Cold Hard Secret (Secret McQueen) (15 page)

Yes, Sutherland looked younger, still as fresh-faced and innocent as the day he died. But there was no mistaking the family resemblance. Nolan had never met my mother, but I was as much Sutherland’s daughter as I was hers. And given that neither my father nor I could spend any time in the daylight, the similarities were magnified by our shared pale skin and light blond hair.

Nolan let go of Sutherland, and my father didn’t even bother touching his neck. He wandered past Nolan and sat back on the couch like nothing had ever happened.

It would be a gross understatement to say Sutherland wasn’t all there.

He was fucking nuts.

But not the kind of crazy that went out on killing sprees, which was why he was allowed to live on his own, outside the watchful eye of the Council. He talked to himself, and what he said generally didn’t make a lick of sense, but it was hard to expect more when his sire, Theo, had turned dear old dad against his will and then sent him off to murder his own family.

That sort of thing will mess a teenager up permanently.

“He’s your…” Nolan kept staring at the other man, who still maintained some baby fat in his cheeks. The only thing that gave Sutherland’s true age away were his eyes, which looked desperate and haunted when he focused long enough for me to see them. Normally he shuffled around staring at the floor.

I wondered sometimes if he’d been saner before The Doctor got hold of him. I was irreparably fucked up thanks to my ten days underground, but Sutherland had been there for weeks. Maybe he’d been able to hold a conversation before then. Now I was lucky to get complete, coherent sentences from him once or twice a week.

I clicked the gun’s safety back on and reholstered it, closing the door behind me now that the threat was over. No sense in making a public spectacle of our private matters.

Nolan picked up a lamp that had fallen to the floor, which was probably the source of the crash I’d heard. He ran a hand over the stubble on his shaved head and gave me a sheepish half-smile.

“I’m real sorry,” he said apologetically. I’d missed him and his goofy accent. For some reason when Nolan spoke he forgot to begin or end his words properly, leaving the letter A off words and dropping consonants willy-nilly. When he drank, I needed a translator to understand what he was saying.

“Where have you
been
?” I asked.

“’Salong story, ya know?”

I was familiar with the concept of long stories. I had one or two of my own. “Can you try giving me the CliffsNotes? I’ve been worried about you.” Though I hadn’t done anything to track him down beyond calling him and leaving several texts, it didn’t mean he hadn’t been in my thoughts. I was all for needing time to heal after a tragic loss, but I had my fears that Brigit’s death might have been too much for Nolan to handle.

It relieved me to no end to see him standing five feet away from me, looking no worse for wear.

“I had ta get ’way. Get my shit t’gether.”

“And is your shit together now?”

“’S’muchas it’s gonna get.”

“Have you stopped to see Keaty yet?” Prior to Nolan bailing, he’d been working with Keaty at the PI firm that still had my name on the masthead. “I know he could use an extra set of hands around the office.”

“Not yet. Gonna go t’morrow. Stopped by Shane’s, but he’s got a girl now.”

Ah yes, Siobhan. The pint-sized Irish archer who was ninety percent attitude. I hadn’t seen Shane in a few weeks, but I was glad to know he was making things work with his ladylove. It wasn’t like he was going to find another girl who believed in vampires, could kill demons, and thought his faux-rock-star getup was sexy.

Okay, to be fair, any woman with eyes and a functioning sex drive would probably be attracted to Shane’s, er, packaging. But Siobhan was the perfect match for him.

“No crashing on his couch, then.”

“Nah. I came ’ere ’cause I wasn’t sure where else ta go. Then I saw yer…dad? I freaked. Sorry.” He turned to Sutherland. “Sorry.”

“What for?” My father blinked up, glancing to Nolan then me. “Secret, who’s your friend?”

Perhaps it was for the best not to remind him my
friend
had tried to kill him not two minutes earlier. “Dad, this is Nolan Tate. He and I go way back.”

“It’s a pleasure.” Sutherland returned to staring at the blank television set.

Nolan’s eyes pleaded for an explanation, but what could I say? I didn’t have the energy or desire to review the story of what had gone down in California, and was there an easy way to tell someone your absentee vampire father was a bit…unhinged?

“He’s had a hard twenty-four years,” I said.

That might be the best way to explain a lot of things.

Chapter Twenty

Nolan couldn’t stay with me. Even with Desmond out of the equation until Lucas could fix him—well hopefully not
fix
him—I still had Holden to contend with. Technically only Desmond lived with me, though he and Holden both had their own apartments. But now that Desmond and Holden had come to their tense agreement regarding my relationship to them both, I was seeing the vampire in my domain a lot more often.

And since he knew I was back in the city, I would surely be seeing him once I found my way back to Hell’s Kitchen.

It wasn’t that he’d view Nolan as a threat, but I didn’t think it would be fair to put my young sidekick in such a tense situation.

He couldn’t stay with Shane, and I didn’t bother suggesting he crash on Sutherland’s couch. I’d been amazed Nolan had accepted Brigit for what she was, considering his distaste for most vampires. He wouldn’t be so flexible when it came to my dad.

So, in spite of his claim that he’d visit Keaty the next day, we found ourselves standing in front of a brownstone with
Keats & McQueen
painted on the front door. My one-time home beckoned with the kind of warmth one can only get from a place they don’t have to live in anymore.

“Should’ve called first,” Nolan grumbled.

“Please. You think he’s sleeping? No. Keaty doesn’t sleep.”

“’E might be mad.”

“At you?”

“Yeah.”

The truth was Keaty probably
was
mad. He hated unreliable people, and Nolan had been the dictionary definition of unreliable when he’d skipped town. There was no sense in playing the dead-girlfriend card, because as far as Francis Keats was concerned, vampires weren’t people. Mourning Brigit would mean the same to him emotionally as mourning a dead goldfish.

Considering he was one of the only humans in my life, Keaty was easily the most detached from his humanity. It made him a great partner, an excellent teacher, but absolute crap as a substitute father figure.

Not that my real dad was doing much better.

“He’ll be fine. Just ring the bell.”

Nolan, ever dutiful, did as I requested, and a few moments later the front door opened.

If I were to imagine the perfect sociopath, a no-nonsense killer for money, I don’t think I’d picture Keaty. I might think of a guy in full flack gear, maybe with scars from a stint in a war zone somewhere.

Keaty had no scars, at least no physical ones. His hair was dark blond and cut in a short, tidy style that would have served him equally well on a battlefield or in a boardroom. Sometimes he wore wire-rimmed glasses, but he’d removed them before coming to the door. I could make out the indent of the plastic feet where they’d been resting on his nose.

“McQueen.” He nodded at me. If he was surprised to see either myself or Nolan, it didn’t show. “Tate. You back from your vacation?”

“Uh. Yessir.”

“Good. Room’s still upstairs. Hope you don’t think I’m paying you for all those weeks you were gone. We have a case I’m expecting your full assistance on. I’ll break it down for you in the morning.” He held the door open to let a befuddled Nolan pass him. “Secret, could you please wait in my office?”

I’d known fear in my life. I’d been bruised, beaten, tortured, shoved through dimensions and made to wear uncomfortable heels while doing a lot of it. But few things could terrify me like Keaty’s
we need to talk
tone.

Nolan looked visibly relieved to learn I was the one in trouble tonight rather than him. Suddenly I felt like we’d just been busted by our father for stealing his car, but I was the one getting yelled at because I was the oldest.

I trudged down the hall to Keaty’s office, and a minute later he announced his arrival by quietly shutting the door. I didn’t glance back at him, choosing to wait until he took his seat across the desk from me.

Nothing in his expression had changed, which notched my anxiety up a few points. If he at least looked mad, I might be able to appropriately steel myself, but this whole nonchalant lack-of-emotion thing put me more on edge.

“I trust your trip to Paris was…fulfilling.” He opened the top drawer of his desk and slipped a newspaper towards me.

It was a Parisian periodical, written in French—of course—but even with my relatively rusty grasp on the written language, I could work out what the front-page article was about.

Corps décapité découvert dans le metro.

Headless body found in metro.

“Of course what the article fails to mention is how the body turned to ashes the moment they brought it out into the sunlight.” He took the paper back and replaced it in the drawer. Did he have a scrapbook somewhere to commemorate all my fuckups? He might need more than one.

“I killed Peyton.” I hoped he might see the silver lining in the whole thing.

He looked moderately impressed, but only for a nanosecond. “I’m glad you were able to clear your plate of one pest, but at what cost? This isn’t the most subtle way you could have gone about it.”

There was no sense in drudging up the details of everything that had gone down that night in the sewers. Keaty would think I was making excuses, which would be true. “It was either kill him there or lose him, maybe forever. I wasn’t about to let him slip through my fingers.”

“You found him once.”

“And it took me months. I needed to finish him, and I did. End of story.”

“What do your Tribunal partners have to say about this?” he asked.

My internal alarms started sounding at the mention of my two Tribunal counterparts, Juan Carlos and Sig. I had made every effort to avoid them since my return from California, but there were certain aspects of the position that made avoidance impossible. Among them, our regular disciplinary meetings.

I felt sorry for any vampire whose punishment fell to me during those sessions, because I had been extra cold due to my lack of desire to be there.

“I only got back into the city a few hours ago. I haven’t been to see the Tribunal yet.”

I still hadn’t adjusted to the whole Sig situation. Sig, the Tribunal’s leader, was also my…something. My father’s sire’s sire. Which meant his vampire blood was what lit the undead spark in me. Which made all the times he’d hit on me
really fucking creepy
. He didn’t view it as a family connection in the traditional sense, but that didn’t keep me from getting squicked out by the idea of us sharing blood.

Basically, he was my great-great-grandfather, but in the vampire world there was nothing to forbid you from screwing your family. Figuratively and literally.

I’d never been bothered by the idea of sires bedding their vampire children. I knew Rebecca—Holden’s sire—tended to play bedroom favorites with her creations, enjoying their company until she got bored of them and made someone new.

But now that I was on one side of a vampire family line, I couldn’t get past the idea of Sig and I being related. Maybe it was unbearably Western of me and a glaring representation of the culture I’d been raised in, but there was no way in hell I’d ever flirt with the idea of a roll in the sheets with Sig again.

Yeeeeeuck.

Things had never advanced very far between us, but in the past I’d sometimes found the idea of him appealing. After all, it was hard not to be flattered when a gorgeous two-thousand-year-old vampire lavished all sorts of attention on me.

Now I didn’t know what to think. His motivations were a mystery to me, and if I dwelled on the whole thing too long, it made me dizzy.

So instead of discussing it with him like a rational adult, I avoided him, hoping the whole thing would just go away.

Too bad I’d gone and made a huge mess of things in France. Killing Peyton wasn’t my biggest concern. Peyton was a known rogue, and as a Tribunal leader I had the freedom to issue death warrants on a whim. The much bigger issues at hand were the very public way in which I’d killed him and the fact a dozen baby vampires were running around Paris who knew
exactly
what I was.

I’d be stunned if the big Secret gossip wasn’t already stateside.

If I could skip town long enough to get my affairs in order, I would come back and face the music like a big girl. But I couldn’t leave
Grandmere
unprotected in her time of need. Callum could say whatever he wanted about Ben and Fairfax being able to protect her, but I wouldn’t rest easy until Mercy was in the ground.

Keaty was right. I had one problem off my plate, but I wasn’t going to feel a sense of satisfaction until the whole thing was clear, and that meant finding my mother and putting her down for good.