by SM Reine
“I haven’t thanked you for getting me out of prison,” Tormid said, hanging out on the other side of the car. “Charmaine and I were talking. She’s got the hookups for the silver cure. She’s arranging to get more for my packmates. Not all of us got arrested, you see, and this is gonna help people who don’t obey the Alpha. It’s gonna help a lot.”
“You’re welcome,” Dana said.
“I owe you. I don’t like owing someone like you.” He surveyed her in the burning daylight, the shadows on his face the deep purple of raven feathers in moonlight. “I know how you can defeat Nissa Royal tonight.”
Dana’s skin went cold. “How?”
And Tormid told her.
18
The holes underneath Vampire Vegas’s plumbing might as well have been dug out with spoons. Huge spoons. Dickless looked to have punched through sewer walls using vampire strength, and the remaining concrete was so heavily cracked that it was on the verge of collapse.
Standing at the first of the holes, Dana could look through hundreds of meters of sewer until the tunnel disappeared into darkness.
Dickless was at the other end.
Dana’s scalp crawled as she felt a presence brushing over her mind.
I’m not far, Nissa’s voice whispered. I’m zeroing in on you now. Wait right there.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Dana said into the nothingness. She didn’t care if Nissa could hear her or not. She didn’t care about anything. The Garlic Shot in her pocket felt like it weighed a thousand pounds, but that was fine, too.
Dana was good at being drunk. Not as good as she used to be, since she’d started getting days-long hangovers as she approached thirty, but good. The only way you got good at something was by doing it a lot, and gods, Dana had done it a lot. She knew how to stand tall when it felt like the ground was slipping under her feet. She knew how to focus when every fiber of her being wanted to let go. She knew how to keep her eyes fixed on one point, even when her eyes and mind were wandering.
She’d drunk on her way down to the sewers—alcohol, amongst other things. Now the walls were unfolding around her. The ground was sliding. The tunnel looked infinite.
Dana focused through her intoxication.
For Penny, she focused hard.
Dana felt cold deep inside, in the dark places caged by bone where light wouldn’t touch until she was autopsied on a steel slab. She was wobbling on the precipice of destiny. She was digging in her heels, claiming that this was the end, the fight to end all fights.
She tuned out the activity she heard elsewhere in the sewers. Now that she’d seen the tent city in the reservoir, she heard faint shuffling and imagined corrugated doors, patchy blankets, camping lanterns fighting to penetrate thousand-pound darkness. The dripping wasn’t sewage, but blood shivering at the fingertips of fresh corpses. She wasn’t alone. In fact, she had more company in the sewers than on the surface.
There were demons waiting, and vampires.
Dickless wasn’t far.
And Nissa Royal had found her.
“You made it.” Nissa slipped out of the shadows, coming from the same direction as the sounds from below. Her hair had been collected under silver mesh, trapping all but a couple of curls. The empire-waisted shirt trailed behind her, fading into shadow, slipping against the walls.
The sight of her turned cold to heat.
Nissa was a slight woman, but her size wouldn’t have mattered when she abducted Penny. Vampires didn’t have the same strength limits as the living. Dana couldn’t help but imagine Nissa reaching up to grab Penny by the shoulders…by the throat…
Dragging her down into darkness…
That infinitely dark tunnel that served as a one-way road to Dickless’s lair…
I didn’t learn this from the Fremont Slasher. I learned this from you.
“Keep your distance,” Dana said, lifting her miniature crossbow. It was strapped to her forearm. Not a tool she commonly used to fight vampires, since it could only be loaded with a single bolt at a time, but it meant that she could theoretically kill a vampire from a distance.
“I won’t enthrall you,” Nissa said, hanging back by the wall. “You’re going to kill yourself by choice. Just like you’re going to cooperate with me now by choice.”
“It’s not free will when you’ve got my wife captive.”
“You could choose to let her die. There is always a choice.” Nissa sagged as though she felt weakened by emotion. “I don’t want it to be like this between us.”
Dana wasn’t going to get into a conversation about whatever Nissa considered to be “us.”
“Have you given Penny water?” Dana asked. “Is she safe? Comfortable?”
“She’s had plenty to drink. She’s safe, but far from comfortable.” Nissa stepped around Dana. She wasn’t using super-speed, but it was still so hard to track her around the room. “She’ll be more comfortable once we can get back to her.”
Dana rubbed her aching arm. “Okay. We’ll fight this guy together. But if you use psychic powers on me, I’ll put this stake between your eyes.”
Are you afraid I’m going to read your mind? Nissa asked, her crimson eyes lanterns in the darkness. Is there something you don’t want me to know?
The triadist rune hung as heavily on Dana’s chest as the Garlic Shot in her pocket.
Lincoln had told her to have faith.
She looked Nissa full in the eyes, and she said, “I’m an open book.”
“Then let’s meet Il Castrato Senesino,” Nissa said.
“He’s that way.” Dana pointed her free hand up the stairs.
Nissa started walking without looking back.
After a moment, Dana followed.
The tunnel looked bad at the beginning. It got worse as they progressed through it. Dickless seemed to have lost strength for punching big holes, so they grew smaller near Vampire Vegas. Smaller, crumblier, darker. There was barely enough lighting for Dana to watch Nissa’s back as they walked single-file through the sewers.
Nissa’s spine was indicated by a slender valley in the shirt she wore. Her heart was on the other side of that spine. The crossbow was tight around Dana’s wrist.
“Did you get the Garlic Shots from the OPA?” Nissa asked as she stepped carefully over a broken piece of wall. She wouldn’t even see the bolt coming.
“I’ve got it,” she said. “I just didn’t get it from the OPA. I found another source.”
Worry flicked through Nissa’s eyes. “There’s no other source. Nobody else has the ingredients, the recipe—”
“Surprise,” Dana said. “They do. It leaked. It’s everywhere now.”
“I’m going to have to get control of the supply,” Nissa said. It had the sound of thinking aloud, trying to wrap her mind around how she could lock down a drug that killed vampires. Dana wasn’t the only person thinking about the next mission while heading in to get murdered by the current one.
“You can’t control it,” Dana said, scrubbing a fist over her eyes. Focus was so fucking hard like this. She was so intoxicated. “Pandora’s box is open. The cure’s out there. You can keep vampires safe from it about as much as you can keep them safe from trees.”
She meant that to be a taunt to shake Nissa up, but the vampire laughed. “You’re happy about it,” Nissa said. “Typical Dana.” As if they were such good friends, sharing old jokes.
The tunnel led to a heavy locked door. It punched through the wall immediately to the left, giving them access to a set of stairs.
Dana stopped moving. Nissa got ten feet up before realizing she no longer had company. “What?” Her mouth formed the word, her eyebrows pinched with concern, her hands went to her hips. She was spinning—or Dana was spinning, floating on the cocktail she’d imbibed before this fight.
Nissa’s hands were small. Almost dainty. Those same hands had grabbed Penny, shoved her into a glass cage.
Dana was dizzy with the hatred, flooded with drugs that turned her mind to fo
g.
“The lights,” Dana said. “They go out ten feet above us.” The stairs were impenetrably dark after that. She took out a flashlight, held it in her free hand. She wasn’t going to obstruct the crossbow.
By that light, they reached the top of the stairs. It leveled out into an old hallway that looked like it predated Genesis. Lights with actual filaments instead of LEDs. Exposed electrical wiring. Concrete crumbling into dust.
They were getting close to Dickless’s hideout.
“Who is Il Castrato Senesino, anyway?” Nissa asked. Her presence slipped through Dana’s mind like Penny’s curls gliding through her sweatband when she first put it on. “You must know by now.”
“The cops think it’s Freddie Bloom,” Dana said.
Nissa’s mind nudged her. The triadist charm burned.
“Do you think it’s Freddie Bloom?” Nissa asked. “Let’s find out.” Nissa tugged on Dana’s elbow, pulling her down low so that she could look through a crack in the wall.
The chamber on the other side was cavernous—a basin, Dana thought, based on the big drain in the middle and the elaborate ductwork crisscrossing the ceiling.
Her mental orientation to Las Vegas geography was good, even when they’d gotten turned around and around in the whirlpool labyrinth of the sewers. “We’re under the Bellagio fountains,” Dana whispered.
Dickless hadn’t been trying to get into Mohinder’s club after all. Dana had to angle herself lower to see why.
The room beyond was a basin lit by candles. There must have been thousands of them set around the edges of the floor—a bold choice for a full-blooded, flammable vampire.
It was hard to see in the darkness, but the cages that Dickless designed appeared somehow suspended within the fountain’s piping. There were also funnels, extra PVC tubing, and simple gears. Everything except the gears—which looked like bicycle chains, as far as she could tell—made perfect sense to Dana.
Dickless had built the blood showers. Not a single cage intended to hold a single vampire, but a dozen cages, with a dozen fledglings. Maybe more.
All the pipes led to a single nozzle above a claw-footed bathtub. She couldn’t imagine how Dickless would have gotten it down there. Someone must have seen a vampire dragging a bathtub all the way through the sewers.
Extra candles clustered around the bath, and around an antique vanity with a big cracked mirror. The only thing it was missing was a toilet; else Dickless would have made a very nice creepy bathroom.
“There are vampires inside those cages,” Nissa murmured, eyes wide with wonder. The flames inside of the basin reflected off the sclera so that they glowed red. “They’re so afraid. The victims…they’re still conscious in those cages, and they’re afraid.” Her luminous-fleshed face turned toward Dana slowly, too slowly, too quickly, folding over to repeat the turn a dozen times. “Tell me, Dana, what’s our next step in hunting him? How do you approach killing someone so much stronger than you?”
Dana took the vial out of her pocket. It had barely any fluid inside—a centimeter, maybe, of her makeshift Garlic Shot. It was bluer than usual from the lethe substitution for unobtainium. “It’ll kill any vampire. Even one with multiple sires. Even Dickless.”
Echoing footsteps rattled through the tunnel.
Nissa reacted by tensing, so the sound must have been real—not something that Dana was imagining with her impaired senses.
Candle flames flickered within the basin, stirred by movement. The dancing shadows stretched long.
A cloaked figure appeared.
The enormity of the flimsy black cape made it impossible to tell if the figure was male or female. The stiff collar hid the jawline, too. All Dana saw was the sweep of the Halloween cape as the newcomer approached the vanity.
Dickless stopped in front of the mirror. A crack split the reflection into pieces.
A sturdy hand tipped by fake black nails picked up pots of makeup. Sponges swiped purple greasepaint down a nose, smeared it over cheekbones, across the upper lip. Dickless really looked like the Muppet vampire that Dana used to watch as a kid.
It would have been hilarious in any other situation.
“To hit with the crossbow, I’m going to have to get close to Dickless. Within ten meters,” Dana whispered.
“That close, he could kill you in a heartbeat. I can help you.”
“I don’t even want you near me, much less helping.”
“You don’t get to dictate the terms of this.” Nissa’s fingers traced a line up Dana’s wrist, slipping in between the leather straps of the crossbow. “When Il Castrato Senesino dies, we do it together.”
Dana’s jaw clenched tight. “Wait here. You’ll know when to jump in.”
She slipped down the hall to a metal door. Its lock had been broken off, so it swung open easily when she pushed.
The hinges groaned loudly.
It scraped through her mind, a metal rake against the thick plates of her skull, filling her vision with sparkling black dust.
Smell washed over her. The candles were chai-spice scented, like they’d been picked up on clearance after the last Halloween. It did nothing to conceal the smell of sludgy vampire blood.
Dickless turned from the mirror.
Dana’s vision was so unreliable, she wasn’t sure if she was seeing a wide puppet mouth or if she was imagining Count von Count. She still couldn’t make out the shape of the figure. Couldn’t even see the face.
“It’s you,” said Dickless. “I thought it would be.”
She kept her arms loose at her sides as she approached. “Do you know me?”
“Uh, yeah.” That voice…
Dana nearly tripped over the bathtub. She hadn’t realized she was getting that close.
When her knee bumped the edge, she caught herself on its other side, leaving her momentarily suspended over it.
There was a dead woman at the bottom, stewing in her own decomposed human remains. The tub was filled with a soup of fat, skin, and hair. She’d moved beyond the initial bloat to waft putrefaction from the bursting pustules in her bruised flesh.
Even with the rot, Dana recognized that face from older photos.
“Fuck,” she said.
It was Freddie Bloom.
Dickless was only twelve, maybe fifteen meters away now. Dana suddenly found it easy to focus on his face. The wide froggy mouth. The sagging eyes. The shape of facial hair plastered with greasepaint.
It was Albert Jeffreys—also known as Brian Harris, also known as Il Castrato Senesino, and best known as Dickless.
“I fucking knew it!” Dana said, pumping her fist.
19
Officer Albert Jeffreys had the decency to look embarrassed being caught shirtless, wearing a cape, and painting himself like a cartoon vampire by candlelight. So he wasn’t a complete loss.
Except that he should have been dead.
Like, permanently dead.
She’d found his body in the apartment. That was the entire reason that they’d ruled him out as the killer. A huge mistake, clearly. “Draugr venom,” Dana said. “You stole draugr venom from Near Dark and used it on yourself.”
That was why he was painting himself like that. The unpainted portions of his skin were even whiter than they should have been on a vampire—not just pale, but colorless and translucent.
“You found me, McIntyre!” Jeffreys’s draugr form was skinnier than his human one, and he had a belt cinched tightly around loose black pants to hold them up. His chest was sunken. His hair looked like strands of algae floating on the surface of a tepid pond.
“I found you twice,” she said. “First your body, and now…” This crazy-looking Count von Count motherfucker, who was keeping his dead sister in the bathtub, no big deal.
“Everything you told me about them before is true. Draugr are different from most vampires. They’re substantiated spirits of the deceased, rather than reanimated bodies,” Jeffreys said. “They’re special, so I wanted a piece of it for myse
lf.”
She moved deeper into the room, keeping close to the edge where she had a few extra millimeters of distance between herself and Jeffreys. It meant she was standing directly underneath the mass of the pipework. There were vampires right over her head, lying on a grid of metal, moaning in quiet misery.
A drop of room-temperature blood, sludgy and black, plopped onto her shoulder.
“Good for you, picking the draugr venom.” Dana tried to flick the blood off. It smeared down her bicep instead. “It means I’ve got practice killing your type.”
“What?” Now he looked more surprised than embarrassed. “Why would you come after me? I’ve only been killing vampires.”
“After you made them into vampires first,” she said.
Jeffreys set the makeup pots down. “But you’re a McIntyre. ‘Kill all vampires.’ You should be my biggest fan.” A psychopath and an idiot. He set the brush down and patted his pockets. “Do you have a light? I don’t want to get close to the candles.”
“Sure.” Dana moved as deliberately as he did, taking care to show that she wasn’t aggressive. Not yet. She pulled out her Zippo and tossed it to him.
He lit a blunt. It was as thick as his thumb at the end, and long as his hand.
“Good stuff?” she asked.
“Yeah. Want a taste?” He offered it to her.
“Still don’t. Never did. My body’s a temple and I’m not wallpapering it with tar.”
“Beer’s worse,” Jeffreys said.
“Only a bad guy would have that attitude,” Dana said.
“Bad guy?” He stepped toward her. Dana didn’t move, but she must have tensed, or shown some other type of discomfort that only a vampire was capable of picking up. He only took the one step.
“I saw the injuries on your mother,” Dana said.
“And you’re going to blame them on me?”
“Did you inflict them?”
“She hurt me first. Both of them did. They made me do this!” He flung his hand out, and Dana tensed for an attack that didn’t come. He was using her dad’s lighter to point at the bathtub, as if Dana might have forgotten that it was filled with Sister Soup.