“Secret.” This from Tyler, shouting a warning in the same instant one of the guards leaped at me. I raised the sword, slicing it back and forth in a Z pattern, the steel blade making a faint rushing sound as it parted the air in front of me. It also parted the guard, who fell in three neat slabs at my feet.

With the wet, meaty sound of the vampire’s body hitting the platform, the remaining crowd seemed to realize this wasn’t a show. There was an uproar of frightened voices, and someone threw up. If I hadn’t been so impressed by the precision of the blade, I might have been sick too. I wanted to turn my attention back to Charlie, but the final guard still planned to prove his loyalty to his master.

And considering it was the vampire who had nearly thrown me under a train, I was pretty sure he was going to try killing me for purely personal reasons too.

He bellowed at me, making sure I was focused on the six-foot-seven bulk of him. As if I could miss it.

“Bring it on, Baldy,” I said, and made another showy display of windmilling the blade in my hand. It gave him pause. Our eyes locked, and I was sure we both knew how this would end, but where we disagreed was on which of us would be dead.

He charged at me and gained confidence when he avoided my first swing, sliding to a halt against a closed convenience stand. Next to him, beside Charlie, a Coke machine was glowing a merry red and white and completely unaware of its impending demise.

The huge, bald vampire ripped the big metal and plastic box away from the wall as if it weighed nothing, and hurled it at me. I didn’t have a chance to dodge it, but his aim was off due to the bulk of the machine. It glanced off my left side, knocking the wind out of me and bringing me down to one knee. Had he been farther back he could have hit me better, but he was too close and couldn’t get the proper momentum or direction for his toss. As it was, the only thing the hit did was give me a few new bruises. It also made him believe he had the upper hand, now that I was back on the floor.

He chuckled and opened his mouth to say something, but he never got the chance. I rolled forward so I was less than two feet from him, then swung the blade upward from the ground, cleaving him neatly in half, where he and his insides slopped to the floor next to his former colleague.

I wasn’t interested in playing games anymore. I’d stopped caring that we had an audience, most of whom were now in a panic-induced state of shock. My arm hurt like a bitch, and if Charlie had let me kill him back at the hotel, this whole mess could have been avoided. There was going to be hell to pay from the Tribunal later, but at the moment there was only one thing on my mind.

I turned to Charlie, who was standing still in the way only a vampire could, as if he believed by not moving he might avoid being seen. Fear painted his face, and he didn’t mask it. He had nothing clever to say to me as I stalked towards him with slow, deliberate steps. The front of my dress was splattered with blood the last vampire had sprayed on me as he fell. My sword dragged across the tile floor, emitting a loud, eerie squeal that ate away at the silence that had fallen over the crowd.

I stopped about four feet from Charlie, the sword at my side. My vision was clear, my eyes only for him. He was trembling.

“Don’t fight it,” I said, and even to my own ears my voice sounded wrong. It was too calm, too empty. “Don’t fight me anymore.”

He nodded and his legs gave out under him. He collapsed onto his knees and looked up at me with wide, terrified eyes. The look was so honest it gave me a brief pause because it almost made me want to take pity on him.

“Secret?” Tyler’s voice came through like the voice of an often-overlooked angel on my shoulder. “You don’t have to do this.” I don’t know where he’d gotten the gun, but its small size suggested it came from an ankle holster. Out of the corner of my eye I could see he had it trained on me, and in spite of the shake in his voice, his hands were perfectly steady.

He must have thought I was only going to use the sword for defense when he’d kicked it to me.

“You don’t understand.” I raised the blade so it was even with Charlie’s eyes. “He has to die.”

“No one else has to die.” The cop in him had replaced the man. I was no longer the girl from our date, just a threat that needed to be neutralized. Funny, because that’s exactly what Charlie was to me.

Reality broke through shock for someone, and first one scream, then another added pointed hiccoughs of noise to the otherwise weighty silence of the standoff between Tyler, myself and Charlie. Tyler loaded a bullet into the chamber of his gun as I pressed the tip of my sword against Charlie’s forehead.

“Don’t be a hero, Tyler.” The voice mirrored what I was thinking, but it was calm and male.

Holden had arrived, and with him a whole crew of vampires who were already busy convincing the panic-stricken crowd they were only extras in a movie. The vampires even had clipboards with official-looking waivers on them. The real power, though, was the thrall they were placing over each and every one of those poor human suckers.

My focus was still all for Charlie, but I could see his terror was slipping away. The arrival of the vampires seemed to promise a stay of execution in his eyes. If he thought this meant he was going to walk away, I was about to show him how wrong he was.

Holden talked Tyler into handing over his gun, and judging by the detective’s dazed expression, he wasn’t going to remember any of this in the morning. My vampire, whose face was a little bruised, must have taken one monster of a beating, because when he looked at the pile of body parts behind me, all I saw in his countenance was satisfaction.

He was proud of me.

“Don’t you have a job to do?” He looked past me to Charlie.

“Holden?” Charlie’s voice quivered. “You won’t let her?” His pitiful, helpless mien was back, but my empathy vanished when a new wave of pain rocked my body as my bones attempted to force themselves together. My collarbone would need to be re-broken and set again if it had any hope of healing properly.

“I’d finish you myself if I could,” Holden replied, then led a very compliant Tyler away from the scene.

“I’ll make it painless.” The smile on my face gave away how much I was going to enjoy it. I only wished I could make it last longer.

The sword only had to swing once. A vampire couldn’t come back from a beheading.

Chapter Eight

The next night, I found myself sitting on the steps outside of the council’s headquarters with a newspaper in my hands, thanking my lucky stars I was alive. Surviving Charlie and his goons had been the easy part. Facing the Tribunal afterwards to explain why I’d killed three vampires on a subway platform filled with witnesses, well…

I’d rather be neck-deep in hungry rogues than square off against the Tribunal again.

To be fair, they’d gone easy on me given how close I’d come to exposing the truth about vampires to the world. I could have been executed for what I’d done, and one of the three leaders, Juan Carlos, seemed more than happy to watch me die. Thankfully, the two others, Sig and Daria, weren’t in such a hurry to do me in.

They needed to punish me for something, though, or risk total anarchy among the council. They’d charged me with the unlawful execution of three rogues. It was, as charges go, a misdemeanor and a total walk in the park punishment-wise. I got to keep the ten thousand for killing Charlie but owed the council the head value of each of the guards. They had docked fifteen hundred dollars from my bounty, and I’d been removed from active duty for a month.

I tried to be happy about my hefty new bank balance, but I was too mad at Holden to enjoy it. Not only had he missed almost the entire fight, he had done nothing to defend me to the Tribunal tonight. Instead, he’d agreed my actions had been reckless and stupid and that I had put every vampire in New York at risk.

It wasn’t that he was wrong, I was just pissed he hadn’t even tried to take my side.

My phone vibrated, distracting me from my grumpy musings. The caller ID told me it was Mercedes, and I considered not answering.

“Hello?” I said warily, bracing myself for her wrath.

“So, Tyler called me,” she began. She sounded calm enough.

“Yeah?” I didn’t know what Tyler would have told her, because I only knew the truth. I had no idea what Holden had convinced Tyler of when the detective was under the thrall.

“Yes.” Anger laced her tone, and I knew whatever the story was it wasn’t good. “He said you guys were having a great time until you got a business call and just vanished. He said you left him in the restaurant without a word, and even though he tried to call you, you totally blew him off.”

“Oh.” Well, so much for a second date. I was livid. Instead of giving him a story that would have let me still be the good guy, like a friend in the hospital or something, now Tyler was always going to remember me as that bitch who ditched him in the middle of dinner. Awesome.

“Oh? That’s all you can say?”

I was somewhat distracted by that day’s edition of the New York Post, which Holden had been kind enough to provide me a copy of. The front-page headline boldly announced the story of a vigilante blonde with a sword who had been terrorizing the subway during the night. Details were foggy, because the only witnesses were people who had run away before the vampires had arrived, and there were no bodies or evidence of any kind to back up the story. The body of the guard in Charlie’s room had already turned to ash thanks to the big, open windows, and the vampires had subsequently wiped the memories of everyone involved.

Sig had seen to it that by tomorrow the Post would be printing a retraction, and hopefully by the end of the week it would all be forgotten.

“I’m sorry, Cedes.” I really was. “Something came up.”

“I just don’t know about you sometimes.” She hung up.

I slipped the phone back in my pocket and stood. Sure, things could have been a lot worse. But that didn’t mean I had to like the way they were.

A month to the day after the Tribunal passed judgment on me, I awoke at nightfall with a dead man in my bedroom.