Cashing Out

by SM Reine

  His voice replied, “I see it.”

  “How are you guys feeling?”

  “Queasy,” he said. “The vaccine is working. We should move before daylight’s gone. How long before UV drops to safe levels for the vampires?”

  Dionne heard the question and relayed it to Brianna back at the Lodge. It only took a moment to get an answer. “Eight minutes,” Dionne said. “It’ll be prickly, but with full skin coverage, they can go outside in eight minutes.”

  “We’ll go in now. Sniper support?” Tormid asked.

  “On it.” Lina set up her sniper rifle stand on the edge of the rocks, lying belly-down and pressing her eye to the sight.

  “Mohinder’s not a fool. He’ll be watching for us.” Dana kept the button on her Walkie Talkie pressed so Tormid’s shifters would hear it too. “He’ll start with silver bullets. As soon as he realizes that silver isn’t hurting anyone worse than usual bullets, he’s going to pull out Plan B.”

  “Which is…?” Dionne prompted.

  “No idea. Probably something he can do with his telekinesis,” Dana said. “I want you guys to focus on supporting the pack. Remember our number one goal: that cocktail of metal can’t get into the water supply. Our friends are relying on us. There are a lot of preternaturals in this county whose lives will be shattered if Mohinder succeeds.”

  “And you’re going inside to chase him down alone?” Lina asked without lifting her eye from the sniper rifle.

  There was nobody else who could face Mohinder.

  Nobody Dana wanted to let face Mohinder.

  “If you see his face, shoot him,” Dana said. “Don’t hesitate. I’d rather have him dead than get to take him out personally, understand?”

  Anthony covered his microphone, preventing Brianna and Penny from hearing him back at the Lodge. “What do I do if I see Nissa?”

  A hard lump lodged in Dana’s throat.

  She remembered opening the terrarium where she’d found Penny, and for an instant, it was too easy to imagine Nissa’s body in the orc’s place.

  “Shoot any vampires you see.” Dana held her hands out. “Buffy?”

  Anthony passed the hydraulic staking gun over, but didn’t immediately let go. “Be careful, McIntyre. We just got you back.” His hand brushed over hers, squeezing briefly.

  “I’m not going anywhere yet, Morales. You still owe me at least fifteen bucks and I plan to collect.” She leaped down the ridge, Buffy hanging over her shoulder and Wardbreaker at her hip. She skidded toward the wastewater treatment plant.

  Dana was halfway into the canyon when she heard Lina open fire. When she heard shifters snarl, and saw dust rising from the place where the limousines had been waiting.

  The battle had begun.

  She didn’t pause to watch. The Slasher was waiting for her.

  Dana headed straight into the office building attached to the tanks. She didn’t have to break anything to get inside; someone had already shattered the lock with hard kick, or maybe a gunshot.

  There was no lobby here—a remote wastewater treatment plant didn’t expect to have many visitors. There was a room with a coffee vending machine and a couple of security cameras. Someone could be watching her on those cameras.

  “Brianna?” she prompted.

  The blinking red light on the nearest camera went dim.

  “Security is going down and all interior doors are unlocked. You’re looking for the filtration station,” Brianna replied. “Godspeed, McIntyre.”

  Dana turned off her microphone. She didn’t want to be distracted.

  She gazed down the hallway, and the end was disconcertingly blurry. When she lowered herself to a half-crouch so she’d be ready to move in any direction, her thighs and glutes ached, reminding her of how recently she’d been dead. She’d eaten an Awful Awful-style burger before heading out, but it wasn’t enough nutrition, wasn’t enough protein. Her body was deprived. She was still halfway to dead, even if she was closer to the human side of things now.

  Dana was too weak to face master vampires like Mohinder and Nissa now that she wasn’t one of them.

  She followed the signs directing her toward the filtration station, listening to the distant pops of gunfire and the snarls of shifters through the walls.

  The room Dana needed had windows that opened to the river, letting in too-hot evening wind. It whistled when she stepped through the pipes. Should have masked the sound of her movements.

  A man stood at the edge of the floor, looking down at the river. From behind he could have been any vampire. Tall, lean, pale.

  Mohinder turned. There was no surprise in his blood-red eyes, and the hand curled over his bicep was tipped with sharp silver claws. Dana mentally inventoried the length of those claws, and how neatly they’d have matched the wounds delivered unto the Fremont Slasher’s victims.

  “It’s been a long time, McIntyre,” he said.

  It hadn’t been that long. She’d run into him at Near Dark one evening earlier.

  But she understood what he meant.

  They gazed at each other for a long, silent moment. Dana wasn’t sure what he saw in her. She could only see evidence she’d missed in Mohinder.

  He was so squeaky clean. Even when he wore his usual long black jacket, he was made approachable by his attempt at emulating living skin tones, his tidy hair, his sympathetic lips. A good politician. An edgy politician, granted, but still someone who knew how to function in society alongside everyone else.

  Dana and Charmaine had talked about what the Slasher must have looked like based upon physical features. They’d thought he was well over six feet tall, maybe six and a half, judging by the angle his blows came from. Mohinder currently stood with his feet three inches off the floor. It was an effortless and almost boastful display of his telekinetic abilities. No wonder he’d seemed to be so tall when he killed.

  “Well?” Mohinder asked. “What happens next?”

  There was no way in hell he’d let her get close enough to use Buffy.

  “Tell me where Nissa is,” Dana said.

  “Do you think you can save her the way you saved your wife?” He strolled closer, walking on air between stacks of crates labeled with the Gaslight Corp logo. They must have prepared for this attack in advance. There was no way those boxes could have fit in the limos. “Do you think that Nissa needs to be saved?”

  “Even if she pretends to like you, she’s still a victim. Victims do what they gotta do to survive,” Dana said.

  “You’d know best,” Mohinder said. “You have multitudes more victims than I do. In fact—”

  Dana threw a fire charm.

  Frankly, she just wasn’t all that interested in what he had to say.

  Brianna’s charm was a good one. It splattered magic all over the boxes that was even more effective than accelerant, and they caught fire in an instant. The explosion of heat washed over her.

  Flames bathed the room in shades of brilliant orange, reducing Mohinder to a monochromatic monster. It reflected in his crimson eyes and made him look like he’d trapped Hell within his skull.

  The fire swept toward him, magically attracted to the vampire.

  Mohinder flicked.

  All those flames bunched into a column thick as a car, contained by telekinesis, and punched toward Dana.

  It struck her.

  She caught.

  Dana fell, shouting, slapping at her arms. She remembered being told to stop, drop, and roll in school. She remembered practicing it, too. But now the moment that her sleeve had caught fire, making the skin feel like she’d pressed it to a barbecue, the memories of what to do when catching fire felt unreachably distant. Meaningless. She had the words but didn’t speak the language.

  Dana slammed into the cold wall when she tried to run. Down the hall, there was a sink for flushing eyes after chemical accidents. She lunged for it.

  Mohinder’s telekinetic power swept past her again.

  The pipe on the sink burst.

 
; It exploded in her face, blinding her. The hiss of water escaping pipe was deafening. She lost her footing on wet concrete and Dana let the movement translate into a roll, taking her to the other side of the sink.

  Instinct served her well. It got her out of the way before Mohinder could flash across the room with super speed and smash his fist through the sink. Had she not moved, the porcelain would have crushed her skull.

  Dana came up against the opposite wall. She flung out a hand, grabbing a wrench.

  Mohinder’s eyes fell to her sodden sleeve. He was only a meter away now. “You’re not flammable,” he said.

  Her first thought was that it was a stupid observation. The sleeve of her shirt was obviously very flammable, and her arm was susceptible to burns to the point that she now felt cold. Probably damaged nerves. That wouldn’t be a fun visit to Edie Ashe.

  Except that Mohinder wasn’t remarking on whether she could catch fire at all, but how quickly it would spread. If she’d still been a master vampire, she would have turned to cinder.

  “How?” Mohinder asked.

  “Why? Do you want to be cured too?” She swung her arm.

  The wrench connected with Mohinder’s skull. He jerked back, flinging up a hand to shield his eyes.

  He barely stumbled.

  It was enough for Dana to plow into him, using her momentum to carry him toward the flaming crates. But Dana was a lot slower than she’d been as a vampire. He twitched aside, and instead of flinging him into the fire, they both hit another wall.

  A few weeks of being dead had made Dana’s body forget what it was like to fight a vampire one-on-one as a human. She overestimated her speed and underestimated her strength. Dodging nine of ten punches from Mohinder wasn’t good enough when the tenth almost knocked her skull off.

  Stars exploded at the edge of her vision. She stumbled backward.

  “You must have so many questions for me,” Mohinder said, advancing on Dana slowly. He was in no hurry. He knew her odds of survival. “Why did I choose those victims? Why did I let you live? How did I get a hapless, helpless Paradisos vampire to confess to the crimes?”

  Those were all decent questions. But Dana didn’t really care about the answers. Even the vampire who’d been arrested as the Fremont Slasher didn’t really matter, because Mohinder had summed it up himself: he’d gotten a hapless Paradisos vamp to take the fall. A tale as old as time.

  “You’re not that interesting,” Dana said.

  Mohinder’s face spasmed. His prideful expression took a hard left toward insulted. “You hunted me for months.”

  “So what? I hunt a lot of bad guys, and you’re just another random, shitty vampire.”

  “How many of your ‘random’ enemies held your wife hostage and has a bucket of her hair?”

  “Who fucking cares?” Dana asked, sweeping the wrench into her hand again. “We’re ancient archetypes, good guy and bad guy, and you’re on the wrong side of mythology.”

  Mohinder’s affront was almost comical. “I am so much more than that!”

  “Not really. If you were more interesting, you wouldn’t be facing me here alone.”

  “Oh,” Mohinder said, “I’m not alone.”

  Cold hands closed around Dana’s throat. The short, dead form of a vampire pressed against her back. “You cured yourself,” Nissa whispered, and she sounded so hurt that it made Dana’s heart sink.

  Until ten seconds earlier, Dana had been confident she’d be fine. She’d fought vampires stronger than Mohinder and emerged alive.

  But Nissa Royal had arrived, and she was pissed.

  19

  When Nissa forced Dana against a wall, there was nothing Dana could do to stop her. Not physically. Buffy was pinned at her back and she was out of fire charms. But whatever was happening with Dana and Nissa had never been physical anyway. It had been a friendship, like Penny said.

  It was crazy. Nissa was a vampire, and Dana didn’t have vampire contacts, much less friends. But Dana had always been soft for the hard cases, and it didn’t get harder than surviving the Fremont Slasher.

  Her fingers closed around a stake on her belt. She didn’t yet draw it.

  “Listen to me,” Dana hissed, quietly enough that Mohinder would struggle to hear her over the wind. “After Penny was taken, I changed. A lot. I was lucky to walk away from those changes without doing something irrevocable. Thing is, even though you’ve already done wrong, you can fix it. There’s precedent for fledglings getting reduced time when they turn a sire over.”

  Nissa’s face crumpled, her elbow digging into Dana’s neck. “Turn him in? Do you really think I’d do that?”

  “It’d be the hardest thing you’ll do,” Dana said. “You’ve been his victim for four years so it’ll be hard as fuck. But it’s the only way out of this, Nissa. If you don’t give me Mohinder, I’m going to have to stake you.”

  “I know that’s not true,” Nissa said. “Remember, I can see in your head. I can read your every emotion. There’s no lying to me, especially since you’re mortal again.”

  “Then what am I thinking? Tell me.” Dana glared at her, filling her eyes with emotion and her mind with memories. Memories of Penny. Crawling down into the well where she’d been kept. Smelling the blood, seeing the bodies. The metallic stench.

  “You know what I see?” Nissa’s knuckles traced a line along Dana’s collarbone, even though her eyes never moved from Dana’s. “You keep regretting that you don’t have vampire powers anymore.”

  Dana jolted.

  The fact was, it was true. How could she not miss the tactical advantage a vampire had against other vampires?

  But those had been casual thoughts that had passed through her during earlier phases of the fight. She hadn’t been thinking of them in that moment.

  Nissa hadn’t just read what was on the surface of Dana’s mind, but in the deep. She could see all of Dana’s thoughts. Even the conversation that Dana and Penny had shared about a friendship with Nissa. The vampire knew that Dana cared about her, so much more than she should have, and it made her deadly.

  “Kill her.” This came from Mohinder, barely centimeters behind Nissa.

  Dana hadn’t heard him coming. Had he learned to move so quietly when sneaking up on women in alleyways? White-hot rage surged inside of her at the idea of it.

  The intensity of Dana’s emotions must have surprised Nissa. She lost focus for a moment. Zoned out, hands going slack. So Dana seized the opportunity to shove her out of the way.

  She made it all of four steps toward Mohinder, with Buffy lifted to her chest, before Nissa roused again.

  “Stop,” Nissa said.

  Dana’s legs stopped working.

  Nissa’s presence was deep within Dana’s mind—deeper even than she needed to read thoughts. It was like a fist shoved right between the lobes of her brain, knuckles pushing against the nerves that signaled movement.

  Dana was so close to staking Mohinder.

  So close.

  Her finger twitched on the trigger. The hydraulics kicked off, and the stake moved.

  She couldn’t lunge.

  Mohinder circled her. At his nearest, his chest was millimeters from Buffy. There was no hint of human emotion in his eyes anymore. He wasn’t amused by her peril, or angry, or even vengeful for all the things Dana had done to him. “The reason I sent you presents every few weeks since you and the police chief shut me down is simple, McIntyre,” Mohinder said. “I wanted to remind you that there is a vampire in this world better than you. Stronger than you. Even when you were a vampire, you were only one of the pigs.” He extended his hand toward Nissa. “You’d never be one of us.”

  “Nissa,” Dana said warningly. “You can still come back from this.”

  The younger vampire took Mohinder’s hand. She settled in against his side, a mouse snuggling with a deadly vulture.

  “You should have remained a vampire,” Mohinder said. He was so cold and lifeless. Nothing but marble rigidity, totally unrespo
nsive to Nissa’s affection.

  This was the greatest monster Dana had ever hunted, and yet Penny was loyal to him.

  No. She’s not Penny.

  “Kill her,” Mohinder said again. His arm fell away from her shoulders, giving Nissa more space to move. “Now. Kill the hunter.”

  Nissa hesitated.

  “McIntyre made her choice.” Now Mohinder was giving his focus to Nissa, beginning to circle her instead. “She doesn’t care about you. She doesn’t even want to kill you, and that is what fascinated you, wasn’t it? Her ruthlessness. It’s not what you thought. She is only human.”

  “I know,” Nissa said. Even as she spoke, her control on Dana’s mind remained unbroken. Dana couldn’t move. But Nissa clearly was no longer reading Dana’s thoughts, because if she had been, she’d have realized that Anthony was creeping along the walkway at the back of the filtration room.

  Dana wanted to shake her head no at Anthony, but she couldn’t even seem to move her eyes.

  Anthony had a sniper rifle like Lina’s. He lowered it to the railing.

  Mohinder’s cold, clawed fingers rested on Dana’s neck. His thumb settled on her pulse point. It was hammering. “Why are you waiting?” Mohinder asked.

  Nissa said, “I don’t want to kill her, either.”

  Mohinder said, “Then I’ll do it.”

  A gunshot rang out.

  Mohinder flew back.

  The Slasher’s claws were so sharp that the faintest brush drew blood on Dana’s neck. She clapped a hand to the wound—and realized that she could move freely.

  Nissa had released her.

  “Mohinder!” Nissa cried in genuine distress, whirling to see where the gunshot had come from.

  Anthony had aimed again. He was using high caliber bullets, big ol’ fuckers capable of knocking even the bloodless on their ass. He’d laid out Mohinder like it was nothing because Mohinder wasn’t expecting it. When he shot Nissa, she was prepared.

  She barely jerked.

  He opened a hole the size of a fist in her back, and she only jerked.

  Mohinder flung a hand out. Dana tried to leap out of the way, but the master vampire wasn’t aiming for her.