by SM Reine
“Give the vial back to me,” Dana said, and Nissa obeyed. There were only a few CC’s remaining inside. It was enough. It would have to be enough.
She poured the rest into the tub.
Nissa stepped up to the nearest cage. It had two vampires inside, indistinguishable due to the flayed flesh. They were too weak to fight. They didn’t even react when she opened the door.
She said, “All of them?”
“All of them,” Dana said.
One by one, they opened the remaining cages. Dana took the vampires’ hands. Nissa took their feet. They dragged the bodies to the tub and threw them inside with Freddie Bloom. It was a deep tub, and the body had been squashed enough that there was plenty of room to submerge each vampire as the last turned to ash.
Within the hour, Dana stood calf-deep in vampire dust and sludge from the bathtub. She was breathing hard, her arms too tired to lift the crossbow even though it weighed only a few ounces.
It was done. There were no more vampires to drown in Garlic Shots.
Nobody except Nissa.
Dana’s fingers moved on instinct, cuffing Nissa’s arms. Nissa was startled. She tripped into Dana, and both of them hit the tub. The blood sloshed at the impact.
Nissa looked up at Dana, question in her eyes. Even without being psychic, Dana knew what Nissa was wondering. Is it time? Are you going to kill me?
They were both willing and ready. Suspended on a thread of violence.
Nissa lifted her hand. Her fingertips hovered over the curve of Dana’s cheeks, brushing the fine peach fuzz that had been regrowing ever since she came back to life. It was thicker on the underside of her jaw, back toward her ear, and Dana kinda thought Nissa was trying to pet her.
Then her thumb skimmed over Dana’s lips, and she tasted copper. Nissa was smearing Jeffreys’s blood on Dana’s face.
Dana twitched back. “Don’t touch me.” She couldn’t manage to put as much heat behind it as usual. She felt so tired. It was orgiastic succor, the drained and satisfied feeling that came after climax, and she didn’t want to move.
Nissa licked the blood off of her thumb. “I forgive you,” she said. “For curing yourself…I forgive you.”
Dana’s scalp prickled. “It had nothing to do with you.”
Noises echoed up the sewers, and Nissa’s head snapped around, her gaze fixing on the doors into the chamber. “What is that?”
“Tormid,” Dana said. “He’s bringing in the OPA to clean up.”
“Clean up what? Me?”
If Dana stayed there with Nissa much longer, the answer would be yes whether they liked it or not.
But Penny was still out there.
“Let’s go,” Dana said. “I held up my end. It’s your turn.”
Nissa laced her fingers with Dana’s. “Happily.”
21
Moving at vampire speed while mortal was a completely different experience than when she was a vampire.
Dana was barely aware of the world surrounding her. Time didn’t slow to let her experience the glisten of water moving at quarter-speed. She couldn’t make instantaneous decisions, couldn’t move swiftly enough to change the flow of a battle.
Instead, it felt like being in a car accident.
There was nothing to support her back, her neck. She slammed forward, backward, left, right. Her shoulders smacked into doorways. The walls blurred until she couldn’t make out which part of the sewers she was in, much less tell if anyone was following them.
She was helpless in the locked arms of Nissa Royal.
Almost as soon as Nissa snapped into motion, she snapped out of it again, releasing Dana simultaneously.
Dana spilled onto the ground at her feet. The momentum carried her a couple meters before she got onto hands and knees again. “Fuck!”
Nissa ran past her at a more normal pace. “The OPA is right behind us!”
Dana held her breath, tried to hear. She could make out faint shouts. The OPA would catch up within thirty seconds. If Dana delayed Nissa long enough, then Cèsar and Charmaine could catch them. She could change her mind. There was still time.
“We have to move!” Nissa snapped. “Come on!”
The shouts were getting closer.
Are you really Cèsar Hawke’s dog?
Dana turned away from the sounds that the OPA made, plunging into the shadows with Nissa. She willingly followed the vampire further away from the scene of their crime.
Closer to Penny.
They rounded a corner, and Nissa stopped so suddenly that Dana slammed into her back. A handful of OPA agents stood in the sewer. They obviously hadn’t been expecting to intercept Nissa coming from that direction because shock had turned those trained personnel into statues.
Nissa bared her fangs. “Agents!”
Dana grabbed her hand. The vampire turned a wide-eyed stare at Dana, mouth going slack so that her lips slid over her teeth.
“Jump,” Dana said. She wrapped her other arm around Nissa’s neck.
Nissa jumped.
They were right below an access hatch, and a vampire jumping with preternatural strength propelled them hard enough to burst through it. Nissa sheltered Dana from the majority of the impact and it was still enough to make her head swim.
At the top, they landed hard in a tangle of limbs. Dana shoved Nissa away and got onto her knees to look around. She was shocked to be greeted by the sight of piled boxes, steel shelves, and produce tagged with QR codes. They weren’t in the sewer anymore. They’d reached one of Vampire Vegas’s sub-basements.
The OPA shouted underneath them.
“Follow me,” Nissa said.
Dana had to wipe blood off of her watch face before she could tell the time. There were maybe two hours before the daylighting protocol kicked in, killing all the vampires in the area. Including the one vampire who knew where Penny was caged.
“I’ll follow you,” Dana said. “But move fast.”
Dana wasn’t surprised when Nissa dragged her to the wax museum. It had been shuttered after the fight against Achlys in its Red Carpet Room, since the damage to the attractions was too expensive for even the Paradisos to replace immediately. A few of the boards over the front door were loose. Nissa pushed them aside so Dana could step in.
The door to the office behind the Red Carpet Room was locked and covered in yellow warning tape. Nissa slid a key into the lock and twisted it. Tumblers clicked. “She’s on the other side. I want you to go inside and release your wife.”
“Just like that? Walk in, let her go?” Dana asked. “You gonna stop me when I try to leave?”
Nissa folded her arms to wait.
There was a trick to this. No doubt in Dana’s mind. But she strode toward the door, wrenched it open, and headed for the one glass cage in the back. It looked like it had been taken from Mohinder’s old hideout. Its base had left muddy smears from being pushed across the floor, and the inside was fogged with condensation.
There was no lock on the box. Dana found the latch and wrenched it open.
Penny spilled out.
She was unconscious—eyes closed, arms limp at her sides—and as filthy as she’d been while in the Fremont Slasher’s captivity. How’d she gotten so disgusting while at the wax museum? Nissa had held her less than a day.
Dana glanced back at the vampire, who was still standing calmly in the doorway. Nissa’s form blocked off the moonlight coming through the office window, so it was hard to see anything. “What did you do to her?” Dana asked, pressing her fingertips to Penny’s throat. Her skin felt cool. “You said you wouldn’t hurt her if I cooperated!”
“Is that what I said?” Nissa asked.
Dana couldn’t find a pulse. She shifted her fingers, kept looking for a heartbeat.
Penny was alive. She had to be alive.
The orc’s skin was slimy with a fluid of indeterminate color, impossible to distinguish in the darkness. It smelled awful. Like the inside of a rotting corpse.
A chi
ll settled over Dana as she realized where all this slime had come from.
“Fuck,” she whispered.
Penny’s eyes flew open to focus on Dana.
Her irises were red.
Orcs were scary beasts. Each one was at least two hundred centimeters tall and packed a hundred kilos of muscle. Dana had thought several times that Penny was among the most intimidating people she’d ever seen, even though Penny was not herself an intimidating person.
An orc turned into a vampire was much worse.
When Penny’s eyes opened, there was nothing familiar in her eyes except hunger. The same hunger Dana had suffered after Nissa fed her blood to turn her full vampire.
Penny’s hands shot out. She grabbed Dana with the strength she used to swing hammers.
Dana had never been thrown against a wall by a vampire without making any effort to fight back, but that was what she did now. She hit the wall like a ragdoll. Her body reeled with pain.
Penny’s mouth opened wide, exposing fangs.
“Off! Down!” Nissa was suddenly between them, pushing Penny back toward the glass cage. She wrenched Dana out of the hole with super-speed and slammed the door.
“Gods,” Dana said, staring at the door. It shook in its frame as Penny struck it.
Nissa had turned Penny into a vampire.
Penny was dead.
Dana turned on Nissa slowly, shocked by how empty she felt. Not angry anymore. Not hateful. Just…empty. “You said you’d let Penny go.”
“I also said you’re going to kill yourself. And I’m right, aren’t I?” Nissa asked. “It’s the only thing you can think about now. Your hatred of vampires—your wife becoming a vampire. You’ll have to kill her to adhere to your code. And then…”
Nissa traced her finger over Dana’s throat, creating an invisible line. Dana imagined blood spurting from the path it swished.
Penny was still hammering the door. In order for her to be mindlessly violent, Nissa must have drained her blood, leaving Penny as addled as any of Il Senesino’s victims.
She’d come back to her senses with enough blood.
But she’d still be a vampire.
One of the bloodless damned to spend her life wandering the Earth looking for her next two-legged meal.
“Don’t tell me you’ll be able to live with yourself once you’ve killed Penny,” Nissa said. Her voice cracked and a brilliant-red tear slithered down her cheek. It looked black in the darkness. “You still hate vampires, and you’ll kill Penny. Then yourself.”
Nissa reached into a pocket, and she pulled out a jangling set of metal claws.
“You can borrow these to do it,” she said. “They’re still sharp.”
Dana’s emptiness was threatening to transform into anguish. Penny was striking the door harder. She’d break through before she got her senses back at this rate, and Dana would have no choice but to react.
“You don’t know me,” Dana said again, grabbing Nissa’s wrist roughly. The metal claws jangled.
Nissa’s luminous eyes gazed with burning satisfaction, hate, and…something a lot softer than that.
“Turn me into a vampire again,” Dana said. “You said you forgave me. You wish I hadn’t been cured. So I don’t think you want me to kill myself—you want to keep me around. Turn me back into a vampire.”
“But…” Nissa swayed on her feet, leaning against Dana’s chest as though she needed help to stand. “You killed Mohinder. You hate vampires!”
“I can’t turn Penny back. She’s no longer a blood virgin, and there’s no more cure. But…” She grabbed Nissa by the shoulders, gazing down at her. “Nissa, I can’t kill Penny. Just like I can’t kill you.”
“Gods,” Nissa murmured.
There was no air left in the room. Dana was suffocating. Falling into the bottomless pit.
“Change me,” Dana said. “Keep us both.”
Nissa was trembling.
Dana had been right. She knew exactly what Nissa wanted.
The vampire pressed against Dana’s mind, jamming a fist deep into the folds and curves, surely seeking whether or not Dana could be serious. The triadist charm was heavy on Dana’s clavicle. She was engulfed in the white light of the gods—not meditating the way Lincoln did, but protected.
There was no way to keep Nissa from seeing some of the truth: the enormity of Dana’s love for Penny, and even the enormous, frustrating feelings Dana had for Nissa.
Dana jerked the neck of her shirt down to expose her throat. She dropped to her knees to make it easier for the shorter vampire to access. “You’ll be the sire to Penny and me.”
Nissa’s fingers slid into Mohinder’s claws one by one. She flexed her hand so that the metal chimed gently. “You mean it, don’t you?” Cold claws brushed over Dana’s cheek. The door behind them shook. “You…see me.”
Nissa moved at vampire speed again, rejuvenated. Her claws flashed. Bright pain flared on Dana’s throat. Warm blood spilled over her chest.
The vampire sank down, cradling Dana’s head in one hand, and she drank.
Dana was consumed by the pain.
She’d never willingly exposed her throat—or any other body part—to allow a vampire to drink from her. The idea was on par with going scuba diving in a Port-a-Potty. But now she surrendered, and she paid for it in agony.
Nissa’s teeth slid into the exposed slit of her throat. Her tongue traced up the inside of it, as if memorizing the shape of Dana’s muscles, the tendons, the blood vessels. There was so much blood. So much more than Dana had thought there’d be when she planned this. And she’d thought there would be a lot.
As Nissa drained blood, the pain receded.
She felt suddenly chilly, but not unpleasantly so. Dana was submerged in the cold of a crisp autumn day. Pleasure washed over her brain, the same way that she felt kicking through piles of dried leaves. It was nighttime, but the kind of nights that came around the holidays, where everything went quiet in the falling snow and fairy lights twinkled in envy of the stars.
Dana was transported by Nissa, with Nissa, taken from this pit to somewhere perfect.
Nissa’s cold lips pressed to her throat harder. She sucked harder. Her fingers curled in Dana’s hair.
Dana reached up to grip Nissa’s back, fisting her shirt. She let her eyes fall shut. Her head bowed back.
They were falling, falling, falling…
The banging sound was not a disoriented vampire chasing the smell of blood. It was the thudding of Dana’s heart as vampire venom shot through the muscle for the second time in her life.
It was the pounding of Nissa’s heart, too.
The vampire jerked back with a gasp. Her hands released, and Dana really fell this time, thudding onto the linoleum.
“You taste…” Nissa swiped blood off of her chest, licked it from her thumb. She smiled. “You’re so…” And then the smile disappeared, and she started to cough. “Gods. You taste terrible.”
Without the soporific effects of a vampire bite, the pain quickly returned to Dana. It doubled, tripled, quadrupled. The venom was in her chest. It was in her blood. It suffused every fiber of her body.
The Garlic Shot she’d injected earlier had gone to war against the venom.
She’d spent hours tripping on lethe. Hours with apotropaics racing through her system. Her body must have been close to metabolizing it now, after all this fighting—yet Nissa had drunk enough blood to be impacted.
“I hope I taste like garlic,” Dana whispered.
Nissa clutched her throat, wheezing. Her hands scrabbled over her chest. She threw herself backwards, as if trying to escape some invisible enemy, and she only succeeded in knocking over a wax celebrity. “It hurts!” She clutched her head. “What did you do to me? How?”
At Tormid’s suggestion, Dana had used the lethe-heavy Garlic Shot as a prophylactic. Turned out that taking Garlic Shots as a human felt terrible. But whatever Dana was feeling didn’t compare to Nissa’s ordeal.
The vampire was screaming. Beating at her chest. “It hurts!”
Dana rested her hand on Nissa’s chest, and she felt the strengthening heartbeat. Its rhythm was a lot faster than Penny’s fists on the door now. The heart might burst from Nissa’s chest before Penny got through that door.
“Relax,” Dana said. “You’re not dying. You’re coming back to life.”
Nissa’s eyes went blank. She passed out.
22
Dana sat with Nissa’s body for a very long time. She sat until the pounding against the door subsided to scratching, and then went silent. She sat until light started flashing outside of the wax museum. It was a slow beat of yellow-white, like a dim sun. That flashing was a countdown. Ten minutes until the OPA lit a daylight bomb to end all daylight bombs and left Las Vegas hostile to vampires.
All vampires.
A number which now included Penny.
Dana remained frozen until Nissa Royal woke up.
Nissa jerked upright, inhaling a breath that sounded like it hurt. Dana remembered those early breaths. It had felt like someone had been stabbing her in the lungs, since they hadn’t needed to function for weeks. It had been bad enough after being dead for a couple months. Nissa had been dead for over four years.
Her hands flew over her hair, her face, her chest. She was breathing too fast. She squinted up at the light, down at her fingers, around the walls. “What happened to me?” Nissa yelled, as if she couldn’t hear herself. “Where am I?”
Her narrowed eyes finally found Dana.
Nissa’s face went slack. “Gods. You…ungh.” Nissa folded around her stomach. She probably hadn’t digested all of Penny’s blood and still had a full belly, which couldn’t feel good as a new human.
Her shoulders jerked. She arched. She vomited, and her last meal emerged in clumpy black clumps. She remained on all fours, the hair in front of her face stuck together by vomit.
It seemed to take all of Nissa’s strength to look up at Dana and say, “You cured me.”
“I’d hoped it would kill you.” If Dana had thought there was a real chance for it to cure, she’d have let Penny drink. Not Nissa.
