Free Something Secret This Way Comes: Secret McQueen, Book 1 by Sierra Dean Page B

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    Fairies, on the other hand, prized their privacy. They existed in a separate reality, only deigning to cross over when something caught their curiosity or they found babies or women to steal.
    Fairies never stole men.
    Calliope’s mansion was a border station between human reality and the realms of fairies and immortals. It was a fascinating and terrifying place to visit. Calliope herself was part of the appeal. She had once lived among the mortals, using her particular gift for being the center of attention to its full advantage.
    She had taken over the life of a small-town girl who had died without anyone’s notice, and reinvented herself as the ultimate blonde-bombshell glamour icon. When she’d had her fill, she left the body without further explanation. It remains one of the greatest mysterious Hollywood deaths.
    To see Calliope now, she looked exactly like the icon once painted by Andy Warhol, only her hair was no longer short and blonde but restored to a long, smoky black. Her figure was bodacious, her pout still as alluring. I did a double take whenever I saw her.
    Looking the way she did it was strange to hear her tell me what my future held. True to her title, Calliope was an oracle and could see the future of those around her. Her visions were often vague, but she was always right.
    She also dealt in blood. Food for vampires without fangs or those still too young to hunt without being dangerous. The council sent all sanctioned newborns to live in Calliope’s care until they could be trained to behave.
    I went to her because although I had fangs, I could not bring myself to feed off humans, willing or otherwise. It would cross too many lines for me. I could eat human food and enjoyed coffee and the occasional alcoholic beverage, but they did nothing for me nutritionally. I liked caffeine and booze because the acceleration of my metabolism meant I felt their effects almost instantly, and they burned off too fast for any lingering unpleasantness afterward. The downside was, going on a bender after a bad week was pretty much impossible because I was never drunk longer than an hour, and I couldn’t blame my bad judgment on impaired sensibilities. And while I could eat, I still needed blood. In a pinch I could eat blue-rare steak, or even raw meat, as they appeased the hunger of my wolf. But both monsters craved blood, so that was the only thing that really satisfied me.
    I had my fridge well stocked, which meant we didn’t need to see Calliope tonight no matter how badly I wanted to.
    “I’ve got some O neg in the fridge. You want?”
    Holden grimaced. He’d attempted, and failed, to understand my aversion to drinking from the source.
    “No, thank you.” He rose from the chair and straightened his blazer. He tried hard to look as if he belonged in this century, and for the most part he succeeded. He was tall and slim with a narrow waist and a well-built upper body. From what he’d told me of his youth, he’d come from a poor farming community. His build came from hours of hard labor with little to eat, making him strong and lean.
    His face was chiseled with a strong jaw and lips suited for pouting. His hair and eyes were both dark brown, and depending on the mood of the evening often passed for black. The eyes defined classic vampire—deep, focused and brooding. His mouth usually set itself in a pensive angelic frown with his brow furrowed. Holden’s hair tended to be a bit too long, owing to the uncut look favored by farmhands two hundred years earlier, which he had opted to maintain. He liked to be consistent about that rather than trying to keep with the changing styles of the decades. Tonight he had pushed it behind his ears and gelled it enough to keep it there. It stopped just shy of the collar of his jacket.
    It was no wonder Holden didn’t have any difficulty feeding. Human women found him irresistible. His looks combined with the vampire gift to enthrall humans, better known as the