Kill Game: An Urban Fantasy Thriller (Dana McIntyre Must Die Book 2)

by SM Reine

  “I don’t see anyone yet,” Nissa said. “Maybe they’re getting more chips. We just need to wait a few minutes.”

  Nissa was so trusting. From the way she was angled, she wouldn’t be able to see what Dana was doing at her back. She wouldn’t be able to react in time if Dana drew her wooden stake. Dana had already stabbed her once—Nissa should have known better.

  Dana considered the blade in her belt, thought about how hard it would be to eviscerate Nissa’s heart from behind.

  She thought about the Fremont Slasher, and human-Nissa wandering alone four years earlier.

  “What were you doing before you died?” Dana asked.

  Nissa’s smile was only visible because it made one of her cheeks lift beyond the veil of her curls. “I don’t remember much.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Not at all. It’s normal to forget things from your human life after you die, and it’s worse with blood virgins. I might remember if I drank blood regularly.”

  “You can’t tell me that you don’t know who killed you.”

  “I know the story the way children know fairy tales,” she said. “Mohinder has told me about it.”

  “What does he say?”

  “It was dark. Around the holidays, so it was chilly for Vegas. He found me getting dragged behind the Nugget. Mohinder attacked. My killer ran away. Mohinder saw that I was still a little bit alive, so he filled me with venom and drank my blood to ensure I’d wake up again.”

  Nissa related the story with no attachment to it. She might as well have been describing the season finale of a TV show she’d watched a few years back. Even Dana took killings more personally than that.

  Penny had been profoundly changed by the Fremont Slasher’s attack. Nissa didn’t remember it, didn’t care about it, didn’t get emotional talking about the night.

  Must have been nice.

  When Dana remembered that she needed to speak, she only got one word out. “Why?”

  “Why? The blood and venom exchange? That’s how vampires are made.”

  “No. Why did Mohinder save you? It’s illegal to make vampires without prior consent. There’s paperwork.”

  Some people thought it should be illegal to turn others into vampires, the same way that people thought abortions should be illegal or that physician-assisted suicide should be illegal. Many people with those opinions held public office. There were laws about when you could and couldn’t change someone into one of the undead.

  Nissa’s death would have been a gray area. Saving someone’s “life” was technically a legal application of vampire venom. Dana wasn’t confident that it would have held up in court, but hey, she wasn’t a judge.

  “Mohinder saved my life. I didn’t ask a lot of questions,” Nissa said.

  “He must have had political aspirations, even then. I don’t know why he’d risk them to save a stranger. I’d need him to give me a hell of a lot more details than that.”

  “Don’t you think it’s ungrateful to be so demanding?”

  “I don’t care if it seems ungrateful,” Dana said. “If a fucking vampire took it upon himself to turn me into a monster, I’d need to know what he had planned for me.”

  “You never asked Achlys,” Nissa said.

  “Didn’t have to. She wanted to torture me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.” There was no question about what would be the worst punishment for a vampire-hating hunter. She’d have wagered that most vamps would have changed her as a way to get revenge. It was a lot worse than getting straight up murdered. “It sounds like you didn’t get changed because of torture, so there’s another reason. You think Mohinder wants to fuck you? Or are you already fucking?”

  “He’s my sire,” Nissa said, and she actually sounded a little offended. “He made me.”

  “But are you fucking?”

  The mousy vampire turned, one of her hands tugging hard on a lock of curls. A nervous gesture. She’d been calm before, even when Dana had been threatening to stake her. Now that Nissa was in public, she was unraveling, fingers twitching and eyes rolling and her chest rising and falling even though her lungs didn’t need oxygen. “No,” Nissa said. “Never. Why does it matter?”

  “It’d be a classic power move. Taking control of some pretty young woman, holding her captive, using sex to control her.”

  Nissa tugged harder on her hair. “You don’t like men.”

  “Some men are fine. Abusers are typically male, though. Am I a misandrist if it’s a fact that ninety percent of serial killers are men?”

  “What percentage of all men are serial killers?”

  “I don’t really care,” Dana said.

  Nissa was colorless in the darkness. They were just above the level of the lights for the casino floor, leaving them in shadow. Without color cues, Nissa’s silhouette alone, with the curls and the shrunken posture… Gods, she really did look like the exact same “type” as Penny.

  “Mohinder is special. He doesn’t have to support me, just like how he didn’t have to save me from a mugging.”

  Dana felt a dull jolt at that last word. Mugging.

  Getting dragged through an alley didn’t sound like the serial killer’s usual methods. Reports from survivors—the report from Penny—had said that he had knocked them unconscious from behind. There had been no serious injuries until he got them to his hideout. No slashing until they were contained. And no murders until he’d already been holding on to victims for weeks.

  If Nissa had been victimized by the Fremont Slasher, then maybe he’d made a mistake with her. Gotten a little too rough.

  Or maybe Dana was starting to get patchy cognition from her change into a vampire. Drawing conclusions from information where she shouldn’t. Going soft. Like Tormid pointed out, Dana should have killed Nissa by now, but…

  “There.” Nissa pointed down at the floor, where a rowdy party was playing roulette.

  Dana understood what the reports meant about draugr looking ephemeral now. The gray hair and skin made them look like ghosts, especially since their flesh seemed transparent enough to show the casino carpet on the other side of them.

  These were no apparitions. They were very physical, tossing back drinks, pushing their chips around on the table, grabbing cocktail waitresses.

  Even from twenty feet above, Dana could hear them shouting and laughing.

  “Red? Never go all in on red!”

  “I cannot bet on black as sheer policy! It’s a personal standards thing!”

  It was strange to hear them speaking English amongst themselves when they had such thick accents that they clearly weren’t native speakers. They wanted everyone to understand them.

  Had the draugr wanted to blend in, they wouldn’t have been wearing such gaudy, glittering snakeskin boots and jackets. They wouldn’t have been wearing all white to accentuate their ghostliness. They wouldn’t have had silver belt buckles big enough to make a barrel-racing queen jealous.

  They were graceful, imbued with preternatural speed and everything else that most vampires had. They might have been a little faster too. They occasionally flashed from one position to another without seeming to transition between, as though they were moving faster than light.

  Dana was certain she could kill them by decapitation. Few things survived decapitation.

  Three men and a woman. Four draugr.

  Easy.

  When the female draugr moved, her snakeskin coat parted. She was wearing a white blouse unbuttoned to her navel. She also flashed bright, shiny metal under one arm where someone ordinarily would have kept a gun.

  It didn’t look as though she was armed with a gun, though.

  “Valkyrie feather sword,” Dana muttered.

  It didn’t seem right. What was the motivation? Tourists killing an airship dock attendant?

  They were so rowdy. It could have happened in a drunken fit of glee. Who knew?

  Dana had never seen a valkyrie feather blade before
in her life until that night. It was rare enough to be damning.

  “I want that sword,” Dana said.

  Nissa’s fists were knotted against her gut, almost like she was doing the Heimlich on herself. Her face was all screwed up. “We can get it for you, as long as we get away from here first.”

  Dana’s brow lowered. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “The human players are afraid of the draugr,” she said, her voice shaking. “I can’t…” Her hands came up to clutch her skull. Her eyes closed. “It’s too much.”

  When Dana had found Penny in the Fremont Slasher’s den, she had been curled up in a corner, drawn in on herself, hands pressed to her face. She’d barely been alive. After all of the cuts that the Slasher had delivered, Penny had barely been keeping the skin on her face intact.

  There were no visible scars anymore. The plastic surgeon had worked with Edie to ensure that any scars that weren’t hidden by hair would remain flush to the skin, making them easy to conceal with makeup. Even most of the scars on Penny’s back had disappeared. Only ghostly imprints on her trunk remained to mark weeks in captivity with a serial killer.

  The outside parts healed. The inside parts didn’t.

  Dana recognized the fear in Nissa’s eyes because it was so much like Penny’s. And when Nissa pushed the fear down, trying to hide it the way that Penny’s scars were hidden, Dana recognized that too. Nissa might not have known why she became a vampire, but she didn’t need the information to be hurt by it.

  “I have an office here too,” Nissa said. “It’s on the fourth floor, back by the spa. I’ll bring the draugr there. Meet us in ten minutes. And then you can question them about…whatever you need.”

  When she turned and walked away, Dana thought it was Nissa who looked like the ghost.

  8

  Dana got to Nissa’s office before anyone else did. The workspace in this casino was much smaller than the one in Judex, which made sense; it wasn’t Nissa’s primary point of operations. Her RKO Pantages office was equally windowless, but designed around an art deco theme instead of the austere jungle. She had no computer, no fountains. Just a couple of lamps and an ovular desk with a few chairs. Nissa didn’t care to decorate this office.

  The casino’s interior designer had ensured furnishings matched the rest of the casino, though. There were sculptures of women against the walls, backs arched and breasts thrust forward like figureheads on pirate ships. Their curves created nooks in the room, and the one in the far back was most shadowy when she turned off the lamp.

  Dana took position. She debated for a moment, then settled on drawing only her knife. The stake would be saved for later.

  She was crouching in utter darkness when the door opened.

  “Do you have the real stuff back here?” It was the gaunt female draugr, who was only a couple of steps behind Nissa.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Emery,” Nissa said. “We don’t serve human blood anywhere on the Strip.”

  Miss Emery made a disgusted sound. She was clearly intoxicated, based on the weaving pattern she cut through the room. It probably was lethe. That drug had been tailor-made to fuck up preternaturals.

  Watching from the darkness, Dana could see that Miss Emery’s male draugr companions were similarly faded. All wore slim-cut suits, mirrored sunglasses, albino animal prints. Rich people who weren’t afraid to show it. Rich enough to get enough lethe for four draugr to party all month.

  “No human blood? Not anywhere?” One of the male draugr threw his arm around Nissa, pulling her hips flush against his. “But you said that you had something for us in here.”

  Nissa peeled away from him with an uncomfortable laugh. She accidentally backed into another of the males and twitched away. “We do like to treat our high rollers well,” she said, “but there are laws to be followed, and—”

  “You’ve got to have blood somewhere.” The second male grabbed Nissa by the arms, and he never stopped smiling. He must have liked intimidating her. Ninety percent of serial killers were men, after all.

  “I brought you here to comp services,” Nissa said. She managed to get to the other side of the table, away from all the draugr. “I want to help you.”

  Miss Emery kicked her feet up, spread her arms over the backs of her adjacent chairs. Her jacket fell open to expose the valkyrie feather dagger. This close, Dana could see that it looked like a piece of metal worked into the delicate shape of a feather. There were no welding marks or other signs of crafting because it had not been created by an artist. It had grown like that, razor-edged and deadly, reflecting rainbows on its chrome surface.

  Those edges would be more than fine enough to kill an airship attendant.

  But why?

  Dana couldn’t wait to find out.

  Draugr or vrykolakas or whatever, these were vampires. They demanded to be served human blood. They grabbed Nissa like she was property.

  They were monsters.

  “Of all the services casinos owned by vampires offer, the things we really want aren’t among them?” asked the third male. “I find that hard to believe.”

  Nissa slid the office door shut. “Vampires are a tourist attraction, not the tourists. We profit off of selling ourselves.”

  “We have the money to be tourists, and we want to be treated like kings,” said Miss Emery. “You should be opening veins into wine glasses for us.” A wholly unoriginal idea. Dana had encountered many vampires who thought that made them look cool.

  “Aren’t there prostitutes in Nevada?” asked another of them. “We should have prostitutes.”

  “They sell sex, not blood,” Nissa said.

  “Anyone will sell blood if you offer them enough money.” Miss Emery flashed fang. Draugr didn’t have especially elongated canines, but all their teeth were sharp. “And you don’t have to pay if you drain them dry.”

  Nissa glanced around the room, as if she was worried about Dana’s reaction but wasn’t sure where she was hidden. “Murder is illegal via any means.”

  “Anything’s legal for the right price.”

  “Not here. You have something else that we want more than money,” Nissa said.

  Dana took that as her cue.

  The only visibly armed draugr was the female, but she was clearly not a leader. These men demonstrated no respect for females in their body language. The distance from their female cohort was derived from disdain rather than diffidence.

  No. Their leader was another of the men. He was the third, the one that was not getting grabby with Nissa.

  When she melted out of the shadows, when she wrapped her arm around a throat, it was that third draugr’s. She pressed her knife under his jaw much the same way that she’d done to Nissa. Dana was rewarded by the sight of all the draugr going very still. “What are you doing?” he asked, stiffening at the press of cool metal.

  She slammed him into a wall face-first.

  Vampires were human corpses animated by primal magic, so many maneuvers that were effective against humans had no impact upon a vampire. Bouncing a brain against the inside of a skull was enough to daze most of them, though.

  Dana had never tried it on a draugr. A solidified ghost. She wasn’t sure it would work.

  It didn’t.

  He drove his foot back between her legs to stomp her instep. Dana used the shift in his balance to fling him to the floor.

  “What is this?” Miss Emery snarled, leaping to her feet.

  Nissa bared her elongated canines in a snarl, and she leaped over the table to smash into the female draugr.

  They overturned chairs. Knocked the table over.

  For an instant, the office was in chaos.

  It was a lot of sensory information for Dana to process. Bodies striking walls and floor, furniture breaking, vampires everywhere.

  She zeroed in on what really mattered.

  Controlling the leader.

  Dana exchanged knife for stake, pinned him down, and introduced his chest to a millimeter of wood. She
kept pushing until she felt the breastbone bowing under the strength of it.

  A draugr may not have been susceptible to head trauma, but a stake to the heart was universal.

  “Stop!” he cried out.

  And everyone stopped.

  “Nice choice,” Dana growled. “Let’s make this fast and simple. There’s a woman dead at the airship dock. Why did you kill her?”

  “You’re insane,” he hissed.

  She leaned her weight on him.

  He made a strangled noise. The room was so quiet—four vampires watching in suspense didn’t breathe, didn’t move, didn’t cough or fart or belch. Not a peep. Nothing but the draugr’s bone cracking underneath her.

  “Why?” Dana asked again.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” He sure looked like he meant it.

  She didn’t let up. “What’s your name?”

  “Arne,” he said, and he coughed. Blood spurted over his bottom lip.

  The smell of human blood washed over Dana. Arne was regurgitating human blood.

  If Dana had tested its genetics, it would have shown no relation to Arne the draugr. It wasn’t as though the ghost had a circulatory system. This was the result of feeding off of someone.

  “You’re in big trouble, Arne,” Dana said. She glanced up at Nissa. “I want a paper towel.” Nissa didn’t seem to hear her. She was transfixed, eyes wide, locked on Arne. With that expression, she looked like she was one hard breeze away from orgasm. Dana raised her volume. “Paper towel!”

  Nissa snapped out of it. “I don’t have any in here.” She pulled a cotton handkerchief out of a drawer. “This is—”

  “Fine.” Dana took the cloth. She soaked up the blood on Arne’s mouth. “I’m going to test this. I’m going to know if this blood came from the woman murdered at the airship dock.”

  “It was from a volunteer, you crazy bitch,” Arne said. “It’s not illegal to take blood from friends.”