Drawing Dead: An Urban Fantasy Thriller (Dana McIntyre Must Die Book 1)

by SM Reine

  7

  Dana woke up at some point later, unsure how much time had elapsed and unsure why she wasn’t dead. She’d suffered blood loss often enough to know what it felt like. The pounding heart, the weakness, the chills. She was sweating as though she was mid-marathon.

  Altogether, it was a suite of terrible symptoms.

  She’d have preferred to be dead.

  Dana lifted her dizzy skull to see a hole in the drywall. Presumably that was how she’d left the hallway to end up in another room. She’d broken glass shelving on the way, scattering wax museum-branded merch across the floor in the process.

  Now she sprawled on her back by the cash register of the gift shop, uncomfortable in her ballistic vest, feeling like she was bleeding to death.

  Which she probably was.

  Dana applied pressure to her throat. The wounds that Achlys had torn into her were smaller than she expected, especially since the balefire failsafe had been embedded deep. Must have been a not-so-lucky slip of the fang.

  A small, hesitant voice spoke up from behind her. “Are you okay?”

  She jerked upright, twisting to see who had spoken.

  There was a girl with mounds of soft hair sitting against the counter. Couldn’t tell if the hair was brown or black with such limited lighting. Early twenties, maybe, although the fact she wasn’t wearing a spot of makeup meant she could have been anywhere from sixteen to thirty.

  The only weapon Dana still had was fucking pepper spray. Pepper spray! But she took it out and aimed it at the girl just in case. Every moment Dana could give herself to escape another attack could be a moment that would save her life.

  “The fuck are you?” Dana asked.

  “Nissa,” she said. “My name is Nissa. Nissa Royal.” She pulled on her shirt to straighten it out, and Dana saw that it was a Judex uniform. Not one of the skimpy cocktail-waitress things but a professional button-down. “I’m a night guard.”

  She didn’t look hostile, but sometimes those types presented the deadliest threat.

  Dana didn’t lower the pepper spray.

  “I saw you fighting the vampires in the Red Carpet Room,” Nissa Royal said. “I saw what you did to Achlys, shooting her and…what was that white stuff?”

  Dana swallowed. Swallowing should have been more structurally difficult. She could have sworn that Achlys had gotten her esophagus. But here she was, breathing and swallowing and speaking, even as blood poured over her hand. “Balefire charm.”

  “Balefire could have killed both of you.” Nissa’s wide eyes were rimmed with thick eyelashes. Maybe it was the eyelashes that reminded Dana of Penny. Or the curly hair. There was something soft and vulnerable about Nissa that was identical to Penny, even though she was physically smaller, and nowhere near as green.

  She wasn’t Penny. She was a night guard in vampire territory. A threat.

  Dana’s eyes flicked around the room.

  The knife replicas wouldn’t be sharp enough. Replica award statuettes? Not heavy enough.

  A pole meant to hold up velvet rope? That would work.

  Dana got to her feet. It made the blood rush from her head, and she feared she’d fall over again. But she unclipped the velvet ropes and hefted the pole. It weighed a solid twenty pounds, at least. Decent bludgeon.

  “You saw me?” Dana rasped. “You saw us fighting, and you didn’t help?”

  “What could I do?” Nissa seemed genuinely curious as she stood up too. She was shorter than Dana, very petite. She looked like she’d dart off into a mouse hole to hide if there was one loud sound.

  “You could have opened the fucking doors for me.”

  “So you could have run away?”

  “So I could have pulled in more people to help me kill those fucks,” Dana said.

  Nissa gazed at Dana with her mouth open and hands folded over her heart. “You are a monster.” It didn’t sound like an insult.

  “There’s worse out there than me.” The sounds of scuffling hit the door to the gift shop. Bodies thudded on the other side. “Hell, there’s worse about ten feet away. Get in the corner and don’t move.”

  “Will you kill me?” Nissa asked. Still no fear. Anxiety, frayed nerves, but not legitimate fear.

  “I’m gonna keep an eye on you while I kill them,” Dana said.

  The doors exploded open. Sunlight bathed the room. UV bombs had detonated—a lot of them.

  Charmaine Villanueva and Anthony Morales stood on the other side of the doorway, framed by blazing daylight and dust from vampires going up in ash. Bloody, bruised, hands stained with gunpowder. But alive.

  Beyond them, cops were on the ground. Some were applying pressure to their wounded brethren, barking orders to each other, holding the doors in case there were more attacks.

  “You’re a fucking asshole, McIntyre,” Anthony said when he saw Dana.

  “Shut your pie-hole, cunt-face,” Dana said.

  He laughed and swung an arm around her for a half-hug.

  Dana glanced at the corner for Nissa. The mousy girl was wedged into shadow where UV couldn’t touch her. She had gone pale—or maybe her skin was colorless because, Dana was realizing for the first time, that she was bloodless.

  “Arrest her for questioning,” Dana said to Chief Villanueva.

  But Nissa had already vanished into the night, slipping around the gift shop door.

  “Get her!” Anthony released Dana to give chase, but Charmaine blocked him. He slammed against the bar of her arm. “She’s one of the Paradisos who attacked me in Henderson!”

  “And she obviously didn’t attack us tonight because she’s still alive!” Charmaine shoved Anthony back.

  “Did you get Achlys?” Dana asked.

  The chief stiffened. “Achlys? Achlys was here?”

  “She attacked me, yeah.” Dana spread her bloodied fingers, just in case they hadn’t noticed the severity of her wound. “This was a trap.”

  “No shit,” the chief snapped.

  “A trap from the Paradisos!”

  “Try to prove it,” Charmaine said. “Seriously. Prove it. In the meantime…”

  Rolling red and blue lights had appeared outside the gift shop’s exit. Ambulances. Amazing how fast EMTs responded to an officers-down call.

  Men rushed in with gurneys. Dana backed away, snagging Anthony’s collar to pull him beside her. “They should look at you,” he said.

  “Our healer’s better,” she said, which was true.

  She had a growing, painful suspicion that she wasn’t going to need any healing.

  Charmaine thrust a finger toward Dana. “I’m gonna need you to make a statement, McIntyre. And your body camera—”

  “Achlys ripped it off before I caught footage of her,” Dana said. “I’ll make a statement. I’ll testify too, if you can get her into court. But first I need to get to my healer.” She pointed to her bloody throat, still clasped underneath a slick hand.

  Sympathy flitted through Charmaine’s eyes. “Both of you better be at the precinct in the morning. First light. My office. You’ll find me behind the huge fucking stack of paperwork taking an angry call from Mayor Hekekia.”

  “Got it,” Dana said.

  She shoved past the EMTs to get out. Anthony chased after her. “Dana. Dana! Get back here!”

  But she was moving so fast she couldn’t stop. She was carried on the momentum of her adrenaline.

  Her fingers were no longer pressed against mangled wounds, and she wasn’t bleeding.

  Anthony had to sprint to catch up with her. He still didn’t get to Dana until she was already a block up the Strip, standing underneath construction scaffolding where a casino was being renovated. She’d run into half a dozen tourists without actually seeing them.

  He leaped in front of her and braced his hands on her shoulders.

  “The fuck is your problem?” Anthony asked. “You say you need a healer before you can cooperate with the cops, and then you run?”

  “Yeah, I’m running,”
Dana said.

  She yanked off the ballistic vest with the sound of tearing Velcro and jangling buckles. She used both hands to open the neck of her shirt. And she exposed the skin underneath to Anthony—the bare, healed skin, which was rapidly losing color as her body processed the last ounce of blood it would ever produce.

  “I got bitten by a master vampire,” she said, “and now I’m going to become one.”

  Achlys’s glassy penthouse was not going to cut it for recovery after that battle.

  They retired to the Bunker instead. Capital B, just like that, because it was one of the Paradisos’s underground nightclubs. This particular one was war-themed. Its dimly lit walls were decorated with vintage pin-ups of buxom women in high-waisted bikinis. The ancient jukebox was always playing quietly jazzy music, except when it wasn’t, because Achlys was a sucker for Garth Brooks.

  Aside from the shackles against the wall, and the unwilling human victims struggling within those shackles, it looked like any other nightclub with a quaint aesthetic.

  “Fuck her,” Achlys said.

  At least, Nissa thought that was what she said. Achlys was missing most of her jaw and tongue. There were a few sloppy, dripping holes in her throat as well.

  Nissa was entranced watching her master’s tantrum as she raged through the Bunker. Muscles worked in Achlys’s throat, dried from exposure to air. Balefire had cauterized parts of the wounds. The only reason that damaged tissue existed was because Achlys had clawed the balefire out of her body, losing a fingertip in the process.

  Their resident witch, Momoe Esquerer, had managed to capture the balefire after it burned through the floor of the wax museum. Achlys remained mangled. It might be permanent—an idea Nissa found enchanting.

  “What shall I do with this?” Tormid was cradling a glass sphere in his palm that now contained the bead of balefire. It was hard to believe that Dana McIntyre had once contained such destruction in her body.

  I mean, damn. Wow. The woman had been walking around with balefire in her throat. Because the vampire hunter knew that her throat would be vulnerable against her quarry. Because she’d, presumably, prefer to unleash a near-unstoppable force of destruction upon the Earth rather than get changed into a vampire.

  Because Dana McIntyre was even more of a monster than Shawn Wyn.

  Nissa hadn’t thought it was possible.

  “We’ll need a way to contain it permanently,” Mohinder mused aloud. “Yucca Mountain, perhaps. The safeguards in the nuclear disposal area should be enough to protect the vessel from shattering.”

  “And if the vessel does shatter, it will burn through a lot of atomic material to multiply its apocalyptic potential.” Nissa was trying not to smile. Why did she feel like smiling? Not a happy smile, exactly, but a dopey drugged-up smile, as though someone had just shot a gallon of lethe into her shriveled veins.

  “Blood!” Achlys said in a garbled voice.

  Tormid took her into his arms. He gazed at her with pain in his eyes—pain and only the faintest hint of revulsion—as he tipped his head to the side, exposing his jugular.

  There was no tenderness when Achlys snapped. She ripped into him, and he groaned deep in his chest.

  She drank sloppily, running the remaining shreds of her tongue around the wound, smearing her hands through it, raking her fingers down her injuries to ensure the blood was applied directly.

  “You’ll need more blood than Tormid alone can supply.” Mohinder took chains off of a woman limp against the wall—someone who had been captive for so long that she barely even cried when he picked her up.

  They usually took better care of their feeders, but this particular woman had been caught stealing from one of Achlys’s properties. Humans who transgressed against Paradisos were given ample time to regret it. There was no limit to the punishments they inflicted on such criminals.

  Mohinder stroked his knuckles down the human’s cheek. He had put silver rings on each of his fingers that had long metal claws at the end. The woman whimpered when she felt the cold kiss of metal.

  Achlys shoved Tormid away. It took perceptible effort for her to keep from draining him dry. “Next.”

  “Whatever you want, my master,” Mohinder said.

  His claws flashed.

  The woman’s throat was just…gone.

  And all the emotions that Nissa’s euphoria had been holding momentarily at bay poured in.

  The humans’ feelings drove into her skull, pounding against the folds of her gray matter, making her stomach squeeze into the tiniest ball. If Nissa had ever drunk human blood, she was certain that her body would have retched it up in that moment.

  The woman that Mohinder eviscerated had been stealing from the casino to fuel a drug habit. The drug habit had been forced upon her by an older brother, who had begun slipping meth into her drinks when she was just twelve years old. That woman had never known a day in her life where she hadn’t been abused, in pain, struggling.

  And now this.

  The others kept in the Bunker had similar stories. No matter how hard Nissa pressed the heels of her palms against her temples, she couldn’t get them out.

  That guy who had been counting cards to impress a girl.

  The shoplifter who had never broken a law before, and thought it wasn’t a big deal to take one six hundred-dollar purse from vampires.

  Even the scuzzy contractor who’d scammed them while renovating bathrooms had beloved dogs at home. He didn’t know if his dogs were okay. He assumed that his neighbor would check in on them, but he wasn’t sure, and he’d been trapped in the Bunker so long that they’d be out of food.

  These were criminals who had wronged Achlys, and who wholeheartedly deserved whatever punishment she deemed appropriate.

  But their pain was as tangible to Nissa as if it came from within her.

  “I’m going upstairs,” someone said. “Come with me?”

  Nissa squinted over her shoulder. She saw a radiant man with gemstone skin.

  Shawn Wyn.

  “What are you doing here?” Even with his throat wrecked, Tormid barked the question with authority. “You’ve been told where you’re expected to be, Shawn! Protect our guest like Achlys told you!”

  “He’s at the tables right now, having all the gratis drinks,” Shawn said. “Thought I’d check in on my partner during the downtime.” He ruffled Nissa’s hair and she wondered how long he would survive in her closet without sustenance.

  “Upstairs,” Mohinder said, “now. Nissa has nothing to do with you.”

  Achlys lifted her head from her meal. “Go,” she said with a tongue that was more complete than it had been earlier. It was a tone that Nissa recognized. A tone that said she wouldn’t ask one more time.

  Shawn breezed upstairs in a flurry of violin strings and wildflower pollen. Nissa watched his hair flitting around the corner. He was scary in the way that big cats were scary.

  Dana McIntyre was a breed of scary that Nissa had never seen before.

  “I’ll have my pack hunt McIntyre,” Tormid said. Achlys bowed over the meth addict, once more deaf to the surrounding world. “They’ll set out immediately.”

  “Is she that dangerous?” Nissa asked hopefully.

  “More dangerous than you can imagine.” Mohinder turned his cool red eyes upon her. “Dana McIntyre is the leader of the Hunting Club. She has made it her life’s mission to eradicate all vampires.”

  Nissa felt an unfamiliar fluttering in her chest. “All vampires?” she whispered, pressing her palm against her breastbone. What is that feeling?

  Achlys whipped her head away from the woman again. Now the human was melted over Achlys’s forearm, back bent at an impossible angle. Most of the holes on Achlys’s throat were gone. She could speak more coherently. “Don’t be afraid, Nissa. I promised I would take care of you.”

  Nissa wasn’t afraid.

  “Dana McIntyre presents little threat to the murder. She’s more myth than human,” Tormid said. “Half of what
they say about her can’t be true.”

  “It’s all true,” Mohinder insisted.

  “Sister to God?”

  “Truth.”

  “God,” Nissa echoed. Her euphoria was returning, sheltering her from the humans’ pain again, and she clutched at it desperately. “Which god?” Triadists acknowledged three: a god of demons, a god of angels, and a god of the creatures of Earth known as gaeans. Vampires were gaean, like shifters.

  “Gaean,” Mohinder said.

  “So is Dana god-blooded?”

  “Mohinder might tell you that she is,” Tormid said. “But it’s hokum. Dana McIntyre is only human.”

  Only human, yet still capable of reducing Achlys to…this. A savage beast that had discarded the addict’s lifeless body and was looking for more.

  Mohinder took the contractor from his chains. He was not tender about stroking his claws on this man; he waited barely an instant before ripping out the victim’s throat and tossing him into Achlys’s starving arms.

  The contractor’s fear bounced off of Nissa’s glow. Thinking of Dana was shielding her from the pain.

  “Believe her power or not, Dana McIntyre will one day kill all vampires,” Mohinder said. “All of us. Unless we manage to kill her first.”

  Achlys’s tongue darted out to lap a line of blood off of the contractor’s throat. “She’s already dead. I pumped her full of enough venom to turn a dozen mortals into bloodless. Give her a couple of days for the cravings to set in and she’ll be one of us.”

  And then Nissa realized why her chest was fluttering like that.

  For the first time since she’d died, her heart was trying to beat.

  8

  Empathy powers meant that the casino floor was an unpleasant place for Nissa most nights, but she felt nothing hours after the LVMPD’s failed raid upon the wax museum. She was surrounded by mortals who were surely riddled with anger as their bank accounts emptied on the roulette table, and yet Nissa still felt…nothing.

  Except that fluttering.

  She couldn’t take her hand off of her heart. It was only beating once every few minutes, but it was beating.