by SM Reine
They went in together.
It might not have been a warehouse where Dana used to attend raves, but it looked like every rave venue she’d been in before. The first floor was so empty that every movement echoed. It was as bleak inside as without. Somehow it managed to be claustrophobic and cavernous simultaneously. Probably the darkness. If not for her vampire eyes, she’d have been utterly blind inside. “What’d Achlys use this for?” Dana asked.
“It was one of her black sites. She used to hold people here when she didn’t like them. People who stole from her, insulted her, tried to attack her properties—”
“By people, you mean humans.”
“You already know about the Bunker.” That was the secret club where Achlys had been keeping human victims. “This is sort of like that, but less luxurious. The people she really hated came here.”
“Humans,” Dana said again, just to be clear.
“Yes, humans. Mohinder’s not like that, though. He won’t be keeping humans in warehouses and secret clubs. He will have very different policies than Achlys did.”
“Tell me about what happened with Mohinder,” Dana said. “Can’t imagine he was happy to realize you know about his unobtainium.”
“He wasn’t, but only because he thought I’d be distressed to know that he was hoarding it,” Nissa said. “The lab’s upstairs, by the way. We’ve got a few more minutes before I’m done but we can head in that direction.”
“I’m surprised you know how to put the Garlic Shot together.”
Nissa’s nose crinkled, like she found the name painfully cute. To be fair, it kinda was. “I have access to everything Achlys did now. Because I’m Mohinder’s only fledgling, I’ve suddenly found myself the second most important vampire in the Paradisos, and that’s a little weird. But good!”
“Access to everything, huh? All the secrets that the Paradisos have?” Dana asked.
“It’s not as exciting as it sounds. You have to know what to look for in order to find anything. Pulling up Harold Hopkins’s notes? Easy. Finding another lab Achlys made for him? Easy. But doing a search in our database for ‘old dark creepy secrets’ doesn’t pull up much.”
“Notice how she didn’t say it pulls up nothing?” Brianna asked, her voice tiny and dry coming through Dana’s earpiece.
Dana didn’t respond.
She followed Nissa up the creaking, rattling steel stairs to the next level of the warehouse. The second floor was much more cluttered with crates, almost like Dana’s post-divorce crypt. They weren’t as worn and dirty as everything else in the warehouse, so they must have been recent additions.
“The lab’s in there.” Nissa nodded toward a room that must have been a manager’s office. The windows were obscured by blinds, but would have ordinarily overlooked the floor.
“I want to see the lab,” Dana said.
“Soon. It’s just not ready yet, and I don’t want to open the door until we’re closer.” Nissa plopped onto one of the crates, leaning back on her hands. She didn’t have Penny’s stocky figure. She didn’t have Penny’s taste under Dana’s lips. But gods, the similarities.
They had a few minutes before the cure was ready. A few minutes to talk.
The things that Dana knew nagged at her. She didn’t worry herself about honesty most of the time, since most people were too whiny to handle truth bombs.
“I’m so sorry about Momoe,” Nissa said. “I never would have dreamed she’d keep executing Achlys’s plans once our old master died. And I had no idea that Achlys wanted safeguards against so many preternaturals. She never seemed that paranoid.”
Nissa was probably looking for forgiveness. Reassurance.
She was gonna be disappointed on both counts, because nothing that Dana had to say was forgiving or reassuring.
“Has Mohinder ever told you about how you died?” Dana asked.
Nissa looked surprised by the change in subject. “A few things. I don’t talk about it very much with him.”
“So he didn’t say who killed you.”
“He probably doesn’t know. He saved me from the mugger, but I doubt they survived.” She hastily added, “Mohinder typically isn’t violent, but anyone would go nuts if they caught someone killing a college kid. Don’t you think? I know I would, and I’m about as threatening as Barney the Dinosaur.”
Dana set her shoulders. “It wasn’t a mugger.”
“Huh?”
“Your killer. He wasn’t a mugger.” She took a deep breath. Nissa was probably going to remember details of her death once she was cured, so there was no point in trying to keep it quiet. “I’m sure he was the Fremont Slasher—that serial killer from a few years ago. You fit his victim profile and you died on Fremont Street.”
“The Fremont Slasher? Why do you—”
“I hunted him,” Dana said. “A long time. Kept going back and forth on it. Never did get him.”
Nissa’s eyes seemed weirdly bright in the shadowy warehouse. “Tell me about it.”
Talking about the experience was the last thing Dana wanted to do.
Fuck. She was the one who’d brought it up. She’d opened that can of worms, and she couldn’t close it now that her grimy, dirty past was wriggling its way out the lid.
She sat on a crate opposite Nissa. “It took a while for anyone to realize it was a serial killer. At first we thought there was a spate of college kids just…disappearing. Thought it might be sex trafficking. You know how human trafficking got worse after Genesis for a while, and Vegas’s population is transient, so it’d be a good target. Then the bodies started showing up.”
Charmaine had brought Dana to the early scenes, as soon as they found vampire fang-bites within the slashes. Charmaine had been Detective Villanueva at the time, shortly before she leap-frogged her way up the political ladder, skipping sergeant and captain by virtue of one lucky election. She’d been on the beat. Hitting the streets hard. Desperate to protect the women.
Even Dana had felt sick when she’d looked at those bodies the first time.
In some ways, the lack of sexual violence was worse. Nobody had been raped. There was no genital trauma, no foreign DNA in any orifice.
The girls had been beaten, starved, and butchered like cattle.
“It quickly became obvious that the killer was a sadist, and a sociopath. Didn’t care what people felt. Liked to see them in pain. That was the entire purpose of his game.” Dana swallowed hard. It felt like swallowing sandpaper.
“Then what?” Nissa asked, leaning forward.
Then Penny had been taken.
“Charmaine arrested a vampire who confessed to the killings,” Dana said. “He killed himself in jail before he could go on trial. It took months, though. Months and a whole lot of bodies.” She couldn’t bring herself to get more specific than that.
“If you had gotten him sooner, I’d still be alive,” Nissa said. “I’d have gotten to graduate.”
Penny had never said that it was Dana’s fault she didn’t catch the Slasher sooner. She’d never blamed her abduction on Dana at all.
But Nissa did.
It was a weird feeling, hearing those words. It was kind of a relief to finally—finally—acknowledge Dana’s culpability in the deaths of all the humans who had died. She’d failed to save them. Penny, Nissa, all those other girls.
It hurt to hear it too.
She wouldn’t shy away from it just because it hurt. What Nissa had suffered at the Slasher’s hands would have been a hell of a lot more painful.
“Yeah,” Dana said. “It was my fault.”
Nissa slithered off the crate, staring blankly at the wall. She touched her hair. Touched her shirt. It was almost like she was trying to remind herself of who she was now, in the present, or like she was straightening herself up. No way to be sure. But she didn’t look comfortable around Dana anymore. “I think the Garlic Shot should be about done. Give me a second to check on everything. The situation in there is delicate—all those flasks and stuff.
Just wait here? Okay.” Nissa flitted through the door, shutting it behind her and leaving Dana alone with her guilt.
The guilt was a behemoth. It had stalked Dana for years, the same way that the Fremont Slasher had stalked his victims. It was always lurking around the corner. Under her bed. In the shadows of night.
Dana was surprised that Brianna didn’t have anything to say about that. She’d be listening over the earpiece, though. She’d know that Dana was stewing.
She couldn’t stew.
Dana pushed the Slasher out of her mind with a practiced mental shove. She closed her fist around the triadist charm hanging from her neck. It helped a lot, just as praying with Lincoln had provided enormous comfort in the past.
Slowly, her mind emptied.
And Dana was still waiting.
Had Nissa only left Dana to wait for a few seconds, then it was likely Dana wouldn’t have done anything. She hooked her thumbs in her pockets and hummed a tune from a chewing-gum commercial.
Then a few seconds were over, and Nissa wasn’t back yet.
Dana didn’t know how to be idle. Not when she was in Paradisos territory, and especially not unsupervised.
When she jumped off of the crate, the lid was jarred underneath her. It slid aside an inch. The moonlight spilled over its contents and metal glinted. She nudged the lid of a nearby crate aside to look inside of it. There was a sword nestled on hay at the bottom. “Hay,” Dana said with a snort.
She grabbed the hilt.
It was a weird sword. She didn’t have a word to describe it. Had the sword been built less sturdy, she might have thought it was some kind of fantasy replica made in homage to a movie. The blade was thin enough that it bent when she swung it. The jagged cutting edge was very sharp, and Dana kinda wished she could cut someone with it to see what the wound would look like.
“Well, shit,” she said. “Why not?” Dana ran her thumb along the blade. It cut her almost to the bone.
A very thin, very sharp, very jagged blade.
She had seen cuts like this before.
“Shit,” she whispered, turning the sword over in her hands again.
It didn’t look anything like the valkyrie blade, but it cut similarly. The feathery shards on its cutting edge would produce wounds just like the actual valkyrie feather, in fact.
This was a sword that had been custom-made to resemble the sword Dana took from the draugr.
And Dana said again, “Shit.”
Because this could only mean one thing.
Dana had already known that the draugr weren’t the killers, since the killing had continued after she slaughtered them. That meant someone else had the sword used to kill Carlitos Oborsky.
Her gaze snapped to the door of Harold Hopkins’s lab. It was still closed.
“Nissa,” Dana said softly. The vampire who handled all of the Paradisos’s travels and would have known about draugr tourists convenient for a frame-up. A victim of the Fremont Slasher. A blood virgin who didn’t drink human blood, whom Lincoln had warned her not to trust, whom she had allowed out of her sight.
Later, she’d take time to think about how stupid she’d been.
Nissa had asked Dana for lessons in merciless killing. That had been their second interaction, right after Nissa’s gods-damned master pumped Dana full of venom.
And then, conveniently, Nissa had led Dana to a group of draugr deserving of merciless killing.
I’m now the second most powerful vampire in the Paradisos, she had said, or something like that.
Dana should have known.
She was so fucking stupid.
The sword was flimsy—no good against an opponent more threatening than a mundane mortal who worked at an airship dock. She dropped it into the crate and drew the only other weapon she had brought: a wooden stake. “Brianna?” Dana asked, putting two fingers to her earpiece.
No response.
“Anthony? Penny?”
Still nothing.
She plucked it out of her ear. The blue light had gone red, indicating that it had no signal.
“Real fucking stupid,” Dana muttered.
A smart woman would have gone outside to look for reception, call her friends, and wait for reinforcements…but she’d already proven she wasn’t smart.
She shoved open the door to the lab.
It wasn’t a lab at all. There wasn’t a single flask or bubbling pot or anything. Not even a computer. Just another set of stairs and a huge logo on the wall. “Gaslight Corp,” Dana said.
Shouldn’t have been any kind of surprise. Dana already knew that Mohinder owned the company. What she didn’t like to see were all the canisters of gas arrayed on the floor against the wall. Same canisters of airborne pesticide that they’d found at the abandoned Hardwick mine.
“Really stupid,” she said out loud. Anthony would have been laughing his ass off at her if he was there, and she’d have deserved every bit of it.
Dana headed up the stairs.
It was darker up there. Much darker. And the lack of lighting was only a fraction of what made everything so horrific.
This level had a lot of blankets laid out on the floor. There were lumpy shapes underneath.
Human shapes.
Nissa was nowhere in sight.
“Do you like it?”
Dana swung around at the sound of the girlish voice. She didn’t see anyone. Couldn’t tell where the words had come from.
“Can’t say that I do,” Dana said, easing slowly to the left. There were several large pillars in the room that supported the floors above. Nissa must have been behind one of them, but the echoing meant that she couldn’t tell which.
Without lowering her stake, Dana flicked one of the sheets aside. There was a naked man underneath. He must have been in his forties. He was hirsute and obese and sun-worn. Dana didn’t recognize him.
Dana pulled back another blanket, and another.
There were human bodies underneath each of them.
“Achlys left some of them behind,” said Nissa’s disembodied voice.
“Some?” Dana asked. If she’d been able to get reception in there, Anthony would have pointed out that meant that some of the bodies had been left behind by others.
She leaped around a pillar at the center of the room, stake uplifted.
Nissa wasn’t on the other side.
There were a couple of tables beyond the pillar, though. And the bodies on them weren’t human. One was a shriveled woman with soft blond hair. The other was a man whose head had been blown away by gunfire.
Achlys’s body. Shawn’s body.
And someone had been cutting into them. They weren’t mangled the way that Harold Hopkins had been; this was an evisceration performed with care. Each organ that was removed had been placed neatly alongside the body and the open cavities were tidy.
This wasn’t a mauling. This was…exploration. Curiosity.
Practice.
Something thumped upstairs. Nissa had gone to the next floor. Dana followed, emerging on the next story. “Oh fuck,” she said.
She’d found the missing iron and silver. It was on display in a dozen different forms: in transparent plastic tubs, on shelves, as bars stacked on the floor. She couldn’t tell what was in all the crates, but she suspected that they were metals too.
The worst part of it was that there were duffel bags with the LVMPD logo on them. Charmaine had complained about the thefts that had left them without supplies. Now Dana knew who had been stealing from the cops. She reached a hand into her pocket to grab the UV grenade…but before she could fish it out, she felt a finger tap on her shoulder.
Dana whirled.
Nissa stood behind her, smiling. “Boo.”
18
Dana hadn’t intended to use vampire speed to duck behind crates, but she suddenly found herself several meters away from Nissa and grateful that her instincts had taken charge. She hunched in the corner and tried to think.
She’s just one vampire.
I can kill just one vampire.
The Fremont Slasher killed her first.
Gods.
“I can run like that too,” Nissa said. “You couldn’t escape even if you needed to. But you don’t have to run from me. I didn’t bring you here to die.”
Dana’s eyes flicked, studying her surroundings. The wooden stake was good for a killing blow. Not so much for a fight. She needed another weapon—something heavy, or something sharp. “I trusted you.”
“You can keep trusting me.”
“Even though you’re a huge fucking liar?”
“I’ve always told the truth about how many people I’ve killed,” Nissa said. “None of those human bodies downstairs are from me. I still haven’t drunk from anyone. I’m a blood virgin and can be redeemed by your gods.”
“Except you didn’t get unobtainium from Mohinder and don’t plan to make Garlic Shots,” Dana said.
Nissa sighed. “I was going to explain that to you. But you changed the subject.”
“I was trying to help you.”
“By accusing me of falling victim to a serial killer?”
“That’s not your fault,” Dana said. “What is your fault is lying to me.” Gods, she felt so stupid. How could she have dared to hope? She’d spent the day with Penny, letting herself think that life was going to be normal again, and instead…
“Las Vegas is going to be inhospitable for anyone who isn’t a vampire very soon. I’m doing you a favor,” Nissa said.
“You’re going to poison the water supply.” Exactly as Dana had thought.
“The OPA can’t sweep the area if they can’t survive in the area.” Nissa’s voice was moving as she migrated through the room, and it was impossible to tell exactly where since everything echoed so much. “Did you know that seventy-five percent of OPA agents are either shifters or sidhe these days?”
“It’s the witches you have to worry about. They’re the ones who will daylight bomb Vegas the second they realize what you and Mohinder are up to.” Dana grabbed a lid off of the crate behind her, testing its sturdiness. Pretty good shield.
There was an iron bar inside. She grabbed it too.