by SM Reine
The heel of her palm slammed the magazine into place with a satisfying click. “The rumors are almost true,” Dana said.
She did want to get rid of all the vampires, herself included. No question about that.
But she didn’t want them gone enough to give power to a serial-killing faerie.
“We can work together,” Shawn said. “Make this transition happen nice and—”
Dana opened fire.
A pinpoint bullet hole opened on Shawn’s shoulder, because he’d shifted at the last moment so that she missed his heart.
Magic gushed out of the wound. It ripped the hole wide, and it was like breaking the Hoover Dam. Lake Mead sprayed out with the force of a thousand trains.
It hammered Dana in the chest, nearly knocking her out the window.
Anthony had less body mass. He did tumble over the edge of the window.
She shot a hand out, clasped his wrist. His weight dragged her across shards of glass and magical ice. It didn’t really hurt, and not just because of her armor; Dana’s bloodless skin seemed to have very limited sensation.
Dana braced her feet against either side of the window frame. Their drop halted.
“Whoa!” Anthony shouted from outside.
“The ropes!” she yelled back, hoping that he could hear her over the blast of magic.
Shawn’s fist closed on her hair, yanking Dana’s head back. “You could have just said no,” he said.
He stomped on her arm.
Dana’s fingers released Anthony.
His strangled shout was muffled underneath the roaring wind. The world warped dizzyingly as Shawn threw her hair-first into the middle of the room.
She rolled across the floor and came up against a table. On the other side of the legs, she saw a familiar mousy face peeking out from the other side of the couch.
Nissa.
The young vampire was looking at Dana in the same way that Penny watched old Beyoncé music videos. It was hero worship so extreme that it threatened to tip over into psychosis.
When was the last time Penny had looked that excited to see Dana?
She flipped over to face Shawn as he descended.
There was no way that his physical form was as big as it looked. The guy was a hundred eighty centimeters tall at best, but the sidhe magic made him look the size of Achlys’s tower.
Dana should have felt all blissed out watching his wave of sparkly glitter crashing over her. Sidhe magic was a beautiful way to die. Autumn wind would wring out an orgasm then choke you to death moments later. And people often didn’t fight it. They were too dazed by the hallucinogenic qualities of sorcery to care about dying.
Shawn was used to that dazed reaction from humans and vampires alike. He was relying on it.
Except Dana wasn’t quite human or vampire at the moment.
She lifted her gun and fired again.
This time, she hit him in the thigh. About an inch from his stupid floppy dong, in fact.
His body hit hers. Blood sprayed over Dana, drenching her in damp warmth the color of sapphires.
“Gross,” she said.
Shawn’s hands locked around her throat. He pushed her down flat using all of his sidhe strength. “It could have been nice, working with me.”
“Doubt it,” she squeezed out.
He lifted his left hand, and a blade of magic formed. It was so sharp that Dana couldn’t see it from the right angle. That was definitely the weapon responsible for all the vampire deaths.
Shawn’s elbow drew back to pummel her…
And Nissa stepped up behind him.
“Boo,” she said.
Nissa smashed the coffee table into the back of Shawn’s head like a pro wrestler.
He collapsed.
Dana drove both of her knees into his crotch. Which would have been painful even if she hadn’t been wearing knee pads that were studded with metal spikes, and even if she hadn’t already shot him in the peen once.
Shawn gave an impressively supersonic shriek.
All the glass in Achlys’s penthouse cracked. It pulverized to dust and sprayed into the night.
Dana tossed Shawn to the floor next to the shattered pieces of the coffee table. The rope outside the window was taut; she trusted that meant that Anthony had caught it instead of falling to his death on the sidewalk. She kept her focus on Shawn.
And on Nissa.
The vampire might have saved her, but she was still a vampire. And this particular vamp had good reason to turn on Dana.
“I stabbed you,” Dana said, angling herself so that she could see both Nissa and her master at the same time. She kept the gun on Shawn. The iron bullets Penny had given her would only do real damage against the sidhe anyway.
The vortexing magic made it hard to aim directly at Shawn. Dana’s arm kept wavering, her hand pointing at something else as her attention wandered off to the lumpy, rippling shape of the couch, or the webbing of cracks in the floor.
“Yes, you almost killed me.” Nissa’s smile made her colorless eyes sparkle. She lifted the hem of her shirt to show Dana that she still had the stabbing wounds in place, unhealed. “Now kill him. Kill Shawn Wyn.”
He looked shocked. “Nissa!” Both of his hands were clutching his junk like he’d barf out his testicles if he didn’t hold very still.
“Sorry, Shawn,” Nissa said. “You don’t do anything for me.”
Dana edged nearer to Shawn to make sure she could aim right. She only had a couple bullets left, and she wasn’t going to risk missing.
“I’m Dana McIntyre, and it’s within my authority to punish you for the murders of Harold Hopkins and the vampire known as Beelzebub,” she said.
She barely got the last syllable of his name out before she started squeezing the trigger.
Bullets tore away at Shawn’s skull in rapid succession. The resulting splatter was like a dozen mallet strikes to a gem-toned watermelon. And Nissa had a front row seat to the destruction.
The smell of sidhe blood wasn’t like human blood. It was a different kind of intoxicating, so heady and rich and spicy. Shawn’s blood reminded Nissa of pumpkin-spiced ale during Halloween.
Sidhe weren’t far from humans, as far as heritage went; they were all gaeans, and as close genetically as Neanderthals and Denisovans had been. So Nissa held her breath waiting to experience Shawn’s death with him. She braced herself for empath agony to punch through her gut.
It never came.
She watched Shawn dying, his head shot off of his neck, and she felt…nothing.
Until she looked at Dana.
Wisps of smoke spiraled from the muzzle of her pistol. Gunpowder residue marked Dana’s pale knuckles. Colorful blood drenched the hunter’s armor. Yes, she wore actual body armor made of stone and leather, as though she were an ancient warrior-god walking alongside the Spartans.
Mohinder and Tormid’s argument about whether Dana was myth or woman came back to rattle inside of Nissa’s skull.
This was certainly a real person standing in front of Nissa. Dana McIntyre had just blown Shawn’s head off, after all. But she looked like glorious myth too. She looked like someone had dripped the essence of ruthless murder into the shape of a woman.
Dana killed Shawn and didn’t care. Just as she hadn’t cared about killing Nissa.
She was perfect.
“Perfect,” Nissa whispered, knotting her hands over the hole in her stomach. Her fingers were very warm. She’d forgotten that she was still clutching the cure.
When she looked down at her hands, clasped around the glowing blue vial, Dana looked too.
“Is that the cure?” Dana dropped her gun and pulled that stake cannon in front of her again.
Achlys rose from behind the couch. “Yes, McIntyre. That’s the cure. It’s the only one.” She tossed a piece of plastic and glittering metal to Nissa.
A syringe.
Now Nissa had everything she needed to inject the cure into herself.
“Only one
cure?” Dana asked.
“And it’s not for you,” Achlys said.
Dana stepped back toward the window, glanced over the edge. “You okay?”
A male voice drifted in the wind. “Yep. Just hanging out.” Dana’s companion wasn’t dead.
Too bad, Nissa thought, and she realized with a jolt of pleasure that she meant it. She really wished that the human had died. All it had taken was a few minutes in the same room as Dana and she could feel herself being infected with the ruthlessness.
“Great.” Dana pumped the cannon. The motor whirred and the stake pistoned. “I know you’ve got Harold Hopkins’s research notes on the floor under this one. My team’s hacking into the computers right now. They’ll synthesize more cure, so it doesn’t matter if you have one vial or one thousand.”
“You’re bluffing.” Achlys had resumed those unsettlingly jerky movements that she always used in front of outsiders. She was optimistic again. She thought she would survive this. “His equipment is disconnected from any network.”
Dana barely blinked. “Well, that’d explain why they were having trouble hacking it. They hacked the rest of your system, though, and they found the Bunker.”
Achlys went completely still. “Oh?”
“You’ve got cameras in your murder pit,” Dana said. “Not a pro move. We’ve got footage of you killing three missing people after the assault on the wax museum.”
“I wouldn’t have had to kill anyone if you hadn’t fed me balefire,” Achlys said.
“We can go back and forth on this all night, or you can turn the cure over and I’ll walk out.” Dana extended a hand to Nissa.
“I would like to let you have the cure,” Achlys said. “The problem is that if I let you walk out of here alive, you’ll turn the Bunker footage over to the LVMPD.”
“Sure. They’ll put you in jail, where you can spend the next couple of centuries thinking about what an asshole you’ve been. And hell, if the LVMPD gets here fast enough, their healers might be able to save your shifter friend.” She jerked her head toward Tormid’s body. He hadn’t moved in a long time. “Whereas if you don’t give me the cure, I’m going to kill you right now.”
Achlys’s head popped, rotating two inches to the right. The master’s eyes connected with Nissa’s.
Strange movements aside, there was nothing but tragic humanity in Achlys’s gaze. She knew she was cornered. She’d spent a couple miserable decades lording it over Las Vegas, and now it was about to end through incarceration rather than a cure.
“Inject it now,” Achlys said to Nissa.
And then she lunged.
Dana reacted immediately. She hurled herself toward Nissa, away from Achlys, and their bodies collided.
Nissa slammed into a steel girder that had been exposed when Shawn broke all the glass. She dropped the cure vial. It didn’t break—thank the gods it didn’t break—but it struck the tile with a tink and spun across the floor.
Dana lunged for it.
Achlys did too.
The vampire won, and she was fast enough to slam a knee into Dana’s head. The hunter wheeled away, dazed. “Take this!” Achlys shoved the warm glass vial into Nissa’s hands. “Take it before McIntyre can!”
“But I—”
“Quick!”
Achlys had already turned her attention back to Dana, which was Achlys’s final mistake that night. The master vampire had been so busy thinking about noble ways to save Nissa that she’d never once wondered if Nissa craved salvation.
Nissa twisted the vial into the syringe. Dana watched her doing it. From underneath Achlys’s outstretched arm, Nissa could see the hunter’s boiling rage. Dana wanted that cure. She wanted it bad.
Dana got on her feet, ran toward Nissa. The hunter’s speed was only slightly faster than a living human’s. She looked to Nissa like she was in slow motion.
Achlys braced herself to block Dana. “No!”
Nissa slammed the needle into Achlys’s back, penetrating her brittle spine, and pressed the plunger down.
Time resumed normal speed.
They tumbled to the floor together. Nissa hadn’t hit Achlys hard, but it seemed that the cure was taking effect immediately because Achlys had turned to jelly. Nissa could actually see the passage of it underneath Achlys’s papery flesh. She watched the veins blackening, her face hollowing out, the skin stretching over her bones.
Achlys’s mouth moved and tissue-thin skin stretched over her teeth. The cheek skin tore into a ragged gash. The only coherent sound that came out was, “Why?”
Nissa cupped her master’s cheeks in both hands, gazing down as that once-perfect Morticia Addams face was seized by pain, taken to a place beyond deception. Achlys couldn’t look good anymore and she didn’t care.
She was suffering.
When Nissa looked closely enough, she thought she could see the same vibrancy of emotion as she felt from humans. She could almost believe that she was doing something wrong to Achlys. She could almost feel.
Not emotions stolen from a human victim, but emotions that originated from Nissa.
It was a high she’d hoped Beelzebub would give her. But this was much better than a slow, painful starvation in a closet. It was so immediate.
“Why?” Nissa mused, stroking her thumbs along Achlys’s exposed cheekbones so that the remaining skin flaked away. Nissa felt grief, regret, and total sorrow. Nissa already wished that she hadn’t killed Achlys and it was glorious. “I guess it’s because everyone thinks I like vampires a lot less than I actually do.”
She dropped Achlys’s head.
Dana stood a few feet away, fists lifted and feet braced as though she were about to attack even though she didn’t move.
Nissa stared at Dana, and Dana stared back.
It was like they were looking at each other for the first time.
Oh, it was blistering, this sense of emptiness radiating from Dana McIntyre. She was a black hole cut out of the fabric of the universe as far as emotion went. Nissa could stare into her eyes, try to mold her mind against Dana’s. She’d never feel anything. Dana was bloodless.
Nissa’s heart was beating again. Pounding, in fact.
Her mouth was so dry that it hurt. Like her tongue would crack into dust if she moved it. She wanted to ask Dana, Are you going to kill me now? But nothing came out, and Nissa couldn’t will life to undead lips.
Physical pain descended.
Nissa’s hair wrenched upward once, twice. Like a huge fist had grabbed the entire bulk of her curls. Then a knife jabbed into her scalp, and Nissa cried out.
The weight of massive claws sank into her back, curving over her shoulders, biting her skin. The animal that had taken position on Nissa felt like it weighed as much as a car. The flapping of massive wings whipped the air in the room.
She twisted and sank her fangs into the toe on her shoulder. It was scaly, flaky. Tasted rotten.
At her bite, the weight lifted. Nissa scrambled to her feet.
Tormid was alive. While everyone else had been distracted, he’d managed to shapeshift into his animal form to heal the wounds that Shawn inflicted. Now he was a one-ton raven with feathers bigger than Nissa’s forearm. She’d never seen him in his bird shape before. She could imagine why Achlys would have fallen in love with someone who looked that deadly.
Her curls were stuck to his beak. He’d gotten a shred of shirt on one of his talons.
“I take it you’re angry about Achlys,” Nissa said.
Tormid’s wings flapped with insane power.
One of those wings broadsided Nissa.
He flung her through the window. The wards must have been completely disabled because there was no responding push of magic to contain her within.
The few remaining shards of glass scraped her body passing through. She saw Dana beyond Tormid’s undulating wing feathers, and the hunter didn’t look like she had any urge whatsoever to try to save Nissa. A beautiful, perfect, ruthless killing machine until the very last m
oment.
There was a weightless moment where Nissa felt like she was floating. She could see the entire Strip. She could see Anthony Morales dangling from the window, bleeding from his scalp, dazed but grinning. She could see a helicopter puttering through the beam of the Luxor 2.
She could see starlight.
And then she fell a long, long way.
18
Day two in a coffin.
“I will never get used to this,” Dana grumbled, shoving the lid open.
Her strength was still low, being a blood virgin and all, so she struggled to push the coffin open. Stone ground against stone loudly. People must have been waiting in the hallway to hear that sound because someone knocked on the door.
“Come in,” Dana called, dismantling the wards.
It was Brianna. Anthony wasn’t far behind, but he stayed out in the hallway, chatting with Lincoln as the door swung shut. “Well, you did a great job making a huge mess,” she said, fingers running over the wooden beads on her necklace. “Can I sit?”
“No. Fuck off.”
“Great.” Brianna took the lonely chair against the wall. Her eyes traveled over the sparse room’s nonexistent decor. “This is so cheerful.”
“What do you want?”
“The Hunting Club is a legal operation, for the most part. But we’ve got some resources for covering things up extra-legally.”
“Nice way to say illegal,” Dana said. “And I know. I’ve used those resources before.”
“You really strained the resources this time. Performing executions upon Achlys, Shawn Wyn, and Nissa Royal—”
“I had a warrant for Achlys. I’ll file the paperwork for Shawn and Nissa ASAP.”
“—setting fire to the microbiologist’s lab—”
“What?” Dana shoved the lid the rest of the way off of her coffin.
“The lab burned down,” Brianna said.
“I didn’t do that!”
“No, you didn’t drench the place in accelerant and light a match, but you went storming in there with an obvious purpose. The vampires reacted. They didn’t want you to win.” Brianna sighed. “Are you shocked that someone would try to cover things up? I’m not.”
Shocked wasn’t the right word for it.