One Last Secret

By Sierra Dean

After years of bitter enemies, moving love stories, and enough broken bones to fund a hospital wing, Secret McQueen is taking her final stand.

While Secret and her new FBI unit are on the trail of a serial killer stalking the streets of St. Louis, they quickly realize this is no ordinary killer. A chance encounter with death itself will put Secret in peril unlike she has ever known. With the fate of every supernatural being hanging in the balance, it is an internal struggle that will decide who lives and who dies, as Secret must revisit the biggest decisions and mistakes of her life and decide if she had chosen the right path, or if she will change the past--and the future.

Will her decisions save her people, or will one wrong move change everything about her carefully constructed life?

And will she come out the same at the other end, or forfeit herself to save those whose lives were lost along the way?

The epic conclusion to the Secret McQueen series will decide our heroine's fate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sierra Dean
• Release date: Apr 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781939291431

Sierra Dean

Sierra Dean is the kind of adult who forgot she was supposed to grow up. She spends most of her days making up stories, and most of her evenings watching baseball or playing video games. She lives in Winnipeg, Canada with two temperamental cats and one sweet tempered dog. When not building new worlds, she can be found making cupcakes and checking Twitter.

Book preview

Chapter One

I’d been killed before, which was never a good time. But nothing in my whole life of varied experiences was enough to prepare me for being pregnant.

There’s pregnancy, and then there’s werewolf pregnancy.

And there’s werewolf pregnancy, and there’s going through your first trimester while trying to track down a serial killer in St. Louis.

I was experiencing the latter, and if God himself were to descend from the heavens and offer me a quick death, I probably would have accepted.

Instead, I got to share adjoining hotel rooms with a literal demon, while my husband was at home trying to figure out just how binding verbal agreements with fairy kings were.

I’d say this was all out of the ordinary, but honestly, nothing really surprised me anymore.

A gentle knock on my bathroom door forced me to lift my head from the cool white tiles beneath my cheek. I had stopped being worried about the cleanliness of a hotel bathroom floor almost a week earlier. Sometimes comfort won out over germy concerns.

Secret? a gentle, male voice asked.

Go away or I’ll true name you back to the pits of hell, I grumbled. But even as I said it, I pushed myself up into a sitting position. My face was slick with sweat, and not in that cute way where strangers and friends told me I was glowing. No, a lot more frequently people these days were asking me if maybe I should go to a hospital.

I understood why. My skin had taken on an ashy hue, and while I was normally petite to begin with, even I could see how hollow my cheeks had become over the past weeks. Dark circles creased my under eyes, because I barely slept more than an hour or two a night, and my stomach growled as if it was constantly hungry, but if I tried to eat anything I couldn’t keep it down.

Anything except raw meat.

And look, I’d been a half-vampire for the better part of my early life. I had lived on nothing but blood and meat for a good number of years. It’s not like I was squeamish about these things, but since becoming human I had developed a very human palette, and even though I had since become a werewolf again, werewolves still ate human food.

I liked human food.

I didn’t want to eat raw meat.

I rested my head against the bathroom wall as the most recent wave of my never-ending migraine slammed into me, an iron fist squeezing my brain.

Secret, come out. You’ve been in there for hours.

Harry’s voice was calm and even. I suppose spending several eternities in the constant torments of hell meant you didn’t really worry too much about what one cranky werewolf was threatening you with.

He also knew I’d never do that to him.

He might be a demon, but he was also my pal.

There was an old saying about the company you keep, but I’d long since forgotten it, because the company I kept was never up to any good. Demons, vampires, werewolves, witches. The company I kept were the bread and butter keeping Spirit Halloween stores afloat.

You might think those things went out of business after it became public that supernatural creatures were real, but unfortunately, we hadn’t really gotten to a point where humans worried about offending monsters, at least one night a year. And to be fair, most of us monsters were used to it after seeing it our whole lives, anyway.

Honestly, most of us decorated for Halloween, too.

If you can’t eat ‘em, join ‘em.

I glanced at my watch to see if Harry was exaggerating and was shocked to see that it was almost ten in the morning. We were supposed to be at a debriefing at the local St Louis FBI field office in fifteen minutes, and I was sure I looked like I’d just gone on an all-night bender.

My role with the FBI was a unique and important one, as the Special Director of a supernatural division, people were looking to me to figure out what was going on in the city and surrounding area, and I could barely stand long enough to make it from one room to the next, let alone lead a team of supernatural experts to uncover this killer before he struck again.

I scrubbed my palms over my face, shocked at how sweaty my skin was. I felt like a shell, like something had hollowed me out inside and I was no longer the same person I used to be.

Harry? I called out.

Yeah, boss?

Could you just… possess my body and go to work for me? I squeezed my eyes closed, because even though the lights in the bathroom were off, the sunlight filtering in from the small window above my head was enough to set my migraine off anew.

Harry was quiet for a long time, and I suspect at least a tiny part of him was considering the offer seriously. He was a demon, after all.

Sorry, boss. You’re not my type.

Ouch.

Fine, fuck you too, then.

"All right, all right, that’s enough pity party for you, mamacita. I’m coming in and dragging your pregnant ass downtown, and you’re going to look poised and professional and then you can puke in a garbage can all afternoon if you want to, but people need to see someone not running scared, and that someone is you."

Perish the thought that I was our team’s soul hope of keeping the ranks from turning tail and running, but I had to admit he might be right. This killer, who had been dubbed the St. Louis Butcher, was leaving crime scenes in his wake that would haunt the nightmares of the most seasoned law enforcement officers.

All his victims were supernatural beings, but not just one type. He’d killed werewolves, vampires, fae. He was all over the map. And the scant profile we’d been able to assemble on him suggested he wasn’t a human seeking revenge against the supernatural community.

Everything we’d collected so far told us he was supernatural as well.

Which meant unprepared human cops and agents attempting to bring him in would end up deadly, so we needed everyone ready.

I got up off the floor and washed my face in the sink. I didn’t bother to look in the mirror. I knew it was going to be bad, and seeing it would just make me feel worse.

When I opened the door, Harry recoiled, but kept his usual sarcasm silent, for which I was grateful. He might be a demon, but he wasn’t an asshole.

You can’t go in looking like that, he said politely, scratching his copper red beard stubble and giving me a long once-over. Come on, sit down.

He led me to my hotel bed, where the duvet had been kicked almost entirely onto the floor thanks to my ferocious night sweats. There was an empty glass of water on the nightstand and I’d pulled the garbage can next to the bed just in case.

Knowing he’d seen all this while waiting for me to come out of the bathroom made me flush with hot embarrassment. I was supposed to be tough and untouchable. There were legends about me. And yet I was being undermined and undone by a baby.

I touched my stomach, where the signs of my pregnancy hadn’t yet begun to swell, but I knew there was something in there, and it was trying to kill me. Perhaps that was dramatic, and in fairness I knew the poor kid wasn’t to blame, but there was nothing in books or the life lessons I’d spent decades learning that could have prepared me for being pregnant with a werewolf baby.

I wanted to be happy, thrilled even. My very handsome, very adoring husband had knocked me up with a baby who would likely—hopefully—be just as sweet and lovely as he was. But holy hells, I did not enjoy being pregnant. I knew some women—my friends Mercedes and Siobhan among them—who were practically incandescent during their pregnancies. Beautiful glowing skin, adoring maternal connections with their babies. I wanted that, I really did, but so far, I was only feeling resentment and perpetual sea sickness.

Right now, I just wanted to meet the person who had invented the phrase morning sickness and ask them what kind of sick joke that had been.

Harry sat me down on the bed, gently patting the top of my head because he really didn’t have any idea how humans offered comfort to one another, but he sure tried. He went to the small closet in the hotel room’s armoire and pulled out a clean pantsuit, laying it down on the bed beside me. He then headed into the bathroom and returned with a hairbrush and my minuscule makeup bag.

You fix this… He waved in the general direction of my face. And I’ll make you some coffee.

I felt drained and utterly exhausted, and the desire to fall backwards into my bed and drift back to sleep was so palpable I could practically taste it. But I knew he was right, that this case wasn’t going to get solved without our help, and the best way I could offer that help was to be a strong and unwavering presence for the field office to lean on.

That’s what was expected of me in my role as the head of all things supernatural with the FBI, and I had to take that title and its responsibilities seriously, even if I did want to curl up into a ball and die.

I brushed my hair, thankful for the mirror inset in the armoire, so I could see what I was doing and tame my errant curls into a relatively tidy chignon. I never wore much makeup most days, so I merely applied a thick coating of concealer under my eyes and a swipe of mascara and tinted lip balm. It was enough to take me from looking like the Crypt Keeper to just an overworked FBI director, and the latter was something I was allowed to be.

Harry busied himself at the coffeemaker, giving me time to change. I could have gone into the bathroom for privacy, but I knew he wasn’t going to look. Harry was a demon, which meant a lot of things to a lot of people, but he was also just Harry, my Harry, and if one could say that a soulless beast from hell was like a brother, then that’s what I felt for him. We were stuck with each other, because he needed a babysitter if he was going to continue to live among humans, but he had earned my trust in our months together, and while I knew he might bite the hand that fed him at any moment, I chose to believe that wouldn’t be the case.

I also didn’t think he was particularly interested in gawking at my pale, naked body, so I stripped out of my pajamas and quickly dressed in the pantsuit he had laid out for me. Honestly, moving from the bed to the bathroom to change would have been too exhausting for words, so I was glad I could trust him not to gawk.

He handed me a paper cup emblazoned with the hotel logo on it filled with black coffee, just the way I liked it. My stomach churned at the smell, which was a bummer because the smell of coffee was one of my favorite pleasures in life. Still, as much as my tummy wanted to protest, this baby could take my morning coffee out of my cold, dead hands.

I sipped the coffee, expecting to retch, but grateful to find I was able to swallow it down. It wasn’t particularly good coffee, but the stuff they were making at the field office would be ten times worse, so this was going to have to do.

Once I’d finished it, Harry held my suit jacket up for me, letting me put my arms in the sleeves. He gave me an awkward pat on the shoulder and looked at me in the mirror.

Well, you still look like shit, but at least you look like you can solve a murder.

Chapter Two

The St. Louis field office where a small group of my team were making themselves at home was nothing like the New York office we’d left behind. The supernatural division of the FBI had two primary offices, the first in Los Angeles where my two co-division heads worked, and the New York office, which was under my supervision.

Moving back to New York from Los Angeles had been necessary to saving my marriage, but it had also given me a new and unique slate of responsibilities that I was only just beginning to get accustomed to. I had a wide array of leadership roles: queen of the Eastern werewolves, princess of the Southern werewolves, former head of the vampire Tribunal. But in all those positions, I had shared power or deferred it to someone else. I was only just beginning to understand what it really meant to have people depend on me, and it was a steep learning curve, especially now that I was going to have someone in my life who genuinely depended on me for everything.

I settled into my office space and looked around at the grim work area we had been assigned. Back home, we had a full floor in an office tower. Thousands of square feet of beautifully outfitted workspace that looked more like it should belong to a tech start-up than an FBI division. Here, I felt like I’d been dropped into a set from The Wire, only more depressing.

The space hadn’t been painted in decades, so the once-white paint had a sallow yellow quality to it and was flaked and peeling in places. The linoleum tile—probably riddled with asbestos—was likewise stained and faded past being able to recognize its original color. Possibly it had once been olive green, but yellow or beige were equally likely contenders.

The furniture was all at least forty years old, and not a single desk in the space had four legs that were the same height, so no matter where you sat down to work you were always faced with the miserable task of trying to balance the desk before you could even open your laptop. The sound of thump-thump-thump as my staff worked and their desks banged along as they typed echoed through the space. The overhead lights were bare fluorescent bulbs and only one in three of them worked properly, the others all flickered and different frequencies, creating a dizzying, maddening hellish disco. We’d switched to leaving the blinds open and relying mostly on natural light from outside, but when it got dark, we had no other option.

The little annex where my team worked was in the main FBI building in St. Louis, but we had requested dedicated workspace, and the best they had available was this floor that had been—and still was—intended for storage.

At first, I’d thought this was their way of trying to punish me for coming in as an outsider and sticking my nose into their case. We were all on the same team, but I’d learned a long time ago no one really likes to have external pressure placed on them, even when it’s from someone trying to help.

But I learned after a day or two dealing with the local leadership that this wasn’t intended to make our lives miserable or make our jobs harder. They just didn’t have anywhere else to put us that could house my incoming team and their local crew.

So, we would have to make do with what was on offer.

My one minor consolation in the whole thing was that at least the place had been kept clean, even if it wasn’t kept modern. It looked like it should stink of mildew and black mold, instead there was just the faintest aroma of pine-scented wood cleaner and the unmistakable scent of Windex. Both made me want to gag, but it was miles better than the alternative.

I’d kept my desk bare even though we’d been here almost two weeks at this point. A few of my colleagues—I think sensing this layover wouldn’t end quickly—had decorated their spaces with little touches of home. Tamsin, my assistant, had a bobblehead of an anime character next to her computer monitor, as well as a framed photo of her fiancé and her dog.

There were other family photos here and there, or custom mugs that said things like World’s Best Cat Mom or bearing—inexplicably—the Kansas City Chiefs’ logo.

It occurred to me, sometimes, that these people were under my care, and they depended on me, yet I knew almost nothing personal about them. Of the lot, only Harry and Tamsin were aware of my current maternal condition, and the latter only because I had asked her to get the pregnancy test for me. It seemed like a smart move to have my assistant in on my big secret, because she’d be the one lying on my behalf about what was wrong with me and why I was frequently cancelling or rescheduling meetings.

Tamsin was frequently awkward on an interpersonal level, but she was an absolute genius about the work we did here, and might know more about me than I did, as she had been tracking my career since before vampires and werewolves were known to the wider world. She was a godsend.

I’d gone a long, long time without having anyone to handle my business for me, and I had honestly scoffed at the idea of having or needing an assistant, but ever since she’d come on board, I wondered how I had ever lived without her.

She was, naturally, already here, helping me go through my emails. Calling myself a technological Luddite would have been polite. And I know, considering my age and my generation I was supposed to be hip and with-it when it came to social media and the newest, hottest devices, but the only reason I didn’t still own a flip-phone was because mine had been broken in a fight with a vampire and my plan carrier had rudely informed me they could not replace my grandma phone with the same model.

Don’t get me wrong, I understood how to use a computer, but I hadn’t actually owned one until I was almost thirty. There hadn’t been a reason. When I was younger, I’d spent my nights hunting vampires and other creepy-crawly monsters and just doing my best to stay alive. During the day, thanks to my vampire bloodline, I was out cold. There just wasn’t a lot of time for me to follow up on meme trends, and no one wants you to Instagram your food when all you eat is blood.

Now that I was in a position of authority, suddenly people wanted to know what my calendar looked like, and I just got constant emails. All. The. Time. Endless emails that as far as I could tell served absolutely no purpose, and I had quickly learned no one knew how to use reply-all appropriately. Misery upon misery.

So, while the FBI had given me a computer that I was told was very top of the line, I had almost immediately passed it and its contents over to Tamsin to handle for me.

She came over to my desk. Her dark hair had recently been cropped short with blunt bangs that did not work with her natural cowlick, so she spent much of her day trying to smooth her hair back into place, while her genetics resisted all her efforts. While the style was cute, I thought it made her look a bit too young, even though I think her goal had been something more sophisticated.

While I was in a pantsuit, I did not enforce a dress code with my team, especially not the lab staff or agents like Tamsin, who would not be in the field with me. Normally I’d be in jeans, but I was still trying to pretend like I was an authority figure around the St. Louis brass.

Tamsin wore a layered dress the color of peach sorbet, and a graphic tee with a band name on it that was impossible to read. I squinted at it, and she caught me.

Ghost, she explained.

The killer is a ghost? I blinked at her. I don’t think that’s likely. Too much physical trauma. Ghosts usually just push people to do damage to themselves. Psychological. I tapped my temple, which only reminded me of my migraine.

We stared at each other for a long, awkward moment. Tamsin didn’t get jokes. Sarcasm and subtlety were foreign languages to her, so while I was being dead serious at the moment, she knew I was frequently prone to bouts of sarcasm, and it often made her unsure of how to react to what I was saying.

She pointed to the shirt. Ghost.

For a hot minute I was about to ask her if she was telling me she was a ghost, and I was racking my brain trying to recall all the times I’d seen her move things in my presence. Then in dawned on me what she was saying.

The shirt. Is a band. Called Ghost. I nodded to myself. I think this might be what people mean when they talk about pregnancy brain.

She opened her mouth like she was about to launch into a detailed explanation of exactly what experts were referring to when they talked about pregnancy brain, but I raised my hand and gave my head a little shake. She had gotten used to this from me as well, and I think we were both grateful for the signal.

Sometimes I just let her go, and it could be fascinating because I think she might have actually known everything given enough time to absorb the world’s knowledge, but I just didn’t have it in me today.

She laid a file folder on my desk and then turned on her iPad to review whatever so-called important correspondence needed my attention most that morning. Other members of the team were filtering in and finding their way to the desks they had chosen. The echo of the thump-thump-thump told me they were getting settled in for work.

I winced.

"Special Director