Fucked. I was so very, very fucked.

Chapter Fifteen

For obvious reasons, I’d never been to Monica’s chamber. Nor had I ever met her. I didn’t have to know her to fear her. Plenty of kids were afraid of the boogeyman, and plenty of adults were afraid of God. Monica fell somewhere in the middle.

I had no idea what to expect when I met her. Perhaps an old crone or a beautiful woman. There was no way to know, but whatever I’d guessed or suspected, it wasn’t what I was greeted with when Sig led me through a pristine white door.

The room was big and clean with a large four-poster bed against one wall and a circular rug in the middle with a pastel flower print on it. On a dresser next to the door was an enormous Victorian dollhouse, complete with working lights. The walls had been opened, and inside, all the small figurines were standing alone facing the corners of their rooms.

Creepy.

Sitting on a chair in the far part of the room was a small girl with chocolate-colored skin and tight curly hair pulled into two puffy buns on either side of her head. She couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old, and she was working on an intricately detailed cross-stitch. Her speed was dizzying.

When she looked up, I gasped.

Her eyes were white, no iris or pupil, just the flat, empty white of a corpse. She was looking at us, but it was apparent she wasn’t seeing us. Monica was completely blind, except where it mattered. The girl smiled, and her fangs showed.

“Ah, the Tribunal, together at last.” Her voice had a sweet, childlike tone, but her words spoke of maturity and wisdom. This was one freaky vampire. It didn’t escape my notice that Juan Carlos’s bravado faded when we entered the room, and he hung back near the door.

Sig, on the other hand, crossed the distance from the entrance to Monica’s chair in a few long-legged strides, stooping over to kiss her small hand. “A pleasure as always. You look younger every time I see you.” His tone was as warm as melting butter.

Monica threw her head back and laughed, her tiny fangs gleaming. “You devilish flirt. Don’t think this will make me forget your sins, Sigvard.”

The only other person who’d ever called Sig by his human name was Calliope. Apparently you had to be older than democracy in order to get a pass on that one. “I would never ask you to forget.” He was smiling, but there was a chill in his gaze. What kind of secrets had she seen in his past?

Ones I probably didn’t want to know about.

“You’ve brought me our unusual new leader?”

Sig looked to me and crooked a finger, indicating I should come. I was happier next to Juan Carlos near the door, but it didn’t seem like this was an invitation so much as a command. Slowly I made my way towards Monica and Sig until I was standing in front of her plush chair. Her dark skin had a gold undertone, making her seem warm, like she’d spent a day in the sun. She smelled inviting, like my grandmere’s kitchen. I’d once thought Sig was the only vampire who could produce an unnatural sense of calm. Now I knew he wasn’t even the best at doing it.

“H-hello,” I said, cursing my own tripping tongue for giving my nerves away.

“No need to be frightened, my dear. This won’t hurt a bit.” Her smile said she was being honest, but I had a hard time believing that Monica and I were going to sit around and shoot the shit over tea and scones. I was here so she could bite me. “Gentlemen, if you’d be so kind as to leave Tribunal Leader Secret and me alone.” She used my official title, in spite of the fact she had about six thousand years on me. Give or take a few thousand.

Sig and Juan Carlos were gone in an instant. Not a moment too soon for Juan Carlos, who was already halfway out the door when she began to bid them farewell.

“Have you ever bitten him?” I couldn’t help but ask once we were alone.

“Juan Carlos? Heavens, no. Would that I never have to, darling. He reeks of dirty history, don’t you think?” She continued to work on her cross-stitch, her tiny fingers creating the most astonishingly small, detailed stitches. Grandmere would die of jealousy. Even as a witch she couldn’t magic up such fine work.

“Did they tell you what they want to know about me?”

“Love, if they’ve sent you to me, it means they don’t know what they want to know.”

“I don’t understand. Aren’t you like, the live-in polygraph?”

“Have you lied about anything?”

Had anyone ever specifically said, Hey, Secret, you don’t happen to be half-werewolf do you? No. “Not…directly.”

“By omission perhaps?”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

Monica changed the thread on her needle and began to work on the scalelike feather pattern of a tiny hummingbird. “Tell me something, Secret. Do you believe you have rights different from those of the rest of the council?”

“I don’t think I used to have any rights at all, let alone different ones.” She was easy to talk to. Distressingly so. I’d been told she read the truth from blood, but maybe she didn’t even need blood to get honesty from people.

“Do you think you deserve your seat next to Sig?”

I looked around the room, not sure what I was trying to find, then I sat on the floor in front of her, cross-legged. “No,” I admitted.

“But you earned it.”

“I didn’t kill Daria because I wanted the seat.”

“Reasons are inconsequential, sweet. It is actions and their consequences that matter to me.”

Actions and consequences. That was why I was here after all. Everything I did, no matter how big or small, had an outcome. And I’d done so much lately I was losing track. Now the fallout of what I’d done was starting to catch up with me. I’d been a fool to believe I could go on forever and not have to face this day eventually.

“I killed Daria so I could live.”

“Your life is important to you.”

“Of course,” I said, not questioning it for a second.

“And yet you put yourself in situations of mortal peril on a regular basis.”

“I…well… Trouble sort of has a way—”

“You invite risk because it reminds you that you’re alive. Whenever you stand on the precipice of death and spit into the void, you feel more human because you walk away from death with your heart still beating.” Her gaze was focused on the wall behind me, her hands working to create a rose with three-dimensional texture. The pulse she claimed I was so fond of was hammering.

When I didn’t speak, she continued. “Why did you come to the council to hunt vampires?”

“I don’t know.”

Monica stopped stitching and turned her sightless gaze on me, tutting with three clicks of her tongue. “Let’s not play games, you and I. I’ll know it all soon enough, so why don’t you try honesty on. I think you’ll like it.”

I wasn’t so sure. “My family was split apart because of vampires. I am what I am because of a vampire.”

“Ah, and now we have it. The million-dollar question. What. Are. You?”

“I’m unusual.”

She smiled, and I wished she hadn’t. The fangs in her child’s mouth scared the living shit out of me. More than Sig and his chilly unspoken threats. I never thought a vampire would scare me more than him, or more than Alexandre Peyton, the one who’d come closest to killing me.

They had nothing on Monica.

“You certainly are. The first Tribunal leader in the history of the council to not be a full-blooded vampire, did you know that?”

“I sort of assumed.”

“You haven’t been the most popular.”

“I’m used to that.”

Monica set down her project and held her hands out, palms up. Not wanting to be rude, I put my own in hers. If she was going to tell me I had mismatched lifelines and two different destinies, I was so out of here. There was only so much your future is yours to make I could handle. Instead, Monica raised my hands to her face and rubbed her cheeks against my palms, taking a good sniff at each of my wrists.

“You smell strongly of werewolf.”

“I…uh…”

“And sex.”

Okay, hearing an eight-year-old say I smelled like sex took this whole scenario from creepy and strange to straight fucked up.

“Yes.”

“So you make it a habit of bedding werewolves?”

Geez, lady, judgmental much? “Just two of them. One now.”

“You have a vampire on your skin too. Our young Mr. Chancery if I’m not mistaken.”

“That’s not what it, uh…smells like?” I was trying to say she was misinterpreting the scent, but I wasn’t sure how to phrase it, and my claim ended up sounding more like a question than an assertion.

“Believe it or not, Secret, who you give your body to is not of the utmost concern to the council. Sleep with Holden, sleep with your wolves. Your sex life is not what worries us.”

I wanted to point out that she was the one who brought it up, but I bit my tongue. I was getting better and better at not being glib at inappropriate times, and this definitely counted as an inappropriate time.

“Then what is the council worried about?”

“Pillow talk.”

“What?”

“The things whispered from lover to lover at night. The secrets you should be keeping you might not be. And most importantly, we worry that having a vampire Tribunal leader in the spotlight with the Werewolf King of Manhattan might make the wrong people ask the right questions. That is what we’re worried about.”

“I don’t discuss Tribunal secrets in bed,” I said honestly. Aside from knowing I was part vampire, and I was an important one at that, the werewolves had never asked me anything about the inner workings of the council, and I’d never volunteered anything they didn’t need to know. If something in my vampire life might cause them harm, they would know about it, the same way I’d tell them if a case with Keaty might go south. But the werewolf-vampire loathing ran both ways. My wolves didn’t ask about vampire business because they genuinely didn’t care.