by SM Reine
But Shawn vanished in a flash of stinking ley line magic and another hard bend of reality.
Within a heartbeat, Dana and Anthony were left alone with a dissected body in a luxury hotel room, a whole lot of mangled organs, and no cure for vampirism.
“Think that’s Harold Hopkins?” Dana asked, head tilted as she gazed down at the bloody bathtub. “I thought he’d look different. You know, maybe taller. Older. Alive.”
“Fuck,” Anthony said. “He was going to cure you.”
“Well he’s not now.” In fact, the only thing that Harold Hopkins now accomplished was making Dana feel like an alcoholic who hadn’t seen Jose Cuervo in months. Who’d have thought a human could have so much blood in him?
Dana waited in the living room while Anthony called the cops. She perused the selection in the liquor cabinet since the words “Jose Cuervo” had passed through her stream of consciousness. She was in the mood for a drink or six.
“The cops will be here in three minutes,” Anthony said, joining Dana. “You okay?”
“Aside from a hole in my armpit, I’m great.” She grabbed a bottle of Kraken’s spiced rum and decided to forego the glass. Dana was already dead. She no longer needed to worry about protecting her liver.
“I sense that you’re not great.”
“Thanks Lwaxana,” Dana said.
“Look, it’s okay to be pissed. It’s okay to be scared. It’s okay to not wanna die.”
She twisted the Kraken’s cap off and took a swig. It didn’t taste like much. Probably why vampires were typically hard drug users. “I wouldn’t be with the Hunting Club if I was scared of dying.”
“Everyone’s scared of dying.”
“I’m not everyone. My dad was ripped apart by one of the three Fates right before Genesis. That’s my fate too—not killed by a Fate, but killed by something. I’ve always known this was coming and I’ve always been ready.”
She almost said it with enough firmness to sound convincing.
The glare Anthony shot at her said he didn’t believe it.
“Have you tried putting cameras on your door? Your mailbox? Your truck?” he asked.
Dana blinked. She couldn’t make sense of the jump in subject. “Why?”
“You said the Fremont Slasher brings you a present every year. It’s been four years since he took Penny. You must have tried to find him before now.”
“Yeah, I’ve tried surveillance,” she said slowly. “I got nothing. I’ve beaten and bribed everybody who knows anything in Las Vegas. I still reanalyze evidence constantly. I can’t find fucking anything. The dude’s a ghost.”
“So you gotta kill all vamps,” Anthony said.
“Every last one of them.”
“You know you’re not the Fremont Slasher.”
“No shit,” Dana said.
“Then why do you think that you need to die with all the other vampires?” Anthony asked. “It’s not your fault Penny got hurt.”
She swallowed hard. It hurt, like scrubbing a cheese grater down the inside of her dried throat. “I’m not the Slasher. That doesn’t mean I’m not responsible.”
“You and your fucking martyr complex.” Anthony started digging around the lab equipment, picking up papers, trying to power on computers.
“What you’re doing right now? That’s interfering with evidence,” Dana said.
“Help me look for cure info before the cops get here,” Anthony said. “They’ll have the OPA on their tail. If there’s cure info here, we need a copy before the OPA redacts it all to hell.”
Dana slumped onto a stool, setting the nail-spiked baseball bat on the bar. “That’s illegal, Morales.”
“It’s illegal to kill seventeen vampires in a casino hallway too,” he snapped. “Help me!”
“Go fuck yourself. There’s no cure.”
Anthony threw his hands in the air. “You don’t know that! You just blame yourself for Penny being kidnapped, so you decided to punish yourself by dying!”
“Better dead than a vampire!” Dana shot back.
Which was when they heard a thump and a shout from the bathroom.
Dana beat Anthony to the door by a half a second. That meant that she got a front row view of Harold Hopkins bowed over the side of the tub, vomiting all over the bathroom. It was too soon to be the expulsion. But Harold Hopkins didn’t look to be coping well with the scene of his murder.
He lurched out of the tub. Dana got to see another shriveled flopping dong, which was two more dongs than Dana wanted to see on any day ever.
She caught Harold Hopkins when he tumbled into her. His naked flesh was coated in blood and the flaps of his stomach hung open.
“Help me,” he rasped.
His canines had already turned into long, sharp fangs.
13
The Hunting Lodge was an operation that never closed, a lot like your local 7-Eleven. Most associates worked nights. So it wasn’t quiet when Dana got back to the office, and that was fine with Dana. She wasn’t in a quiet mood.
A couple of their younger associates were in the armory. Judging by the smells lingering on the air—body spray, sweat, and vape juice—Dana suspected that they were Lina and Dionne, a pair of feline shifters who were great at handling non-emergency calls. Good at managing witnesses. Nice people. Their thunderous laughter boomed through the walls.
The night secretary, Chris, was on shift too. He was a broad-shouldered witch who wore horn-rimmed glasses. Bad at magic, great at organization. His soft voice drifted on the air as he tried to schedule maintenance. Normally Dana couldn’t hear him talking from the meeting room, but normally Dana wasn’t turning into a fucking vampire.
“They’ll call us once the microbiologist has been stitched together and interviewed,” Brianna said. “Harold Hopkins is still too disoriented to give us information.”
“She never got disoriented after the change,” Anthony said, jerking his chin at Dana. “What’s the difference?”
“I kept my blood when I changed, so my brain continued running during the switch-over,” Dana said. “Hopkins has been drained and dismembered. We’ll be lucky to get anything out of him.”
“We have to get something,” Brianna said.
Dana snorted. “Have to? No, you just hope we’ll get something out of him because you’re not ready to think about me dropping dead.”
Until that moment, Brianna had been sorting through magical crystals on the coffee table. But Dana’s tone got Brianna onto her feet. “Look, you little shit—”
“Little?” Dana asked, standing up. She towered almost a foot taller than Brianna.
“I knew you when you were still eating your boogers,” Brianna said. “You’ll always be a little shit to me, you little shit. You might want us to think you don’t care about what’s happening, but you can’t make the rest of us stop caring. All right? So shut your gods-damned mouth, sit down, and listen for once.”
“Don’t use that tone with me,” Dana said.
“I’ll use whatever tone I want. Sit down!”
There was unfamiliar danger in Brianna’s tone, a sizzle of magic in the air. She wasn’t one of the strongest witches, but she didn’t need to be good at attack spells to fuck with Dana. She just needed to refuse to repair Dana’s armpit-hole.
So Dana sat down.
“Also, you were right,” Brianna said, sounding barely mollified. “CSI took a gander at Hopkins’s wounds. Same cuts as on Beelzebub and the five other dead vampires.”
“I’ve been researching Shawn Wyn since we ran into him the first time,” Anthony said. “He was banished from the entire Middle Worlds for the last year in a rare show of solidarity from all four courts. They said he was too violent to keep around.”
“What’s his flavor of violence?” Dana asked.
Anthony tapped his tablet to project files on the wall of their meeting room. Shawn Wyn’s square face leered at them alongside a lengthy list of infractions. “Insubordination. Resisting discipline fro
m the queen. Sexual assault. The last one’s what got him kicked out—the sidhe don’t fuck around with consent. His records keep going, though. He had years of infractions before he got booted.”
“And Achlys took him in,” Brianna said grimly.
“Sure, because the prestige.” Dana had never understood it, but people jizzed themselves over the idea of the sidhe, even though they were run-of-the-mill gaeans. Faeries were no more than witches on aphrodisiacs who made everyone around them feel like they were on shrooms. But they were rare compared to vampires, and obscurity made them seem cooler than they really were.
“Now do you want a fun fact about our new favorite microbiologist?” Anthony asked, tossing his tablet to the table. “Before Hopkins went missing, he lived on Orchid Crest in Henderson.”
“That’s where you guys were looking for a new ritual space, isn’t it?” Dana asked.
“And where we butted heads with Shawn Wyn.”
Dana folded her arms. “You can’t tell me that Achlys wanted Hopkins kidnapped and then immediately killed by her enforcer.”
“It’s unlikely his death was ordered by Achlys. My guess is that Shawn’s uncontrollable,” Anthony said. “Achlys has been enjoying having him do shit for her. Keeping Shawn is like being a drug kingpin with a tiger chained to his chair. The tiger’s chained, but he’s still a tiger. Shawn Wyn is unhinged.”
“So why’d he kill Hopkins? It doesn’t fit the rest of his pattern.”
“Maybe he just wants to piss off Achlys.” Brianna scooped up crystals in both hands. “If Shawn is behind this many deaths of Paradisos allies, we could just tell Achlys what her enforcer has been doing. She’ll take care of him.” She repositioned herself to sit by Dana, crystals and all.
“Fuck that,” Dana said. “We’re not telling Achlys she’s got a mongoose in her pit of snakes. We’re letting them tear each other apart.”
“We have to protect all American citizens. Stick this under your armpit.”
Dana rolled her eyes, but she did put a giant quartz crystal under her armpit. She had to squeeze it tight to prevent it from falling into her ribcage hole. “The Paradisos aren’t worried about breaking laws.”
“Their behavior doesn’t give you a free pass.”
“The fact I’m gonna be gone soon gives me a free pass,” Dana said.
Anthony grinned mirthlessly. “Wouldn’t you feel like a giant asshole if you broke a thousand laws, only to get cured and spend the rest of your human life in prison?”
“And it’s not just that!” Brianna was getting worked up. “The OPA’s going to pull our vigilante license! That means no more government grants, no more support, no more Hunting Club—”
“All right, all right,” Dana said. “I hear you. My behavior reflects on the whole club until I’m perma-dead.” Which meant she was going to have to be quiet about killing all the vampires in Vegas. Nobody could know about it. Even the Hunting Club.
“So we’ll need to get a hold of Achlys and tell her about Shawn Wyn’s extracurriculars,” Anthony concluded. “I’ll run it up the pole with Charmaine. It’ll be better coming from the LVMPD. I can also take that chance to explain how Dana and I found a murder scene on an empty floor of a hotel-casino where we never should have been.”
“Empty floor?” Dana asked.
“Someone had cleaned up all the other bodies by the time the LVMPD showed up.”
Which meant that someone on the Paradisos end of things was trying to keep this fight away from law enforcement eyes. The Paradisos surely wanted Vegas to get daylighted even less than the Hunting Club wanted to have their license yanked. At least the club’s associates could operate illegally if they lost their license; vampires would be truly fucked if Las Vegas got bathed in daylight.
The idea of having even a silent truce with the Paradisos against law enforcement rankled.
“Let me see your armpit,” Brianna said.
“If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me that…” Dana lifted her arm.
Brianna caught the crystal when it fell from her pit. “The stake hole looks good. It’ll keep knitting for a few hours, so be gentle with yourself. You could speed it up by drinking blood but—”
“Fuck no.” Dana twisted her neck to peer down at the place where the wound had been. It was gone. She hadn’t felt the touch of magic, hadn’t felt herself healing. She should have felt something. Increasingly, it felt like Dana had a wall between herself and the surrounding world, muffling all sound and sensation.
Guess that was just how dying worked.
“I’ll let you guys know how everything goes with Charmaine,” Anthony said. He headed out.
Brianna lingered. “Penny wants you in the forge ASAP, McIntyre. Go check in with her before sunrise?”
Sunrise. No longer a time when Dana could stumble home in her pickup, letting the morning light bathe her with more energy than three cans of Monster. For the rest of her unlife, Dana was going to have to spend her mornings in some lightless crypt.
She shot a wary look at Brianna. “Why’s Penny want me?”
“Maybe because she’s your wife? Don’t put me in the middle of this. Just go see her.”
“Harold Hopkins—”
“Will still be the disoriented undead after your talk,” Brianna said. “I’ll make sure you get a call as soon as he can talk. Go see your wife.”
So Dana went to see her.
Penny’s forge was hot as ever, and it blasted Dana in the face when she opened the door. It wasn’t weird for the forge to be that hot when it was operational. It was, however, weird for the forge to be operational at that time of night. Penny was a diurnal dame. She had no interest in adapting to the night-bound schedule of vampire hunters.
But there she was, stripped down to a sports bra that exposed every one of her thickly corded muscles as she pounded the daylights out of a sword. She was drenched in sweat, curls held back by a headband, flexing and hammering and grunting with the effort.
Dana hung in the door to watch her for a minute. She always liked watching Penny. The muscle had been the first thing to attract Dana to Penny all those years ago.
They had met at the Nevada State Fair. Penny had been lurking in a corner between The Round-Up and the pig pens, wearing a giant hooded sweater even though it was over ninety degrees. Dana had been wearing a bikini top and jeans to show off every one of her tattooed curves to the public. She’d spotted shy, preternatural Penny instantly.
Dana’s memories of the night were hazy. She was pretty sure she’d bought a couple of beers for Penny, but she didn’t recall the details. She did remember waking up the next morning in a jail cell with an orc. A gorgeous, shirtless, muscular orc with glistening green-bronze skin and tusks.
Later, Penny said that Dana had gotten drunk and “punched the shit” out of some rude teenage boys. Penny hadn’t been angry that Dana’s behavior landed them in police custody—she had been touched. She’d admired Dana’s noble violence. They’d been friends immediately and girlfriends within the week. Marriage had followed not long afterward.
Years had passed, and Dana was still in love with that enormous orc-woman.
Orcs weren’t a common gaean species. They were biologically similar to sidhe, like Shawn Wyn, but distributed even more narrowly across the globe. Technically orcs were sidhe that didn’t have any of the magical aura. Not gentry, and not quite as bestial as giants, and unwelcome in the Middle Worlds.
Penny was lovable. Beyond lovable. But her shyness had isolated her before she met Dana.
Dana had a hard time imagining how someone like Penny could be alone. She was gorgeous. It stunned Dana that a creature like Penny—brilliant and strong—could be overlooked by so many people just because she had horns.
At the moment, Dana wasn’t admiring Penny’s horns, or even her incredible sturdy physique.
Today, Dana was looking at the reminder of why she couldn’t let herself change into a vampire.
There were
scars on Penny’s exposed trunk. Big long gashes, like claw marks, drawing a path from shoulder blades to belly. They were the marks of an attack she’d barely survived. The memories remained lifted on her skin in cruel ridges.
Those scars were the reason why Dana would never drink blood. Never finish becoming a vampire. And why she wouldn’t die until the Paradisos—and the Fremont Slasher—were fucking gone.
Dana finally spoke up. “You want me?”
Penny dropped the hammer and turned. Her chest was heaving from the effort of smithing. She didn’t have cleavage in the sports bra, not in the traditional sense, but her refined pectorals created a pleasant curve dipping below her neckline.
“Yeah. I asked for you.” She shuffled around on the shelves and came up with a box. Penny held it out without looking at Dana. “I heard that the new serial killer is sidhe, so I made iron bullets. Please don’t tell Charmaine.”
“I’m surprised Charmaine didn’t give you the iron herself.” Part of their vigilante license meant that they had access to small quantities of illegal substances, like silver and iron. But only when they filed paperwork with the government. Chief Villanueva had always been awesome about rushing those orders along, though.
“She couldn’t have even if she wanted to,” Penny said. “There was a theft at the precinct. Someone stole all their specialty ammunition. That’s why you really can’t tell Charmaine. I should give the LVMPD these bullets.”
Dana took the box. “But you’re not giving them to the LVMPD.”
Penny wandered back to her forge, shoulders hunched. “You won’t tell us where you’re going. You won’t ask for help. You won’t even let yourself finish turning into a vampire so that you can survive. This is all I can do for you now. I can give you bullets to kill your enemies.”
“Come on, Penny,” Dana said.
“No. Don’t even try.”
“Hey, look at me.” She turned Penny gently, and the orc kept her eyes fixed stubbornly to the ceiling. “There’s a chance of a cure.”
“If Harold Hopkins gets his memory back.”