by SM Reine
“They made you, huh?” Dana asked.
“It’s not my fault I was born broken,” Jeffreys said. He rubbed a hand down his face tiredly, smearing black greasepaint over the purple. “It’s not my fault I was born…like…” His hand wandered down his chest, sliding over the concave plane of his furred belly. He cupped his crotch.
Dana didn’t bother trying to hide her cringe.
“My mom only wanted girls,” he said. “Shelley thought it’d make Mom happy if I…if I didn’t…” He wrestled with words, and ultimately lost. His jaw clapped shut.
“I’m not here to be your therapist. I don’t care why you turned into a killer.”
“All these guys deserved what I’ve done.” Jeffreys nodded up at the cages. As soon as he glanced at them, the groaning intensified. As comical as he looked, he managed to evoke real fear in his victims. “I only went after criminals. Rapists. Men.”
“Okay, stop,” she said. “Take your last smoke and give my lighter back.”
He lobbed the lighter at Dana, and she caught it in a fist. “Last smoke,” he echoed. “So that’s how it’s gonna be.” Jeffreys lifted the blunt to his lips, inhaled deeply. He held on to it. Blew out smoke. The sticky smell of cannabis clung to the vanilla candles. “I’m not surprised. The student always surpasses the master someday.”
Her eyebrow lifted. “I’m the master?”
“You taught me everything I know about hunting vampires. It was special, getting to work with you. All the other cops looked up to you like you’re some kind of idol, but we had something special.”
They had worked all of three cases together, and never closely.
Dana wondered if Nissa would see the parallels between this idiot and her own behavior.
“I’ve never wanted to be idolized,” Dana said, loudly enough that she hoped all surviving vampires would hear the words. “I’ve been doing my job. And, to be clear, the only thing between us right now is disgust and a wooden stake.”
“Okay.” He took another drag. “Okay.” He tossed the blunt onto the same stool as the makeup palette.
And then he moved.
She didn’t even see him crossing the space between them. She felt a brush on her hips and knew that those were his fingers, even though there was no rational way for him to have gotten that far, that quickly.
Dana dropped to the floor, sliding through his hands like a bar of soap squeezed too hard in the shower. She rolled between his legs, got to her feet, lifted the crossbow.
Twisting her hand discharged the bolt. The snapping string grazed leather.
Wood thumped into Jeffreys’s chest.
It penetrated deep, just right of his breastbone. He looked down at the fresh blood that oozed around the edges. Maybe she hit his heart, maybe she didn’t. The bolt didn’t ash him either way.
His hands were steel against her ribcage. He lifted her up, up, jumping high. Dana was off the ground.
Her back slammed into the pipe work underneath Vampire Vegas.
The impact bowed the metal. It splintered, crumpled. Didn’t break. Dana grabbed a rung with both hands to try to hang on, and her feet dangled twenty feet above hard concrete and a soup-filled bathtub. It was so much easier for Jeffreys, ephemeral as he was. He was hanging on to Dana with one arm and seemed to weigh nothing.
“Do you like them?” he asked, gazing up at her with vampire eyes and Count von Count’s purple face. He must have meant the victims in the cages around them. He’d shoved Dana up between two victims who had already been punctured a few times, allowing them to drizzle into the tub.
Then she realized that she wasn’t between cages.
She was inside a cage.
“Oh fuck,” Dana said.
Jeffreys grabbed a lever, presumably to shut the door on the cage. Dana would be contained. She’d be right above that damn tub, right where he could shower in her blood.
That couldn’t happen.
Dana let go.
She fell, and Jeffreys dangled from the lever while she plummeted for the barest blink of time.
Dana hoped momentum could carry her away from the tub.
Instead, her hip banged into the side of the tub. Her shoulder scraped the nozzle. And her knees—oh gods, her knees were sinking into the muck, the slurry of decaying fat and blood and bone shards that had yet to deteriorate.
Dana flung herself over the side onto the ground. Vomit flooded her mouth without warning, and it didn’t seem to matter when she accidentally spit it out onto a boot. Bile was better than all the fat.
Bare feet slammed into her back. She flattened to the floor, spattered in barf and blood.
Jeffreys had landed on her.
She twisted to throw him off, but the instant she got to her feet, he slammed her into the tub again.
Dana bowed backward, the balls of her feet digging into the ground, teeth gritted.
“You’re weaker than me,” Jeffreys said, delighted. He wasn’t straining to hold her at all. He pushed gently, and her head bent backward. Her shirt’s hem dangled millimeters from Freddie Bloom’s crushed body. “From the moment you got attacked by Achlys, I started to think you were weaker, and you are.”
“I wouldn’t count on that,” she growled, trying to breathe as little as possible, trying not to inhale Bloom’s putrefaction.
“You can’t tell me that you don’t think about turning into a vampire again,” he said. “It’d be easy. I’ve got the venom in me now.” His lips peeled back, and his teeth were a mess. All of them were sharp from the front teeth back to the rearmost molars. They were different lengths—some jagged, some pointy. “I could change you back.”
She locked her elbows to make it harder to push her back. “If I could get you a cure, you wouldn’t want to take it—would you?”
Jeffreys laughed with a toss of his head. It was probably meant to sound like a villainous laugh. Somehow, the fact that his laugh was so normal made it more menacing.
She’d laughed with this guy before. Gone to drinks at the bar the cops liked with him.
He was just some guy.
Then she remembered the part where he was “just some guy” who liked to rip dicks off, and she suddenly stopped feeling bad.
Dana threw all her weight against him and twisted.
Jeffreys wasn’t a good vampire. He didn’t have anything close to the speed Dana had when she’d been undead, so he didn’t react in time to get away from her.
She tossed him against the tub.
He slipped down along a gear, hand flying out to seize the attached cable.
When he yanked, all those weird bicycle chains amidst the cages started spinning.
Which was how Dana discovered they were not, in fact, bicycle chains at all. They were flails made of barbed wire. And once they began spinning, they only went faster and faster, lashing the flesh of the vampires within the cages.
Dana never would have expected to flinch in sympathy at a vampire’s pain, but she’d have to be a true monster not to react to the screams. The sounds of tearing flesh. The spattering of blood drizzling into basins, rushing down pipes, and then dripping into the tub behind Dana.
“Fuck!” She leaped away.
Jeffreys hauled himself up on the edge of the tub. He gazed in wonder at the faucet dribbling blood over his sister’s desiccated face.
Dana usually only saw expressions like that on the faces of orphans on Christmas fucking morning.
“I’ll let you watch this,” he told Dana over his shoulder. “After everything you taught me, you deserve it.”
And he ripped his pants off.
20
When she’d learned of Jeffreys’s childhood mutilation, Dana hadn’t been able to resist imagining what remained of his genitals. She had come to the conclusion that his condition couldn’t be too bad. How much damage could a witch kid do, even if she was a huge piece-of-shit bully?
Turned out that witch kids could do a lot of damage.
The only thing
hanging between his thighs was scar tissue. Maybe that used to be some of his balls, but now it looked like white fleshy raisins. The place his dick should have been was even worse. Whoever had stitched him together hadn’t been careful about it, and it would have taken a topographical map to navigate all those crevices.
She scrambled back on all fours, like a crab. “Get the fuck away from me!”
But Jeffreys wasn’t moving in on Dana. He was throwing a leg over the side of the tub, and then the other leg. He slid directly under the dripping faucet, positioning himself over his sister, crab-like, until he could lower himself deliberately into the sludge.
His head fell back on the edge. A drop at a time, blood slapped his face and slid down his body.
If Dana hadn’t already barfed, she’d have been barfing again.
“Get out of the tub,” she said slowly, quietly, forcefully. “Get out of the fucking tub right now.”
He rubbed the blood on his face, down his chest, between his legs. “I’m going to be healed, McIntyre. I’m going to be strong.”
“You’re going to fit in an ashtray!”
“No! I’m going to be strong!” There was a hint of desperation to the claim. More than a hint. Jeffreys stared down at himself and saw he wasn’t growing his dick back. Wrath scrabbled over his face. “I need more blood. There’s a way to do this. I need more blood.”
He yanked on the cable behind the tub again.
The barbed flails spun faster. The screams intensified, and something spattered onto Dana’s shoulder. She looked down to see a shred of skin.
She hurled herself at the cable and grabbed it.
This occurred to her as a bad idea, but only after she earned blazing red friction burns along the insides of her palms.
Dana screamed and gripped it tighter. Jammed the heel of her boot into the gear. The machinery clanked to a halt as metal bit into the rubber.
The flails went limp.
Jeffreys got to his feet. Blood pasted his hair to his scalp, made the purple greasepaint run, created rivers of black down his concave chest and the mangled white webbing of scar tissue. “They’re just vampires,” he said.
Dana wouldn’t have expected to disagree with that statement. Ever.
She also wouldn’t have expected her jeans to be soaked with rotten body fat from a serial killer’s sister in a bathtub, so life was full of surprises these days.
“Get on your knees,” Dana said, leveling the reloaded crossbow. “If you don’t fight this slaying, I won’t tell anyone what I saw here. You’ll be remembered as…” She glanced around the room. “Slightly less of a douchebag than you really are.”
He didn’t seem to be listening. He was slicking the blood all over his body again, scrubbing it on his thighs. It didn’t cause any changes. He looked exactly the same as before, except more disgusting. “Why won’t I heal?” he roared, his whole body shaking so hard that blood flicked off of him. “I’m a vampire! I’m not weak anymore!”
It turned out that an angry draugr could billow into the form of an icy cloud, seeming to swell. That stringy hair faded to crystalline nothingness. His face sucked in, like he was the one rotting.
Dickless was still dickless, and he wasn’t happy about it.
He rounded on Dana with fire in his eyes. He ripped the first wooden bolt out of his chest. More blood poured out of him, mingling with the blood and rot that already caked his skin.
“You told me I’d be better once I was a vampire!” Jeffreys lunged at her with the bolt.
Movement blurred in the corner of Dana’s vision.
Nissa grabbed Jeffreys from behind, wrapping her arms around his bloody chest to hold him in place. Jeffreys roared ineffectually.
“Took you long enough,” Dana snarled.
Nissa’s mouth twitched into a smile. “It was fun watching.”
She suplexed Jeffreys.
Had draugr required bones to remain animate, he’d have died from the way his neck snapped. Instead he could only collapse into a pile of greasepaint and Bloom’s blood.
Nissa beamed at Dana. “I think I might have—”
“You ugly cunts!” Jeffreys had swirled into an upright position again, and oh boy did he look pissed.
“Wait a second,” Nissa said. “Someone’s interrupting us.”
She turned her crimson gaze on Jeffreys.
The texture of the air changed. The victims in the cages went silent. The drip-drip-drip of blood slowed.
“Stop,” Nissa said.
Jeffreys stopped.
He froze in midair, hands uplifted, mouth open to expose his jagged teeth. He wasn’t a master vampire like Nissa. He could rip dicks off of all the fledglings he wanted, but he didn’t stand a chance against her psychic powers.
Dana braced her hands on her knees, fighting to catch her breath. At least one of the fluids dripping from her hairline was sweat. “That’s…that’s cheating, Nissa.” There was something so anticlimactic about that one word ending this. Stop.
“Forget about him. None of this is about him.” Nissa waved a dismissive hand at Jeffreys. His lips were shivering with tension, but that was the only thing that moved.
Nissa reached for Dana’s hip, like she was going to push the hem of her shirt up for access to the soft skin under her arm. Instead, her fingers went down, and she extracted a handful of bolts from the quiver at her thigh.
“The first bolt didn’t kill him,” Dana said.
“I know,” Nissa said. She turned back to Jeffreys. “Lay down, arms and legs spread.” And he did. He lay down among the blood and trembled silently. Rendered impotent again. One by one, Nissa punched the crossbow bolts through Jeffreys’s body and into the concrete, pinning him down. “There. Now what do we do?”
Dana stood back, unsure if that nasty crawling feeling was from her sodden jeans or the sense of dread. “Huh?”
“We’re killing him together so you can get Penny back,” Nissa said.
It had seemed like a straightforward request earlier. Dana would have killed anything to save Penny, and killing a vampire was easiest of all.
At the time, she’d felt nothing more complex than desperation.
Now, she felt pity. A multihued emotion.
“I should turn him in to the OPA,” Dana said. “Let them get information out of him before he dies.” She pulled out the vial of Garlic Shot as she spoke, twisting a needle onto its tip.
Nissa’s hand wrapped around Dana’s so that they cradled the syringe together. “That’s not the deal,” she said. “I want you to kill him now.”
This vampire had taken Penny. She didn’t deserve to have one gods-damned thing she wanted.
Even if what she wanted and what Dana wanted happened to align.
Dana did want to kill Jeffreys.
She’d never seen anything as wretched as this limp, shriveled man, forever chasing some masculine power that remained eternally beyond his reach. He’d slaughtered to get closer to it. Tortured people. Ruined lives and took away the choices of others. All so that he could feel better about exactly how weak he was.
Killing Jeffreys wasn’t doing Nissa a favor. It was a mercy.
“Would it be so bad if you were doing me a favor?” Nissa whispered. She’d let herself into Dana’s mind again, and Dana barely even noticed.
Jeffreys struggled on the ground between them. The stakes kept him effortlessly pinned.
Dana’s free hand went to the triadist charm dangling from her throat. Nissa guided the syringe toward Dickless, aiming its point above his hairy navel.
“Show me how to kill,” Nissa said. “One more time. One last time before your final murder.”
“The OPA wants him for questioning,” Dana said.
Nissa’s mind slipped through Dana’s like the first breezes of autumn. Are you really Cèsar Hawke’s dog, carrying prey back to him like that? Woof woof, Dana.
Dana jabbed the needle into Jeffreys.
She pressed the plunger.
Albert Jeffreys’s eyes widened and his mouth opened in a silent cry. The stretching skin made his paint flake. He may have been Muppet purple on the surface, but underneath he was a dry, papery bloodless.
Jeffreys suddenly stopped fighting. His limbs went limp.
His body shriveled to nothing.
The whole time that he was dying—and in the same way that Achlys had died—Nissa stared at Dana. Her red eyes remained fixed upon her as though she’d never seen anything more interesting than Dana’s face.
Nissa said, “You wanted to use that Garlic Shot on me. Now it’s gone.”
“I’ll find another way to kill you,” Dana said.
Nissa shivered.
Jeffreys flaked to dust.
Dana looked down at the syringe still in her palm, lying crosswise from the pad of her thumb to the pad of her pinky. It looked small in comparison to her hands. The same strong, sturdy hands she’d always had. She’d killed a lot of vampires with those hands.
She’d been gripping the triadist charm so hard that its shape had imprinted on one of her palms.
“Now for the rest of them,” Dana said, closing her fist on the mark. The vampire captives had gone quiet during the fight, but now the most recently injured were beginning to stir again.
Nissa’s eyes smoldered. “You want to kill them because they’re vampires.”
“Because if these mutant abominations are unleashed on the world, it’ll be like facing dozens of Albert Jeffreys,” Dana said. She set her shoulders. “And because they’re vampires.”
“No good vampire but an ashed one,” Nissa said.
It only took a moment to locate the lever that lowered the vampire victims’ cages. Dana pulled a couple ropes, dropped the metal grids onto the cement next to the soup-filled bathtub.
She glanced around the room, searching for ideas—or at least a bucket.
Dana spotted a hose. It hung on a crank wheel, and when Dana grabbed the nozzle, she found that it extended easily. She dragged it over to the bathtub of blood. She sprayed it out, blasting the vampires’ sludgy black fluids onto the floor. And then she filled it with water.