by SM Reine
“Guess so.” Anthony watched in tense silence as Dana shut her locket, jamming it back down her shirt. He was probably waiting to see if Dana would tell Charmaine about the hair. Or trying to decide if he believed her. “Yeah, I’ll get out of here.”
Anthony rested a hand on Dana’s shoulder for a half-second, then stepped out and left the women alone.
“Didn’t expect to see you here, chief,” Dana said. “Thought you’d be on the phone with Mayor Hekekia all day.”
“She was waiting for me when I got in this morning. Getting chewed out in person saves time. I made excuses and slipped out when Anthony told me what happened to you.”
“You’re so sweet. Where are my condolence flowers?”
“I’m not here to grieve. I’m here to talk the case.” Chief Villanueva pulled a chair around and sat down. “There’s no data from your camera during the attack. No audio or visual. You didn’t manage to film a single face during the Red Carpet Room conflict.”
“So what?” Dana asked. “Your guys took down a bunch of vamps. They must have gotten something on their cameras.”
“Nothing useful.” Charmaine’s arms were folded across her chest, eyes slanted with concern, mouth tipped into a frown as she studied Dana. “We have no proof that the Paradisos attacked us at the wax museum. That means we don’t have enough justification to arrest Achlys.”
“You can hold anyone for twenty-four hours without cause.”
“Don’t quote the law at me like you know it better than I do.”
“I know why you’re holding back. You don’t want to inspire the Paradisos to attack again so that the OPA comes in to seize your whole damn city. But guess what, Charmaine? The Paradisos already attacked us. It’s open war. There’s only one way out of this.”
“What is that?” Charmaine asked. “Are you planning to take a UV grenade into Paradisos headquarters to kill yourself and every other head vamp in the city?”
Dana had contemplated it. But that plan had two major flaws.
First of all, vampires who hadn’t drunk human blood were still in transition. A UV bomb wouldn’t be effective suicide unless Dana completed the transformation.
The second major flaw was that there were too many vampires in Las Vegas for a single UV grenade to have the effect she wanted. To make sure she got the Fremont Slasher, Dana needed to be thorough.
“You’ve got to talk to the OPA,” Dana said. “Get them to lean all their resources against the Paradisos.”
“The OPA is neutral in regards to this. To them, the Hunting Club’s as bad as the Paradisos. They’re not taking down one of you unless they take down both.”
“Make them see the difference.”
“It’s nice you think I have that much influence. I’m as helpless as you are, McIntyre.” Charmaine fixed Dana with a piercing golden gaze. “Are you sure you’re infected? Really sure?”
Dana lifted her chin to expose her neck. “I haven’t been touched by Edie.” That was their healer. “This got fixed by the same venom that made my heart stop beating hours ago.”
Charmaine’s eyes fell. “Fuck.” She let out a breath, rubbed a hand over her eyes. “There are no vampire employees of the LVMPD yet, but departments in other states employ a few. They’re good to have on night shifts. And it’s good to have diversity on the team to help with community outreach.”
“Vampires aren’t diversity,” Dana said. “They’re a mistake.”
“Was it a mistake that I came back from Genesis a coyote shifter?”
“Probably. Different kind of mistake though.”
“Was it a mistake that I was born with a dick and balls even though I’m a woman?” Charmaine asked. “Was it a mistake that I got bullied all through school for dressing the wrong way, talking the wrong way, moving the wrong way?”
“Yes, big fucking mistake, because biology and society have sick senses of humor,” Dana said. “You hung up on how hard it is to be a translady again? You want hugs?”
Charmaine’s eyebrows pinched together in the middle. “Do you want hugs?”
“No. I’m going to kill myself.”
“I considered suicide when Genesis turned me into a coyote. The bullying when I was a confused trans kid made me want to kill myself too. As it turns out, it’s good that I kept going. My life just keeps getting better.”
“I don’t have a life to look forward to.” Dana stood up, and it was so easy even though she hadn’t had a blood transfusion, and her skin had taken on the color of a lake in winter. “I’m already fucking dead, Chief.”
The chief stood too. “I’m going to recommend you see my therapist. She usually helps people during gender correction but she works with some preternaturals too.”
“Fuck off.”
“Look, you were there with me during the transition, you and Penny. Let me help you the way you helped me. Okay?” She fished a card out of her wallet. When Dana didn’t take it, Charmaine set it on the bed. “Do me one favor? Just don’t kill yourself until the case is closed. You’re my only witness to Achlys’s most recent crime.”
Dana grunted.
Charmaine left.
When she exited the healer’s room, she left the door hanging open. It was bright out in the hallway. They hadn’t closed all the windows in the Hunting Lodge—just the ones in the med bay. There was still a sliver of harsh yellow Nevada sun splattered on the wall.
Dana extended her fingers into the sunlight.
It felt like touching the burner on a stove.
She yanked her hand out with a hiss. In those few moments of exposure, her skin had already produced blisters.
“Be careful!” Penny ducked to enter the room, and she still caught a horn on the doorframe. The thumping surprised her. She leaped away from the noise she’d made like a spooked cat, flustered hands flitting through her hair and over her t-shirt. “Gosh. Sorry. Let me look at your hand.”
“It’s fine,” Dana said.
“It’s not fine!” Penny grabbed her wrist, and there was no winning an arm-wrestling match against a worried orc blacksmith whose biceps were thick as tree trunks. “Oh, honey, did you do this on purpose?”
Dana glared at her. “I had to know.”
“You already knew,” Penny said. “I thought I should wait to tell you this, but…heck, I know you, and you won’t want to be babied.” She hesitated, then plowed on. “I’ve started looking at real estate. An agent is preparing to list our penthouse. We’ll move into one of the vampire-friendly developments underground. There are some really nice ones over in—”
“No,” Dana said.
Penny grew more flustered. She picked at a flake of keratin on the end of her horn. “Okay, we don’t have to move. We could outfit our penthouse with better blinds but it wouldn’t be as secure. We need at least one room where you can spend daytime.”
“No.” She grabbed her wife by the shoulders. “I’m not going to be a vampire for long, Penny. Nothing will make me stay like this.”
A crying orc was a truly pathetic thing to see. “Not even me?”
Dana didn’t answer immediately.
The fact was, Penny should have known the answer to that. She did know the answer to that.
But she was going to make Dana say it anyway.
“Not even you,” Dana said.
10
As the day wore on, Dana remained in the blacked-out med bay, listening to Hunting Club associates elsewhere in the building. The Lodge was a sprawling fortress that could—and had—survived the likes of a zombie apocalypse. Their second basement was sturdy enough to survive an atomic bomb. Their water tanks could sustain a dozen people for a year. Food supplies could last a similar duration.
Aesthetically, the building was unlike any other in Las Vegas. Brutalism wasn’t popular in Nevada. The Lodge had a lot of hard edges, sheer faces, and functional geometry that verged on ugly.
The Hunting Lodge was fucking badass.
Dana spent most of the time in th
e back, around Penny’s forge. Today, she pulled her laptop into the med bay for work. She wasn’t in the mood to talk to her wife.
Not a day went by that Dana didn’t comb through police reports, with Charmaine’s blessing, and track crime trends throughout the city. The routine activity felt hollow that day. She didn’t have time to hunt down crime trends anymore. Dana’s skin was getting paler as her body made use of the last of its blood; she kept getting colder even though it was over a hundred degrees outside.
She felt herself dying as that single sunbeam crept across the med bay wall.
And then the sunbeam vanished.
It was only five in the afternoon.
Dana closed her laptop lid, stood up. “The fuck?” The med bay was on the third floor of the Hunting Lodge. It wasn’t like someone could be standing on the other side of the window, blocking the light.
She yanked the curtains aside. Dana halfway hoped she’d be bathed in the sunset. Instead, she found herself facing a wall of gray brick.
Another building abutted the Hunting Lodge.
This was physically impossible. There was no room outside the Hunting Lodge for another building. It was between McCarran International Airport and Dick’s Barbecue, so there should have been a wall with coiled barbed wire on top and eight lanes of freeway outside her window.
Instead, there was a cathedral. Not a small cathedral, either.
Holy Nights Cathedral wasn’t exactly fussy about the laws of physics.
“Linc,” she grumbled.
Brother Lincoln Marshall’s timing was impeccable.
Dana pried the med bay window open in an explosion of caulk. She kicked out the screen and climbed onto the windowsill.
There was nothing brutalist about Holy Nights Cathedral. It was more gothic. Think gargoyles, think bell towers, think creeping vines and stained-glass windows. A stained-glass window on the cathedral had been opened for her. “Wanna chat?” asked Brother Lincoln Marshall, cowboy hat tipped low to shade his face.
“Damn straight.” Dana leaped across the gap between buildings. She overshot and had to catch herself on the top windowsill, swinging her legs inside the cathedral.
Her boots thudded to the stone floor.
“Hey McIntyre,” Lincoln said, shaking her hand in greeting.
Not much had changed about Lincoln since their last encounter. He was still a good-looking guy, as far as men went, with all those symmetric features that straight ladies soaked themselves over. His linebacker shoulders were hidden under voluminous robes. He usually carried a sidhe staff that the late Winter Queen had gifted to him, but it was absent now.
As far as manly-men went, he was all right. Lincoln was smart, dedicated, and really fucking hated vampires.
Lincoln shut the window and slammed the inner shutters, blocking out all light.
“So you heard about me,” Dana said. “Here to give last rites?”
“When it’s time. Walk with me.”
They headed down from the choir loft, where Dana had never once seen a choir, and walked among the pews in the nave. The inside of the cathedral was as impressive as the outside. It had buttresses, elaborate artwork, statues. The whole overblown shebang.
Beyond the pulpit, a mural of a man and a woman gazed down at Dana. Both were black-haired and white-fleshed. They were two of the three gods recognized by the triadists. Triadists hated the third, considering him a Judas unworthy of commemoration, so his face wasn’t anywhere in the cathedral.
“You heard from them lately?” Dana asked, jerking her head at the mural.
“Not in ages. Reckon you’ve heard from them a lot sooner.” Lincoln’s faintly Southern accent was coming through stronger than usual. It only did that when he was upset.
“I haven’t heard from them in a while either.” Dana did favors for the gods whenever they remembered she existed. She didn’t mind their spotty attention most days. This was the first time she’d really started feeling bitter about it. “I’d sure love to know what the fuck they’ve got in mind for me now.”
“Do you think that they did this to you?” Lincoln asked.
He didn’t look upon her with any fear. That was nice. It was also kinda nice that he looked grossed out. So far, Dana had only encountered pity and sympathy, both of which were bullshit.
Lincoln saw Dana for what she was: a dead woman turning into the animated dead. A ticking time bomb.
That was good. He wasn’t going to try to polish the piece of shit that Achlys had crapped into Dana’s life.
“They didn’t stop me from getting killed,” Dana said. “Best I can figure is that they don’t care if I change into the walking dead.”
“You’re already dead,” Lincoln said.
She flung her hands into the air. “Thank you.”
“Getting much opposition on the subject?”
“My wife,” she said.
“She loves you. It’s natural that she would want to save you.”
“I’d have been saved if I hadn’t been fucking bullied into going on a police operation last night,” Dana said.
“Don’t dwell.” He was sharp about admonishing her, even curt. “You drink blood yet?”
“Fuck no.”
“Good. Gives you an advantage. You can still touch the sun as long as you’re quick about it, and you can pass for human most of the time.”
“Sure, until I fucking blow my brains out.”
“I won’t convince you to finish the transition. You know how I feel about…this.” He grimaced at her. “You can’t blow your brains out yet. We have unfinished business, McIntyre. Las Vegas is lousy with vampires, and it’s worse than ever.”
Dana felt so much more settled talking to someone who saw things the way she did. She hadn’t realized she was tense until it started draining out of her. “Got a plan?”
“No, but I know you do,” he said.
“I haven’t gotten further than the fact that I’ve gotta wipe out the vamps in Vegas,” Dana said. “The Paradisos laid a trap and the LVMPD still isn’t going to tear into them, so fuck them. Earrings are off, gauntlets are on, and they’re going down before my body’s ash.” And she’d get the Fremont Slasher in the process.
Lincoln nodded grimly, tipping his hat back with a knuckle. His eyes were unpitying. “Kneel.”
Dana sank to her knees at the head of the aisle.
He dipped his fingers into the font of holy water by the pulpit. Lincoln flicked the water over her, touched his fingertips to her forehead.
“I bless you in this righteous pursuit, Dana McIntyre, sister to God,” he said. “I’m blessing you with strong muscles, a clear mind, and a sharp sword. You’ve sinned in your life, but it’s all purged now that you’re dead. In death, there is purity. There is purpose.”
The words were delivered flatly, without any sort of grandiosity to them. Lincoln was a religious man but not pompous. There was gravity to his blessing anyway. Dana felt it settling into her rapidly drying flesh.
She let her eyes fall shut so that she kneeled in darkness.
“You were born to die,” Lincoln said.
“As are we all,” Dana said.
He agreed with her. “As are we all. Now pray, McIntyre. Pray and hope the gods have got guidance for you, because you’re coming up fast on the end of the road, and it’s paved with gods-damned teeth.”
Dana prayed.
She wasn’t sure she’d ever prayed to the gods before. Not like this, sitting in a pew with her hands folded and her head bowed.
Whenever she’d spoken to the gods, it had been face-to-face. They’d yanked her ass into the Infinite for a sit-down, told her what they wanted, and kicked her back to the mortal planes.
Which was fine.
Dana had better shit to do than sitting around whispering pleas to the sky, hoping the gods would be paying attention to her right at that immediate moment.
Except she suddenly didn’t have better shit to do, because she didn’t have a plan.
>
With her eyes shut, kneeling in the silence of Holy Nights Cathedral, Dana was left alone with nothing but her thoughts. Ninety percent of them were swear words. The other ten percent was a jumbled mess.
It was hard to focus when her body was dying.
In the serenity of her isolation, Dana could feel her organs shutting down. It was represented by an ache in her lower back where she suspected her kidneys rested. A pang in her chest that turned into a crushing steel grip. Her toes getting as cold as though she were submerged in the Arctic Ocean.
Piece by piece, Dana’s body finished dying that evening, kneeling right there in the Holy Nights Cathedral.
And she was trying to pray to the gods like some giant-ass moron.
Dana focused her eyes on the two faces on the mural. The gods weren’t bad people. But they were people, with all the flaws that came along with it, and omnipotence didn’t change them at their cores. It wasn’t their fault if they weren’t listening. This probably wasn’t their plan. She could only ask so much of them.
“I need to take down the Paradisos,” she muttered, “and I’m perfectly happy making it happen all on my lonesome, but I need you to open a door. Or show me where the door is. Or something.”
Footsteps rang out in the aisle behind her.
Dana whirled, drawing her sidearm, and lifted it to aim.
A familiar woman stood at the far end of the cathedral. “I’m not here to attack.” It was the girl from the wax museum gift shop. Anthony had identified her as a Paradisos vampire. “My name is Nissa,” she went on. “I have information you’ll want.”
Information was the magic word in this case, giving Dana pause where nothing else would have.
Her eyes flicked up to the stained-glass window that depicted the female god surrounded by hellfire, twin swords crossed over her chest. Divine intervention? Total stupid coincidence?
“I remember you,” Dana said finally.
Nissa traced the golden chain of her necklace over her collarbone. “You remember me. Gods, okay.”
Dana stood without lowering the gun. “You don’t look right for a vampire.”