Charmaine wasn’t sure how long she stood there, staring at Mohinder. It could have been hours.
Then his hand closed around her wrist. He looked at her fist clutching the cell phone—now locked. There was no way for him to see the pictures taken of the body behind his couch. It didn’t matter at that point. Charmaine had been caught in his office. The body was visible from the doorway. She knew the truth about him, and she couldn’t deny it.
Mohinder released her hand. “They already notified you?”
She was silent for a moment, thinking fast.
Who notified me? Of what?
“I’m impressed,” he went on when she didn’t respond. “I only hung up with them a minute ago. They said it would take a unit ten minutes to get here.” Mohinder must have called the police. He thought they’d passed the information on so that she could do something about…whatever he’d called about. “I assume the EMTs are next?” The body. He’d called to report the body.
“I’d expect an ambulance to be here before my unit,” Charmaine said. Her phone buzzed in her hand. Her eyes flicked down. It was dispatch—the department was calling to notify her of Mohinder’s problem. She dismissed the call before Mohinder could see it. “Do you want to tell me what happened here?”
“I found the body like that when I first came into my office tonight,” Mohinder said. “Whoever killed this agent must be mine—a Paradisos vampire. Only someone who works at Vampire Vegas could have wiped my surveillance footage and deposited a body without tripping my security system.”
Fingers of doubt curled in Charmaine’s belly. Mohinder hadn’t hidden the body because—he claimed—it wasn’t a body he had produced.
It was very possible.
She had no evidence to the contrary, she realized. She’d just seen the body and made assumptions.
Why?
Because the Hunting Club had told her Mohinder was dangerous?
“We need to wait in the hallway until the team gets here.” She took a step forward.
Mohinder stepped in front of her.
“I saw you here earlier,” he said, gaze sweeping down her dress. Her hair fluttered in a sweep of invisible energy that felt almost like wind, even though they were in a closed room. It exposed her soft throat. She reached up to cover it reflexively. “You were with Mr. Morales. I didn’t recognize you.”
“I couldn’t resist the urge to see Vampire Vegas in person,” she said neutrally, forcing herself to lower her hand. “Good thing I was here for this. Now I’m going to have to ask you to—”
“Stop.” His silver-clawed hand waved. She felt as though a hand pushed her back. “Vampires can’t smell lies the way that werewolves can, Chief Villanueva. But we can see blood and you can read a person’s mood by changes of speed in the heart rate. Do you know what your heart is doing?”
Adrenaline had her heart going about a mile a minute. Even so, she felt calm and clear-headed. This wasn’t the first time she’d been cornered by a vampire. Even one as powerful as Mohinder. He couldn’t inflict any wound that she couldn’t heal unless he had silver and she didn’t smell silver on his gauntlet.
Except…
Her nostrils flared. She sniffed the air.
Charmaine did smell a little silver, very faintly. Not as though it was on Mohinder, or even in his office, but like the smell was drifting through a vent in the wall.
The silver bullets?
“I won’t ask again, sir,” Charmaine said. “Step aside.”
His gaze traveled over her again. Mostly over her throat, the inside of her wrist, briefly upon her thigh where the femoral rested. Mohinder couldn’t seem to decide if he wanted to obey her or declare open war.
The screaming kept him from needing to make a decision.
His head snapped up, and he bolted out the door to look down the stairs. Charmaine observed the chaos through the windows. People were thrashing in the bubble pool, and it looked literally like all Hell had broken loose. She remembered the Breaking, when the City of Dis had spilled onto America with thousands of demons. These shriveled, blackened vampires looked like they came from the infernal realms.
Charmaine saw an opportunity to escape Mohinder—a gap in the door behind him. She bolted.
“Hey!” shouted Mohinder. His hand swept at her back as she passed, but he was too slow to grab a coyote shifter, even in her human form.
Charmaine made it down the hallway.
It was endless and black and empty. The screaming from the crowd echoed around her, rattling as though she were in a bell that someone had just rung. She knew what dying sounded like. Those people back there were dying. Permanently.
“Charmaine!”
Hands gripped her arms.
“Fuck!” She jumped and swung a hard right hook.
Her knuckles connected with Anthony’s face. He slammed into a wall, eyes unfocused in the dimness of the hallway. “Holy shit, Charmaine, it’s just me. It’s Anthony.”
“Sorry! I thought you were Mohinder.” She shook out her fist. He had a hard face. “He killed Agent Eichmann. I saw the body in his office—got pictures. Can’t get a signal through to the undersecretary.”
Anthony absorbed this information surprisingly well, considering he wobbled when he stood up. “We won’t get a signal in this direction.”
“I smell silver too,” she said.
“Oh man.” He grabbed her by the arm and yanked her down the hall—away from Mohinder, toward the silver stink.
“What were you doing back here?” Charmaine paused long enough to kick off her shoes, then kept running. It put her level with Anthony’s height. “I thought you were going to create a distraction for a while.”
“I did it as long as I could,” he said. “It worked too well. I went into hiding so a werewolf wouldn’t smear me against the wall.”
The hallway turned, led into an elevator. They jumped through its waiting doors. The buttons went down a dozen basement levels. Anthony punched the lowest button, and the elevator gave a menacing chime as it shifted into movement.
“So you didn’t see the vampires dying?” Charmaine asked.
Anthony’s gaze sharpened on her. “Dying? How?”
“All the ones in the bubble pool looked like they were…shriveling.”
“Gods,” he breathed. “It sounds like—”
The elevator chimed again. The doors opened.
There was a cavernous bunker on the other side filled with cages. A lot of cages. It looked like videos that Charmaine had seen of factory farms before Genesis—back when pigs had been permitted to be packed into tiny crates where they couldn’t stand or turn around or even get out of their own shit.
But the animals in those cages weren’t animals at all.
They were humans.
When Charmaine stepped out of the elevator, Anthony immediately grabbed her back.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, shoving him away.
“You see that?” He pointed through to the warehouse—a shifting, stinking room of wails far more painful than the ones that they’d left behind upstairs. “That’s the proof we need to get Undersecretary Hawke on Mohinder’s ass. If we get the OPA down there, we win. Instantly.”
“Those are humans, Anthony!”
“I know,” he said tightly. He hit the button to take them back up to the level of Vampire Vegas. “I know. But we need backup.”
“We should go directly to the lobby level,” Charmaine said. “We’ll be able to get out faster. And I may get cell phone reception.”
“No, we have to go to Vampire Vegas first. Like I said, I recognize how those vampires are dying.” Anthony’s eyes were shadowed with anger—but deep inside, lit by inner starlight, she saw a faint glimmer of hope. “Someone’s dosed them with Garlic Shots.”
The chaos of emotion and rushing water was too much for Nissa.
As soon as Dana’s sword went through that aquarium, Nissa was useless.
Fish washed over the shards as the room flooded. The wave swept through the legs of the crushing crowd. Screams signaled vampires touched by tainted water, and the crowd shifted as they began to drop.
“Hey asshole,” Dana said, seizing Nissa’s attention again. “Go for a swim.” She brought her legs up between them and kicked.
Nissa flew backward.
For one breathless instant, she felt like she had when tumbling out of Achlys’s tower. She was in zero gravity. Suspended in midair, heading toward certain death. As soon as she brushed the tainted water, she was dead.
She never hit the water.
A hand shot out, biting into her shoulder.
Mohinder swept Nissa into his arms, off of the stairs, far from the spray of the aquarium filling his club. “McIntyre!” he snarled.
“Slasher,” Dana said. She jumped to her feet with super-speed so fast that Nissa couldn’t see her moving.
Apparently Mohinder could.
As soon as she was upright, his hand clenched on her throat. The silver claws dug into either side of her neck even as Mohinder’s other arm bracketed Nissa tightly against his chest.
As fast as Dana and Nissa were as master vampires, they were still new.
Mohinder was old.
He lifted Dana from the ground by her neck, and she thrashed, kicking him ineffectually. Nissa was still throbbing from one good kick. Mohinder looked like he felt it as much as a cinderblock would have. “You smell like the sewers where you’ve been stewing,” Mohinder said, tightening his claws on Dana’s neck. Trickles of black blood oozed into the neck of her shirt. “Did I keep you awake at night when I sent her hair to you? Did you feel fear or anger?”
“Fuck you,” Dana squeezed out.
“Sometimes it’s fun to kick an anthill and see the ants go wild.” He yanked her close so that he could glare into her eyes from inches away. “Only sometimes. It gets boring after a while. And I’ve kicked your anthill for quite a while, haven’t I?”
She sank her teeth into his cheek. Dana had fangs like Achlys’s, with multiple sharpened teeth, and she ripped off a chunk of skin the size of Nissa’s fist.
Mohinder roared and flung her away from him—down the stairs, into the club, where the flood was now three feet high.
Dana splashed down amid the crowd and vanished.
“No!”
The cry came from behind Mohinder. Anthony Morales stood there with the police chief, and he looked stricken. Only for an instant. Then he was running to the end of the landing, kicking off his shoes, and he dived into the water too.
Mohinder faced Charmaine Villanueva. Nissa clutched his shirt to hang on, ensuring he wouldn’t have to drop her if he wanted to slash Chief Villanueva. He only strode past the chief without touching her, and without ever letting go of his fledgling.
“The night’s over,” Mohinder said. “We’re going on lockdown and escalating to the next phase right now.”
Nissa glanced over his shoulder before he turned the corner. She saw Charmaine hurrying down the stairs after Anthony, trying to shout to people, directing them to alternate exits. But Nissa neither saw nor felt the presence of Dana McIntyre.