by SM Reine
Dana grabbed Penny’s chin and forced her to make eye contact. Tears welled in those big brown eyes. “We’ve always known I’ll die fast. You came into this knowing how it ends. You gonna let this end with weeping and whining, or you want to go out right?”
Penny gazed at Dana the same way she’d been gazing into the fire. It wasn’t fair how pretty Penny was, with that big round nose and the big round eyes and her plump cheeks. Even the way that the tusks created faint indentations in her lips was pretty.
“You’ve been pulling away from me for a long time,” Penny said. “This isn’t just about you getting turned into a vampire. Although that’s the cherry on the sundae, isn’t it?”
“I’m not pulling away from you.”
“No? So why’ve you spent more time on your vendetta against vampires than you have with me in these last few years?”
“It’s my job,” Dana said.
“It’s your passion. I used to be your passion.”
That hadn’t changed. Dana still loved her with as much ferocity as one human body could contain, even when Penny was frustrating and whiny and clingy. Maybe especially when she was like that. It was hard for Dana to let people in, but Penny didn’t wait for an open door. She knocked down Dana’s walls and invited herself into the wreckage.
“I have gotten crazier about hunting vamps,” Dana admitted, “but you know why I got like this. It’s for you. Everything’s for you.”
“I didn’t ask for this,” Penny said.
But her fingers were creeping around Dana’s waist, and her mask was melting, and Penny let the tears start falling. She buried her face in Dana’s shoulder.
“You never gotta ask me to protect you,” Dana said, squeezing Penny tight. “I’ll protect you until my body stops moving.”
“But I just want you,” Penny said. “Dana, if you don’t—”
“Shut it.” She kissed her wife. It provided no succor. Penny was unresponsive, and Dana didn’t seem to have as much sensation in her lips as usual.
Penny must have had normal sensation. She pulled away looking foggy-eyed, like she was stunned by Dana’s kiss. “You can’t—”
Dana kissed her again.
She might not have felt much sensation, but she tasted the salt of Penny’s sweat. She tasted the Sriracha that Penny had sprinkled on her phở gà earlier that night. She even tasted the sweet tang of steel hammered into a weapon.
Penny’s muscles were reassuringly firm under Dana’s fingertips. She yanked her wife to her, crushing their chests against each other. Dana kissed her harder to make up for the fact she was so numb.
She needed Penny to know all the things she couldn’t say.
How much she needed Penny.
How valued she was.
How grateful Dana felt for the fact Penny had ever put up with her, even for a few precious years of blissful marriage.
Yes, this was how this was supposed to end. Dana was going to die. Hunters died. That was what they did. Darkness had swallowed Dana’s father as his destiny determined, and that was her destiny too. But every moment before her death had been so much brighter because of Penny.
She’d never deserved this. The weight of Penny’s breasts on hers, the press of thighs. Her forge’s heat branding their flesh.
Dana grabbed Penny by the horns and yanked their mouths apart. They remained close—less than an inch. Dana wanted to see nothing but Penny’s big brown eyes.
“I love you,” Dana whispered.
Her cell phone rang loudly.
Her nerves leaped at the sound. Nobody called Dana for any reason except work, since she only picked up for work. And the only call she was expecting at the moment was about Harold Hopkins.
She stepped away from Penny to answer it.
“The microbiologist is answering questions,” Anthony said.
“Be right there.” Dana hung up. She pocketed the box of bullets, jamming them into one of the bigger pouches on her cargo pants. “I’m going to the precinct, Penny. I’m going to talk to the guy with the cure.”
“You mean the guy who can help you take down the Paradisos,” Penny said, leaning against the shelves like Dana had rendered her incapable of standing. Tears glistened on her cheeks. “This isn’t about helping you. This is about your vendetta.”
“I’m done with this argument,” Dana said.
“It’s just that you—”
She didn’t hear the rest of the sentence. She slammed out of the forge, got into her pickup, and chased sunrise into the police station.
14
When she arrived at the precinct, Harold Hopkins was performing the most pathetic dry-sob that Dana had ever seen. He’d been given one of the secure interview rooms intended for vampires. Someone had been nice enough to provide clothes and wrap him in a big woolly blanket. Gods only knew where they’d found a wool blanket in fucking Las Vegas.
Officer Jeffreys was standing guard outside of the interview room, eating a bag of Funyuns. “Hopkins is in rough shape.”
“Well yeah, he got his organs removed,” Dana said.
“Amazing, isn’t it? That he could have his organs removed and still manage to move, talk, think.”
“Amazing,” she said, “or disgusting.”
“He’s pissed to have woken up at all.” Anthony had also been waiting outside the room when Dana arrived, playing games on his cell phone and generally looking way too comfortable in a police station. “If he hadn’t had blood, he wouldn’t have.”
Dana lifted her eyebrows at him. “Someone gave him blood?”
“I did,” Anthony said. That explained the bandage on his wrist. Dana had assumed that was a result of their hallway fight.
She cringed. “Dude, what the fuck is up with you today? Have you developed a bloodless fetish? Wanna be a feeder?”
He rolled his eyes and let his boots fall off the bench, thudding to the floor. He stood up. “I want to save your ass, Dana. Hopkins wasn’t going to get his mind back without blood. The cure’s in his mind. So it was an easy choice.”
“For you.” Dana jerked her thumb at the window. Harold Hopkins was still sobbing on the other side. “He doesn’t look happy about the choice.”
“That’s what he gets for not having a living will. It was legal for me to help him finish transitioning since he didn’t have preferences specified.”
“You hear this asshole, Officer Jeffreys?” Dana asked. “You better go write down on a sticky note right now that you don’t want Anthony force-feeding you blood if a vampire kills you.”
Officer Jeffreys laughed weakly. “So…are you going to talk to him?”
“Yeah,” Dana said. “I’m going in alone.”
“Be gentle with him,” Anthony said.
She flipped the bird and headed inside.
Harold Hopkins tried to compose himself at the sight of Dana. “Hello. Are you another officer?”
Dude must have still been fried from the transformation. Nothing about Dana’s leather clothing made her look like the fuzz. “I’m Dana McIntyre, a registered vigilante with the Hunting Club. I’ve got questions for you. Sorry if they’re repeats. First up: how’d you turn into a vampire if you were killed by a sidhe?”
“Achlys,” Harold said. “She kept me filled up with venom in case I died on the job. She wanted to make sure I delivered the product.”
“The cure?” Dana asked.
He nodded. “I don’t think that Shawn killed me over the cure, to be frank. I think he…” His chin began quavering again, jowls wiggling.
“We don’t need to talk about that.” Hopkins would have already given details to the police. Dana could look at the files later. “Let’s talk cure. Procedure, how it works, all that good shit.”
“The cure’s not ready,” Harold said. “It might never be ready.”
“Not if you don’t work on it,” Dana said.
He made an obvious effort to calm his trembling hands, resting them flat on the table with fingers spread
. “Achlys wanted me under her employ because progress stopped with Hardwick Research. I had been sending her information and—”
“What about your Hardwick NDA? You must have signed an NDA.”
His head dropped low, shoulders sagging. “Do you know how much cancer treatments cost?”
“Nothing,” Dana said, “except what you put into taxes.”
“Public medicine means waiting. It means seeing local oncologists. It means that if you want experimental treatments, or if you want to be seen faster, or if you want to see someone better outside the NAU, you have to cough up the money.”
“So you effectively stole information from your employer to finance better medicine for your wife.”
He turned pained eyes on her. “Are you married?”
“Yeah,” Dana said.
“Then you should know why I made these choices. Going to chemo that was proven to only add weeks to her lifespan, knowing I was already married to a dead woman…” His forehead dropped again, thudding atop his hands. “Stealing from my employer was the least of the things I’d have done to save her.”
Was he going to start crying again?
For fuck’s sake.
“But progress stopped,” he mumbled without lifting his head. “I got as far as I could on that cure, and…my wife’s battle ended. The Hardwicks ended my research program too. To be honest, I think they only kept it going that long so I would keep busy while my wife was sick. They knew it wasn’t going anywhere.”
“Achlys wanted you to continue,” Dana said. “You told her that you could do it so that she’d keep giving you money, drinks, casino chips…”
“And I did make progress. Finally, once I was in a pit of vampires without my beautiful wife at my side, I made progress. I saw what I hadn’t been able to see with the Hardwicks.”
Now this was getting good. Dana straddled the chair next to Harold, leaning close so she wouldn’t miss anything he mumbled at his lap. “You finished the cure?”
“A cure with caveats,” Harold said. “I started out avoiding elements harmful to vampires. But once I put those poisons in, it worked.”
Her brow lowered over her eyes. “You made a cure that…kills vampires?”
“Instantly,” Harold said. “It shrivels them away to nothing, and they only need to consume a few drops of it—less than a teaspoon—to feel the effects.”
“It’s not a cure. It’s a weapon.”
“Both, Miss McIntyre,” he said.
“McIntyre. No miss.”
Harold looked at her in bleary confusion. “You…what?”
“Don’t call me miss,” Dana said. “Keep going. How’s it both a cure and a weapon?”
“Fledglings who haven’t had human blood are less vulnerable. Like the way that sunlight makes baby vamps blister, not burn. I made a cure that attacks the vampire virus. For blood virgins, who’ve never tasted human blood and haven’t changed yet, it’s a cure. But for everyone else…”
Dana sat straighter. Her mind was whirling with possibility, and her heart even tried to beat. “It kills.”
The cure was even better than she’d realized. Dana hadn’t tasted human blood yet, so once she got this cure from Harold Hopkins, she’d be human again.
And she could use the cure to kill every single vampire in Las Vegas once she was done.
“How do I make it?” Dana asked.
“The composition is too complex for me to have it memorized, and the ingredients are rare. It’s difficult to synthesize. Everything is in my lab. Everything you could ever need. My notes, the vial I successfully created—”
“I searched your lab. We didn’t find cures or notes or nothing.”
“The lab in my room?” Harold asked. “No, that was only one place I worked. The bulk of it is in Achlys’s tower, in the big lab. It’s right under the top floor where she’s always drinking with all of her friends.”
Which meant Dana had an excuse for a raid.
The night kept getting better.
She stood up, and Harold grabbed her by the arm, gazing at her with such miserable crimson eyes. “I can’t be like this,” he said. “I’m supposed to be with Jenny.”
“What do you want me to do? Kill you?”
“Yes,” Harold said.
“I’m not gonna patronize you by pointing out that you could make a new cure, or improve the existing cure, if you stick around,” Dana said. “Bet you’ve thought about that. You’ve decided that the worldwide implications of a vampire cure aren’t worth what it’s gonna cost you personally.”
“It could be decades,” Harold said. “Decades remembering Jenny, drinking blood, hurting people…” His fingers tightened painfully. Unlike Dana, he had full access to the strength of a vampire. “What do I have to do for someone to kill me?”
She jerked a wooden stake out of her belt. “Just tell me when you’re ready.”
Officer Jeffreys saw Dana through the window and started shouting. She couldn’t hear the words because of the soundproofing. She didn’t care what he had to say.
“I’m ready,” Harold said.
Dana pulled him out of the chair by his collar, tossed him out flat on the table. She wasn’t gentle with him even though he was crying and limp. He was a grown-ass man. He knew what he was asking for.
“You’ve made the right choice,” Dana said.
Harold gave her a grateful nod. “I know.”
She plunged the stake into his heart.
So Dana got in trouble for that.
But she got in trouble for a lot of things. Like when she forgot to put the mayonnaise away so that it went bad on the counter, and Penny didn’t have mayo for her sandwich the next day. Dana always got in trouble for that.
Or like when she kept forgetting to hang up all her armor at the Hunting Club. Brianna was a stickler for organization.
Staking a suicidal vampire was no worse than leaving pauldrons on the floor.
“What am I going to do with you?” Charmaine stood in front of Dana, hands on her hips, looking simultaneously frustrated and helpless.
“Put out a warrant for my arrest,” Dana suggested. “You can stake me when I’m done with my plans.” She brushed past the chief to head up the aisle at Holy Nights Cathedral. Dana was feeling good after Brianna’s patch-job, so Charmaine couldn’t have stopped her if she wanted. “I didn’t do anything illegal to Hopkins, though.”
“It’s true that suicide is not illegal for vampire Americans.” Charmaine looked spooked to be in the strange cathedral, but she was a professional, a police chief. She kept her nervous ticks to a minimum. “You’ve got a case for arguing that it was suicide. That’s something that’s going to have to happen during your murder trial, argued by a lawyer.”
“It won’t go to trial. Just send the tape of my interview to Judge Kusak.” The judge was an ex-girlfriend of Dana’s, from the days before Penny. She had split with Billie on good terms. Whenever Dana butted heads with the law, she tried to do it in front of Billie’s bench, because she always got off. Pun intended.
“What if I want it to go to trial?” Charmaine asked.
“You don’t want that much paperwork.”
“Damn it, McIntyre. Look at you. Triadist necklace, triadist cathedral.”
“So what? I am a triadist,” she said.
“You never wear that necklace.”
“Yeah, well,” Dana said, fingering the charm that hung over her breastplate. It was an elaborate, alchemical-looking rune. It had been derived from rituals performed to close the Breaking before Genesis.
“Did you know cops are trained to spot signs of suicidality? This sudden lean toward the spiritual, your great mood, the fact you’re unconcerned with consequences…”
Dana stopped walking. “Looking for a cure is suicidal?”
“Are you really looking for a cure if you’re diving head-first into a vampire murder to get it?” Charmaine asked. Using a recording of Hopkins’s testimony, Anthony had gotten a warra
nt allowing the Hunting Club to infiltrate Achlys’s tower. Charmaine knew exactly what they were doing.
“I’m taking backup into the tower,” she said. “Anthony’s coming along, and Brianna’s giving remote support too.”
“Sure, but your behavior’s ringing all kinds of alarm bells, both on a professional and personal level for me.” Charmaine folded her arms. “You’re right about one thing. I don’t want you to go to court over Hopkins.”
“Great. Thanks.” She started walking again.
Charmaine wasn’t done talking, though. “I want you to ditch this vigilante thing—including your invasion of Achlys’s tower—and work for me.”
“Fuck no.”
“Just listen to the proposal, McIntyre.”
“No, no, and also again, no.” Dana dropped to her knees at the altar. Lincoln had appeared back near the confessionals, a shadow in his cowboy hat and robes. The chief probably hadn’t even noticed. “I’m gonna pray now. I promise I ain’t planning to slit my wrists if you turn your back on me.”
“I won’t be able to protect you when the OPA comes in. I won’t have control over whether they press charges for Harold Hopkins. And the things that I’ve said are fine for vigilantes to do in Vegas, maybe the OPA will have different opinions. There might be a lot of laws they think you’ve broken.” She backed away, hands lifted in a gesture of surrender. She was done. Giving up on Dana.
“Gotcha,” Dana said. “Appreciate the warning.”
She bowed her head over her folded hands.
Charmaine’s footsteps retreated.
The doors to Holy Nights Cathedral opened then shut again.
Lincoln emerged from the shadows behind the confessional, and he took a seat in a pew behind Dana.
She kept her eyes closed. “Is it ready?”
“Nice and cozy, just for you,” Lincoln said. Keys jingled. “You’re the only person who can unlock it.”
“Hope you didn’t waste too much magic on that. This might be the only day it’s used.”
“Doesn’t hurt to have it around, just in case.”
Dana kissed the pendant on her triadist necklace before standing to take the keys from Lincoln. There were two identical keys on the ring. They were cold to her increasingly colorless hands.