by SM Reine
“Thanks for cleaning up the body, by the way,” Dana said.
Lincoln frowned. “Body?”
“The vampire I left for you. Stabbed her right there after my vigil.” Dana nodded at the floor next to the pulpit.
“There was no vampire there,” Lincoln said.
So Nissa Royal was alive. She had escaped.
“Damn,” Dana said. “I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain after all.” She’d really meant to kill that mousy-faced fucker.
“What bargain?”
“Never mind,” she said. “Take me to my grave.”
Dana’s final resting place was in the catacombs. Her grave was only one of many heavily warded chambers, as they kept all sorts of artifacts in the musty tunnels underneath the cathedral. Some were relics of the gods, others belonged to the sidhe, and some were more dangerous things that Dana preferred not to know about.
Her chamber was all the way in the back, down a hallway flanked by statues of the gods. Dana unlocked the door and magic flared.
She faced a windowless room containing an open stone sarcophagus. Lincoln had thoughtfully fitted a foam pad to the bottom. Even included a pillow.
“The hallway door will lock as soon as you pull your lid shut,” he explained. “And nobody except you will be able to open either of them.”
“That’s a lot of costly magic cast there. You must have called in favors.” Dana’s eyes narrowed at him. “Makes me think that you expect me to be here a while.”
“If you die, and if we recover a body, you’ve got a lot of enemies that would love to make use of your parts. We can entomb you here until you rot to nothing so nobody can use you.”
Now that was more like it. “Thanks, Linc.” Dana hauled herself into the sarcophagus without taking off the armor. Normally Dana slept naked, just like Penny. But she was about to sleep the sleep of the dead. Comfort wasn’t a huge issue.
She’d rise at sunset, like the vampires did. She’d walk into Achlys’s tower.
And she’d either find a cure, or…not.
“Would you like your last rites now?” Lincoln asked as she laid back.
Dana shifted around on the foam pad. She really couldn’t seem to get comfortable, but it also wasn’t uncomfortable. She didn’t feel much of anything. “Yeah. It’s about time for that.”
Her last sight before she slid the sarcophagus shut was Brother Marshall, hands and lips moving, a triadist charm dangling over her grave.
And then darkness.
15
After Nissa was stabbed in the Holy Nights Cathedral, she spent two days dragging her undead body toward Achlys’s tower.
Two days lurking in the shadows. Two days sleeping in a mildewed sewer while daylight traced lines through the grates. Two days struggling to move because Dana had inflicted a massive wound that collected grit worse than white pants at a barbecue.
The two best days of Nissa’s postmortem life.
She’d never felt so clear, so calm, so…purified.
It might have taken another night to get home, but someone found Nissa before she had to keep going.
Sunset descended. Footsteps splashed through the sewers. Distant voices conferred. A familiar gravelly growl whispered over it all, and Nissa felt the indistinct words in her belly-hole.
“Mohinder,” she rasped.
He found her an instant later.
Glossy black loafers appeared in front of her. He hiked his slacks up an inch and kneeled, resting his cold hands on her shoulder, her forehead. “Ah, my fledgling.” Mohinder turned her enough so that he could see her face. “You had me worried.”
“Dana McIntyre,” she said. It was the name that had blazed white-hot and pure in Nissa’s soul those two days of struggle.
Mohinder’s brows formed a severe line that shadowed the crags of his face. “Hold on. I will carry you.” One arm slid under her shoulders, the other under her knees. He lifted Nissa as though she weighed nothing.
It was familiar, being cradled against Mohinder’s chest. Being scooped out of the muck by him.
Nissa’s memory of her transformation was hazy. The four-year fast had allowed a fog to settle permanently within her skull. Still, she recalled waking up in downtown Las Vegas after being beaten to death. She had been cradled against Mohinder’s breast then too. His teeth had been embedded in her throat, pumping her full of venom as he stroked her hair.
Now she was rocked in his arms as he strode into the night, flanked by a pair of Achlys’s vampires. Nissa must have really worried Achlys to have ranked such a search party.
Or else Dana McIntyre had made a very big mess trying to retrieve Harold Hopkins, setting the Paradisos at high alarm.
Nissa let her eyes fall shut, turning her head into Mohinder’s shoulder so that nobody would see her smiling. She may not have recalled her transformation well, but she remembered Dana plunging the knife into her gut perfectly.
Dana was perfect. Emotionless. Unsentimental.
Nissa’s mind had been opened.
The elevator chimed, and Mohinder stepped into climate-controlled darkness at the glassy apex of Achlys’s tower.
“Where did you find her?” Achlys asked.
“Sewers. She was filthy. It looks like she barely survived an attack.”
“McIntyre.” The name was poison between Achlys’s fangs. “Put her on the couch.”
The comforting wall of Mohinder’s chest was replaced by Achlys’s worried face. The master vampire was wearing her wig, her Elvira dress, her stupid fingernails. Her entire mouth had reformed from swallowing balefire, but her chin was scarred.
“What happened after I disappeared?” Nissa asked, blinking heavily into the dim lights.
Achlys pulled Nissa’s shirt apart to examine her wound. “McIntyre slaughtered seventeen people to reach someone in my custody.”
“Harold Hopkins.”
“How did you know?” Tormid asked sharply. Of course Tormid was there. Achlys always needed her pet shifter nearby.
“I was supposed to get Harold Hopkins from Henderson. Shawn was guarding someone the next day. Wasn’t hard to figure it out.”
The answer seemed to satisfy Achlys. “Dana McIntyre abducted him, took him to a police station, and murdered him. I felt the instant that she drove a wooden stake into his heart.”
It was normal for a master vampire to feel the deaths of vampires she’d created. But… “Hopkins wasn’t a vampire.”
Achlys’s jaw went taut. “I’d kept him flush with venom, just in case he got hurt. And he did. He was a vampire by the time McIntyre got to Hopkins. In order for someone to have killed him in his room, we must have a traitor in our midst—most likely the same person who killed Beelzebub.”
Mohinder’s eyes flicked to Nissa.
“I don’t know about that,” Nissa said hesitantly.
“Someone’s been killing my vampires,” Achlys went on, like she hadn’t heard Nissa. “I believed it to be the Hunting Club, but now I don’t know. Beelzebub’s death was slow. The Hunting Club isn’t torturing my people for weeks, and they didn’t vivisect Hopkins.”
Nissa’s heart beat again. Just once. “Someone vivisected him?”
“Removed all his organs and filled a tub with his blood,” Mohinder said, still gazing steadily at Nissa, as if to gauge her reaction.
“That’s interesting,” she said faintly.
“The people in this room are the only ones we can trust,” Achlys said. “The only people I know for a fact would never, ever betray the Paradisos.”
Three vampires, including the murder’s master, and a shapeshifter.
She didn’t have much confidence in her community.
“We need to cut the traitor out of the murder,” Achlys said.
Her fingers plunged into Nissa’s wound.
Nissa cried out.
“Are there many shards?” Mohinder asked. Sometimes wooden stakes splintered within wounds, and those splinters would halt efforts to repair the
injury.
“No, it feels clean.” Achlys extracted her fingers with the rasping sound of paper against drywall. “She’s not healing because she’s not blooded.”
Nissa grabbed Achlys’s wrist. “Don’t feed me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Achlys said soothingly.
But that got Mohinder looming over Nissa, glaring down at her. His fingers encircled her skull. He clutched tightly. “You are my fledgling, Nissa Royal. It has entertained me to watch you conduct yourself as you choose, but no more. You will not repair this wound without blood.”
“She won’t be fed if she doesn’t want it!” Achlys said.
“I am her sire,” he said with dangerous quiet. “She wants what I want.”
“What if she wants to be made into a human again?”
“Impossible,” Mohinder said. “And ridiculous.”
“Harold Hopkins made a cure before McIntyre murdered him,” Achlys said. “It only works on blood virgins. I’d planned to make him develop something better, but…” Emotion traveled over her starkly made-up face. “There is only one vial of the cure synthesized, and it will only work on a blood virgin. Nissa will heal if I use it on her.”
Nissa was so shocked by the idea that she didn’t have a voice.
Become human again?
Such a thing was impossible, even though vampires talked about it all the time. “What’s the first thing you’d do if you got to be alive again?” was the most popular conversation topic in bars around the city. The most popular answer was “have a good long fuck without drinking blood to fuel my boner first.”
Since she didn’t have a boner to fuel, Nissa had never bothered coming up with an answer for that question.
Even when she’d been alive, she’d been a mostly nocturnal college student. She had watched a lot of Netflix. She didn’t miss daylight, and she didn’t miss boners, so…why worry about being human again?
If you were human again, you wouldn’t have to deal with that empathy thing.
The thing that made it impossible for her to drink blood in the first place.
“So that’s why you’ve been acting strangely. You’re looking for a way to ‘fix’ yourself,” Mohinder said. “I should have believed everyone when they told me that you miss being one of them.” He stood, invading Achlys’s space, and she had to get to her feet so that he wasn’t towering over her. “Do you realize what your reversion to human would do to my run against Mayor Hekekia in the fall?”
“Nobody needs to know what I am or am not,” Achlys said. “I can fake being a vampire.” Mohinder shuddered as though she’d just revealed a plan to murder his puppy. “It’s irrelevant, though. McIntyre murdered Harold Hopkins so we don’t have a complete cure. We can only save Nissa.”
“Save her?” Mohinder barked a bitter laugh. “Save my fledgling, by stripping her of the gift I gave her? Do you want this, Nissa?”
Nissa’s hands crept to the wound on her belly. It was dirty, soiled from all her time in the gutters.
It wouldn’t heal unless she drank blood and invited some human into her head.
She’d have to suffer with them, feel their pain, let her entire body become wracked. It would feel like being a mouse trapped within an eagle’s talons.
Or she could turn human again.
She took too long to answer. Mohinder sank to Nissa’s side. “Making you into this was a gift, my fledgling,” he murmured. “If you want a human victim to bleed, then you know where to find my help.”
His cold lips pressed against her forehead.
Mohinder vanished in a whirl of shadow, dragging it behind him as a cloak. Doors flew open to let him pass and slammed shut behind him.
Nissa watched her sire departing through the glass walls, and she felt…
Nothing.
Even Mohinder’s dark threat was nothing compared to the brilliant glow of Dana McIntyre within Nissa’s soul.
Once Mohinder was gone, Achlys stripped off her wig. She tossed it to Tormid. “Please, Nissa,” Achlys said. “I know that you never chose to be a vampire, and I want to help you.”
“Did you choose?” Nissa asked.
Achlys shook her head. “Before Genesis, I was a professional ice dancer. This is true. Don’t laugh.” Nissa wasn’t laughing. “When Genesis struck, I woke up a vampire. It was like I’d hit on a twelve and got a jack. Anything else would have been fine—anything at all.”
“You don’t want to be a vampire,” Nissa said, disbelieving.
Achlys’s smile was angry. “Who does?” Tormid rested a hand on her shoulder, and she nuzzled her cheek against his hairy forearm. “Vampires can’t be turned to shifters. If I’m made human, I can live with the moon as Tormid does.”
It was bizarre to hear this coming from Achlys. She owned the Strip! Thousands of vampires looked up to her as an icon of their people.
She didn’t even want to be one of their people.
“Look here.” Achlys’s fingers plunged into the depths of her cleavage and came up with a thumb-sized vial of luminescent blue fluid. “This is the only cure synthesized by Harold Hopkins. If you drink it, you’ll turn back.” She pressed it into Nissa’s hands. “Take it, please. Do what I can’t do.”
Nissa kept her palms shut around the vial. “How does the change happen? I mean…how will it work if I go back?”
“Nobody knows for certain, but Tormid has agreed to watch you through all hours of day and night until you’re human again. You’re safe with us.”
“Safe,” Nissa echoed.
It wasn’t safety that made Nissa’s heart beat, but getting stabbed in the gut by Dana McIntyre.
The elevator chimed. Doors slid open.
“Where is she?” The roaring voice was literal thunder, making the glass in Achlys’s tower shiver.
Shawn emerged from the elevator.
He didn’t look happy.
When Achlys laid her eyes upon him, she didn’t look happy, either. Nobody came up to her penthouse without an invitation. Especially not a faerie enforcer who didn’t have any real status in the murder of vampires.
She swept her wig off of the floor and placed it on her head, but too late—Shawn had already seen.
He brought the stench of rain-drenched cliffs with him into the room, even though Tormid attempted to bar his entrance. “Why didn’t my security detail stop you?” Achlys asked.
Shawn grinned broadly, and the world shone like starlight. “There was no security detail. Everyone checked out of the tower for the night.”
Alarm flashed in Achlys’s eyes. “You’re not welcome here,” she said in that cool, rigid tone that she seemed to think was vampire-sounding. “If you leave right now, I may forget to punish you later.”
“I’m not going anywhere without talking to Nissa,” Shawn said. He shoved past Tormid.
Achlys raised her eyebrows at Nissa. “Your affection isn’t as one-sided as I thought, apparently?”
Oh, it was one-sided, all right. But it had swung over from one direction to the other. Nissa had spent all that time pining for Shawn’s attention, and now that she didn’t want it, she apparently had it.
“What’s going on here?” Nissa managed to sit upright on the couch without needing to engage her dusty abdominal muscles too much.
“Do you really want to talk here?” Shawn asked. “About the thing?”
Tormid shifted his weight to stand in front of the only exit. Achlys said, “You have no choice but to talk about it here. What thing?”
Shawn’s eyes flicked between Achlys and Nissa. When he finally shrugged, it was a gesture that filled Nissa with dread. That sort of “fuck it” attitude wasn’t a good thing coming from someone like Shawn. He was shedding the veneer of cooperating with Achlys.
It meant he’d decided to do something really crazy, and damned be the consequences.
“How did Dana McIntyre get the key card I gave you?” Shawn asked.
“What key card?” Achlys asked, dropping each
word one at a time, nails hammered into a coffin.
Nissa’s face stayed blank. They were several stories away from the nearest human but she was starting to knot up in anxiety again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know about any key card.”
Betrayal flashed across Shawn’s eyes. “I held up my end. I did it for you. Harold Hopkins, Beelzebub—”
Achlys interrupted him. “Beelzebub? You killed Beelzebub?”
He laughed. “Hell yeah, I killed Beelzebub.”
Nissa’s relief was immediate and overwhelming.
He was taking credit for the death. Nobody but Mohinder would ever know about the stroke of perverse curiosity that had led to Beelzebub spending two weeks in her office’s closet.
She thought she was safe until Shawn said, “I finished the job for Nissa so I could show her that I was serious about a partnership.”
And now everybody was looking at her.
“Finished the job?” Achlys asked.
“Sure,” Shawn said. “Tell them, Nissa. Tell them about how you tortured Beelzebub in your closet. Tell them about how you loosed him onto the streets of Las Vegas assuming he’d keep his mouth shut out of fear. Tell them how much you love your vampire brethren.”
Nissa let the anxiety fill her eyes. “I don’t know what he’s talking about, Achlys.” She clutched the cure in her fist, letting it poke out an inch so that the glowing blue would spill over her hand—a beacon reminding Achlys of how much she cared about Mohinder’s delicate fledgling.
Achlys bought Nissa’s lie.
“Kill him,” Achlys told Tormid.
The shifter didn’t hesitate. He grabbed Shawn from behind—a hand on the back of his head, a hand on his jaw.
He was going to snap Shawn’s neck.
But then the sidhe slammed a hand into Tormid’s gut. There were spikes of magic running from his elbows to his knuckles, forming blades of light thinner than any mortal sword.
He buried his blades so deep inside Tormid that they came out the other side with a splattering of blood on glass.
Achlys screamed.
“I wasn’t done talking,” Shawn said pleasantly. “Don’t interrupt me.”