Cashing Out

by SM Reine

  “It’s a sidhe I picked up at the same time as the silver bullets,” Mohinder said. “You haven’t tried sidhe blood yet. It’s a treat. You’ll like it.”

  In the lights from Vampire Vegas, the agent looked unremarkable. Almost human. Were it not for the unnatural symmetry of his features and his impressive build, she wouldn’t have guessed he was sidhe.

  Mohinder had brought him to the club on opening night so that Nissa could have a sip. She stared down at the unconscious agent, unsure if she was feeling anxiety or if she was picking up something from the sidhe’s dreams.

  Nissa had felt like she’d had a hangover ever since she finished reading the Fremont Slasher’s files. She’d read them all the way through three times, start to finish, again and again. There were no new details for her to absorb the third time through. There was no flashing sign that said, “This is all about your sire.” But she hadn’t been able to pry herself away from those documents, those victim profiles.

  The anxiety might have been hers.

  Gods, it was hard to tell the difference.

  “Where’d you find a sidhe in Vegas?” Nissa asked, tilting her head to study his features. He didn’t look anything like Shawn Wyn, who’d been blue-toned in flesh and hair. This one was more earth tones. Very beautiful in a very different way.

  “He’s an OPA agent,” Mohinder said.

  “So you’re trying to poke the tiger deliberately.”

  “I don’t care if the ‘tiger’ feels ‘poked’ at this point. We won’t have to worry about anything from the OPA in a few more hours.” Mohinder turned to another vampire. “Take him upstairs.”

  Nissa didn’t look up to see which of his servants was taking care of the sidhe. She was still staring at the floor for several long seconds after the sidhe’s unconscious body had been relocated, watching the way that the club’s lights slithered over the black flooring.

  A hand touched her chin. Lifted her face.

  Her sire surveyed her features, his expression as unreadable as Nissa’s own emotions. “Everything is ready,” he said after a moment. “We’re about to win a victory that nobody can take away from us. We’ll have thousands of feeders under our roof, along with all Paradisos, and we’ll be untouchable by the OPA.”

  It didn’t feel like a victory.

  But she turned to take in the sight of the club. She had worked hard with Mohinder on Vampire Vegas in the last few months—hardest of all in the last couple weeks—and it really was a win for both of them. For the entire murder.

  Human minds pressed against hers from outside the building. Those minds belonged to thousands of mortals who wanted to experience the newest casino on the Strip. The bouncers wouldn’t be allowing people inside based upon how attractive they were—rather, based upon how good their blood smelled.

  Once the witching hour hit, all those delicious victims would be drugged and shoved into secondhand kennels from the City of Dis.

  The OPA could daylight bomb the whole city and the Paradisos wouldn’t need to care.

  Nissa wondered if Mohinder had encouraged the bouncers to look for mousy girls with curly hair.

  “We don’t want to be down here with the masses when the doors open.” Mohinder offered his elbow to her. “Coming?”

  “Yeah,” she said, curling her fingers around his arm. “I’m coming.”

  Mohinder had created a special office that looked down upon Vampire Vegas from on high, like a foreman watching the pigs milling around on his farm. It was chic, sleek, and smelled of expensive scotch. Thick walls muffled everything so that they couldn’t hear music in the club, even though it must have been playing based upon the lighting down on the floor.

  Those thick walls also meant nobody would hear it if there were screams inside the office, Nissa realized.

  It wasn’t enough to shield her psychic abilities, though.

  The doors to Vampire Vegas opened. People entered, and the excitement spilled over her. It was a torrent of joy. Half of them were already drunk.

  Look at that fish tank.

  Oh my gods, the pool! The bubble pool!

  Spiky chairs? This is so creepy. I fucking love it.

  A lot of idiots in the crowd, too.

  “Any threats?” Mohinder asked, strolling over to stand beside Nissa, gazing down at the floor as people filed into the club in small groups.

  “Not among the mortals. It’ll take me longer to adjust to ‘hear’ what preternaturals are thinking.” She smiled when she noticed a towering drag queen entering the room. “Is that…?”

  “Wenda the Wicked, yes,” he said. “I’m also expecting visits from the all-vampire male revue. We have one hell of a night planned.”

  “How’d you get those guys?” Nissa had gotten a quote on how much it cost to hire them, and it had been too high.

  “They aren’t here to perform. I ordered them to come as the new master of the Paradisos. Also, I promised that they’d get to try every one of my delights before anyone else.” With that last word came coiling, slithering self-satisfaction. Mohinder had made a playground for vampires that Achlys would never have allowed. And now he was going to enjoy watching everyone experiencing the gift he’d given them.

  It felt like a gift now. But once they were trapped in Near Dark, it was going to feel like a prison for everyone involved. Wouldn’t it?

  “I’m hungry,” Nissa said.

  Mohinder’s servant had left the sidhe victim on the couch. The agent’s glamour had been stripped away. Now he looked like the beautiful, pristine subject of a classic painting. His skin had no visible pores, no blemishes. His hair was sleek. She was certain that no matter how close she looked, she would find no split ends.

  Nissa had spent a lot of time gazing at Shawn Wyn noting similar details. There was nothing special about this particular sidhe. All of their breed were like that.

  She traced her fingers over his forehead. In his dreamless unconsciousness, there was nothing to read. His mind was as impenetrable as Mohinder’s.

  “What do sidhe dream about?” she wondered aloud.

  “They dream of their faerie queen riding within an empty hazelnut with spider legs for spokes,” he said. “Their lovers dream of love, and their soldiers dream of blood spilled, and when they’re bad they get to be plagued by dreams of syphilis. Their insides are as magical as their outsides.” Mohinder took her hand, guiding her to sit on the couch. “What do you dream about?”

  She stroked the ruby strands of hair off of the sidhe’s copper forehead. His skin felt like silk. “I don’t dream. What about you?”

  “I dream of pigs,” he said.

  Nissa looked up when metal jangled. Mohinder had pulled his claws out of his pocket. She’d seen him use them before without giving them much thought; melodramatic weapons weren’t uncommon among vampires. But now she looked at them again.

  Each of the claws was jointed so that they would bend along with Mohinder’s long fingers. The sharpened tips were inches long.

  “Bacon, as a matter of fact,” Mohinder said.

  His fingers flashed.

  Nissa jerked back, but not quickly enough to avoid the emerald blood splattering her shirt.

  “Drink,” he said.

  He didn’t have to urge her. Nissa’s entire body was consumed by hunger as soon as she smelled it.

  The sidhe’s blood smelled the way that their magic felt: like the tiniest worms twisting on the fingertip of a child, entire barrels of potent liquors, and the money that men wasted on Las Vegas’s green fields of tables. The giddiness of it all. The heady illusion of magic.

  Nissa might not have dreamed before, but she knew what she’d be dreaming about now. If it weren’t the files about the Fremont Slasher, it would be about this. A faerie’s blood.

  She wished, belatedly, that she’d licked up Shawn Wyn’s shattered skull after Dana broke it open for her. His blood had been sapphire but smelled like sun-warmed watermelon.

  “Drink,” Mohinder said aga
in, and she barely heard him.

  With an arm underneath the sidhe’s shoulders, she lifted him, bowed her head, and drank.

  When she latched on, Nissa was flooded by dreams.

  She could see the Summer Court in this faerie’s mind. Its vast fields of emerald hairs, murky forests filled with the silvery bodies of unicorns, the queen’s sprawling beachside palace.

  The places within Nissa’s mind were so much darker.

  Blood brought power, and power brought memories.

  Four years earlier, Nissa had slammed against the pavement on Fremont Street. She had felt the crushing weight of a hand on her throat and seen the glimmer of metal as claws raked over her face. Metal joints chimed when they moved. She’d felt it more than heard it, deafened by music pulsing over the street.

  Nissa was inside of a glass box, cowering in her underwear, given little more space than a chicken at a battery farm. The legs curled underneath her were green-toned and muscular. She looked up and saw the Slasher coming for her. Arriving to lap at her fresh blood.

  Mohinder was watching Nissa drink from the sidhe.

  Dana was saving Nissa from this glass box, her face contorted into lines of rage.

  Nissa lifted her mouth from the sidhe’s throat and reality snapped back into place with a dizzying lurch. The blood rapidly cooled on her lips, chilled in the air conditioning. She could almost hear the music in the club. From that angle, she could see that Wenda the Wicked had gotten onto the bar, and her mouth was open in a noiseless shout as she sprayed faerie liquor over the excited crowd.

  Soon those mortals would thin out. There were so many that nobody was likely to notice a few picked off, shoved into boxes in Mohinder’s underground human-meat factory.

  He knew what he was doing. It wasn’t his first time.

  “Why did you stop?” Mohinder asked.

  Nissa had just been drinking, but her mouth felt parched. “Why me?”

  “I thought I’d treat my fledgling, like I said.”

  “No.” She met his eyes, crimson against crimson. “I mean…four years ago. You didn’t treat me like the victims who came before. You changed me instead of holding me captive.”

  Mohinder looked surprised. He really hadn’t realized until that moment that Nissa knew the truth about him, but now that he did, he recovered quickly. He almost looked pleased. “I had watched you for hours. I watched the way you watched the world, and I knew that you saw humans the way I do. You’re not one of the pigs. You’re a butcher.”

  That calm, cool analysis turned Nissa’s blood to ice.

  She had never butchered anyone before. She wasn’t like the Fremont Slasher.

  For fuck’s sake, she had taken four years to work up the nerve to kill a human even after she had a good excuse.

  Was she different?

  Mohinder settled onto the couch beside her. Even seated, his presence was enormous. He was a black hole at the bottom of a grave consuming all light.

  “You watched me,” Nissa said.

  He nodded, tracing his fingers along the sidhe’s veins, almost like he was petting their victim. “I watched all of them for a while to decide which ones I wanted.”

  “But nobody looked at me,” she said. “Nobody ever noticed me. I was invisible.”

  “Not to me,” Mohinder said.

  Ice turned to blossoms of warmth.

  Gods, Mohinder was different too. Different from all men that Nissa had known. Different from any other vampire she’d ever met.

  He was different from Dana McIntyre as well. She was a cold bitch who killed everyone she decided to kill.

  But Mohinder wanted to kill.

  It was a nuanced difference, but one that lifted him above all others that Nissa had admired. He was so much better than Shawn. And much better than Achlys, too. The last master hadn’t seen Nissa; she’d only seen herself, and her own regrets, and she’d misjudged Nissa based upon that vanity.

  Mohinder saw Nissa. He saw that she was like him.

  The deadliest serial killer Las Vegas had ever known had seen Nissa, and he’d chosen her.

  “I want to do it,” Nissa said. “Share blood. Bond us as master and fledgling.”

  Mohinder registered as much emotion as he usually did, which was to say, none at all. That was why his mind was so impenetrable. Not because he was a vampire, but because he was a sociopath.

  He slid closer to Nissa on the couch, lifting his arm so that she could nestle underneath. The sidhe stretched across their laps.

  “Let me,” Mohinder said, arranging the limbs of the OPA agent so that it was comfortable for both of them. He tilted the agent’s head. A light press of his fingers on the back of Nissa’s skull urged her mouth down toward the sidhe’s throat again, and she rested her lips upon his weak pulse point. “Good. Like that.”

  And then he lowered his mouth to the sidhe’s shoulder, only a few inches from Nissa. She glimpsed a flash of fangs just like hers when he opened his mouth.

  They bit at the same time.

  They drank.

  When she sank into the depths of the sidhe’s mind, Mohinder was already there, in curls of black smoke and in the hollowed hazelnut chariot and in the forests slaughtering the queen’s unicorns. He drank from the sidhe and let traces of his venom linger in the veins. Nissa could taste its familiar bitterness. She knew Mohinder’s venom the way that a baby knew its mother’s milk.

  She was losing herself into Mohinder’s black infinity.

  It was an endless place without emotion. Without soul. It was somewhere that a god resided, and Mohinder knew that he belonged there. He was better than everyone who shared the universe with him.

  This world crawled with pigs. Cattle. Farm animals stewing in the dirt, bleating in their cages, soiled by their own filth. Mohinder was not cruel, not exactly. But he deserved this world and they didn’t.

  Nissa was like him.

  He loved her in the only way that Mohinder knew how, because he loved himself like that too.

  The sidhe’s skin was losing temperature against Nissa’s mouth. She had to suck harder to draw blood out of him. It took almost an hour to drain a human completely when only one vampire fed; two vampires were much faster, especially since Mohinder was master. It was easy to withdraw once the blood no longer flowed. Nissa shoved the sidhe away, and he crumpled to the floor in a pile of lightless limbs, no longer glimmering with internal light.

  Nissa gasped and panted, struggling to breathe.

  She wanted to breathe.

  Spreading her hands in front of her, she stared at the gemlike glow of her colorless flesh. Her veins raced with electric blue.

  “Gods,” Nissa wheezed.

  Mohinder tipped her head back with a knuckle under her chin, gazing down at her with satisfaction. “I told you it’s a treat.” His head dipped—he was going to kiss her. Or so she thought for one wild, confused instant. Then his tongue lapped along the corner of her mouth, sucking up the last drops of blood.

  If he had wanted her in that moment, he could have had her. Nissa felt alive in a way that she’d never felt alive before, not even when she’d been mortal, and it was because of him. He had given it to her. She would give him anything he demanded.

  But he only licked the blood away, and then he stood, removed the claws, dropped them into his pocket.

  He took a large jug from the bottom drawer of his desk. It was unlabeled, but she knew that it held a cocktail of diluted silver nitrate and iron. Nissa had been there when he mixed it the first time. The amount of metals in the water was minimal—enough to sicken shifters and sidhe without having them go crazy, like at the police station, and without killing anyone.

  “I’ll begin distributing this shortly,” he said. “The doors will close in an hour, once we’re at peak capacity. And then…” Mohinder wasn’t the smiling type, but he smiled now. “Take a look around. Peruse the people who have come into our club, and pick a few humans you’ll want to keep for us exclusively. They don’t
have to look like you. I don’t adhere to a type as strictly anymore.” So casual about it, as though it were normal to have a profile for one’s victims.

  “Why did you like them like that, anyway?” Nissa had read so many theories. She wanted to know which was true.

  He flashed a brief smile at her. “Why do you think?”

  Mohinder strolled away.

  Nissa sat alone with the body for a moment, her eyes shut tightly, fists clenched. She could feel the sidhe’s blood inside of her. She still tasted the Summer Court and all of its magic—the warm sunlight, so much gentler than that in Las Vegas, and the kiss of salty air.

  She no longer felt fear when she remembered Mohinder slamming her to the alleyway behind Fremont Street.

  When she rose to her feet, she was strong and smooth. She could listen to every single mortal mind. It was easy to pick the voices apart, to select their thoughts.

  Nissa gazed down at Vampire Vegas and knew that she could compel every last one of those humans to kill. To hurt themselves. To turn giddiness to violence. She could do anything because she was so powerful—a god among mortals, a butcher among pigs.

  And then she saw it. A face lit by the lights within the enormous fish tank.

  Someone stood on the other side of the aquarium, like a ghost beyond the delicate coral and the bubbles that flowed from within shells. A jellyfish flitted across the tank to momentarily obscure her. But when the writhing, delicate veil of tentacles passed, she was still there.

  Nissa pressed both of her hands to the window, staring down with her heart pounding. It beat more strongly than she’d ever felt before.

  She reached out for the mind that she knew was waiting for her.

  Dana? Is that you?

  And she heard the response, crystal clear.

  Come and get me.

  12

  Charmaine wasn’t the most feminine of women as a matter of practicality. As law enforcement, there were regulations that she couldn’t escape even when she was off the job. She could only paint her fingernails in neutral colors. She kept her hair off the collar. Her makeup was always minimal. And that was fine.