Glutted on Melissa and Shannon’s blood, Nissa felt as though she could have done anything.
But she didn’t want to do anything.
She wanted to figure out who the hell she’d seen in Shannon and Melissa’s memories.
Both of them recalled a towering blond woman rescuing them from Maximillian. Neither of them remembered any details beyond that, though. They’d quickly fled once Maximillian was felled, and their savior had been so coated in sludge that they couldn’t tell anything about her at a glance anyway.
It was unsurprising that Nissa would mistake that blond woman for Dana McIntyre. Her head was filled with the huntress—her scent, her predatory grace, the way she filled a room with her personality. It had been barely hours since Nissa had dared to press her lips against Dana’s. She could still smell her dusty vampire flesh.
Someone had killed Maximillian. From the brief memories supplied, he had been eaten, too. There was a preternatural out there who had killed at least one vampire. Nissa wanted to know who.
Nissa slipped through the private tunnels behind the animal habitats and headed out onto the streets of Las Vegas.
It was a different experience drifting over asphalt bathed in neon now that Nissa was full-blooded. She saw colors she’d never seen before, as though someone had added a few new primary colors to the spectrum. She had no words for the shades. They weren’t really there; the glistening fog that slid off of mortals she passed was the residue their minds left upon the world around them.
They didn’t overwhelm Nissa anymore. She wasn’t victim to their fears, griefs, and pains. She slid between them untouched.
And disinterested.
What colors would Dana McIntyre’s mind have displayed?
Nissa imagined she must have been a bloody rainbow splattering hot pinks and lime greens on her environment.
But maybe she hadn’t known Dana well enough to guess.
She never would have become a vampire for you. That was what that hulking green woman had said.
Nissa was familiar with Penny McIntyre, though only distantly. Dana had mentioned a wife a couple of times. They had been estranged.
Feelings clearly had not vanished along with their marriage.
She never would have become a vampire for you.
Why not?
Because Nissa was so unremarkable that nobody noticed her? They hadn’t made eye contact in the days where she’d been a college student, hadn’t wanted to share drinks with her on Fremont Street, hadn’t intervened when a murderer dragged her into an alley.
Penny McIntyre didn’t see Nissa.
But damn it all, Dana had seen her. She should have chosen to survive as soon as Nissa changed her.
“What if she did survive?” Nissa wondered aloud. Even when she spoke, standing on the intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard and Flamingo Road, the sound of her voice didn’t draw gazes in her direction. Even people who glanced at her quickly turned away the same way that her college professors used to.
Penny insisted Nissa didn’t know Dana. Something had changed Dana at some point, turning her into the merciless killer Nissa found so interesting.
Someone who might have faked her death to survive.
Someone who might have rescued Nissa’s last victim from another vampire.
Someone who could still be out there.
Surely if Dana were still on this Earth, she’d want to tell her spouse as soon as possible.
Penny McIntyre was easy to locate. Nissa had looked up Dana’s address once, weeks earlier, and knew that the couple owned a penthouse at the top of the Allure building. It was a condominium tower that had been built shortly before Genesis and had been rendered many aesthetic updates in the years since—a shining pillar of glass at the heart of Las Vegas.
When Nissa stepped into the lobby, a doorman stopped her. “Hello! Who are you here to visit?” With his fingers poised over a keyboard, he surely intended to register her arrival, and most likely notify her target.
Nissa did not want anyone to know that she was coming.
She opened her mind to him.
Nirav Piliszek was ex-military. A Marine. He was stronger than he looked, though that was a low bar to clear, since he was near eighty years old. This was his retirement job. He was a widower, but at peace; he found comfort in his grandchildren.
“Hands off the keyboard,” Nissa said.
His hands dropped.
What could she make this deeply decent man do? She saw his love of animals at his core, and Nissa said, “Do you see the cat?” She pointed at a potted plant between two couches in the lobby. That’s a cat, Nirav. You love cats. You love to press your ear to their furry flanks and listen to the purr deep within.
“Pretty cat,” Nirav agreed. He saw what she had told him to see. He was still at ease, unaware of the intrusion upon his mind.
Nissa’s heart was beating again.
She could control him the way she’d controlled Melissa and Shannon.
“Kill it,” she said. Kill that cat, Nirav. Kill it.
He walked around the desk. His movements were smooth for a man of his age—likely a result of his rebirth as a shifter in Genesis—and when his heel lashed out toward the imaginary cat’s skull, it was with enough force to kill an elephant.
Nissa slipped his security badge off his lapel and stepped into the elevator. He was still stomping pottery shards.
Her heart was pounding.
Floor by floor, she climbed to the apex of the Allure. Nissa found Penny by opening her mind again, detecting the people who lived on the same floor. They were professionals, and mostly couples rather than families. The orc woman stood out. She poured agony that radiated for miles.
Nissa was drawn to the pain.
Dana. Oh gods, Dana.
Penny was crying inside of her penthouse. Nissa didn’t have to break in; she just invited herself into the minds of the mortals within, peering through their eyes.
Lincoln Marshall, a triadist monk, was sitting beside Penny while Brianna Dimaria sat on the other side to hold her hands. All three of them were crying. Lincoln was trying to be restrained about it, as such men were wont to do, but Penny saw his eyes glistening. The orc didn’t like Lincoln. She liked him even less for trying to hide how upset he was.
“There’s no way that she’s dead.” Penny was glaring mistrustfully at the wooden box on her coffee table. An urn.
“You keep saying that, but…” Brianna patted Penny’s hand again. “Do you think she’d leave you like this? Feeling like this?”
“She never cared about my feelings,” Penny said.
She never cared about my feelings, Nissa thought.
Nissa had been wrong to think that Dana would run to Penny if she survived. She wasn’t there.
Nissa leaned against the wall, trying to separate her mind from Penny’s. She clutched at her skull in both hands and screwed her eyes shut. Isolating herself from her normal senses only made the blurring of lines between them worse; she plummeted deeper into the gray depths of Penny’s despair.
“Well, I gotta get going,” Lincoln said. It was an awkward way to interrupt all the crying. All the more awkward when he shoved a box at Penny. “Sorry to run, but I only came here to give this to you anyway.”
Penny’s fingers lingered over it. “Wardbreaker?”
“You should have it,” he said. “You can have anything else from the crypt too.”
She shoved the box off of her lap onto the floor. “Screw that. Dana’s not dead, and she’ll be back for all that crap before she comes back for me. I don’t want Wardbreaker. I don’t want anything.”
Lincoln stood, shifting uncomfortably on his feet. Apparently this was not how he wanted the conversation to go. His awkwardness made Nissa feel all sweaty. “Well, uh…”
“I don’t know why I loved her,” Penny said. It took her a full two seconds to get each word out between sobs. “She treated me like shit.” And Penny felt horrible for thinking that. For thinking that she wanted out of the condo that she’d tried to make a home with Dana. For wishing desperately that it were Dana herself, rather than Brianna and some stupid triadist monk, offering her comfort at that moment.
Penny hated Dana, she loved Dana, she was addicted.
It used to be less complicated. Years earlier, before Dana had changed, before…
The Fremont Slasher.
Nissa was walking down Fremont Street. It was dark, and she had one of those tall plastic hurricane glasses in her hand. The melted remnants of an alcoholic shaved-ice drink sloshed at its bottom. It sloshed in her belly. She was heavy, drunk, dazed.
And then the hands.
The alleyway.
The blow to her skull.
Waking up in a glass box, bleeding from multiple gashes.
Was this the night Nissa had been killed? Or was this the night Penny had been abducted?
“No,” Nissa whispered, forcing her eyes open, pushing Penny out of her mind.
She wasn’t Dana’s wife. It wasn’t Nissa inside that glass box, cut open by the Fremont Slasher. She wasn’t some dirty, smelly, green-fleshed orc who liked to sweat over a forge. She was Nissa Royal: a vampire with power over the minds of mortals. Soon Nissa would help Mohinder secure the future of the Paradisos. She was powerful, worthy, important.
“What do you want to do with everything in the crypt?” Brianna asked gently.
Penny’s mind radiated anger. She’d just given everything to Dana in the divorce. That terrible lawyer, Lucinde, had spent hours bothering Penny about getting boxes moved to Dana’s daytime resting place. Now she was dead. They had to move the boxes again.
“Donate it to the other associates, keep it for yourself, set fire to it. I don’t care.” Penny never had. She shouldn’t have bothered fighting Dana over that crap in the first place.
“Should I take Wardbreaker back, you reckon?” Lincoln asked.
“I guess I’ll keep that one. There’s no way to know when I might need something like this again.” If Penny’d had Wardbreaker four years earlier, she might have been able to escape the Fremont Slasher’s glass cage. Which meant the sword was four years too late: too late to help Penny, too late to help Dana. “Brianna…”
“What?”
“The book. Did you find the book?”
What book? Nissa probed Penny’s mind, and she got no images from her. Whatever book Penny was talking about, she hadn’t seen it yet, had no visual information on it.
“I found someone online who says they have a copy,” Brianna said. “But what good would it do now?”
“I don’t know. I just want to see it. Even if I can’t help Dana with it anymore…I don’t know. Maybe I can help someone else. Can you just get it for me? Like you said you would?”
“Of course,” Brianna said softly. “As soon as possible.”
Penny collapsed against Brianna, who patted her shoulder awkwardly as she continued to cry. Lincoln edged away. “Yeah, so…I’m sorry for your loss, ladies.”
“Just go away,” Brianna said.
Lincoln strode toward the door. He was going to realize there was a vampire in the hallway.
Nissa wrenched herself out of the dense core of Penny’s aura and climbed into the elevator before she could be spotted.
When she reached the first floor, Nirav Piliszek was crying over the shattered pottery he’d stomped into dust. A cluster of baffled tower residents stood around him, looking horrified, confused, worried.
And Nissa went to visit the nearest police precinct.
The police station nearest the Strip, just outside the invisible borders of Paradise, was a recent structure built of sun-resistant stucco. The exterior xeriscaping had the ugly pebbled look of the Nevada desert. Swoops painted around the windows were surely meant to evoke the colorful local sunsets.
Like the Allure, the precinct’s lobby was unlocked. Unlike the Allure, Nissa was met within by police officers—human police officers. They didn’t look at her any more than people on the street did, though that may have been for different reasons. Nissa was far from the most attention-getting person in the lobby. Compared to the people piled on the hard benches, Nissa in her Judex-branded suit was civilized.
She approached the desk.
“How can I help you?” asked the receptionist.
Nissa opened her mind instead of responding. She was barraged by the surrounding mortals. Their pain seized her—the shaking, the cramps. These people had been exposed to Mohinder’s poisoned water and didn’t know it. Nobody knew what was happening. Why the shifters were acting strange.
One more glass of water from tainted water, and a lot of these people were going to go completely nuts.
It wasn’t Nissa’s problem. She hadn’t come here to see the results of Mohinder’s experiments. Even if she cared about that, she wouldn’t have expected to see the people at a police station anyway. More like a hospital. The system didn’t know what to do with the lash-outs, hadn’t diagnosed the problem.
Shifters poisoned by silver were suffering excruciating pain. She collapsed against the desk, clutching the edge. “No,” she whispered.
The receptionist leaned back in her chair. She didn’t look frightened, but annoyed. She flagged down an officer. “Another one. Paramedics almost here?”
“Gods damn,” said an officer that Nissa couldn’t see. He was twenty-seven years old, angry, abusive toward his partner at home. His tone evoked glimpses of swinging fists in his memories. “That tainted lethe is getting everyone, isn’t it?”
Nissa gritted her teeth. They thought these people were drug addicts, and they were still arresting them. The police deserved what was going to happen on Vampire Vegas’s opening night. “I’m not an addict.” Not to drugs, anyway.
Hands closed on Nissa’s shoulders, and she wasn’t sure if it was one of the shifters crawling up in her skull or the Fremont Slasher or a police officer trying to help her sit down. The sensation was too much. Her mind turned to jumbles.
She was in a dark alley. A glass box. Bleeding to death.
“No!” Nissa roared. She thrust her hand toward the receptionist and opened her mind wider. Nissa kept opening until she had no mental walls left. She was an empty vessel that gathered all these mortal minds into her belly to slosh around like melted alcoholic Slurpee at the bottom of a plastic hurricane cup.
Everyone started screaming, like the intrusion hurt.
Great. Let them choke on it. Their intrusions on her mind hurt too.
But damn it all, she wanted them to suffer quietly.
“Freeze!” Nissa said.
The precinct went silent.
She swung around to look at the shifters. There were two women leaning against each other on a nearby bench. They had gone still except for the tears dragged down their cheeks by gravity.
The police officer who had tried to grab Nissa was also motionless, hands outstretched.
Everyone on the receptionist’s side of the desk was immobile too.
Nissa had grabbed the minds of the entire precinct and shut them the fuck down.
They were still seething inside of Nissa like she’d swallowed live worms. Their minds broiled. Abuse. Denial. Fatigue. Stress. Nissa held them with as much ease as a rodeo cowboy could have held a bull, which was to say, not easily at all.
But for the moment, nobody in the precinct was moving.
Nissa fished around the nearest officer’s pockets. He had a small dongle that would activate a computer somewhere around the office. She took that, along with his badge, and leaned over the receptionist’s desk to push the button that opened the door to the office space.
Most of the police worked at desks on an open floor. There was a closed office where the chief, Charmaine Villanueva, did her work. It was dark inside at the moment. The blinds were drawn. Nissa didn’t feel her inside of there.
Nissa shuffled carefully through the office, edging past officers who had stopped moving in mid-conversation. She feared that physical contact would worsen her connection to their minds. It was bad enough feeling their thoughts intensify as she drew nearer without touching them.
This officer was angry because he’d gotten in trouble for turning off his body camera during a traffic stop. The department was being sued by a money-hungry werewolf because of him.
That guy was worried about being able to cover the interest on the payday loan he’d gotten to finance his addiction to strippers.
This one was…
Huh. What is he thinking?
Nissa stopped by a desk with one officer sitting in front of a computer. He had a bushy mustache and a skin blistered from sunlight, though these must have been ordinary human blisters rather than vampire blisters. The skin on his nose was peeling where he’d been burned.
His head felt hollow.
She angled the nametag on his chest to read it. “Officer Albert Jeffreys,” she said, brushing her hand along his jaw. He felt like wrinkled leather. He was the color of cowhide baked in sunlight.
Even with physical contact, Nissa felt very little from inside of him. It was as though his emotions were muted, and the lack of emotion limited her access to his mind. “What are you?” Nissa asked, inhaling the scent at his throat. He smelled like a normal human. He wasn’t a witch.
Interesting.
His computer would do.
She sat down on his lap and used the first officer’s credentials to log in to the database. The search for cases involving Dana McIntyre’s name took time; the hourglass cursor kept flipping over for what felt like minutes on end. It was hard for Nissa to keep holding the entire precinct that long.
She bet it would be easier if she drank more blood.
Nissa ran her mouth along Officer Jeffrey’s throat again, seeking the place his pulse was closest to the surface. She breathed over his stubble. His skin bounced against her lips. There was blood inside that artery—rich crimson blood, thick and filled with life.
She lapped along the pulse point. Her fangs descended another millimeter.
The computer pinged.
Her search had completed.
“I bet you taste as bland as your brain feels anyway,” Nissa said, shoving Officer Jeffreys’s head away from her.
The wormy feeling in Nissa’s gut indicated that she was losing control of the minds. Nissa needed to leave before she found herself surrounded by two-dozen law enforcement personnel who knew exactly how to take down vampires.
Nissa emailed everything to herself and then stood. She regarded the entirety of the precinct that she could see. “You’ll all wake up in sixty seconds. None of you will remember the last ten minutes,” she said, and she was certain that was what would happen.
She dropped her stolen dongle on the desk and left.
The door swung shut behind her.
As soon as the lock clicked, Officer Jeffreys let out a gusting sigh, slumping in his chair. He was the only person in the entire building who moved.
He touched his throat and then looked at his fingers. They’d come away shiny with his own blood. He’d barely been nicked by the vampire’s fangs, but it had been enough to make him bleed.
“Wow,” he whispered.