too impressed by the expression on my face. “Did you guys need to talk or something?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  Tyler turned from Holden’s affirmative to my emphatic negative and deduced there was something he was missing. He was smart, otherwise he wouldn’t be a detective and Mercedes wouldn’t have set us up. Unfortunately, he jumped straight to the obvious assumption, not that I could blame him.

  “So, clearly there’s something going on with you two, and I don’t want to get into the middle of some domestic entanglement.” He moved to step out of the line, and Holden did nothing to stop or correct him.

  “Tyler, wait,” I insisted. He obeyed, and I wondered, not for the first time, if I might have a little of the vampire thrall magic in me. “It’s not what you think.”

  He waited. Holden waited. My brain waited, which pretty much left me hanging in the wind.

  “I need Secret for a business meeting,” Holden offered at last, and in spite of how pissed off I was, I could have hugged him.

  “At eleven o’clock at night?”

  “She probably told you about our new client,” Holden replied by way of explanation.

  “Charlie Conaway?”

  “You know those Hollywood types,” I chimed in. “Odd hours.”

  Holden shrugged a halfhearted apology. “What can you do?”

  “You need her now?” Tyler asked, obviously miffed about waiting in line for forty minutes only to have me vanish again.

  Holden was already leaving the line, angling me back towards Times Square, when I turned back to Tyler and said, “It won’t be long. We’re just going to the Columbia Hotel.” Holden squeezed my elbow in warning, but I kept right on talking. “Meet me at the Billie Holiday Bar? One o’clock?”

  I could tell he was going to protest, but I took advantage of his hesitation and went for broke. I shot him a variation of the look that landed Charlie’s attention earlier, only poutier.

  “Okay,” Tyler replied, and then I could no longer see him as he was swallowed up by the crowd surrounding the bar.

  Chapter Five

  We had an hour before I was supposed to offer myself up to Charlie at the Columbia Hotel. Holden seemed inclined towards spending this time scolding me for not bailing out of my date with Tyler sooner. I reminded him he’d been the one who told me I shouldn’t cancel in the first place. That silenced him for the short term.

  My thoughts were otherwise occupied. I hadn’t brought any weapons with me, with the exception of a small silver switchblade I had hidden in a garter holster beneath my dress. The weapon was designed so it was safe for me to hold, with a spiffy mother-of-pearl handle.

  Unfortunately it was meant for protection, not as an offensive weapon. And since Charlie was being careful to stay in well-populated, human-heavy areas, there was no way for me to get away with using a gun.

  We were going to need to stop so I could get something different. Since both my apartment and Keaty’s office were west, and the Columbia was comfortably nestled in Midtown East next to Bryant Park, I was going to need to do a little shopping. I wouldn’t have enough time to get home and back before the rendezvous.

  Ignoring Holden’s sulky silence, I steered us towards Koreatown and looked for the most brightly lit, kitschy tourist trap I could find.

  Unlike Canal Street, where every other store was designed for the sole purpose of taking your money, Koreatown was smaller, more insular and less inviting to Ma and Pa Missouri. Blessedly, a few stores bucked the trend, and even after eleven at night one enterprising shopkeeper was still open. And judging by the stuffed Hello Kitty in the window, he was just what I was looking for.

  A smart Korean novelty shop in New York knows exactly how to rip off tourists who assume all Asian cultures are the same. By carrying a little of everything, they could cater to every whim and reap the financial gains of other people’s ignorance.

  Inside, the shop smelled like incense and spice. One wall was crammed full of children’s toys, from plush animals to Chinese kites. Racks of Oriental fans and paper-thin bamboo umbrellas overwhelmed the aisles, and on the facing wall was every conceivable color of kimono.

  Towards the back of the store, behind a beaded curtain, a shriveled Asian man peered out at me with inky black eyes. In that moment it became clear why the shop was so cloying with spicy smells. This man wasn’t human, and the smell of decay coming off him would be noticeable to even the most mundane nose. Humans would pass it off as body odor, but I knew better.

  He was a lesser fae of some kind. I was betting on ogre, based on the smell, but from what I knew of the fae, most ogres preferred to destroy things rather than keep nice, tidy stores.

  I shrugged off the ques
tion. It didn’t matter what kind of fae he was, because he had what I needed inside the glass cabinets at the back of the store.

  I moved with determined focus towards the man, Holden trailing behind, and when he saw what I was after in the cases, his reaction said it all.

  “Ohhhh.” His eyebrows went up in surprise before he caught himself and returned to his typical aloofness.

  The fae-Korean shopkeeper had been kind enough to stock a limited but functional selection of Japanese katana swords.

  “That one.” I tapped the glass above a black-sheathed katana, inlaid at the hilt with the pattern of a phoenix. It wasn’t the design that made me choose it—the cherry blossom one was prettier—but rather it had the longest blade of the bunch.

  Reach counts for a lot when you’re five-foot-four and fighting a six-foot-tall vampire.

  The old man eyed me but wisely said nothing. He must have known I was on to him. He pulled it out, and where the blade met the hilt, it was engraved with gold dragons. I took back my earlier assessment; it was the prettiest after all.

  “Five hundred,” he announced, his words clipped and his voice rumbling with something that wasn’t an accent. If I could see through the shroud of magic hiding his true form, I was betting he was huge. Only something with a big lung capacity could growl their words the way he did. Now I was more certain than ever he was an ogre.

  I unsheathed the blade, all twenty-eight inches of hand-folded steel, and the sword sang to me of age and violence. I plopped my credit card on the counter and thanked all the half-gods I knew it wasn’t declined, because I already had the weapon slung over my back.

  “Let’s go kill a vampire, shall we?”

  If the old man understood me, he didn’t seem to care.