by SM Reine
She approached the desk.
“How can I help you?” asked the receptionist.
Nissa opened her mind instead of responding. She was barraged by the surrounding mortals. Their pain seized her—the shaking, the cramps. These people had been exposed to Mohinder’s poisoned water and didn’t know it. Nobody knew what was happening. Why the shifters were acting strange.
One more glass of water from tainted water, and a lot of these people were going to go completely nuts.
It wasn’t Nissa’s problem. She hadn’t come here to see the results of Mohinder’s experiments. Even if she cared about that, she wouldn’t have expected to see the people at a police station anyway. More like a hospital. The system didn’t know what to do with the lash-outs, hadn’t diagnosed the problem.
Shifters poisoned by silver were suffering excruciating pain. She collapsed against the desk, clutching the edge. “No,” she whispered.
The receptionist leaned back in her chair. She didn’t look frightened, but annoyed. She flagged down an officer. “Another one. Paramedics almost here?”
“Gods damn,” said an officer that Nissa couldn’t see. He was twenty-seven years old, angry, abusive toward his partner at home. His tone evoked glimpses of swinging fists in his memories. “That tainted lethe is getting everyone, isn’t it?”
Nissa gritted her teeth. They thought these people were drug addicts, and they were still arresting them. The police deserved what was going to happen on Vampire Vegas’s opening night. “I’m not an addict.” Not to drugs, anyway.
Hands closed on Nissa’s shoulders, and she wasn’t sure if it was one of the shifters crawling up in her skull or the Fremont Slasher or a police officer trying to help her sit down. The sensation was too much. Her mind turned to jumbles.
She was in a dark alley. A glass box. Bleeding to death.
“No!” Nissa roared. She thrust her hand toward the receptionist and opened her mind wider. Nissa kept opening until she had no mental walls left. She was an empty vessel that gathered all these mortal minds into her belly to slosh around like melted alcoholic Slurpee at the bottom of a plastic hurricane cup.
Everyone started screaming, like the intrusion hurt.
Great. Let them choke on it. Their intrusions on her mind hurt too.
But damn it all, she wanted them to suffer quietly.
“Freeze!” Nissa said.
The precinct went silent.
She swung around to look at the shifters. There were two women leaning against each other on a nearby bench. They had gone still except for the tears dragged down their cheeks by gravity.
The police officer who had tried to grab Nissa was also motionless, hands outstretched.
Everyone on the receptionist’s side of the desk was immobile too.
Nissa had grabbed the minds of the entire precinct and shut them the fuck down.
They were still seething inside of Nissa like she’d swallowed live worms. Their minds broiled. Abuse. Denial. Fatigue. Stress. Nissa held them with as much ease as a rodeo cowboy could have held a bull, which was to say, not easily at all.
But for the moment, nobody in the precinct was moving.
Nissa fished around the nearest officer’s pockets. He had a small dongle that would activate a computer somewhere around the office. She took that, along with his badge, and leaned over the receptionist’s desk to push the button that opened the door to the office space.
Most of the police worked at desks on an open floor. There was a closed office where the chief, Charmaine Villanueva, did her work. It was dark inside at the moment. The blinds were drawn. Nissa didn’t feel her inside of there.
Nissa shuffled carefully through the office, edging past officers who had stopped moving in mid-conversation. She feared that physical contact would worsen her connection to their minds. It was bad enough feeling their thoughts intensify as she drew nearer without touching them.
This officer was angry because he’d gotten in trouble for turning off his body camera during a traffic stop. The department was being sued by a money-hungry werewolf because of him.
That guy was worried about being able to cover the interest on the payday loan he’d gotten to finance his addiction to strippers.
This one was…
Huh. What is he thinking?
Nissa stopped by a desk with one officer sitting in front of a computer. He had a bushy mustache and a skin blistered from sunlight, though these must have been ordinary human blisters rather than vampire blisters. The skin on his nose was peeling where he’d been burned.
His head felt hollow.
She angled the nametag on his chest to read it. “Officer Albert Jeffreys,” she said, brushing her hand along his jaw. He felt like wrinkled leather. He was the color of cowhide baked in sunlight.
Even with physical contact, Nissa felt very little from inside of him. It was as though his emotions were muted, and the lack of emotion limited her access to his mind. “What are you?” Nissa asked, inhaling the scent at his throat. He smelled like a normal human. He wasn’t a witch.
Interesting.
His computer would do.
She sat down on his lap and used the first officer’s credentials to log in to the database. The search for cases involving Dana McIntyre’s name took time; the hourglass cursor kept flipping over for what felt like minutes on end. It was hard for Nissa to keep holding the entire precinct that long.
She bet it would be easier if she drank more blood.
Nissa ran her mouth along Officer Jeffrey’s throat again, seeking the place his pulse was closest to the surface. She breathed over his stubble. His skin bounced against her lips. There was blood inside that artery—rich crimson blood, thick and filled with life.
She lapped along the pulse point. Her fangs descended another millimeter.
The computer pinged.
Her search had completed.
“I bet you taste as bland as your brain feels anyway,” Nissa said, shoving Officer Jeffreys’s head away from her.
The wormy feeling in Nissa’s gut indicated that she was losing control of the minds. Nissa needed to leave before she found herself surrounded by two-dozen law enforcement personnel who knew exactly how to take down vampires.
Nissa emailed everything to herself and then stood. She regarded the entirety of the precinct that she could see. “You’ll all wake up in sixty seconds. None of you will remember the last ten minutes,” she said, and she was certain that was what would happen.
She dropped her stolen dongle on the desk and left.
The door swung shut behind her.
As soon as the lock clicked, Officer Jeffreys let out a gusting sigh, slumping in his chair. He was the only person in the entire building who moved.
He touched his throat and then looked at his fingers. They’d come away shiny with his own blood. He’d barely been nicked by the vampire’s fangs, but it had been enough to make him bleed.
“Wow,” he whispered.
5
Nissa stretched out with the snow leopards to read Dana McIntyre’s police files. The male, the one they called Felix, stretched out his nose to sniff at her teapot. His whiskers tickled Nissa’s knuckles.
When he looked at her, she could see calculation in his feline eyes. He was trying to decide if he wanted to attack. There was no question as to whether he was hungry, since Judex pampered its exhibits. Yet he was a cat, and that was what cats did. They killed.
She bared her fangs at him. “No.”
The big cat shrank back, spine arched, haunches taut.
Nissa returned her attention to the tablet, swiping through the pages.
Eighteen disappearances had been attributed to the Fremont Slasher. All of the victims had been gaean or human; there was record of two sidhe going missing, four witches, five shifters, and one orc. The orc, Nissa supposed, must have been Penny McIntyre.
Of the eighteen people who had disappeared to the Fremont Slasher’s hands, twelve had been found dead
. Only one survived. The other five had never been located.
Nissa tapped on their names to bring up pictures. She found herself facing five different versions of herself: women of varying ages and skin tones with curly brown hair, hunched shoulders, and big eyes. One of them had golden eyes. Another of them had a tattoo on her bottom lip. Aside from that, they all could have been Nissa in alternate lives. All those loose sweaters, that shrinking posture.
A hot tear rolled down Nissa’s cheek, and she was so startled by the tickling sensation that she wiped it away to look at it. The tear smeared crimson on her fingertip. When she licked her finger clean, it tasted salty.
The notes offered no illumination as to why the Fremont Slasher was interested in those specific women. Three profilers had offered theories, spanning from mommy issues to sexual rage. Mundane theories, and dull ones at that. There had been no anger when the Slasher’s hands closed on Nissa’s throat, nor had there been lust.
The violence of the night spilled over her again.
“Stop!” she’d cried, and he’d pressed his fingers into her throat to silence further sounds. Nissa had feared his weight would collapse her throat. She hadn’t yet been familiar with the ungodly strength of the undead, and hadn’t realized that the Slasher was being gentle.
He was gentle lifting her, then slamming her back to the pavement.
Gentle digging his knee into her side when she tried to wriggle away.
Gentle backhanding her across the cheekbone.
Nissa had gazed up at the shape of the man pushing her down. His face had been close to hers, but he’d had no breath at all. And there had been no erection to dig into her hip.
She wasn’t attacked because she was a stand-in for someone else in the Fremont Slasher’s life. Why Nissa had been attacked at all…she didn’t know. She couldn’t guess. But it hadn’t been about sex, love, or hatred.
Had she seen his face? What had he been thinking when he’d attacked her?
Why couldn’t Nissa remember Mohinder rescuing her from the Slasher?
Leaves rustled nearby. She looked up expecting to see that Felix the snow leopard had returned. Instead, Mohinder stood bathed in the blue-white spotlight, his hair slicked back, his jaw lifted regally. “Did I startle you?”
Nissa’s flesh crawled along her spine as she gazed, open-mouthed, at her sire.
The man who had attacked her behind The Nugget had stood over her like that. Moonlight and neon had shone over his ridged nose.
“What is it?” Nissa asked, blinking rapidly to dismiss the memories.
“Vampire Vegas,” Mohinder said. “You were going to take a tour before opening night.”
Oh yeah. That club they were opening. The one they’d been planning for over the course of the last…gods, what had it been? Two years since Mohinder had invited her to help him transform the city?
“It’s ready?” she asked.
He lifted her from the ground. “Yes. What’s this?” He looked at the tablet closely. “Why are you reading police files on the Fremont Slasher?”
“Before Dana died, she told me that I was killed by the Slasher, not a mugger. I think she’s right.”
Mohinder lifted her over the stream, down the stairs to the back entrance for the habitat. “Does it matter now? The Fremont Slasher was arrested.”
“You heard Penny McIntyre,” Nissa said. “Fighting the Slasher changed Dana. I want to know how. I want to know who she is at her core.”
“Was,” he said. “She’s dead.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“There was ash outside the Gantry warehouse. A vampire must have died there.”
“Someone else could have put the ash on the sidewalk to make the police think Dana died,” Nissa said.
“Be realistic. Why would anyone do that?” Mohinder asked.
She wasn’t sure there was reason to fool the police or the Hunting Club. But there had been a few minutes where Nissa had been healing without her sire’s presence; he could have been up to anything in that time. Including setting up a crime scene to make Nissa think the target of her obsession was dead.
After all, Mohinder had never approved of Nissa’s fascination with Dana McIntyre.
Vampire Vegas was in the new casino tower that Mohinder had built between Judex and Grauens. Near Dark was a special hotel tower unlike any other in Las Vegas; it had no windows, not a single one of them, and most of it existed underground. It was a casino that catered to those who didn’t care for daylight, for any reason. Nissa had heard Mohinder talking about it with his board before; he’d claimed it was a money-saving measure to ensure they only needed to hire vampires to entertain human patrons.
This was not true.
The lie of it was obvious from the moment Nissa entered Vampire Vegas. The lightless club would never be comfortable for the living. The temperature was cool, even to Nissa’s bloodless flesh; it must have felt like a refrigerator to the living. The music was played quietly, too indistinct for weak human ears to be able to distinguish much information.
Yet the club was sleek and appealing. Gothic in sensibility, with steel cages, glass accents, and spike-backed chairs. Some of the furnishings had even been purchased from a collector of pre-Genesis demon artifacts. They were from the City of Dis—once an infernal metropolis, which now didn’t exist except for uncomfortable stone furniture.
Mohinder’s hand on her arm guided her down the stairs into Vampire Vegas. He was gentle about it, but if she’d been human, his strength would have felt breathtaking. “What do you think?” he asked.
“It’ll be more impressive when we get the lights going,” Nissa said.
Mohinder signaled to the DJ booth. Dim lights illuminated the walls, pulsing in time with the low bass. Nissa’s elbow brushed one of the metal chairs. It vibrated deep into her marrow.
“Better?” he asked.
She studied the leather sofas, the exposed pipes on the walls, the straps and chains. The bar was in the tallest part of the club. Some of the bottles of alcohol were well above reach, even for a telekinetic like Mohinder, and the light shining through them tinted the liquor red.
The most remarkable feature was the floor-to-ceiling fish tank dividing the seating from the dance floor. It contained literal tons of water. Nissa had the numbers, she had arranged for aquarium maintenance, she had the information somewhere. She couldn’t remember.
Deep inside her mind, she was still pressed to the pavement underneath the Fremont Slasher, his fingers digging into her throat.
Mohinder’s fingers digging into her elbow.
“The vampires will love it,” Nissa said.
“I know. Especially the Back Room.”
Chills rolled down her spine again. “Show me.”
Mohinder stepped behind the bar, touched a latch underneath one shelf, pushed open a secret door.
They were interrupted before they could step back there.
“Mohinder?” Urien was one of the Paradisos who handled staffing for Vampire Vegas. He was underneath Nissa, technically, but she had been too distracted lately to give him the guidance she usually delivered to management. “Can we talk about the couriers? Just for a quick second.”
“Wait here,” Mohinder instructed Nissa.
He went into the Back Room with Urien, sliding the secret door shut. Nissa wouldn’t be able to hear their conversation.
Not with her ears.
She sat on a bar stool in front of the tower of alcohol. Nissa closed her eyes, let her mind expand into the rest of Vampire Vegas. She brushed against Urien and Mohinder’s presences behind the bar. She couldn’t get as deep into the mind of a vampire as she could a mortal, but the fact that she could get in at all was testament to her developing powers.
Nissa probed Urien’s mind.
She could see through his eyes, much the same way she’d been able to see through Penny McIntyre’s eyes. The Back Room was a pleasure chamber for vampires. There were more metal spiked chairs,
none of which vampires were intended to sit upon. Urien wasn’t looking closely at the torture devices. He was too busy being frightened of Mohinder.
A strange reaction. People had been terrified of Achlys because she’d deliberately affected a scary visage. Mohinder made an effort to look normal for a vampire. He loomed a little, and he liked the shadows too much, but he wasn’t as overtly frightening as his predecessor.
Urien had good reason to be afraid. He had bad news to deliver. “Three more have disappeared.”
“That leaves only five couriers.” Mohinder was calm, outwardly emotionless. Still nothing for Nissa to penetrate.
“I think we have five left, yes.” Urien hesitated. “The last time I heard from Tila and Dawes was yesterday. They missed their check-ins this morning. I don’t usually worry about them until they miss three or four. But given the current conditions—”
“What about the security team?” Mohinder asked. “Have they found her?”
Nissa’s heart beat once. It was such a heavy thump that she felt it all the way down to her toes, and her head swam with the fresh blood.
Mohinder was talking about Dana.
Dana McIntyre had survived.
She was in the sewers killing Mohinder’s couriers, who were trying to rally all of the Paradisos so that they could shelter in Near Dark.
Dana. McIntyre. Is. Alive.
Did Mohinder have plans for Dana that he didn’t want anyone else to know about?
What else was he keeping from Nissa?
“We can’t catch her,” Urien said. “Nobody can evade us like that, nobody can hide in the sewers without getting caught in our sweeps. Even if she’s working with the shifters—“
“We’ll have to put the rest of the free silver into the system,” Mohinder said. “Understood?”
“What about Paradisos shifters?” Urien asked. There weren’t many, but a few did associate with the murder. It was the best and easiest way for any preternatural to survive in Vegas. “Should we warn them to drink bottled water?”