When Nissa forced Dana against a wall, there was nothing Dana could do to stop her. Not physically. Buffy was pinned at her back and she was out of fire charms. But whatever was happening with Dana and Nissa had never been physical anyway. It had been a friendship, like Penny said.
It was crazy. Nissa was a vampire, and Dana didn’t have vampire contacts, much less friends. But Dana had always been soft for the hard cases, and it didn’t get harder than surviving the Fremont Slasher.
Her fingers closed around a stake on her belt. She didn’t yet draw it.
“Listen to me,” Dana hissed, quietly enough that Mohinder would struggle to hear her over the wind. “After Penny was taken, I changed. A lot. I was lucky to walk away from those changes without doing something irrevocable. Thing is, even though you’ve already done wrong, you can fix it. There’s precedent for fledglings getting reduced time when they turn a sire over.”
Nissa’s face crumpled, her elbow digging into Dana’s neck. “Turn him in? Do you really think I’d do that?”
“It’d be the hardest thing you’ll do,” Dana said. “You’ve been his victim for four years so it’ll be hard as fuck. But it’s the only way out of this, Nissa. If you don’t give me Mohinder, I’m going to have to stake you.”
“I know that’s not true,” Nissa said. “Remember, I can see in your head. I can read your every emotion. There’s no lying to me, especially since you’re mortal again.”
“Then what am I thinking? Tell me.” Dana glared at her, filling her eyes with emotion and her mind with memories. Memories of Penny. Crawling down into the well where she’d been kept. Smelling the blood, seeing the bodies. The metallic stench.
“You know what I see?” Nissa’s knuckles traced a line along Dana’s collarbone, even though her eyes never moved from Dana’s. “You keep regretting that you don’t have vampire powers anymore.”
Dana jolted.
The fact was, it was true. How could she not miss the tactical advantage a vampire had against other vampires?
But those had been casual thoughts that had passed through her during earlier phases of the fight. She hadn’t been thinking of them in that moment.
Nissa hadn’t just read what was on the surface of Dana’s mind, but in the deep. She could see all of Dana’s thoughts. Even the conversation that Dana and Penny had shared about a friendship with Nissa. The vampire knew that Dana cared about her, so much more than she should have, and it made her deadly.
“Kill her.” This came from Mohinder, barely centimeters behind Nissa.
Dana hadn’t heard him coming. Had he learned to move so quietly when sneaking up on women in alleyways? White-hot rage surged inside of her at the idea of it.
The intensity of Dana’s emotions must have surprised Nissa. She lost focus for a moment. Zoned out, hands going slack. So Dana seized the opportunity to shove her out of the way.
She made it all of four steps toward Mohinder, with Buffy lifted to her chest, before Nissa roused again.
“Stop,” Nissa said.
Dana’s legs stopped working.
Nissa’s presence was deep within Dana’s mind—deeper even than she needed to read thoughts. It was like a fist shoved right between the lobes of her brain, knuckles pushing against the nerves that signaled movement.
Dana was so close to staking Mohinder.
So close.
Her finger twitched on the trigger. The hydraulics kicked off, and the stake moved.
She couldn’t lunge.
Mohinder circled her. At his nearest, his chest was millimeters from Buffy. There was no hint of human emotion in his eyes anymore. He wasn’t amused by her peril, or angry, or even vengeful for all the things Dana had done to him. “The reason I sent you presents every few weeks since you and the police chief shut me down is simple, McIntyre,” Mohinder said. “I wanted to remind you that there is a vampire in this world better than you. Stronger than you. Even when you were a vampire, you were only one of the pigs.” He extended his hand toward Nissa. “You’d never be one of us.”
“Nissa,” Dana said warningly. “You can still come back from this.”
The younger vampire took Mohinder’s hand. She settled in against his side, a mouse snuggling with a deadly vulture.
“You should have remained a vampire,” Mohinder said. He was so cold and lifeless. Nothing but marble rigidity, totally unresponsive to Nissa’s affection.
This was the greatest monster Dana had ever hunted, and yet Penny was loyal to him.
No. She’s not Penny.
“Kill her,” Mohinder said again. His arm fell away from her shoulders, giving Nissa more space to move. “Now. Kill the hunter.”
Nissa hesitated.
“McIntyre made her choice.” Now Mohinder was giving his focus to Nissa, beginning to circle her instead. “She doesn’t care about you. She doesn’t even want to kill you, and that is what fascinated you, wasn’t it? Her ruthlessness. It’s not what you thought. She is only human.”
“I know,” Nissa said. Even as she spoke, her control on Dana’s mind remained unbroken. Dana couldn’t move. But Nissa clearly was no longer reading Dana’s thoughts, because if she had been, she’d have realized that Anthony was creeping along the walkway at the back of the filtration room.
Dana wanted to shake her head no at Anthony, but she couldn’t even seem to move her eyes.
Anthony had a sniper rifle like Lina’s. He lowered it to the railing.
Mohinder’s cold, clawed fingers rested on Dana’s neck. His thumb settled on her pulse point. It was hammering. “Why are you waiting?” Mohinder asked.
Nissa said, “I don’t want to kill her, either.”
Mohinder said, “Then I’ll do it.”
A gunshot rang out.
Mohinder flew back.
The Slasher’s claws were so sharp that the faintest brush drew blood on Dana’s neck. She clapped a hand to the wound—and realized that she could move freely.
Nissa had released her.
“Mohinder!” Nissa cried in genuine distress, whirling to see where the gunshot had come from.
Anthony had aimed again. He was using high caliber bullets, big ol’ fuckers capable of knocking even the bloodless on their ass. He’d laid out Mohinder like it was nothing because Mohinder wasn’t expecting it. When he shot Nissa, she was prepared.
She barely jerked.
He opened a hole the size of a fist in her back, and she only jerked.
Mohinder flung a hand out. Dana tried to leap out of the way, but the master vampire wasn’t aiming for her.
The ductwork above Anthony tore free.
It wrenched away from the wall and slammed down with all the force of a meteor hitting the ground.
The walkway vanished.
So did Anthony.
“No!” Dana roared.
There was no way he could have survived that. He was only human. A mortal made of flesh and bone and tacky mustache and Mohinder had just dropped a car-sized air-conditioning unit on him.
Dana didn’t think.
She swung Buffy.
There was no need for a hydraulic assist. Not when she was this pissed off.
The stake snapped through Mohinder’s spine, and it hit the black heart of the Fremont Slasher, pulverizing it.
His face blanked.
Nissa’s hands clapped to either side of her head. “No!” Her cry was pitched almost identically to Dana’s, an echo of her exact grief.
Dana stared down at Mohinder. She was rendered as immobile as when Nissa held her, but now there was no vampiric presence in Dana’s mind. For fuck’s sake, Dana wasn’t even in Dana’s mind. There was nothing but yawning emptiness. The visual of a falling air-conditioning unit, a broken walkway, a subtle spray of blood.
Mohinder shriveled on the end of the stake. His mouth opened in a silent gasp.
Gods, that should have been so much more satisfying.
Dana kicked Mohinder’s body off of Buffy. She dropped the hydraulic gun and stepped back, giving Nissa room to drop to his side, gather him in her arms. Mohinder lifted a hand to touch Nissa’s face. His fingers were crumbling to ash.
“No,” Nissa panted. She was hyperventilating, too. A vampire hyperventilating—funny. Except nothing was funny. Nothing could ever be funny again.
Dana had intended to savor the death of the Fremont Slasher. She’d hoped to drag it out, in fact, holding him for weeks until he starved. But now she couldn’t even stop to watch him turn to ash.
She rushed to the rubble of the walkway, and Nissa’s sobbing was soundtrack to tossing aside pieces of bent conduit, metal shards, insulation. It tore into her hands. She kicked a few big pieces away, and then she saw it.
The leg.
Dana gripped the body of the air-conditioning unit like she was going to deadlift it, and she gritted her teeth, throwing all her strength into straightening her legs.
Come on. Get off of him. Come…on…
It groaned, whined. Dust puffed out from underneath it.
Dana lost her grip, and it fell out of her torn hands.
“Fuck!”
She grabbed it again, pulled harder. Her back ached. Her muscles screamed. Her head throbbed. But she couldn’t lift it more than an inch. If she’d still been a vampire with preternatural strength…
Dana swung around to look at Nissa, kneeling on the floor next to a pile of ash.
“Help me!” Dana shouted. Nissa didn’t move. Red tears streaked her cheeks. “Damn it, you stupid fucking vampire…!” Dana braced her hands and shoulder against the unit. She dug her feet in and shoved.
It finally shifted. Not a lot, but enough that gravity took over, shifting its mass until it tumbled down a ramp of corrugated metal torn free of the roof.
His body was underneath.
There was no question in Dana’s mind that Anthony was dead. It wasn’t possible to dump that much brain out of a hole in his skull that big and walk away from it.
Dana sank to her knees, hitting the shards of railing next to Anthony. His face hadn’t been crushed. That awful mustache was still there, curved into a shape almost like a smile, white from the sprinkling concrete dust.
He still owed her fifteen dollars.
“Guess you don’t have to pay now,” she told his limp face. Heat tracked down her cheek.
“Turn around,” Nissa said, her voice dead. The command reached right into Dana’s mind, just as before, so Dana turned around. She shook from the effort it took to fight Nissa’s command. It didn’t help. Nothing helped.
Nissa had smeared bloody tears all over her face trying to scrub her cheeks clean. She looked like she’d painted herself in it.
She was trembling with black fury.
“Die,” Nissa whispered. “Die.”
Dana felt the order deep inside.
Then she felt nothing except pain.
It was like someone had just dropped an air-conditioning unit on Dana’s head, but when her hands flew to her scalp, she felt no injury. Her brain was tearing apart by the neuron, her vision was red with white stars, her heart pounded—but there was no injury.
She was dying.
The footsteps echoing up the hallway erupted into the room.
Metal rang out as doors slammed open. Voices shouted. Leather rubbed against nylon. “Get on the ground, face down! Hands behind your head!”
Gunshots fired.
The pain suddenly vanished, and Dana collapsed. The OPA agents swarmed her. They rolled her over so that she was facedown on the ground the way they’d commanded. One of them practically stood on top of her.
It took five to hold down Nissa, even though she now had three large holes in her body from the various gunshots. One of them from Anthony.
They stabbed a charm at the back of Nissa’s neck and she finally went limp. But her eyes remained opened. They were fixed on Dana.
Mohinder! Nissa’s voice wailed within Dana’s mind.
He’d deserved so much worse than death.
Anthony had deserved so much better.
Polished black shoes stepped between them, cutting off Dana’s view of the vampire. She twisted to look up. It was Cèsar Hawke, and he looked somewhere between annoyed and sad. “Nissa Royal, Dana McIntyre,” he said, “do I even need to tell you guys that you’re both under arrest? Because you’re under arrest. And neither of you are seeing the sky for a long, long time.”