by SM Reine
She hurled the vampire off of Dana.
When Mrs. Harris hit the wall, she exploded into ash.
Charmaine reeled away. “What the…?”
Dust showered to the floor. Dana’s stake landed at the center of it all, thumping across the carpet and coming to a stop at her toes.
She had brought the stake up when Mrs. Harris jumped. The vampire had staked herself.
And now their only contact who knew Albert Jeffreys before he’d been Albert Jeffreys was ash.
“You know,” Dana said, propped up on her elbows on the smoke-stained carpet, “this week has been total shit.”
Charmaine took out her phone and looked at the screen. Anger clouded her features. “It gets worse.”
Dana’s phone buzzed too.
She’d gotten a text from Cèsar—presumably the same one that Charmaine had.
“Alarms at Tonopah detention center. Nissa Royal missing.”
14
Nissa’s prison rose from the desert, a line of white on a field of black. From a distance, it looked like a daylit greenhouse built on a dried lakebed. As they grew nearer, Dana could make out the faint glimmer of warding magic, barbed wire, outlines of men with guns—features that belonged on no greenhouse.
Dana’s phone rang and Charmaine handed it to her.
“The number’s unknown,” said the chief.
With the phone pressed between her ear and shoulder, Dana whipped around an outcropping to take a shortcut closer to the prison. “McIntyre here,” Dana said.
“It’s Lincoln. I looked for Garlic Shots.”
“And?”
“I don’t have the right stuff. The Hardwicks aren’t sharing, either. They can’t afford to donate again,” Lincoln said.
Dana clenched her teeth. She drove over a pile of sagebrush and it felt like her skull was gonna shake out of her head. “I’ll take whatever you’ve got of the Garlic Shots short of unobtainium.” Maybe the apotropaics alone would shrivel Freddie Bloom into a helpless raisin.
“I can drop it off at the Hunting Lodge before sunrise if you—”
“Good, do that,” she said, and she turned off the phone. Not a courteous way to speak to her spiritual leader. But she’d reached the prison, and she could hear the alarms.
The shadowy men inside the prison were running. It was never a good sign when OPA agents got moving like that.
“Fuck,” Dana swore.
“Go find Nissa,” Charmaine said. “I’ll get right to the security station.”
“Roger.” Dust exploded in front of Dana’s car when she braked hard, leaping out to badge through the gate. She was a few long strides from the door, where she didn’t need a badge to get inside; someone had torn the plastic open, leaving a ragged hole in both wall and ward.
Dana stopped short inside of the entryway. All that semitransparent plastic was splattered with blood. The harsh UV lights meant that the blood was bright, violent red. Even the scuffed dirt was soaked with it.
“What happened?” Dana asked, grabbing an agent by his arm when he tried to head for the security checkpoint.
He looked at her without seeing. His panic made the world behind him swirl, breaking through the OPA glamour that otherwise concealed his sidhe magic. “We have to check the perimeter!” he said, shoving Dana aside to burst through the doors. The plastic flapped behind him.
Her heart flopped. “Fuck,” she said again.
Nobody stopped Dana when she raced through door after door. They were too busy trying to help their compatriots escape—carrying the wounded over their shoulders, applying pressure to bullet wounds while they moved.
Bullet wounds. Not teeth marks.
Maybe Nissa hadn’t escaped.
Dana only had the luxury of thinking like that for a few seconds. She raced down the long hallway to Nissa’s cell and flung aside the plastic sheets that formed the door.
Nissa was not in the center ring of darkness. In fact, there was no center ring of darkness. The entire room was only half-lit. It was still bright enough that it should have kept Nissa from wandering—unless she had help.
Like the blank-eyed OPA agents aiming a bunch of guns at Dana.
Thralls.
Dana flung herself back into the hallway a heartbeat before they opened fire.
Bullets chewed through the plastic. Holes opened over her head, each of them the size of her fist or smaller.
Dana rolled and kept rolling. Bullets peppered the ground where she’d been lying as they adjusted their aim to compensate. They could only make out her silhouette in the hallway once she was on the other side of the plastic, just as she’d only been able to see silhouettes when she approached.
The torn plastic let hot desert air blow in. Dana squirmed through it, crawling out into darkness.
She swept her gaze over the lakebed. Even with the moonlight, it was too dark to tell if anyone was running into the distance.
Nissa was long gone.
Dana raced around the perimeter of the prison tent, getting behind the enthralled OPA agents. They’d lost track of her, brains numbed by Nissa’s psychic power.
That meant that they weren’t ready for Dana when her hands punched through the tent, tearing plastic as she grabbed two agents by the shoulders and slammed their heads together. Skull against skull sounded like striking hollow coconuts.
She kicked aside the tangle of plastic sheeting to break through. The thralls turned slowly. She ripped a gun out of the hands of one agent. Dana aimed low, squeezed the trigger, and swept wide. Bullets bit into the legs of enthralled agents.
They weren’t so numbed by thrall that they couldn’t scream from the pain.
Dana kicked the guns away from them as they fell. It was enough to disarm the humans, but one of them was sidhe. They couldn’t be disarmed of their most powerful weapon.
She flung a hand toward Dana. Sidhe magic zipped through the air, turning it to electricity. Cold wind blasted into Dana’s chest. Her feet tore free of the ground.
Dana lost track of gravity, lost track of the tent. Light and darkness flipped end over end.
It wasn’t until she hit lakebed that she realized she’d been thrown meters from the tent.
A gunshot rang out.
Dana flinched.
But she didn’t feel any pain.
Pushing herself onto all fours, she looked up to see the sidhe agent facedown in the dirt and Undersecretary Hawke holstering a Desert Eagle.
“Sorry, Colleen,” he said.
Dana got to her feet. She was hurting in all sorts of places where she’d forgotten that she could even feel pain. Vampires didn’t hurt like this. “Did you just kill one of your own agents?”
Cèsar grabbed Dana’s arm when she staggered over, helping her keep on her feet. “I just shot her a little bit.” By which he meant he’d shot her in the back. The shoulder blade, to be precise.
“That looks a half-inch away from being fatal,” Dana said.
“If she were human, it would be fatal,” Cèsar said. “But the faerie folk are sturdier than you’d think, and these aren’t iron bullets. Hey! Cleanup crew!” He waved at headlights approaching from the opposite side of the lakebed.
“Did you run into Charmaine?”
“Yep. Already sent her back to the city. She had no business being out here anyway.”
“You don’t think an escaped convict is the police chief’s business?”
“Nope,” Cèsar said. “So we’ve got a little bit of a problem, McIntyre.”
“Little? Nissa Royal is a little problem?”
“We know she won’t have gone far. After all, didn’t she escape for you? She better have escaped for you. I paid you fifty bucks over that.”
Dana shook her head slowly. As much as she cherished her hard-won money, she didn’t think Nissa had left to look for Dana. Nissa would have intercepted her on the way. Or she’d still be at the prison. “She’s up to something else.”
“Well, wherever she went,
she better plan on getting out of the area in the next eighteen hours,” Cèsar said. “Once we light this city up, any vampires left on its streets are ash.”
Dana kneeled next to the sidhe agent—Colleen—and helped turn her over. She was beautiful, as all sidhe were, and already beginning to stir. When her eyes opened to focus on Dana, the light within her irises made it look like she contained hollow galaxies. “Dana,” Colleen said. Her voice was as vacant as her gaze.
Dana muttered a few choice swear words. “Nissa.”
“What?” Cèsar asked, putting a hand on his gun.
“She knows who I am so she’s still under thrall,” Dana said. She sat Colleen up. “I’m gonna bet you have a message for me.”
The way that Colleen hunched her shoulders made her look a lot like Nissa. “I changed my mind about the series of events. I want to kill Il Castrato Senesino together,” Colleen said to Dana. “One more kill as a team, like old times.”
“There are no old times, you fucking stalker,” Dana said.
“Find Il Castrato Senesino for me,” Colleen said. “I’ll meet you once it’s time for him to die.”
“Where? Where will we meet?” Dana asked.
“You’ll find me,” Colleen said. “You’ll have no choice but to find me.” The instant the last word came out, she slumped, falling back to the ground. Message over.
“I hope that message made more sense to you,” Cèsar said.
Unfortunately, it did.
Dana was on her feet, lurching toward the car she’d parked by the entrance.
“There’s only one place Nissa could go where I’d have to follow her,” Dana called over her shoulder.
And she needed to get there first.
Dana slammed through the door to the penthouse she shared with Penny an hour later.
One long, agonizing hour of driving at top speed into Las Vegas. It was the fastest Dana had crossed that much space on four wheels before.
It wasn’t fast enough.
The penthouse was dark. It was empty.
“Penny!” Dana shouted, pushing into the bathroom, the bedroom, the armory. She knew she wouldn’t find her wife there. She could feel the emptiness in the air from the moment she’d entered the city.
OPA agents spilled throughout the penthouse, searching behind furniture and generally violating the McIntyres’ private space. As if Penny would be hiding in the pantry.
Dana remembered how it had felt when she’d first realized that the Fremont Slasher had taken her wife, four years earlier. It was one of those unforgettable moments. Sort of like seeing Anthony’s brains spilled over the rubble, or like watching that video of Albert Jeffreys impaling people in front of Luxor 2.
Penny and Dana had argued the night that she was taken. They argued a lot, even back in those days. The fastest way through such an argument was usually to give one another space, so they’d taken turns going for walks without each other, getting a little air.
Penny had gone walking on Fremont Street.
Later, she’d admitted that she’d only gone there for a walk because she’d known it would drive Dana crazy. Fremont Street had already been a known hunting ground for Mohinder. They hadn’t had a victim profile at the time, but they’d known women weren’t safe there.
Even so, Penny had thought she could survive anything, and the risk had been worth it to teach Dana a lesson.
After a few minutes downtown alone, Penny had gotten over their fight. She’d texted Dana to ask her to meet at a restaurant there.
When Dana had arrived, Penny’s table had been empty.
There had been blood in a nearby alley.
Orc blood.
It was distinctive, orc blood. A strange inhuman hue that looked like an oil slick at night. It smelled like fires burning in the belly of the Earth.
When Dana found that blood, she’d felt like she was falling into a bottomless pit. Tumbling for eternity seemed like it’d be worse than death. At least there was an abrupt ending to that. A splat, a squish, oblivion.
But Dana fell and kept falling when Penny disappeared the first time.
“McIntyre? McIntyre, respond!” Cèsar’s voice was more demanding than usual, and also quieter. Dana had begrudgingly put on one of those earpieces when she headed back into town so that the undersecretary could keep communicating with her.
“I need you to put out an APB for Penny McIntyre right now,” Dana said. “Nissa Royal has taken my wife.”
15
There had been OPA agents watching the penthouse to ensure Penny’s safety. They were found sitting in the van where they had been performing surveillance, staring blank-eyed at the street ahead. They didn’t fight when Cèsar ordered them rounded up, and they sat quietly in an interview room at the precinct once herded there.
Charmaine braced her elbow against the glass of the two-sided mirror, staring into the yellow-tinged brick room. It was enchanted to contain sidhe and shifters, just in case Nissa had given them further orders. They didn’t look to be going anywhere. “How many thralls does she have now?”
“Dunno,” Dana said. She couldn’t seem to get out more words than that. She couldn’t manage an educated guess, either. Or an uneducated guess.
She paced the room from end to end, imagining that the soles of her studded boots could punch earthquakes into the planet’s crust. Stomp on one end, mountain on the other. A mountain that would skewer Nissa Royal.
Dana should have tried so much harder to kill her.
“Nissa’s got the same time limit as Freddie Bloom,” Charmaine said. “Fifteen hours until the daylighting. She won’t be alive this time tomorrow.”
“Penny might not be alive either,” Dana snarled.
Slam.
She’d punched the wall without thinking about it. The bricks hadn’t been impressed. Her knuckles were bleeding. The pain hadn’t struck yet—she had barely felt the impact—but Dana suspected she’d soon discover a broken bone in her hand.
Charmaine took her phone out, pressed a button. “Send Edie Ashe to the precinct,” she muttered into the microphone. She hung up. “We don’t have the resources to find two vampires in fifteen hours. But if you find Bloom, you’ll get Royal too. We have to keep the teams on Bloom.”
“Fuck Bloom. She can kill every last person in the city for all I care!”
This time, Dana’s lashing fist shot for the window.
Charmaine caught her hand before it could strike glass.
The force of it didn’t even make the police chief blink. A shifter was exponentially stronger than Dana, and being clutched in her fingers was like being held by steel. “Remember how we found the business card in Albert Jeffreys’s apartment?” Charmaine asked quietly. “I couldn’t get the therapist on the phone, so I sent a unit to his office.”
“Don’t tell me,” Dana said. She pulled her fist free. Shook out her aching knuckles. “The therapist is dead.”
“Skewered. Bloom tried to change him into a vampire, but the therapist didn’t survive.”
Dana’s rebirthed anger came from nowhere, and so did the crash. She hadn’t consciously thrown a stapler at the door. There was suddenly glass everywhere and Dana’s skin was hot with fury and the chief’s gun was drawn.
Even now, the thralls didn’t react.
Charmaine kept the gun trained on the floor. “Take a deep breath and tell me what sin that stapler committed against you.”
“Nissa has Penny,” Dana said. “She has my fucking wife.”
She holstered her gun. “I know.”
“Every minute that Dickless runs circles around us is a minute that Penny relives her worst nightmare!”
And it was all Dana’s fault.
“Breathe,” Charmaine said. “Come on, girl. Breathe.”
The words were a knife slicing through the bitter haze of Dana’s anger.
She inhaled, exhaled.
Charmaine closed the blinds over the hole in the door’s window. “The good news is that Bl
oom didn’t destroy the therapist’s files. She trashed the personal server, but not the paper backups in the basement.”
“Paper records.” Dana snorted.
“Frankly, I’d be a happier person if I didn’t know the story of the Harris family.” Charmaine picked up the stapler, set it on the table. “As we’ve learned, Albert Jeffreys’s birth name was Brian Harris, and he has a sister named Shelley. Genesis didn’t touch them. Their stepfather came back sidhe. He left the family for the sidhe courts, Mrs. Harris lost herself to substance abuse, and the kids entered foster care.”
“Did growing up in the system hurt their feelings? Turn Baby Girl psycho? Boo-fucking-hoo,” Dana said. “Thousands of people grew up in foster homes because of Genesis and didn’t turn into serial killers.”
“Well, it gets worse,” Charmaine said. “Bloom didn’t just abuse Jeffreys. She turned him into a total eunuch. It seems like he was her first victim. Jeffreys was sixteen, so he went into the military immediately. Bloom went through years of therapy and graduated with honors. Never hurt anyone again—not on record.”
“Wait. Jeffreys went into the military? Where’d Bloom get military training?”
“We can’t prove that the killer has it,” Charmaine reminded her. “And if you’re implicating Jeffreys…”
His cold corpse flashed through Dana’s mind.
“I can’t shake the feeling I’m missing something,” Dana said. “Don’t know what. But I do know one thing: I need another Garlic Shot. Mine were confiscated by the OPA, so they’ve gotta be around. Call Cèsar, tell him I need a vial or two.” One for Dickless, one for Nissa.
“The same law forbidding warrants against vampires forbids giving out Garlic Shots,” Charmaine said.
“But the government does have the samples taken from me? I knew it.”
“They’re trying to produce more. I heard that Secretary Friederling forged a pact with the Hardwicks that means he’s got access to unobtainium from them, but—”
“Then get unobtainium!” Dana said. Lincoln was bringing her the rest of the Garlic Shots; she could surely synthesize a cure in the next fifteen hours. “I don’t care about laws. I don’t care if the government’s waffling over the legal future of vampires. I don’t care. The only thing that matters is Penny.”
