Cashing Out

by SM Reine

  “You’re wrong.”

  The light in Penny’s eyes faded as hope died a painful death. “But I just got you back.”

  “I don’t trust the OPA to handle Mohinder,” Dana said. No matter how foggy her brain was, she couldn’t forget what Nissa had told Dana.

  Mohinder was the Fremont Slasher.

  He was the one who had taken this beautiful, towering, sensitive orc and crushed her spirit.

  He’d spent years taunting Dana with locks of hair. He was a madman, a sadist, and whatever the OPA had planned for him wouldn’t be enough.

  Dana was no longer super fast. She wasn’t super strong. She was human again, purely human, and that meant she was no match for the Fremont Slasher. But that idea had never slowed her down before.

  Penny’s brow crimped. “But—”

  “Nothing’s changed,” Dana interrupted. “Listen to me. There will be time for us later. I owe you…fuck, everything. Apologies. Gratitude. Hours of massages.”

  Lincoln cleared his throat, like he was making sure they hadn’t forgotten he was there.

  “But right now, I have to finish what I started,” Dana said. “Do you understand?”

  Penny didn’t answer.

  She just turned to walk away.

  16

  The OPA was swarming Mohinder’s casinos when Dana arrived in her hot pink truck. She emerged into sunlight, flinching, to find that a three-block radius had been cordoned off, and crowds were held back by barricades. It only took flashing her registered vigilante license to be allowed inside. She probably hadn’t even needed to do that—the cops she’d approached looked star-struck when they recognized her mussed bleached hair.

  There were a few other LVMPD agents around, but most of them were holding the perimeter. Everything else was crawling with black-suited OPA agents. Dana liked seeing them around. The feds had a lot more training than local police, and she’d worked with them when she was young.

  Unfortunately, the OPA’s broad geographic distribution meant she didn’t know any of the people there personally. And she had to flash her credentials to about two-dozen different shifters and sidhe to get even within a hundred feet of Near Dark and the street-level doors for Vampire Vegas.

  “Come on, let me in,” Dana said gruffly when a cougar shifter stopped her at the sidewalk.

  “I’m under strict orders to keep everyone outside until they finish searching the building,” he said.

  “The entire building?” She eyed the tower dubiously. It must have been almost a hundred stories tall. “Is Chief Villanueva here?”

  Before he could answer, the doors to Vampire Vegas opened. Anthony stepped out, talking to Charmaine. Even at that distance, Dana noticed how good the police chief looked. Charmaine was wearing a suit with slacks and a blouse, like normal, but her makeup was bolder than usual. Heavy eyes, red lips. Very flattering.

  The chief spotted Dana first. She pointed.

  Anthony’s face brightened. “McIntyre!”

  Dana wasn’t sure how she crossed that block so fast without vampire speed, but she was suddenly on Anthony, arms wrapped around him, swinging around the sidewalk. The sun was blazingly hot and Anthony smelled like hand sanitizer and hair grease and she nearly knocked him over from the strength of her embrace.

  He was laughing and choking at the same time, patting her on the back from an awkward angle. “It’s almost like you’re happy to see me,” he said.

  “Almost.” She squeezed harder.

  He exhaled a hard gasp. “I’m not a vampire. I need to breathe.” Dana let go. He held her by the elbows, grinning up at her as he squinted into sunlight. “You’re not a vampire either. Jesus fucking Christ, what the fuck?”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Dana said. It was so good to see Anthony with human eyes. It meant she couldn’t make out as much detail about his aging, increasingly lined face, or as many gray hairs. She also didn’t have the slightest urge to drink his blood.

  “I don’t think you’ve hugged me since you turned ten,” Anthony said. “You should die more often.”

  “I’m done dying for now. Maybe it’s your turn, ass-wipe.”

  “Ask and thou shalt receive.” He jerked a thumb back at the casino. “There’s no sign of Mohinder anywhere. He grabbed what few Paradisos survived, all his contraband, and cleared out. Gods know where the guy’s gone. He could be waiting to pounce us anywhere.”

  “Wait, the casino’s cleared out? Mohinder’s missing? Fuck!” Funny how fast delight turned to horror.

  “Maybe this is good,” Anthony said. “The Paradisos doubled down and still lost. They’re all out of chips. Now they’re on the run, and we’ve won! Right?”

  “The metro area isn’t going to feel like this is a victory once the economic impact settles in, but sure, let’s call it a win.” They were joined by a tall, broad-shouldered man with obvious sidhe blood. Beauty radiated from his every pore. His hair was way too glossy, his eyes way too appealing. He wore a black suit like the rest of the OPA, though his was much more expensive. “Hey, Dana. How’s it going?”

  “Good,” she said, shaking Cèsar Hawke’s hand.

  He pulled her in for a quick hug and a pat on the back. “It’s nice to see you up and around. I’d heard rumors you’d dropped dead, but you look very alive to me.”

  “I died, I got better. You know how that goes.”

  “You two know each other?” Charmaine asked.

  “Sure,” Dana said. She knew Cèsar because he lived with Fritz—the Secretary of the Office of Preternatural Affairs, also known as the guy that Dana had briefly attempted to hold a summer internship with. Dana and Fritz had butted heads way too much and ended up dueling it out with swords. She’d only lost because he’d still been taller than her at the time. She’d win a rematch.

  “We go way back,” she said by way of explanation.

  “What’s this about economic impact?” Anthony asked.

  “I don’t even know where to start,” Cèsar said, raking a hand through his hair. “All of Paradise was owned by the eponymous Paradisos, and after everything we found in their basement, we’ve got warrants against the lot of them. It seems like every single vampire in the area was registered as a member of their murder—so every single business that they owned is seized. Every vampire employee now can’t work legally.”

  “The city’s going to collapse,” Charmaine said.

  “I don’t know about collapse, but it’s not gonna be pretty. Sure would have been nice if those assholes could have, you know, elected not to build a kennel for humans downstairs.” Cèsar shivered. “Kennels. Haven’t seen shit like that since before Genesis.”

  “We need to take them down,” Dana said.

  “Luckily, I don’t think many are left. All the Paradisos were in Near Dark last night. And it seems like someone poisoned their watering hole even though there was no warrant to kill them at the time.” Cèsar was looking pointedly at Dana.

  She looked right back at him, folding her arms across the chest. “What a crying shame.”

  “You get why you’re not invited to come along when we ‘take them down,’ right?” Cèsar asked. “As far as I’m concerned, your vigilante license is suspended effective last night. Suspended, not revoked. Take a vacation.”

  “Go to a spa and get a massage?” Charmaine suggested, shooting poison at Cèsar with her coyote eyes.

  “Sure. Make a day of it,” he said. “Look on the bright side. The OPA’s going to take care of the Paradisos. They’re not going to trouble Las Vegas, law enforcement, or the Hunting Club again.”

  “Las Vegas’s economy is gutted,” Charmaine said. “There’s no bright side.”

  “Sometimes that’s just what happens,” Cèsar said. Even the shrug of his shoulders was kind of dismissive, a little too casual for comfort. This guy wasn’t just chill. He was downright uncaring. “I’ll be in touch soon.”

  Dana watched him go, annoyance scrabbling within her ribcage, threatening to turn
into anger and burst out.

  The anger wasn’t directed at Cèsar. Not really.

  “I have to find Mohinder first,” she said, rounding on her friends.

  Anthony cuffed her arm, dragging her out of the perimeter. “Don’t talk like that where they can hear you.”

  “You aren’t going to stop me. If you get in my way—”

  “I won’t,” he said. “I saw their basement. I get it.”

  As soon as they got back to Dana’s truck, she seized Anthony by the collar, slammed him against the hood. “You don’t get it,” she hissed into his face. “Mohinder is the Fremont Slasher.”

  A light dawned in Anthony’s eyes.

  “Whoa there,” Charmaine said, peeling Dana off of him. “Bring it down a few notches, all right? We’re friends here.”

  “If the OPA takes Mohinder, they’ll sweep him away, lock him up somewhere,” Dana said. “There’s a chance they’ll kill him, but not a guarantee. As far as I know, he’ll always be out there. He’ll be waiting for an opportunity to—to finish—fuck.” She paced away from them, balling her hands into fists. She couldn’t talk anymore. She was too far into the white-hot light of rage.

  Penny had bled out for Dana. She’d given her fucking blood to a fucking vampire in order to save Dana’s life.

  How did Dana thank her? By leaving Mohinder to the OPA?

  “What if I told you that I know where Mohinder has gone next?” Charmaine asked.

  Dana stopped. Turned slowly.

  The coyote shifter was watching her with calculating eyes. Predator eyes. The intelligence that had drawn Dana to become friends with Charmaine in the first place was lurking there, and she wanted justice as badly as Dana did.

  “I’m listening,” Dana said.

  The Hunting Lodge looked like a totally different place in daylight. It felt like it had been much longer than a few months since Dana had been there at high noon, sitting in one of the rolling chairs while hot sunlight bathed her through the enchanted glass. She basked in it, lizard-like, while Penny hacked into the Paradisos’s security.

  “I’m in,” Penny announced after a few minutes.

  “That didn’t take long,” Dana remarked, kicking off the meeting table so that she spun in place. Comfortingly familiar faces swirled past: Brianna, Anthony, Charmaine. She could even see the secretary, Chris, through the doorway, and he looked much more awake than he did on night shifts.

  Everything had gone back to normal. Everything felt, for the moment, totally right.

  “Ever since we heard about the calendar from Nissa, I’d been trying to get in her emails. I did get in—but not until two nights ago, when it was too late to help you,” Penny said. “Or so I thought.” She hit a key, and security footage from outside of Near Dark was displayed over the many monitors at her workstation. From a half-dozen different angles, at twice normal speed, Dana could watch all the traffic coming and going from Vampire Vegas.

  “I could have saved you the effort,” Dana said. “Tormid’s got a path into their system. Easy.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. Penny shot a look at Dana that was a nauseating mixture of hurt, anger, and resentment. “Yes, you could have saved me the effort—instead of letting me think you were dead.”

  Dana shrugged. “Just saying.”

  “Just saying? You were just saying that you—”

  Anthony interrupted. “Once emergency vehicles started to arrive, the only things that left the club were limousines. Mohinder and his surviving Paradisos have to be in those limos, along with any supplies they planned to take on the run. Unless they’re traveling underground?”

  “I doubt it. The Paradisos were careful keeping their permits in line, so I know that they didn’t build any subterranean transport systems,” Charmaine said. “They even had permits for those huge underground warehousing spaces—although they obviously didn’t tell anyone they were planning on keeping feeders in there.”

  Brianna stood up to take the screens from Penny, tapping a few buttons to display designs of the Near Dark tower. “They were so careful up until the last minute,” Brianna said. “Recontextualizing what we know about Near Dark paints a terrifying picture, though. I’ve been looking at their wards. They had passive magic that I totally missed while analyzing the building—basically invisible until it was active. This ‘hotel’ was going to be a complete fortress. We’d have never gotten inside once they locked it down.”

  “Mohinder planned to hole up with all his vampires and enough victims to feed them for decades, free from inconveniences like the law,” Anthony said.

  “And morality,” Penny added.

  They all sounded happy about this. Which kind of made sense. They’d averted the Fortress of Evil, after all.

  Except that Mohinder was still out there.

  He had Nissa.

  “So where are they?” Dana asked, leaning on the table to stare down Charmaine.

  It was strange to have the police chief in their sanctum sanctorum, but she seemed to fit in well, with her chair wedged up against Anthony’s and a cup of that nasty coffee that Chris liked to brew. “When I was in Mohinder’s office, I found plans for the Hoover Dam,” she said.

  And it all clicked.

  “Gods,” Dana said. “Nissa was telling the truth.” There weren’t any other pumps in the sewers—just the one set. Because they were planning on poisoning the water for the entire county.

  “It’s efficient,” Penny admitted, looking ashy-pale. It might have been from nerves or blood loss or both.

  “Efficient and really bad for the rest of us.” Brianna didn’t look up from her computer as she spoke. She was typing about a thousand words per minute. “The Hoover Dam’s a hard nut to crack. I bet it was easier planning to get into Achlys’s tower than it will be to get into the dam.”

  “We had to swing from her roof on harnesses to get into her tower,” Anthony said.

  “I know.” Brianna pressed a button to send her computer’s information onto the big screens.

  She’d found a low-detail map of the dam’s layout, with multicolored Venn diagrams overlaid upon it. Dana had seen similar diagrams before. Those were attempts to map the wards surrounding the dam.

  “I can break in to all this stuff,” Brianna said, gaze skimming the ward diagrams, “but if I can, then Mohinder has probably already done it. We don’t know what he’s going to have there. Magic? Probably. Vampires? Definitely.”

  “Whatever magic his witches have set up shouldn’t slow me down,” Dana said. “I have Wardbreaker.”

  “True, but we’re still going to have to contend with all of the surviving Paradisos. We need Wardbreaker and an army.”

  “If you’re about to say that we should trust Undersecretary Hawke…” Dana began.

  “We don’t have a lot of options,” Charmaine said quietly. The fact that she sounded so fucking reasonable about it only made Dana angrier.

  It wasn’t that Dana didn’t trust Cèsar, necessarily. She knew him well enough to say with certainty that he was a good guy on the right side of justice. Good sense of humor too. Rare quality in a stuffed suit. But he’d take over the entire operation with the OPA. He’d roll in with a lot of black trucks, a lot of sidhe, a lot of werewolves.

  Dana would never know what happened.

  “I have an army,” Dana said. “Like I said, I’ve made nice with the local shifter pack. Tormid’s got a real chip on his shoulder ever since Nissa killed Achlys. He’d be pissed if I didn’t invite him to back me up on this raid.”

  “Back you up?” Anthony asked.

  “I’m not going to ask anyone with the Hunting Club to do this. It’s too dangerous. Worse, it’s unnecessary. There’s no reason to put us all at risk.” Dana lifted her eyebrows at Charmaine. “What do you think?”

  “I think I’m not hearing any of this. Even though the undersecretary has me on administrative leave, I still have an obligation to report illegal activities from a group of vigilantes with susp
ended licenses.” Charmaine’s fingers were laced together so tightly that her knuckles were white.

  “But you’re a coyote shifter,” Dana said. “And I don’t trust a single person in Tormid’s pack the way I trust you.”

  “You want me on the ground with you?”

  “You’re as good as any of our associates. Better than a lot of them.”

  “Participating in an illegal operation like this would be a great way to turn my temporary suspension into a permanent job loss,” Charmaine said. “Sorry, McIntyre. I can’t endorse it. You must turn this over to the OPA. It’s the smart thing to do.”

  “I’m not gonna,” Dana said.

  Charmaine pinched the bridge of her nose like she felt a headache coming on. “I know.”

  “I’ll come,” Anthony said. Dana opened her mouth to argue, but he said, “Nope.”

  “You don’t even know what I was gonna say,” she said. “You and I don’t—”

  “Nope,” he said again, even more firmly. “I’m coming. It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten a tour of the Hoover Dam.”

  “I’ll support from here, as usual,” Brianna said. She didn’t look happy about it.

  Neither did Penny. “Same.” She rested her hand atop Dana’s. “You’re going to have all of us helping you, Dana. You don’t get to decide who’s necessary when we all care about you. We just got you back. We’re not letting you go again.”

  “Then it’s set,” Anthony said. “The Hunting Club is teaming up with Tormid’s shifters—hopefully—and we’re going to take the Paradisos the fuck down. Should be fun.”

  “Going after an army of vampires with an army of shifters? Fun?” Charmaine asked.

  Anthony grinned. “You kidding? That’s the stuff the Hunting Club was made for.”

  17

  Dana caught up with Penny after the meeting, once everybody dispersed to get equipped. She’d shot a text message to Tormid and he said it would take twenty minutes to rally his pack at the Hunting Lodge. That meant they didn’t have much time. Twenty minutes to put on armor, grab guns, and leave so that they could beat the OPA to the Hoover Dam.