Deep Dark Secret (Secret McQueen #3) 3

Cold stung my skin, seeping into my clothes, making my limbs feel heavy and useless. I slipped under the water again, my eyes open and aching. Then, through the murky depths of night-blackened water, I saw Mayhew’s detached head. The demon’s eyes were wide open and seemed impossibly alive and aware.

When he blinked and gnashed his teeth at me, I screamed. A cold stream of water rushed in, pressing against my impossibly hot internal organs. I felt like I was being steamed from the inside out. Mayhew’s disembodied head continued to snap at me, his mouth growing wider and wider as though he could swallow me whole. I thrust my sword through his open jaws, spearing the living cranium on the tip.

I know Calliope had told me I needed to destroy the head, but I’d figured it was one of those folksy warnings. I didn’t think his head would actually continue to function when it was removed from the body.

That bordered a little too close to zombie territory for my liking.

I reached the surface again, and this time I could see the light of a not-too-distant shore. I sucked in a deep breath, sputtering out some of the remaining river water, then dove back under and kicked like hell.

For thirty minutes I fought fatigue, hypothermia and traitorous limbs that begged me to give up. When I hit something solid, I wept openly. I didn’t care if my cheeks were stained red. I didn’t care where I’d landed. All I cared was I’d made it alive, and I still had the goddamn demon head.

I dragged myself onto land, pushing my body out of the water with my bone-weary legs threatening to fail me at any moment. I sucked in breath like air was going out of style, sobbing loudly with every expansion of my chest. Breathing had never hurt so badly, but if I could cry, it meant my lungs were working. I was alive.

After what felt like hours I forced myself into a sitting position. The New York City skyline winked at me from across the river. Liberty Island was a small silhouette to my left.

Then I saw the big orange boat, and I don’t think that hideous beast had ever looked so beautiful. The Staten Island Ferry pulled into its dock about a half mile away, unloading one batch of late-night commuters and picking up a group wanting to make the return trip to Manhattan.

I never in my life thought I’d be so happy to wash up on the shore of Staten Island.

An hour and twenty minutes later I was grateful for so many more bizarre things. I was thrilled for Manhattan’s popularity as a Hollywood set piece. In any other city people would have run screaming from a sopping wet girl in a party dress carrying a sword with a demon head skewered on it. Instead, I muttered something about a new J.J. Abrams horror movie and the few late-night riders ignored me after that.

I had no cash to take a cab from the main station and no cell phone to call for a ride, so I hobbled home in my ruined heels. When I made my way through my apartment door, Lucas was administering some first aid to Desmond’s already-healing stab wound, and they’d obviously been talking about me because a hushed silence greeted my entrance. They scrambled to their feet, and Desmond made a move to embrace me, but Lucas held him back.

“Can someone take the head, please?” I asked, my jaw aching with the effort of forming words.

Lucas was the first to move, but stayed out of my reach as he pulled the head off the end of the sword, almost dropping it when the demon tried to bite him. “What should I…? Uh… How do I…?”

“Put it in the tub and burn it.” I shuffled past him and smiled weakly at Desmond. “Head or heart, right?”

He winced. I must have gotten him pretty good. “Is it really you?” he asked cautiously.

I thought the demon-pop I’d carried in would be a dead giveaway, but I couldn’t blame the guy for asking. I nodded. “Dracula.”

He heaved a relieved sigh and collapsed on the loveseat, resting his head back and looking at the ceiling. I think he was crying.

I didn’t have the energy left to comfort him.

By the time Lucas returned from the bathroom, I was already lying horizontally across my bed in the same position I’d landed when I fell onto it. I was still clutching the sword when I passed out, listening to Desmond and Lucas debate how to burn a demon head.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

There were a lot of things Mercedes didn’t say to me the night of Gabriel’s funeral. She didn’t ask why I’d paid for it, or where I’d gotten the money. She didn’t ask me to explain how the whole station had lost their collective memories and only she and Tyler could remember the truth. She never said anything about the two officers whose funerals she’d had to attend, whose families believed they’d died in a tragic fire in the basement of the police station.

Faulty wiring was the official report.

That report had been drafted by my people.

Fire was the easiest way to make a mess like that go away. Vampire clean-up crews had been using it as a get-out-of-jail-free card for centuries. Gabriel Holbrook had been another casualty in a terrible tragedy.

It was easy to paint him as the villain. He was dead, the families of the missing girls had their justice. That was what went into the file so we didn’t have to answer any impossible questions. But Cedes, Tyler and I all knew the truth. Gabriel wasn’t innocent, but he wasn’t the killer.

As it turned out, Professor Oliver Mayhew had been a real Columbia professor once. Nolan did some research at my request and discovered that Mayhew had originally come to New York in the mid-eighties. I couldn’t be sure when the demon had killed the real Mayhew—it might have been long before—but now both incarnations were gone.

Erasing the memory of Mayhew from an entire school would have been too much for even the Tribunal’s resources. Instead I’d had the wardens convince the dean Mayhew had given his notice months earlier so he could return to England as a faculty transfer to Cambridge.

Lucy Renard had some permanent scars on her feet thanks to the filthy sawdust, but otherwise she had made a miraculous physical recovery thanks to her shifter blood. The memories of the event, however, were still too fresh for her to process properly. It turned out she’d been locked in the dark little room in the basement for days, visited periodically by Mayhew so he could scare the bejeezus out of her, and once so he could bite her. Genevieve told me Lucy couldn’t even look at a closet without screaming.

I doubted she’d ever be able to cross my path, and it made me sad knowing someone I’d never had a chance to know would be terrified of me for the rest of her life.

We hadn’t yet been able to figure out what type of demon it had been exactly. Without knowing the specifics, it was hard for us to understand why Mayhew had chosen the girls he had, or what he’d gotten from them. But I’d been thinking about his actions, and of what I’d seen at Calliope’s the night she drank the boy’s aura.

Calliope fed on life force, and on the goodness of youth. It wasn’t impossible to believe Mayhew had been doing something similar. When he’d stolen my memories, I remembered feeling something escape my body like a breath.

What if it hadn’t just been my memories, but a part of my soul?

By taking little bits from many different girls, he could have continued taking only slivers of life essence without actually killing anyone for decades. I’d looked into missing persons and homicide reports in the Columbia campus area dating back to Mayhew’s arrival, but they weren’t as substantial as I’d anticipated. It seemed like Mayhew the demon hadn’t actually started killing his victims until recently. My best guess was he’d gotten more and more desperate lately to return home, and it had made him sloppy. Girls ended up dead, and that was how he’d been found out.

Who knew how long he could have carried on with his feedings if only he’d left the girls alive? I wasn’t sure what I’d have preferred. Too many lives had been lost in such a short period of time. Was their sacrifice worth it to know a demon was no longer in our midst?

There was no easy answer.

Stranger still, I never regained my memory of the missing hour in Mayhew’s office. It still nagged me constantly, the wonder over what had happened and why I’d gotten years’ worth of missing memories back, but not that scant hour.

Cedes walked with me back to my car, her hand wrapped around the inside of my elbow. Instead of asking me any of the questions that must have nagged at her, she asked me the hardest question of all. “Are you okay?”

When I looked at her, I forced a smile and squeezed her hand. “I’m getting there.”

The truth was, I was so far from okay I didn’t know what okay looked like anymore. Both of the officers who’d died in the supposed fire had families. One had just had a new baby a few months earlier. I had read their obituaries about a hundred times.

And Gabriel—for all his wrongs—had just been a stupid young man who’d made a mistake. He’d been taken in by a demon, and though it was his own weakness that had allowed it, it didn’t mean he deserved to die. During the day, when I slept, I was haunted by the sounds of his screams.

I dropped Mercedes off with the promise we would have a tequila-filled evening very soon. Before I pulled away she made me swear I would talk to Tyler. There was only so much she could explain, and his questions wouldn’t wait as long as hers.

At home I parked behind Desmond’s car and sat in the warm interior of my BMW for a few quiet minutes.

Ever since my little swim in the Hudson, I couldn’t seem to get warm enough. Desmond told me I wrapped myself around him while we slept. I lifted my palms from the steering wheel and looked at them. There were no visible burn scars from the sword. When I’d woken the night after my fight with Mayhew, the sword had freed itself from my grip and my hands were healed.

I’d gone back to Koreatown to talk to the ogre, but the shop was empty. I had to wonder if he’d run because of me and the sword. It certainly cast a dark pall over the future if I could make an ancient fae bolt for the hills without even threatening him.

Things didn’t get much better when I finally called Grandmere to tell her what had happened and fill her in on my new engagement. When I explained the precarious position of Lucas’s leadership, I hadn’t been able to help asking her about Callum. My grandmere was French, and quiet wasn’t a word I would typically use to describe her. But when I told her Callum was making a play for Lucas’s territory, she had fallen so silent I thought the call had dropped. When she did finally speak, I almost wished she hadn’t.