by SM Reine
“Unobtainium. It’s an element that should be impossible, but exists between lead and bismuth on the periodic table.”
Impossible indeed. Dana’s adoptive mother had schooled her extensively on the periodic table. Ariane Kavanagh was a witch specializing in potions, and understanding the elements was critical in her line of work. “There’s no element 82.5 and the idea of it is fucking stupid,” Dana said.
“Lincoln has a gargoyle named after a NASCAR driver,” Brianna pointed out. “We live in a stupid world.”
“Okay. But…unobtainium?”
“It exists,” Brianna said firmly. “Human scientists discovered it after Genesis, and it’s named unobtainium in homage to stupid movies like Avatar. We can argue over whether or not this seems scientifically accurate to a layman or you can accept that it exists but we still can’t find any. A few microns of it are worth millions.”
Dana’s eyebrows lifted. “Wow.”
“How Harold Hopkins got it, we don’t know,” Brianna said. “Best guess is that Hardwick Research let him use some for the sake of research. We don’t have the resources he did. We also don’t have Harold Hopkins because…you know, he’s dead.”
Dana examined the cathedral’s flying buttresses with great interest. She’d killed Harold Hopkins after he rose as a vampire. It was her fault that his dead body wasn’t still ambulating and sharing scientific information.
She had no regrets. Hopkins hadn’t wanted to be a vampire any more than she did.
“You see the problem?” Lincoln asked. “Unobtainium is crazy rare. There’s no chance that we’ll make another Garlic Shot.”
“Unless we do,” Anthony said. He was typing wildly at a laptop, his fingers flying over the keyboard.
“We do?” Brianna asked.
“Hardwick Research does.” He stopped typing to turn his laptop around. He was on Google Maps, zoomed in on what looked like an empty patch of desert. “I correlated recent mining activity with shipments to Hopkins’s former lab. It looks like they’ve got an unobtainium mine in south-central Nevada.”
“You extrapolated all that, cobwebs-for-brains?” Dana asked.
“Yes, I am sometimes capable of more than punching vampires in their ugly faces.” Anthony yanked his laptop back. “This mine has been shut down for a couple of months. Looks like it was no longer yielding minerals in high enough quantities to make its operation profitable.”
Brianna stood. “But that doesn’t mean there’s no minerals left.”
“Exactly.” Anthony slammed the lid shut and grinned at Dana. “Wanna see if we can find some unobtainium?”
She glanced at the stained-glass windows. They were casting fragmented red-and-orange light over the opposite wall, signaling the dying gasps of sunset. Within a few minutes, Holy Nights Cathedral would be in total darkness, and there would be nothing to stop Dana from heading out to the Nevada desert.
If there was unobtainium in the mine, then maybe she’d get to come home to Penny as a human.
“Let’s go,” Dana said.
3
It felt weird to be working with Anthony again. Dana had been rolling solo in recent weeks. Prowling bars adjacent to the Strip, punching her way through her various contacts, trying to figure out how the Paradisos had restructured now that Achlys was dead. Information was paltry and business felt unsatisfying.
Being with Anthony felt right, even if he was sleeping in the passenger’s seat of Dana’s lifted pickup. The old fuck snored like a chainsaw chugging through redwoods and he sweated all over her Hello Kitty seat covers. And that was exactly how Dana wanted it. It actually made her happy to see his stupid Ricky Ricardo mustache twitching as he dreamed.
“We’re here,” Dana said.
Anthony’s mustache stopped twitching. “Go away.”
“Get up or I’ll eat you,” she said.
“Eat me so I can go back to sleep.” He rolled over and rubbed his face in Hello Kitty’s on the headrest. He’d reclined the chair enough to make it basically flat.
“Okay. How’s this? Get up or I’ll stay parked until morning, and you’ll wake to a driver’s seat full of ash so you have to go back to the city alone.”
He shot a venomous look at Dana over his shoulder. “Not funny.”
“Your sense of humor’s more anemic than I am.” She leaped out of her pickup.
Taylor Town was one of Nevada’s many ghost towns. This particular location was two hours north-northeast of Vegas, and it had enjoyed explosive growth when prospectors had realized that them there hills had new gold veins after Genesis.
The easily accessible gold had been stripped within a couple of years, but not before a boomtown had sprung up around the mine to support the miners’ families. There were two schools, a whole lot of abandoned manufactured homes, a gas station, and even an old post office.
At this point in 2034, there was nothing but abandoned buildings and Dana’s tire tracks.
“Hey look,” Anthony said, shambling out of her passenger’s seat. He slammed the door and tossed beer cans that had fallen onto the ground through the window to ensure they didn’t litter. “It’s a town as emotionally empty as you are.”
“All towns are emotionally empty. Towns don’t have emotions.”
“That’s true, towns are way nicer than you,” he said.
“I’ve never pretended to be nice.”
They headed up to the mining base. There were administrative offices on the ground level, not far outside the town’s only trailer park. Everything was dusty and boarded up. Didn’t look like anyone had worked the area in at least a year. Even the hills on the horizon, just beyond a lonely line of telephone poles, looked sort of glum.
Her boot heel lashed out. It shattered the lock to the administrative offices. “See?” Dana said. “Not nice at all. I’m actually a huge asshole who breaks locks instead of taking time to pick them.”
The computers within were new models, and the workspaces were sparse. There was little need for local equipment at an operation run by a big corp like Hardwick Research.
Dana had to use one of Brianna’s hexes to open a warded desk drawer. There was a keycard inside.
“I don’t think Penny married an asshole,” Anthony said.
She headed out into the hot Nevada night. Southern Nevada liked to cling to its heat, and it was at least thirty-two degrees Celsius even though midnight was fast approaching. “Are you saying I’ve turned into an asshole? Are you trying to edge toward some kind of statement? I’m too much of a moron for this passive aggression, Anthony. Be plain.”
“Oh, fuck off,” he said. “You’re as much a moron as I am.”
“Ouch.”
“Gimme the key card, fuck-face,” Anthony said. She did. They headed up the slope into the nearest of the hills, taking a dirt road that had crumbled into pebbles. “You know I’d never call you an asshole or a moron.”
“That’s because you’re a pussy bitch.” Dana made a point not to use gendered insults like pussy or bitch most of the time, but Anthony had known her a long time, and he knew that if she was being misogynistic in her language that she was pissed. It was a low-effort way to express her frustration with her near and dear. And Anthony, Ricky Ricardo ‘stache aside, was both of those things.
He swiped the key card outside a door that would have been suitable for Fort Knox. It was set into the side of a hill, and boarded up like a mine that had been abandoned ever since the nineteenth century. “I’d call you remote.”
“Remote? If I was a remote, then TVs would—”
“Don’t,” Anthony said. “Don’t get snarky.” The door swung open.
“I can’t help it. I’m so good at sarcasm.” Dana followed him in, glancing around the entrance. It looked like a mine. Concrete hole in the ground with cheap fluorescent lights and rust-stained walls. It was as far from the opulent crap on the Strip as humanly possible. “So where do you think we should look for unobtainium? Should we go down into the ground, or
, say, down into the ground?”
“Down into the ground,” Anthony said.
There was an elevator. Its cage rattled when they got in, and Dana was pleasantly surprised that it actually responded when she hit a button. They lurched into motion.
“Still got power to the town,” she said. “Someone must have been here recently.”
“Or the Hardwicks have the kind of ‘fuck you’ money where they can leave mines operational when nobody’s in them,” Anthony said.
“Either way. Too bad there’s no button for ‘unobtainium vein.’” Dana snorted. “Unobtainium.”
“You laugh so easily at something that can save your ass,” he said.
“I laugh at a lot of things.”
“It’s easy to laugh when you’re emotionally remote.”
Back to that word. Remote. Dana glared at Anthony’s face, especially his receding hairline. The cage of the mine elevator let light slide over him as they descended into the deeper, quieter levels of the mine. “This is about Penny, huh?” Dana asked.
Anthony had always been a big fan of Penny and Dana as a couple. He had walked Dana down the aisle in lieu of her actual biological father. He’d even organized Penny’s bridal shower.
According to Anthony, Penny was exactly what Dana needed. The orc was sensitive and fragile emotionally, but with boundaries like fucking barbed-wire fences. Her self-respect was through the roof. Probably the reason Penny had been so fast to issue ultimatums. She wouldn’t put up with bullshit from Dana, and Anthony thought that it was good Penny held Dana to such high standards.
Dana thought he was a fucking traitor for siding with a random orc instead of the human girl he’d helped raise.
But you know, whatever.
“We can breathe,” Dana pointed out.
“I can, yes,” Anthony said.
She made a big show of inhaling and exhaling. “Look at all this breathing I’m doing. I wasn’t sure we’d be able to this deep in a mine.”
“Don’t you hear it?” He cupped a hand behind his ear. “Listen close. Ignore the elevator.”
Dana didn’t have to try to ignore the elevator. It landed on the bottommost level of the mine at that moment, groaning and rattling, and it got a lot quieter without the creaking of the chains.
Without the elevator noises, she could hear it.
Ventilation.
“Power and ventilation,” Dana mused aloud. She drew an enchanted knife from her belt. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Someone’s been here recently,” Anthony said.
Yep. That was exactly what Dana had been thinking.
Which led her into another train of thought that was even less pleasant.
“There won’t be any unobtainium on site,” she said.
Anthony’s lips pressed into a grim line. “Let’s take a look-see.”
They looked. They saw.
The unobtainium vein had been mined at the rear of the bottommost level. The Hardwicks must have struck it by total accident. If not for the nearby source of groundwater, they never would have found it.
“I don’t know much about mining,” Anthony said, flicking on a light switch to illuminate some of the workspaces around the machinery, “but this kind of looks like it’s been stripped.” The tumblers, belts, and relays looked freshly oiled and operational. The walls themselves were nothing but rock.
The smooth lines of the walls looked to have been worn down by a combination of magic and mechanics. Charms that probed the deeper stone remained in position, but they were dim, indicating no more minerals to be mined.
Dana felt similarly dim. And annoyed.
“Who’d even want unobtainium except us?” she asked.
“You could buy small nations with a handful of it,” Anthony said.
“Okay, aside from the megalomaniacs.”
“Fuck, who knows?” He flung his hands in the air. “Let’s take a look in the office. See if we can find anything about what happened here.”
The foreman had worked in a metal structure bolted to the cavern’s roof, supported by I-beams and scaffolding thicker around than Dana’s waist. Her stolen keycard opened his door.
Inside was silent other than the murmuring of the ventilation system. His desk was scattered with paper. The window overlooking the machinery had its blinds closed.
Dana flopped into his chair.
“Let’s see what Foreman Whatsisface was up to,” she muttered, opening his drawers to pull out the most recent paperwork.
Anthony remained by the window, peering through the slit his fingers made in the blinds. White-blue fluorescent bars splashed over his eyes, stupid mustache, and sweaty collarbone. “Penny’s not happy.”
“Don’t worry about Penny. She just hasn’t been the same since, you know…” Dana tried to say the words, but it was hard. She had to take a breath before she could say, “Penny hasn’t been the same since the Fremont Slasher.” Expelling the name made her stomach lurch.
“You haven’t been the same either.” Anthony let the blinds shut. “Four years, Dana. It’s been four years since you beat him.”
Dana stared blankly at the paperwork on the foreman’s desk. “Did I?”
“Yes.” He flopped into the chair by the filing cabinet, flipping his knife open to clean under his fingernails. “There haven’t been any murders since you found the Slasher’s hideout. You saved a lot of lives by finding him—and by finding Penny.”
“Who’s been sending me locks of her hair, then?” Dana asked.
“How many enemies do you have who might like to fuck with your head?” Anthony asked. “Penny gets a haircut at the same barbershop every six weeks. Anyone could sweep it up and mail it to you as a threat. You want to think it’s the Fremont Slasher so you won’t have to get over what happened.”
Dana didn’t respond. She wasn’t sure that she had a response.
“You can’t blame her for being changed by what she experienced,” he went on. “You can’t blame yourself, either. But you’re not going to fix anything with the two of you until you air this shit out.”
“I don’t remember signing up for marital therapy. I’m looking for unobtainium, not inner peace.” Her fists slammed into the top of the desk. The foreman’s pens jumped. “I won’t find inner peace until I kill all the vampires in Clark County.”
“Or until you accept the fact that the Fremont Slasher isn’t still out there.” Arguably, his tone was gentle. He was being nice about this, broaching the one subject that Dana had declared to be off-limits ever since she’d rescued Penny from the hideout of a sadistic, serial-killing vampire.
No matter how gentle his face was, no matter how much sympathy glowed in his baby browns, Dana felt attacked. She decided the only way to make Anthony stop talking was to ignore him. “Look at this.” She lifted a paper to show him. “Seems like the mine was operational three weeks ago. Someone was working down here.”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“You’re the one trying to be Mr. Fix-It when all I’m looking for is a cure.”
Anthony rolled his eyes, rubbed the sweat off his forehead. He was dripping. “I understand why you’d be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid of anything,” Dana said. She meant it. She’d faced down monsters migrating from the Nether Worlds who were as big as the Luxor 2, and she’d shared brewskis with the gods a couple three times. Dana didn’t fear anything or anyone.
But when she remembered realizing that Penny was gone…
Realizing that Penny had been taken by a known serial killer…
Finding her in that dark pit underground, caged with a whole lot of dead bodies…
“It’s okay to be afraid,” Anthony said, his eyes glossy, his shoulders slack. He wiped his forehead dry again. Sweat popped back onto his skin instantly. “Does it feel kinda stuffy in here?”
Dana felt fine. “Think you’re being a pussy again.”
“I’m going out to get some air.�
�� He pushed off the chair.
Anthony only made it a couple steps before his knees buckled.
He caught himself on the desk.
Faintly, he said, “Damn.”
Then he lost his grip and crashed onto his shoulder on the floor.
Dana was on him within seconds. She turned him over, tipped his chin back, listened for airflow. He was barely breathing.
It occurred to her that she hadn’t attempted to breathe like a human in several minutes.
Dana inhaled deeply. Whatever filled her lungs wasn’t just oxygen. She coughed it back out, swiping the back of her wrist over her lips. A vampire didn’t need to breathe, but that didn’t mean she wanted to inhale whatever the fuck that was into her body. It tasted sour, bitter.
Only when Dana realized the air wasn’t right did she also realize how quiet it was.
The ventilation had turned off.
They were a mile underground.
“Fuck,” Dana said.
She jammed the shipping invoice into her pocket, scooped Anthony into her arms, and kicked open the door to the office.
The lights to the mining equipment turned off. It was dark. Like, pitch-black dark. So dark that even her sensitive vampire eyes didn’t have anything to pick up.
“Fuck,” she said again, more passionately.
Where are the stairs?
There was a clank, and then something began to throb steadily. Metal ground against metal. Stones ground against gears and dropped to rubber conveyor belts.
Somebody had turned on the machines.
Dana wasn’t alone.
But Anthony was cradled in her arms, barely breathing, and she couldn’t see the way to the surface. She tossed him over her shoulder. Turned on her phone’s flashlight.
The circle of light fell on the belts, sending rocks through the grinders. She swept the light around the room, shining it on the dull stone walls, looking for signs of company. Aside from the moving machinery, there was nothing.
She spotted stairs.
“Hold tight,” she told Anthony’s head, which was hanging near her butt.
Dana bolted up the stairs. The higher she climbed, the more she found that she had the urge to breathe.
