Cashing Out

by SM Reine

  3

  Nighttime found Nissa in the animal habitats at Judex. Some Paradisos vampires liked to hang out with the big cats; they thought lounging with tigers made them look cool. She’d seen it go awry several times, so Nissa didn’t make it a habit. Other vampires could drink synth blood to heal themselves if a lioness ripped them open, but Nissa hadn’t been able to do the same when she’d been a blood virgin.

  But things had changed.

  That was why she felt comfortable sitting alongside an artificial pond in the snow leopard habitat. The environment was kept comfortably cool for the furry white feline, and the water was colder still. Nissa’s feet were numb from being immersed.

  Every time she closed her eyes, she could remember the taste of human blood on her tongue as though it were fresh. She suspected that moment would be imprinted on her gray matter for the rest of her existence.

  Nissa had murdered humans.

  Slaughtered them, in fact.

  The police had been so slow that it hadn’t even been logistically difficult. As soon as Dana had made use of her vampire speed to escape, Nissa had found it easy to transition to vampire speed too. From there, it had been a trivial matter to access their vulnerable human throats, shred their arteries, and suck them dry.

  Logistically easy did not mean emotionally easy.

  With vampire speed came vampire empathy. From the moment she’d laid fang upon the first officer, she had been inside of his head—and he had been inside of hers.

  He had been a young man, the same age as Nissa when she’d died. He had just gotten married. His bride was pregnant. They had been arguing a lot because she wanted him to quit working with the LVMPD. It was too dangerous, she said.

  Nissa had screamed as she tore into him.

  She’d been able to feel her teeth as though they were in her throat. She’d felt like she was dying all over again.

  In her victim’s pain, she had found memories. Not from the officer. From Nissa’s life before she became a vampire.

  Her memories involved getting beaten by fists, cut open by knives, slashed to pieces by a man. There was little detail to the memory—only sheer, overwhelming emotion, which had turned off her brain after a few endless moments of agony.

  Then the officer with the young wife had dropped to the ground.

  She had killed a human man.

  “Strange place for you to relax.” Mohinder had just entered through the door to the hallway, leaving it ajar. He leaned against the frame with his hands in his pockets. He wore lean-cut black, as always, with his hair swept into a bun.

  Nissa rubbed her hands over her face. She could feel the air shifting as the snow leopard family moved through the trees nearby. “I’m not relaxing.”

  “Grieving?”

  “I don’t know.” She let her hands fall and met her sire’s eyes. “Do the police know anything?”

  “When you caught fire, it destroyed most of the evidence. I tried to relocate everything else before they arrived. Even so—I didn’t have time to be tidy, and they’ll find something if they look hard enough. I don’t think they’ll keep looking, though. They don’t care what becomes of vampire-owned properties.”

  Nissa nodded, and her reflection in the pool of water nodded too. “They may keep looking for answers about…”

  “Dana McIntyre,” Mohinder said.

  She nodded again. Words were too difficult for her.

  Nissa wasn’t angry that Dana had set her on fire—quite the opposite. That was the exact kind of ruthless myopathy that made the huntress so good. In Dana’s crocodile mind, vampires were bad, so Nissa was bad. There was beauty in the predatory simplicity of it.

  But Nissa had hoped that she could prove she was worth the effort. She’d thought if she could just force Dana to become a vampire, Dana would realize that it was a favorable state. The ideal predatory form.

  Instead, Dana had set fire to Nissa.

  She’d taken full-thickness burns, exposed some bone, ended up writhing on the floor. There had been no light at the end of the tunnel Nissa descended toward death. It had been nothing but endless darkness swarmed by the memories of her recent human victims.

  And then Mohinder had been there, dropping over her, smothering her flames with a blanket. He’d brought a charm to limit the damage. He’d also brought a bag of blood and a fresh outfit for Nissa to wear.

  She picked at a loose thread on her sleeve, flicked it into the snow leopards’ pond. “I pushed Dana off of the roof.” It was so hard to speak about it. In a way, it still felt as though her mouth was filled with human blood, and it would spill out if she parted her lips.

  Mohinder sat beside her, folding his legs underneath him. “You killed one of our deadliest enemies. You’ve never killed before. It’s obviously hurting you.”

  Nissa couldn’t help but hunch in on herself even though she didn’t feel that old anxiety. There were humans on the other side of the glass, gambling away their savings on the roulette table, but she didn’t feel any of their struggle for once. She wasn’t sure what she felt. “The sun didn’t rise for a while after she fell.”

  Mohinder surveyed her with calm eyes. Now that their irises and fangs were a matched set, Nissa imagined they looked alike in the way a father and daughter would, though none of their other physical features were similar. “Do you think she let herself die?”

  “She insisted she didn’t want to be a vampire. That she’d be better off dead.” But Nissa had believed that Dana would choose to survive. Damn it, she had never met someone as resilient as the hunter. She should have been able to push through anything.

  Penny McIntyre’s words burned with shame inside of Nissa.

  She would never turn into a vampire for you.

  “I’m proud of you,” Mohinder said.

  Nissa’s head popped up. “Proud?”

  “Look at you.” His hand smoothed along her jaw, tipping her head back so that he could survey her face. It was also similar to the position vampires liked to put humans in before draining them of blood. “You finally did what you needed in order to make yourself strong.”

  Nissa still wasn’t sure how to identify most of her feelings, but she knew she was warming at his praise.

  Had she ever wanted anything—even Dana—as much as she wanted Mohinder’s approval?

  “We can exchange blood now,” Mohinder said. “I’ll seal the bond with you.”

  Nissa felt a pleased jolt. “Bonding with a fledgling makes the sire weaker.”

  “With the benefit of making you stronger. I chose you, Nissa. I want you to succeed me once we’ve initiated Vampire Vegas.”

  She should have been eager to accept.

  But then she thought of Dana, and she hesitated.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Why?”

  Again, Nissa said, “I don’t know.”

  The leaves rustled. The oldest of the snow leopards stuck her head through to peer at the vampires. She had bright-blue eyes, crystalline as snow, and she reminded Nissa a little bit of Shawn Wyn.

  Mohinder bared his fangs at the leopard. She retreated.

  Emotions stirred on the other side of the glass. Everything that Mohinder and Nissa did within the habitat was observed by humans; tourists could see that vampires were sitting among big cats untouched. They had impressed some people. Some were frightened. Others were hoping that they’d get to see violence.

  None of it overwhelmed Nissa. Not anymore.

  “Drinking blood changed me,” Nissa said. “I don’t understand how. I don’t know who I am.”

  “The time of transition isn’t well studied. No known vampire has remained a blood virgin as long as you have. That said, it’s believed that if a fledgling vampire shows signs of a preternatural ability, it will become magnified once that vampire drinks.”

  “Were you a weaker telekinetic before you drank blood?” she asked.

  Mohinder looked thoughtful. “I was never a blood virgin. I came
back from Genesis as I am now.”

  It occurred to Nissa how little she knew about her sire. She only knew enough not to ask him for details. Mohinder would have little interest in his human life, and inquiring about it might even anger him.

  The last thing she wanted was to anger him.

  Bolts of familiar anxiety raced along Nissa’s nerves. She lifted her hands to survey them, as if she’d be able to see this strange new stimulus. For some reason, the idea of angering Mohinder had scared her. She’d never been scared of him before. The dark places in her mind were filled with blades, cuts, bleeding.

  “Try to use your powers on them,” Mohinder said, waving toward the glass. The tourists on the other side were only dimly visible. There was so much light inside of the habitat that the wall mostly acted as a mirror.

  “They’re human tourists,” Nissa said. “We don’t hurt tourists. They’re our income.”

  Mohinder’s fingers curled over the back of her neck. “You’re my fledgling, my one and only.” He dipped his head toward her cheek, running his nose over the fine hairs in front of her ear. The sound of his inhale was the rasping of dry snakeskin over desert. “You can do whatever you want.”

  She tipped her head so that it rested against him. Nissa let her eyes fall shut.

  And then she let her walls fall away, too.

  She was always so guarded against the emotions of humans. She had to be. Her initial months as a vampire fledgling had been torture, no matter how she isolated herself; she’d learned to create barriers as deep as the ocean in order to preserve her sanity. So it wasn’t enough to relax into her powers. She had to make a concerted effort to peel herself free.

  Then she was exposed.

  Raw.

  And there were humans everywhere.

  “I can feel them,” Nissa said, balling her hands into fists atop her knees. “I can feel all of them.”

  The people who were giddy with their winnings, even though they’d still lost money on their vacation.

  A group of men who were preparing for competitive poker. One had poisoned another with drain cleaner; his friend would not be making it to the competition that night, and he was feeling both excited and guilty.

  The woman at the bar was cheating on her husband with one man. She planned to find a second partner that night.

  It was a morass of guilt and lust and hunger.

  Nissa was shocked to realize that the hunger belonged to her.

  “I’m thirsty,” she said, opening her eyes.

  Her reflection was nestled against Mohinder’s. She wasn’t sure when she’d molded herself so closely against him, and she was shocked that he allowed it. His hair and skin were darker than hers, his eyes brighter. He’d been drinking blood for so long that his eyes were glowing rubies.

  Mohinder was watching Nissa in the reflection. A snow leopard perched atop the rocks was watching them, too. Despite the differing colors, Mohinder looked exactly like one of his animals.

  “Thirsty?” he asked. “Is that the only thing you’re experiencing?”

  She considered the question. “I’m getting feelings from everyone, but—”

  “It isn’t breaking you down. I see that. Explore it further.”

  Nissa’s mind stretched out. There was a new aspect to her empathy that she could feel, though she wasn’t sure the shape of it yet. It was like plunging her hands blindly into an oubliette and trying to guess who was locked at its bottom. “It’s like…I think they’re not invading me anymore. It’s almost like I can invade their feelings?”

  “Can you control them?” Mohinder asked.

  She couldn’t. But she wanted to.

  Nissa wanted to hurt these people.

  “Someday,” she said softly.

  Mohinder stood, using her hand to pull her up alongside him. “For four years, we have been in stasis, but things have changed now. I’ll be ready to move on to the next level once you are.”

  “Good,” Nissa said.

  She almost meant it.

  But she couldn’t keep herself from thinking about who she’d wanted to be with.

  This wasn’t her plan, holding hands with Mohinder in the snow leopard habitat on the Judex casino floor. She hadn’t wanted him to draw her into the hallways so that they could execute another stage in his plan for seizing Las Vegas. She hadn’t wanted them to be so…contented.

  She had wanted to make him angry by telling him that she was leaving with Dana McIntyre.

  Nissa had wanted a chance to kill beside the hunter again, just like they’d done with the draugr.

  She’d wanted to start a war.

  Memories continued to return to Nissa as she followed Mohinder underground.

  She was aware that they were approaching the tunnels under Judex. She could smell the mildew, the dust, the fresh paint. The tunnels had been expanded recently to allow vampires to move between some of the Strip’s casinos during daytime, and Nissa knew the spaces well.

  Despite her awareness of the present, a large part of her was stuck in the past.

  Nissa wasn’t walking down these stairs, watching her Docs moving in front of her. She was wandering down Fremont Street in search of something interesting to do. She was lonely going to college so far from her family. Not that Nissa wanted to be with her family—her family was terrible—but at least they had paid attention to her, even if such attention was delivered with swinging fists and cruel words.

  Nobody at UNLV looked at Nissa. Even her instructors seldom met her eyes when she sought them out during office hours. She radiated dysfunction that made others want to get away.

  Fremont Street should have been different. Nissa had wandered the Strip and found no human connections, but Fremont Street didn’t have the pretense of the Strip, the attitude. The casinos were cheaper. The people were real.

  Someone should have spoken to the college girl wandering alone. At the very least, someone should have looked at her.

  But still, nobody looked.

  Until someone did.

  She didn’t remember the man who had beaten her. She’d seen a lot of faces in the hour leading up to when she was seized, but she recalled details to none of them; they hadn’t seemed important at the time, though it was likely her killer was among them.

  “Are you coming?” Mohinder asked, drawing Nissa back to the present. He stood in front of an open door, holding it open with his elbow. The darkness beyond was deeper than in the alleyway where Nissa had died.

  Her fingertips were playing over her lips. She tasted copper. “I feel strange.”

  “You’re transitioning,” he said. “Again.” Mohinder swept a hand through the open doorway. “We can keep talking as we walk.”

  “Thank you,” she said. Nobody had ever seen her like Mohinder. Nobody had ever treated her so kindly.

  It was so dark under Judex. Nissa wasn’t looking where she walked. She bumped into a turn in the hall, and the impact against her shoulder sent her back to that Fremont Street alleyway again.

  Getting shoved into a trashcan. The clang of metal, the searing pain as her bones broke. The taste of her own blood on her tongue.

  Her killer had dazed her instantly so that he could pin her down.

  When he had cut into her belly, Nissa hadn’t moved.

  She’d just…stared.

  The night sky had filled her vision. Heavy purple clouds reflecting the Las Vegas lights. She could almost make out patterns of neon-orange and green flitting across the sky. It had been warm. The pavement had still radiated daytime heat against her back. Nissa wondered if her blood had sizzled when it spilled.

  A mugger. She had always thought it was a mugging. Why else would someone have attacked her? What did Nissa have to offer the world except for the cash in her wallet, the iPhone in her pocket?

  She’d fit a profile. She had looked like someone that the killer wanted, and that had been enough to make her deserving of death.

  “You’re getting hungry again,” Mohinder
said.

  Nissa looked down. His fingers were curled around her elbow, guiding her through the dark hallways.

  They had already descended to a door into the sewers. A walk that ordinarily felt like it took hours.

  “How can you tell?” Nissa asked.

  “It’s a matter of time. You can’t have had a chance to drink much during the attack and your body has expended its stores finishing your transition.”

  Nissa’s fingers wandered over her lips again. “I don’t know how to hunt. I don’t know if I can.”

  Mohinder took the stairs backward, holding her hand to steady her. He was so graceful. How could he be so graceful without seeing where he was going? “How did it feel to kill?”

  Her blood on the pavement. The smell of wet asphalt. The grit grinding into the back of her head, sticking in her hair.

  Her teeth sinking into a man’s throat for the first time.

  Nissa could summon a mental image of her victim’s young wife, who was now widowed at home. She was a cute lady. Cleft chin, sharp nose, round cheeks. She would be crying now, sleepless in her grief.

  Her husband had died in so much pain. Having one’s veins suctioned dry was hideous, and the quick decline into unconsciousness didn’t make it better.

  He had known what was happening to him.

  Nissa had known she was going to die, too, back on Fremont Street. She had forgotten how painful that was, but now she remembered. The human feelings she’d once experienced had come crashing back. It was his mood, it was her mood.

  “I felt alive,” Nissa said. “Exhilaratingly, gloriously alive.”

  Was that how the Fremont Slasher had felt when he’d killed Nissa?

  Mohinder nodded his acknowledgment of her words. “Can you do it again?”

  Live death again? Fear, despair, pain? Could Nissa surrender her body to the empathy? Could she kill people even though it was like falling from the penthouse level of Achlys’s tower a thousand times? “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Good.”

  The tunnel widened. They had reached pumps recently installed by contractors, each of which was marked with the Gaslight Corp logo. They were warded against interference, but the wards were tied to Mohinder’s presence, so it took only a wave of his hand to disable the safeguards.