by SM Reine
“I’m like you. In transition.”
That explained why she didn’t have the blood-red eyes. “How long?” Dana asked.
Nissa ducked her head, letting her hair fall into her face. “Four years.”
Dana sucked in a breath, and it must have been a few minutes since she’d last done that because it made her lungs hurt like a spike was driven into them.
Four years without blood. No vampire resisted the cravings that long.
“How did you find this place?” Dana asked.
“Someone told me a building appeared at the end of the Strip, where the Excalibur used to be,” Nissa said.
Lincoln had relocated the Holy Nights Cathedral from an impossible wedge between the Hunting Lodge and the freeway. He must have been intending to stay in town long enough for Dana to complete her final mission.
Nissa ventured a smile. “Honestly, I was looking for the cathedral. I’d heard it was sighted near the Hunting Club earlier, and I read that you’re a triadist, so I figured…”
“You’re researching me.”
“Because I have information you need. Achlys has seized a microbiologist named Harold Hopkins, a former employee of Hardwick Research. He was on a project that was trying to find a cure for vampirism.”
Boom. There it is.
Dana lowered her gun slowly, even as her gaze lifted back to the stained-glass windows. God’s face had been rendered in a few triangular shards. There was still depth to her black eyes, and a sort of cunning.
“You’re one of Achlys’s vamps,” Dana said. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I lied about being a night guard for the wax museum. I’m Achlys’s travel expert. I issue visas for preternaturals coming into this territory, and I apply for visas when our people are going elsewhere. I know every single preternatural who’s been in Clark County since Genesis, and I know what they do.”
“And?”
“I can’t do what they do,” Nissa said. “I can’t kill human beings.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“It’s the same effect either way. But you…” She took another step. Moonlight was coming through the stained glass now, rather than sunlight. It painted Nissa’s dead skin a sickly shade of blue-gray. “You’re a killer, Dana McIntyre.”
Dana lifted the gun another inch. “Stop moving.”
Nissa stopped. “Vampires throughout the county are terrified of you. Your name is whispered like you’re always listening in. You embedded balefire in your throat and let Achlys swallow it down. I may not be a triadist, but I know that to kill beside you would be a holy experience.”
“So that’s what you want?” Dana asked. “You’ll tell me where I can find this scientist, this…Harold Hopkins.”
“I can tell you exactly what room he’s staying in at which casino,” the vampire said.
“And in exchange for information about this guy who can cure me, you want me to show you how to kill.”
“Without mercy,” Nissa breathed. “Without empathy.” The girl looked like a sorority girl from UNLV, but she talked like a fucking psychopath.
Dana’s misgivings must have shown on her face. Nissa hurried to speak again.
“I’ve lived on teaspoons of blood substitute for four years, and I’m weak, Dana. I’m so weak. I need to kill if I’m ever going to be as strong as the other vampires. You kill for the law, don’t you? I could do that too. I could kill righteously.” Nissa looked so hopeful.
Dana holstered her gun again, but rested one hand on the belt at the small of her back.
She hadn’t considered that there might be a cure for vampirism. If Dana could get the venom out of her system and resuscitate her fading heart, then maybe she didn’t need to stay dead. She could come back. She could have more time to find the Fremont Slasher.
She could be with Penny.
“Where’s Harold Hopkins?” Dana asked.
“You’ll show me how to kill?”
Dana made herself smile. She knew she didn’t have a pleasant smile—people remarked on how scary it was all the damn time. “Without mercy.”
Nissa’s hand extended. She was holding a hotel card key. “Seventeenth floor. Judex.” Dana stepped forward to take the card, but Nissa didn’t let go. “Can I be with you?”
There was something in the way that Nissa pitched her voice that was faintly reminiscent of Penny. Sweet Penny, the skilled blacksmith who could use a hammer to pound out weapons of murder but couldn’t bring herself to kill house spiders.
“Sure,” Dana said calmly. “You can be with me.”
Nissa’s face lit up with excitement, and she didn’t notice when Dana yanked the concealed knife out of her belt.
The vamp sure as hell noticed it when Dana buried the blade in her stomach.
Dana stabbed her deep.
Then she pulled it out and stabbed her again.
And again.
And again.
Nissa’s face went limp with shock. Her hands flew up to grab Dana’s shoulders, and Dana stared straight down at her, right into her eyes, as she kept stabbing. A knife like this wasn’t good for killing vampires, but Dana was short on wooden stakes. If she got lucky and destroyed enough of Nissa’s heart, she’d die.
The vampire girl fell.
“That’s how you kill without mercy,” Dana said, stooping to clean her knife’s blade on Nissa’s skirt. That wasn’t a necessary gesture. Nissa had been honest about her status as a blood virgin, and her insides were drier than the Mojave. “Lesson over.”
Dana stuck the knife back in her belt, pocketed the key card, and headed out of the Holy Nights Cathedral to find Harold Hopkins.
11
Even with the Holy Nights Cathedral on the wrong side of the Strip, Dana McIntyre was a quick Zyp ride from the Hunting Lodge. She used a side entrance to access the armory without running across associates. No Anthony, no Penny, no massive guilt trips. Just Dana facing a wall of magecrafted armor.
This was how Dana bridged the ability gap between herself and her sisters.
Her eldest sister was indeed God. But before she’d been God, she’d been Godslayer. A human fighter born to take down Adam. She’d been imbued with preternatural strength, speed, and healing long before she crushed the old gods in Genesis and took over the world.
Dana’s other sister was slightly less impressive, but only slightly. Marion was a half-angel mage. Probably the best witch in the world. Dana didn’t talk with her much, and it had nothing to do with their power disparity. Marion was as femme as Dana was butch, with the too-long fingernails and the stupid flowing hair and dresses that were no good for mobility, so the two of them chafed even when they were getting along.
They had a functional partnership, though. Dana saved Marion’s tuchus on occasion. And Marion enchanted Dana’s armor.
Dana may have been one hundred percent human—until the introduction of vampire venom to her system—but she fought with the best of the best. She fought on the same level as the Godslayer, and all it took was a little help from her sister-mage.
Marion’s enchantments were the reason Dana was capable of wearing a stone breastplate and gauntlets, even though they should have weighed too much for a mortal wearer to move. Marion had performed a featherlight charm on them, in addition to the various curses that lashed back against enemies who dared to attack Dana.
It was easy to slide into them. Dana looked like a fucking gladiator once she swung the hexed leather skirt around her hips, letting its studded straps hang over her jeans.
She jammed on a pair of enchanted shin guards, grabbed a nail-spiked baseball bat, and went for the door. The bat wasn’t as effective as the guns she was packing, but it made a statement. She liked swinging it as she stalked around. Made her look cool.
Must have taken less than an hour from stabbing Nissa to leaving the Hunting Lodge.
She could feel herself dying the whole time.
But by the time Dana got to Judex, she could tel
l that things were about to get bad.
Forty-eight hours.
Statistically, that was the average length of time it took a vampire fledgling to undergo “expulsion.” It was a messy process where vampire bodies rejected the last of their living tissue. Real fucking ugly. Dana should have another day before it hit…on average.
But forty-eight hours was only an average.
Dana hit the casino floor and her skin went all hot. Her vision swirled like hair getting flushed down a toilet. People were giving her funny looks—not too funny, because even a gladiator dyke wasn’t that weird on the Strip—but she couldn’t focus on their faces.
Her guts were liquefying.
She got to a bathroom near the buffet before she started to spew.
Dana slammed into the handicapped stall and the fountain sprayed from her throat over the tile wall. There was some bile in there. Also a lot of blood. Runny blood, chunky blood clots, tissue so saturated with it that it looked like liver.
Hey, is that actually a piece of my liver?
She only got some of it into the toilet.
Moments later, she felt cramps like the worst period ever.
“Fuck me,” Dana said.
She struggled out of her jeans, squirming them down underneath her leather skirt.
This time, she got on the toilet before she let loose. A slurry of piss and shit and gods only knew what else exploded from her bowels. Felt like every single organ in Dana’s body.
And while she shat out the last of her living tissue, she kept horking out her face. She tried to shoot some of it into the metal basin where women were meant to ditch tampons, but it couldn’t hold the volume of what Dana was expelling.
She burned with fever. Hadn’t she been cold earlier?
Where was she?
Dana’s cheek hit bathroom tile.
She’d fallen off of the toilet. Not the first time she’d done that. Not even the first time she’d done it after simultaneous barf and diarrhea, for that matter. Dana had only switched to O’Doul’s when she’d started trucking toward her thirtieth birthday and imbibing tequila cued instant death-hangover.
This felt worse than that. All those nights of thudding headaches, all the uncontrollable barfing…
Shit, at least she’d managed to keep her stomach lining inside during those hangovers. Dana was sure that weird saggy balloon over there was her stomach lining.
And most of the time she’d been sick, it had been at home. Not in public. She’d messed up her penthouse’s bathroom, hurling her dinner into the wastebasket while Penny petted her hair.
The nicest thing about Penny was that she never said “I told you so.” She could have—should have—because she always did warn Dana that her risky behaviors were a bad idea.
Like, Maybe you shouldn’t have seven margaritas in a row, Dana.
And sometimes: Have you thought about interspersing tall glasses of water with your drinks, honey?
Or, Why don’t we just go see a movie instead of hitting the bar for the fourth night in a row?
Penny always warned Dana. Always. She’d always known that Dana’s behavior would have stupid consequences, whether it be drinking or rushing blindly into fights, but she’d always been there the next morning to put a cool washcloth on her forehead. She’d babied Dana, made soothing noises, kissed her on the chin even when she smelled like barf.
The memories were so vivid while Dana was sprawled on the bathroom floor in a lake of her own effluence.
“Fuck.” Dana used the spiked baseball bat as leverage to push onto her feet. Even the rubber grips of her boots were challenged to get traction. It looked like she’d butchered a steer in the middle of a public bathroom.
She stumbled out of the stall. Caught herself on the sink.
Dana looked at herself in the mirror and a vampire looked back.
Her irises weren’t red. She’d have to drink human blood in order to attain that color. But her irises had lost their normal shade of brown, the pigment draining away to make room for what was to come.
The bags under her eyes aged her about ten years. And it looked like she’d rolled her short bleached hair around in all the barf.
Not a flattering look.
The bathroom door opened and a pair of women teetered in wearing heels and miniskirts. One sported a “Last Night Single” ribbon across her chest. Both stopped cold at the sight of Dana.
“Gods,” whispered the redhead, vanishing out the door with barely a pause.
The other one, to her credit, stuck around an extra second. “Are you okay? Can I call an ambulance? Get security?” She was a pretty brunette. Long, slender neck. Her skin was a rich shade of brown with violet undertones, and Dana could see where her pulse throbbed under her jaw.
Dana felt very thirsty.
“Run,” she said hoarsely.
Brunette Girl gave a tiny peep and ran.
There was no way that the Paradisos couldn’t know that Dana was coming for Harold Hopkins. If they hadn’t seen her walking into Judex in full body armor, then the bachelorette party would have reported her to security, or janitorial would have reported signs of a vampire’s expulsion.
That meant there was no room for subtlety in her attack, and that was fine. Dana wasn’t much for subtlety anyway.
She rinsed off her gauntlets, splashed water on the worst of her hair, and headed out of the bathroom to the nearest elevators.
The sight of Dana stalking around in ball-busting boots made a few tourists take videos with their cameras, and even her scowl did nothing to stop them. She looked strange enough that they assumed she was an attraction. Like one of those shirtless Spartans who advertised Thunder from Down Under, except that her six-pack was comfortably padded underneath a few layers of beer and french fries.
The elevators opened. A family tried to get on.
“Out,” Dana said, letting the baseball bat fall from her shoulder so that it swung at her side.
The dad giggled nervously. “What are you advertising? Something like Medieval Times, but for the zombie apocalypse? It looks…fun.” He edged into the elevator with his rolling suitcase.
Dana jerked the suitcase out of his hand and hurled it across the hallway. The zipper broke. His boxers flopped onto the floor.
“I’m advertising get the fuck out of my face,” she said.
The dad grabbed two of his children while mom swept up the third. All of them fled.
She stepped into the elevator and pushed two buttons: one to close the doors before another family of fuck-for-brains tried to board, and one to get her to the seventeenth floor.
Dana wasn’t feeling anywhere near a hundred percent on the elevator ride up. Maybe about nine percent. This casino was one of the sadistic kind that thought people wanted to stare at themselves while zipping up an elevator shaft, so she had a great view of her colorless eyes in the mirrored walls.
She used her pinkie to push her upper lip over her teeth. Her right canine was wiggling.
A single thrust of her tongue pushed the tooth out. It clattered onto the floor. There was a shiny white nub of fresh tooth forming within the empty gum—a much sharper tooth. Fangs like Achlys’s. Dana was taking after Sire Dearest.
A cheerful chime played over the speakers. “You’ve been to Las Vegas. You’ve seen the vampires. Now get ready for Vampire Vegas, the hottest new nightclub. Find out firsthand what goes bump in the night! Our hosts are dying to meet you!”
Her fist thrust straight up. She punched the speaker on the ceiling.
The screen cracked in half, fell off. The advertisement crackled into silence.
Doors slid open. Dana faced an empty hallway that looked like every other hotel-casino hallway she’d ever been in. They all had tacky carpet. The hallways were about three inches too narrow. The lights were a little too dim, though Dana expected that the cool lighting was meant to be relaxing.
There was only one window all the way down at the end of the hallway. It was tinted
so darkly that she could barely see the New York, New York’s roller coaster screeching through a loop-the-loop.
Dana stormed toward that window, key card in one hand and spiked bat in the other.
An employee crossed at the junction. He stopped at the sight of her. He was a skinny scrap of a thing, his paleness emphasized by the black polo. Casino staff of some kind. “Hey, uh…” He swallowed hard as he looked her up and down, realizing that Dana was not an invited guest. Smart boy. “You need to leave or I’m going to call security.”
“Good,” Dana said. “Call ‘em. I’m ready.”
She swung the bat. Slammed its spikes into the wall. When she kept walking, it carved a long line through the tacky paint job.
The skinny guy bolted.
When Dana reached the end of the hallway, she found a pair of vampire males waiting on the other side. They weren’t dressed as employees, or as security. They had arrived too quickly to have been summoned by the scared staff member.
The newcomers wore ankle-brushing black jackets with high necklines that brushed their angular jaws. Given the matching brushes of brown hair over their foreheads, they might have been twins.
“The master wants to speak with you,” said the guy on the left.
“If you think I’m gonna do that, then you’ve gotta be stupid. So I’ll call you Tweedle Dum. Your bro-ham gets to be Tweedle Dee.” She shrugged. “Don’t blame me. Luck of the draw.”
Tweedle Dum drew his gun. “We’ll kill you if you resist.”
“Doubtful you’re allowed to use firearms in a hotel with paper-thin walls and tourists everywhere,” Dana said. “Your masters want money more than they want me dead.”
“The floor’s empty,” Tweedle Dee said.
“Except for Harold Hopkins,” she said.
She lunged.
Guns fired. She wasn’t ready for it—she’d thought they’d been bluffing. The Paradisos really did love their damn tourists. But maybe the floor was as empty as they claimed, and maybe they didn’t care if a stray bullet winged Hopkins.
They were fucking shooting at her.
Normally, Dana would have been screwed upside-down and backwards.