Cashing Out

by SM Reine

  They settled around Charmaine’s office. Edie had brewed a pot of coffee in Charmaine’s pot, and there was still plenty left. She poured herself a cup. “Anyone else? Undersecretary?”

  “Never been a fan of coffee,” he said, settling into her chair easily, even though he looked too tall and broad to use normal-people furniture. “And you can call me Cèsar. I don’t like the title. I’ve just come out of retirement—used to work for the government, but I got spoiled on being treated like a normal person after I quit.”

  “You look young to have retired and come back out again.” Charmaine couldn’t quite pin the undersecretary’s age down, but she’d have estimated him from anywhere between twenty-five and forty-five. He must have been a lot older to have achieved his current position, though.

  “A few years at home chasing kids keeps you young,” Cèsar said. “But I’m back, and you’re my new project.”

  Charmaine couldn’t bring herself to smile. “Great.”

  “Mr. Morales tells me that he’s got no clue what happened to those shifters out there. I’m hoping you’ll have more of an answer for me.”

  She struggled not to look at Anthony. He sure as hell had a theory—one that Charmaine felt was confirmed now that she’d been treated like a werewolf chew toy. But saying that vampires had poisoned the city sounded like a great way to encourage the OPA to daylight bomb them. “As you can imagine, we will be investigating extensively. I’ll keep you apprised of anything we learn.”

  “Oh, I’ll be heading this investigation,” Cèsar said.

  “But sir—”

  “Look, nobody wants to make a mess out of this,” he said, spreading his hands in a helpless gesture. “Fritz and me least of all. Uh, I mean, Secretary Friederling. We don’t want to have to pay that much overtime.”

  “It’s good to know you’re worried about overtime,” Anthony muttered.

  “We’ve got multiple concerns about our preliminary investigation into Clark County’s handling of preternatural affairs,” Cèsar said. “Your officers’ attendance is shocking. Evidence goes missing, or gets logged incorrectly and thrown out. Your local vigilantes are involved more than anywhere else in the country. You didn’t even have silver bullets on hand to take down shifters. If Trevin hadn’t been packing, you’d have been fucked in the ass.”

  “We can handle the investigation on our own,” Charmaine said. “I’ve got good men here.”

  “So where’s your silver?”

  The undersecretary was clearly asking because he already knew the answer. She couldn’t lie or obfuscate her way out of it. “We had a theft, sir.”

  “I told you, call me Cèsar,” he said.

  Charmaine was not feeling that friendly. Nothing Cèsar Hawke said could make her forget he was going to seize her city, daylight bomb its streets, and shut down the Hunting Club.

  “All I want to do is get this city under control,” he continued. “I’ll call the shots for a while. Take a close look at your office, see if anything can be improved. Think of me like a friendly auditor. I know it’s the Wild West out here, and you’ve been bending rules, but I won’t worry about the past so long as you’re cooperative moving forward.”

  All right. Cards on the table. “I know that things are different on the federal level, but our only priority is protecting people. If I feel that bending a few rules cast down from on high will help us achieve that, then I’ll do it.”

  “Not to poke holes in your hot-air balloon, but I just had to save your asses from shifters who’d been improperly secured,” Cèsar said. “And if you weren’t bending our rules, maybe you wouldn’t have dealt with poisoned shifters in the first place.”

  “Our handling of local events means we’re on the brink of curing vampirism, which is something that even the OPA hasn’t done,” Charmaine said.

  “Speaking of which, the promised cure…?” He folded his arms across his chest, looking at her expectantly.

  She squared her shoulders. “The samples were stolen too. We’ll find them.”

  “Yes, we will,” Cèsar said. He stood, headed for the door. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fully involved every step of the way, Chief Villanueva. I’m here to save Las Vegas. That means leaving its power structure intact to continue with minimal OPA supervision in the future.”

  “How far in the future?”

  Cèsar smiled. It was a kind smile. Sympathetic, apologetic. “We don’t have precogs who see that far anymore.”

  8

  Dana awakened in the sewer.

  For a blissful moment, she thought that she was in the crypt back at Holy Nights Cathedral. It was dark enough to believe it. But she’d never been so soggy at the cathedral, and the stench was also unique to the sewers.

  She peeled her eyes open to face her tiny corner of Las Vegas’s underbelly. She’d turned a three-foot-tall gap between two chambers into her bedroom. That meant a hard patch of ground and the trophies she’d collected from her vampire victims piled against a wall.

  Cozy. So fucking cozy.

  From the corner of her vision, she could make out the glimmer of protective magic encompassing her hideout. She’d stolen them from a witch elsewhere in the sewers to ensure nobody could see or enter where she was sleeping. As long as she was inside that three-foot gap, she was encased in the safety of glimmering gold. It was almost pretty enough to make her forget she was sleeping on literal shit.

  Today, there was also a white envelope just outside of the wards. A tidy white square enclosed in a sandwich bag a couple inches in front of Dana’s nose.

  It was too clean to be a coincidence.

  She glanced around the sewers before extending her hand to grab the bag. She sat up, hunching over the envelope as she tipped it into her hand, slid her thumb under the lip to tear it.

  When she flipped the envelope over, a cluster of curls fell onto her knee.

  Brown curls.

  Penny’s curls.

  The Fremont Slasher knew that she was in the sewers. He knew that she was hunting down Paradisos vampires and that she was feeding on their blood to strengthen herself. He wanted her to know she wasn’t safe. She’d never be safe.

  And neither would Penny.

  One advantage to being dead was that Dana felt no adrenaline rush at this. The envelope of hair wasn’t new. It wasn’t surprising. The shock and anger didn’t overwhelm her as it usually did.

  She did feel angry.

  Very angry.

  Dana had been hunting vampires in the sewers. Was she getting too close? Had the Slasher seen her?

  He must have been near during the daytime, if nothing else. The fact he’d let her survive could have meant one of two things: he still wasn’t interested in killing outside his profile, or he just hadn’t been able to pin down Dana’s exact location thanks to the wards.

  Either way, he’d been close.

  She crumpled the envelope in her fist.

  “Just wait,” Dana whispered. Her lips had peeled back in a vicious grin. It was manic, a little crazy, much like the way Brianna smiled when she was pissed off. “Just you fucking wait.”

  She wasn’t safe from the Slasher, but he wasn’t safe from her either.

  Dana opened a suitcase she’d tucked behind clothes stolen from the couriers she’d killed. She kissed Penny’s hair, inhaled the traces of the blacksmith’s scent, and tucked the curls alongside six neat little vials of Garlic Shots.

  Tormid received word of the attack on the police station less than an hour after it happened. Had he been a true Alpha, like the one in Northgate, he’d have likely known the instant that it happened. He’d have felt the poisoning within his pack, and maybe he’d even have been capable of responding to it before so many lives were lost.

  No matter how many times Tormid’s people called him an Alpha, though, he wasn’t an Alpha.

  So it took him an hour to find out about the attack.

  “How?” he asked.

  He was with another raven shifter, a
childhood friend who’d followed him from Denmark. His name was Harald. Where Tormid was tall and fair, Harald was middling in every way, from his height to his feathers and his dull golden eyes. Normally the mirth dancing in his pupils made up for his plainness. There was no mirth in him now. “They must have gotten silver somewhere,” Harald said.

  “But we stopped them from buying it!” Tormid still had an entire crate of silver bars—enough silver to choke the Alpha herself, were he to desire it.

  “Who else would have poisoned us?” Harald asked. “It had to be a weapons test from the Paradisos.”

  Tormid couldn’t disagree. They’d known this was coming. Or at least, they should have. Achlys had put this kind of plan in motion long before she was betrayed and murdered. It was no surprise that the usurpers would take advantage of what she’d left behind.

  “I made a mistake, Harald,” Tormid said, striding along the sewers. His feet splashed in the muck. It was extra drippy in the sewers, even though the rain had quickly cleared; the torrent meant they’d be stewing for days before the low humidity dried everything out again. “I assumed that Achlys’s replacement would be money driven.”

  “So?”

  “So Mohinder clearly doesn’t care about money, or else he wouldn’t poison shifters,” Tormid said with all the patience he could muster.

  “We’re not the source of all the money here,” Harald said.

  “No, but who’s going to come to a Las Vegas with shifters attacking people unpredictably?”

  “It might be an allure, to be honest. Tourists are impressively stupid.”

  “But typically not suicidal. No. Mohinder doesn’t care about money. He’s driven by something else.” Tormid just couldn’t imagine what.

  Tormid had been with the Paradisos as long as Mohinder. Four years prior, Achlys had performed a membership drive, murdering any vampires who refused to swear fealty. Mohinder had been a free agent, and he’d joined Achlys without argument. It had confused Tormid at the time. Mohinder was obviously as powerful as Achlys. Where was the advantage in swearing fealty?

  Whatever was happening in Mohinder’s mind, Tormid had no clue. He’d never known.

  But he’d need to find out soon.

  “How many victims?” Tormid asked.

  The answer came from Baraek, a werewolf who’d transplanted from the Bay Area and was scurrying to keep up with them. “Three of ours were shot by the OPA.”

  Tormid bristled. “All dead?”

  “I couldn’t confirm it,” Baraek said. “Dario definitely died.”

  Dario Bellet had been their man inside the police. He was an officer of the law, and unlikely to have been poisoned by silver. “We’re fucked.”

  “I have good news,” Baraek said.

  “Throw it at me. I could use some good cheer.”

  “I caught a vampire for you to torture.”

  That was good news. Not that Tormid was much for the act of torture—it was more of a chore, really. He’d learned how to do it well from Achlys, but he’d never really warmed to the task.

  Keeping control as a non-Alpha wasn’t easy. It took a willingness to inflict pain that Tormid certainly possessed.

  That didn’t mean it was fun.

  Still. A vampire in Las Vegas meant a member of the Paradisos, and that meant getting information. It did cheer him up a little.

  Tormid detoured to his throne room—at least, what Harald jokingly called the throne room when he was in a better mood. There was nothing regal about the space where Tormid gathered his pack. They’d fitted a chair between a few pumps, filters, and heaters, and then they’d stuck risers up above so that packmates could watch. Everything still smelled like sewage.

  After rains, like the most recent downpour, Tormid had to wade through ankle-deep water the color of a dirty toilet bowl to reach his chair. It was not a throne room. Just the most spacious and convenient space to conduct business in the sewers.

  Today, that business would involve making a vampire weep, so maybe it would have been better to call it a torture room.

  Either way.

  “Bring him to me,” Tormid said, climbing carefully into his chair.

  “Her. It’s a lady-vampire.” Baraek put his index finger and thumb to his lips and exhaled. The whistle was sharp, echoing through the tunnels. “There’s not much fight in her. You’ll have to be careful.”

  The instant that Baraek’s friends dragged the female vampire into the room, Tormid realized exactly how stupid and wrong Baraek was.

  The woman that they were hauling into the throne room was tall, as far as females went, and she had a layer of fat over dense muscle. A well-trained body with mass like an Olympic body-builder. Her hair was white. Platinum white. It might have been spray-dyed another color, but she was plastered in so much crap that Tormid couldn’t tell what it used to be. She smelled like magic and metal.

  Tormid shot to his feet. “You morons! You didn’t tell me it was her!”

  All the reports he’d heard said that Dana McIntyre was dead.

  Permanently dead.

  Yet there was no mistaking the woman tossed into the puddle at his feet, even if she really didn’t seem to have any fight in her. She wasn’t struggling. She was barely even recognizable, since she’d stripped down to a sports bra and baggy shorts that exposed all her tattoos.

  “What’s wrong?” Baraek asked.

  Tormid realized he’d been backing up toward the wall. He forced himself to stop, hold his ground. He had to posture himself like an Alpha even if he wasn’t one. “Don’t you realize who that is?” Baraek hadn’t been there on the previous day that Dana McIntyre visited, but he still should have known.

  Everyone knew about this woman.

  But she wasn’t moving. She looked unconscious.

  “Should I just stake her?” Baraek asked as his friends rolled her over, tipping her head back so that her face wasn’t in the water. Her eyes were shut.

  Tormid said, “Grab a stake just in case.”

  And Dana’s eyes popped open.

  “How about we don’t?” she said, and she grinned.

  9

  The shifters closed in to restrain Dana.

  They were too slow. She’d already broken free of the zip ties that had been tethered so tightly around her wrists.

  She was on her feet instantly, soaked in sewer water, almost every inch of her colorless flesh exposed. Blood trickled down one wrist where the zip tie had cut into her. Tormid’s gaze fixed upon that point.

  “Hypocrisy,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” Dana said. “That’s vampire blood. I’ve been busy.”

  Water splashed behind her. Shifters were trying to sneak up on her while she was focusing on Tormid.

  Dana whirled. The speed of her strike couldn’t quite keep up with the speed of her senses. Her muscles bulged, flexed, relaxed. Her elbow swung up above shoulder height. The shifter was slower, inching toward her, putting his face exactly where she wanted it.

  She snapped the bridge of his nose cleanly, ensuring that his shifter healing powers would need a few minutes to heal it.

  And then she was sweeping under him, sliding easily through the water, feet skidding on the mildew.

  Dana twisted around his legs. Hooked a foot behind his knee. Yanked hard.

  She had laughable amounts of time before the next werewolf dived at her. He must have thought he was being fast. He must have thought that he was going to surprise her.

  Cute. Very cute.

  She jumped at him, wrapped her arms around his trunk, slammed him into the wall.

  The fact that it felt like a slam even when Dana was running at hyper-super-vampire speed was devastating. It meant she caved in the concrete by several inches. It crumbled around her like snow, spattered with blood.

  Blood.

  Dana jerked back, staring wide-eyed at the blood that spilled from the shapeshifter. He’d cracked his head. It was coming from somewhere on his scalp. It smelled so
fresh—so tangy. Dana’s stomach cramped with hunger.

  When she stumbled back, clutching at her belly, it was still in super-speed. She forgot to turn it down until she’d already hit the opposite wall, as far from the shifters as she could get.

  “Wait!” Tormid shouted.

  Dana clapped a hand to her mouth, sank to her knees.

  Her fangs had elongated. Same way that a man got a boner when he thought he was gonna get laid, her teeth got huge when she thought she was going to feed.

  She couldn’t feed off shifters. She wouldn’t.

  “Lithen to me, ath-hole,” Dana said, lisping around the teeth and through her fingers. She cringed. “Fuck. What the fuck ith happening with my mouf?”

  Tormid cawed a laugh. “Get the stake.” He held out a hand, and a moment later, one of his waxed shirtless buddies had handed him a weapon.

  “If you think you can get that anywhere near my heart, you’ve got another think coming,” Dana said, carefully avoiding words that would exaggerate her lisp. It was hard to negotiate with people when she sounded like fanged Elmer Fudd.

  “I’ve been a shifter longer than you’ve been a vampire. You don’t have a gods-damned clue what to do with your powers, even if you have figured out a flashy trick or two,” Tormid said.

  “They’re not ‘my people’,” Dana said.

  “Is Nissa one of your people?”

  Dana bared her teeth. “Ethpethially not Nitha.” Damn it. This wasn’t working. Dana took a few deep breaths, stretched out her mouth, spoke more carefully. “Look, Nissa did this to me. I was an idiot to think I could use her for help.”

  “Sounds like you’re edging toward an apology,” Tormid said.

  Fat chance of that happening. “Mohinder and Nissa are going to flood the system with silver. They’re going to kill all of you.”

  “They’ve already started,” Tormid said. “Several shifters came down with silver poisoning and attacked the police station today.”

  The police station? Dana tried to mask her alarm at the idea of Charmaine and Officer Jeffreys at the mercy of silver-crazed shifters. They would be fine—they were skilled at their jobs, as far as such things went, and Charmaine could heal almost anything other shifters threw at her.