by SM Reine
Metal.
“The fuck is this?” Dana muttered, lifting one of the cubes to her nose. It didn’t smell like anything. Didn’t react to the thumb ring that was supposed to light up when hostile magic was nearby, either.
For some reason, the Paradisos had been buying metal from Lucifer, and it wasn’t enchanted. Just heavy.
“Seriously?” Dana asked the night sky. A raven had landed on the edge of the nearest roof, his chest feathers ruffled, his beady black eye glistening. “Metal? You wanted me to intercept metal?”
“Kene nothi!”
Dana turned to face the speaker a half-second too late.
She was engulfed in magical fog. It burned her skin, prickling like a thousand tiny bees. Probably would have hurt even worse if she’d still been alive.
Momoe Esquerer was shooting the magic from the sidewalk, hands flung outward, clutching ribbons in both fists. The ribbons ignited when the magical fog ended. They dissolved, taking the runes with them.
Dana wiped her hands over her skin. There was nothing to rub off, since the magic had already faded. “Was that supposed to hurt?”
Momoe’s beady eyes tracked over Dana. She obviously inventoried Dana’s colorless eyes, her pallor, her speed and ease of movement. She came to the same conclusion that Aggy had moments before getting staked.
No matter how hard Dana denied it, the legendary vampire hunter was turning into one of the undead. But she was still a blood virgin. Without drinking human blood, she was weak.
“Try this on for size,” Momoe said, yanking another spool of ribbon out of her purse.
Magic activated before Dana could take three steps.
Flaming light blazed over her.
That hurt.
Dana had been exposed to daylight a couple times accidentally, and she’d become painfully familiar with how it felt for her dead skin to start boiling. She could feel the blisters even without looking down. But this was a thousand times worse, a thousand times more intense. It seared to her bones.
She tumbled to the concrete slope and slid a few inches back toward the suitcase. Scraping on the ground didn’t make the flames go out; magic ensured that it burned inside of her.
She managed to slap her earpiece. “Anthony!”
Momoe cackled as she stepped closer. “Cry all you want. They won’t be here in time.” She had more ribbons—white cloth that swayed in front of Dana’s eyes. “You won’t get Mohinder’s delivery.” She punctuated that statement with a forceful, “Ack!”
Her feet vanished.
So did the dangling ribbons.
The last thing that Dana saw before she passed out was a dark, winged form descending upon her, oversized feet extended to close around her body.
Damn, she thought. I’ve been saved.
And then she was out.
2
Dana woke up in a grave. Again. Just like every other night since she’d died.
She shoved the lid of her coffin aside and sat up. She was in her not-so-final resting place within the catacombs of the Holy Nights Cathedral. It was a triadist enclave that happened to travel freely throughout the dimension. It usually hung out on the East Coast of the North American Union, but lately it had stuck around Vegas. Dana suspected that the church would remain firmly rooted there until she was perma-dead, which she planned on happening sooner rather than later.
For now, it was home.
She was unpleasantly surprised to find someone waiting in her room when she woke. Or something, to be more precise. Unseelie magic prevented people from entering Dana’s room when she slept, but it didn’t keep gargoyles out. Gargoyle’s weren’t people.
This gargoyle was Dale Junior: Brother Lincoln Marshall’s favorite bodyguard, occasional steed, and titleholder for the World’s Ugliest Dog 2034. Dale Junior was as tall as a guy sitting on another guy’s shoulders, and three times as thick. His gray skin could have been stiff leather or weirdly supple rock. His silhouette made orcs like Penny look downright anemic. The clawed feet Dana had glimpsed before passing out were affixed to his chunky-ass ankles.
Dale Junior was distinguishable from the cathedral’s other resident gargoyles by the number of chips missing from his chest and face. Lincoln landed in the line of fire often enough that his gargoyle sponged damage, and gargoyles could only be repaired with specialized sorcery found in the Middle Worlds. There weren’t a lot of options for fixing him topside.
Once in a while, Lincoln took Dale Junior for a trip down south, and he came back solid again. But the gargoyle would get all chipped up again within a few weeks. He was always an ugly fuck.
“I didn’t need saving,” Dana told Dale Junior.
Characteristically, he didn’t reply. He was a gargoyle. A statue animated by magic. Definitely not sentient, and therefore immune to snark.
Dana clambered out of her grave. Her clothes were still caked with ash from the vamps she’d killed. She grinned as she peeled the shirt off over her head, recalling the ways that she’d killed Roy and Sergio.
“Did you know some breeds of vampires turn to ash if you yank their skulls off their spines?” Dana asked Dale Junior. “And did you know that even blood virgins are strong enough to yank skulls off of spines?”
Dale Junior’s gray eyes stared blankly at the wall.
She wiggled her jeans down her butt, kicked off her undies. They were the same hole-riddled pair from Target she’d been wearing all week. If there was one upside to vampirism, it was a distinct lack of discharge from her holes. The only blood that got her undies dirty came from the people she killed. Even then, vamps didn’t bleed that much. Cue way less laundry than usual.
Dana still managed to get dirty through the normal course of business. She’d recently wrassled with an informant in a gutter, so she had something slimy in her hair. And of course Lucifer’s guys had rudely ashed all over her, which had a habit of sticking to cotton.
“So fucking rude, how they exploded everywhere,” Dana said.
Dale Junior said nothing.
She walked naked down to the monks’ showers. Nobody was using them now. Ascetics didn’t bathe too often, so she was alone in enjoying their cavernous magical bathroom. Mosaics partially covered the floor, and steaming water shot out of a crack where decorative soaps had been conveniently placed in a basket. Lincoln said that their water came from a hot springs, but he’d been vague about where, exactly, that hot springs was located. Dana seriously doubted it originated from Nevada. Probably came from the Himalayas or something. Magic was weird like that.
Dana stood in the spray. Mud tracked down her bare feet as dirt sluiced off of her flesh, which was the same shade of gray as granite at this point.
Really, she didn’t look that different from Dale Junior.
“Although I use more moisturizer than a boulder like you,” she told the gargoyle, cracking herself up. Her laughs echoed off the bathroom cave walls.
He remained in the hallway, immobile.
Moisturizer wasn’t going to do much for the wounds Dana had sustained at the hands of Momoe Esquerer. That magic must have been tailored to boil vampires. Had Dana drunk any human blood since transitioning, it might have ashed her as impressively as Roy and Sergio. Instead, her skin was blistered like she’d showered in a deep fryer.
When she stuck her arms into the hot springs, some of the skin sluiced off with the mud.
“Pretty, very pretty.” It was easy to be flippant when she didn’t have a strong sense of pain anymore. “Hey Dale, can you get a word to Edie? I need a patch job.” Edie was the not-evil counterpart to Momoe. She served as healer at the Hunting Lodge.
Dale Junior wasn’t good at taking orders from anyone but Lincoln Marshall. He didn’t respond to her orders except to stare.
“Pervert.” Dana flung her towel in his face. He didn’t pull it off, so he functioned excellently as a towel rack while she jogged back to her room, jiggly bits flopping around the way they always had. Even if she was kinda skinned.
<
br /> She found a monk waiting outside her bedroom. Lincoln Marshall couldn’t seem to decide if he wanted to laugh or scold her for running around naked. He pulled his cowboy hat low over his eyes. “Dana…”
“You’re welcome,” she said, shaking her blistered boobs at him as she headed inside.
He didn’t follow.
Dana called back, “It’s okay, man. Come in. I’ll get dressed.”
Lincoln stood in the doorway as Dana wiggled into a cleaner pair of jeans. “You look bad.”
“What? You’re not into pustules?” She twisted her arm to look at the worst of the boiling. “Are they pustules if they aren’t filled with pus? I don’t think I can make pus.”
“What were you thinking last night?” It looked like Lincoln had his arms folded disapprovingly across his chest, but it was hard to tell, since he was all tucked inside his monk robe. “Do you think that you should be interrupting drug deals in this condition? You’re a damn vampire.”
“I’m not much of a vampire.” She was as little a vampire as Nissa Royal, in fact. Who was now rumored to be the highest lieutenant in the Paradisos. A very influential non-vampire.
Lincoln wasn’t amused by her flippant responses. His expression had gone nearly as stony as Dale Junior’s. “You planned to die once you got your revenge on Achlys.”
“I still plan to die.” No doubt about that. “But I gotta dismantle the entire Paradisos murder first.” Her head got stuck pulling on her t-shirt, and she had to pop a couple seams to get it down over her ears. Only then did she realize it was a t-shirt belonging to Penny. It was for San Diego Comic Con 2025.
“I know your plans,” Lincoln said. “I don’t reckon this is the most effective way to do it. You’re squashing ants when you need to torch the whole hill.”
“You in a hurry for me to die? You coulda let Momoe Esquerer spit-fry my ass.”
“I could have. But then all the hard work Brianna and I have put into making the shot would be for nothing, and I hold out some naive hope that’s going to magically work.”
He’d been slaving over the empty vial that had held a cure for vampire blood virgins. Dana had seen him working with the other monks in the apothecary at all hours of day and night, trying to figure out exactly what had gone into Harold Hopkins’s masterwork.
It wasn’t a cure. Not exactly. It would cure Dana as long as she didn’t drink human blood, sure, but a drop of it would poison any vampire who’d finished the transition. Dana had gotten to see how it killed Achlys, the master vampire. It hadn’t been pretty. She’d ended up having more in common with beef jerky than a human.
The fact that the sorta-cure was such an amazing weapon only made Dana want it more desperately.
They called it the Garlic Shot. Garlic only fucked with a couple vampire breeds, but Dana had called it that once, and it had stuck. She’d even heard Brianna calling it a Garlic Shot, and Brianna didn’t have a sense of humor. So it was a good name.
“Any progress on the Garlic Shot?” Dana asked.
“Not really,” Lincoln said shortly. “That’s why I’m asking about your plans to die.” Anyone else would have sugarcoated it for her. Anyone else would have encouraged her to just hang in there, sport, because even a sliver of a chance at life was better than dying forever.
Not Lincoln. He was a triadist with roots in evangelical Catholicism, and he’d taken religion seriously long before renting out a cell in a traveling cathedral.
Killing people was evil. Drinking blood was evil. All vampires—including Dana—were evil.
It was nice to see eye-to-eye with someone.
Dana clapped a hand on Lincoln’s shoulder. “You’ll be the first to know when I’m ready to get dead. Mostly because you might have to do the killing for me. I’m harder to take down than I thought.”
“Will do,” he said, tipping his hat at her.
Cool guy, that Brother Lincoln Marshall.
Upstairs in the nave, where all the worship happened, Brianna and Anthony were chilling in front of the pews. It was the biggest patch of empty floor in the church, and therefore the only place to do group work.
The Hunting Lodge had much better workspaces, but Dana had been trying to keep up her usual work schedule. She could only help with work during daytime if she didn’t have to venture into sunlight. That meant no leisurely strolls down the Strip toward the Hunting Lodge.
“No Penny?” Dana asked, turning a chair around to straddle it.
“She’s at the Lodge,” Anthony said.
Dana didn’t ask more questions than that. Things had been strained with Penny ever since she’d decided she’d rather divorce her wife than finish her transition to vampire. Penny was a consummate professional who was still doing her job. She was the one who’d powered down the Mirage to help Dana surprise her enemies, and she was still churning the best weapons out of her forge. But she didn’t see Dana if she didn’t have to. Aside from initial divorce proceedings, Dana hadn’t been in the same room as Penny for weeks.
“It’s iron,” Brianna declared. “Definitely iron.” She had several samples from the stolen suitcase on the table in front of her.
They’d already known that the metal inside of the suitcase was iron. The question had been whether it was laced, or if the bars had something in their cores, or if they were enchanted with magic that Dana’s ring couldn’t detect.
“Just iron,” Brianna said pointedly, shooting a look at Dana.
“How many sidhe are in Vegas these days?” Anthony asked. “One? Two?”
“However many there used to be, minus the unseelie enforcer I decapitated with gunshots to the brain,” Dana said.
“Whether or not we’ve got sidhe in the neighborhood, iron’s federally illegal to trade in these quantities,” Brianna said. “This much pure, concentrated iron in one spot is worth six figures on the black market. You could coat enough bullets to take down half of the Autumn Court just with what we’ve got on the table.”
It was an impressive smuggling operation. The potential devastation was far greater than if she’d caught the vamps trading drugs, as she’d first suspected.
There was only one problem.
“Who’d want this much iron when there’s no sidhe in Vegas?” Dana asked.
“The Paradisos, obviously,” Brianna said.
“We managed to identify the vampire who’d been escorting Momoe Esquerer.” Anthony pushed a tablet at Dana. A photo of the vampire, Aggy, had been screencapped from security footage. It was low resolution and blurry. But definitely the vamp that Dana had staked. “We’ve suspected she’s with the Paradisos for years, but rolling with Esquerer confirms it. We can link a lot of old drug trade to the Paradisos now.”
“For all the good that will do.” Brianna started packing the iron into a locked Turtle Case. She’d have to surrender it to the LVMPD, whose iron stores had been low since someone had robbed the precinct’s armory earlier that summer. “Mohinder’s running the Paradisos. Any crimes predating Achlys’s death can’t be used against him.”
“It might stop his mayoral run in its tracks,” Anthony said.
Dana rubbed her chin thoughtfully. She doubted that Tormid would have tipped her off on the trade of iron if he’d just been hoping to blow the election. The dangerous aura surrounding vampires was ninety percent of the appeal; putting Mohinder in charge of a murder known for trafficking drugs only made him sexier to voters.
No. There was another reason that Achlys’s shifter boyfriend had wanted Dana intercepting the iron.
Their partnership wasn’t friendly. It wasn’t much of a partnership, either. It had kicked off when Tormid appeared at the cathedral’s doorstep the night after Achlys died and tried to assassinate Dana. He’d done a pretty good job of the attempt. Nearly took off Dana’s head with a snap of that enormous raven beak.
But as morons liked to say, the enemy of an enemy is friendship material. Tormid was bitter about losing Achlys. He wanted to destroy the Paradisos. Con
veniently, so did Dana. Every single vampire in the Las Vegas metro area belonged to the Paradisos; it stood to reason that destroying the murder would destroy or reveal the Fremont Slasher too.
Once Dana and Tormid realized how similar their goals were, the assassination attempt had turned into drinks at a nearby bar. Then it had turned into brainstorming. And they had agreed that there was only one way to take down the Paradisos as a whole: take away their money. A desperate murder would get sloppy, they thought. They’d get more brazen committing crimes.
Dana and Tormid would collect enough evidence to get the OPA to daylight bomb the city, killing every single vampire inside its borders.
Intercepting a drug deal had seemed like a good start for building a case.
Except Dana hadn’t intercepted drugs at all.
“I’ll look into it,” she said eventually.
“Not right now you won’t.” Brianna thrust her chin toward the windows. It was still sunset outside. “In the meantime, let’s talk Garlic Shot.”
Anthony transferred some vials over from a portable kitchen island. “We had a breakthrough today while you were sleeping, Dana.”
Dana eyed Lincoln, who’d thrown aside his robes to sit in a chair in Wranglers. He looked less like a monk and more like he was ready to crack open a cold beer to enjoy an evening on his stoop.
Lincoln hadn’t mentioned that research into the Garlic Shot had progressed. Only that he wanted Dana dead.
“Breakthrough, huh?” she asked pointedly.
“We’ve broken down the last of the component ingredients,” Brianna said. “We now know everything that Harold Hopkins included in his Garlic Shots, which is an impressive mix of stuff that kills vampires. Juniper, hawthorn, wild rose…some industrial-grade solvents…”
“He did nuanced work,” Anthony said. “He tempered the more intense apotropaics with things like moonstone dust.”
“But?” Dana asked. The way that they were talking made it clear that there was a but involved.
“He also used unobtainium,” Lincoln said.
“Unob…what now? Isn’t that from the bad movie with the blue aliens?”