Cashing Out

by SM Reine

  There wasn’t time for chatting.

  But damn it all, Dana had to tell Penny what she’d learned from Nissa.

  If everything went wrong…if Dana did the unthinkable and died before Mohinder…

  At least Penny would know who the monster in her closet was.

  “What’s up?” Penny asked without looking back at Dana. She was beelining for her forge, so she must have been stressed. She only went for a good pre-mission hammering when she’d gone mindless with anxiety.

  “We’ve gotta talk,” Dana said.

  Penny stopped walking. She turned, and Dana realized that Penny was already wearing that silly striped sweatband. “We do need to talk. I don’t think you owe me anything for saving your life—it’s not like I was doing you a favor, or like I wouldn’t have done it if you weren’t grateful, but—”

  “Mohinder is the Fremont Slasher,” Dana said.

  Penny cut off.

  She wavered on her feet.

  Those big brown eyes of hers went unfocused and distant, like she’d been dragged to another time, another place. All the way back to a week-long period where her limbs had been stuffed into a glass cage where she couldn’t stand up, turn around, or even take a piss without getting it on herself.

  “Mohinder,” she echoed softly. “And you found this out...how?”

  “Nissa.”

  “Oh.”

  There was that jealousy again. Dana didn’t question it anymore—Penny wore her heart on her sleeve even at her most discreet. She was jealous of Nissa.

  “Why didn’t you tell Charmaine?” Penny asked. Charmaine had arrested a vampire years earlier when he confessed to being the Slasher. He’d died in prison not long thereafter, and Charmaine’s career had been made.

  “How do you think she’ll feel when she finally accepts that she arrested the wrong guy?” Dana asked.

  Penny sighed. “She’ll be pissed at herself. Probably resign.”

  “We need her where she is. She can’t know. But you—I know you need the truth, just like I do. That’s why I’m so hell-bent on walking this path, Penny.”

  “Not because you still want to rescue Nissa?”

  A shadow settled over Dana’s heart, and she clenched her fists at her sides. “Stop talking about Nissa. I don’t care about Nissa!”

  “She’s your friend,” Penny said. “I know how you get with friends.”

  “That’s fucking stupid. Look, the end of this is coming up fast. I’ve just gotta push through, and then…I’m going to kill him for you,” Dana said. “It’s over tonight.”

  Penny tugged on the tip of one of her horns, the one she usually bumped into doorways. It was cute how she pulled on it like that. Reminded Dana of a kid hugging a blankie. “Will it be over? Really? Your vendetta...”

  Why did Penny always have to put it like that? Like Dana was just holding some stupid grudge. “If you want, as soon as Mohinder’s dead, we can take a whole year off of being vigilantes. We can get some place on the beach and never wear shirts.”

  The hope that glimmered deep in Penny’s eyes managed to be a little bit sad. “Do you think that’s how it will fall out? The Fremont Slasher will be dead, and our relationship’s ills will magically be repaired?”

  “Not magically. But naked beaches are so much better than marriage therapy, don’t you think?” Dana trailed her fingers down Penny’s shoulder.

  Penny sighed. “You don’t get marriage therapy after a divorce.”

  “The paperwork’s not done. We aren’t divorced. We’ve already given way too much money to Lucinde and Mala. One hour of their time is worth about a million beachside hot dog barbecues, a whole keg of really good beer, a strappy pair of bikini bottoms for when you’re feeling modest…”

  The orc placed her hand over Dana’s, fingers intertwined. “I will always love you,” Penny whispered. “But…”

  She didn’t finish the sentence.

  Anthony rounded the corner. “Yo, McIntyre. Can we talk?”

  Dana let out a breath, and then she drew it again. It was amazing how weak her lungs felt now that she was using them again. “No. We’re busy. We were just discussing—”

  “You’re not interrupting anything,” Penny said.

  “I had Charmaine find plans for the Hoover Dam that looked like the ones she saw in Mohinder’s office,” Anthony said. “They didn’t just encompass the dam itself, but a larger part of the system. We know that Mohinder wants to taint Las Vegas’s water, right? The Hoover Dam is a power plant. It doesn’t do much filtration. Most of that happens at the Clark County Wastewater Treatment Facility further up the Colorado River.”

  Dana felt a jolt of pleasure. “Anthony, you brilliant fuck.” She turned to smile at Penny. “We know where…oh.”

  Penny had already vanished into her forge and shut the door behind her.

  Anthony rested a hand on Dana’s shoulder.

  “She’ll always come back to you,” he said. “You guys are soulmates.”

  Dana shrugged him off. “Fuck off.” It didn’t matter if they were soulmates or not, or even if Penny came back. Penny hadn’t saved Dana’s life expecting to get a favor in return. And Dana wasn’t going to expect Penny to come back just because she killed the Fremont Slasher.

  No matter what Penny wanted, Mohinder was about to die.

  It was going to end tonight.

  Charmaine hung out in the locker room to watch the Hunting Club’s preparation, feeling heavy with dread.

  None of this was legal.

  Just being at the Lodge wasn’t legal. They’d lost their licenses. They couldn’t operate.

  Yet here they were, preparing to go to battle.

  Illegal or not, it was interesting to watch the way that they prepared themselves. She was never on this end of it. The Hunting Club often rode along on police operations, but not the other way around.

  There was a lot more beer at the Lodge pre-operation than there was at the precinct. A nice young lady named Dionne had rolled a keg into the armory and started filling cups while Dana tried on new body armor, and Anthony drank three full cups on his own before he even started threading his limbs into holsters.

  “Liquid courage?” he asked, offering Charmaine a Solo cup.

  She didn’t have to lean in to smell it. Her coyote senses meant that she was subject to the yeasty scent of the beer even at arm’s length. “No, thank you.”

  “You look so serious, you’d think you were going on the mission,” Anthony said.

  “I just don’t like this. Any of it.” Charmaine folded her arms as she watched Dana flexing in front of a mirror.

  “We’re kinda Viking about rolling into battle in these parts,” Anthony said. “Never know when an operation is going to be the last, so we have fun with it.” He drained the cup that he’d offered to Charmaine.

  “It’s not the mood.” Although that did concern her. She considered no loss of life acceptable or inevitable. She dedicated a hell of a lot of time to ensuring her men got home to their wives at night. The attitude that they were all heading to Valhalla was not just ridiculous, but dangerous.

  Her instincts alarmed a millisecond before the door opened. Charmaine’s gaze sliced over to the armory’s entrance as a tall blond man slid in, his wary gaze traveling over the room.

  His eyes finally settled on Charmaine.

  She recognized Tormid, the leader of Las Vegas’s primary shifter pack. He’d tried to recruit her once, many years earlier, back when she’d only been a detective. He hadn’t taken the refusal nicely.

  “Hey! Tormid!” Dana waved him over to the lockers. “How are our numbers looking?”

  “I got us nine good bodies,” he said. “They’re getting their things together now. Do you have what you promised?”

  “I’m good as my word.” Dana jerked her thumb toward Charmaine.

  The chief hefted a locked suitcase onto a table, opening its lid so that Tormid could see inside. This was the other reason that Charmaine wa
s still at the Hunting Lodge. She had access to the cure for silver poisoning through the department and kept several vials at home, just in case. Even if she couldn’t bring herself to go to the Hoover Dam—she wouldn’t bite her thumb at the OPA that overtly—she could help, and this was the best way to do it.

  “This is the real thing?” Tormid asked, uncapping one vial to sniff at it.

  “Guaranteed,” Charmaine said. “I’ve used it multiple times. I purchased it through the local hospital network, so the source is legitimate too.”

  He nodded. “We want to use this as a prophylactic measure.”

  The cure for silver poisoning could be used in advance of the actual exposure. It functioned as a vaccine, preventing shifters from feeling the effects of silver, but only for a few hours.

  It was never used for that application because shifters never knew when poisoning was coming and it was too expensive to shoot up with it for fun.

  Charmaine blanched at the idea. “I don’t think—”

  “It’s the only way we roll,” Tormid said. “We know for a fact that we’re going up against silver tonight. It’s a huge risk to my pack. I won’t do that to them unless we know that we can survive.”

  “I’ll pay you back, Chief,” Dana said. “You know I’m good for it.”

  The money wasn’t the only problem. The cure for silver poisoning was a scarce resource that could save so many people when used properly. Charmaine’s bad feeling about the operation was only getting worse.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Tormid took the suitcase. “When are we going?”

  “Five more minutes,” Dana said, glancing around to make sure Lina and Dionne and Anthony were ready too. “Meet you at the bus?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer. She headed out, and Charmaine heard her greeting other shifters in the hallway like they knew each other well. Dana had been busy for a dead woman.

  The others followed too, and Charmaine hung back to watch them go, her stomach writhing.

  Anthony bumped his shoulder against hers. “Bathroom’s over there if you need to barf.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. It was a lie she’d given many times over the years, and it came to her easily, even now. She studied Anthony out of the corner of her eye—his minimal body armor, Buffy at his back, the stakes at his waist. She didn’t want to let him go. “I got a question, Morales. When we were at Vampire Vegas…”

  “Yes, I was hitting on you,” he said.

  Her cheeks got hot. “How did you know what I was going to ask?”

  “I didn’t know. I was hoping.” He buckled his underarm holster, slid a gun into place. Then poured himself another cup of beer. “We need a proper date night after this. What do you think?”

  “I think that sounds great,” she said.

  Assuming that he’d want anything to do with her after this.

  She stood back to watch the Hunting Club leave, followed closely by Tormid. She wasn’t nervous for them. She was too numb for that.

  Numb enough that logic was conquering emotion.

  They left, and she remained on the hot sidewalk to watch their retreating taillights. It wasn’t a very long drive to Lake Mead. They’d arrive in the next hour or so, if traffic was good.

  An hour until their arrival. An hour until they faced Mohinder and his dwindling Paradisos—vampires who had been cornered like dying predators and would be lashing out with more viciousness than they’d ever shown before.

  Charmaine pulled her phone out as she headed toward her car.

  The phone picked up in two rings. “Hawke here.”

  “Undersecretary?” Charmaine asked. And then she cleared her throat and said, “Cèsar, this is Chief Villanueva. I’ve uncovered information withheld by the Hunting Club. And it’s putting the entire city in danger.”

  18

  The night that Dana had found Penny in the Fremont Slasher’s hideout had been hot. Very hot. It was the kind of heat that melted tires to asphalt and sent even the most determined tourists running for shade. The shadows always felt darkest on bright, burning days like that one, etching black silhouettes of Joshua trees onto the yellow desert.

  It had been darker still within Dana’s core.

  Her wife had been gone for a week.

  Immersing herself in the Fremont Slasher case had taken her to places gloomier than Hell. After the hard work of so many profilers, police, and federal agents, Dana hadn’t had a lot left to uncover. She could only analyze what they’d already learned, over and over, and worry about what was happening to Penny right at that moment.

  The fact she’d ever found him had been a total accident. A stroke of luck. Dana had reexamined one of the locations that a woman had been taken, and she’d found a smudge of mildew from a shoe. Magical analysis had revealed the mildew only grew in one specific part of Nevada. It plagued wells, poisoned families, and made the water on many properties undrinkable.

  After that, Dana had only needed to search old houses with untreated wells. And she had. Relentlessly. She hadn’t slept for days.

  And then she’d found him.

  At the time, police believed that the Slasher must have had an elaborate setup at his lair. The number of people who had gone missing and the length of time he’d kept them suggested a lot of space, somewhere discreet. Dana located his property outside town, barely a few miles away from the nearest highway. The only above-ground structure had been a trailer. There had also been a well capped with a locked metal lid.

  As soon as Dana had wrenched that lid open, the heat and effluence had mingled to form a toxic perfume that dizzied her. She’d found the Fremont Slasher and he wasn’t a fancy killer. He wasn’t elaborate or well equipped. He didn’t care about his victims enough to give them adequate space.

  With the help of a rope and harness, Dana had rappelled down to splash in the muck at the bottom of the well. She’d found glass cages wedged into the damp hollow. The Fremont Slasher must have cut partway into the surrounding earth, with little concern for structural integrity; part of the low-ceilinged room had already collapsed. Judging by all the glass shards scattered over the stone floors, he hadn’t removed all the glass cages before the collapse, either. Some of his victims were pinned under there.

  Later, the police would excavate the well and find bones belonging to a handful of bodies. Only fragments of them.

  Dana would always wonder which victims they’d failed to identify. Which families would still be hoping for their loved ones to come home, yet never see those smiling faces again.

  Several of the sturdy glass cages—more like terrariums, really—had contained people inside of them. Dana had gone to them one at a time, breaking the locks open, helping people out. She’d had to look closely at each survivor to be sure if she knew them or not.

  Penny’s uniquely green skin should have made her easy to identify, but it had been so dark in there, lit only by the Maglite Dana had brought along, and all the survivors had been caked in blood, mud, and shit. Everyone looked green-brown.

  Dana had known, seeing those injuries, that the Fremont Slasher hadn’t been there for days. He hadn’t cut them more recently than that. He’d abandoned his victims.

  The last cage had been fogged on the inside and smeared with handprints.

  She would never forget how it had felt to walk toward that terrarium. The weight of her legs. The pounding of her heart. How light her head had become—light enough that she worried there were poisonous gases venting into the well.

  Dana hadn’t been sure that Penny was among the survivors.

  It was the worst feeling in the world. That anticipation, that dread. It was worse than the fear she’d struggled through ever since Penny went missing on Fremont Street. Dana would have almost rather killed herself than look in that case to find it was someone other than her wife.

  But it had been Penny. The door had swung open and the orc, withered to near-nothingness, had fallen into her arms.

  Dana never
wanted to feel that fear again. She’d sworn she wouldn’t. That she would hunt down the real Fremont Slasher, even if it meant killing every fucking vampire on the planet.

  She felt that same dread while driving down to the Clark County Wastewater Treatment Plant. She was finally going to face the Fremont Slasher firsthand. She was going to make him pay.

  Then maybe his victims would be free.

  The Hunting Club took position atop a canyon ridge and used binoculars to survey the wastewater treatment station from afar. Its enormous tanks, the tall barbed-wire fence, the glimmering wards. It straddled a river trimmed by scrub brush. A jackrabbit vanished into the shade behind the tanks, its shadows stretching long as sunset approached.

  The Fremont Slasher was inside.

  “It would make most sense to inject the toxins after the filtration to make sure it doesn’t get removed,” Lina said. She was a cute girl with dark hair chopped short—a Washoe Indian who used to wrangle demons solo in Carson City. She was also a former government intern who knew infrastructure better than anyone else from the Lodge. “The output comes from there, that big pipe letting out into the river. They’ll dump everything there.”

  “The OPA’s already issued warnings that everyone needs to drink bottled water only.” Dionne showed her phone to the other associates. A news article featuring Cèsar Hawke’s pretty headshot talked vaguely about water contamination in Clark County. They had found the Gaslight Corp pump and were currently retracing Dana’s steps through Mohinder’s plan.

  “This water has broad agricultural usage too,” Anthony said. “Our produce will be tainted. Our ground will be tainted. Vegas will be ruined for generations.” He handed the binoculars to Dana.

  She peered through the narrow eyeholes, looking for movement. There were limousines with blacked-out windows pulling up along the river. As soon as it was dark enough, they’d unload those barrels and start infecting the water.

  Dana didn’t see Mohinder.

  “Tormid?” she prompted, thumb pressing down on her Walkie Talkie’s button.