“Six years to a vampire is hardly a long time, Secret. Especially one as old as Peyton.” He unlocked the door and let me in. I made a beeline for the upstairs bathroom, and Keaty followed me. “As for why now,” he continued, as I started up the taps in the old clawfoot tub, preparing to wash vampire brains out of my hair, “I believe he must have bigger plans in town than just your death. I think you’re a small perk in a much larger scheme.”

I had been thinking along those same lines. “You think he has something to do with the number of rogues going against the council?”

“Probably, and maybe more than that. I believe Peyton may be responsible for a lot of the Tribunal’s current headaches. He may even be one of the masters we’ve been hoping to find.”

“I shudder to think that Alexandre Peyton is that high in the vampire food chain. I know he’s powerful, but at three hundred and change, I sincerely doubt he’d be considered worthy by those in charge.”

“Maybe he would if he killed a certain vampire hunter.” He jutted his chin out to me. “A certain half-vampire, vampire hunter.”

I sighed. “A certain half-vampire, half-werewolf vampire hunter?”

Keaty’s jaw clenched. As a man who made his living killing monsters of all makes and models, he’d always had some difficulty dealing with the vampire half of my heritage, but he had even more trouble accepting the werewolf half. That made two of us. “He doesn’t know that. None of them know that.”

“They know I’m not human, Keaty. They can smell it. The wolves can too. They all know something isn’t right, they just haven’t been able to put it together yet. All it takes is one wolf to tell one vampire that I smell furry, and one vampire to tell one wolf that I smell undead, and the pieces will fall together. It’s all a matter of time.”

“Then I guess it’s a good thing that vampires and werewolves aren’t exactly having weekly brunches.”

I put my hair under the water, my blonde curls unraveling in the warm stream, streaks of red washing out and circling down the drain. My heart pounded as I thought about Peyton and the vampire council.

I still needed to call Holden.

Holden was my vampire liaison with the council. Like a caseworker, I guess. Whenever a baby vampire or the rare non-vampire was brought into the fold, they were assigned a liaison from within the council. A lower level vampire, most of whom were younger than two hundred. They were all wardens, a title assigned to trusted vampires, but those who had no real power in the hierarchy.

Wardens needed to prove themselves at that level before being promoted to sentries, governors, then to tribal elders, and finally, if the possibility presented itself, to Tribunal lords. Since there were only three Tribunal lords at one time, unless you challenged one in a fight to the death, the only way to advance that high was to wait.

I was proving to be a much more difficult challenge than the elders had expected when they assigned me to Holden, and I often worried that I was keeping him from gaining ranks within the council. His bicentennial had come and gone during the six years I’d known him, and yet he remained in his lowly warden position.

Both Holden and the vampire council knew about my vampire half—there was no hiding it from them—but only Holden knew about the other half, and he had kept it a secret, even from the Tribunal lords. Holden, like Keaty, had known me since I was sixteen, and they were both guarding me without being asked, like overprotective brothers.

“I think, maybe, the Tribunal will go a little bit easier on me this time than last.”

“You mean the time you killed three rogues on a subway platform, without sanction, in the middle of the evening, with a hundred people watching?” A chuckle lightened his voice and could have almost gone unnoticed. “Yes, I imagine that one vampire, in a dark field, would be a shade easier for them to swallow than headlines in The Post about a maniac girl with a sword and bodies that turned to dust in the morgue.”

“The Post is a joke anyway. The Times didn’t even touch it.”

“And you made a valiant attempt of explaining the difference to the Tribunal, didn’t you? They loved that, as I recall.”

I pulled my hair into a wet ponytail, the thick, loose curls already returning, all the red gone from the gold.

“I just think they’ll see the significance of Peyton’s return more than the death of one rogue.”

Keaty sat on the edge of the tub and offered me another towel to wipe the stubborn bits of brain out of my ear. “You still don’t understand them at all, do you? They’re your people, part of your heritage—”

“Don’t,” I warned, shooting him a humorless glance.

“And don’t keep denying it. You can’t just pretend it isn’t true. Their laws apply to you because you let them. You asked to be allowed into their fold. I was killing vampires for the council for ten years before you ever tried it, without ever meeting them face-to-face. You were in the city three months and you were begging for an audience. What you fail to recognize is that a death to them is always a loss. When they sign over the warrants to us, they are allowing us to kill their children. Their brothers and sisters. Their parents. Vampires are not as abundant as you like to pretend, and they won’t ever take a death lightly, not even when you see it as a reasonable kill.”

I held the towel and looked at myself in the mirror, pale, exhausted, but otherwise no worse for the wear. I listened to what he was telling me, and he was right. To the council I was both an aid and an abomination. They would not kill their own but knew Keaty would because he was human and also lacked a moral compass when it came to killing monsters.

Then I showed up, a half-vampire, blood kin to their history, and I demanded that they let me kill my own people. And I wondered why they had so much trouble accepting me. I couldn’t even accept myself.

“I’ll call Holden,” I said again, still no closer to actually wanting to do it.

“I’m sure he’ll be thrilled.”

Chapter Five

Holden, like most vampires, did not answer his phone. He always let the machine get it, believing that any caller with a real reason to contact him should be willing to leave a message and willing to wait for a reply. Vampires are patient to a point where it wears thin on anyone around them, which is one of the reasons they spend most of their time with their own kind.

I recapped the events of the evening as best I could over the limitations of voicemail. “Hey, Holden, it’s Secret. I killed an unsanctioned rogue in the park tonight. He had it coming. Send the Tribunal my love.”

I was in an all-night café near Keaty’s, waiting for my nonfat no-foam latte while I left the message. The barista behind the counter, who appeared to be about fourteen, gave me a concerned look.

I flashed him my well-practiced innocent smile and said, “My dungeon master.” A spark of revelation lit upon his zitty face. “I just needed him to know the outcome of a campaign he missed.” I winked and took my drink out of his hand while he muttered something about rolling twenties.

It was late spring, and there was still a chill in the air, but the café had seen fit to set up its sidewalk patio a week or so after the snow melted. I pulled my jacket around me, though the cold didn’t really bother me, and sat on one of the wrought-iron chairs. My cell phone was securely in my pocket in case Holden called, but I expected I wouldn’t hear from him right away. I was also in no hurry to go back to the office and talk to Keaty about the state of affairs I now found myself in. I’d told him I was getting a coffee and then calling it a night.

Dawn was only an hour or two away, and there was nothing I could do to change what I’d done tonight. I would have to face the consequences when they came.

I tried to enjoy the hot, bitter sweetness of the latte, in sharp contrast to the coolness of the night, but my mind was reeling from what had happened. It took a lot to scare me, mostly because almost anything that went bump in the night I had killed at some point, but my encounter with Henry Davies had really shaken me.

The unshakeable, calm and centered Secret McQueen had been knocked on her proverbial ass by the impression of a bite mark. Maybe I had been mistaken. There was a chance part of the bite had healed faster or maybe I had been anticipating it so much I had imagined the missing tooth mark.

I prayed that I was wrong. In the six years I had been doing this, the closest anyone had ever come to truly killing me was Alexandre Peyton, and he had promised me that next time we met he wouldn’t fail. If I was right about it being his mark, I was going to need to be on my guard more than usual until things either came to a head or blew over.

As I sipped my coffee I was overcome by an unexpected warmth which had nothing to do with the drink. It was like a humid summer breeze was blowing down 81st Street, only it crawled over my body and into my pores. My mouth felt thick with musky, dense flavor. The sensation was invasive and overwhelming, and what scared me the most was how comfortable I felt with it. I licked my lips and tasted cinnamon.

My latte was vanilla.

It was then, with a ripple of electric pinpricks up my spine, I felt a man pass. He approached from behind me and seemed to be wholly unaware of my presence until he turned towards the café door. He paused before entering, his close-cropped ash-colored hair tousled by the cool night air, and fixed his radiant azure eyes on me. There were two men with him, one on either side—a brunet who was the same height, just over six feet, and another who was my height and blond. The one who was watching me looked as puzzled as I felt, but he snapped out of it after a brief period of stunned silence and took a step in my direction.

“Hello?” he said, the way people do when they believe they already know you and simply cannot place the who and how.

If I’d been on my game, I’d have a snappy shoot-down or roll my eyes and tell him to get lost. I might have ignored him under any normal circumstances, because as a general rule I try to avoid men who might try to flirt with me. I did not date, although I had tried once or twice in the past. I had no time or patience for it, not to mention there were certain aspects of my life I could never explain to a human boyfriend.