Maybe Aubrey Delacourte had done me the greatest favor of my life.

Once I’d had to worry about what path my destiny would take—the werewolf life or the vampire life. Now my dual futures had been obliterated and there was only one life.

And that life was sitting across the table from me.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

My happily ever after wasn’t meant to go off without a hitch. Apparently even as a human nothing was going to come easily for me. After spending the better part of my afternoon lying in the Sheep Meadow of Central Park with my head in Desmond’s lap and my mind anywhere but on the problems of old Secret’s life, I got called back to reality.

By Lucas.

Dusk had settled over the city when Desmond and I started walking back to the apartment, and the sounds of my cellphone singing “Maneater” cut through my waking dream. Stupid goddamn phone. I should have thrown it in the Bethesda Fountain when I’d had a chance. Hell, I should have hopped on a plane to Las Vegas with Desmond the second we’d realized what had happened to me. Anything to get both of us as far from New York City as we could get.

But we’d stayed, and now I had to deal with my nighttime life again.

“What do you want?” I asked, not really caring what his response was.

“Where the hell have you been?” roared the response from the opposite end of the phone. “I told you very clearly you had a week to get her back, and three weeks later she shows up? In that time no one has a single fucking clue where you’ve been or if you’re coming back?”

I waited, listening to him shout and curse and shout some more. When he finally took a breath, I interjected, “First, you didn’t give me a week, you gave me to the end of the week. And, correct me if I’m wrong, but I did bring Kellen home, didn’t I?”

Silence.

“And can you tell me the last time you went into a different plane of existence, Lucas? Do you have the faintest clue of how time functions in a fairy world?”

“A…what?”

“Yeah. If you’d stopped your bitching for ten seconds and actually asked me what happened to her, I would have told you. Your sister was kidnapped by fairies.”

“Did you say—?”

“Fairies. F-a-i—”

“Okay, I heard you.”

“I wasn’t sure. Sometimes I think you only hear the sound of your own voice.”

Desmond and I had arrived in Hell’s Kitchen and were making slow progress towards my apartment. His lupine hearing would give him an advantage, since he’d certainly be able to hear every word Lucas was saying, even if the billionaire hadn’t been shouting at the top of his voice like a petulant toddler.

“Yes, she is home,” he said. “But she won’t talk to me. She won’t talk to anyone. She’s been locked in her apartment all day sobbing.”

Sobbing? That was news. I’d remembered her seeming out of sorts when we’d come back through the gate, but I’d written it off as some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. That had seemed likely then, but Kellen was a tough girl. I was surprised to learn she was still upset over her ordeal. Maybe more had happened to her with the fairies than I’d had a chance to learn about.

If that scumbag had done something to her, I didn’t care how mortal I was, I’d go back across the gate and kick his fairy ass into another dimension.

“I’ll go see her,” I said.

“Secret…” Desmond’s voice cut in, an edge of worry coloring his typically calm tone.

“One second,” I said, covering the mouthpiece of the cell.

“I don’t know if we have a second.” He pointed down the block to where a group of six men was walking in our direction. Their purposeful strides told me it wasn’t a coincidence they were moving our way. They were coming for us.

“Wolves?” Not being able to smell them for myself made me nervous. What made me more nervous was knowing it was six against two and I didn’t have any kind of supernatural strength on my side. Considering I’d been bested by rug burn that morning, I didn’t think I’d be much help against six werewolves.

“Yeah,” Desmond whispered, unable to hide how uneasy he was.

For the first time in my adult life, I was going to be a liability to someone’s safety just by being with them.

“Lucas, I gotta go.” I hung up the phone before he could reply.

Even if I wasn’t going to be much use in the strength department, I had something that could do damage against wolves. After dropping my cell back into my purse, I withdrew my SIG, pulled my hand back out and clicked off the safety. These guys weren’t here for Desmond, they were here for me. I could already see Hank and the ponytailed scumbag among the group.

My mom’s pack.

“Don’t suppose you think they’ll go easy on us if I tell them about my predicament?” I gave Desmond a fake-hopeful smile. He grimaced in return. “So much for putting my past behind us, eh?” That didn’t seem to make him laugh either. Honestly, I wasn’t in a laughing mood at the moment, but being human didn’t mean I had to be deathly serious all the time.

Maybe deathly was the wrong way to think of things right now.

I’d been human less than twenty-four hours, and I was already looking down certain death. This had to be a record for the shortest lifespan of a newborn twenty-three-year-old ever.

But then I reminded myself how often my death had seemed like a sure thing in the past, and I was still kicking, so maybe this wasn’t hopeless. I did have Desmond with me, and my gun. And a fucked-up adulthood that had trained me how to think and behave in situations like this one. Not to mention my training had all come from one man…a human man.

Fuck the discouraging thoughts. I might be human, but I was still Secret McQueen.

I chambered a round and dropped my purse to the ground. If I couldn’t use it to kill someone, it wasn’t any good to me, and as big as my purse was I don’t think it qualified as a deadly weapon quite yet.

“I’m not sure how much use I’m going to be against the big ones,” I admitted.

“Stay behind me.”

“I can take out the scrawny one. And the leader.” My voice didn’t belie my uncertainty, for which I was grateful. Sounding self-assured went a long way towards making me feel it.

“Secret, stay behind me.”

The pack was only a block away, close enough to hear what we were saying, so I chose my next works carefully. “I know you’re prone to being protective, but I’m not useless here.” I waved my gun in his peripheral vision. “I can handle myself. If I can’t, then I’ll stay behind you.”

Desmond, who had been rigid and standing with a fighter’s determination, shifted his position to look at me. In one brutally masculine gesture he grabbed me by the waist and yanked me against him, his mouth crushing mine with a rough, hot kiss that made my whole body explode with tingles. When he released me, I was dizzy and my feet had gone missing.

“I won’t lose you, understand? Not now.”

The pack was crossing the street, and we didn’t have time for romantic proclamations, just barely enough time for me to whisper, “Not ever.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

In some ways being human was not so different from being a vampire.

While in the throes of a vampiric rage—or while my body was healing itself—all the world around me would dim into a white noise. When Pony-boy and his goon squad came to a stop a few feet away from Desmond and me, the throb of my pulse in my ears was so loud it was all I could hear. All other noise vanished, and the constant reminder of my humanity thrummed inside my head.

“Be calm,” Desmond said quietly, even though the other men would hear him.

“This is me being calm.”

“Maybe be calmer.”

My fingers spasmed around the grip on my gun, and I was thankful I knew better than to keep one on the trigger.

“We meet again,” Pony-boy said, his voice a silky growl.

“I thought I made it clear last time, I was done meeting with you.”

“In a city like this, it was inevitable our paths would cross a second time.”

Yeah, because in a city with over eight million people there was no way to avoid one pain-in-the-butt rogue and his posse of would-be badass wolves. “Be honest, you just missed me,” I said.

“We never took a shot. Hard to miss when you haven’t tried yet.” This came from Hank, who was a half step behind Pony-boy. I knew what hiding looked like.

“Sorry, Hank, I couldn’t hear you from behind Mom’s apron strings.”

Hank growled, and my body responded with a surge of pure adrenaline. My heart was screaming for me to run and my limbs wanted to listen to the order for flight. Too bad my brain was still running things, and my brain still thought like a bounty hunter.

“We heard a rumor you were gone,” Pony-boy added, ignoring my banter and Hank’s reaction. “The true queen wanted us to see if the rumors were true.”

I shrugged with my hands out in front of me, giving an innocent face but also flashing my weapon at them. “You’ve seen me. Now you can go tell Mommy Dearest to get bent.”

The men Pony-boy had with him muttered amongst themselves. I wasn’t sure what they’d expected from this interaction, but this back-and-forth chattering mustn’t have been it. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility it was something along the lines of, “I thought we were going to beat up a girl.”

“Actually, the true queen—”

“Stop calling her that,” I demanded. “Unless she’s the true queen of being a pain in my ass, you are sorely mistaken about her title.”

“We know who our queen is.”

“Oh, right, I forgot… You guys are just as crazy and fucked in the head as she is.”

There was more muttering within the posse. It also hadn’t escaped my notice that Desmond got stiffer and breathed more heavily each time I spoke. If I kept it up like this, I’d be hearing—