The Secretverse Novellas

Night Moves

A Holden Chancery Story

Sierra Dean

For Team Holden.

Chapter One

October 4, 1983

Leo Castelli Gallery, SoHo, New York

Whoever invented the mullet deserved to die a slow, painful death.

Holden stared at a man on the opposite side of the clean, white gallery. The man’s hair was bleached blond and trimmed short on top, but kept long in the back where it was stiff with hairspray. Holden didn’t bother to repress his shudder as he looked away.

In the back of his mind he was already writing a new headline: How to style your hair if you never want to see a woman naked again.

Art Cooper, Holden’s editor-in-chief at GQ, would hate it.

Art wanted stories with depth. He wanted the magazine to mean something and set a standard for a new wave of professional men.

Holden wanted to make the haircut go away forever.

He took a polite sip from his glass of champagne. The bubbles felt nice on his tongue, but the taste of alcohol had long ago stopped having any enjoyment for him. Booze, like all varieties of food, had started to taste more like paper when he lost his humanity and became a vampire.

It wasn’t all bad. The taste of blood had become so much sweeter than any delicacy he could have sampled in his human form.

And considering how poor he’d been as a mortal, the food available to him had been dismal at best.

But these days he faked it around the living, because people tended to find it strange if he didn’t eat or drink. He had to make the rounds with the social elite, and while models wouldn’t blink at someone skipping a meal, the folks who made big advertising investments in the magazine wanted to chew the fat with someone who would, well, literally chew the fat.

Oh, the sacrifices he made.

He finished off the champagne with a long swallow, a buzzy feeling swimming through him before fading completely. He vaguely remembered what it was like to be drunk. He hadn’t known that sensation in a very, very long time.

Holden moved through the gallery like a shark in shallow water. He wasn’t necessarily hunting anyone, but if an easy meal were to stumble into his path, he wouldn’t turn it down.

Every now and again the photos hanging on the walls drew his notice, large black-and-white prints depicting beautiful, naked bodies. Earlier that year Robert Mapplethorpe had caused quite a stir on the art scene with his evocative nudes depicting a female Olympic bodybuilder.

This series, an exhibit mixing old and new prints, was an attempt to capitalize on the photographer’s burgeoning fame. The pictures were so lurid they could be borderline obscene, and around the room Holden could make out tittering giggles and muffled gasps. Not everyone in the room was a seasoned art snob, and the average looky-loo might be shocked by what they were seeing.

Grabbing another glass of champagne from a passing tray, Holden continued to prowl around the gallery. He’d done a lap already, earlier in the evening, and there was a particular section of the gallery he was keeping an eye on.

The figure of a woman stopped in that area caught his attention.

He walked up next to her and paused, taking a sip of his drink and gazing at the huge print in front of her, wearing a bored expression he’d perfected over the decades.

He felt the weight of her glance on him, then she looked back to the photo. He smiled faintly, because though she didn’t respond outwardly, he heard her pulse kick up.

She was excited.

How well has this worked for you so far? Her voice was smoky and deep, like Kathleen Turner’s.

About as often as introducing myself the old-fashioned way, he replied.

She gave him a once-over, and in spite of her elevated heart rate, she remained totally cool on the surface. Holden liked it when women pretended they weren’t interested. The extra effort it took to woo them made the reward that much sweeter. Literally.

Just like fast food was an easy but often unpleasant meal choice for humans, blood given too readily didn’t have the same lush flavor. He’d never take a meal by force, though he rarely had permission for the actual donation. It was an easy thing, to take blood from a lover and heal the wound before they knew what had happened. With the vampire thrall he could convince anyone, but he only liked it when someone wanted to be with him of their own volition.

There were some people who knew about vampires and wanted to give up their blood and become walking donors. Holden hated that. Willingness and desperation were entirely different things.

Deep down he was still a predator, and part of the joy of the meal was in the hunt.

He wasn’t sure which way this girl would tilt—willing victim or eager lover—but based on the scent of her skin he was betting she’d be worth the work.

I think this is where you’re supposed to tell me your name, she prompted.

He realized too late he’d made the common vampire mistake of lapsing into stillness. He’d been so lost in thought he forgot to maintain a normal conversational pace.

Holden Chancery. He offered his hand and smiled when she gave it a firm shake.

Felicia. She drank a little more then asked, Holden, like from Salinger?

He loved the sound of her voice and the way she drew out the O in his name like it was a dirty word used fondly. But he hated the comparison. In the thirty-some years since J.D. Salinger had written Catcher in the Rye, Holden hadn’t gone more than a week or two without someone comparing him to the book’s hero, Holden Caulfield.

Just what he wanted, to have people think of a petulant fifteen-year-old schoolboy when they met him.

He’d hoped the book would be a flash in the pan, but in three decades folks hadn’t yet stopped talking about it. Typical luck.

And now his permanent thirty-year-old appearance made him the exact right age to be named for the little twerp.

No. It’s an old family name. He tried to keep his voice light, but the annoyance must have come through because she grimaced in a self-aware way.

Sorry. You must get that a lot.

Probably not as often as someone named Hamlet, but it happens.

I dated a guy named Mercutio once. She twirled the champagne in her glass, her eyes sparkling more than the bubbles.

Liar.

Does this look like the face of a woman who would lie to you, Holden Chancery?

God, her voice would kill him. Low and husky, like a jazz singer he’d known in the ’20s who might have been better than Billie Holiday if she hadn’t…well. Heroin was a hell of a drug, and things hadn’t ended happily for her. Yet here was this beautiful creature standing next to him who sounded like she’d stepped right out of a speakeasy.

He must have waited too long to reply, because she returned her attention to the print, and her cheeks took on a rosy hue.

What was that like? She tilted her glass towards the art.

He followed her gaze to the portrait. It was a black-and-white nude like all the others, but the subject was much more familiar to Holden, since it was a photo of himself. He pretended to take a drink and contemplated the piece. He was damn near life size with it blown up so large. He wasn’t entirely naked. Robert had strategically hidden his manhood with artfully placed female hands.

Holden repressed a smile when Felicia’s pulse sped up again.

She liked it.

It was unforgettable. He relieved her of her empty glass and placed it along with his on the tray of a passing waiter. And a little cold.

Her laugh was nervous but edged with excitement.

Someone bought it. She pointed to the red dot beneath the information placard.

Sure. He’d bought it. Not out of any self-involvement or vanity, though Holden could admit he was plenty vain. He just didn’t need it hanging in MoMA or some millionaire’s living room. He would eventually drop out of the public eye when his eternal youth started to become too conspicuous, but he’d still want to call Manhattan home.

The original negatives were also in his possession now, thanks to his vampire thrall, meaning the photo would never show up in a Mapplethorpe coffee table book.

Owning the print wasn’t vain.

Letting it be shown in the first place, that was a hundred percent ego.

Felicia? He had her attention now, having stolen her champagne glass so she couldn’t use it to distract herself.

Hmm?

Let’s go.

Her heart was beating a mile a minute, but still she pretended not to know what he was talking about. Go? Go where?

He moved in closer, picking up the faint scent of Oscar de la Renta perfume. Oh, yes. She was an excellent choice. He could have easily willed her to come with him by staring at her and telling her she wanted to leave. But baiting women with the thrall wasn’t good sport, and the idea struck him as ungentlemanly.

A walk? Drinks? Anything.

Felicia was already nodding her assent before he’d finished his pitiful list of made-up suggestions. Sure. Yeah.

She left him to get her coat, it being October and all, and Holden waited for her outside the gallery’s doors. Something in the air caused an uneasy stir in his belly, but he pushed the worry aside.

Felicia joined him on the sidewalk, not bothering to hide her smile, and he offered her his arm.

They walked a block in the crisp night air, but in spite of his enchanting company, Holden couldn’t shake the unsettling feeling something was very, very wrong.

It threw him enough he didn’t notice Felicia’s demeanor shift from bubbly to stone-cold serious in the flash of a second.

He only figured out things had changed when she sank the knife into his ribs.

Chapter Two

Holden gaped at the blade sticking out of his chest, a garish red bloom flowering out from the hilt of the weapon and staining his pristine white shirt.

This is Armani, he snarled.

Vampire scum, she shot back.

He pulled the knife blade out, dropping it onto the sidewalk with a heavy metallic clatter. Prodding the hole in his shirt with the tip of a finger, he sighed in disgust. Ruined.

You couldn’t have stabbed me when I was wearing Calvin Klein?

Whatever response Felicia had been anticipating, this clearly wasn’t it. She was edgy and nervous, but her stance told him she was ready for a fight, and her adrenaline was so high she probably wouldn’t consider the danger she was in until it was too late.

Aren’t you going to, you know…bite me?

Was that the goal, here? Because if you wanted me to feed off you, you could have asked politely. Destroying a two-hundred-dollar shirt doesn’t really make my fangs itch, love.

His wound was already healing, leaving him only with a bruised ego and a shirt he’d need to burn later. This wasn’t how he’d wanted his evening to go.

Evidently this wasn’t how the girl had seen things playing out either. You’re supposed to attack me.

Holden buttoned his overcoat and kicked the fallen knife into the gutter. He didn’t need any passing pedestrians asking questions. Have you ever met a vampire?

The blush warming her cheeks spoke volumes.

Holden sighed.

Independent contractors. With a dramatic roll of the eyes, he jerked his head at her to indicate she should follow him. She snorted. Girl, if I was going to kill you, you’d be dead.

Unlikely.

In a flash, Holden grabbed her by the wrist and spun her around, forcing her face first against the side of a nearby building. He wasn’t trying to hurt her, just show her how easily he could. Tightening his grip on her, he waited until she let out a small yelp of pain before releasing her.

If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead, he repeated.

This time she didn’t argue. She wrestled her hand away from him, rubbing her wrist, a petulant expression on her face. Good. An annoyed would-be slayer might survive. A cocky one would be dead before sunrise.

So you think you’ve got what it takes to kill the big, bad undead, do you? He rolled his eyes. He might not be two hundred years old yet, but that was plenty enough time for him to have seen dozens of vampire hunters come and go. And the way they went was never pretty.

Blood-sucking assholes. Her lip curled with disdain.

Let me guess. Vampire killed your brother or something? You figured you’d hit the streets, hunt some vamps, and kill us all like we killed him. How close am I?

She fidgeted uncomfortably, and he thought she might avoid the question altogether, but she said, It was my sister.

Come on, then. Let me buy you a coffee and tell you a couple things.

Why would I come with you? I just tried to kill you.

Tried. And failed spectacularly. If you’d pulled that with a rogue, you would be a husk right now.

A rogue?

Holden bristled. This girl knew nothing. Yet somehow she’d known what he was. Either someone had sent her after him, or she had a natural gift. If it was the latter, she’d need guidance. If it was the former, he wanted to know who had it in for him.

Either way he wanted to talk to her.

Look, believe it or not I think you’re probably well-intentioned. Stupid, but well-intentioned. I might be able to help you stay alive at this game longer than one night, if you’ll let me.

Why would you help me? Especially after… Felicia nodded at his stomach. Though the wound was no longer visible, he got her meaning.

Some vampires aren’t such nice guys. And those vampires would have used your inexperience against you. You’d be someone’s midnight snack right now.

I don’t know why you care.

Honestly, neither did he. The girl had tried to gut him. Not the kind of behavior that would typically endear a young lady to him. Perhaps he was going soft in his old age. More likely, though, he knew what might happen to her if word got around that a pretty young thing was out on the streets trying to make a slayer of herself with no training.

He couldn’t let that happen.

Plus, maybe if she survived, she would replace his shirt. It would be the polite thing to do.

Inside a small coffee shop with far-too-bright lights, Felicia shifted uncomfortably on the plastic-covered banquette seat. Holden knew it would take more than a cup of coffee and a short stack of pancakes to earn her trust, but he figured it was a good enough place to start.

Is Felicia your real name? he asked.

Is Holden yours?

He nodded. Since the day my mother gave birth to me in a South London whorehouseI think it was my father’s last name, but she never told me.

Felicia winced. Good, honesty and personal details would throw her off. It was important for her to know that drinking blood and having no pulse didn’t make him a monster. He was still a person with a rich, complicated personal history. One that might make most polite people change the subject.

Holden hadn’t always been so metropolitan. He’d spent much of his human life fighting tooth and nail for scraps of bread and kitchen waste, and worked for next to nothing as a farmhand. It hadn’t been a romantic upbringing. The ways of the world had been so mysterious to him, that when he met his sire Rebecca in London, she didn’t even need to enthrall him to make him follow her into that dark alley.

He’d been a lost cause from the second she batted her long lashes at him and purred a bonjour in her rich French accent.

Rebecca was the kind of maker vampires considered themselves lucky to have. Beautiful and poised, and willing to stick around for the ugly parts of the change. She had been the one to introduce him to a lifestyle of wealth and class. But she was also ruthless and violent, and didn’t believe human beings were worth much more than the blood that animated them. She based her siring decisions solely on appearance, transforming the beauties she wanted in her menagerie, and leaving the less beautiful to die.

Several of Rebecca’s conquests had already been cruel when she found them, as pretty people often could be. As a result many of her offspring had a nasty streak that only got worse when they became vampires. Holden himself remained kind, but his closest brother, Charlie, had a soul black to the marrow. If not for the rules of the Tribunal governing what vampires could and could not do in public, Charlie might have a run a killing spree across Europe that would put a plague rat to shame.

Felicia had been speaking, but lost in thought, Holden missed most of it.

What’s a rogue? she asked, giving him a place to jump in. She was holding her coffee cup with both hands, as though trying to absorb its warmth through her palms. Compared to the confident, poised woman he’d met at the gallery, she seemed much younger now.

Vampires exist under a specific set of laws. We have a governing body called the Tribunal that determines the best course of action to keep human beings from finding out we exist, and of course their immediate need to kill us all once they learn the truth. For the most part, vampires abide by those laws, because they are what helps us survive.

For the most part.

There are vampires out there who believe we were better off before the laws. Those who think because we’re stronger and live longer that we are better. They forget we were all once humans, too, and are far more interested in killing than they are with blending in.

Rogues?

Holden nodded. Usually it’s baby vamps.

Babies? Her eyes widened with horror and he realized she thought he meant the word literally.

Sorry. I should clarify. Baby vampires are the newly undead. Those freshly turned who don’t know better. In those cases we can sometimes straighten them up before they take things too far.

And if you can’t?

We have people who will deal with them. He jerked his chin at her. People like you. Non-vampires with great ability who take care of them for us.

Up until that moment he hadn’t considered bringing Felicia to the Tribunal. But the longer he sat with her, the more he came to like the idea. She was too green for it right now. Juan Carlos would laugh him out of the room before Sig and Daria could politely say no. But with a little training and some better knowledge of what she was up against, she might become a suitable bounty hunter for the Tribunal.

Did you know what I was when you saw me at the gallery? He poured some cream into his coffee so he could watch the white clouds billow up in the black liquid. Simple pleasures didn’t end just because he didn’t like to drink the stuff anymore. He still enjoyed the sights and smells of it. Cream had been a luxury he once couldn’t afford in his life.

Felicia glanced out the window, not answering him immediately. Information was sometimes the only currency a person had, and he could tell she wasn’t sure if she wanted to give in yet. At last she made up her mind and looked back at him. Yeah, I did.

Did you know because someone told you?

Her brows knit together in an adorable look of consternation He’d offended her. Thirty minutes earlier she had jammed a knife between his ribs, yet here he was offending her. The world could be a funny thing.

I just knew, okay?

Nice try, but no. Not good enough. Tell me how you knew.

Felicia sighed and sat back in the booth seat, staring out the window once again. A fine film of grease had turned the glass opaque, causing the bright lights beyond to blur.

It’s your skin.

Because I’m pale? He snorted, shaking his head. A lot of people are pale. I’m not exactly white as the driven snow, here.

Felicia sipped her coffee and smiled at him. Something about the expression made him think she was laughing at him rather than actually showing happiness. Yes, you’re pale, but that’s not it. She traced her fingernail along her throat. You were hungry. You wanted to feed.

And? He was interested now. He’d never known he had a hunger tell, some visible sign he was on the hunt for a meal. If there was something he was doing, it would be a smart thing to correct.

Your veins. I’ve noticed when vampires haven’t fed, their veins start to bulge.

Holden’s hand lifted to mirror hers, and he touched his throat. Sure enough, the skin felt thinner, and the veins stood out markedly.

Felicia went on. I think it’s an aging thing. The same thing happens to the veins of the elderly. Your bodies start to age more rapidly when you don’t eat, like you’re going to decompose.

Having seen what happened to vampires who were denied food, Holden could attest she wasn’t far off. But how could she make that kind of assumption?

His expression must have given away what he was thinking because she gave a half shrug and let her hand drop to the table. I used to be a nurse. Once. I know a thing or two about how the body is supposed to work.

So you’ve seen enough vampires you can recognize them on sight, but I’m the first one you’ve ever confronted.

Her silence was all the confirmation he needed.

Why me?

Honestly?

I think we’re past the point of polite lies, don’t you?

She nodded. You didn’t seem all that tough.

Whatever answer he’d been expecting from her, this wasn’t it. He hadn’t known what he thought she would say, but you didn’t seem all that tough wasn’t even in his top-ten list of potentials.

I beg your pardon?

You’re pretty. You hang around art galleries and wear Armani.

Let me guess, the guy who killed your sister was some monstrous former biker who was about seven feet tall and weighed three fifty? Holden snorted and ignored how uncomfortable the topic made her. Not tough. Now I’ve heard everything.

Felicia blushed. If it makes you feel any better, clearly I was wrong.

I think it’s safe to say you’ve got a lot of things wrong, little one. Holden slid out of the booth and tossed a twenty on the table.

Wait, where are you going? Felicia’s embarrassment melted into panic. I didn’t mean to upset you. I thought you were going to tell me more about vampires. Her tone dropped low at the end, so the last word was almost a whisper.

I don’t think talking is going to help you.

But—

"I’m going to have to show you.

Chapter Three

Bold splashes of color crisscrossed the entirety of the subway platform at Canal Street, creating an oppressive wall of tags that loomed over Holden and Felicia as they waited for the train.

Felicia had her arms wrapped nervously around her middle, and Holden could tell his presence wasn’t doing anything to soothe her. This late at night it didn’t matter where in the city they were, the subways were unsafe. Especially for a beautiful young woman wearing an expensive dress.

Holden’s own attire would be an invitation for trouble, if he hadn’t undone his coat to expose his bloodied midsection. Now, instead of an upper-class couple with no sense of self-preservation, he looked like a serial killer in a nice suit leading his next victim to certain death.

Somehow that was the better of two options.

Metal crashed against concrete somewhere nearby, and Felicia jumped.

Try to relax.

She shot him a withering glare. Try to relax, she snipped back. Easy thing to say when you’re immortal and have superhuman strength.

And yet you thought I wasn’t tough enough. He smirked at her and stuffed his hands into his pockets. On the other side of the platform a young kid with stringy blond hair and filthy clothes was watching them hungrily. Holden knew what they represented to him: money, another fix, easy prey.

It was how Holden eyed up girls at Studio 54 during its heyday. Those girls had tasted like sex and stardust, the human incarnation of champagne bubbles. God bless them.

The street kid was eying the distance between them, trying to decide if it was worth it to make the trip around to them before the next train arrived. Felicia had noticed their observer as well, and was fidgeting more than before.

Stop, Holden warned. It makes you look like prey.

Felicia froze, immediately halting her uneasy swaying. She relaxed her arms and straightened her posture, and suddenly looked like someone not to be messed with. She was still trembling, but no one else would notice if they weren’t right next to her.

Squealing brakes and a faint rumble announced the arrival of an incoming Northbound 1 train. Holden gave the kid a smug flip of the bird, and the punk bared blackened teeth at him.

Not having to feed off that guttersnipe was the best thing to happen