Secret Unleashed

Chapter Twenty

“Are you sure this is the right address?” I squinted at the crumbling edifice of the U-Save Studio Rentals building.

The apartment complex that had fallen on me days earlier had looked sturdier than this place. I was worried a powerful sneeze might knock the entire structure down.

But it had survived near-daily earthquakes over the last several decades, meaning it had to be made of stronger stuff than I was giving it credit for.

“Yes. I’m a hundred percent sure. Just like I was the last three times you asked.” Holden stuffed the paper with the address back into his coat pocket and followed my dubious gaze upwards.

“It’s a shit-hole,” I said.

“A very apt description, yes.”

“Why would someone who has the financial backing of the council need to rent a shit-hole?”

“We aren’t paid in cash,” Maxime explained. “We all have credit cards that draw from a central pool. Any purchases Sutherland made would be accessible by the council. He’d have used his own money for this, and I doubt he has much. Most of the young ones haven’t learned to build outside savings. This was probably all he could afford.”

Cans rattled near the side of the warehouse, and a man emerged, pushing a shopping cart full of garbage. He wore a heavy overcoat—which I was learning was a summer necessity in San Francisco—and had long hair matted into gray-brown dreadlocks. Having seen the people of this city, I couldn’t tell if he’d been homeless so long his hair had come to look that way over time, or if he was just a hipster from the Mission with terrible style.

He grunted at us and opened the lid of a nearby garbage bin, rummaging inside for cans and bottles to add to his collection. He kept right on muttering as he worked, completely unconcerned by our arrival. I wondered what things he must see on a daily basis to make the three of us look right at home here.

As we approached the building, a group of five people in their early twenties stumbled out from inside. Two girls—whose hair looked strikingly similar to that of the homeless man—and three young men all came to a halt in front of us. They reeked of cheap beer and pot.

“Heeeyyyy,” one of the girls said, her tone loopy. “Watch where you’re going, ’kay?”

I couldn’t tell if it had been a threat or a concerned gesture. Was she telling us to watch our step inside, or berating us for getting in their way? With her high and saccharine voice it was impossible to know.

They all began giggling like maniacs and mimicking her ’kay over and over until she was blushing furiously, her cheeks a bright pink that made her look young and far too sweet to be out here at night.

People thought the only thing they had to fear in the night was other people. Sometimes I wished they understood how much there was to be afraid of in the darkness. It wasn’t that I wanted to strike terror into the hearts of mortals, but I did wish they knew more. Really knew what was out here in the streets with them.

“Guyyys.” She staggered a step as she lurched along with them. “Isss not funneeeee.”

Maxime’s nostrils flared, and he tilted his head as he watched her go. The way his eyes narrowed I knew what he was thinking. He was imagining how easy it would be to follow them. To wait until the girl lagged behind again, stopping to catch her breath from all the giggling. In that moment he could grab her and pull her into a back alley. She would never remember what he did to her.

I knew what Maxime was thinking because the same careful expression colored Holden’s face too. I knew, because I was thinking the exact same thing.

We were all predators, and no matter how domesticated you try to make a predatory animal, it will always have the instinct to hunt.

Inside me, my wolf was imagining how fun it would be with a pack, trailing the group from both sides and picking them off one at a time. She was no better than my vampire half. Every part of me craved the chase, and I didn’t give myself enough outlets for that anymore. I used to make do by hunting and killing rogue vampires.

What did I have now?

I was a killer by nature, and I’d managed to find myself locked in the nicest cage imaginable. But it was still a cage, and I was still denied my only release.

I shuddered and shook the feeling off.

The homeless man had stopped rattling his bottles and was staring at us with renewed interest. His eyes—visible even through the cloak of night—were an icy blue and showed no signs of warmth. They did, however, convey a sharp awareness I hadn’t previously believed the man had. He wasn’t drunk or crazy. This guy was watching us very carefully.

A pit of worry gnawed at my belly, overriding the guilt I was accustomed to feeling there. Something was off about the homeless man, and this whole place gave me a serious case of the willies.

“Let’s go.” I refused to take my gaze off our observer until we were inside the building.

The warehouse had been modified from one large space into individual units. We were greeted by a seemingly endless hallway with a series of doors on either side.

Since we’d been unable to contact anyone by phone in the middle of the night to find out which space Sutherland had rented, we were on our own in determining which unit was his.

Normally I’d rely on scent since it was my strongest gift with the combined force of a vampire and a wolf to fuel it, but in here my nose was as good as useless. The ammonia tang of urine seemed to be an underlying theme, but the potpourri of stink went beyond that. The whole building reeked of mold and mildew, and from the rooms were varying chemical perfumes. Weed, like the kids outside smelled of, but different types as well, some sweet and others skunky. One room had the telltale brewing scents of a meth lab, which meant this entire building was a ticking time bomb.

I smelled sweat and sex and blood. There were so many rooms, all fixed with a basic padlock but others with secondary triggers like alarm systems or deadbolts.

Noises, too, made it difficult to concentrate. Several bands were using their storage spaces for practice rooms, and the cacophonous blend of bluegrass, hip-hop and jazz floated up and down the hall. Beneath the racket were moans or soft chatter. Behind one door someone was saying, “You don’t have to do this.”

The white knight in me wanted to bust through the door and save someone from what was no doubt a bad situation. But we weren’t here for me to save anyone. Bad things happened, and people had good reason to fear other people, but right now they weren’t my job.

I had to find my father, and we needed to get out of this building fast, before the meth lab sparked, or I got overwhelmed by the sensory overload.

“Maxime, start at the end of the hall and work your way back towards us. Check every door to see if you recognize anything that might suggest Sutherland was using the space.” I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a barely used lipstick tube, handing it to Holden. “Mark all the doors occupied by humans so we don’t waste our time with those.”

Holden palmed the lipstick tube, inspecting it. “Harlot Red?” He raised an eyebrow at me. Bless his twisted vampire heart that he could make even a facial gesture seem sarcastic.

“Shush. Just mark the doors.”

He set to work, and Maxime followed my directions. There were fifteen doors on either side of the hallway, meaning we had to find one room in thirty. It didn’t seem like such a tall order, but when we started looking, the cool reality of it sank in. We were able to eliminate ten rooms right away because of their human occupants, but that still left twenty. We couldn’t just bust down twenty doors and hope one of the rooms seemed to belong to my father.

I couldn’t ask myself which space I would have selected, because the rooms would have been assigned randomly. Wouldn’t they?

I stopped—my ear pressed against a rough wooden door—and stared down the length of the hallway. Maxime was on his knees in front of another door, peering underneath it, while Holden drew flashy red Xs across two other entryways.

If I did have the option, which room would I pick?

A vampire who wanted to hide himself from others of his kind wasn’t going to go for the obvious spot. The rooms at the very back—as far from others as possible—would have been the most instinctual place for a vampire to hide if he was forced to use this warehouse.

Which would make it the first place other vampires would look for him. I took a few steps backwards and assessed the units from the center of the hall, trying to imagine this place as my father would have. He wanted to hide something, and maybe the best place to do that was in plain sight.

Where was the scent and distraction the most dense?

Taking another step backwards, I stopped in front of the room where a jazz quartet was at work. Trumpet bleats and drum snares made my ears throb. Across the hall was the room with the meth smell coming from it. Next to the meth lab Holden had already marked the door with an X, but the room beside the jazz space had an untouched door. It was protected by only the most basic padlock, with nothing fancy to distinguish it from the other rooms.

I pressed my ear against the door and listened. I’d already checked this door once but dismissed it in a rush due to all the distraction surrounding it. Maybe that was the point though. Perhaps it was my father’s gene pool I inherited the smarts from, because this would have been the perfect room to choose if he wanted someone to pass him quickly by.

I longed for my sword, since it would have sliced through the lock like it was made of butter. But my weapon choice had been vetoed by Holden at the hotel. We were on a simple informational scouting mission. A sword would just draw unwanted attention. Unfortunately he was right, so I’d agreed to leave it behind, opting for my favorite gun instead.

I couldn’t shoot the lock off, that would be too much noise in the small space and would definitely bring us an unwanted audience. Hoping no one would come out of their rooms at that moment, I braced my back against the wall and kicked the door.

The particleboard gave no resistance, practically crumbling around my foot. It swung wide, slamming against an interior wall before swinging back towards me. Holden and Maxime were drawn by the sound and came to join me in the dark mouth of the room.

“This one?” Holden asked, giving a repulsed glance into the rooms surrounding it.

“They’re all equally bad,” I reminded him. “This one felt right.”

“No vampire in his right mind would hide so close to that…smell.”

“Wouldn’t that be what he’d expect another vampire to think, though? I mean, this is the last place I’d want to hide too, but that makes it perfect.”

We stole into the room, shutting the broken door behind us to cut down on the chances of someone noticing it and calling the police. Cloaked in darkness, I became less capable than the others. I could see, but not as well as a full-blooded vampire, and I didn’t want to risk missing an important clue.

Fumbling along the wall, my hand found the light switch and a fat spider at the same time. I flicked on the light and recoiled. The spider—now exposed and irritated—raised its front legs in a challenging gesture, then scuttled down the wall and out of sight.

Fucking spiders. I’d fought a lot of scary monsters in my time, and still spiders gave me the creeps. Keaty, my PI partner, had once told me he’d been sent to recover something stolen by a fae. Turned out the fae spent his days in spider form, guarding a webbed nest of jewels and money that would make Smaug weep with jealousy.

I got a wicked case of the heebie-jeebies whenever Keaty told that story. He’d obviously survived, and knowing Keaty, the fae had not. But learning there was a type of fae who took the form of a giant spider? That was the kind of knowledge human beings were lucky not to have.

Wiping my hand on my pants to rid myself of the tactile memory of the spider, I gave the room a glance now that I could see it better. Holden and Maxime were doing the same, and I wondered if they saw anything I was missing.

The space was clean, much tidier than I’d expected given how disgusting the building itself was. A plain, scarred wood table sat in the center of the room. There was a set of pliers and a roll of soldering wire on it, but nothing to indicate what they were for. A simple chair—wood, but not matching the table—was tucked underneath. All the walls had orange carpet stapled to them, likely as a buffer from the sound in neighboring rooms. It seemed to work, because the jazz was an almost enjoyable volume from in here, the too-sharp high notes blotted down or muted out entirely.

Yellowing flyers and handbills for long-ago concerts in local bars were tacked into the carpet, and someone had spray-painted a lime-green penis beside the door so it would appear to be ejaculating on whoever was walking into the room.

Nothing here told me about my father. The clues were all remnants of a previous tenant, one who’d possibly been in a band called Lady Killers and had an affinity for alien cock.

Either I’d picked the wrong room, or Sutherland was hiding his secrets better than I expected. I’d given myself too much credit as a detective. Over the years I’d learned a lot from Keaty, but I was still the student in so many ways. If he were here…

Of course.

I jerked my cellphone out of my pocket and pressed the speed-dial key for my mentor.

“McQueen,” he grumbled. “This had better be good. It’s two in the morning.” I’d forgotten about the time difference between California and New York.

“Oh don’t pretend like you were asleep.”

“As a matter of fact I was. Sometimes I do need to yield to my basic human needs.”

Hearing Keaty confess to having human needs was about as strange to me as a serial killer liking cuddles. It didn’t fit.

“I need your help with something.”

“Naturally. Come by the office.” The grogginess in his voice began to lift after he hefted a mighty yawn over the line. “Give me ten min—”

“Keaty, I’m in San Francisco.”

Without missing a beat, he said, “I’m not coming to you.”

“No, no. But do you think you can get to a computer?”

He sighed but didn’t protest, and given the rustling sounds, I was beginning to suspect I’d roused him from a nap at his desk. The familiar creak of leather was a dead giveaway. I wondered if he slept with his eyes open.

Windows announced its alertness from his laptop with its cheerful chimes, and he said, “What am I looking for?”

“I’m going to Skype you from my phone so you can see the room I’m in, okay?”

“Fine, but what am I looking for?”

Giving him a quick review of the situation, I left out the part about Sutherland being my father. I’d tell Keaty eventually, but now didn’t seem like the right time. For years, Francis Keats had been a stand-in father figure for me. I knew our relationship had its issues because of what I was, but he loved me in his own sociopathic way, and I loved him. It didn’t seem right to tell him about my real father over the phone.

When he had the necessary backstory, I hung up and redialed using the phone’s Skype app. I might not be great with fancy-pants technology, but the video-calling feature had been forced on me by my younger sister Eugenia. Since she was all the way down in Louisiana with my uncle’s wolf pack, she liked to be able to see me.

Thinking of Genie, I felt a swell of joy in my stomach. I hadn’t known her long—we’d met for the first time that spring—but I enjoyed having at least one family member who liked me for me. My brother Ben—Genie’s twin—hadn’t yet warmed to me the way she had, but that was fine. I couldn’t expect a big Kumbaya-style hug-fest from my siblings when we’d gone eighteen years without meeting.

Genie and Ben didn’t know their father either. It seemed Mercy had trouble with commitment after Sutherland died, abandoning her twins the same way she’d abandoned me.

Keaty accepted the video invite, and his face filled the screen of my phone. He wore his simple wire-framed glasses, and his dark blond hair stuck up at the back. Instead of his usual pressed dress shirt and tie, he was wearing a rumpled white T-shirt. He really had been sleeping.

“You want me to tell you where you think this rogue hid something?”

“He’s not a rogue.”

“Oh, forgive me. You want me to tell you where this missing vampire might have stashed items he’s intentionally keeping from the council, ignoring strict order from his leaders? Better?”

“Whatever.” I didn’t want to waste time arguing with him. I’d never win, and we’d both end up irritated. Since irritation accomplished nothing, I moved on.

I pressed the option to flip my phone’s camera from the front to the back, so Keaty was now able to see the room as I did. The image of his face on my phone went from annoyed to zoned-in.

“Go slow,” he instructed. “I need to see everything from the floor up to the ceiling.”

I did as he asked, going around the room in a painstakingly slow circle, scanning the camera up and down as I went so he could get a glimpse at every nook and cranny, every visible inch of the place. As I approached the door again, my heart sank. He hadn’t stopped me once, made no comments that might suggest he’d seen something noteworthy.

“What’s that?” His voice was muffled by my hand.

“What?”

“Next to the door.”

“You mean the awful graffiti?”

“Yes, can you show me the floor?”

I pointed the phone down to my feet to let him see the ground beneath the big green wang on the wall.

“Can you see that?”

I stopped looking at his face and turned my attention to the floor. All I saw was a fine coating of dust.

“Dust.”

“Drywall dust,” he corrected.

I checked the floor in other areas, but the dust was only located in the one spot. When I looked up from my crouched position, I could see the faintest bubbling in the carpet where the graffiti was painted.

“How the hell did you see that?” I stood and aimed the phone at the gap.

“Isn’t that why you called me? Because I can see things like that?”

He was absolutely right. “Thank you. Do you want to see what it is?”

Yawning again, he smiled faintly at the screen, possibly unaware I could still see his face. It wasn’t like him to show any kind of emotion. Unless annoyance counted.

“No. You do your thing.” The screen went black before I had a chance to thank him a second time.