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It took me a moment to figure out why he looked so familiar. He was one of the cloaked figures we’d fought in the alley.
“What’s this?” I asked.
Tyler got up and tapped another button on the screen. “Say hello to Secret, Harold.”
The handsome man glanced up at the security camera mounted in the ceiling, and I realized the holding cell we were seeing was the demonic one that housed Harold.
And then I understood I was looking at the very same man Harold had been strangling in the alley.
Which meant I was right. The man hadn’t been a vampire, and Harold had left him just alive enough to jump into his body before he died.
Thanks to me taking the collar off.
Still, it was hard to feel a single ounce of pity for the man whose face Harold was now wearing. The guy wanted to end the world and had signed his own death warrant as a result.
I handed the tablet back to Tyler. “It’ll be a lot easier getting around with him now that he looks like this.”
Tyler stared at me, naked disbelief on his face. “You would find the only bright spot in a demon possessing the body of an unwilling victim.”
“An unwilling victim who opened a gate to Hell. Forgive me for saying it, but that body is being better used now.”
Giving his head a shake, he sat down again and put the tablet on the chair beside him.
“There’s another problem we need to deal with, and that’s explaining to the President why we moved on this intel without advanced alert. You know what the protocol is.”
“We did precisely what we had to. Do you think we could have done that with a whole military unit tripping all over us? They’d have tried to blow up half a block before doing anything with a little nuance.”
“Says the woman who blew off a demon’s head with a collar bomb.”
“That was insanely clever of me, don’t even pretend it wasn’t.”
He nodded his grudging agreement, and it was obvious all of his anger at me had faded away. This was the Tyler and Secret show in a nutshell. Get really mad at each other, then mellow into mutual appreciation. It was the reason we’d been able to work so well together for so long. We shouldn’t work as a team, but we managed to find the perfect balance.
“Where’s Emilio?” I asked.
“He’s in a meeting with the Secretary of State explaining the brass tacks of what went down tonight and how much a risk to national security it poses.”
“And what’s he telling her?”
Tyler got up from his chair, stretching then running his hands through his already messy hair. He was still wearing the T-shirt he’d had on under his tactical gear, but had changed into jeans and a pair of Converse sneakers. He looked like he could be the lead singer in an indie rock band.
“He’s telling them we didn’t have enough advance warning to call in backup, and that we acted on the information we had as soon as we received it. He’s telling them we bypassed protocol for the better good of the nation, and that we hold ourselves responsible for capturing and removing the foreign element that escaped.”
“So he’s lying.”
“This is Emilio we’re talking about. He’s not lying, he’s restructuring the truth for the better good.”
“If he’s out covering our asses, why are you in here griping at me?”
Tyler picked up the folder from my desk and placed it in my hands, the photo of Agent Conrad staring up at me. “Because, Secret, even when it all works out, that doesn’t mean it all worked out.”
Chapter Eleven
I would have to wait until evening to make my visit to the West Coast Tribunal. By the time I got out of the office after the whole demon fiasco, the sun was already on the rise, and I’d lost a whole day to the job yet again.
The smart move would have been to go home, have a hot bath, reapply my burn salve, and sleep until sunset, when the West Coast Tribunal would be open for business. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Even now, five years after I’d gained my humanity, it was difficult for me to justify wasting valuable sunshine.
Gorgeous, buttery sunshine was one of the reasons I spent so much time in Los Angeles, even though my husband and our pack were on the East Coast. It made managing schedules and relationships hard, but over the course of five years we’d learned to make it work, and I’d built certain requirements into my job.
