by SM Reine
Dana’s face scowled back at her from at least a dozen of those news articles.
She knew that she hit the papers sometimes, but avoided reading the articles. Dickless had been so invested in news about Dana that they went to buy the hard copies—something that only the oldest of the old and collectors did. Same way that vinyl still circulated.
“Please don’t tell me they’ve cut my face out and taped it on any naked women,” Dana said.
“I don’t think it’s the sex she wants.” Cèsar ripped a page off the wall. It was a think-piece from The Atlantic analyzing how a mere human like Dana could take down vampires. The author’s conclusion at the end had been highlighted in pink. It boiled down to saying Dana was simply stronger than vampires in every way but physical. Mentally, socially, in her advanced training.
That article had been published a few weeks before Dana got eaten by Achlys, and written the year prior. She’d forgotten about the interview she’d given the author by the time it was published.
Someone had written “WRONG” in big letters over it in permanent marker.
Cèsar waved his hand toward one side of the wall. “These articles are from before you got changed.” He waved his other hand at the opposite side. “These are from after.” There were no articles about Dana on the right. They were all about Mohinder, Nissa, and the evolving Paradisos. “On the bright side, McIntyre, I don’t think this killer is out to get you.”
“You kidding? All the ladies want me. Can’t resist me.” Because Dana seriously needed another lady-vampire obsessing over her.
“Naw, we’ve gotta look at this another way. She’s fixated on getting strong. That’s why she stole venom and started dressing up like Count Chocula.”
“The strongest of all the vampires ever,” Dana said.
“I like his cereal,” Cèsar said.
The desk was as cluttered as the kitchen table, but one thing caught her eye. “Weird. Look at this.” Dana lifted a book from amid the crumpled gum wrappers.
“That’s Lucian Wilder’s book on werewolf hunting, isn’t it?” Cèsar took it out of her hand, glanced over his shoulder at Charmaine. She was distracted talking to the agents in the living room. “Let’s not tell the chief what we found. Shifters get touchy about the Wilder legacy of mayhem, slaughter, and skinning.”
“Yeah they do. That book’s been out of print since Genesis, and the Alpha made sure it’s illegal to reprint.”
“Well, this one’s dated 2015, so she must have gotten a last copy somehow. Bloom must have been a collector.” Cèsar shifted other books on his desk around with a knuckle. “Old annotated copy of Hume’s Almanac, Vampyr: A Guide, copies of The Prophecies of Flynn—you want to talk about weird, creepy books? That’s a whole series of creepy books.”
Someone had been annotating some of the older books. They were yellowed, crumpled, and torn. The spines had gone soft from how many times they’d been opened and closed. The top one was called A History of Vlad the Impaler. The one underneath…
“Countess Báthory?” Charmaine asked, peering over Dana’s shoulder. She’d caught up to them. “Who’s that?”
“The Blood Countess was in sixteenth-century Hungary. She was caught taking baths in the blood of virgins lured from a nearby village,” Dana said. “She thought it would keep her young.”
“I’d rather inject copious amounts of botulism into my face,” Cèsar said.
The police chief flipped through the book on Countess Báthory. Dana didn’t need the refresher; she’d studied history as part of her adolescent training, and her memories of the Blood Countess’s crimes were as clear as Il Castrato Senesino’s.
This information must have been new to Charmaine. She looked increasingly grave as she flipped through the book. “If Freddie Bloom was studying Vlad the Impaler to learn how to skewer people, then what’s she going to do after reading about this countess?”
“Ideally, she’ll follow Báthory’s example and rot in a cell until the day she dies,” Cèsar said. “But not if we stand around talking all day. Hey!” He raised his voice as he approached the agents in the next room. “Round up the evidence! Everything you see in here? That’s evidence!”
“I trusted Officer Jeffreys,” Charmaine said, standing back beside Dana. “If you’d asked me yesterday who I’d want to back me up on a deep dive into the Nether Worlds, I’d have put him near the top of the list.” She stared helplessly around his apartment, frustration trembling in her fingers. “It took too long for me to realize he was gone. I should have been checking on him.”
“Best thing to do when you feel betrayed? Punch shit,” Dana said. “It’s what I do.”
“I don’t feel betrayed. I can’t believe I didn’t see this. I’m disappointed in myself, shocked, angry… I should have known.” Charmaine raked a hand through her hair, tipping her head back to gaze at the ceiling. “I’m thinking of quitting.”
“You quit, I quit.”
Charmaine flung her hands in the air. “I got this job in the first place for arresting the Fremont Slasher. And he was never the Slasher. I worked with Jeffreys for years without realizing his information was bogus. And Anthony…”
“We all make mistakes,” Dana said.
“You don’t.”
“The fuck I don’t. Hey, you missed something twice. Twice across a career. Doesn’t mean you’re not good—and the city needs you now more than ever. You got it? Don’t mention quitting again or I’ll make a coyote skin rug out of you.”
Charmaine snorted. “I don’t know why I’m venting to you. You know I hold you in high esteem, McIntyre, but not in the feelings department.”
“You’re talking to me for the same reason I’m talking to you. Because neither of us can talk to Anthony anymore.” Dana almost couldn’t get the last words out.
The police chief cleared her throat. “Hey, Cèsar! Time’s wasting. Next move?”
“Well, we have to look for something like this.” Cèsar crossed the tide of techs and agents to show them diagrams taken from the Wall of Crazy. “Freddie Bloom was designing a shower.”
“How’s a giant cage hanging over a bathtub work as a shower?” Charmaine asked, tilting her head to study the diagram from another angle.
Dana remembered engravings of that particular device. “Person goes in the cage. Psychopath goes in the bath. He stabs whoever’s in the cage and stands under the blood spray.”
Charmaine looked like she was halfway between disgusted and pensive and didn’t know which one to chase. She picked pensive. “Freddie Bloom might have a trade background. Someone who can plan and build elaborate cages like this has a background.”
“Was Freddie Bloom in the military?” Dana asked.
“We’re searching for information about her, but her background check will probably come up with as much legitimate information as Officer Jeffreys’s.”
“If Bloom doesn’t have a military background, she’s not the killer.”
“Don’t get cocky. You don’t know that.” Charmaine picked up another photograph, her golden eyes fixed on it with breathtaking fury. “I think we know where we can find all about Bloom and her brother. Who they really were.” She turned the frame so that Dana could see it.
The picture showed a younger Albert Jeffreys standing next to a much older woman with the same nose, the same eyes. She looked like Freddie Bloom plus thirty years.
“Il Castrato Senesino has a mommy,” Cèsar said. “That’s nice.”
“Look at the L&Ps in the background,” Charmaine said. L&Ps was a local convenience store chain. “That’s a few blocks east of here. She might be local. I’ll see if I can find her. We’ve gotta pin this fucker down now, before we lose more people like…” She trailed off, gazing at Jeffreys’s body. A photographer was taking shots of him from every angle now. The flash made his skin flare bright each time.
The chief blew out the front door.
Dana checked her watch. “How long before daylighting protocol
kicks in?”
“About thirty hours,” Cèsar said.
One day.
Thirty hours too many.
13
It turned out that Albert Jeffreys’s last known address was near the L&Ps from the photo. His name was still on the deed to the property, but the electricity bill was sent to a woman named Joni Harris—a sixty-three year old who lived alone. She had been arrested for drug possession once. The photo on file matched Jeffreys’s picture.
Dana and Charmaine arrived at sunrise.
The home was a tiny stucco house with a clay-colored roof and a dirt yard dotted by foxtail tufts. A shoebox-sized swamp cooler was jammed where a window used to be, held in place by copious amounts of tape and plywood. The door’s screen hung ajar, crooked, disconnected from its upper hinge.
When Dana opened the squeaking gate, a Chihuahua’s head thrust through the dog flap. It yapped frantically at them, teeth bared.
“I’m not going near that thing,” Dana said. “Just FYI.”
“It weighs less than a toaster,” Charmaine said.
“I got bitten by a Bichon Frise when I was seven. Those tiny teeth hurt.”
Charmaine shook her head. “Dana McIntyre, legendary vampire slayer.” Her eyebrows twitched into a scowl. “I hate small dogs.” She whirled and snarled, baring her human teeth at the Chihuahua.
The dog yelped. It disappeared inside.
“Much better,” Dana said, climbing the stairs.
Charmaine pounded a fist on the doorframe. “Mrs. Harris? Mrs. Harris, are you home?”
The responding silence was filled with the rushing of cars over the freeway, the Chihuahua barking somewhere deep in the house, and the rattle of the swamp cooler.
Charmaine pounded harder. “Mrs. Harris!”
“Hey look, the door is open,” Dana said.
“No it’s not. What do you—?”
Dana leaned back and lashed out with one boot. She shattered the jamb.
“Damn it, McIntyre,” Charmaine said.
Dana shoved into the house. All its windows were boarded internally—a fact that she hadn’t been able to tell from outside. It made the tiny one-bedroom house hot and close.
“It reeks of dog shit,” Dana groaned, stepping aside so that Charmaine could enter as well. They tested the light switch. It didn’t turn anything on.
“It smells like a lot of things, and dog shit is the least offensive of them.” Charmaine’s sense of smell was much better than Dana’s. She was probably picking up all kinds of details about Mrs. Harris’s life that Dana was happy not to know about.
Just being able to see inside the house was bad enough. Its sagging brown couch had accumulated a good fifty years of tar from cigarette smoking. It had been nudged aside recently, exposing a slice of white paint where everything else was stained yellow. The peeling linoleum was edged in dirt that had blown in from outside.
A woman stood in the doorway to the kitchen. Dana hadn’t heard her coming.
“Mrs. Harris?” Charmaine asked. She grabbed the badge on her belt. “I’m the chief of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, Charmaine Villanueva. Your door was open.”
“You have no right to be on my property,” Mrs. Harris said without lifting her head. What remained of her patchy hair was stringy, hanging limp over her sagging shoulders. “This is my home. You need a warrant.”
“We thought someone was being murdered in here,” Dana said. “You know, with all the screeching.” The Chihuahua sounded like he’d been locked in a bathroom, but he was still going.
“That’s Conan,” Mrs. Harris said. “Conan is not probable cause.”
“I have questions about your kids,” Charmaine said.
Mrs. Harris’s hands clutched the collar of her shirt. The chest had “Nama-Gonna-Stay At Home” encircled by tacky-ass fake mandalas around it. It looked slightly more recent than the couch, but only slightly. The hems at the armpits had torn over time to expose the stretched lines of her sagging side-boob.
“Brian? Or Shelley?” Mrs. Harris asked.
“Brian and Shelley Harris? Those are the names of your children?”
The old woman nodded after a moment’s hesitation. “They came out of me. Yeah. Too old to call them children now.”
“Let’s talk outside,” Charmaine said.
Getting out of that stench sounded like a great idea to Dana, but Mrs. Harris puffed up at the suggestion. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“I’m allergic to cigarette smoke and dog shit.” Dana faked a cough. “The wall stains alone are sending me into anaphylactic shock.”
“That is from incense,” Mrs. Harris said, pointing at the wall. “It’s part of my religion, you ignorant assholes! You can’t discriminate against my religion! It might be legal to imprison witches with filthy shifters, but this is still America, goddess damn it all, and—and I don’t talk to Brian anymore! If you want help with him, you’ll have to look somewhere else!”
“Do you think Brian is someone the police would need help against?” Charmaine asked.
Mrs. Harris grabbed sunglasses off a shelf before shuffling into the living room. She crammed them onto her face, hiding her eyes, and wedged herself against the wall by the end of the couch. “He was a disturbed man.”
“Was?” Dana asked. “When was the last time you spoke to your son?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember. Get out of my house.”
“Do your children get along with each other? Do you think they’d ever be likely to hurt one another?”
“I told you to get out of my house!” Mrs. Harris clung to the neck of her shirt tighter, like it was a security blanket.
“We can have this talk here or at the precinct. It’s your choice,” Charmaine said. “Your kids appear to have falsified their backgrounds, and we need to know their histories.”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know about what happened to him at school. How he hurt her.”
“What did Brian do to Shelley?” Charmaine asked.
Mrs. Harris laughed. “What didn’t he do? He was sadistic. Killing her pet rabbit, pushing her into walls, sticking her with thumb tacks when she slept… Brian deserved it when Shelley messed with him. It’s all in the files—I know it is.”
Charmaine didn’t look visibly disturbed. Killing pet rabbits wasn’t much when compared to the kinds of crime scenes they’d been working. “What did Shelley do to Brian in retaliation?”
“He was always cruel to her,” Mrs. Harris said. “I kept telling him to stop, so he had it coming.”
Charmaine repeated herself. “What did Shelley do to Brian?”
“Both of them went through treatment,” Mrs. Harris said. “They were cleared to live in society. I didn’t even raise them—they were in foster homes. You can’t blame me for anything.”
“Yes. I know. We’re just here to talk.”
“I can see the truth in you,” Mrs. Harris said, shaking her pointer finger at them both. “I know what you’re thinking. That losing Brian’s manhood made him more aggressive, more violent. It’s not true. Men are only improved when those hormones are taken away from them. He’d have been even better if Shelley had fixed him before puberty struck!”
Dana’s hand went to the stake on her belt. This lady was a complete creepshow. “You’re telling me that Brian Harris lost his ‘manhood’? As in his genitalia? And this fixed him?”
“Those were her words, not mine,” Mrs. Harris said. “I did my best to make Brian all better afterward. It’s not my fault he’s…” Her jaw trembled. She forced herself to let go of her shirt, and the cloth was all wrinkled where she’d been holding it.
Charmaine was wound up so tight that she practically hummed. Her eyes glinted in the darkness. “Are you aware your son has been found dead?”
Mrs. Harris slid onto the arm of the couch. Her fingernails dug into the arm. It was like she was trying to retreat as far into the darkness in the back of the room as poss
ible. “I didn’t know.” But she didn’t seem surprised, and she certainly didn’t look grieving.
She was lying. Mrs. Harris had seen at least one of her kids—and recently.
Alarm bells rang out in Dana’s mind. “Take the sunglasses off.”
“I’m hungover. I don’t wanna,” she snapped.
Dana released the stake from her belt, swinging it behind her so that it was hidden.
The chief approached Mrs. Harris slowly. “We’re going to need you to come down to the station to discuss this.”
“No!” She slammed her back into the corner. Even then, she kept trying to get further away, digging her feet into the couch for traction. “It’s not my fault!” A tear tracked down her cheek, sliding out from underneath the frame of the sunglasses. “He was wrong the minute he came out with that shit between his legs!”
“Take the glasses off right now and put your hands behind your head,” Dana said.
Mrs. Harris seemed to snap. “You want my glasses off? Fine! I’ll take them off!”
“No sudden movements,” Charmaine began to say.
But the woman had already taken off her sunglasses and thrown them so hard that they whipped Dana’s head backward. Her skull struck drywall.
She staggered with a groan, touching her throbbing head. Her fingers got bloody. The woman’s sunglasses had cut Dana.
Mrs. Harris’s irises were crimson.
With a shriek, she tore her shirt open from the neck to the hem, exposing those sagging tube-sock breasts. There was a line of impalement marks running from her collarbone to her navel. One of Dickless’s victims left to walk.
The smell of blood in the air was too much for a new vampire.
She was on Dana within instants.
Mrs. Harris’s head snapped back, jaw opening wide to expose short, pointed teeth. Dana didn’t know what kind of vampire she was. It didn’t even matter. She was about to tear Dana’s throat out.
Then Charmaine appeared behind her.
