Chapter Two #2
This is none of those things.
My phone is out, and I photograph the scars from three angles, moving with an efficiency that comes from knowing evidence is only as good as its documentation. Then, I step back and pull the knife from my boot strap.
Hunter protocol: Dispose of the body, leave no trace, file the report, move on.
I follow the protocol.
I always follow the protocol.
But a staked vampire isn’t finished.
That thought cuts clean through everything else.
It always does.
I shift my stance, adjusting the angle, my hand steady even as something in my chest pulls tight in quiet resistance, a reflex that doesn’t belong to the weapon I was trained to be, but to something softer that learned too late how to survive alongside it.
I ignore it.
I always do.
The knife comes free in one smooth motion, the metal catching the light just long enough to register before I’m moving again, stepping in close, bracing, lining up the angle without needing to think about it.
The blade settles against his throat, the edge resting just firmly enough to mark skin.
I feel the give of flesh beneath it, the hard stop of bone underneath that.
Everything else falls away. The alley, the noise, the rain, all of it gone until there’s nothing left except steel against skin and the split-second decision to finish it.
This is the part they never struggled with teaching me.
This is the part they made sure I got right.
I exhale.
Steel parts flesh in a hot, slick drag, fresh blood spilling across my hand, the warmth of it immediate. It’s thicker than human, and the scent of it sharpens as it hits the air.
The blade meets bone, and I don’t hesitate, shifting my grip and driving through it, feeling the vibration travel up my arm as steel grinds through with a stubborn resistance that never gets easier to feel, no matter how many times I’ve done it.
My jaw tightens.
Not from effort but familiarity.
From the way my body knows exactly how much force it takes.
The sound is low and final, and by the time the neck gives, by the time the last of the resistance breaks and the motion completes, I’m already pulling back, already stepping away before the rest of it can register, before the weight of what I’ve just done has time to settle into anything more than second nature.
I don’t watch his head fall.
I don’t need to.
The job is done.
And the part of me that notices anything beyond that is something I learned a long time ago to keep quiet.
By the time I step back, the change has already started.
The tension leaves him all at once, like something unseen has let go, and his body sinks heavier against the concrete, muscles slackening in a way that’s too sudden to be natural.
The shape of him softens where it shouldn’t, like whatever was holding everything tight beneath the skin has been ripped out, leaving nothing behind to keep it in place.
Then the blood turns.
It doesn’t spread.
It thickens.
What should be a dark, liquid pool beneath him slows, then drags, the surface going tacky, almost sticky like tar, as if the air itself is rejecting it.
The color deepens fast, red collapsing into something darker, duller, until it looks less like blood and more like something spilled from a machine that was never meant to run this long.
A slow, wet sound follows as it clots in real time, strands forming where it shouldn’t, clinging to the concrete, to my boot, stretching when I shift my weight like it doesn’t want to let go.
The smell changes with it.
Copper goes sour, and sharp becomes rotten.
Something tangy pushes through, thick enough to taste at the back of my throat, like whatever was keeping it fresh has finally given up and let it spoil all at once.
I’ve seen it before, and I still fucking hate it.
Because it’s not just death.
It’s the body remembering it shouldn’t have been alive in the first place.
The silence settles across the alley, broken only by the distant groan of city infrastructure and the wet, uneven breathing of the victim against the far wall.
He’s going to survive this.
He’s going to wake up with marks on his throat and no memory of the thing that put them there. In six months, he’ll probably convince himself it was a blackout, a bad night, some screwed-up mugging his brain never pieced together properly.
Good.
People sleep better when the monsters stay fake.
I crouch beside the rogue and strike the lighter. The flame catches fast once it hits old blood and dead flesh, crawling up his clothes in hungry orange waves. The stink hits a second later, smoke twisting into the rain while the fire chews through the evidence.
Then my attention drifts back to the photographs of the markings burned into the rogue’s skin after the flames start doing their job.
Long after, I check the human slumped against the wall and find him still breathing, pulse steadier than it should be after that much blood loss. Then I dump the burner phone in a trash can three blocks over, after calling emergency services anonymously.
My eyes stay on those images while I walk. At the same time, the industrial district thins out around me, and the city reasserts itself in the form of lit windows, passing traffic, and the ordinary, oblivious noise of people who don’t know what else lives in their city alongside them.
The order I trained with would have called this a standard extraction.
Rogue neutralized.
A human survivor
Zero exposure.
A clean night on paper.
The order was very good at making things look clean on paper, while everything underneath rotted.
I walked away from the order that took me in when I realized the money wasn’t just buying politicians anymore.
It was buying targets and permission. The hunt stopped being about monsters and started turning toward whoever got in the way of the people signing the checks.
Twelve years of training, of bleeding, of sharpening myself into something precise, dangerous, and useful, and they wanted to aim that at innocents because innocents had things worth paying for.
I walked out the same way I do everything, without ceremony or speech.
I just didn’t come back.
The code I live by now is my own, assembled from the wreckage of the one they gave me.
It isn’t complicated…
Supernatural creatures who prey on humans are my problem.
Supernatural creatures who keep to their own are not.
Which is why I don’t touch the Kings of Anarchy MC.
I’ve heard the stories about what they run through this city, including money laundering, smuggling routes, and underground fight pits packed with monsters, where they bet on other monsters tearing each other apart inside cages lined with iron and runes strong enough to keep the bodies contained.
Not exactly a charitable operation.
Not exactly the kind of enterprise that wins civic awards.
But the Kings have rules, territory, and a hierarchy that keeps the chaos from spilling onto the streets, that keeps the thing that almost happened in that alley tonight from happening in broad daylight in a school parking lot.
Whatever the Kings of Anarchy are, they are not, categorically, people who make humans into victims for sport.
And in my world, that distinction is the only one that matters enough to build a policy around.
Besides, picking a fight with a club full of ancient vampires and supernatural beings is a good way to horrifically die.
My apartment is twenty minutes away, and my legs cover it on autopilot. The part of my brain that doesn’t shut off keeps turning the photographs over, keeps returning to the geometry of those scars like a tongue seeking the sharp edge of a broken tooth.
Someone put those marks on that vampire.
Someone who knew exactly what they were doing and exactly what they were building toward.
In the morning, I’ll start making calls.
Tonight, I walk through the dark city with ash on my boots, a question I don’t yet have a name for lodged in the pit of my stomach, and I let the hunter half of me, the part that was built for exactly this kind of trouble, start pulling at the thread.
The thing about pulling at threads is that shit tends to get unraveled.