“Oh. Look what you’ve done,” she said, her voice never losing its cheerful quality.
I jerked back my hand in horror, hoping it would stop, but she continued to dissolve in front of my eyes.
“I’m so sorry.” Now the tears fell, and there was no stopping them. I wasn’t crying for the loss of her in the dream, but rather the restored knowledge she was gone forever from my real life.
“I was supposed to tell you something.” Her arm dropped away, and her chest began to crumble, exposing bits of rib before they too became ashes.
“Tell me.” I wiped away pink tears with the heel of my hand.
“The betrayal is not what you think.”
“The…betrayal? What betrayal?”
“Sometimes you misplace your trust, but then you find it again.”
“Brigit, what are you talking about?”
“You look really pretty in red,” she commented, and her gaze rested on my hands.
Instead of being covered in her debris, my arms were coated with thick blood, all the way up to my elbows, dripping down in a puddle around my feet.
“Don’t worry,” she whispered. “Someone else will clean up your mess.”
When I woke up, I was still in the box.
My heart seized as I stared into the black interior of the coffin, and in defiance of all logic I pushed out, scrambling against the velvet walls. I couldn’t stretch my arms fully in any given direction, and each time I tried to find purchase on something my hands slid off.
So, of course, I attempted to sit up.
My head thumped the roof, and I broke out in a cold sweat. Why had I let Ingrid talk me into traveling this way? How had Holden been so cavalier about the whole thing? As if being inside a coffin was no big deal.
Considering how many people wanted me dead, I’d given them a perfect opportunity to come right to me. And now what? I was stuck in the coffin, unable to tell where I was or who was waiting outside. What if I’d been buried alive?
Just the thought of it made my panic swell, adrenaline coursing through me as I clawed at the velvet and pounded my fists into the metal underneath.
“Let me out,” I screamed, my voice raspy with terror.
Something bumped against the coffin, and I went still, straining to hear what was going on. The lid creaked and lifted, filling the small space with an impossible amount of light. I squinted at first—momentarily blinded—but once I realized I had been released, I scrambled out of the coffin and shot to the other side of the room.
A boy who appeared to be no older than twelve or thirteen years old assessed me with a quizzical expression, fingering the tattered lining of the casket and nibbling at his lip with a tiny fang.
“Madam, are you quite all right?” he asked, his voice soft and carrying a French accent. “You seem to have destroyed your chamber.”
I swiped my arm across my brow to keep the sweat in check, and my gaze darted around the unfamiliar room. No offense to the kid, but a small French boy wasn’t going to put me at ease. Alexandre Peyton looked seventeen at most, and his angelic face made him very misleading. This stranger could easily be one of Peyton’s minions.
“Where’s Holden?”
The room we were in was lovely. Modern without being too cold, elegant without being too stuffy. The walls were painted a warm gray, and the furniture was accented in shades of violet and charcoal. My coffin was placed near a king-sized bed, and the rest of the room was a suite built to invite comfort. Large chairs and couches were set in front of a slate fireplace, and beyond that was another bedroom, where I could see a coffin identical to my own.
Holden’s coffin.
The lid was open, but there was no sign of the vampire sentry anywhere, so I repeated my question. “Where is he?” When the boy didn’t answer straightaway, I switched into the French my grandmere had drilled into me as a child. “Où et Holden?”
I must not have butchered the pronunciation too badly because the boy’s smile broadened, and he began chattering away in mile-a-minute Parisian French. My grandmere was Creole, and I’d been raised in the Canadian prairie. The French I spoke was a bastardization of Quebecois and Bayou. It certainly wasn’t the soft, eloquent language this kid had perfected over a century or more.
“Désolé, mais mon français n’est pas très bon. Pouvez-vous parler un peu plus lentement, s’il vous plait?” I hoped he wouldn’t be offended I’d spoken to him in French and was now asking him to slow down.
He frowned but appeared more disappointed than irritated.
“Your accent is atrocious,” he commented.
“Isn’t it though?” I offered him a halfhearted smile. My heart was pounding, and he would definitely be able to hear it. So much for playing down my mortal side.
“How interesting.” He tilted his head to one side, eyes narrowing, and looked at me as if I were a piece of art he was having trouble capturing the meaning of. “We were told you were…unique, but I suppose I didn’t believe it until now.”
Perhaps I should have taken his fascination as a compliment, but him gawking at me just added to my nervousness. I still didn’t know where I was, or who he was. The presence of Holden’s coffin calmed me slightly, but not as much as having the actual vampire present would.
“Who are you?” I asked, trying a different tactic since he still hadn’t told me his name.
“Oh! Mon dieu, my apologies Tribunal Leader McQueen, I have forgotten my place entirely.” He did a half bow, holding his hands at the small of his back. His shoulder-length brown curls tumbled forward to cover his face briefly, and when he righted himself, I looked at his eyes. They were a lovely color of green, not the solid black of a vampire itching to feed. “My name is Maxime.”
“Hello.” I raised my hand in a limp wave, and in spite of the fact he clearly knew who I was, I added, “I’m Secret.”
“Yes, of course.” He bowed again. “Do you prefer Tribunal Leader Secret?”
Lord have mercy, I was going to have to deal with a whole new group of people addressing me with the longest title known to man. But I knew from over a year with the East Coast council it was pointless to try getting them down to a first-name basis.
“Tribunal Leader Secret is fine.” At least it was less formal than McQueen.
“I will be your valet during your stay in Los Angeles, and I do hope if you have any needs or requests, you won’t hesitate to approach me with them. I sincerely apologize, as well, for treating you in such a common manner earlier. I beg your forgiveness.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Evidently he was worried because he continued to gnaw at his lip. He didn’t feel old to me, ignoring the youthful mask of his appearance. “Are you quite certain I cannot make amends in some way?”
“Really, Maxime, it’s fine. I’m used to much stranger responses than that. No apologies necessary.”
If he’d been breathing, he might have let out a sigh of relief, but his shift in demeanor was obvious nonetheless. His expression softened, and a smile curved his cupid’s-bow lips upwards.
“How old are you?” I asked him.
“One hundred and seventy-three.”
He would have been turned sometime in the mid-1800s, not long after Holden had been. And he was French, and beautiful, and assigned to me. My own tentative smile faltered.
“Who is your maker?” I’d been told once by Sig it was common practice for Tribunal Leaders and Council Elders to send their progeny far away to avoid conflicts of interest. I had a feeling I knew exactly whose spawn was my new man-in-waiting.
“Rebecca Archambault.”
My jaw clenched, and I gritted my teeth, biting back a growl. “Well then, Maxime, you can do me a favor.”
“Yes, of course. Anything.”
“Tell me where your brother is.”
Maxime guided me to a set of oak doors not unlike those leading to the subterranean Tribunal chamber in New York. He bowed again—something he had a lot of practice with it seemed—and scurried away before I had a chance to go in.
The uneasy feeling I had still lingered, making me wary to waltz into any unfamiliar rooms, but since I was in a city I’d never been to, all the rooms would be unfamiliar. I didn’t bother knocking because I figured anyone inside would have heard me coming, and why give them any extra heads up if they meant me harm?
From what I’d gathered during my short chat with Maxime, I was likely at the West Coast council headquarters, but he hadn’t said anything during our walk to confirm my suspicions a hundred percent, and I hadn’t outright asked. If we were where I suspected we were, I was going to sound like an idiot for asking, and idiocy wasn’t the impression Sig wanted me to make.
I opened the doors and stepped backwards rather than straight into the room. When nothing fired at me and no one lunged to attack, I decided it was safe to continue and went in with my head held high, projecting an air of authority I didn’t necessarily feel.
“You look well rested.” It was Holden’s voice, but I couldn’t find the man to match it.
I scanned the room and took in my surroundings as I searched for him. The space wasn’t at all what I expected from a vampire stronghold. For one thing, the floor-to-ceiling windows were out of step with protecting vampire safety.
The massive space reminded me a great deal of the top floor in Lucas’s penthouse, where one half of the entire area was dedicated to a big lounge-style living room with an unbeatable view of New York. Only here the view wasn’t of my beloved hometown, it was the glittery oasis of Los Angeles.
We must have been outside of the L.A. city limits because I could see most of the city sprawled out before us like a carpet of stars. What New York had in height, L.A. had in distance, spreading wider than I could see without shifting my position.
I hadn’t expected to like L.A.—that was the snobby New Yorker in me—but there was something beautiful about it, lit up orange in the early night sky. What I didn’t enjoy was discovering we weren’t in the city proper. Judging from the vantage point, I gathered we had to be up in the Hollywood Hills somewhere, and my extensive research with Us magazine told me that would put our neighbors at a distance.
