by SM Reine
Vampires didn’t need oxygen. Vampires. The undead. People who had been filled with venom, murdered, and then fed human blood.
Blood virgins who still hadn’t fully transitioned were different.
Dana was not quite dead and not quite alive. She didn’t need to breathe often. But when she exerted herself, her body still needed resources that full vampires could only extract from blood.
She was feeling tired. Sluggish. Slow.
Both of them slammed into the elevator cage. She dropped Anthony, and he flopped to the floor, head lolling. His eyes were barely open. His chest expanded. He gasped and coughed like it hurt.
Dana pressed the button to open the elevator doors.
Nothing happened.
“You fucking assholes,” she said. Her unseen enemy had diverted power from the elevators to the machinery.
Were there stairs? Would she be able to find them in the darkness if she looked, and could she get to the top before Anthony suffocated?
The elevator shaft was exposed—not a shaft at all. Dana tossed Anthony over her shoulder again and scaled the elevator’s exterior, grabbing the oily chain.
Her vision was growing foggy. It took a minute for Dana to realize that it wasn’t her eyes getting all fucked up, but particulate filling the air. The gas was coming from the vents. This wasn’t a failure of the ventilation system in the mine. It was a deliberate attempt to kill Dana. Again.
She gripped the chain and started climbing.
It was interesting trying to ascend with eighty-two kilos of limp weight obstructing her arm movement, and while her body was trying to decide if the gas was worthy reason to shut down. Dana’s muscles spasmed as she climbed even though the actual strain of it wasn’t difficult. Her head was getting light.
She wasn’t sure Anthony was still breathing.
Dana King Kong’d her way to the top level and they rolled to the floor.
Anthony flopped onto his back. His eyes were shut. His chest wasn’t moving.
It was still very dark in the mine.
She grabbed him by the shoulders and dragged him into the moonlight.
There was no sign of anyone outside. Taylor Town looked as dead as it had on arrival. The only difference was that there was a second set of tire tracks next to Dana’s—but no car to match. Whoever had come was already gone. Hadn’t even had the decency to see if they’d succeeded in killing Dana.
They had littered, though. After all that care Anthony had taken to clean up Dana’s cans of O’Doul’s, the bad guys had left gas canisters tilted against the outside of the mine. The canisters had giant labels on them. Dana couldn’t tell what gas was inside of them—the printing on the label was too small—but she saw a logo like a campfire encompassed in a box.
A murderer who left trash in the desert.
Seriously, biggest asshole ever.
She slapped Anthony’s cheeks back and forth. “Wake up.”
His head rolled to either side without regaining consciousness.
But his heart was beating. Dana could tell his heart was beating because she could see the weak pulse under his jaw—and was it getting weaker, or was she just imagining things?
No. It’s getting weaker. He’s dying.
For a moment, she couldn’t tear her eyes away from his throat. Maybe it was because she’d been bloodless too long, or maybe it was because the gas had weakened her, but cravings stirred within Dana. Big time.
She wanted to kill Anthony. Sink her teeth into his throat, rip it open, drink deep.
“No!” she growled through her teeth.
Anthony believed Dana wasn’t evil, even if she was a vampire. He was probably the only person who didn’t hate her these days. She wasn’t going to disappoint him by draining him dry.
Dana tossed him into the bed of her pickup where she couldn’t eat him. Then she climbed into the driver’s seat, opening the rear window so that she could hear if Anthony died while they were on the road.
They were two hours from Vegas. Almost two hours from the nearest hospital.
She gunned it.
Wind blasted through the windows, whipping her hair around. Anthony gasped and choked in the pickup bed. She nearly swerved off the road in shock.
“Don’t you fucking die, you prick,” Dana said, reaching back through the window to check his airway.
His teeth closed on her fingers.
“Ow!” She yanked it back.
Anthony’s eyes opened groggily, and he pulled himself up on the window, braced against the truck’s jittering. “Oops,” he groaned. “Sorry. Thought I was being attacked.”
“You sweaty butt cleavage! The fuck is wrong with you? Getting gassed to unconsciousness, biting your heroic savior—”
“Aww,” he said, slumping against the window’s frame. He shot a toothy but weak smile at Dana in the rearview mirror. “You weren’t worried about me, were you?”
“Fuck off,” she said. “Fuck right fucking off with your fucking self.”
But she finally let out the breath she’d been holding ever since the mine, and for a moment, she let herself feel relief.
4
Two hours later, Dana found herself standing over Anthony in the Hunting Lodge’s med bay, thinking about how delicious his blood would be.
She could only imagine it would be tasty as hell. Better than the nicest tequila. Better than Cheesecake Factory. Better than taking a bubble bath with every single one of her sexy ex-girlfriends at the same time during a baby-oil convention.
Anthony was strong for an old guy, and that strength would be in his blood.
She was so thirsty.
“Vampires are the worst,” Dana growled at herself.
This was why she needed to die. Because she couldn’t watch over her friend—maybe her only real friend—without thinking about killing him. It wasn’t because she was hung up on the ghost of the Fremont Slasher.
He was still out there, dammit.
As if drawn to Dana’s mood, Penny knocked on the door and edged inside.
Anthony would have been thrilled if he’d been conscious. Dana didn’t leave the room, so she and Penny coexisted in the same space, exactly the way that Anthony wanted them to.
Too bad it took poison gas to do it.
“He looks awful,” Penny said.
Dana snorted. “What else is new?” Flippant response aside, Anthony did look like shit. He was almost as colorless as Dana.
“Will he be okay?” Penny asked, turning to the woman sitting in a chair beside Anthony’s bed.
“Oh yeah. Dana got him out of the gas in time,” said Edie Ashe. She was the Hunting Club’s healer based in Las Vegas—a woman of Samoan descent who knew more about magical theory than almost anyone. She was also a doctor. Very smart, very beautiful, and very tragically heterosexual. “The human body isn’t a huge fan of pesticides, though. There was damage on the cellular level. I’ve just put him back to sleep so he doesn’t have to feel the magic repairing him.”
Dana had enjoyed more than a few painful repairs on Edie’s part. Edie was great at magical theory, but not great at painless healing. According to Edie, numbing nerves detracted from the efficacy of the spells for reasons that whooshed right over Dana’s spiky hair.
Basically, getting a patch job from Edie hurt like a bitch. If sleeping through it were an option in the future, Dana would opt for that.
“How long is Sleeping Beauty down for the count?” Penny asked.
“Dozing Dummy will be down for at least twelve hours,” Dana said.
The orc sighed and bent to press a kiss to Anthony’s forehead. She petted his receding hairline, too. “Poor baby.”
“Let’s shave his mustache while he sleeps,” Dana suggested.
Edie laughed. “I won’t interfere as long as you make sure he knows I didn’t accidentally sear it off with magic. I’ve got a reputation to protect.” She loaded her crystals and Book of Shadows into an old-style medical handbag that matched Brianna’
s. They’d gotten them at the same thrift store.
Once Edie left, Penny stared at Dana with obvious discomfort, like there were words she needed to say but couldn’t get out.
Dana wasn’t one for mushiness. She wasn’t going to tell Penny about all the sleepless days she’d spent wishing she was at home in their condo. She didn’t say that she missed terrifying all-you-can-eat sushi chefs by showing up with Penny at her side. And she didn’t say how much she liked hearing Penny’s voice on the earbud the other night.
So Dana took the crumpled, sweat-dampened shipping manifest out of her back pocket. “I’ve got a present for you. Here,” she said.
Penny peeled the pages apart to look at them. “This is from the mine in Taylor Town.”
“Yep. It was shut down a while back, but someone brought it back online for a short time a couple weeks back. Thinking that they ramped stuff up again to mine more unobtainium.”
“Maybe because Hardwick Research wanted to supply Harold Hopkins?” Penny asked.
“Harold Hopkins was already dead by then. Don’t think that order was for him. You want to see if you can get a hold of the Hardwicks to figure out what they’re doing with the unobtainium?”
“I’ll see what I can do, but you know the Hardwicks.” Penny shrugged helplessly.
Hardwick Research was run by a mated pair of sidhe named Jaycee and Pierce. They were elusive at best. Unlike most sidhe, they didn’t have interest in elaborate social games or politics. Once the Winter Court had fallen the first time—it had changed hands repeatedly in the last couple decades—the Hardwicks had turtled themselves away from society.
The Hardwicks continued funding research that saved lives all over the world. They had made breakthroughs on preternatural medicine that nobody else dreamed could exist. But you couldn’t get a hold of them unless you had good reason, and Jaycee Hardwick considered very, very few reasons to be good enough.
“If anyone can get them, it’s you,” Dana said. “I know that you’ve got friends at Hardwick Industries.”
“Yeah, their tech departments, not the research side of things,” Penny said. “I’ve got a deal with the head of information systems. They help me with computer stuff and I give them weapons. That’s as far removed from the Hardwicks as assemblymen are from presidents.”
“It’s better than anyone else has got.”
“Guess so.” Penny gazed glumly at Anthony. Her green-brown fingers curled around his, offering a squeeze that he wouldn’t feel while unconscious.
Dana had expected Penny to be a lot more gung-ho about getting the last ingredient for the cure. “You giving up on me?”
“You gave up on yourself first.” She squeezed Anthony’s hand again and stepped back. “There’s a new body. Charmaine called us.”
This was about work, not about the divorce. “Vampire?”
“No, but Charmaine seems to think it’s in our wheelhouse,” Penny said. “She requested you and Anthony specifically.”
“He’s not going anywhere for a while.” Dana headed out the door, shooting a smile at Penny. “Coming with?”
Penny’s shoulders sagged when she sighed. “Dana…”
“Yeah?”
“Nothing. I’ll come.”
It wasn’t immediately obvious why Charmaine summoned the Hunting Club to this murder, or why the police chief would have been there in the first place. Until recently, Chief Villanueva had been doing mostly political stuff. There were more than enough able detectives at the LVMPD to handle the grunt work.
Yet there was Charmaine waiting at the airship dock, supervising her guys again while Officer Jeffreys struggled not to barf on the murder scene.
“It’s preternatural-on-human crime,” Charmaine said, greeting Dana with a firm handshake. At least, Dana assumed it was firm. Charmaine used to seem firm about her handshakes, but super-strength had rendered Dana immune. “Come over this way.”
She lifted the police tape, and Dana and Penny ducked underneath. Penny didn’t duck low enough. One of her horns caught on the tape, nearly snapping it. She blushed as she stumbled away.
“If you’re here, is this an OPA case?” Dana asked. The Office of Preternatural Affairs had been threatening to get involved in the rivalry between the Paradisos and the Hunting Club. Charmaine had landed smack dab in the middle.
“No, I’ve gotten them distracted,” Charmaine said. “I convinced Secretary Friederling that Achlys’s death has brought you guys to a detente, so they’re reassessing. Should give us a few days of quiet, at least. Come over this way. Body’s outside.”
The airship dock was at the top of a spindle west of the Stratosphere. Big cities on the East Coast, where civilization grew vertically, had put similar airship docks on many of their skyscrapers after Genesis, but this was the only one of its kind in Las Vegas. It was a tourist destination, not a method of transportation for important people like in New York.
There were a lot of similarities to the airship’s dock and the loading platform for the Big Blind Ferris Wheel. The first thing outside of the gates was a colorful bar displaying multitudes of liquor bottles, and a glass case filled with edibles baked to look like Las Vegas monuments. Hoover Dam, the New York New York, that kind of thing. Enormous TV screens displayed drone views of the Nevada desert. When the airships approached, the drones would chase them back so that people could watch.
Right now, there were no airships incoming or outgoing, no tourists paying too much money for shitty drinks, and nothing of interest on the drone footage.
There were, however, a whole lot of law enforcement personnel clustered around the open-air platform beyond the bar.
Charmaine cleared out the crime-scene techs so that Dana had room to look at the body.
It was a woman. A white human lady. Her body was swathed in an oversized t-shirt with the airship company logo on the chest and frumpy sweatpants. A square of plastic stuck out from under her shirt’s hem. Dana pushed the shirt up to look. “Security badge,” Dana said. “What’s this open?”
“The security room, appropriately.” Charmaine nodded toward a door marked for employees only. “Our victim performed surveillance. As far as we can tell, she saw something on the cameras that she found alarming. She placed a call to police.”
“How long ago?”
“An hour,” Charmaine said.
“What’d she see?”
“No clue. The security footage is blank. Whoever killed her also trashed the servers, and since they only do back-ups nightly, today’s footage is gone.”
“What was her name?” Penny asked, voice soft, eyebrows meeting in the center while the edges of her lips dragged down on either side of her tusks.
“Irma Stoppard.”
“Irma.” Penny echoed it quietly, as if trying to memorize the name. She was like that—concerned about the victims so much more than the killers.
Dana doubted she’d remember this victim’s name longer than five minutes after the murder was resolved.
“Am I good to get grabby?” Dana asked, and Charmaine nodded. Dana used her gloved fingers to part the clothing and look at the wounds underneath. “Fuck. That’s a weird one.”
“You see why I called you,” Charmaine said.
Irma had been killed by slashes deep enough to allow her organs to spill out. Another cut had opened a glistening crimson chasm under her jaw. That was surely the fatal one, since she would have bled out fast from having her jugular severed.
“What causes a death blow like this?” Dana wondered.
“I hoped you’d know,” said the chief. “And I’m hoping against hope that the answer isn’t ‘something wielded by a Paradisos vampire,’ because whatever break we’re getting from the OPA won’t last if vampires run wild.”
Dana barely heard her talking.
Blood. So much blood.
Dana hadn’t stopped being thirsty since Anthony had dropped at her feet.
This was a lot less tempting than Anthony, though. Dana
was grateful for the lurch of nausea she felt at the smell and sight of old, tacky blood. Whatever kind of vampire Achlys had been—and whatever kind of vampire Dana was becoming—they weren’t carrion eaters. Cold blood that dribbled from the hour-old wounds of a cadaver did zilch for her.
She wasn’t used to being so strongly sickened by bodies, though. It was hard to look at the wounds when they made her want to hurl like Officer Jeffreys.
Dana wondered what would come up if she barfed. She hadn’t eaten in a long time. Maybe stomach lining?
Probably better not to find out.
She sat back on her heels, gazing thoughtfully out past the edge of the airship dock. There was a gate that opened once the airships anchored. Beyond that, there was a very long drop that terminated in a landing guaranteed to kill anything short of a werewolf.
“Irma Stoppard was human?” Dana asked.
“Lab results will verify,” Charmaine said, “but we don’t have her in our database of preternatural citizens, and her next of kin said she was human when notified.”
“Good enough for me.” What had this victim seen on the cameras that made her think she should get up from her desk? She was wearing sweatpants. She wasn’t meant to be seen by customers. “They got records of the trips they had scheduled?”
Charmaine waved to one of the officers. “We’ll grab them.”
“Good. I’ll wait.” Dana got up and strode from the body to the edge of the fence. She looked over the Strip—the city-within-a-city called Paradise. Vampire territory.
Oversized magical figures straddled the road, advertising various attractions. The nearest of them was dressed like a horny teenage boy’s fantasy of a Halloween witch. Her ruffled skirts came up in the back to expose a butt the size of a billboard, and she bent forward to press together cleavage adorned by pentagrams. Her pointed hat had “Toil and Trouble” across the brim.
A new casino was being built between Judex and Grauens, the two properties run by Mohinder. From this angle, Dana had an excellent view of the workers speeding over the scaffolding on its side with preternatural speed. Magic foamed over the exposed beams. Witches and vampires were putting together a new tower for Mohinder. This tower had no windows, not on any of its hundred stories.
