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I stopped walking so abruptly Sig bumped against my back. “No. ” Just that. A flat no.
“It’s not a discussion. ”
“In fact, it’s long overdue,” added Juan Carlos. Now the source of his pleasure was evident.
“Sig, no. ” I gave him an imploring look, begging him with my eyes when my words had obviously failed me. I couldn’t say more, not in front of Juan Carlos. But Sig knew what I really was. He had to understand why this was a terrible idea.
“We were willing to look the other way with your wedding to the wolf king,” Juan Carlos said, his tone thick with disgust. “Though God knows why you dirty yourself with their kind. You smell of one even now. ” His lip curled. “But getting your name all over the papers? You’re bringing dangerous attention to us. Monica will know if you can be trusted. ”
“I can be trusted. ” I refused to move forward again, turning my gaze from Juan Carlos to Sig. “Please. Please don’t do this. ”
“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from Monica. ”
Monica wasn’t her real name. Her real name was old Sumerian and so hard to pronounce they’d had to come up with something new vampires could say without offending her. She’d chosen Monica. Said it would be easy to remember. Sig told me she’d thought this was the height of comedy a thousand years earlier. Sig was the only vampire to have known Monica when she went by her original name.
He was the one who’d told me I should never be alone with her.
That was six years ago when I’d been only seventeen.
The vampire was the oldest in memory. So old no one knew her true age, and she wasn’t volunteering it, but I bet she and Calliope could have a good laugh about their memories of the construction of the pyramids.
She and the Oracle had something else in common. They both had very peculiar gifts.
Calliope could look at someone and see their future.
Monica was the vampire version of a lie detector. She could taste someone’s blood and know the whole history of their life. I didn’t want her tasting my blood. Ever.
It was a miracle that to this point the only council vampires who’d figured out what I was were Holden and Sig. Everyone else believed I was a half-vampire who worked with—and sometimes dated—werewolves. That I’d killed a wolf or two in my time worked in my favor to uphold this lie, because a pack wolf almost never kills another of their kind. The inner workings of the werewolf pack would be a total mystery to the vampire council. In the twenty-two years of my life pre-Lucas I had know diddly squat about royal family lines and pack politics.
Vampires thought werewolves were sub-human. Worthless. They couldn’t be bothered to
learn about them, because they didn’t matter. Holden’s disdain of wolves wasn’t a rarity, it was the norm. And that opinion had kept me alive because it kept them from looking too hard at me.
But Monica didn’t care about vampire discrimination against other supernatural species.
One drop of my blood and she’d know why I was so involved with the wolves.
And it was all because of Lucas. If we’d gotten married like two normal people, the event would have been in and out of the papers and people would have stopped caring after a few days. News like that doesn’t register to vampires.
Three weeks of reports on what I was going to do with the gifts, whether or not I’d return the engagement ring, or how much the damage to the Columbia Hotel had cost…well, it was apparently more than they could overlook. That was three weeks of Secret McQueen puns in the paper, and they’d really loved my name in the press. In the days before the ceremony they’d been quips like The Once and Future McQueen. Lucas’s Not-so-Secret Love. Afterwards, my personal favorite had been The Secret’s Out—A Day Without Rain is Bad Luck After All. Clever.
Lucas had screwed me royally, in every way possible.
I just never thought my life would be forfeit for it.
“Sig. ” I was fighting back panicked tears, trying not to fall into abject terror in front of Juan Carlos. Sig touched the bare skin at the back of my neck, and a sense of ease trickled through me. His false brand of personal well-being hadn’t been what I was asking for, but when I felt my worry slipping away, I didn’t complain.
“It will be fine,” he said, his ice-blue gaze locked on mine. “Just a precaution. ”
I dared a glance at Juan Carlos. He looked delighted. Delighted.
Of course he would. He’d finally have the ammunition he needed to not only prove I didn’t deserve to sit on the Tribunal, but he’d somehow figure out a way for me to pay the ultimate price for this, I had no doubt about it.
There were no rules in the council that said a Tribunal leader couldn’t be half-werewolf. But I’d seen how the council treated me when they believed I was merely half-human. That my blood was mingled with something as lowly as a werewolf?
Fucked. I was so very, very fucked.
Chapter Fifteen
