by SM Reine
There was only one way to find out what was in that shipment.
And there was only one way to find out who might be running around with valkyrie-feather swords.
“When’s the shipment coming in?” Dana asked.
“It’ll be here tomorrow night,” Nissa said. She checked the time on her watch. “Okay, tonight. After the next sunset. Do you want to check it out? It’s okay if you don’t.” She added the last bit quickly.
Dana didn’t have to look at Anthony and Brianna to know they were staring at her in horror. “Yeah,” Dana said. “I’ll go to the sale.”
11
There were a few times in Dana’s life where she’d gone through big transitions. She regarded the separate phases of the last twenty-whatever years as distinctive eras: her young childhood before becoming an orphan; her adolescence raised by witches; the teenage years with the gods; meeting Penny and taking over the Hunting Lodge. The years since the Fremont Slasher had been the worst possible, she thought—worse than getting orphaned in many ways.
It turned out that the era where she was a blood virgin was worse. Because not only was the Slasher still out there, but she didn’t have Penny, and she slept in a fucking tomb.
The brothers passed the hour before sunrise in prayer and gardening in the greenhouse. Dana hadn’t been joining them lately. But as Lincoln had pointed out, maybe it was time for Dana to refocus her efforts on worship.
She only got to the hallway behind the pulpit before running into Lincoln, though. He was waiting for her, arms folded inside his voluminous robes. “Morning, McIntyre,” he said. “Have a nice night?”
“No,” Dana said. “How about you? Going to the greenhouse already?” She’d obviously gotten back to the cathedral too late for prayers if Lincoln wasn’t with the other monks.
“No, I just got off the phone with the Hardwicks,” Lincoln said. “Brianna wasn’t happy with the information they gave her. Asked me to get in touch with Pierce.”
“Why’d she ask you to do that?” It was like expecting your neighborhood pastor to be able to call the president for funsies.
“We’re, uh…old friends.” Lincoln coughed into his fist. “My staff came from the Winter Queen. The first one. Before she was assassinated, the Hardwicks hung out in Niflheimr with her, so we got acquainted.”
Considering how many sidhe were involved in the story, Dana figured Lincoln was choosing not to tell her about an orgy. There were always orgies with the sidhe. She never asked how many visits to Pound Town Lincoln had made to get that sidhe staff from the Winter Queen, but she’d always assumed it had been at least a few dozen.
Hey, whatever it took to get what they needed.
“All right, so you talked to Pierce Hardwick,” Dana said, heading to the catacombs’ stairs. Lincoln sauntered alongside her. “What’d you get from him?”
“Pierce offered to sell us unobtainium at cost. But we can’t afford it.”
“I can tap my savings.” The Hunting Club used to divert all its money to a savings account for her when she was a kid, so she had money distributed across worldwide bank accounts, which she totally ignored.
“You got a billion dollars in savings?”
“No, but I don’t need a fucking ton of unobtainium.”
“You need a billion for a quarter-gram of refined unobtainium,” Lincoln said.
Okay. So they couldn’t afford it. “Fuck, you can’t just honey-dick your way into getting us a couple crumbs?”
“The Hardwicks don’t want anything I have. They’re not those kind of sidhe.”
Dana wanted to argue that all sidhe were “those kind of sidhe,” but it felt stupid arguing with the Lincoln Marshall, who’d been the first human with an open invitation to visit the Middle Worlds. He knew sidhe the way Dana knew vampires.
“Pierce suggested we contact Gaslight Corp,” Lincoln said. “They’re said to have unrefined unobtainium on hand that might be cheaper.”
“Gaslight Corp? Never heard of ‘em.”
“Me neither, so I looked them up. Seems like they’re a company with roots in Hyderabad.”
“Who’s at the reins?”
“Probably a shell company inside a few other shell companies. Couldn’t find the innermost nesting doll, so they’ve gotta be pretty big.”
It made sense for a huge company like Hardwick Research to have a billions-per-gram resource. The idea that this Gaslight Corp could have similar reach but fly under Dana’s radar was…well, it didn’t seem likely.
Dana would have bet her Swiss bank account that Gaslight Corp was evil based on that information alone.
“I’ve put the word out,” Lincoln said. “We’ll know soon if we can buy unrefined unobtainium from them.”
“Great.” Dana reached the door to her cell, but didn’t go inside. She hesitated. Sighed. Scrubbed her hands over her face, and turned back to Lincoln.
“Problem?” he asked.
“I didn’t kill a vampire,” she said. Felt as bad as admitting that she’d punched a puppy in the face.
Lincoln tipped his hat back with a knuckle, lifting an eyebrow at Dana. “You let one survive?”
“I tried to kill her once. It didn’t work. I’ve run into her since then and haven’t taken her down. She’s like me, Linc—she’s still in transition. A blood virgin.”
“And that’s why you’re letting her go,” he said. “Because she reminds you of yourself.”
“Because she reminds me of Penny.” There. Dana had said the words out loud. “This vampire, Nissa Royal, she died four years ago. She got jumped on Fremont Street. The only reason she walked away from it was because Mohinder found her.”
“Fremont Street four years ago.” Lincoln scratched his fingers over his jaw. “Damn. Does she have info about the Fremont Slasher that you don’t?”
Dana loved how Lincoln didn’t pussyfoot around the subject with her. Everyone was so careful about it, like she’d snap if they even said the killer’s name. “I don’t think Nissa even knows that she’s one of his victims.”
“You don’t do anyone a favor by telling her about it,” Lincoln said.
“That’s not what’s bugging me. She’s not a killer like the other vampires, and she can’t be the Fremont Slasher herself. But I’ve sworn to kill all vampires. Tormid and I are working to dismantle the Paradisos, and that includes Nissa Royal.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t killed her if she’s one of the murder,” Lincoln said. “You’re not the sentimental type.”
Understatement of the epoch. “If I’m curable, so’s she. And she’s giving me access to information about the Paradisos I wouldn’t otherwise have. I’m not used to feeling like I dunno what to do. Makes me wish the gods actually answered prayers.”
“Come on, let me show you something,” Lincoln said.
“The sun’s rising in a minute. Need to go to sleep.”
“We’re not going anywhere near daylight.”
He took Dana down the long hallway of warded doors in the catacombs. Lincoln walked past a pair of statues that resembled the triadists’ two favorite gods.
“Just because the gods don’t talk much doesn’t mean we can’t figure out their intent,” he said, veering down another hallway. Dripping water echoed around them. “They made the world as we know it when Genesis hit. They tweaked everything a little, but vampires? Vampires got tweaked a lot.”
“Vampires didn’t exist before Genesis,” Dana said. “They’re the most embarrassing mistake of the gods, you ask me.”
“A mistake? Maybe. Maybe not.”
The tunnel widened into an unremarkable cave with a shallow pool at its heart. Someone had stuck a folding chair and bucket alongside the pool.
A single shaft of sunlight glowed at the end of the cave, shining through a crack in the rock. It was too blue and cool to be Vegas sunlight. This part of the Holy Nights Cathedral rested elsewhere in the world through the magic of sidhe ley lines.
“Thought you said we weren’t goin
g near sun,” Dana said.
“Not much sun,” Lincoln amended.
He grabbed Dana’s arm and thrust it into the light.
She boiled immediately.
“Fuck!”
Dana didn’t wrench away from him. She gritted her teeth and watched the skin burn. It bubbled, then popped into dry craters that flaked like parchment.
“The gods’ light blisters you, so you can reckon that they want it to do that. They want this world to be deadly to vampires. But…” Lincoln pulled her over to the pool. He pushed Dana to her knees and plunged her burned arm into the water.
The pain instantly stopped.
When Lincoln released her arm, Dana found that her skin was unbroken. Healed.
“This is the blessed spring we get our holy water from. If the sun burns but the water heals, then it makes me think that the gods aren’t done with you yet,” he said. “You’re still pure, McIntyre. You haven’t drunk from humans. Neither has this Nissa character.”
Dana turned her hand over in front of her face, examining the repaired skin. It was as dead as ever. Yet she could be fixed by the gods’ blessing. “So you think I shouldn’t kill her.” It wasn’t the answer she’d expected from Lincoln. She’d been ready to get her ass chewed out, and she had been kinda looking forward to it. But this…
“I think if Nissa repents, and if you guys can work together to save Las Vegas from murderers, then it’s your moral responsibility to wait.” Lincoln rested a hand on Dana’s shoulder, giving her a serious look. The triadist charm glimmered at the hollow of his throat. “But don’t trust Nissa. Never, ever trust a vampire.”
12
The Big Blind was a Ferris wheel, in a manner of speaking, though there wasn’t any other Ferris wheel like it on the planet. Unlike its older sister, the High Roller, the Big Blind wasn’t anchored to the ground. None of its parts touched the Earth. It was also tilted at an angle with the cars dangling underneath it, kinda like the Round-Up at the carnival, and the whole thing glowed with magic.
Each of its room-sized cars cost thousands of dollars to rent one for the night, but once you did, you had limitless alcohol, great views of the Strip, and private vampire bartenders. The experience probably wasn’t terrible. But if you didn’t rent a whole room—and who but rich douchebags could?—then you had to share space, staff, drinks. You also had to listen to bad music and ads blaring over the speakers. Half of the advertisements encouraged humans to visit vampire bars, while the other half were for sex workers and strip clubs.
It was a tourist trap, and an obnoxious one at that. Dana made a point to have never ridden it. Which was why she was so annoyed to step into a shared car with Nissa Royal at midnight.
“Fuck,” Dana muttered, glancing around the glass room. The place reeked of tourists. Dana accepted tourism as a necessity for the local economy, and she preferred human visitors to vampire natives, but that didn’t mean she wanted to be anywhere near these out-of-towners with their huge camera lenses and plastic sunglasses and novelty t-shirts.
Nissa didn’t seem any more thrilled to be there. She couldn’t stop shaking from the moment they passed the ticket booth.
“What’s your problem?” Dana asked. “You see something I don’t?”
“I feel something you don’t.” She pressed her hands against her forehead and squeezed her eyes shut. Her empathy powers must have been going wild around all of these mortals.
“Do you feel the guys doing the trade?”
Nissa shook her head. “Just mortals. I can’t read vampires.”
“Damn.” Dana pointed to a curved bench along one of the windows. “Sit down before you fall down.”
“There’s room for both of us,” Nissa said.
Dana wasn’t going to sit within arm’s reach of this vampire. Like Lincoln had said, Nissa might be redeemable, but that didn’t mean she was trustworthy. Dana took position against a girder nearby instead, since that permitted a view of the open door to the car as it slid past the dock.
There must have been fifty people in Dana’s room alone, and she didn’t need empathy powers to pick out threats. She just watched them. Body language and facial expressions gave away enough. Right now, there was nobody interesting in Dana’s view. But she couldn’t see everybody at once.
She noted the positioning of the security cameras: two black domes on either end of the car. They’d see everything she didn’t. Dana touched her earpiece. “Two cameras here. Can you get in?”
“What?” Nissa asked.
Dana wasn’t speaking to her. She was talking to Dionne back at the base, who was on computer duty. Dionne was a feline shifter. Her voice was silky-smooth, like a phone sex operator’s voice, and she looked like black Hermione Granger. “Yes, I can have one of the cameras up at a time,” Dionne said. “I’m watching. Is there anything I should be looking for in particular?”
“Briefcases, suitcases, backpacks. People talking intently. Anything that looks like selling drugs.”
“I’ll ping you if I see anything,” Dionne said.
“Great.” Dana turned off her microphone.
The Big Blind car lurched and accelerated. Whoops of drunken excitement filled the room.
The Strip sprawled out underneath them. At that height, the giant magical figures looked like people walking among a town of toys. The Rio had added a Wenda the Wicked advertisement, and she was the tallest of them. Each of her boobs was bigger than the cars on the Big Blind.
It was cloudy again. The thunderheads reflected the light from the Strip, turning them purple. Because the Big Blind was at a higher elevation than most of Vegas, it gathered condensation that couldn’t reach the road without evaporating; droplets beaded on the other side of the glass.
Nissa kept her eyes locked to her pigeon-toed feet. The ballet flats had little skulls on the heels—the only hint of style similar to Achlys’s.
“You afraid of heights?” Dana asked, folding her arms.
“A little, since I fell out of Achlys’s tower,” she said. “But there are a few people in here that are very afraid of heights. Over by the bar.”
Dana peered over the crowd to look at the group Nissa indicated. There was a group of pale tourists who weren’t vampires—just scared witless. Looked like a bachelor party where only the bachelor was having fun, possibly because he was too drunk to realize how far off the ground they were.
They didn’t look likely to be part of the trade. Nothing about their body language was threatening or covert.
Dana kept scanning the others in the car. “You’re sure this is where it’s supposed to happen?”
“The calendar event said the Gergich Room.” Nissa pointed to a sign over the door. It had been named in honor of an assemblyman killed in Genesis. “And this is the time of the event, so…” Unless the calendar event was fake, they were in the right place at the right time.
The Big Blind continued to rotate. They skimmed an advertisement for an all-incubus revue, which looked like a ten-story-tall man with a waxed chest and six-pack for days. A giant eyebrow waggled suggestively as they passed. Dana rolled her eyes.
“Have you heard anything that might suggest why the Paradisos are ordering iron?” Dana asked. Nissa shook her head, mouth sealed shut as if afraid she might vomit. “What do you think are the odds Mohinder’s stocking up to prevent another attempted coup from the likes of Shawn Wyn?”
“Very low, now that Shawn is dead.” Nissa drew her knees up to her chest, back pressing against the glass. She didn’t make contact with the bewitched incubus. “We’ve stopped issuing visas for anyone but vampires while Mohinder stabilizes things.”
Or else Mohinder wasn’t running all the travel visas past Nissa anymore.
Dana didn’t trust Mohinder nearly as much as Nissa did. The guy had to be pretty fucked in the head to wanna be mayor—or any other politician. But Nissa wasn’t gonna admit that Mohinder could keep secrets from her, so Dana approached the question from another angle. “Do you th
ink anyone might try to bump Mohinder off the throne while he’s still new to it?”
“I guess it’s possible,” Nissa said. “Sounds like a losing fight to me.”
“Do his generals have purchasing authority? Anyone high enough to buy stuff secretly?”
“I mean, yeah, lots of people could do it. All Vegas vamps are Paradisos. We don’t give them a choice. And the number of businesses we have means we’ve got so much cash flowing in every direction. But even if a Paradisos vamp is buying illegal metals, that doesn’t mean they’re trying to topple Mohinder. It might have nothing to do with the murder.”
If Nissa had more information about it, she wasn’t in a condition to be wheedled into sharing. She looked two seconds from barfing.
It made for a quiet rotation around the Big Blind—quiet conversationally, if not audibly, since the blaring ads and drunk fucks just kept getting louder. Dana would have liked to join the drunks if the drinks hadn’t been eighteen bucks per cocktail.
“I don’t think anything’s gonna happen,” Dionne said over the headset. Her silken voice was pleasantly soft compared to the rest of the auditory assault. “I’m falling asleep at the desk. Wanna clock out. You good?”
There was no point subjecting an associate to a long night when the trade was clearly a dud. Dana turned her mic back on. “Yep, I’m good.”
“See you tomorrow, Big D.” Dionne’s voice crackled and the line to the Hunting Lodge terminated.
Dana stuffed her headset in her pocket.
They were nearing the end of the first rotation. At that point, they could get off of the Big Blind, or they could spend another half-hour listening to assholes boast about how many hookers they’d banged on this trip while an oversized incubus leered at them. Dana would prefer to let a sale of iron go uninterrupted than stay on the worst tourist experience on the Strip.
“Let’s clear off,” she said. “Call this a wash and see what else we can do.”
Nissa nodded mutely. She wavered on her feet when she stood, like she might pass out.
