by SM Reine
She had spent the week testing the limits of Beelzebub’s capacity for pain. It seemed starvation was much more painful than screws to the skull.
When he saw Nissa, he made a noise that should have been a furious snarl. His emotions didn’t touch her. Couldn’t reach her. Vampires didn’t jab at Nissa’s senses the way that mortals did.
Without his emotions on the attack, there was nothing left but Nissa.
Nissa didn’t know what she felt.
Anxious, yes. Worried about getting caught.
But did she feel bad for what she was doing to Beelzebub? She wasn’t certain.
“He is suffering,” Mohinder said matter-of-factly. “What is it that you hope to get out of this?”
She gazed up at the furrows that the ropes had dug into Beelzebub’s wrists. “Vampires are brutal creatures, Mohinder.”
“Predators tend to be.”
“I can’t be brutal to humans because…” She hugged herself tighter. “I can’t.”
Yet Nissa wanted to be brutal.
She had caught Beelzebub hunting in Judex. It was federally illegal to hunt humans, and Achlys banned it as well. Beelzebub’s punishment should have been death one way or another. Nonetheless, Nissa had been ready to smooth it over, keep it quiet, maintain the peace in Las Vegas.
Then Beelzebub’s victim had smashed his fear into Nissa, and she’d felt his every broken bone. Their minds had merged for one blazing instant.
Beelzebub had been about to murder a volunteer firefighter, a hero of the nation. The firefighter had been scared. He’d known he was about to die, his throat torn out by a hungry jackal.
The fear had seized Nissa.
And she’d attacked.
The firefighter was still recovering in a local hospital. And here Beelzebub was, stretched out in her closet, serving his punishment for hunting tourists. Except it wasn’t Nissa’s job to punish vampires of the murder. And she hadn’t told anyone except for Mohinder.
Achlys had tipped off the LVMPD about a torture closet. It was an unlucky coincidence. Achlys meant for the tip to lure the Hunting Club into her trap, but instead, it risked luring the cops to Nissa’s doorstep with wooden stakes.
Nissa gazed up at her sire. His broad face was ruggedly handsome despite the fact that he wore such sleek couture, his brows angled down in the middle, his cheekbones as prominent as his eyes were sunken. It was the first face that Nissa had seen when she’d opened her eyes as one of the undead. “What would you do to him?”
Mohinder returned her gaze with a blank stare. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He was her sire, but they’d never sealed the bond with a final exchange of blood, so they didn’t have the psychic connection they should have. Just another of the many things Nissa was missing.
“What would you do if he were human?” Mohinder asked.
“He wouldn’t be.” Nissa couldn’t have survived through experiencing all that fear. There was no alternate universe where she was capable of keeping a human in her closet.
“Beelzebub feels anything a human would feel in this situation. He feels more, in fact. The bloodless are emotional beings with much more depth than the living. Strange as it may seem, all vampires are just as complex on the inside as you.”
“You’re saying I should let him go.”
Mohinder rested a hand on Nissa’s shoulder. “Curiosity is normal, but you’ve studied Beelzebub long enough. If Achlys catches you in this pursuit, you’ll be dead to preserve the peace in Las Vegas, no matter how much she cares for you.”
“Beelzebub will tell her if I let him go,” Nissa said.
“No he won’t. He won’t speak of this to anyone for fear of my retribution.”
He was right. Nissa couldn’t hold on to one of their guys. Especially not when the OPA was closing in on them.
Sooner or later, someone was going to figure out what she’d done.
She said, “Okay.”
Mohinder twitched his fingers and the ropes fell apart. He had low-level telekinesis—a far less intrusive ability than Nissa’s hyper-empathy—and it meant that he had plenty of time to step out of the way when Beelzebub stumbled out of his confinement.
“Run,” Mohinder said. “Don’t feed on another tourist or I will find you.”
The vampire could only squeeze out a groan.
He slammed through the doors, feet slapping all the way down the hall.
Mohinder said, “Thank you Nissa. You’ve made the correct choice to preserve the tenuous peace in Las Vegas.”
She sat down at her computer. Just as she hadn’t felt anything at torturing Beelzebub, she didn’t feel anything at him leaving. “Will that be all?”
4
Nobody at the murder scene wanted to see Brianna Dimaria. Nobody got excited when she shuffled over with her bathtub-sized coffee and wooden pentacle charms, and a couple of the cops didn’t even make eye contact.
“I thought you said that the Hunting Club was coming out,” muttered one crime scene tech to another. Brianna prepared not to hear them.
She’d gotten to the Hunting Lodge at six o’clock that morning, right after sunrise, so she’d been the first person to check the answering machine. The cops had requested a consult on a murder. Brianna put the word out and headed in first.
Dammit, people should have been thanking her for how quickly she’d gotten there.
But no, there was all the whispering and glancing around, seeing if Brianna might be followed by one of the Hunting Club’s more famous associates. Chugging the coffee wasn’t waking her enough to deal with this crap.
“Ugh,” she sighed once she’d drained her mug. She swirled the dregs of the black coffee around the bottom. “Anyone got chai, by any chance? Or any other tea?”
“The only thing we’ve got here is ash,” Officer Jeffreys said. “You don’t want that.”
“No. I don’t.” She set her mug on top of a police car, made a mental note to retrieve it later, then wiped her hands off on her tunic. “Okay, what’ve we got here?”
“Vampire. Permanently dead vampire.”
“No kidding,” Brianna said.
The corpses left behind by perma-dead vampires were distinctive from those left behind by humans. Sure, they had all the same parts, but every bit of a vampire was flammable in sunlight. If they found the body before sunlight wreaked havoc on the evidence, it looked like finding a human who had been barbecued. Bones charred as well as the soft tissue, and the skin got crispy fast.
Given a few more minutes in daylight, this vampire would have been indistinguishable as having ever lived, much less as a vampire. But right now, Brianna Dimaria was confident that the pieces crime scene techs had fished out of a Dumpster belonged to one of the bloodless.
“What’s that?” Brianna asked.
Officer Jeffreys lifted a piece of bone in his gloved hand, careful to keep it in the shade of the bar’s rear alleyway. “Judging by the curve, I think…skull?” He swallowed wetly.
Who could blame him for looking queasy? He wasn’t just holding a piece of skull. He was holding a piece of skull with clear characteristics of the person it had once belonged to. Probably a masochist, considering that they had screwed metal horns into their skull.
“Damn,” Brianna muttered.
There was no way that the Hunting Club wouldn’t get blamed for this dead vampire.
She heard the bass rumbling on a car’s stereo before it pulled up to the mouth of the alley. The crime scene had been taped off, but someone pulled the tape aside to allow the lifted pickup truck to roll up to the edge of the scene. The windows were opaque black, in stark contrast to the lime-slashed Pepto Bismol of the body’s paint job. The grill on the front looked like it had been used to literally catch cows, since there was dried blood and tissue caked to the bars. The driver was listening to music by Slipknot—Brianna recognized the frantic rhythm of the drums.
A couple cops had the nerve to start applauding when that pickup appeared.
“You can’t blame them. She’s got a legacy.” Chief Villanueva came up to stand beside Brianna. Charmaine hadn’t been doing fieldwork since her promotion, so if Charmaine was watching, then it meant Mayor Hekekia was watching. And so was the OPA.
“Legacy shmegacy,” Brianna said. “Did you know that I used to be high priestess of the single most prestigious coven in the world before Genesis?”
“You might have mentioned it twenty or thirty times,” Charmaine said with a good-natured smirk.
“That, and I show up to consults on time,” Brianna said.
The pickup door popped open. Beer cans tumbled out of the driver’s seat, scattering across the cracked cement, and studded platform boots struck a moment later.
Dana McIntyre glared murder at the cops who’d applauded her arrival, and that only seemed to make them all the more excited.
If a McIntyre was on the scene, they considered the case already solved.
There was nothing to get excited about at the sight of Dana. Her pink-tipped hair was styled into spikes, the solid mass of her body was held snug by a leather corset with stone pauldrons, and she wore a leather skirt. She had an open beer can in one hand and let a belch out of the corner of her mouth as she sauntered over.
“Dana, good morning.” Brianna was grinning crazily and speaking through her teeth again. “How nice of you to join us at a crime scene, with police, where you drove in a pickup while drinking beer. Which is so totally legal.”
“O’Doul’s.” Dana crushed the beer can and hurled it over her shoulder. “Like the flavor. Don’t drive drunk.”
Chief Villanueva was not surprised by this display from Dana. “Glad to have you.” She clapped Dana’s hand in both of hers and shook with genuine relief. “We could have used you last night when I had the master of the Paradisos in my office.”
“Good thing I was there,” Brianna muttered.
“I was on patrol.” Dana lifted her gauntleted fists, and magic sputtered from her elbows to her knuckles, which were just as studded as her boots. These particular studs were bloody on the tips. “There was a shifter brawl, so you’ll want to check in with jail intake later. You guys are full up. Brianna, help me strip.”
Brianna sighed. “What’s the magic word?”
“Ngou ho,” Dana said in hetânâ, the magic language both of them were fluent in. Ngou ho meant “fuck you.” The words had absolutely no power coming from a mundane like Dana, except that it made Brianna’s blood pressure spike.
“Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning,” Brianna said. “Try again or else I’ll show your adoring fans pictures of when I helped potty train you. I bet they’d love to hear how you insisted on wearing pull-ups until kindergarten.”
Dana’s eyes narrowed, as if she were evaluating whether or not Brianna was serious.
Brianna was completely serious. She’d been putting up with Dana McIntyre and her stupid family legacy ever since Dana was knee-high to a pig’s eye. When Dana had been a teenager—worst decade ever—awkward childhood photos had been the only threat to control her.
“Help me please,” Dana finally said.
“Happily.” Brianna undid the straps on Dana’s gauntlets, her pauldrons, even her belt. She was left standing with fifty pounds of enchanted gear, which she tossed into the back of Dana’s ugly-ass pickup while Dana herself went to examine the scene.
A crime scene tech handed latex gloves to Dana. She snapped them on and picked up the same piece of skull that Officer Jeffreys had been investigating.
Dana lifted it into the sunlight. It began smoking. She blew the fire off, then peered closely at the remaining bone.
“This vampire was killed by the Paradisos,” Dana said.
“How do you know?” Chief Villanueva asked.
“Because I’ve got fucking eyeballs.” She tossed the skull to Officer Jeffreys, who managed to transfer it to an evidence bin before diving into a corner to barf. “This vampire was starved. No Vegas vampire starves on accident, and no Vegas vampire gets held captive without Paradisos knowing. So the Paradisos did it.”
“Our lab will be able to confirm that the vampire was starving, but we’ll need more than that to pin it on the Paradisos,” Chief Villanueva said.
Brianna shot a sideways look at the chief. Did Charmaine want to pin it on the Paradisos? She’d made it clear that vigilantes and vampires in Las Vegas were on equal footing, and equally fucked if things went wrong.
“Don’t waste your resources.” Dana peeled her gloves off and dropped them into a trash bag held by another tech. “If the vampires are fucking around with a civil war, let ‘em do it. Vamps killing vamps is nobody’s problem.”
“Murdering American citizens is illegal, no matter who does it,” Brianna said.
Dana’s snort wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t meant to be. She reveled in being as disgusting as possible, even while consulting at crime scenes. Maybe especially while consulting at crime scenes. “But the vampires do it anyway, because they’re vampires. They’re killers. They aren’t capable of doing anything else.”
“Help me link this murder to the Paradisos,” Chief Villanueva said.
Dana said, “No.”
She climbed into her pickup. Brianna heard another can of O’Doul’s cracking open before the door slammed shut.
The truck backed out of the alley. Dana’s tailgate clipped a trashcan and knocked it over, spilling its contents across the pavement. She dragged a bag halfway down the street before it finally tore loose, and then she was gone, leaving wreckage and adoring cops behind her.
Dana McIntyre had been there less than five minutes. Everyone looked star-struck and it seemed like Brianna no longer existed.
“Yep,” Brianna said, glancing at her watch. “Just another Tuesday.”
Brianna caught up with Charmaine again when they were wrapping up the scene. “I’m sorry about Dana, Chief.” Brianna kept quiet enough that none of the other cops on the scene would be able to hear. “You’ll have our support, as always, but we just can’t guarantee Dana’s direct involvement.”
“I know. I understand.” But that didn’t make Charmaine look happier. How could she? She was police chief in a city that was about to explode, and their most prominent ally in the hunting community wanted nothing to do with it. “Walk with me, Dimaria.”
Brianna struggled to keep up with the chief as they headed to the end of the alley, further away from the people cleaning the scene of the crime. They could have cleaned up the area a lot sooner, but they’d wanted to wait for Dana to see it all, even if it meant risking further sun exposure.
Clark County’s law enforcement had been relying on McIntyre help for generations now. Before Genesis, the resident McIntyre had been named Lucas—a kopis, a demon hunter, who had looked like his daughter with a few more piercings and less hair. He’d been wrestling with the local preternaturals since before preternaturals were legally American citizens.
Lucas McIntyre had died in Genesis. The old gods and new gods had gone to war against each other in 2015, and it had been one ugly battle with a lot of collateral damage. Heaven and Hell had gotten onto Earth. Then Earth had fallen apart.
At the end of it all, a void had swept over the world, devouring every last living soul.
The world had rebooted.
And when everyone had been reborn, there were a lot more preternaturals in it than before. Many mundane humans had been normal one day and shapeshifters, witches, or sidhe the next. Most importantly for Las Vegas, there had suddenly been vampires, too.
And there had been no Lucas McIntyre.
His surviving daughter had risen to take his mantle. For the most part, Dana did the job even better. She knew vampires like nobody else. There was no doubt in Brianna’s mind that if Dana said a vampire had been held captive and starved that she was one hundred percent correct.
LVMPD was lucky to have Dana’s help. They might hav
e even been right to treat her like a celebrity. At some point, she’d been worth the hype.
But Dana had changed.
Brianna had always found Dana difficult to get along with. It was a side effect of Brianna—a woman who was happily, deliberately childless—being forced to help raise an orphan with a community of hunters. Brianna hated kids; Dana hated Brianna. They hated each other the way that family hated, though. Brianna had been legitimately happy when Dana turned eighteen and took control of the Hunting Club.
At first, Dana had pretended to be professional working with the cops. She’d operated beneath a veneer of normalcy. Dana’s brand of normal involved corsets, sure, but she’d worked predictable hours, and she’d followed the law so that her evidence was admissible in court. She’d never endangered the Hunting Club’s vigilante license.
Everything had been fine for a few years.
Then Dana had changed.
Now this was her new normal. Showing up to a time-sensitive crime scene an hour after she was called, leaving beer cans all over the evidence, deciding that she didn’t care if vampires broke the law by murdering other vampires…
“This isn’t the first vampire who’s died like this,” Charmaine said. The Las Vegas sun blasted the detail out of her skin, leaving her a tanned, scowling silhouette that towered over Brianna. “I’ll have to wait for results to be sure, but this looks like the deaths of five other vampires we’ve found in recent weeks.”
Brianna’s eyes went wide. “Five other vampires? Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”
“We’re capable of investigating crimes without you sometimes. Six is pushing it, though. Six is more than a pattern. And if Dana’s right that these people are being killed by the Paradisos…it could get ugly.”
“Any connections between the victims?”
“Aside from being Paradisos? No. I’m pretty sure that guy they’re cleaning up is our missing Beelzebub, though. The horns match his description.”
“Beelzebub is the one Achlys mentioned last night,” Brianna said. “Jesus. So if she’s killing them and blaming us, this is a frame job?”
