Cold Hard Secret (Secret McQueen) (25 page)

Ben gnashed his teeth together and lunged at me, his full weight colliding with me and knocking me back into the wall of the barn.

“Well then,” a voice overhead rang out. “Now we’re having some fun.”

I stumbled to the ground, and the last thing I saw before Ben’s teeth blocked my view was my mother looking down from the exterior door of the barn’s upper loft, smiling like a maniac.

Chapter Thirty-One

I’d never punched a werewolf in the throat before.

Evidently it worked just as well as doing it to a human. Ben yelped and rolled off me, rubbing his snout into the ground and wheezing like he’d been tasered.

Damn, a taser would actually be a really good idea for nonlethal confrontations.

Since I rarely had to consider nonlethal means of defending myself, it had never occurred to me to invest in anything else, but I made a mental note to visit Leary Fallon, my weapons guy, when I got back to New York to see if he might be able to hook me up with something.

If
I got back to New York.

That was a big qualifier right now.

I undid the snap on my remaining holster, withdrew my pistol and without hesitating I disengaged the safety, loaded a bullet and fired directly at my mother’s head.

If she’d been human, she’d be dead.

Alas, she was a werewolf, and a wily one at that. She must have figured out what I was up to within the milliseconds it took for me to complete the action, and she darted back inside the barn. I half-expected her to be cackling like a cartoon villain, but she was quiet once she vanished.

Holden helped me to my feet and observed, “Guess we know where she is now.”

The gunshot had done double duty in making my mother disappear and spooking Ben and Fairfax. The two wolves were a good ten feet back now, their ears perked up on high alert as they danced from paw to paw.

“So much for our nice, quiet approach, eh?” I mused.

“You’ve been back in Canada for three hours, and already you’re dropping eh-bombs?” Desmond teased, tracking the movements of Fairfax with his shotgun.

“Shush.” Since it no longer mattered if we were being stealthy, I turned my sword on the padlocked door, slicing through the metal links of the chain with no effort. The chain and lock fell in a metal heap at my feet. I briefly considered bringing the chain along, since it might be a useful weapon in hand-to-hand combat, but thought better of it. The weight would be cumbersome, and if Mercy had used silver as an added bonus, I’d be in for a nasty surprise when I picked it up.

I slid the door open, and it shrieked in rusty protest. Once it was ajar, the distinctive odors of a barn wafted out to greet us. It must have been years since anything alive had called the barn a home—the owls, mice and other squatters notwithstanding—but still the pungent odor of pig manure and sweet straw filled the air. Some things didn’t vanish with time, they just became less obvious.

Beneath the animal scents was the distinctive cooper tang of blood. So much blood even I could pick it up without a problem. But this was old blood. My spirits lifted slightly, hoping this meant there was still a chance of finding
Grandmere
alive.

And in one piece,
I amended.

“Are we just going to leave them out here?” Holden asked, indicating the two wolves.

“Do you have a better idea? Should I ask them to sit still while I rig up some collars and leashes from the leftover tack in here?” We were far enough out of town I wasn’t worried about the wolves making a break for Elmwood. They were obviously more interested in hunting
us
than looking for an alternative snacking option, and besides that, wolves wouldn’t gravitate towards populated areas. I didn’t care what they’d been dosed with, they wouldn’t make a run for town.

Holden seemed to be considering my question because he was staring at the two wolves with a consternated expression.

“Holden.” I held the door open, and Desmond ducked under my arm, keeping his weapon raised. “They’ll be fine, trust me. We’ll deal with them once we’ve found my
grandmere
. They aren’t going anywhere.” It wasn’t like him to show anxiety over many things, but I think he might have had unresolved issues with werewolves.

We’d once been held captive by a pack of wild werewolves in Louisiana called the
Loups Garou
, and they’d kept us in a pit where we both nearly perished from exposure. We escaped, sure, but I think he had some werewolf-related problems after the fact.

Together, Holden and I had walked away from quite a few near-death situations. I could honestly say, after all this time, the adage
what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
was total bullshit. There were plenty of things that could nestle inside you like a sickness and dismantle you piece by piece, even if people still thought you were alive. Fear was a disease I’d caught while in captivity, and I wondered what Holden had come away with.

“Come on,” I urged.

He gave them one last look and followed us into the barn, where I slid the door firmly shut behind us, keeping the wolves on the other side of the barrier. They might find a way in, or they might lie in wait for us outside. Either way we hadn’t seen the end of them yet.

Inside, the barn was enormous.

It had looked plenty big on the outside, but even the façade didn’t give me a good grasp on how large the interior space would be. Along one wall was a series of stalls with straw covering the floor in patches and metal gates with latch locks. The manure smell was strongest there, which led me to conclude the pigs must have lived in those pens.

The size and layout wasn’t as bad as I’d been led to believe it would be from various magazine stories and documentaries I’d seen snippets of on TV. Buck Syler’s pigs lived a pretty luxurious life by comparison. Until they had to cross the barn, that is.

Buck, it seemed, preferred to slaughter his pigs the good old-fashioned way. A metal slab platform was set in the middle of the floor, and on either side were two slop drains. Overhead, a long hose hung from the ceiling, rigged to a series of other tubes. There was a holding cage next to the slab, and off to the side a dozen meat hooks hung behind a plastic curtain.

Then a sick thought seized me. This setup wasn’t for the pigs. The whole layout was designed specifically for him to make it easier to kill women. The ghosts came then, though not the way I expected them to. It wasn’t really ghosts I was seeing, but rather the macabre living truth of the space. Spectral versions of the past overlaid the present, and I could see the bodies of women—some still wriggling with life—dangling from the metal hooks. I could see a woman laid out on the table, her skin peeled back from the muscles of her legs and arms, but only in small patches, as if she were a living version of the gameboard in
Operation
. Inside the holding cage another woman—naked and shivering—watched in horror and waited without hope of escape.

I gagged and shut my eyes, grinding the heels of my palms into the sockets, willing myself to go blind rather than continue to see these things. This was the first time I’d had a flashback to something that wasn’t out of my own experience. Yet seeing the gruesome fates of these women brought up my memories, so when I opened my eyes again, it wasn’t Buck Syler operating on the woman, it was The Doctor.

He looked up at me and grinned, his smile unnaturally wide as though his cheeks had split open, and suddenly I could see all of his teeth at once. I wanted to get the hell out of this place.

“Ten…nine…eight…” I breathed deeply, keeping my counting quiet. Not that whispers mattered much, since both Desmond and Holden were accustomed to this panic routine by now. “Seven…six…five…”

The ghostly images began to fade, and one by one the hooks were just hooks, the table was just a table, and the cage was once again empty. These weren’t real ghosts. They were the ghosts of ghosts.

“Four…three…two…” The room returned to its former bleak self, and I let my breath out with a shuddery, “One.”

“You okay?” Desmond asked.

“Yeah. Just…saw some things. That’s all.”

“Ready to keep looking?” Holden gave my shoulder a squeeze, but the smile he offered me didn’t quite reach his eyes. Had he seen it too? “I’d like to get out of here quickly, if we can.”

“That makes three of us,” Des answered. “She was looking down from a loft upstairs, but the chances of her sticking around there are slim to none. You think she made a break for the main house?”

“I didn’t hear the other door open,” I said.

Holden glanced around the main room. “When I was out front, I noticed a broken window. She could have climbed through there, but we still would have heard some of the glass breaking.” He edged away from the pigpens, evidently put off by the smell. “I can’t get a read on your grandmother, but the scent in here is pretty repugnant. If she’s hidden somewhere, I might not be able to tell.”

So there was a method to this madness after all. I could call my mother many things—crazy, fucked-up, horrible, murderous, worst woman on earth—but I couldn’t call her stupid. She’d thought this through, beyond just a simple kidnap and kill. Sending
Grandmere
the warning, that had only been the first step. Mercy had to have planned this for months, knowing exactly what location to use, one that stank of death and was set apart from any other people. She hadn’t missed a move.

Her level of preparedness made me exceptionally nervous. This wasn’t revenge on a whim. She knew what she was doing, and that put me at a decided disadvantage because I was the unprepared one.

I was a lot less sure of our chances here than I had been crossing the creek. Things could get bad really fast, and we were in the thick of it. There was no backing out.

Though I would have died here and now if it meant saving
Grandmere
’s life.

I had a choice to make.

We could continue to comb the barn and the whole Syler property for signs of Mercy and her men, and likely stumble into any number of traps or treats they’d laid out for us. Or…

“
Mercy.
” I clanged my sword against the rusty steel surface of the butcher’s table, making an awful clanging echo through the barn. “You dumb bitch. You want me dead? Come and get me. Such a big, brave queen, isn’t that how you sold yourself to your idiot henchmen? What kind of queen cowers when her enemy comes around, huh? If you’re so tough, show me your ugly goddamn face.” I spit on the floor for good measure. In for a dramatic penny, in for a pound, right?

I looked back to the boys, and Desmond was cringing, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe what I’d done. Holden seemed completely unsurprised. He crossed his arms and quirked his head to the side, listening as the echo of my rage petered out and vanished altogether.

When silence reigned again, I pulled my sword off the table, making sure to grind the blade against the metal so it screamed out in loud frustration. The blade wanted to be fed, and the weapon and I were of a single mind. Soon it would drink its fill, and we would both be satisfied.

“You think calling me names will solve your problems?” Her voice seemed to shift with every other word, ricocheting from surface to surface so quickly I couldn’t get a read on her location.

“Speakers,” Desmond grumbled. He must have been trying to pinpoint her as well. The speakers were in pretty damned fine condition for her to sound like she was right next to us and not talking through a radio.

“I think hiding behind your victims makes you a coward,” I shouted back, trying to match her volume.

“Do you know what they call a room like this?” she inquired.

Hell?

I refused to answer, but she went on anyway. “It’s a killing floor. Isn’t that a marvelous phrase? Usually it’s where they bring the animals to die, but in your case I think it’s almost the same thing. Not quite human, are you? No. And I hear Secret’s secret is out now. Loose lips.” She laughed, though it wasn’t as maniacal as I had imagined it might be. At a different stage of life—and if she wasn’t plotting to kill me and those I loved—it might even be a nice laugh.

“First of all, I’ve read
Fast Food Nation
, or at least
parts
of it, and it’s called a kill floor, not a killing floor. Second, stop playing your stupid mind games, Mercy, I’ve had enough.” I’d read precisely two chapters of
Fast Food Nation
before finding it too boring to continue. There’s not much that can shock me about food, considering I don’t eat human meals. Poop in the ground beef? No big deal, I don’t eat burgers. Once the sensationalized aspects of the book proved less than titillating, I stopped reading.

Who knew the few pages I’d flipped through would ever give me ammunition for a sassy quip?

“I see your attitude problem hasn’t diminished since our last encounter,” Mercy said.

“It’s probably gotten worse,” Holden muttered.

Nice. Thanks for the support, peanut gallery.

“You mentioned my so-called
idiot henchmen
earlier. I guess that was your way of saying you’d like to get to know them.” Two doors at the front end of the barn opened, and the silhouetted figures of six men filled the doorway.

That was it? This was all the men she had with her? Once we beat them down, we only had to find Mercy, get
Grandmere
and this whole ordeal would be over. Three against six wasn’t so bad.