Kill Game: An Urban Fantasy Thriller (Dana McIntyre Must Die Book 2) Read online

  This tiger butted its head against the glass where Nissa’s hands rested. It ran its flank along her back. She didn’t even glance down.

  “You’ll betray your sire and your murder to make more cure?” Anthony asked.

  “I will do anything for Dana,” Nissa said softly. “If you don’t trust me, call the LVMPD. They should be arresting Momoe Esquerer right now.”

  He folded his arms across his chest, studying Nissa’s anxious expression. The tiger was still rubbing on the opposite side of the glass. Its glossy side was a wall of muscle in stark contrast to the frailty of Nissa’s form.

  She had admitted what the Hunting Club had always known—that the Paradisos had killers in its numbers. Killers close to Mohinder. As far as Anthony could tell, Nissa was being honest with him, and she really was head-over-heels for Dana in some weirdo vampire way.

  But he still couldn’t trust her.

  Not just because she was a vampire. Because Gaslight Corp had put those gas tanks down in the mine, and no matter how Nissa denied it, a maneuver like that could only have been ordered by Mohinder.

  It was the one card that he hadn’t played. The one scrap of evidence that the Paradisos wouldn’t know that they possessed.

  Maybe it’d even be enough to get a warrant against Mohinder.

  “I’m going to take my phone out,” he said. “Call the police chief.”

  “Please do,” she said.

  He dialed. It rang repeatedly, but Charmaine picked up before voicemail took over. “Anthony? Are you okay?” she asked, urgency in her tone.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know. Just…” There was shuffling on the other side of the line. Anthony waited as she moved. She was probably trying to find somewhere more private to talk. “I’ve just found the killer responsible for the deaths of Irma Stoppard and Carlitos Oborsky. She confessed to everything once we broke down her door with a SWAT team.”

  Anthony eyed Nissa. “Momoe Esquerer?”

  “News gets around fast.”

  “Sure does,” he said. “I think you and I have the same source.”

  “You talked to Mohinder too?” Charmaine sounded surprised. No more surprised than Anthony was, though.

  “I guess we’re good neighbors,” he said.

  “Thank the gods for that. Maybe our asses are saved from the OPA after all. Play nice—I’ve gotta go clean shit up with Momoe Esquerer. You good?”

  “I’m good,” he said, although he didn’t feel good.

  Charmaine hung up. He stuck his phone in his pocket. He didn’t need to tell Nissa about the conversation that had just unfolded; she’d have heard it with her sensitive vampire ears. Instead, Anthony said, “So what’s your plan with the Garlic Shot?”

  “There’s a warehouse on Gantry,” Nissa said. “It’s a lesser-used Paradisos property, and also the location of one of Harold Hopkins’s labs. I’ve already gotten another cure brewing there. It should be ready around four in the morning tomorrow. Dana can come at that time and we’ll take the Garlic Shot.”

  “Together? Both of you?

  She gave him big doe-eyes. “Would you judge me if I did?”

  Anyone that innocent looking must have been total trouble.

  “If you cure Dana, I’ll save the judgment for people more deserving,” Anthony said.

  “I may deserve your judgment, Mr. Morales,” Nissa said. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t also save Dana McIntyre’s life.”

  16

  Dana woke up to a lonely grave, as she had for the last too-many weeks. Except now her grave was filled with boxes. Lucinde moved the contested items from the divorce mediation into the catacombs and it had the effect of making her not-so-final resting place a cluttered mess. She had to wade knee-deep through piles of crap she didn’t care about to get dressed.

  It took several minutes of contortionist squirming into her pants, one-legged hopping into boots, and banging her elbow against boxes to get ready. When she finished and stumbled to the door, she found an orc slumped against the opposite wall, chin dropped to her chest, arms limp in her lap.

  For the first time since she’d died, Dana’s heart leaped.

  “Penny?”

  The orc’s head snapped up. She blinked slowly, groggy. “Oh, hey.”

  Surprise quickly turned to a gentle kind of annoyance. For one stupid, foolish instant, Dana had feared that someone killed Penny and left her in the catacombs to make a statement. The Fremont Slasher kept leaving her curls, after all. How long before he came back for Penny and left an entire body on Dana’s doorstep?

  But no.

  “Were you sleeping out here?” Dana asked.

  “I was tired,” Penny said sheepishly. “Can we talk for a minute?”

  “You don’t gotta ask. Come on in.” Dana stepped back, letting Penny lumber inside.

  Penny glanced around the living space, nibbling on her thumbnail in between the broad spears of her tusks. “It’s not very cozy in here, is it?”

  Dana shrugged. “It’s home.” Cozy had never been one of her priorities. The clash between cozy and spartan had been the first real fight Dana and Penny had when they’d moved in together, in fact. Unfortunately, the clutter was far from spartan, so neither of them could have been comfortable in there.

  “I guess so.” Penny was already getting all hunched in on herself again. “Look, Anthony found your, um, your friend. He found Nissa at Judex.”

  “And?”

  “Nissa discovered that Momoe Esquerer was behind everything. The healer? She’s in custody. The fight is over, and now I guess we’re supposed to believe we’re friends with the Paradisos,” Penny said.

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Probably about as much as you do.”

  Which was to say, not at all.

  Dana didn’t care if the Paradisos turned over a thousand bad guys. There was only one enemy she cared about—one serial killer who’d tortured innocents like Penny—and in order for her to be friends with the Paradisos, every last one of them would have to fucking bathe in sunlight and splinters.

  Momoe Esquerer surely deserved to be arrested. No question about that.

  But she was just one witch.

  Penny wrung her hands together. “Nissa also said that she got unobtainium from Mohinder. If you meet Nissa at the warehouse on Gantry tonight, you can turn human again. With her.”

  “That’s it?” Dana asked. “She got the chemical from her sire and he’s just gonna…let us have it?”

  “That’s what Anthony said.” Penny offered a tremulous smile. “You must be relieved. You get to start a new life with…Nissa.” The pause before she said the vampire’s name was nearly imperceptible. Anyone but Dana would have missed the hesitation entirely.

  “I get to change back with Nissa, yeah.”

  “But then you’ll have a life with her.”

  What Penny was trying to say finally clicked with Dana.

  Penny’s jealous.

  Dana could have opted for being petty. After all, Penny was the one who’d dropped an ultimatum at Dana’s feet: go full vampire or get a divorce. Had Dana wanted to make Penny suffer, it would have been totally validated.

  But the last thing Dana had ever wanted was for Penny to look as droopy and sad as she did now.

  “Listen close,” Dana said. “I’m going to have exactly jack and shit to do with Nissa after this. You know what happens when I wake up human again? I go home. To my real home, with you and the huge-ass windows overlooking the city. If you’ll have me, I’ll come back to you.”

  “I would always have you,” Penny whispered.

  Dana couldn’t tear her gaze away from the orc’s pulse point throbbing underneath her jawline. It felt like there were a thousand neon arrows pointing straight at it.

  All of a sudden, Dana felt real thirsty.

  Her need was so much stronger than with other people. Most folks just looked to her like a McDonald�
�s cheeseburger, but Penny looked like a juicy T-bone from a fancy steakhouse.

  It probably didn’t help that Dana wanted Penny for other reasons, too.

  “Did I tell you how good this shirt looks on you?” Dana asked, running her fingers under the strap over Penny’s broad, strong shoulder.

  Penny swayed, leaning into her. “It’s your shirt.”

  “I know,” Dana said. “I’m thinking I should take it back.”

  “Dana…”

  “I’m going to be human again tonight. I don’t care about Nissa, and I’ve only been hanging out with her because I think that’s what the gods want. I still fucking love you. I want to spend every last minute I’ve got on this planet making you blush the way you’re blushing right now. Is that clear enough?”

  “Will I have to spend the rest of our lives together being afraid of your vendetta on my behalf?” Penny asked. But she was leaning closer. Close enough that Dana was engulfed in the sweet, salty scent of her sweat.

  Dana ran her nose along Penny’s neck. It was dangerous getting that close to her veins—so hard to try not to think about how it’d feel to sink her teeth in for a nice long drink.

  She wasn’t going to bite Penny. She’d never bite Penny. She might hurt her wife, but only in the ways that Dana couldn’t control. Like the fact she couldn’t promise she’d let go of her grudge against vampires. She’d never drop her vendetta. She’d never forgive herself for letting the Fremont Slasher have Penny. And that was going to hurt Penny, sure.

  But Dana was no physical risk to her. Penny knew that. There was nothing but trust in her face when she lifted the hem of the shirt over her head, baring her sports bra and the ridged expanse of her pectorals.

  “My vendetta isn’t only on your behalf,” Dana said. “The Fremont Slasher is still out there.”

  “Gods, Dana.” Penny drew back, but Dana caught her by the elbows.

  “Nissa’s another one of his victims,” she said.

  Realization dawned over Penny’s features. “Another survivor?”

  Dana nodded. “You get why I cut her some slack? Surviving what you did…everything that you guys dealt with…”

  “He didn’t break me,” Penny said. “It was horrible. So horrible. But I’ve been in therapy, and I’m sleeping these days, and you don’t have to keep being so crazy for me. I’m okay. I want you to be okay too.”

  Dana would never be okay. Not until she was certain that Penny could be safe…and certain that Nissa could be safe, too.

  “Please promise me you’ll stay,” Penny whispered, lowering her lips to Dana’s. “That you won’t turn human and go back to chasing vampires even when it’s bad for you.”

  “You know I won’t promise that.” Dana kissed Penny’s tusks one at a time, the sturdy bases and the pointy tips, then slipped her tongue into her wife’s mouth.

  “I know.” Penny groaned the word into her mouth.

  Dana yanked the shirt out of Penny’s hands. She tossed it into the casket.

  They tumbled against the wall together, falling into the familiar patterns they’d established over their years together. It was no longer the desperate fumbling they’d first experienced in the jail cell—after Dana beat up those guys at the fair, but before Anthony made bail. They knew all each other’s spots. She knew that Penny liked having her horns yanked on and Penny knew that Dana liked to straddle her thigh while they kissed, lifting her a few inches to make it easier.

  Dana had been so focused on fighting lately that she hadn’t even realized how much she’d missed this. Maybe she’d have known if she’d had time to think or breathe. This used to be the reason she fought—the way that Penny’s brassy skin glided underneath Dana’s callused palms, and the desperate noises that Penny made against her mouth.

  Penny pushed, and Dana pushed back.

  The meekness that typified Penny vanished in moments like these. She tore Dana’s Black Death shirt apart at the seams with her blacksmith muscles, and when Dana protested, Penny said, “Shut it.” Getting ordered around like that only made Dana wetter. It only made her need Penny so much more.

  But when Penny ripped off Dana’s bra to take a nipple in her mouth, there was hesitation to the moist warmth of her tongue, the pull of her lips.

  “You’re so cold,” Penny murmured. Her fingertips dug into Dana’s spine.

  “Make me warm,” Dana said.

  Penny tried her best. She molded their thighs together, their breasts, and she breathed life into Dana’s throat. Fingers tangled in hair. They fell to the dirt floor together, knocking boxes everywhere. The ground was uncomfortably hard against Dana’s knees when she reared up to kick off her pants, her shoes.

  But then they were together—two bodies, one cold and one hotter than the fires that blazed in a furnace. Penny’s tongue traveled over Dana’s body and left flames in its wake.

  Dana was so often numb to the world. Pain didn’t hurt as much, adrenaline was nonexistent, she was forgetting how it felt to fear.

  But with Penny, she could feel again.

  She even thought her heart might have started beating.

  17

  Four o’clock in the morning hit. Dana arrived at the warehouse on Gantry with Brianna’s voice in her ear.

  “Things look good on the street level,” Brianna said.

  Good was a generous word to use for this neighborhood. The amount of development suggested it had once been prosperous, but at least forty years had elapsed since then. All the signs had vintage 80s fonts, none of the buildings had post-Genesis magical augmentations, and everything was falling apart. Rebar jutted out of the remaining walls, and there were few of those.

  Even the roads in this area were bad. Broken asphalt crunched under Dana’s heels as she approached the warehouse, abandoning her pink-and-lime pickup on the curb. She’d parked on the sidewalk since it seemed like the only other people around tore through at twenty kilometers-per-hour over the speed limit, escaping as quickly as possible. She’d hate for her first experience as a newly reborn human to be taking her baby in for repairs.

  “I think you’re gonna have to rephrase,” Dana said. “What’s good about this place?”

  “City cameras don’t show any other life in the area. Or undead, as the case may be. Nissa didn’t bring the whole murder of Paradisos to this neck of the woods to surprise you.”

  “Did you think she would?”

  “Forgive me for being a little leery of Paradisos,” Brianna said. “I feel like I should fill in for you since you’re not the one being paranoid about vamps.”

  Dana grinned at nothing in particular. “Thanks. Makes me feel better.”

  “I’d feel better if you had backup on the ground with you.”

  “Hey, if you hear me dying, just send Anthony in,” she said. “No big deal.”

  It really wasn’t a big deal. Dana hadn’t forgotten her years of experience and her many more years of training, and she hadn’t been stupid enough to come without a backup plan.

  The stake at her belt was her only real weapon. The only one she wanted to use, anyway. But even though she no longer had a bead of balefire embedded in her throat, she’d still thought to bring a failsafe. A small daylight bomb—a UV grenade—weighed her back pocket down. It was a tiny thing, fitting easily into a closed fist. But when the pin got pulled, it would blow enough daylight to kill any vampire in the same room.

  By the time Brianna heard Dana getting killed, chances were good Dana would have already killed every vampire in the area.

  Maybe including herself.

  Hopefully not, though.

  Dana had left Penny basking in an orgiastic afterglow in her sarcophagus—a morbid but sexy mental image that chased her all the way to Gantry. At this point, Dana had zero urge to die. She had every single intent of tasting the sweat between Penny’s shoulder blades again, and holding the orc as she shuddered helplessly, wracked by ecstasy.

  Being undead was terrible. But gods damn it all, life was
good.

  “At least the warehouse doesn’t look too bad,” Dana said, peering up at the building. It was the one structure with four intact walls and no bullet holes. The clouds high above suggested that it was going to try to rain again, and there was enough roof on the warehouse that she might not even get soaked. “If I was gonna have to go into the wreckage ten feet down the street, I’d be worried. But Harold Hopkins’s old lab looks all right.”

  “Nothing down there looks all right on the cameras,” Brianna said.

  Maybe Dana was feeling too optimistic after all the orgasms herself.

  Whatever.

  She was about to enter the Gantry warehouse when Nissa emerged from the front door. It was the first time Dana had seen her outside of work clothes. She was dressed modestly, wearing a pair of slacks and a feminine blouse that Penny never would have bought. Because Nissa wasn’t Penny. Only Penny was Penny, and Dana was going to have her back.

  “Did you get it done?” Dana asked. “Did you make the cure?”

  Nissa beamed. “It’s brewing. Are you excited?”

  Dana wasn’t sure that “excited” was any better at describing her feelings than “good” was at describing the neighborhood. “I’m done being dead, that’s for sure. I wanna get to the next thing now.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Nissa said. “Where are you going?” Dana had started to walk into the warehouse that Nissa had emerged from.

  “Going to the cure?”

  “Oh, this isn’t the warehouse I was talking about,” Nissa said. “That one did belong to Achlys, but it’s just got a bunch of old restaurant equipment. I was hoping to find a microwave for my office. We’re next door.” At the ruin that looked like it had probably been a meth lab at some point.

  It was a three-walled crumbling monolith of a building that must have been ten stories high. It had no windows. It was an angry cement block worn down by harsh Nevada sunlight. “Pretty sure I went to a few raves there in high school,” Dana said.

  Nissa laughed. “I’ve got something better cooking in there than a rave!”