Drawing Dead: An Urban Fantasy Thriller (Dana McIntyre Must Die Book 1) Read online

  Drawing Dead

  Dana McIntyre Must Die: Book One

  S M Reine

  Copyright © 2017 by S M Reine

  DM1-v1.0

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Dear Reader…

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  About the Author

  Dear Reader…

  Dana McIntyre is one tough bastard. She was taught to shoot guns when she was three years old. She field dressed her first werewolf when she was six. The Fates made her an orphan at seven.

  Since then, her life has become a mission to eradicate vampires. So it’s a little bit awkward to get turned into a vampire herself.

  I’ve been writing about Dana for years. She first showed up in my life when she was a toddler, daughter to another character who I dearly loved. She’s since grown up into a total hard-ass: smart, tough, irreverent, and as principled as she is crass. I’ve never written a tank quite like Dana before. I hope you enjoy getting into her head during this, the toughest fight of her career, as much as I do.

  For those of you new to my books, welcome! This is a great place to jump in. Although there are over forty other books in this universe (forty! seriously!), Dana McIntyre Must Die stands alone. If you decide you’d like to spend more time in this “Descentverse,” you can find reading lists on my website.

  For those of you who have already visited the Descentverse, welcome back! This series takes place shortly after Cast in Godfire, but you don’t need to read The Mage Craft Series first. There are no spoilers.

  Enough of my blather. You can always find me on Twitter if you want to hear me ranting. Draw your sword, turn the page, and get to the good stuff!

  ~ Sara (SM Reine)

  http://smreine.com/

  1

  Henderson, Nevada—June 2034

  Nighttime was supposed to be welcoming to a vampire. Sultry, alluring, velvety—all those beautiful adjectives that poets had been vomiting since the undead had arisen during Genesis.

  One of the most famous poems of recent history claimed that the night looked like daytime to a vampire’s acute eyesight. Apparently the vibrancy of moonlight meant vampires never needed to miss sunlight.

  The writer was a gods-damned liar.

  To Nissa, a vampire who did not drink blood, the nighttime looked like nighttime. Colorless. Dark. Empty.

  As such, she didn’t make a habit of going out at night. Or during the day for that matter, though that was mostly because of the photosensitive blistering and the weird smell and the smoking. But Nissa didn’t go out at night because there was nothing waiting for her there. Certainly not “moonbeams shining bright as day into a vampire’s soul,” or whatever-the-fuck romantic bullshit mortals wanted to believe about the sordid non-lives of the undead.

  After dying, Nissa had learned it was possible to live a very fulfilling life without going outside at any time of day or night, and she liked it that way.

  She was outside tonight. Not just outdoors, but miles away from her usual stomping grounds.

  Tonight, Nissa had been assigned a job.

  She had been given a street address in the suburbs, a description for the man she was meant to retrieve, and a partner who could handle any violence that might arise.

  Hopefully there’d be no violence, though. Achlys, master vampire of the Paradisos, had instructed Nissa to just grab the man and go.

  Grab and go. Easy.

  Even so, Nissa considered herself as “high strung,” while Achlys described her as “endearingly sensitive” and the other vampires used less flattering terms. However she wanted to color the sentiment, Nissa was a ball of anxiety. If anxiety could ball itself so tightly that it turned into a matter-crushing black hole.

  “Come on out, please,” she whispered urgently at the closed front door of the house she was visiting.

  Nissa was lookout tonight while Shawn Wyn did the not-so-dirty deed of abducting a sleeping man from his bed. At least, his deed should not have been dirty, though Shawn was not reliable in these matters. And he had been inside Harold Hopkins’s home for a long time. Longer than it should have taken to search thirty-four hundred square feet of HOA-planned stucco housing for a lone mundane.

  With no idea what was happening inside, Nissa’s mind was left to run wild. She could vividly imagine Shawn deciding to skin Harold Hopkins.

  It wouldn’t be the first time Shawn had skinned someone on Achlys’s behalf, after all.

  “There’s no reason to think he’s doing that,” Nissa reminded herself, rocking back on her heels. She hadn’t sensed any mortals getting skinned, and there was no way she’d miss an outpouring of that much emotion.

  Nissa wasn’t a full vampire. She had never completed the transition. Her body was dead, her tissues reanimated by her sire’s venom. But she was missing a lot of vampire powers. Until she drank human blood, she wouldn’t fully transform.

  Yet even as a blood virgin, halfway between human and vampire, Nissa had psychic powers. They manifested exclusively as the worst empathy ever. If a human being had been getting skinned nearby, Nissa would have felt it as acutely as though she were the one under the knife.

  She didn’t sense any pain from Harold Hopkins before his door slammed open and Shawn Wyn whirled out.

  Shawn was the Paradisos’s lone sidhe member, an unseelie lord who’d been excommunicated by the Sidhe Courts. His mere presence bent the world around him. The doorway seemed to curve away into a circle when his shoulders passed. His voice was an orchestra playing at the bottom of a canyon, echoing off the walls a thousand times.

  “Nissa!”

  “What?” she whispered, hoping that he would take her volume as a cue to lower his voice.

  “He’s not here! Why the fuck isn’t he here?” His magic made the sodden grass sparkle like emeralds in fire.

  “Achlys said he would be here.” Nissa didn’t know more than that. She was only a travel expert for her murder. She didn’t know a damn thing about scientists Achlys wanted kidnapped, nor did she care to.

  Shawn descended upon her in a swirl of opera coat and distressed jeans. “What? I can’t hear you! Speak up!”

  “We’ll get caught,” she hissed.

  “So what? It’s not illegal for us to be here.”

  “B&E is always illegal.”

  “Who’s gonna report it? I blasted his home security system.” Shawn thrust his palm out to demonstrate, and there was so much power coming off of his skin that he rippled like a Nevada highway at high noon.

  “Okay, Shawn, bring it down a few hundred notches.” They couldn’t return to Achlys empty-handed. “Hopkins must be somewhere. Stayed at work late? Running errands? We could wait and see if he shows up. We’ve got hours before sunrise.” Sunrise, blistering, funny smells…

  “Wait for him?” Shawn looked like she’d suggested that he sell his beloved SUV. The sheets
of white hair spilling down his back and absurd sparkly eyelashes did nothing to feminize his shockingly masculine features. “I’m not waiting in fucking Henderson on a fucking Saturday night!”

  “But Achlys—”

  “Fuck Achlys. Not literally—I don’t want my dick bitten off. Metaphorically, fuck Achlys. We’ll try again tomorrow night. Come, Robin. To the Batmobile!”

  Any degree of resistance from her partner in this environment was enough to make Nissa’s resolve crumble into atoms.

  Shawn was already moving toward his car—a 2025 Ford AP, which did not resemble the Batmobile—and Nissa followed him lest he start yelling again.

  Frankly, Nissa was shocked that Shawn hadn’t woken anyone up yet. He was pulsing magic everywhere that mundanes would feel more acutely, and more dizzyingly, than Nissa did.

  If mortals were managing to sleep through Shawn’s gushing power, they’d be having Courtly dreams of wine dribbling down naked bodies while tongues writhed between their legs. Anyone who woke up would probably call the police because they’d think they had been dosed with LSD by a home invasion from a Mardi Gras parade.

  Yet the street was, for yet another moment, thankfully quiet.

  Nissa permitted herself a moment to admire Shawn as he leaped toward the SUV. The line of his throat sloping into those sharp shoulders, the length of his muscular arms. She’d seen him gut a man with two swift sweeps of those arms. Watched the blood pour like rubies with every heartbeat in pulsing waterfalls. Seen how Shawn laughed when his hair swept through the resulting puddles, and the way he’d kicked the cold body into a ditch with those very same pointed-toe shoes.

  Truly, he was a glorious entity, whom Achlys should never have assigned to such a quiet task.

  “He’s overkill for a snatch-and-run, but I guarantee that you’ll want him if things go awry,” Achlys had told Nissa earlier that night. “Harold Hopkins will soon be in high demand. Shawn can protect you—and your quarry—from anyone who might be competing for his attention.”

  “But the mission is non-violent?” Nissa had asked.

  “Theoretically.” Mirth had sparkled in Achlys’s blood-red irises.

  Theoretically non-violent.

  Nissa was not going to be able to breathe again until they got into the car and back to the safety of Achlys’s tower.

  Yet when Shawn opened the door of his Ford, the front door of a different house opened. The house that they had parked in front of, in fact, because they had assumed that the for-sale sign on its lawn had meant that it would be unoccupied at such a late hour.

  “I don’t know, it’s kinda far out of town,” said a woman’s voice. “Even at night, without traffic…I don’t know.”

  “But is it magically clean? Like they said?”

  “Clean enough for minor spellcasting. If I whipped up a thing with some sage and lotus, and I let it smolder for a few weeks, it could become squeaky clean.” The two speakers stepped onto the porch, pausing to lock the realtor’s device.

  Nissa recognized both of them instantly.

  Although she was only the Paradisos’s travel expert, she was still familiar with the Paradisos’s Enemy Number Ones.

  The Hunting Club.

  Registered vigilantes operating in the gray areas of the law.

  The cops had the Hunting Club on file. There was a lot of paperwork involved in becoming and staying a registered vigilante. All Hunting Club associates signed waivers that said they couldn’t apprehend or kill anyone who hadn’t broken laws, but they had more authority to judge these things than any independent company should have.

  When things went bad with preternaturals in Southern Nevada—or when the Hunting Club wanted to dispense their idea of justice, or when someone got an ego, or when they were bored—you could bet your buns that the Hunting Club was going to be in the middle of that stuff.

  The Hunting Club all too often decided that the Paradisos were causing trouble.

  And that made for friction. Lots of it.

  Nissa recognized the latinx as Anthony Morales. He was identifiable by the well-trimmed mustache, the tattoos peeking out from under his tee, and the stubble that showed his shaved hair was receding.

  Anthony Morales was a deadly bastard. He’d been a kopis, a demon hunter, before Genesis stripped him of preternatural strength. These days, he was known to be augmented with performance-enhancing drugs both human and magical. In other words, Anthony Morales was stacked for a man approaching fifty years old.

  He had tried to stake Nissa Royal twice.

  Anthony wouldn’t recognize her. Nissa had been one more bloodless body among dozens of others, slumbering peacefully in the shadows of daytime, and he’d been the asshole with the sticks and sledgehammers turning her counterparts to ash. Nissa had only escaped because blood virgins didn’t slumber as deeply as full vampires. But he’d gotten close. Too close.

  The woman at his back looked less intimidating, but only a fool would underestimate Brianna Dimaria. Her neck was draped with wooden charms that clacked with every motion. Brianna was a witch, and a damn good one. It was impossible to hex the Hunting Club—Achlys had tried. Brianna had their facilities and associates buried under more wards than the White House.

  At least she hadn’t tried to stake Nissa.

  Yet.

  Shawn recognized Anthony Morales and Brianna Dimaria, too. These two were the public face of the Hunting Club in much the same way that Nissa’s sire, Mohinder, served as public face for the Paradisos.

  So Shawn recognized them, and he must have known it would make for trouble if they crossed paths. The Hunting Club and the Paradisos never crossed paths without things getting deadly.

  A familiar light brightened Shawn’s sparkly baby-violets. It was excitement, to a degree. It was also mania.

  Blood lust.

  Nissa saw people who’d want to stake her. Shawn saw fun.

  “Quick, get in the car,” Nissa hissed, digging her fingernails into Shawn’s sleeve.

  “Hey!” His voice shook through the street. Nissa spotted tiles sliding off of one roof.

  “Shawn,” she whined in a tiny voice.

  Anthony and Brianna turned at the push of Shawn’s power. They were experienced fighters, so a sidearm leaped into Anthony’s hands and Brianna’s fingers flung forward, sizzling with witchfire.

  Fire. Had Nissa a functioning heart, it would have ricocheted through her chest.

  “Paradisos!” Brianna snapped.

  “Paradisos? Us?” Shawn affected a swoon, placing a hand over his heart. His swinging hair and the accompanying aroma of wildflowers should have set Brianna’s loins aflame. She didn’t look impressed. “Nissa, baby girl, did you hear what they just called us? Paradisos!” The sparkle in his eyes darkened. “These Hunting Club fucks said Paradisos like it’s a bad thing.”

  “What’s your business in this area?” Anthony was aiming the gun steadily at Nissa. Nissa! Who hadn’t done a goddamn thing!

  “I’m here to rape and pillage Henderson,” Shawn said. “How ‘bout you?”

  “I’m not in the mood for attitude, son,” Anthony said.

  Nissa was shaking like a Chihuahua surrounded by coyotes. Gods, she must have looked ridiculous. She wished she could have been half as scary as Anthony Morales. “We were just passing through. Not making trouble.”

  Anthony’s mortal mind swept through Nissa as his attention zeroed in on her. She couldn’t block it out. Once she started picking up on emotions from the mortals, it jangled around in her skull until she got away.

  His adrenaline was climbing and the flavor was acid in Nissa’s parched mouth. Anthony’s heart pounded, sending blood surging through his throat, and Nissa thought about finally doing it. Right here, right now. Leaping at this human to sink her fangs into his jugular, ripping the skin away so that she could get at the juicy, delicious treat flowing just underneath the surface.

  He’d shoot her first.

  Even if he didn’t, she’d still have his
thoughts in her head as she killed him. She’d feel his throat getting torn open as though it were her own.

  She couldn’t do it.

  “Shawn,” Nissa meeped.

  She tingled when Shawn pulled her close to his side. It was overwhelming to be tugged into his aura. “My girlfriend and I are house shopping. Is that so bad?”

  Girlfriend. Oof. Nissa’s loins were doing the things Brianna’s mortal loins should have been. And Nissa didn’t even have fluids to stir.

  “House shopping,” Brianna echoed, scoffing. She didn’t lower her hands. Bright-orange flame crawled up her arms. “The bloodless don’t house shop.”

  “Legally they can,” Anthony said, “but they don’t. Not out here, with all these big sun-facing windows. There are windowless condo compounds for the likes of your ‘girlfriend.’”

  “I love the sun,” Shawn said.

  Brianna snorted. “And your girlfriend loves the sun too? She’s pastier than a goth at Yule.”

  “Don’t judge our dreams. You don’t know us.”

  “I know you’re lying,” Brianna said.

  “Now you’re calling me a liar? Who’s got the attitude here?” Shawn shoved Nissa behind him and stalked forward.

  One step forward. That was all it took.

  Anthony’s gun swiveled, he aimed it at Shawn, and his other hand went to his pocket. He extracted a new magazine.

  So the hunter did have iron bullets.

  Shawn reared back, nostrils flaring, eyes widening. “Oh really?” he snarled.

  He pointed at the house next door.

  “Don’t!” Brianna shouted.

  The front door ripped off of its hinges, screen and all, and the pieces of it went flying onto the lawn. A sprinkler head snapped off. Water fountained a story high, and Shawn clenched his fist.