by SM Reine
“I know.”
“If you leave Nissa walking this Earth, our alliance ends.”
“Holy obvious statement, Batman.” Dana thumped her chest. “I’m McIntyre. Hunting Club. Vampire slayer.”
“And now a vampire,” Tormid said. “I saw you with Nissa in Achlys’s tower. You had an opportunity to kill her and you didn’t.”
Dana and Nissa had both been on the ground, on either side of Achlys’s body, and their eyes had met. They’d just…looked at each other.
Could Dana have killed her?
It seemed unlikely. She would have killed Nissa if such a thing were possible, since Dana never faltered when it came to putting the undead in their final resting places.
“I’ll bring you a souvenir once she’s dead,” Dana said.
Tormid let out a long sigh, rubbing a hand over his face. “I look forward to it,” he said dully.
6
Nissa Royal’s role at Judex may have changed in the last few weeks, but her office had not. It was still a dimly lit box of concrete and glass, trimmed by planters that turned her walls into a forest. The humidity was kept high, both for the sake of the plants and because it made Nissa feel less dried-out. Dehydration was a perpetual state for a bloodless who didn’t drink blood.
The setting hadn’t changed an iota since her renovation three years earlier. Yet new work had intruded upon her space. Work that involved other vampires.
She’d always found comfort in the solitary work of managing a casino. Most of her responsibilities could be performed without ever getting off of her computer, so the majority of her work time was spent in this exact spot. This chair, this desk, this office.
Nissa had only ever left work when Achlys summoned her to do the usual chores of a master vampire’s vassal. Like going out to Henderson with the enforcer, Shawn Wyn, to find a microbiologist working on a cure for vampirism. Achlys had found tasks like that for Nissa every few days. The master claimed it was because Nissa was discreet, but Nissa had always thought it was because Achlys wanted to get her out of the office.
Achlys was gone. Nobody cared if Nissa lived in her office-jungle anymore. Mohinder was happy to have Nissa exactly where she was, performing high-level organizational tasks to keep everything flowing.
Leading up to his mayoral run against Kai Hekekia, Mohinder planned to launch a series of initiatives—community outreach, new businesses, that sort of thing. He’d made it clear this was the best place for Nissa to support that initiative.
Which she’d thought would be fine.
Except that it wasn’t.
Nissa was working robotically, tracking shipments into the territory for her master and sire, and she was definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent not fine.
And that was before she realized she wasn’t alone.
Cold metal kissed her throat. A dagger.
“Don’t turn around.”
That deep, growling female voice…
“Dana McIntyre,” Nissa said, letting her eyes fall shut and her hands drop from the keyboard into her lap. Her heart thudded within the cage of her chest.
A vampire slayer had come into her office.
Nissa could imagine that it wouldn’t be difficult to infiltrate her office, so long as one knew where to look for the employees-only entrance. The stairway to her office was deliberately private to reduce Nissa’s exposure to mortals.
If one were to get past the initial doors and wards, there was nothing stopping a vampire hunter from sneaking up.
Especially if that vampire hunter was developing vampire powers too.
“I need you to give me information,” Dana said, leaning her weight on one of Nissa’s shoulders. Dana’s mouth was just inches from her ear. “You’re going to cooperate or I’m going to cut your throat.”
Nissa turned her head enough to feel the brush of Dana’s hair against her temple, and to smell her laundry soap. Dana had no human body odors left. “You’ll cut my throat anyway.”
“Sure. But I can make your death fast or slow,” Dana said.
“Cutting my throat won’t kill me. If you vivisect a vampire who’s been drinking blood, it may deplete their reserves enough to send them into shock and eventual death. But I don’t have reserves. Just like you. I don’t feed from humans and never have. Cutting my throat will do only that—cut. I think that you realize that.”
Dana’s knife fell away. “Yeah, I know.”
Then she grabbed Nissa, ripped her out of her chair, slammed her back onto the desk. The glass cracked under Nissa’s spine. Dana climbed onto the desk, pressing her weight against Nissa’s belly to hold her down. It wasn’t necessary. Nissa wasn’t fighting.
“That’s why I brought this,” Dana said, holding up a stake. The Hunting Club manufactured stakes with a combination of hard and soft wood, carved into a shape ideal for breaking through bone. The combination of woods meant they’d make a big hole and leave a mess no vampire could heal. “This stake is the same one I used to kill Harold Hopkins. Thought you’d appreciate it.”
Nissa’s heart flopped again, seeking a steady rhythm.
Gods, the huntress was an impressive creature to gaze at from this position.
How many people had gotten to stare up at the cold, emotionless lines of her face, untouched by makeup, shadowed by the fall of bleached hair in the moments before dying permanently? How many had felt the press of her weight during their final instants?
“I’ll give you anything you want,” Nissa said. “Information. Anything.”
“Your password,” Dana said.
“Fair Verona. One word, all together, alternating caps. Replace the vowels with corresponding digits.”
Nissa remained still as Dana tapped the screen of the computer, inputting Nissa’s password.
It logged in.
Dana didn’t get up. She still didn’t trust Nissa, and probably wouldn’t regardless of how much compliance she showed. Dana was cold like that. So damn cold. And she’d been cold long before she became bloodless. This chill was part of Dana. She didn’t hurt when she killed people, not like Nissa did.
“How do I search your visa requests? Find out who’s been traveling in the area?” Dana asked.
“There’s a database. It’s the icon on the top left of the screen,” Nissa said. One of her hands was free. Her fingertips skimmed Dana’s knee, tracing a gap in the denim. Perhaps she had made that hole by climbing onto another vampire’s chest in some grungy alley. Nissa could imagine the struggle, the slam of knee against pavement, the scream of the vampire as it died.
“Hands to yourself, bloodless,” Dana said, shifting so she could pin Nissa’s fingers under that knee.
“You can search my database by date, by point of origin, by—”
“Species?”
“Yes, but I usually don’t. Most preternatural tourists are vampires.”
Dana tapped the screen a few times and made a sound of frustration. “What are the chances that a preternatural could come into the area and you wouldn’t know about it?”
“Low.” The Paradisos hadn’t become powerful by accident. Any visitor was regarded as a potential invader, a usurper, and their screening process was flawless. They rejected a lot more visas than they approved.
“What if they entered after Achlys died, during the transfer of power?”
“The transfer of our monitoring systems hasn’t caused any gaps in coverage. Mohinder’s as aware of every tourist who came in after the moment of Achlys’s death.”
“Then why am I not finding a creature I know for a fucking fact should exist in the area?”
Oh, Dana was beautiful in her anger. How powerful could Nissa have become if she were that angry? If she’d faced her undeath with rage instead of gut-curdling fear?
Even now, admiring Dana, Nissa felt the coils of anxiety loosening her bowels. Her hands would have been shaking if she hadn’t been pinned. “I have records of every preternatural who has passed through here. I swear it
.”
Dana’s jaw tightened. “I’m looking for a valkyrie.”
Nissa smiled. “Can I search the database? I know a few wildcards in search that might help.”
Grudgingly, Dana lifted her weight from Nissa’s. She dropped to the floor as Nissa slithered into her chair. Both of them had messy hair, clothes askew. Dana was still white-knuckling that wooden stake.
Nissa tapped at her screen. “Valkyries are Norse in origin?”
“Probably,” Dana said. “Don’t got much experience there. Never been one in these parts.”
“Hmm.” Nissa ran a few searches. The screen flashed, and Dana leaned over her shoulder to look. Her dry-fleshed scent was overwhelming, but her emotions were not, since Nissa was not vulnerable to the emotional states of a vampire. “I don’t see any valkyries, but we have draugr tourists who originate from Iceland.”
“Draugr?”
“It’s a breed of vampire.” Nissa tried to think of how to differentiate draugr from ordinary American bloodless, or from the vrykolakas of Greece, or the Hebrew aluka. “Draugr are like ghosts. They don’t remain within the bodies of the people who are turned, but corporealize as new entities. We’ve got a murder of vacationing draugr who’re spending the entire month in Las Vegas, beginning last week.”
“And you think they’re from the same area as a valkyrie? Would they be able to kill like a valkyrie?” Dana pressed.
“I’m not sure, but I’ve got nothing else in my database.”
The answer seemed to satisfy Dana. She straightened, stepping back from Nissa. “All right.” Her tone had the weight of finality to it.
Dana thought she was done with Nissa. She planned to kill now.
“What will you do to them?” Nissa might have described her voice as breathless, except that she was always breathless. It would have been more accurate to say that she was whispering in the way that a book nerd whispered when she entered a library to see all those shelves.
“I’ll kill them,” Dana was holding the knife again. The knife and the stake. One to destroy the heart, one to dismember.
Nissa pushed her chair back slowly, standing up. She was much shorter than Dana, so her eyes were level with the vampire hunter’s shoulder. There was something appealing about the threat posed by Dana’s mass. She was graceful in her size, and her curves were simultaneously more delicately womanly and more jaggedly harsh than any other female that Nissa had ever seen.
Dana was stunning.
“I can tell you where the draugr are staying,” Nissa said, and her guts knotted up tight at the offer, making her voice shake and her toes curl within her shoes.
Dana’s expression was empty. “Why would you do that?”
“I want to help.”
“You? You want to help?”
“Is that so weird?” Nissa asked.
“You’re Mohinder’s lieutenant. You were allegedly Achlys’s best friend before you murdered her too.”
So there was that accusation. Nissa allowed her anxiety to be expressed in the roll of her shoulders, the tilt of her head, the angle of her eyebrows. Let Dana perceive her as weak. “Achlys had a secret club called the Bunker. When people made her angry—when humans made her angry—she confined them in the Bunker, taking weeks to slowly torture and kill them.”
“So what?” Dana asked.
“Look at my eyes,” Nissa said. Her colorless eyes. Irises that hadn’t turned red since she had never tasted blood. “Look at me. How do you think I coped with Achlys’s penchant for killing mortals? I was scared of her. I’m not proud of my cowardice, or the fact I’d befriend someone like her to save myself, but…that’s what happened. I took the first chance possible to kill her.”
“You could have reported Achlys to the cops. LVMPD would have taken care of her.”
“Would they really?” Nissa asked.
Dana didn’t reply to that.
It seemed that the Hunting Club’s lead hunter wasn’t confident in the police’s morality. And that was interesting. Useful too.
“We shut down the Bunker when Achlys died,” Dana said. “Where does Mohinder keep the people who piss him off?”
“Mohinder made me,” Nissa said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“He made me, Dana. I was dying when he found me, killed by a mugger. I’d gone down to Fremont Street for some stupid event. And I got attacked. My first memory after dying involves being cradled in Mohinder’s arms. I owe my entire existence to him.”
Dana’s expression changed. “Fremont Street? When?”
“Four years ago,” Nissa said.
If Dana had still been human, Nissa would have been able to read her emotions in such detail that it would be like crawling into her head. She could only guess what the flicker of twitching muscles around her eyes meant. “What’s that gotta do with anything?”
“Anything you might perceive as a sin from Mohinder, I can forgive,” Nissa said. “He made me.”
“You’re saying that you’ll protect Mohinder even if he breaks the law. That makes you equally culpable for his transgressions.”
Nissa stepped closer to Dana, ensuring that the hunter would be able to see the colorless quality of her irises. “Do you think that I deserve to die when I haven’t hurt anyone?” She slid her fingers along Dana’s wrist. The hunter tried to twitch away, but Nissa yanked her arm forward. Pressed the wooden stake between her breasts. “I want this world to be better, just like you do. You’ve gotten information from me. You can find the draugr on your own. Now if you think the world’s better without a monster like me…” Nissa stepped forward, letting the stake dig into her chest.
Dana’s hand dropped to her hip, stake scraping down Nissa’s shirt without puncturing a hole. “You can get me to the draugr?”
“I can find out the exact room they’re staying in to make it easy to question them,” Nissa said.
And Dana said, “Take me there right now.”
7
Dana didn’t let Nissa out of her sight on the way to RKO Pantages. She kept a sharp gaze on the woman’s dense curls as they bounced at her back, same way Penny’s curls would bounce when she was hammering a sword on her anvil.
Just because Dana was watching her didn’t mean she was paying complete attention, though.
I’d gone down to Fremont Street for some stupid event. And I got attacked.
Dana didn’t know which specific event Nissa was talking about. There were a lot of events down on Fremont Street. It was a cheaper, less glamorous version of the Strip. Its attractions were tailored to attracting a younger population. For instance, the bars down there were bad at checking ID. They’d give one of those three-foot-tall hurricane cups filled with margaritas to anyone tall enough to get on the zip line. Everything was cheap, so college students and teenaged tourists could afford to enjoy the second-tier sins offered by the vampires of Fremont Street.
Thinking back a few years, Dana could remember a lot of events that had been happening on Fremont Street. She remembered a Black Death cover band. A bar crawl. A wine walk. A gathering of college students dressed up as zombies performing “Thriller” for Michael Jackson’s birthday. Pole dancers at the ice-skating rink for Christmas.
Dana remembered these events because, for a little while there, she’d obsessed over Fremont Street.
Not the street itself. Not the casinos. Not even most of the tourists.
She’d been dying to know about the young women who visited Fremont Street because they were the chosen prey of the Fremont Slasher.
His victims had all been of a similar type. Curly haired, for one. Cute. All of them had apple cheeks. Hard thing to quantify for a police report, but Dana had flipped through victim profiles and seen the connection.
Indiscriminate of age and class, the Fremont Slasher had picked off women who could all be best described as mousy.
People like Penny.
People like…Nissa?
“Keeping up with me?” Nissa asked
, glancing back at Dana. They were stepping off of a pedestrian bridge, heading through towering casino doors guarded by male models dressed in tuxedos. The archway shimmered with magic that allowed people to pass through freely while still holding in the chilled air.
For a moment, Nissa’s heart-shaped face was illuminated by the dancing lights of the casino sign. She was luminous in the eternal night Dana had come to exist within.
Nissa’s eyes were bigger than Penny’s, and she was a lot shorter. And Nissa would have been human when the Slasher picked her up, assuming that was what had happened. There were differences between the two of them. They were the same type, but not the same person.
The similarities were more striking than their differences.
“The draugr are here?” Dana’s upper lip peeled back at the sight of one of the male models holding the door. He winked lasciviously at her. “At an old Hollywood-themed casino?”
“It doesn’t get more American than this. Foreigners love it.” Nissa had an employee card that allowed her to unlock doors. They headed upstairs to a level overlooking the casino floor—probably some kind of access point for cleaning staff. “We can spot them from up here.”
Dana’s eyes skimmed the mezzanine level. The locked doors, the plain carpet, the unlit mirrored walls. Her reflection looked as annoyed as she felt. “You’re confident these draugr will be gambling right now.”
“It’s all they’ve been doing,” Nissa said. “You’d be surprised how common gambling addiction is, and how quickly it can develop.” She leaned on the railing.
Dana remained behind her, watching over Nissa’s shoulder as the cocktail waitresses dressed like Marilyn Monroe and Betty Page served gamblers. The dealers were dressed like they should have been hanging out with the Rat Pack. Everything was art deco, golden statues, old-style class.
RKO Pantages was one of Dana’s least favorite casinos on the Strip. She didn’t have room for nostalgia, and especially not nostalgia for something that happened a century ago.
“Do you see the draugr anywhere?” Dana had looked up the distinguishing characteristics of draugr while walking over, and the database reported they weren’t physically different from most vampires. Draugr were more ephemeral, like tangible ghosts, but everything was human-shaped. Dana couldn’t see anyone who looked strange from where she stood.
