Cashing Out

by SM Reine

  “On its own, it’s not surprising. But between unobtainium, iron, and silver, you have a cocktail of supplies capable of killing most gaeans. Iron and silver in those quantities are hard to get, too.”

  Charmaine’s heart skipped a beat. “You’re thinking that Dana died because she uncovered a conspiracy by the Paradisos.”

  “You can’t tell me the thought didn’t cross your mind.”

  More than a few times. “I’ve investigated the Paradisos for connection to recent murders, but never found anything. It doesn’t matter if suspicion crosses my mind if there’s no evidence.”

  “Those murders? Dana thought they’d happened because the Paradisos were stealing silver and iron,” Anthony said. “She thought they were going to poison the water supply to kill local preternaturals. Everyone but vampires. That’d be a conspiracy worth killing over, don’t you think?”

  “If you had proof of it, it’d be potential motive for killing Dana,” Charmaine said. Emphasis on the first part. If you have proof. She chewed over her next words, thinking carefully. “Someone’s stolen the Garlic Shots from the Holy Nights Cathedral. Know anything about that?”

  Anthony’s eyebrows lifted. “Being able to thieve anything from there is sort of like managing to break into the president’s bedroom while he’s sleeping to pee on the foot of his bed. Security’s insane. You just can’t do it.”

  “Dana McIntyre could,” Charmaine said.

  Anthony’s eyes darkened. “She could have.”

  “What are the odds Dana faked her death to get us going after the Paradisos?”

  “That’s not her style.”

  “Maybe she thought her usual style wasn’t working and decided to try something new.”

  “Faking her own death? You think she’d do that to her wife?”

  “Yes,” Charmaine said.

  Anthony grunted. “You’re probably right. Dana’s a McIntyre. She’d do anything to keep Vegas safe, and if she thought that Mohinder was going to use those pumps to distribute silver throughout the city’s water…”

  They both knew how ugly that would get. There weren’t as many shifters in Vegas as there were vampires, but there didn’t need to be a lot of shifters to cause a lot of devastation.

  A silver-poisoned shifter was a time bomb.

  “Where are these pumps located?” she asked.

  “Not near here,” Anthony said. “You’ll probably wanna drink bottled for the next few weeks, though.”

  “Noted,” Charmaine said.

  7

  The precinct was busy when they arrived, as always. Vampires usually weren’t a problem; the Paradisos had always done well controlling their people. But something about being in Sin City made mundanes go wild, and the Paradisos didn’t care what humans did so long as they kept spending money. They weren’t in the habit of policing human tourists.

  Lethe addiction was making it worse. It was bad in a few parts of the country, mostly on the East Coast, but it had hit hard in the area. She had gotten more lethe addicts through her doors in the last month than she’d hoped to see in her entire career.

  Anthony looked bothered by all the people hanging out in the lobby of the precinct, waiting to be charged and processed. “Busy night.”

  “All my nights are busy,” Charmaine said. One of the people in the lobby was trying to operate the water fountain to get a drink, but their fingers kept slipping off the lever. Charmaine gently took the cup from his hands. “Here. Let me help you.” She filled the cup and made sure it was steady in his fingers before letting go.

  “Thanks ma’am,” he said.

  The gratitude rankled. These people needed so much more than a cup of water—and much better than getting packed into the stations like sardines. Charmaine and Mayor Hekekia had been reaching out for extra mental-health resources, but everywhere was tight in the country.

  “Hang in there,” she said.

  She waved to the receptionist, who gave her a foggy-eyed smile before hitting the button to open the locked door. Charmaine escorted Anthony into the back. Maybe things around the precinct were worse than usual—all her guys were looking tired, like they hadn’t slept in weeks. Almost like zombies at their desks.

  Officer Jeffreys intercepted Charmaine on the way back to her office. “He’s here,” he whispered urgently.

  Charmaine’s heart dropped into her stomach. “Secretary Friederling?”

  “No, his undersecretary. He says he’s here with the secretary’s full authority. He’s been here for an hour.”

  Charmaine checked her shirt, her gig line, her badge, her gun, her hair. Everything needed to be in place. She couldn’t let one gods-damned thing be out of order. “He’s early. Where?”

  “Your office,” Officer Jeffreys said.

  She swallowed hard, took two steps toward her door. Then she took another look at Officer Jeffreys. He had a bandage on his neck. Not a big one, but he’d been out sick a lot lately, so it caught her attention. “You okay?”

  “Not really,” he said. “I’m gonna have to call it an early night.”

  Charmaine didn’t like the idea of it. Officer Jeffreys was one of the few men she trusted to be more on her side than on the OPA’s. But if he was sick, he was sick. Not his fault. “All right. Check in with you tomorrow.”

  She squared off with her shut door. The blinds were drawn. There were two men posted outside, both of them sidhe. The glamours on their collars prevented them from warping the world the way sidhe typically did, but Charmaine could smell the truth. These were seelie sidhe, probably from the Summer Court, and they served as the personal guard for important OPA members.

  She tried to decide if she should be insulted that it wasn’t Secretary Friederling himself. It wasn’t surprising, really. Vegas was a big metro area, but not the biggest. And Secretary Friederling had big, big fish to fry on his end of the country. But if he’d delegated authority to his right-hand, then Charmaine didn’t know how to prepare herself. She knew Friederling, a little. The other guy was an unknown quantity. No way to tell if he’d hear reason. No way to tell if he was going to make things better or worse until the dirty deeds were done.

  A warm hand spread between her shoulder blades. Anthony’s sympathetic face loomed nearby. “Can I come in too?” he asked.

  Charmaine nodded. “Sure.”

  But before she could open the door to her office, chaos erupted.

  The receptionist was screaming.

  Charmaine’s sidearm was drawn instantly. She was only a couple strides from landing at the front desk, and being in a police precinct meant that she had plenty of company. There were a dozen cops on her tail when she burst into the lobby.

  The old guy she’d helped get a drink of water was standing in the middle of another man’s remains. One had torn the other in half. There was blood everywhere.

  The blood-drenched attacker showed no sign of his earlier gratitude. He hissed at the sight of her. His eyes burned brilliant gold. His veins bulged from his cheeks, his forehead, his arms.

  “Oh shit,” Anthony said. “Get back, Chief!”

  She couldn’t step back to let a civilian—even one like Anthony—face down whatever the fuck was happening. “You find cover.” She turned to address the shifter. “Hands in the air. Don’t move!”

  He lifted his hands into the air, all right. He looked at them, drenched in blood, shreds of skin hanging from his fingertips.

  His whole body shivered. Skin rippled.

  “He’s shapeshifting!” Anthony barked. “Everyone get behind the wall! Move!”

  Too late.

  His flesh erupted. A wolf tore free of his bone cage.

  Charmaine had never seen a shifter change like that.

  She’d been through hundreds of moons at this point. Every full moon and new moon ever since Genesis, in fact. She knew painfully well what it was like to shed human hair, human teeth, human fingernails—to become a beast.

  It was never like this. Never this f
ast.

  Not unless the person in question was suffering silver poisoning.

  “This isn’t about tainted lethe,” Charmaine said, feeling incredibly foolish.

  Fuck Mohinder. Fuck Mohinder, fuck the Paradisos, fuck all vampires.

  Within seconds, he was full-blown wolf with shiny fangs as long as Charmaine’s hand and froth dripping from his jaw. His fur stuck up in sticky spikes from all the fluid that had gushed during the transformation.

  As if his transformation had triggered others, a handful of the other people cuffed to the benches started shaking too. Screams ripped through the air.

  “Get out of here!” Charmaine shouted to her staff. They weren’t running. They were closing in, circling around, trying to get a bead on the shifters.

  “But—” Anthony said.

  She gripped his arm. “Nobody here has silver bullets, Morales!” Not since their supplies had been stolen weeks earlier. They’d applied to the Alpha for more, but she was stingy with that stuff. Wasn’t like she wanted to make it easy for law enforcement to kill members of her pack.

  “Fuck,” Anthony said with heat.

  And then the first werewolf dived at him.

  Charmaine stepped in the way.

  She took the brunt of the blow, slammed into the wall back-first. Felt like her spine snapped, her skull cracked. They probably had. She peeled away from the drywall and hit the ground face-first. A paw rested against her shoulder blades, the full weight of the beast digging into her.

  Heat flooded Charmaine’s body. It wasn’t the heat of adrenaline—though she had that too. It was the healing power of a shapeshifter.

  Even while the werewolf was trying to dig furrows into her spine, she was healing. Bones popping. Reassembling. The fire seized her and she screamed out commands between breaths.

  “Get Wilson! Bellet! Hume!”

  “You heard her! Go!” Anthony sounded more distant, and Charmaine couldn’t tell if it was because he’d taken cover or because blood was rushing through her ears.

  The werewolf scooped her off of the ground. Threw her into the doors.

  Glass shattered. Charmaine rolled out onto the street, skin pricked by glass.

  “Great,” she groaned, staggering to her feet. Her right knee buckled under her.

  She shoved a hand into her pocket, closing her fingers around an enchanted moonstone.

  Under ordinary conditions, shifters were strongly discouraged from changing outside of the normal tides of the moon, as dictated by the Alpha in Northgate. But right now, Charmaine was facing off one, two—shit, four different shifters suffering silver poisoning. They filled the lobby of her precinct with furred bodies so massive that they spilled over the benches.

  Nobody had silver bullets.

  Charmaine clutched the moonstone charm and began to change.

  She wasn’t silver-poisoned, so it took time. Her kneecaps popped and reversed. She toppled forward onto hands that oozed blood because her fingernails had already fallen out. She tasted copper, felt the press of canine teeth within her jaw. Her facial skin tore as the coyote’s muzzle elongated from her grinding bones.

  The most annoying part was her hair falling out, leaving her bald, bare. Only for a moment. Then heat flushed over her skin as the fur erupted. It was coarse desert-brown coyote fur. Not a pretty thing. Not like those enormous shaggy wolves.

  In her animal form, Charmaine was much larger than mundane coyotes, though still half the size of a werewolf. The figure reflected in the one unbroken window was dainty and still had a few human features.

  She couldn’t wait to finish changing. The receptionist had slammed the fire doors down to block the werewolves from getting into the back of the precinct, but there were civilians and cops in the lobby. People who had committed no crimes worse than vandalism. People who were getting shredded apart by shifters on Charmaine’s watch.

  She leaped through the doors again.

  Charmaine struck the nearest of the wolves, and she had to let instinct take over. The coyote was better at fighting than she was. Faster, more ruthless.

  They ripped into each other.

  She tasted blood. Felt skin under her claws.

  Teeth clamped on her flank, and muscle tore.

  Charmaine managed to get her mouth around the muzzle of one of the werewolves. It was a show of dominance that meant little to her coyote spirit, but communicated volumes to the wolf. It should have made a rational shifter kowtow to her superior status. Instead, he thrashed harder.

  His eyes were rolling and his muzzle reeked of silver.

  One of the fire doors reopened. Three more animals were crouched on the other side. Two wolves and a mountain lion. Those were the officers she’d called for—Wilson, Bellet, and Hume—who were shifters staffing the precinct that night.

  The cavalry had arrived.

  They dived into the fray.

  She couldn’t see what they were doing. Couldn’t think, couldn’t feel anything but the pain of teeth sinking into her foreleg, claws gashing her spine. She got a good view down the mouth of one of the slavering poisoned werewolves when it grabbed her whole fucking face in its teeth. Fuck, it hurt—but it got her close enough to dig her paws into his chest, ripping him open.

  Bang. Bang. Bang.

  Gunshots.

  What idiot was opening fire on the werewolves? Lead bullets wouldn’t do jack shit to shifters gone wild.

  Except then one of the bullets hit the werewolf she was grappling with right between the eyes.

  And he splattered.

  It was a silver bullet.

  Charmaine got the fuck down and out of the way, slinking under the bench with her belly to the ground. She hadn’t even realized how damaged she was until she saw the streak of blood she trailed. And…were those her intestines? Had she been gutted? It didn’t feel like she’d been gutted. Everything hurt so badly that she’d gone into shock.

  She shivered under the bench while the unseen shooters continued to fire.

  They had good aim. One at a time, they took down each of the werewolves who’d been silver poisoned. And they didn’t hit her officers.

  Within moments, it looked like her lobby had been wallpapered in blood and werewolf guts, and things were quiet.

  Black boots crossed in front of her bench.

  “You’re good to come out,” said a male voice.

  Charmaine dragged herself out, still shaking hard. Anthony leaped across the room to her side. Helped pull her free.

  “You okay?” he asked, his fingers running through her fur, inventorying her injuries.

  Charmaine shook her head. It was the only way she could communicate in coyote form.

  Anthony must have known what she wanted to ask, though. “I went in to your office to get backup,” he said grimly. “Sorry.”

  She rolled over to see who was wearing those black boots.

  Standing over Charmaine were three people. All of them wearing OPA black. Two of them bore glamours that hid their species. The man in the middle—the one without a glamour—had a yellow Steno pad, a half-smile, and a halo of magic. He was surprisingly attractive. Charmaine actually felt a jolt when she saw him, like she’d accidentally stumbled into a bizarre advertisement for perfume populated by pretty male models.

  “Good evening, Chief Villanueva,” said Undersecretary Hawke. “Looks like we might have to put off our meeting until a healer can look at you.”

  Charmaine had the benefits of accelerated healing, as any shifter did. She would have repaired the damage inflicted by the werewolves within a few hours. But those hours were too long for her to waste at a time like this.

  The advantage to being mauled with Anthony nearby was access to his healer, Edie Ashe. She was well versed in preternatural medicine. She could do more than fix wounds; she had a moonstone to bring Charmaine back into her human form first, and then mixed a potion to restore her energy before she started zipping together the injuries.

  “I brought you some of
Dana’s clothes too,” Edie said. “Figured you could use them when Anthony said you had to shift unexpectedly. Dana’s stuff should be long enough to cover you.”

  “Appreciate it.” Charmaine wasn’t looking forward to meeting Undersecretary Hawke in a baggy Godsmack shirt and ripped jeans, but it was probably better than meeting him naked, which was her other option at the moment.

  “Gimme a ring if you need anything else.” Edie slipped a card into Charmaine’s palm. “I’m used to being on call.”

  Charmaine frowned. “Thanks.”

  “Problem?” Edie asked, packing up her bag.

  “I got an offer to consult from another friend of the Hunting Club earlier. Just wondering where the sudden friendliness is coming from.”

  “Don’t feel too special. All the Hunting Club associates get my card.”

  “I’m not an associate,” Charmaine said. “I’m the police chief.”

  “That too,” Edie said.

  Charmaine bit back a response. Edie wasn’t the problem. But if someone in the Hunting Club was circulating rumors that Charmaine was on their side, it was going to make her life a hell of a lot harder at the meeting with Undersecretary Hawke.

  Clearly Charmaine needed to have another talk with Anthony.

  She dropped Edie’s card in a drawer.

  “Thanks,” Charmaine said again, opening the door to let Edie out of her office.

  Undersecretary Hawke and Anthony were on the other side, waiting.

  The professional vein in Charmaine prevented her from swearing aloud at the sight of them. Her urge to look professional had taken her far—all the way to the top of her department, in fact. And it helped her now, making sure that she could manage a smile and a firm handshake for Undersecretary Hawke even though she felt horribly underprepared.

  “Come in, take a seat,” Charmaine said.

  Anthony didn’t immediately step forward, but Undersecretary Hawke beckoned to him.

  “You might as well come in,” Undersecretary Hawke said. “This will concern you too.”

  “Shit. We’re getting our license yanked, aren’t we?” Anthony asked.

  “Save the freakout,” he said. “Let me start with the good stuff.”