by SM Reine
“Doubt it. Achlys wouldn’t be that sloppy. I’m aching to find out what’s really happening, though.”
“What can the Hunting Club do to help?”
“I’ve been tipped off to a business owned by a Paradisos shell corp,” Charmaine said. “We’ve been informed that the vampires have a torture closet in one of their businesses. I found a judge, got a warrant. We’re going to look at it.”
“Torture closet?” Brianna asked. “Do I wanna know what those words even mean?”
“Hell yes you do. When the OPA comes in, we want to color the Paradisos as the bad guys as much as possible.”
It was jarring to hear Charmaine talking about when the OPA was going to come in, not if.
“Or maybe they won’t take over here,” Brianna said. “You saw Achlys—she wants to keep things good. She doesn’t want licenses revoked and daylight bombs any more than we do.”
“But she has a torture closet,” Charmaine said.
“It’s an anonymous tip. There might not be a torture closet.”
“There are undisclosed details that make me believe the tipster knows what’s up. A judge won’t issue a warrant for a Paradisos business without good reason. I’m not asking if you believe me, but whether Dana and Anthony will consult on the raid.”
“I can tell you that Anthony’ll be jazzed to help,” Brianna said. That much was certain.
“And Dana?”
Brianna didn’t know anything about Dana these days. “I’m sorry, Charmaine.”
“I can’t guarantee that the OPA isn’t going to shut down vigilante licenses in Vegas even if the Paradisos and Hunting Club play nice, you know. They shut down Atlanta indefinitely. Even arrested all the vigilantes who didn’t enlist.”
“Enlist?”
“There’s room on the police force for everyone in the Hunting Club,” Charmaine said. “Las Vegas needs you guys. This place dies without you. I know it, we all know it. If we can get you and Dana and Anthony working with us legally—officially, as employees—”
“Do you want Dana and Anthony’s expertise on the raid, or are you trying to court them by showing how good it can be to work as cops?”
Charmaine folded her arms across her chest, underarm holsters and all. It was before ten a.m. and she already had sweat patches at her pits. “Can you get them to come?”
Brianna glanced down the alley. They’d gotten all the grilled vampire parts into a UV-proof box. A whole vampire murdered after starvation and a couple seconds of sun exposure in a Dumpster managed to fit into a Tupperware.
Vampire murdered by vampire.
The Paradisos had a murder closet.
And the Hunting Club would get its license revoked if the Paradisos were caught misbehaving.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Brianna said.
5
“His name is Beelzebub,” Brianna said, “and you were right. He was starved for at least a week before he died.”
“I know,” Dana said.
It was the next day. Brianna had taken that long to sleep, plot her approach to Dana, and call in reinforcements from the Hunting Club.
By Anthony’s suggestion, Dana and Brianna were at the Clark County Coroner’s Office, in a sterile space where preternatural bodies were processed. It was a state-of-the-art, heavily enchanted room meant to contain corpses that didn’t want to stay dead.
There was another room at the hospital where they took vampires in transition. That room looked like a spa, with potted plants and dim lights and neutral-colored walls. There were no spa elements here. There were embalming tools, marble slabs, and a permanent ritual space. At the moment there were also pieces of multiple bodies arrayed on the table.
“These are all vampires,” Brianna said, gesturing at the cadaver fragments with her gloved hands. “These pieces came from five dead vampires discovered in the last three weeks. Our new guy is the sixth. His name was Beelzebub.”
With her arms folded across her chest, Dana looked sympathetic as a brick wall. “Okay.”
“Do you need my help with anything?” Officer Jeffreys had been tapped to supervise them at the coroner’s office. He didn’t look much happier in the morgue than at an active crime scene.
“We don’t need help, thanks,” Brianna said.
“I’m going to run to the vending machine,” he said. “You guys like chips?”
“Yeah,” Dana said. “Funyuns.”
“Funyuns. Right.” Officer Jeffreys left so fast that he’d turned the corner of the hall before the door could even swing shut.
“Why am I looking at these six bodies?” Dana asked.
“Charmaine thinks that the Paradisos are up to something. She wants us to look for proof so that she can nail them.” And, more importantly, she wanted to build a case that would compel Dana into coming to work for the good guys with the LVMPD. But if Brianna had dared to utter such a thing aloud, Dana would have vanished in a whirl of truck exhaust and Monster energy drinks.
“Charmaine isn’t going to get enough proof from raiding the vampires’ torture closet?” Dana asked.
Brianna blinked with surprise. She hadn’t told Dana about Charmaine’s tip.
It was no surprise that Dana already knew. Dana had more connections in the Las Vegas underworld than casinos had cocktail waitresses. Nothing happened in her city that Dana didn’t know about.
“Well…I mean…”
“I can tell you that these people were killed by the same guy.” Dana flipped over one piece of a body. Brianna wasn’t certain exactly what it was—looked like an ankle stump that had been left on the grill too long. “Look here. Cut clean, one gesture, coming from the left. And look here.” She picked up a hand and showed the nub to her. “Same cut.”
“Were they all starved too?”
“No,” Dana said. “Only Beelzebub.”
“Why the different modus operandi?”
“Dunno.”
It was kind of a relief that Dana didn’t know. Her casual admission of ignorance was an important reminder that Dana really, truly was just a human being. Not a superhuman celebrity that cops should applaud.
“Is it another serial killer?” Brianna asked.
“Another one? No.” Dana gestured at the table. “Serial killers have a pathology. They’ve got rituals and intent. This looks to me like brutalization—something an asshole would do trying to make a stupid fucking statement.”
“Dana,” Brianna admonished. She held out a hand.
“Fuck off,” Dana said. “You can’t make me contribute to the Swear Jar when we aren’t at the Hunting Lodge.”
“I can do it when you’re with cops. We’ve been trying not to curse in front of them so much. Professional pride, McIntyre.”
“I’ve got all the gods-damned pride,” Dana said. “I’m not replenishing the Swear Jar. Anthony depleted it most recently—get on his ass.”
“Fine.” Brianna leaned against the edge of the table, gazing down at the assembled parts. Jaws, spines, elbows. “So you’re thinking a Paradisos enforcer cleaning up after Achlys. You don’t think it’s the Fremont Slasher again?”
Brianna only said it to see Dana’s reaction.
And what a reaction it was.
Anger rippled over Dana’s face, chased by memories of the killer that had gotten away from her years earlier. It was a shadow so dark that the stark lighting of the coroner’s office couldn’t lift its weight. “No. I’d recognize his work anywhere.”
Brianna had pushed too far. Dana turned to leave.
“Charmaine wants you on the raid,” Brianna called after Dana. “They need your help.”
“Fuck ‘em,” Dana said.
She pushed through the door right when Officer Jeffreys was trying to return. Dana ripped the bag of Funyuns out of his hand without missing a step, storming down the hallway so that Brianna and Officer Jeffreys were alone with the cadavers.
“Damn,” Brianna sighed.
Officer Jeffreys watched her
go with wide eyes and a quivering mustache. He was a cartoon caricature of a cop, missing only the donut crumbs on his face. “Is she okay?”
“Yeah. She’s fine. Just mentioned something I shouldn’t have.”
“The Fremont Slasher?” He offered Brianna a can of Slip, and she shook her head. He cracked it open to drink. “The chief arrested the killer. It was her last case before her promotion, right?”
“Chief Villanueva arrested a killer,” Brianna said. “Dana never thought it was the right one.”
“Why?”
Brianna shook her head. That was an old case—a closed case—and there was no point in reanimating those particular corpses.
The fact of the matter was that Dana McIntyre was the reason that the Fremont Slasher stopped killing, one way or another, and she hadn’t been the same since.
At this point, Brianna wasn’t certain Dana would ever be the same again.
And she definitely wasn’t interested in helping the cops chase down Paradisos.
“We’re fucked,” Brianna said.
Penny McIntyre was dripping sweat. Literally, dripping. It was like there was a faucet hidden within the thicket of curls atop her pointy skull. This was a normal occurrence for Penny. She was, as Dana said, “one stinky-ass orc,” and she spent all day working the forge, so sweating was just kinda what she did.
But today, Penny had forgotten her sweatband, and the sweat was getting in her eyes. The salt stung. It was making it hard for her to see the folds in the blade she was making. She sure hoped that her hammer was hitting all the right parts.
She’d know after the annealing. Hopefully she wouldn’t discover she’d made a total mess of her wife’s new sword and have to start over from scratch.
“That looks like shit.”
Penny turned, swiping the back of her wrist over her brow and blinking through the sweat. The blurry form in the doorway had the square-chested look of Dana McIntyre, though it was during such an unholy hour of day that she should have been asleep.
“I forgot my sweatband,” Penny said by way of explanation.
Dana lifted a hand. She had the sweatband dangling from her forefinger. “I know. Saw it in my truck this morning and thought I’d bring it in for you.”
“Oh, you.” Penny set down the blade and the hammer to greet her wife properly. She was going to have to redo the stupid sword anyway.
She reached out to take the sweatband from Dana, but her wife held it back. “Say thanks,” Dana said.
Dana was tall, but Penny was taller, and she bent over to give her spouse the kind of kiss that she deserved. Dana’s responding kiss was distracted, as though there was a disconnect between lips and mind, and she didn’t even fight back playfully when Penny snagged the sweatband from her hand.
“I figured out the enchantments on my hammer to let me work Wardbreaker’s ethereal blade properly.” Penny wiggled the sweatband over her horns so that it was seated between the keratin thrusting from her scalp and the bushy lines of her eyebrows. She fluffed her curls out over the top of the sweatband.
“Great. Can’t wait for my sword, assuming it won’t look so shitty when you’re done,” Dana said.
Penny mopped her face again and turned to look at the sword. “It looks perfect.” Well, almost. Perfect for most sword-makers. Not perfect for Penny. She sighed. “You’re right. It’s a fuck-up. I’ll trash it and start over.”
“Great,” Dana said again.
Penny picked up her hammer, but didn’t swing. Her initial excitement at seeing Dana had cooled so rapidly.
It was always like this now—this distance, this quiet. Dana only became her typical levels of bombastic when she was trying to annoy the cops these days. Otherwise, she always seemed simultaneously angry and drained. Angry wasn’t new. Drained was a problem.
The bigger problem was the fact that Penny could ask what was wrong a thousand times and never get a straight answer.
“A vampire got killed this morning,” Dana said. “Probably held captive and starved for at least a week beforehand.”
Penny’s fingers went limp. She almost dropped the hammer. “Serial killer?”
“Nah.”
She swallowed hard and nodded. It was hot in the forge behind the Hunting Club—so absurdly hot—but she suddenly felt as though she were swaddled in its warmth. She was a mossy rock at the base of a volcano, safe and secure. She was not vulnerable to a killer of vampires.
“He’s killing people with a blade,” Dana said. “Can I get your opinion on what type?”
“Yes!” Penny couldn’t help but let her excitement show. It was a quick swing from fearful to giddy, but come on, when was the last time Dana had actually asked Penny to help on a case?
Dana’s skin was shining with sweat now too. She had to wipe her cell phone screen dry after pulling it out of her pocket. Then she showed Penny the photos.
There were bodies, and lots of them. The photos seemed to have come from an array of crime scenes, not just one.
Penny felt light-headed. “Ooh,” she said.
Dana was watching her closely with that look of concern, those warm brown eyes that Penny had fallen so madly in love with. “You okay?”
“Yeah, just a little hot.”
“Want to have this talk in the main building?”
“No.” Penny was safe in her forge. This was her home. The place where she had crafted hundreds of pieces of armor and hundreds more weapons. Not just for the Hunting Club and its far-flung associates, but for the OPA, and for moviemakers, collectors, demon hunters, and sidhe. Penny was the finest orc craftswoman on the planet, and leaving her forge would never, ever make her feel better. “Those are thin cuts on the bodies. Really thin cuts.”
“Razors?”
“No,” Penny said slowly, zooming in on the police photos. Sweat slid down her brow. “Thinner.”
“There’s hacking marks,” Dana said.
“Yes, but I don’t think that this was a blade. Not a tangible physical blade.”
“Magic?”
“You sound disappointed,” Penny said.
“I was running on the theory that it’s a Paradisos enforcer cleaning up after Achlys.”
“Vampires don’t do magic.”
“Exactly. Since Vegas is ninety percent vampires, your information narrows things down a lot. You’re fucking brilliant.”
She wrapped an arm around Penny’s thick waist and jerked her close. Dana was solid for a human, muscle layered under fat, deadly as any of the great land predators. And when her eyes got all hot with love, she was always looking at Penny.
Dana nuzzled under Penny’s jaw like she didn’t even care that she was sweaty. She said that she liked Penny best when she was in her element, working hard at her craft. But Penny found it hard to believe that this hunter—this legendary detective, more myth than human being—could find a soggy, sweaty, smelly orc as attractive as she claimed.
“This is so nice, but you should get ready for the raid,” Penny said.
And the heat was gone from Dana’s eyes. The distance was back. “What raid?”
“The one Brianna told me about?” Penny stepped back, butting up against the anvil. “With Charmaine?”
“I’m not going on that raid.”
“It sounds like the cops could really use your help.”
“They want me to work for them,” Dana said. “They’ve always wanted me to work for them.”
Penny’s stubby nails picked at the leather braiding on her hammer. “Maybe you should work for them. I’ve been hearing whispers about the OPA banning vigilantes in all of Nevada, and—”
“And if they do, nothing changes for me. Nothing. Vegas belongs to my family. Always has, always will.”
“Our family,” Penny said softly.
Dana’s eyebrows lowered over her eyes. “What?”
“Vegas belongs to our family,” she said, “and part of protecting it means that we work within the law. Right? I mean, yes, if some fas
cist took control of the OPA—”
“The OPA are total fascists.”
“—then it wouldn’t make sense to obey, but they’re the good guys. And we love Charmaine.” They’d supported the police chief through her public transition from male to female identity, driven her to the courthouse after gender correction surgery, celebrated with tequila when her name change finally went through. They’d run with her on full moons when she was a giant fanged coyote. They had killed vampires beside her, and trusted her with the Hunting Club’s oldest secrets. “Working with Charmaine officially, legally, as an employee… It would be an honor for both of us.”
Dana gave Penny a blank look.
Blank was a bad sign.
See, when Dana got angry, she got loud. She was “as subtle as a punch to the fucking face,” as Dana described herself. That kind of anger was a comfortable place for Dana to reside within.
When she got quiet, she’d gone past anger to somewhere else.
Somewhere Penny couldn’t follow.
“I’ll do the raid,” Dana said. “For you. But only because I’d kill vampires anyway.”
“Thank you,” Penny tried to say.
But Dana had already left the forge, and even the warm, heavy air wasn’t enough to make Penny feel anything but alone.
6
Everything with the police was regimented. The way that they prepared their armor, ammunition, and body cameras reeked of careful competence. There was no visceral element to this. No cans of beer and clanging of swords against bucklers and hyping themselves up with adrenaline.
Crashing a human-owned business was a civilized, boring procedure that would have involved a few minutes of snooping around while managers looked on. With vampires, things never went that smoothly.
So the police were real careful.
“Body armor,” Chief Villanueva said, and people put on body armor.
Dana didn’t.
What the fuck was she going to do with a ballistics jacket? It might slow down a vampire with a gun, but a slow vampire was still faster than the living. The trick wasn’t to cover up your soft-and-squishies with ballistic material. The trick was to never land in a firefight with someone who had preternatural speed.