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

  The world turned around him. Grass shined, the stars sparkled a little brighter, and fucking violins played on the wind. For a moment, it really did look like daytime to Nissa.

  A human was yanked out of the house.

  Not Harold Hopkins. Harold Hopkins was surely not a middle-aged housewife wearing a muumuu, screaming as she dangled upside-down by the ankles.

  The chosen victim snapped across the front yard, back bowing like Shawn’s magic had hooked her by the navel. She tore at hands that weren’t really there, trying to break free, and was rewarded by taking a detour through the sprinkler on her way to becoming Shawn’s human shield.

  He locked her in front of his body with a tangible arm across her shoulders.

  “No!” Nissa cried.

  “Stay behind me’n Mrs. Robinson here,” Shawn said. “The Hunting Club doesn’t shoot mundanes, do they? Do they?” It didn’t seem to be a rhetorical question.

  Anthony wasn’t shooting yet. “You don’t get any warnings. Put the woman down or Brianna lets go.”

  “Lets go of what?” Shawn asked.

  The victim he’d called Mrs. Robinson was dissolving into full-body sobbing that looked downright painful. Shawn hadn’t eased up on the sorcery gripping her—he wasn’t exactly a gentle guy.

  “Do it,” Anthony said.

  Brianna flung her hands upward. “Nothi hoxe!”

  Witch magic slammed against sidhe sorcery. The language she used—the hetânâ—summoned magic of gaean origin, fire of the Earth. It fountained from her arms with as much force as the water from the sprinkler.

  Fire. Oh, hell.

  Nissa dived behind the car.

  Witchfire splashed past her shoulder, so close that it seared her hair. The resulting smell was similar to the one produced when she stepped into sunlight. The smell of dead vampire getting deader.

  What happened from there? She wasn’t sure. She knew that it involved screaming from Mrs. Robinson, screaming from Shawn, screaming from the Hunting Club members.

  Fear paralyzed Nissa.

  Nissa curled in on herself, arms around her legs, forehead against the car, and let the flame pass her as she lost her mind to the terror.

  Fire wasn’t a problem. She wasn’t as flammable as most vampires. And when she heard bullets start banging out into the colorless night, that wasn’t really a problem either. She’d been shot before. Neither lead nor iron would kill her.

  The problem was the humans.

  Because they were in Nissa’s head. Anthony was the loudest of them, but Mrs. Robinson’s fear was battering against Nissa too, and she felt intrusion from the other humans as they awakened. Everyone was terrified, and that made Nissa terrified.

  Nissa couldn’t block them out now that she was open. Ripped right open, like a breastbone cracked for autopsy.

  She could hear them all.

  The family on the corner was sick, so this was the first night that they’d gotten any sleep that week. The sound of gunfire that made their eyes fly open. The baby had an ear infection and she was crying.

  There was a gay couple across the street. One of them fell out of bed when he heard the sounds, his PTSD triggered. His adrenaline drenched Nissa. The memory of his time fighting in the Balefire Wars pushed like pins into her brain.

  And the other family…and the other…

  Fear. So much fear.

  Brianna was shouting more of the hetânâ. “Qee! Nemii dita! Itho!”

  The car shook beside Nissa. Shawn’s shrieks turned to cackling laughter, and she could tell that he was employing sorcery to dodge Anthony’s gunfire by the way the whole world bowed in response.

  Nissa clapped her hands over her ears and bolted into the street. She had to get further from the houses. Further from the humans and their feelings.

  Pain flared in her shoulder.

  In her calf.

  Anthony Morales, former kopis who’d already tried to stake her twice, had just shot her.

  He didn’t have the decency to be excited about it, either. Nissa was nothing compared to the tempest of a sidhe now hanging three helpless housewives upside-down in the air around his head. Anthony had only bothered to shoot at Nissa to make sure she couldn’t run very far away.

  Darn him, but it worked, too. Nissa’s calf buckled. She skidded into pavement. She tried not to land on her palms—if she tore the skin, it would take so long to mend—and then she flattened onto her back. The battle swirled over her in a glimpse of too-familiar color, sound, and tremors.

  Just like every other conflict between Paradisos and Hunting Club.

  And Nissa in the middle, poking her finger through the new hole in her leg.

  There was no blood.

  Shawn seized Brianna, lifting her by the throat. He looked thrilled to have finally gotten his long unseelie fingers around one of the hunters.

  “Put her down!” Anthony roared. His voice was loud—he had chased Nissa into the street. His boot stomped on Nissa’s shin. He crouched to press a stake against her heart.

  “Oh gods,” Nissa gasped. “Shawn!”

  Helicopters had begun circling. Even with Nissa’s eyes—the worst eyes the vampire world had to offer—she could tell that the helicopters were blacker than the sky, with white letters on the underbelly that ensured everyone knew who was watching them.

  It was the Office of Preternatural Affairs. Not the Henderson Police Department, whom Shawn could have dispatched with a finger twitch, or even the Las Vegas Metro Police Department.

  The OPA was a federal authority ruling preternatural lives in the North American Union. If anyone had enough iron bullets and neutralizing spells to take down Shawn, it was the OPA.

  Nissa’s hair was blasted from her face as she stared up into the light. Brighter than the sun she hadn’t seen firsthand in four years. Bright enough that it made her dry eyeballs feel like they were going to catch fire.

  A voice boomed from above.

  “This is Police Chief Villanueva with the LVMPD! You will drop your weapons and get on the ground now!”

  The addition of OPA agents and LVMPD officers was too much for Nissa’s empathy powers.

  Humans everywhere. They assailed her brain to the point that she almost wished Anthony would stake her.

  Shawn was a vibrating force of energy on Nissa’s periphery, unseen.

  Anthony’s mind was still rolling over and over in Nissa’s gut, with all its frustration, its anger, and his longing to take one more shot at the sidhe. “Come on!” he shouted at the chopper, as if they’d be able to hear him. “They fucking started it!”

  Brianna was pushing in on Nissa too.

  And Nissa…

  She was swooning, falling, eyes rolling into the back of her head. She wasn’t sure if she imagined that she could see the inside of her skull. There was no mind left to go along with the bloodless tissue. Just a yawning black chasm of spider webs and dust and fear, all of which vanished the moment she went unconscious.

  2

  LVMPD Chief Villanueva’s office smelled like coyote shifter. Appropriate, given that she was a coyote shifter. Brianna Dimaria had sniffed out Charmaine Villanueva’s breed the first time they met.

  It had been a long time since she’d met anyone—shifter, vampire, demon, whatever—and hadn’t been able to tell what they were.

  Brianna’s power wasn’t technically a smell thing. She didn’t really smell anyone, and her nose was very normal for a human. But the feeling of encountering preternaturals was best compared to the sensation of tightness one got before a sneeze.

  Charmaine tingled in the back of Brianna’s throat like all shifters did. Narrowing it down to coyote from there had been a matter of time.

  The woman didn’t look much like a coyote, though. She was built tall and sturdy, unlike the slinky opportunistic canine that infested Nevada’s fields, suburbs, and federal lands. There was also no hint of coyote mischief in Charmaine’s golden eyes, though there was a lupine tilt to her chin, and she
looked as though she were contemplating biting someone’s hand off.

  “Anthony Morales,” Charmaine said. “Achlys.”

  Her eyes sliced between them—the two leaders of opposing factions sitting on the other side of her desk.

  Getting Anthony and Achlys so close to each other without bloodshed was as near a miracle as Brianna had ever seen. It was only made possible by the OPA agents ringing the police chief’s office. Even Anthony wouldn’t try to stake Achlys out of the blue with that much law enforcement personnel present. He wasn’t Dana McIntyre, after all.

  “Three times now,” Chief Villanueva said. “Three times we’ve had to stop you two from fighting.” It was funny that she sounded so affronted by such a small number of conflicts. Really, the Hunting Club had clashed with the Paradisos much more than three times. It had only escalated to the point it couldn’t be concealed from law enforcement three times.

  “I have never fought this vampire.” Anthony’s arms were folded across his chest, his posture slumped, the cast to his eyebrows sullen.

  “I will affirm I have never met this man.” Achlys was his stiff-backed foil in the right-hand chair. From where Brianna sat, she could only see a sliver of the vampire’s features. Achlys had an arched brow, thin lips, and makeup clearly meant to evoke Elvira.

  Chief Villanueva pounded her fist into the desk. “Stop it. You two are the registered leaders of your respective organizations, so whether you’ve met face to face or not, you’re responsible for all this. All of it.”

  Anthony glowered at Achlys, who didn’t even tip her head in his direction. Achlys’s plaster skin looked like it’d have cracked if she tried to move too far.

  Brianna, meanwhile, was smiling.

  It was a reflexive defense mechanism. She always smiled when she was uncomfortable, or when people were saying stupid things, or when she was getting yelled at by the police chief. The latter wasn’t a rare incident, even though they were friends with Charmaine. The Hunting Club did like to push the legal boundaries of its vigilante license, and Charmaine seemed to end up yelling at them on a biweekly basis.

  Not a big deal normally. Charmaine was quick to forgive and forget when the Hunting Club rescued the city.

  Except this time they were being supervised by the Office of Preternatural Affairs.

  The visiting agents radiated preternatural power. There was at least one other coyote shifter among them, but the other shifters were all werewolf in nature. A handful were witches. A surprising number were sidhe from the Middle Worlds— faeries who had been “loaned” to the organization thanks to a treaty with the Sidhe Courts.

  This was a deadly team that had been handpicked by someone for some reason, and Brianna had a bad feeling that reason was going to end in her head on a platter.

  So she just kept smiling.

  “And now the fighting’s spilled into mundane neighborhoods,” Chief Villanueva said. “Do you have any idea how that makes us look?”

  Anthony had the good sense not to respond.

  “You two have pushed this city to the brink of riots,” she went on, jabbing her fingers at both Anthony and Achlys. “All it takes is a Hunting Club associate and a Paradisos vampire breathing within a half-mile of each other, and…boom.”

  “We have reason to be on edge,” Achlys said silkily. “We are frightened. The Hunting Club has killed one of ours without a license.”

  Anthony jerked upright, hands slamming to the arms of his chair. “Bullshit!”

  “Where is he, hunter?” Now Achlys had turned her head to stare at him, and Brianna wished that she hadn’t. She was a swivel-headed Barbie doll with stiff black hair fibers and eyes the color of blood. “What have you done with Beelzebub?”

  Brianna covered her mouth with a hand. She hoped that nobody heard her laugh.

  Beelzebub. I mean, really.

  Only in Vegas could campy, over-the-top vampires like Morticia Addams here and freaking Beelzebub become legitimate.

  Not just legitimate, but powerful.

  Achlys was the head of a hydra who ran the Strip. Her tits were on more billboards than showgirls’. She owned deeds to most of the acreage in Paradise, which was an unincorporated town at the heart of Las Vegas encompassing the Strip, UNLV, and even the airport.

  One tourist dollar at a time, Achlys had spent the years since Genesis building the single biggest vampire murder in the known world. And she did it all wearing a black dress so tight she couldn’t have breathed if she were living.

  Relative to Achlys, Anthony’s energy was offensively loose. One of his boots had come untied. The hem of his wife beater was unraveling. His fingers twitched at his side where a holster usually rested. “I don’t know any vampires named Beelzebub and I haven’t killed any of your Paradisos without a license.”

  “Lies,” Achlys whispered. That one whisper ratcheted the tension in the room up so much tighter.

  The OPA agents shifted. Anthony’s hands weren’t the only ones twitching.

  “I didn’t bring you here to start another fight,” said Chief Villanueva. “I brought you here to issue a warning. Things have been right on the fucking edge—and the OPA has noticed.”

  “We’ve only worked to make the city friendlier to tourists,” Achlys said. “Nevada’s ability to survive relies upon the tax dollars produced by our friendly city.”

  The chief scoffed. “Friendly? You made vampires accessible, flashy, sexy. You turned fear into an aphrodisiac that keno girls offer up with black crayons. You’re antagonists—and you’re half the cause of all the violent displays we’ve been seeing.”

  “Just half?” Anthony asked.

  Charmaine rounded on him. “Don’t fucking start with me, Morales. You know the role you’ve played in this.”

  Brianna couldn’t resist. “Supporting the LVMPD’s investigations? Taking down criminals you can’t safely tackle thanks to our specialized training? Controlling the vampire scourge so that humans can survive visits to Las Vegas?”

  Achlys’s head turned and kept turning. It twisted until her spine audibly popped and her red eyes focused on Brianna. “Scourge,” Achlys whispered. It felt like spiders crawling down Brianna’s spine.

  “Who started the fight today?” Chief Villanueva asked. She didn’t give anyone a chance to respond. “I don’t care. All the OPA sees is that Clark County’s a fucking mess. They’re breathing down the mayor’s neck, and she’s breathing down mine. If this escalates, the OPA will retract all vigilante licenses.”

  “Great idea,” Achlys said.

  Anthony sucked in a hard breath. “But—”

  “And then they’ll daylight bomb the whole gods-damned city,” the chief said. “That’s what’s going to happen if there’s one more clash between your factions.”

  Achlys twisted her Barbie-doll head back around to give the chief her attention again, and her penciled eyebrows were in the same neutral arch as always. Her anger filled the air so thickly that Brianna was choking on it. “Nobody died tonight,” Achlys said. “Shawn lost control of his unseelie powers because he was frightened by these thugs, but his magical flutters caused no harm.”

  She said that like Shawn Wyn was some delicate butterfly and not an elemental force wrapped in the body of a WWE heel. Brianna could still feel his hand locked around her throat. She’d definitely bruise.

  “I will control Shawn better in the future, and Mohinder is arranging for the frightened families to receive reparations.” Achlys’s head popped to the side, probably meant to look like an imploring tilt. There were visible veins on the side of her throat. Thick, pulsing veins flowing with rich human blood. “There was no death, and no injury, aside from Anthony Morales shooting one of my friends.”

  “And he will pay a fine for that,” Chief Villanueva said.

  Ooh, Anthony was not going to be happy. Every time the Hunting Club had to pay a fine, it came out of their communal Swear Jar. Everyone could see the money drop and knew it meant that someone had gotten in tro
uble with the cops again. Anthony would be catching shit from their associates for months to come.

  “Doesn’t matter if nobody died this time,” Charmaine went on. “What about next time? How bad’s it going to have to get before your squabbles are destroying another Luxor?”

  “We didn’t destroy the first one,” Anthony muttered.

  “This is your first, last, and only warning.” The police chief stood and bent to plant her fists on the desk, fixing them with a fierce stare. “If you publicly clash again, the OPA’s taking over. No more nice LVMPD. No more vigilantes in Vegas, and no more vampires in Vegas. Don’t fucking ruin this for all of us.”

  She straightened to gaze around the room. Now Charmaine had those coyote eyes. There was a feral light to them—a beast who had gotten backed into a corner by all the bodies in tactical gear looming around her desk as though they were about to seize it.

  The chief didn’t want the OPA there. She didn’t want to lose her job because the secretary of the OPA sat on the mayor’s head. Everyone was in trouble if the Hunting Club and the Paradisos couldn’t get along.

  Charmaine gestured to her only officer in the room, a short man wearing police blues. “It’s almost sunrise, so we’re done here. Officer Jeffreys, escort Anthony and Brianna to the door. And as for Achlys…”

  A wind gusted through the room. The papers on the chief’s desk rustled.

  Achlys’s chair sat empty.

  Nissa tasted pennies. Wet, slick, dripping pennies. Her eyes peeled open. Without moisture to dampen them, it felt a lot like rubbing tree bark over her pupils. Light sent pain lancing through the nerves to her brain.

  Achlys pulled her arm away from Nissa. “Finally. I was starting to worry.”

  The master vampire had cut her arm to ooze sludgy black blood into Nissa’s mouth. It was highly concentrated yet barely nourishing—and also the only type of blood that Nissa had ever tasted. Vampires needed human blood to finish transforming. Blood from another vampire wasn’t enough to make Nissa finish the transformation.

  It was enough to wake Nissa up. Also enough to make Nissa immediately roll over onto her face and barf.