by SM Reine
A vampire fatted on blood had many functional systems in their body. Sometimes that meant a beating heart, sometimes that meant a digestive system that produced something resembling feces, sometimes it meant crying.
Nissa had never been able to consume human blood, yet part of her body was functioning and her empathy was dulled.
Because of her.
Dana McIntyre, scourge of the bloodless.
Whether myth or human or somewhere in between, she had been an impressive sight to behold in the gift shop. Nissa had been staggered to drag the woman from the shattered drywall to realize that she was, despite the head trauma, still breathing.
Nissa had kneeled over her for a few moments, gazing into Dana’s unconscious face. Nissa wasn’t qualified to rule people attractive or unattractive. Even before she’d died, she’d found it difficult to see people with sexual interest. But she had found something about Dana unusually compelling.
The hunter was muscled and fat, like an Olympic strongman. That alone would have been fascinating, even if Nissa hadn’t longed to drink the blood that poured from the wounds in her throat.
Dana had survived a fight against a master vampire that Nissa had considered impossible to defeat.
As it turned out, Achlys was immortal, but not invulnerable.
Funny.
Then Dana had stood. She had been tall, though some of that was attributable to her boots. She didn’t move with feline grace, like Shawn, or serpentine speed, like a vampire. She moved like…a killer. A human.
A murderer.
Someone who knew what it took to kill, and was willing to do it.
Nissa was so lost within her fantasies as she drifted through Judex that she was startled when Shawn’s power brushed against her again. The musical chiming of unseelie magic was unusual enough in Las Vegas to rouse Nissa’s dulled senses.
Shawn was standing at the top of an escalator, right between two potted trees, looking down at the casino floor.
Nissa caught herself riding the escalator up to his side.
“Hey, baby girl,” he said, flashing a grin at her. He was plastered in enough glamours to make him look passably human. He’d also swept the silk of his hair into a high ponytail, exposing the line of his throat. He liked to tease the bloodless with his pulse point.
Nissa considered suggesting that he call her something other than baby girl. She was a girl, but not a baby, and certainly not his baby girl. Given Shawn’s temperament, telling him off might have been a good way to get a blast of unseelie magic to the face. She decided to opt for a less confrontational response.
“What are you doing here?” Nissa asked.
Shawn sauntered over to brace a hand on the railing beside her. “The better question is, why aren’t you down in the Bunker feeding?”
She wished that she hadn’t been so easily embarrassed. She wished her guts didn’t burn at the implication of his question. “You know why.” Everybody knew why Nissa didn’t drink human blood.
“I retrieved the guy Achlys wanted from a locals’ casino,” Shawn said, casually tipping the conversation away from Nissa’s shortfalls. “Harold Hopkins. A microbiologist employed by Hardwick Research.”
Hardwick Research was an enormous medical science company best known for creating a treatment for shifters’ silver poisoning. They employed half the scientists in the world, it seemed. Including Harold Hopkins.
“Achlys wanted us to get a microbiologist?” Nissa asked, frowning down at the crowd. “Why?”
“You tell me,” he said. “You’re the one who drills into peoples’ heads.”
“It’s more like they drill into mine.”
“Then get drilled, baby girl,” Shawn murmured into her ear. His hands skimmed over her shoulders. “Get drilled.”
Fucking pervert.
All sidhe were perverts, though. It was a species attribute. Probably hard not to turn into perverts when strength of magic was based upon physicality, especially sex, but that didn’t mean Nissa wanted his magic anywhere near her.
She and Shawn were far enough above the crowd that she didn’t need to feel the emotions of the people below. But she could make her empathy stronger by focusing on it. Opening herself to that many mundanes was like plunging her hand into a bucket of needles looking for one that poked in a specific way.
“I can’t find him,” she said.
“He’s a gambling addict,” Shawn supplied helpfully.
That narrowed it down. Nissa spotted a fifty-something white guy stooped over the video blackjack. Blackjack was a game often favored by gambling addicts; of all the games in a casino, it was the one with the highest odds of success.
Just a brush of her mind against his made Nissa’s vision swim. Harold Hopkins was thoroughly drunk. It was a mixed blessing, since neither of them could feel despair with a dozen cocktails sitting in an empty stomach.
Nissa shoved him away, pressing a hand against her brow and groaning. “Addict is right. He feels a lot like the meth head that Achlys…” Nissa didn’t finish that sentence. It was doubtful anyone was listening, but one wrong word in the wrong place would land the chief of police in their lap again.
It had been a mistake to let Harold Hopkins into Nissa’s head. She couldn’t pry him out now. He was stuck to the inner edges of her skull like gum on the underside of a park bench.
She saw inside him. She saw his truth.
His wife had died of terminal cancer. All those preternatural bugs that Hardwick Research had fixed, and they hadn’t been able to save Mrs. Hopkins from the fast-growing mass on her brain.
And Mrs. Hopkins had refused to allow herself to be turned into a vampire. She hadn’t believed that her husband would be able to cure her of that disease any more than he could cure her of cancer.
“He’s been researching vampires,” Nissa said. The words spilled out of her unbidden. “He’s making…gods, what is he making?”
He had argued with his wife about work in the final weeks.
I’m making a cure for vampirism at Hardwick Research, he’d said. If you let the Paradisos turn you, then I’ll be able to turn you back as soon as the cure’s research is complete.
Soon isn’t enough, Mrs. Hopkins had said.
She had died.
And now Nissa was weeping without a single tear, her whole body wracked by Harold Hopkins’s grief.
“Look at you, getting all soft over him,” Shawn said. “You’re the worst vampire I’ve ever met. That’s a compliment.”
It didn’t feel like a compliment. And she wasn’t crying because she was soft over him, but because Harold Hopkins was soft over himself. If he hadn’t been immersed in video blackjack and cocktails, he would have been sobbing.
Harold Hopkins’s grief had slowed down his cure research. Without results, Achlys had gotten impatient. That must have been why she’d arranged for Shawn to abduct him from his home in Henderson.
“Achlys set up a lab for Harold Hopkins to finish his research into a vampirism cure here at the casino,” Nissa said. She’d glimpsed it in his mind. “Why would she want a cure?”
“I don’t care if he can cure vampires or not,” Shawn said. “It’s so boring, babysitting this tragic sad-sack.”
“Then why don’t you kill him?” Nissa asked.
Shawn looked at her. He really looked at her, his gaze sinking into hers. Even a glamoured sidhe still had penetrating gemstone eyes. Nissa’s eyes were colorless by comparison, she knew. She’d been told that making eye contact with her was akin to staring at a mirror without a reflection in it.
“Do you want him dead?” he asked.
“I don’t like him. He’s pathetic. And I know you like killing.” Nissa had been watching him for a long time, and there was no doubt in her mind that Shawn liked killing the way that Harold Hopkins liked twenty-one. He had become Achlys’s enforcer strictly because he would kill anyone, literally anyone, and he’d do it messily, with a huge grin on his face. “You say I’m being soft ov
er him, so I assume that means you think it’s better to be hard. So be hard. Kill him.”
“Killing a scientist that Achlys wants is suicide,” Shawn said.
“Achlys is going to kill you sooner or later.” Nissa edged toward him until she could see her pallid face in the shiny silver buttons on Shawn’s silk shirt. “Don’t you want to die having fun?”
“It wouldn’t be fun to kill him. Look at the guy. He hasn’t done anything wrong, and he’s all…soggy.” Shawn flicked his fingers down at Hopkins’s bald pate. The man had indeed started to cry over the video blackjack machine, and a cocktail waitress responded by bringing him another Tom Collins. “Poor fuck.”
That sounded a lot like sympathy. The exact same kind of sympathy that Shawn had just jabbed at Nissa for expressing.
“I can’t believe you wouldn’t find a way to enjoy the scientist,” Nissa said. “I’d enjoy watching you enjoy him.”
Shawn’s face illuminated. “You know, you could do the killing. There’s a first time for everything, after all.” Shawn leaned over Nissa, and there was that grin, making him look like a complete psychopath.
“I can’t,” Nissa said. She wanted to step away, but his manic eyes were magnets. She wanted to explore the depths of his madness.
“We could kill him together,” Shawn said, stroking her wrist. “Or you could watch me kill him. Is that what you want, baby girl?”
“What do you want, baby boy?” Nissa asked.
His nose wrinkled at having his nickname turned back around on him. He couldn’t seem to decide if she was flirting or not. (She was not.) “I’ll tell you the truth. Keep it to yourself?”
“Sure.”
“It’s dangerous being a sidhe ejected from the Middle Worlds,” Shawn said. “There’s too much black-market value to my appendages, especially my bones. I have to be more valuable than the sum of my parts. Achlys needed a killer, so I became a killer.” It was the calmest, most cogent thing he’d ever said to Nissa.
For the first time, she realized that the madness was a mask. There was nothing hiding in his eyes except a man trying to protect his own ass.
She straightened and stepped back from him, her skin rapidly resuming its normal room temperature.
“Tell you what.” He sauntered closer to her, refusing to yield any floor space to Nissa. The warmth of a summer day weighed against her pallid flesh. “I’ll take care of the microbiologist for you if you’ll give me what I want.”
“And what’s that?” Nissa braced herself for an answer that involved blowjobs.
“Support.” His fingers tugged against the pocket on her hip. Nissa looked down to see that he was sliding a hotel room key card into it. The room number was scrawled on its envelope. “I’m ambitious, Nissa. Vegas would be the perfect place to start a new court.”
“Like in the Middle Worlds?” Nissa couldn’t help but sound as skeptical as she felt.
“Better than the Middle Worlds. And much better than what Las Vegas has right now. Achlys sucks, literally. We both saw what’s in her Bunker and we know that the vamps do worse than that,” Shawn said. “Wouldn’t it be better if a sidhe took over and left the vamps in the dust?”
She folded her arms, creating a barrier between their chests. “I’m a vampire.”
“You’re not like them. And that’s why I like you—you like vampires as little as I do.”
“I don’t know why you’d think that.” Wasn’t Nissa loyal? Had she ever made a single misstep with the Paradisos? She kept her head down, did the jobs she was told, supported the murder. “I also don’t know how you think you can wrest control away from Achlys.”
“She has the infrastructure in place for a decent court. She’s got the businesses, the cash flow, the employees. I’ve just got to bump her out. If she signs everything over to me before the Hunting Club kills her, who’s going to argue with me?”
“I could argue with you,” Nissa said.
“You won’t,” Shawn said. He teasingly added, “Vampire hater.”
“You keep saying that!”
“Because it’s a fact. You don’t kill humans, and I know it’s not because you’ve got a delicate stomach like people say.”
“It’s the empathy,” Nissa said.
“Cute, baby girl, really cute. Look: I want you. You know how to get around Achlys’s information systems better than anyone else. We’d be great partners. And we can start it with a…private rendezvous, if that’s what you want.” His fingers trailed over her hip pocket, where she now had the key card. “I know empathy isn’t stopping you from having fun.” Shawn’s lips curled up at the edges. “How’s Beelzebub?”
Her hair stood on end. She started backing away. “Nobody has seen him in weeks.”
“About two weeks,” he said. “His body was found in a trash can by the cops just yesterday.”
Nissa’s mouth fell open.
Beelzebub is dead? But I let him go.
She stared at Shawn, trying to understand what he knew, what he had done.
One of Achlys’s vampires was dead, and Shawn knew before anybody else. And he seemed to think that Nissa should have already known, too.
Shawn had killed Beelzebub.
Shawn knew Nissa had held him captive first.
Her heel caught on the edge of the escalator. She stumbled. “Careful,” Shawn said, eyes glittering. She stepped onto the down escalator. “See you in the microbiologist’s room tonight?”
Her heart gave a single, painful beat.
Shawn needs to die.
“It’s a date, baby boy,” Nissa said.
9
Dana sat on the edge of the med bay’s bed, feet swinging over the side. She held her arms still so that she wouldn’t disturb the blood pressure cuff or the fingertip pulse oximeter. The machine measuring her vitals screeched alarmingly.
“So I’m good, then?” Dana asked when Anthony unplugged it from the wall.
“Sure,” Anthony said. “You’re as good as dead.”
She already knew that for a fact. Dana’s whole body felt so…quiet.
Her heart had stopped beating a couple hours earlier, right around the time that sunshine had started blasting the Hunting Lodge’s concrete walls. Weirdly, it hadn’t hurt. At some point Dana had exhaled and felt no urge to inhale again. She’d taken a big dump in the toilet, pissed her bladder dry, and didn’t want to eat or drink.
This was only the beginning.
People didn’t get turned into vampires all that often. It was a death sentence if a vampire changed someone without consent. The law was seldom broken; most vamps weren’t strong enough to make another of their kind. Only some subspecies even had the capability.
It seemed that Achlys had both the ability and the strength.
And now Dana was dying.
“How long’s it take to start wanting to eat people?” Anthony asked, ripping the blood pressure cuff off her arm.
“It takes most bloodless two days after death for the cravings to kick in. There’s still some blood reserves until the expulsion, plus you kinda go into shock.” These were facts Dana knew from rote. She could have written a textbook on how humans turned into vampires.
“The expulsion. Oh God.” Anthony grimaced at her. “We’re gonna want to put you in a room we can hose down for that, huh?”
“Or I can do it on Mayor Hekekia’s doorstep,” Dana suggested. “Make it a form of political protest. ‘You’re letting the OPA harass us, you dickface! Cut that shit out! Now here are every one of my mortal fluids exploded out of my ass. Enjoy.’”
“You can pretend you’re fine with this, but you don’t have to,” Anthony said.
“Pretending? Who’s pretending?”
“I took you and Marion to prom,” he said. “You were making these exact jokes to me when Marion ran off with some random jackass and you felt abandoned.”
“Did I joke about shitting on the floor of the ballroom? Really?”
“It was something like that,
” Anthony said. “You get extra-puerile when you’re distressed.”
Dana wasn’t distressed. What was there to be distressed about? She’d spent her adult life dedicated to fighting vampires. She killed vampires on sight whether or not she had a warrant for their deaths. And for the last few years, Dana had been wracked by nightmares of Penny killed by vampires every single gods-damned night.
Now she was becoming one.
She was turning into the bloodless.
“I’m so fucking happy I don’t have words to describe it,” Dana said. “It’s pushing me to do something I should have done a long time ago.”
“Turn into a bigger asshole than ever?”
“Kill all the vampires in Vegas,” Dana said. Everyone knew that was what she wanted. She’d never made a secret of her purpose on this Earth.
Anthony laughed. “You’ve never actually meant that.”
“The fuck I haven’t. The Fremont Slasher is still out there, Morales. He’s lying low, but he’s in Las Vegas. I won’t know he’s gone until every last vamp is dead.”
“Right.” He rolled his eyes.
Dana warmed with anger. “The Fremont Slasher has sent me a present every goddamn year since he vanished.”
“Wait, what? A present?” Doubt flickered over his face. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I didn’t want it to get back to Penny. I don’t want her to be afraid.” Dana fished a locket out from her vast cleavage. She popped it open to show a curl of brown hair inside. “I get a new curl every year. It just shows up somewhere, like pinned to my door or wedged in my pickup’s window. I never catch him doing it, but I know it’s him.”
“Is that Penny’s hair?”
Dana nodded. “He cut several curls off when he was holding her. The only way he could still be taunting me with her hair is if he’s free.”
“Or if he has an accomplice with a sick sense of humor,” Anthony said.
“It’s him,” Dana said. “I know it’s him.”
Someone knocked on the door. Anthony opened it. Charmaine Villanueva stood on the other side, wearing a badge on her belt and underarm holsters over a sweat-dampened button-down. “Afternoon. Can I have a minute alone with McIntyre?”