by SM Reine
“No. Stop trying to distract me.”
“If you’re serious about joining the LVMPD, you have to answer that.”
Dana groaned and answered the phone. “McIntyre here.” She dropped back down to straddle Penny’s hips and traced a finger along her collarbone, right where she was most ticklish. The orc tried to muffle her giggle behind a thick green forearm.
“What the hell have you been doing, McIntyre?” Charmaine asked, sounding irate.
Dana didn’t attempt to be quiet about kissing Penny’s throat. “I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count,” she mumbled into the phone.
“Right. Get clothes on and come to the Luxor 2.”
“In how much of a hurry am I getting dressed?” Dana’s hand slid between Penny’s legs. “Like…next hour? Next two hours?”
“Try five minutes,” Charmaine said. “Il Castrato Senesino has struck again. And this time, he’s made more than twenty vampires.”
10
“How the fuck did this happen?” Dana stared around at the pavilion outside the Luxor 2, struck by the number of bodies she was facing down, and exactly how brutal it was.
She’d seen brutal. For fuck’s sake, Dana had performed brutal.
This was something else entirely.
The Luxor 2 had little in common with its predecessor, which had been destroyed in a demon attack before Genesis. Dana had seen pictures of the original Luxor: a black-glass replica of a Giza pyramid projecting a light beam into the clouds. It had been impressive for a pre-Genesis casino. They’d managed to capture a little bit of magic while designing that attraction.
The builders of Luxor 2 had literal magic on their side. It had two pyramids, one inverted atop the other so that their points touched in the middle. The upper half rotated slowly. The light wasn’t projected from Luxor 2’s apex, but from the magical eye suspended over the roof.
Dana wasn’t going into either level of Luxor 2 today. She was going to a courtyard that was a modern interpretation of the Valley of the Kings. Statues posed against pillars gazed down at a multi-tiered stair. Perimeter torches flared with flames of a dozen colors, spewing diamond sparkles into the hazy night sky. Fountains crisscrossed the pavilion’s center. There was even a pond surrounded by reeds, dotted by lilies, and buzzing with magical simulacra of Nile fauna.
Today the pond and the fountains were running red. “I am getting some serious First Plague vibes,” Lina said, shooting a smile at Dana as she hurried after an OPA agent carrying evidence bags. “If you see frogs and locusts, run.”
Dana laughed. It was the only laugh to be heard for miles.
Il Castrato Senesino had embedded twenty wooden poles into the ground, and then impaled twenty humans on them.
The stakes had been implanted deeply into the concrete, ensuring the wood could support full body weight. A lot of the impalements were sloppy, lopsided, and the stakes still stood firm.
Dana didn’t believe the janky skewerings were incompetence. After all, at this point, Dickless had gotten several opportunities to practice. He wasn’t clumsy in attempting to wrestle bodies onto the points. He must have already known how to shift the different orifices over the tips of the wooden stakes in order to let their body weight and gravity combine to finish the job.
The killer had been trying to handle far too many victims all at once. That was the real problem.
He’d fucked up the house with the twelve inhabitants, yet still shot for the moon with his next murder.
Dickless may not have had a dick, but he had ambition.
“You taking notes?” Dana asked, two fingers to her ear.
“Yes ma’am,” Chris said. “From both you and Lina. She’s quiet now, so you’ve got all my attention.”
“Good. There are twenty stakes and twenty victims on them. All are male.” She strolled around the scene, watching from beyond the bustling group of agents surveying it. “I think they’re all bloodless. Most of them are still moving.”
“Do vampires feel pain?” he asked.
Dana remembered stepping into sunlight, and how it had felt like taking a swan dive into a pot filled with water. “Oh yeah.”
“Are people getting the victims down?”
At the moment, the OPA was too busy cataloguing the scene to remove vampires. Getting them out of there wouldn’t make them heal. Leaving them in place wouldn’t make them deader. For now, they were evidence, not patients.
Dana was surprised Chris couldn’t hear the moaning over her headset.
“You don’t want an answer,” Dana said. “Twelve of the stakes are splintered. Looks like Dickless was tossing victims into the poles before he actually skewered them. Also, there are a lot of bloody handprints on the walls through here. Looks like injured people had been trying to escape.”
“Same people on the spikes?”
“I don’t think so. There’s some women around on the ground too. The women aren’t moving.” Dana snapped a few shots for their files and sent them to Chris. “Got the pics?”
“Yes, and I’ve attached them to the file,” he said. “I’ll start on warrant paperwork ASAP.”
Dana was getting a headache. “Don’t bother. No warrants against vamps right now. I’ll let you know if I see anything else that needs to go in the log; you can grab a cup of coffee for now.”
“Caffeinated coffee, no less,” he said. “Thanks, Big D.”
“What can I say? I live to right wrongs and triumph over evil.” She pressed the button on her headset to turn it off.
Without a Hunting Club associate in her ear, there was no distraction from the wailing. The creaks of wooden stakes under two hundred pounds of load. The splashing fountains.
Why had nobody turned the fountains off?
Dana stepped up to the edge of the pool. There was so much blood in the water that it was nearly opaque black, but she saw pale forms at the bottom.
More female victims slaughtered to feed the men on the stakes.
“That was longer than five minutes.” Charmaine came to stand beside Dana, her mouth bowed into a severe frown.
Dana clawed her way out of the depths of her thoughts, forcing herself to focus on the police chief. Charmaine was dressed ultra-plain. Her suit and shoes were tan, and she wore no makeup. She looked like she hadn’t been sleeping either.
“I actually showed up in damn good time, thank you very much. You just didn’t see me. I’ve been here a while wondering how this happened,” Dana said.
“Well, McIntyre, it’s sort of like barbecuing with skewers,” Charmaine deadpanned. She lifted her hands, fingers pinched, and mimicked jamming cubed veggies onto a skewer. Or meat cubes, maybe. Probably meat cubes.
“That’s not what I mean, smart ass. How did the guy get twenty people impaled in such a public place without getting caught?”
Her eyes were pinched at the edges, her mouth a tight line. “What makes you think he didn’t get caught?”
Dana could have gone her entire life without seeing what it looked like when a guy got a giant wooden stake up his ass. She’d done plenty of staking before, but never through someone’s asshole.
It turned out that there was a world of difference between the faces someone made when their heart got impaled and when their nethers got impaled.
Now she knew what it looked like. Luxor 2’s outdoor security cameras were super high resolution, so she got to see every single scream, every missed punch, every contorted face.
“They must have spent a fortune on their security,” Dana said as Officer Wilson progressed the video frame by frame. It had recorded at over sixty frames per second. Reduced to quarter speed, they had a great view of blood spray misting over concrete and dripping down the inner thigh of one victim.
“I wish I could have cameras this good at the precinct,” Charmaine said. She wasn’t actually looking at the monitors anymore. Watching them once was more than enough. “I’m going to tell Undersecretary Hawke you’re here, McIntyre. W
e need a confab.”
She disappeared around the open door of the van.
The LVMPD’s presence was minimal compared to that of the OPA, but they’d still brought a big van filled with tech to assist the investigation. It had enough monitors mounted in the rear that every one of Luxor 2’s cameras could play at once, surrounding Dana in murder from all angles. She felt like the proverbial fly on the wall, multifaceted eyes and all.
“Start the video over from seventeen minutes after the hour,” Dana said. “Half speed.”
“No problem.” Officer Wilson hit a few buttons.
Dana watched the murders unfold again.
The sudden eruption of violence in an otherwise relaxed courtyard, centralized near the fountains.
The confusion as people tried to figure out who was screaming.
The chaos when everyone ran.
And then Il Castrato Senesino catching them, one by one.
Dana watched the way that the vampire flowed through the night with dread lodged in her throat. He was fast enough that even sixty FPS wasn’t enough to catch every movement, which made his progress hard to follow. The cameras showed the wounds after the fact but not the initial infliction.
“Fucking insane,” she said as Dickless impaled his first victim on one of those big wooden stakes.
Officer Wilson practically exploded. “Right? Oh my gods, what the fuck?”
“You took the words right from my mouth,” Cèsar said, stepping behind the doors with them. “Let me tell you, I’ve been to literal Hell before, and some of the stuff back there didn’t compete with this. That says a lot.”
“Didn’t demons used to dice up human slaves for kebabs?” Dana asked.
“Sure, but they didn’t roast people whole like this most of the time,” Cèsar said. “And even the parts that looked like humans weren’t still half alive and twitching. Not that I’m a fan of dead bodies in any format, mind you. But I’ve developed a hierarchy of most acceptable cadaver types. The best kind of body is one that doesn’t look like a body.”
“I get why Secretary Friederling likes you,” Dana said. “You’re both so fucked in the head.”
“He’d take that as a compliment.”
A flash of movement on the video caught her attention. “Roll that back, Wilson.”
Il Senesino had incapacitated most of his victims simultaneously by sweeping through the courtyard like cheesecloth blown on the wind. It was less than thirty seconds from quiet to blood everywhere.
Then the stakes, those huge-ass poles, came out of seemingly nowhere. Even on the second watch, Dana wasn’t sure where he got them.
“They look like sharpened two-by-fours,” Cèsar said. “He must have carried them to Luxor 2 and had them waiting nearby. Has anyone managed to figure out where he stashed them yet?”
“No sir,” Officer Wilson said.
Wherever the wood came from, it was off-screen, and Dana couldn’t tell exactly where he went to retrieve it.
Il Senesino was fast.
Dana wondered if she used to be a faster vampire than him.
On the video, the killer grabbed a young girl. Cèsar cringed away from the monitors. “Stop rolling through that, Wilson.”
The officer paused the video.
This kind of mass damage was staggering, and there was no way they could give Dickless a chance to attack again. He’d started out killing one at a time. Then a dozen. Now twenty plus. What was next? Dana wasn’t willing to find out.
“Why haven’t you daylighted Vegas yet?” she asked. Before she’d been sent to prison, Cèsar had made it clear that the OPA was going to do two things: cut off the Hunting Club’s vigilante license, and light up Vegas for six months so vampires couldn’t survive within its borders.
“It takes ages to set up the ritual,” Cèsar said. “It’s not easy planting the idols we need, or even determining the locations around the city. We’re working on it.”
Working on it wasn’t good enough. “What’s the soonest you can have this place in perpetual daylight?”
He scratched his chin. “Thirty-six hours.”
Dana glared at the screen, jaw tight. She could still remember Dickless driving a young man mouth-first onto a stake.
Thirty-six hours wasn’t fast enough.
In a stroke of fortunate timing, Officer Wilson had paused the footage so that one monitor showed a clear shot of their perpetrator. Dickless’s skin was painted and plasticky. The vee of his hairline was so distinct that it could have been done in greasepaint, like from a Halloween store. And that cape looked like it was a ten-dollar piece of fabric with a cardboard collar.
“He looks like Dracula. He really, seriously looks like Dracula. Why?” Dana paced from side to side, spanning the width of the van. “That’s weird.”
“Not necessarily,” Cèsar said. “Like Nissa Royal said, he’s got some serious idolatry going on, plus insecurity. Bad mix.”
“Wait. You were listening to my talk with Nissa?”
“You’re surprised?”
“Do you think she’d tell me anything sensitive when she knows we’re not alone? And don’t try to argue that point. She knows. She’s a fucking psychic vampire.”
“It’s a matter of policy,” Cèsar said.
“Smear your policy on the end of a wooden stake and then shove it up your asshole,” Dana said.
“Not until you buy me dinner,” he said, fishing around in his jacket’s inner pockets. He pulled out a plastic card. “If you want to talk to Nissa alone, fine. I’ll shove policy up my ass so you can have a private chat. But you should remember who’s responsible for you while you’re out of jail, and what’s at risk if you piss me off.”
Dana took the card from him. They were OPA credentials that identified her as an employee with high-security access, and they’d used her mugshot for the photo. “For the last time, I’m not your fucking employee.”
“Not yet,” he said, and he tossed her a pair of keys to an OPA vehicle. “But in thirty-six hours, the case will be closed because we’ve daylighted Vegas. And then you’re signing a contract or going back to prison.” He sparkled when he smirked. “Have a good talk with Nissa.”
11
This time, Dana let an OPA agent watch her back as she entered the tent to talk to Nissa. She didn’t like relying on a stranger for her safety, but it was better than exposing Penny to Nissa again. Or anyone from the Hunting Club, for that matter. Let the OPA and their shallow sidhe fucks absorb the danger.
Nissa sat in the column of darkness in the center of the tent, hands resting on her knees, eyes closed. She looked meditative. “What did he do this time?” If she hadn’t started talking, Dana would have almost thought she was one of those creepy magical hologram ads. She was that still.
“Look at this.” Dana held out a tablet at arm’s length, screen facing Nissa.
The vampire’s eyes opened slowly. The reflection of the security video from Luxor 2 made her irises burn bright.
Dana didn’t need to see what Il Senesino had done again. The sounds were bad enough. The screaming, the squishing.
Nissa’s calmly puzzled expression was somehow worse. “It’s nice watching it like this. This way I can see a vampire at work without being distracted by those feelings.”
“Yeah, it’s awful having to feel emotions. Totally the worst part about mass murder.” Dana tossed the tablet at Nissa. “What do you see in the video?”
Nissa watched it to the end. Then she swiped to play it again. When it finished a second time, she started it a third. “Military training. Il Castrato Senesino is ex-military.”
That was what the bartender had said. “How would you know that?”
“My dad was Army.” Nissa nibbled on one of her knuckles, still transfixed by the video. “That looks like a strange breed of vampire. What is he?”
“You tell me what he is. He was made by the venom from the Paradisos’s mortuary.”
A shiver rocked through Nissa. “So it
works. Post-mortem conception. We’d theorized, but…”
“Dickless wouldn’t exist if you and the Paradisos weren’t hanging on to keepsakes. There are proper ways to dispose of the ashes. Procedures.”
“Procedures?” Nissa asked. “You sound like Cèsar.” She said his name with easy familiarity, and she referenced a conversation that she couldn’t have overheard.
Dana resisted the urge to take a step back. “Get out of my head, Nissa. You don’t wanna be in there.”
“Because then I’ll see how much you miss being a vampire?” Nissa asked. “Are you faster than Il Castrato Senesino? We’ll never know. It’s disappointing.”
“We have to catch this guy before he kills again. If you give me something to help catch him, I’ll make sure you’re given synth blood before you starve.”
Nissa’s knuckles went white on the tablet. “Do you think they’ll try to starve me?”
A quiver of fear again. That tremor that made it hard for Dana to hate her.
Gods, she sounded like Penny when she talked like that.
“Give me info. Help me catch him. You won’t starve,” Dana said.
Nissa rubbed her upper arms like she was cold. She couldn’t be cold. It must have been a nervous tic. “I didn’t just issue or deny visas, you know. I researched preternatural breeds applying to visit so our security teams could be ready for them.”
Now that was something that could be helpful. “Can you figure out what he is?”
“I’ll do better than that,” Nissa said. “I’ll tell you some fundamentals about vampires you’d have learned if you were in a murder. For instance—did you know that vampires have attributes specific to their bloodlines?”
“Yes.” Dana had noted how sire and fledgling shared fang shape.
“Did you know that it’s theoretically possible to mix bloodlines?” Nissa asked.
Dana got cold. “How?”
“Multiple sires. You’ll never come across two masters who cooperate enough to change the same person, but if you did, the resulting vampire would have attributes of both.” Nissa shut the tablet off. Finally, the screaming stopped. “We had at least a dozen different breeds of vampire visit the area. A few strong enough to sire other vampires.”