by SM Reine
Her hand had found its way to the stapler again.
Charmaine grabbed her wrist before she could throw it again.
“Look, I can’t guarantee Garlic Shots,” the chief said. “But I can get you something as good.”
It was different strolling through the gates of Southern Desert Correctional Center as an OPA representative rather than as a black-bagged arrestee. It didn’t feel much different, though. Having all those guns trained on her as she walked through the barbed wire, the shouts of the prisoners, the rattling of bars shaken in preternaturally strong fists.
A detainee spit at her. Dana flicked it off her shoulder. Three meters apart, and he’d still managed to hit her. Might have been impressive if it weren’t so disgusting. “Just so you know,” she said, “when I get the serial killer with a fetish for castration, I’m sending him to your cell.”
“The fuck you will, bitch,” said Nunziatina from the adjacent cell. She was a Paradisos vampire who’d been detained at the same time as Dana. “I hope Il Castrato fucks you up! He’s gonna rip off your clit-dick, you ugly dyke!”
Dana slammed her palm against the bars of Nunziatina’s door, baring her teeth.
The vampire jerked back.
“Ha, you blinked first,” Dana said.
Nunziatina lunged, but Dana was far enough away that her arms swiped pointlessly centimeters away. She tried to get at Dana, though. She tried hard.
“Don’t make me come back here and slap you in the face with my clit-dick,” Dana said. In truth, she did not have a clit-dick. Her clit was the daintiest part of her. She’d have slapped people with it if she could have, though.
Fantasies of clit-slapping people followed her through the vampire wing. All the Paradisos had things to say to Dana. None of those things were nice. She didn’t have two fucks to rub together over it.
She ended up in the shifter wing—an area where the bars were made of silver and the guards were equipped with silver-laced batons. Charmaine’s referral sent her all the way to the back, where doors were solid and she had to slide a slot open to look inside the cell.
Tormid sat on the edge of a mattress Dana knew from memory to be hard as wood. He was writing in a notebook spread across his thighs, using a cheap pen with a chewed end. His hair looked pee-colored in the lighting. The raven shifter didn’t seem to have been showering much in prison.
He stood when he realized Dana was watching. It was like watching a tripod unfold, he was so lanky. He stepped up to the window. “So,” he said, his eyes raking her up and down, registering her OPA-issue clothes, “I didn’t expect to see you on that side of the bars, McIntyre.”
“Wouldn’t have expected to be here,” she said.
“I’m unsurprised. Fate seems to favor you, whether it’s pulling out a deus ex machina to win against your foes or escaping prison. I’m not nearly that lucky.”
“Yeah, you’re in a shit place right now, huh? But looks like you’re adjusting to prison life,” she said. “Me? I spent my whole tenure in prison bruised purple.”
He gave a dismissive wave. “Shifter healing.”
She grinned. “But the striped uniform suits you. And you look cozy in this cell, too.”
“It’s not worse than a sewer,” Tormid said. “Chief Villanueva upgraded my living quarters. Not as good as Achlys’s condo, but what is?”
“The prison’s great compared to sewers,” Dana said. “So great that you maybe don’t want to get out? Because I’ve got this deal here…” She waved a manila envelope at him. “If you don’t wanna see it, I don’t mind.”
His hands curled over the rim of the slot, eyes narrowing as he mulled her words. “Do I have to work for the OPA after my release too?”
“The leniency they’re offering does put you on the payroll.” Charmaine hadn’t been able to negotiate a deal for Tormid as generous as the one Dana got. He was signing his life away in a heartbeat. But at least a life with the OPA was more scenic than a life in prison. “For now, you’d be working for me. I need unobtainium, Tormid. I know you’ve got hookups for all kinds of chemicals in Las Vegas that I don’t. Can you get it for me?”
“I don’t know,” Tormid said warily. “Last time we worked together, I got arrested.”
“Fine.” Dana turned to leave.
“Wait!”
She stopped. Turned around. Tormid had reached a hand through the slot, so she gave him the envelope.
He opened the flap and read the offer.
“I can’t guarantee lifelong loyalty to the OPA,” he said. “This is bullshit.”
“It’s true that guaranteeing lifelong loyalty is a lot easier in prison. I’ll give you that.”
Tormid folded his arms. He wasn’t an overly muscular man—most of the strength in shifters was preternatural rather than structural—but his shoulders were wide enough that it looked like he was going to make seams pop.
His gaze swept over his uncomfortable, windowless room.
Resolve weighed heavily on his features.
“I can get what you need,” Tormid said. “The question’s why. We took down Mohinder, so I can only think this is about Nissa Royal, who should also be in prison.”
“It’s about the serial killer. But yeah…it’s also about Nissa. She got out. And she’s got my wife.”
“I’ll help you.” Just like that.
“You hate prison that much?” Dana asked.
“I lost a woman I loved, McIntyre,” he said. “I won’t do this for you, but for your wife. She doesn’t deserve to die because she fell in love with someone like us.”
16
Tormid navigated the sewers like he’d been born in them. “I’d been here before meeting Achlys too,” he explained as he ducked underneath a dripping pipe. Dana noticed it coming too late. Something suspiciously brown splattered her shoulder. “It wasn’t good to be a shifter in the world right after Genesis, so this was the safest place for the likes of us.”
“Sure you’re not being melodramatic? Shifters are the most privileged of preternatural races.” Most people who came back from Genesis changed had been turned into shifters of one flavor or another. It had instantly rendered the werewolf Alpha in Northgate a political figure with more clout than the president.
“We also have some of the most restrictive, punishing laws applied to us.” Tormid clambered over ductwork and edged around a crumbled segment of path. “If you don’t submit to the Alpha’s will, you have to spend full and new moons in a safe house. Safe houses are terrible. The ones in Las Vegas are the worst in the nation.”
“You could have submitted to the Alpha.” Rylie Gresham was a good person. Dana knew—she’d spent summers at the werewolf sanctuary, getting mothered by the Alpha while her actual adoptive mother was enjoying solo time.
Tormid scowled. “Why should I lock myself in some filthy safe house when a raven shifter isn’t as aggressive as a werewolf? I’m not going to hurt anyone on the moons. The only person at risk of getting hurt is me—the only avian shifter in a vault of werewolves. I’d get torn apart for nothing.”
Dana missed her step on the crumbling path. Her boot plunged into the sludgy sewer waters below. She yanked herself out immediately, but it was too late—she’d already gotten feces caught on a buckle.
She groaned and shook it off. “So you seriously think sewers are better than a state safe house?”
“If I have to stew in shit, I’m going to choose the shit I stew in,” Tormid said. “You call it fucked. I call it American.”
When they turned a corner, they reached a downward slope leading to the overflow basins. The extra drainage was seldom used in such a dry area, but it was currently moist from the summer’s thunderstorms. Mildew had grown quickly. Dana still had to trudge through an inch of water that smelled like rotten eggs to keep following Tormid.
The water wasn’t deep enough to keep the sewer’s worse residents away. They’d built a tent city in the lightless lower reservoir, and Tormid was heading toward
them at full steam.
“This is the shit you want?” Dana muttered at Tormid, knowing he’d be able to hear with his sensitive ears.
The reservoir’s inhabitants only had camping lanterns for light, and the dimness meant everybody looked colorless, sickly, dying. The shredded polyester tents were even worse. Their long black shadows looked like screaming faces that had witnessed too much suffering.
Dana had seen what the Nether Worlds looked like a couple times, so she knew that this was a far cry from Hell, but it still looked wretched.
“It might look bad to you, but it’s home for a lot of us. Home and freedom.” He led Dana through the paths between tents. They were crammed tight. Most of the occupants sat in the unzipped doorways, kept warm by patchy blankets. Some argued in the darkness between canvas and moldy walls.
A couple in a lean-to looked up at Dana when she passed. The camping lantern caught their irises. One person had hazel eyes, and the other a murky shade of blue, like sapphires ground into the dirt.
“Those are humans,” Dana said. She’d never have expected to find human homeless amid the preternaturals in the deep.
“Humans can’t get jobs in a vampire city,” Tormid said.
“It’s not a vampire city anymore!”
“And there aren’t jobs, either,” he said. “There’s also not much by way of a social safety net for mundanes. Shifters can always use safe houses instead of being homeless—but where do the mundanes go? It’s a mean country, McIntyre. Everyone suffers.”
Chills ran down Dana’s spine.
Being down in that reservoir reminded her of discovering Mohinder’s well, where he’d stashed his prisoners in cages. Except that there were no visible cages now. The only thing keeping people so deep in the darkness was the fact that they had nowhere else to go.
Society had forgotten these people somehow.
Dana had forgotten them.
She was half tempted to stop, turn around, drag everyone to the surface. Anywhere but here.
Behind the first couple hundred tents, structures became more formal. Salvaged PVC and rubber from tires stacked to form walls. A lot of them were wrapped with barbed wire and spray-painted in metallic colors. It was starting to look more and more like Hell.
“This is all new,” Tormid said. “They’re hoping some of it’ll last the next time it rains.”
“Morons,” Dana said.
“Optimists,” he said.
Tormid knocked on a corrugated metal door, which had been affixed to its pipe frame with bungee cords. He didn’t wait before yanking it open and going inside.
It was a small space. If it had been ten by ten, Dana would have been shocked. There was no insulation, no floor except trash bags cut into sheets and duct taped together. The only occupant was a stocky, tired vampire who didn’t look like an optimist.
He stretched out on a saggy tarp hammock, his butt brushing the puddle underneath him. The relaxed position was contrasted by the intensity in his expression, the stiffness of his arms. “Wait,” he said without looking toward them. He was fixated on vials clutched in each hand. He poured luminescent green sludge from one to the other.
“Howell’s an apothecary,” Tormid explained to Dana, crouching next to the hammock with his elbows on his knees. He was too tall to stand upright under the corrugated ceiling. “He’s got connections in the black market you wouldn’t believe.”
“This is the black market.” Howell stuck his tongue out the holes made by missing teeth as he concentrated. The last of the drops slid into the receiving vial. He fumbled for a cork, plugged it into the filled vial, and sighed.
He set everything into a case on the ground and locked it.
Howell looked Dana over with dull red eyes. He must have fed on human blood at some point to fully transition, but he’d obviously been living on synth ever since. Fake blood kept the bloodless going, sure. But only barely.
“You’re a McIntyre,” he said, fumbling a vaping rig out of his pocket. He took a deep inhale and blew out sparkling blue plumes of vapor. “I’m not helping you.”
“Lethe, Howell,” Tormid said. “We want lethe. Old lethe. Pre-Genesis.”
Dana seized him by the shoulder. “What are you doing?”
Tormid waved her off. “Trust me.”
“I’m literally never going to trust you,” she said.
“Lethe,” Tormid said. “Old lethe. I know you’ve got it, Howell.” He slapped Dana’s hand off of his shoulder. Even a casual strike from a shifter felt like getting hit by a car.
“I know what you wanna do with it,” Howell said. “You want to make more Garlic Shots.”
Dana had no clue how he even knew about that. But obviously he did, so… “Lethe’s not an ingredient in Garlic Shots.”
“The formula leaked from an OPA employee, and there’s been copycats going around,” Howell admitted. “Most of the apotropaics used in the formula are common. It’s not too hard to mix up a batch.”
“Except for the unobtainium,” Dana said.
He waffled visibly, shoulders lifting to his ears. “Well, you know, unobtainium originally comes from the ethereal realms.”
“It does?” Dana looked to Tormid for verification, but he looked as confused as she did.
“They say it was extracted from the river Mnemosyne,” he said. “Unobtainium is a byproduct of producing lethe. All the fun parts go into the drug. Unobtainium is what’s left behind—just a tiny bit for every few tons of lethe produced, but it’s there.”
“Unobtainium’s a mineral. I saw one place it was mined. How’s this simultaneously a byproduct of a pre-Genesis river and also a rock?”
“The gods did a lot of strange things in Genesis,” Howell said. “They put things in weird places.”
Dana fingered the triadist rune on her necklace. “I know.”
“Then you can understand that this is one of the weird things they did, Miss McIntyre.”
“No Miss,” she said. “Just McIntyre. So this unobtainium byproduct—it’s the same as what gets mined?”
He grimaced. “I’ve heard about two assassinations against vampires by Garlic Shot already. And I know they subbed old lethe for unobtainium. I’m not going to make it for you. Garlic Shots are too dangerous.”
Dana seized him by the collar, slamming him into the concrete sewer wall backing his shack.
He exploded into tears. “Don’t hurt me, please don’t—”
“Normally I’d be happy to beat Garlic Shots out of you,” she growled into his face. “I’d have a lot of fun testing your limits on torture.”
Tears streaked his cheeks. His whole body shook.
“McIntyre…” Tormid said slowly.
She pointed at him. “Mouth shut. I took you out of prison and I can put you back as fast.”
“You’re not going to get anything like this,” Tormid said.
“I know.” Dana dropped the apothecary, and he was still such a mess that he hit his knees in the puddle. Couldn’t keep standing upright. “I don’t have time to torture you, like I said.” She pulled a wad of sweaty cash out of her pocket. “These are hundred-dollar bills. Look.” She spread them out so that he could see.
The apothecary had gone suddenly quiet, no longer sobbing or shaking. His wide eyes were affixed on the money. His tongue darted out to wet his lips, but there was no saliva to offer moisture. It looked like he hadn’t had blood in a long time.
“Twenty-five thousand dollars,” Dana said. “I don’t even need you to put the Garlic Shot together. Give me pre-Genesis lethe.”
Howell was silent as he considered the offer. There was plenty to hear when he wasn’t speaking. Dana could make out a conversation to their left, and hear distant screams echoing up and down the tunnel. There was no privacy in the city under the city. No privacy, no light, no life.
“I’m poor,” Howell finally said. “I don’t have a lot. I just…I don’t want you to think that I’m okay with this.”
“I
don’t care if you are,” she said.
He kept talking to himself. “It’s not my fault I can’t afford synth and the benefits system isn’t paying out for any vampires associated with the Paradisos anymore. Things happened. This would change my life.”
“Save the whining. I’m asking you for lethe, not your moralizing.” Dana stuffed the fistful of money down his shirt.
He scrambled away on hands and knees. “I’ll be right back.” As soon as he cleared the doorway, he ran down the narrow aisle, splashing through a stream. Dana watched him go. He obviously hadn’t been imbued with vampire speed. If he tried to run off with her money, she’d be able to catch him.
Howell vanished into shadow.
Across the way, there was a tent where an unidentified demon sat. He looked like a gangly teenage boy with horns. He wore a hoodie, jeans with holes in them, oversized boots. He had rigged an old Gameboy Advance up to a battery and was trying to play it with the light from a Bic.
To their left, the conversation had escalated to an argument. It sounded like the guy had spent his girlfriend’s food money on lethe. She was hungry and pissed—a bad combination.
Elsewhere, people were screaming again.
The worst sound was all the laughing kids. They sounded to be in the next row over, and their running and shouting would have sounded normal in a sunlit suburb too. They were growing up like this. Their whole lives would grow from the seeds planted here.
Forgotten.
“Howell will be back,” Tormid said, drawing her attention back to him inside the shack.
Dana folded her arms. “He better.”
“You’re going to be back too,” Tormid said. “Here, I mean. When you finish Nissa. You’re going to come back to help these people.”
Her mouth opened so she could argue with him.
But she didn’t have an argument ready.
Penny’s voice echoed in the back of her mind. You’re a hero, Dana, through and through. I think when you get rid of these enemies, you’ll find another worthy cause.