Secret Santa

“Now what?” Holden asked.



Turning, I propped my elbows on the railing and met his questioning gaze. He’d been politely silent while we’d walked, giving me time to mull over my thoughts, but now that we’d stopped moving he was expecting me to have reached some mental conclusion as well.



I guess my contemplation had drawn on too long, because he persisted with a, “Well?”



“Okay, well, we know it’s not a vampire because there didn’t appear to be any blood taken. We know it’s not a shifter, because none of them would be stupid enough to make such a public display.”



Holden gave me a tight-lipped frown as if to doubt my certainty. “That leaves us where?”



“Human, fae or other.”



“Other?”



“I don’t know. That’s the point. Alien? Poltergeist?” When I said this, he rolled his eyes, so in spite of my sincere desire to hunt our monster of unknown origin down, I added, “Wookie?”



“Wookie.” He looked dumbfounded by my stupid suggestion, but it seemed like he’d seen Star Wars because he didn’t ask me to elaborate. “I more or less wondered what we were doing here, specifically.”



“Since I don’t know what to look for, I guess I just figured we’d start at the bottom and work our way up. See if we find anything. See or smell anything out of the ordinary. Talk to people who might know.”



Holden stared at me. “Surely you can’t be suggesting we cover the entirety of Manhattan on foot looking for nothing in particular.” His emphasis on the last three words made it sound like he was speaking to a child.



If I knew where to look or what to look for, I’d be on my way with a weapon in hand to dispatch the evil bastard who was doing this. That was how I worked. But I needed somewhere to start. And here seemed like as good a place as any.



“Did you have something better to do tonight?”



Four hours later I was walking back to my apartment with a surly vampire. We’d covered the area from Battery Park to Gramercy Park and in spite of our combined network of sources and our preternaturally heightened senses, we’d come up with nothing.



Well, not nothing, but nothing much.



When we’d stopped into a loathsome little vampire bar called The Ruby Slipper on our way out of the financial district, there’d been rumblings of something nasty that was capable of taking down an adult shifter. But since shifters weren’t known for sharing weaknesses with vampires, I was sure it was just the underground rumor mill.



Nevertheless I’d called Nolan back to ask him about his case and find out if anything new had come up. A missing teenage shifter, dismembered bodies and a trio of missing youths? And now the rumblings of a big bad? Terrible things happened here all the time, but this was too many at once to ignore the likelihood of a connection.



When we turned onto West 52nd, Holden thrust a white paper bag into my hand. Once our search was exhausted and we’d set out on our way home, I’d made us stop at Magnolia so I could pick up cupcakes for Grandmere before it was too late to FedEx them to her. I’d forgotten I gave it to him.



“This wasn’t quite what I had in mind when you said you wanted to go hunting. Stalking the elusive cupcake isn’t a typical sentry job.”



We stopped walking at a red light, and I looked at the bag with its charming blue logo. “I know.” I fidgeted with the zipper on my jacket, pulling it up and down until Holden reached out and grabbed my hand to stop me. His hands were colder than usual, having absorbed the outside chill.



Vampires were weird like that. They weren’t always cold, but they had an amphibious habit of adapting to the temperature around them. With the air temperature hovering at twenty, my breath swam around my head like thick cigarette smoke, and Holden’s skin was freezing.



He moved a step closer, no breath clouds escaping his lips until he spoke.



“Secret…”



I countered by stepping out of his reach.



Since summer I was having trouble coming to terms with Holden’s attachment to me. I wanted to believe he maintained close contact because he was grateful for all I’d done to save him, but there was more to it. The long sideways glances, the lingering touches, the comments laden with innuendo…they all spelled trouble.



Worse still, even months after the fact, I still couldn’t stop thinking about a dream we’d shared in which things had gone way beyond hot and heavy. Sure, a sex dream wasn’t the same as actual sex, but in this case it was more than a dream. We’d shared the visceral experience while both wide awake, and we’d kissed more than once in real life.



And what a kisser he was.



I returned to toying with my zipper and bouncing nervously on my heels. Holden stayed a half step behind me, and he raked one hand through his dark brown hair, then jammed both his hands into his pockets.



I opened my mouth to say something, but a scream brought me back down to earth. Holden put his hand on my elbow and pulled me against him.



Another scream rattled through the night, and this time I could pinpoint its origin. A few blocks down, beyond the line of apartments where I lived, was a public high school. Usually this late at night it was dark and closed, but there were more cars than usual parked in front, some using up space in front of my building, and all the lights were on. The elevated sounds of panic became a chorus of shouts, and the one female shriek continued to rise over the others.



“What the hell?” I moved to cross the street, but Holden held me firm. A speeding cab blitzed past, honking at my near misstep.



“Be careful.”



I sucked in a deep breath. “Thanks.”



“You’re no good to the Tribunal if you’re dead, and I don’t know how I’d explain to Sig that you were being replaced by a Yellow Cab operator.” He held out a hand to the now-green light inviting us to cross the street.



Holden stayed about ten feet behind me as we made our way to the gated area in front of the school. We weaved through the throngs of people bunched together until we were standing in the middle of the group. There were at least a hundred teenagers decked out in their formal best. Boys in borrowed suits and girls in brand-new dresses who shivered against the chill of winter with their bare arms and open-toed shoes.



The smell of blood was so strong I was choking on it. When Holden came to stand next to me, his tightly drawn features told me he could smell it as well, if not better.



“Is it…?”



“It’s human.” He confirmed what I already knew.



“I was worried you’d say that.”



The screaming continued with the unabated consistency of an annoying car alarm. It had been carrying on so long now I almost didn’t notice it. The woman responsible for the worst of the noise was a bland-looking thirty-something sitting on the front steps of the school with her mouth hanging agape, emitting a high-pitched wail.



Sidling up beside her, I lowered to a crouch and took her hand in mine. For a long while she didn’t seem to recognize I was there, until the screaming petered out into hoarse, gulping gasps, and she turned her glassy, red-rimmed eyes towards me.



“I never…” Her lower lip began to tremble and mascara streaks smeared the underside of her eyes, making her face look like a hollow, ghostly void. Her hand squeezed mine, and the strength of the gesture was shocking.



“What happened?” I asked.



Behind us, a group of teenagers were crowded around the fence, speaking in excited tones. Several girls in their midst were crying, and dozens were on their cell phones. The woman holding my hand was grasping me like I was the last safe port in a storm, blubbering incoherently. Her eyelashes were frosty where her tears had frozen from the cold.



“Holden, can you go see what’s going on?” I didn’t look back at him but felt the presence of his body disappear. Still looking at the woman, I asked, “What did you see?”



“Death,” she whispered, and it was the first thing she’d said so far I really understood. She stared at me, her eyes haunted by something she would never be able to unsee, and I battled with myself over whether or not it was something I needed to add to the nest of awful things that lived inside my own mind.



“Secret.” Holden’s voice came from the middle of the wide circle of teens and was heavy with something serious and frightening. “I think you’d better come here.”



I let go of the woman’s hand, and she didn’t protest. Her body rested limp and useless on the steps, and she stared at nothing, tears streaming down her face. This was what my world did to people. This was what happened when there was no plan.



Meeting Holden where he stood amid the crowd of brave gawkers, I slipped in front of him to get a good look at what all the fuss was about. I was fairly certain I didn’t want to know, but blissful ignorance wasn’t an option in my line of work.



On the ground next to the brick wall of the building that neighbored the high school was a human body. Or what was left of it.



It had once been a girl, judging by the sky-blue taffeta party dress spread out on the concrete. The dress and the trunk of the body were all that remained. The girl’s limbs and everything above her neck was missing.



While the one teacher on the steps was too upset to act, several other teachers and adult chaperones were trying to move the teens back inside. A balding man in a cheap suit was crouched low to the ground where a group of girls were huddled together crying. One of the girls kept saying, “I don’t understand, she just went to use the bathroom. She was only gone for a few minutes.”



I turned back to the body after she said it for the third time.



There was so much blood on the concrete it made the dress look like an island of blue floating amid a sea of blackened red. The reek of death was bold enough the crowd must be able to smell it. Whatever had done this, it had acted fast. Too fast to be anything human. One minute the girl had been inside at her winter formal, and now she was out here missing everything that could identify her except her blue dress. Anything that could tear a girl apart—without being seen—before her friends realized she was gone had to be a monster.