Chapter One
As a general rule, people don’t like to date monsters.
I don’t mean in a my ex-boyfriend was such an asshole, he was a total monster to my friends or that girl was a monster bitch kind of way. What I mean is, ask your average New Yorker if they’d like to have a girlfriend whose primary source of food was human blood, and most of them will say no.
At less than five and a half feet tall with bouncy blonde, curly hair and big doe-brown eyes, I didn’t really look like an evil creature. But don’t they say it’s what’s inside that counts? Inside I was a mixed-blood nightmare—half werewolf on my mother’s side and half vampire thanks to my father. Which isn’t to say I inherited the latter part naturally. My mother had been seven months pregnant when my human father was turned. He attacked her, then fed her his blood to keep her alive afterwards.
Talk about a guilty conscience.
As a result, my human cells were attacked and infected with the vampire disease. The trauma activated the werewolf genes already dormant within me, and voila—cute, perky and totally bloodthirsty.
I’d been raised by my grandmere, my mother’s mother, and she named me Secret, which is probably what my mother hoped I would stay. Instead I ended up in New York City as the employee of the vampire council, where my job title is bounty hunter but my real job is more assassin than retriever.
Not really something you can use as an opening line when introducing yourself to guys. Unless of course they have a weird Buffy the Vampire Slayer fetish, but I try to avoid that comparison whenever possible.
Then there was always the pesky problem of how none of it—vampires, werewolves or vampire slayers—was supposed to exist. Humans don’t like to think their bedtime stories are based in reality. Yet those tales, be they scary or fairy, from vampires to the grimmer of the Grimm, are rooted in truth. But no one before me has been afflicted with two kinds of monster curse in the same body.
Aren’t I lucky?
Due to my habit of sleeping like the dead throughout the daylight hours, and my own misgivings about what I am, I don’t get out much. The only men I saw on a regular basis were my business partner, Keaty, and my liaison with the council, Holden Chancery.
Keaty, pushing forty and every inch the cold-blooded killer, was not a dream match romantically. He was the best partner I could ask for, and handsome in an ex-CIA sort of way, but I would never be able to picture him as anything other than a fucked-up father figure. And that’s saying something considering how fucked-up my real father was.
Holden, on the other hand, wasn’t exactly hard on the eyes, being a tall, lean, handsome brunet with beautiful dark eyes and a killer sense of style. No, I didn’t mind looking at him. The problem with Holden was he was a vampire, and not only that, he was sort of my caseworker. I don’t know how the council felt about dating among the ranks, and I had never asked. It wasn’t the kind of question you brought up when meeting with a thousand-plus-year-old Finnish master vampire named Sig who was asking you to kill people while looking at you like he wanted to taste you.
So I was left with few options and no real desire to seek out alternatives. I may have been a twenty-one-year-old woman, single in the city, but I couldn’t wrap my head around getting into the dating scene.
It wasn’t like I was worried about eating my boyfriend or anything.
Well, most of the time. Every girl has her days.
During my time in New York I’d had two semi-serious relationships, and one of the men had lived with me until my peculiar sleeping habits got too weird for him. For over a year there had been no one in my life, and I’d gotten pretty content being unattached.
And that’s when my best and only human girlfriend decided to put her nose into my business. Mercedes Castilla was a detective with the NYPD and in her third go-round of being twenty-nine. Also perennially single, she seemed to have given up on her own love life and had taken over mine instead.
That was how, on a Saturday night in August, I found myself scrutinizing my rear end in a mirror and was less than thrilled with the results. Maybe vampire hunting didn’t give me an excuse to avoid the gym after all.
“Explain to me again why I have to do this?” I asked into the phone crammed between my shoulder and ear.
“You want me to tell you why you’re going out to dinner with a handsome, unmarried, well-educated detective?” Mercedes was sarcastic at the best of times, but tonight it was honed razor sharp. I gathered she was getting annoyed with my hesitations.
“Yes?” I replied, not entirely sure I wanted her to respond. I pulled on my favorite jeans and rechecked my butt. A slight improvement. Sighing with a little too much drama, I put my hands on my hips, arching my shoulders back to see if my cleavage had grown since the last time I looked. Was it wrong to cancel a date because of too much ass and too little boob?
“Secret. ” Now her voice did nothing to hide her irritation. “You have cancelled on two different guys I’ve tried to set you up with. One of them was my cousin. ”
“He could only meet me at five,” I grumbled.
“So?”
“You know my schedule. ” Yeah, my not-burning-into-a-cloud-of-ash schedule. It was pretty strict.
“And you couldn’t have moved things around for an early dinner? I don’t think Keats is that much of a hardass. ”
I gave up on my reflection—yes, half-vampires and all vampires for that matter have reflections—and flopped backwards onto my bed. Staring up at my water-stained ceiling, I prayed it might collapse on me before nine o’clock.
“Okay, tell me one more time what’s so great about this guy?” I wound my loose curls around my fingers and then let them unfurl on their own.
“I mentioned handsome and unmarried, didn’t I?”