Chapter Three
SCAR
The Next Day
It’s been twenty-four hours since something tore through this part of the city and left behind a mess that doesn’t belong.
Ash… and something older, something that clings to the brick and concrete like it’s dug in, like it’s not done being here yet.
I stop at the mouth of the alley and breathe it in, slow, steady, letting my senses do what they have been trained to do for longer than most of this city has been standing.
I peel it back, layer by layer, like stripping wallpaper off a wall you already know is hiding something you’re not going to like.
The city moves behind me, completely uninterested in what happened here.
The burn site is obvious, a broad, darkened ellipse scorched into the concrete near the far wall, the kind of mark that doesn’t come from an accidental fire or a spilled accelerant.
Whoever did this knew what they were doing.
Knew how much heat it took, how long to hold it, how to contain the spread so that the evidence was destroyed and nothing more, the kind of nothing more that takes practice to achieve.
I crouch beside it, studying the edges where the concrete has fractured under the sustained heat, hairline cracks radiating outward in a pattern that tells me the temperature was well above what a basic accelerant could manage.
Professional. The word sits flat and cold in my chest.
Someone is running hunts in my territory, and the way they’re doing it screams training, money, and more importantly, experience.
This isn’t some amateur getting brave with iron and a death wish.
Every instinct I’ve spent centuries building coils tight and irritated in my gut, the way they always do when something moves through what’s mine without the basic fucking courtesy of a heads-up.
I get to my feet and pull the cold night air in deep, sorting through every scent and sound, then I stop.
It’s there.
Not just ash.
Not just the chemical bite of whatever burned through here.
Something warmer.
Something alive.
It threads through the cold air sharp enough to catch my attention, a scent that doesn’t belong to what’s left behind. It sits sharp against everything else, too clean and too real.
Blood like that always carries something different, something caught between worlds, never fully one thing or the other. It hits with that copper-sweet edge that shouldn’t work in a place like this or cut through the mess the way it does.
And the part of me that notices blood first reacts before anything else can catch up.
A sharp pull.
That inherited instinct.
Hunger shifting just enough to remind me it’s there.
I clamp down on it, hard, forcing the rest of my thoughts back into place as I properly track the scent this time.
Because whatever happened here, it didn’t just leave ash behind.
Someone bled in this alley.
Not much. A scratch, maybe. The kind of wound that would close in an hour on a creature with accelerated healing. The kind of wound that closes fast but not fast enough to leave no trace for someone who knows what they’re looking for.
Dhampir.
I say nothing out loud. There’s no one here to say it to, and the word lands harder in the silence anyway, settling somewhere between interest and the sharp edge of a problem I know is real.
A dhampir working my streets, running hunts, cleaning up rogues with professional efficiency and enough fire to leave nothing behind but this scorched apology in the concrete—that’s not a coincidence I can forget about.
I move along the wall, methodical, reading the scene the way I’ve read a thousand scenes across lifetimes of managing the kind of chaos most people don’t know exists, and near the base of the brickwork, I find it, a shell casing, small and bright, sitting in the shadow of a drainage gap like it fell and didn’t roll far enough to matter.
I pick it up between two fingers.
Turn it.
Silver-core ammunition. Custom loaded by the look of the casing stamp, not something you buy over the counter or a casual hunter bothers with.
This was purpose-built for things that need silver to slow down and something heavier behind it to finish the job.
I hold it for a moment longer than I need to, then slide it into my jacket pocket, because evidence belongs to the person who finds it, and I found it first.
My phone comes out, and I photograph the scorch marks from four angles, capturing the fracture patterns at the edges, the contained ellipse of the burn site, and the precise absence of collateral damage to the surrounding wall.
Whoever worked this fire knew exactly what they were doing.
There’s no wild spread or panic, just clean, controlled burn marks laid down by someone with a steady hand and way too much practice.
That certainty sets my body on edge more than anything else.
I straighten, pocket the phone, and take one last look at the alley, this slice of my territory that something moved through without permission, acknowledgment, or the basic respect of letting me know there was a problem requiring a solution.
The irritation that’s been simmering since I first stepped into the dark here sharpens into something colder.
Whoever you are, dhampir, you’ve made yourself my problem now.
And I don’t let problems breathe long without answers.
The garage side of the clubhouse is lit up when I pull in, the wide doors thrown open to the June air, and I hear it before I see it, a shriek of delighted, startled laughter that cuts clean through the rumble of the engine, the kind of sound that belongs to a person caught completely off their feet.
Then Raze’s voice, low and amused in a way he’d deny under questioning, “Lean into it, firecracker. You’ve got it.”
Another shriek.
I kill the engine.
They’re at the center of the garage floor, Roxy sitting astride Raze’s bike, focused and wide-eyed, fully aware she’s in over her head and doing it anyway, her knuckles tight on the handlebars.
Raze stands right behind her with his hands locked on her hips, holding her steady while he watches the room like he’s ready to tear it apart for her if he has to.
The look on his face catches my attention mostly because I’ve rarely seen it there before.
His jaw loose, his eyes bright with something uncomplicated and openly warm, all that banked violence he carries as though it’s a second skin temporarily forgotten in the simple pleasure of watching someone he loves attempt something that terrifies them.
The bike rocks.
Roxy’s entire body lurches to compensate, and another peal of laughter tears out of her as she grabs his forearm to steady herself, and Raze laughs, too, pulling her back against him before the bike can tip further.
“I’m going to die on this thing!” she informs him, completely cheerful about it.
“You’re literally immortal now.” His chin drops to her shoulder. “You can’t die on it.”
“I can absolutely die of embarrassment, which is so much worse.”
I cross the garage floor. Raze clocks me in the same moment Roxy does, her posture brightening with that warmth she has for everyone in this club, the kind of instinctive openness that still occasionally catches me off guard because it has no agenda behind it.
She swings off the bike with considerably more grace than I’d expected, and Raze stays where he is, hands in his pockets, watching me with unhurried attention, the kind that says he knows something is coming, and he’s content to wait and see what.
“Scar.” The warmth in Roxy’s voice doesn’t waver. “You look like you found something you didn’t like.”
“I found something I don’t understand,” I correct her, because the distinction matters. I pull out my phone and hold the screen toward her. “Tell me what you see.”
She takes the phone without hesitation, with her full attention, and studies the photographs, scrolling through them once, then again more slowly. I watch her face, because that’s where the information will be before the words are, and it happens fast.
Her magic flares. I feel it before I see it, a warm, electric shift in the air, the frequency that Roxy’s power throws off when something touches it that it recognizes, and the color drains from her face in the same breath.
Her hand goes still, thumb hovering over the screen, and for a moment, she doesn’t speak, simply looks at the image with an expression that has moved several miles past surprise into something considerably more serious.
“Roxy.” Raze’s voice drops, the amusement gone as though it was never there. He moves to her side, one hand settling at the small of her back. “Talk to me.”
She looks up, first at him, then at me. “There are scars beneath the ash.” Her voice is level, but I can hear the effort behind the levelness.
“They’re ritual channels. Blood magic… old, dark, the kind that witches abandoned centuries ago because the cost of using it made it more curse than craft.
” She looks at the photograph once more, as though she’s hoping she’s misread it, then lowers the phone slowly.
“I’ve only seen diagrams of work like this in books.
Books that were locked for a reason, Scar. ”
Raze’s hand presses flat against her back. “How dark?”
Roxy is quiet for one beat that lands like a stone in still water. “The kind that costs lives to perform.”
Raze’s jaw tightens, a flicker at the corner before he goes still, that quiet, dangerous kind that means something just got personal. And with him, it always does when it comes to his people.
I let the silence stretch. Some things need that space to hit properly.
“Scar.” Coil’s voice, efficient and flat, crackles over the radio on the wall.
He doesn’t waste frequency on inflection.
“Got a buyer waiting on the Seelie shipment we received from the Alaska Kings’ chapter.
Their prez, Blade, said this was the real deal…
the buyer claims he’s got Fae provenance papers on his end, but the name on the transfer doc doesn’t match the account number. Need your call before we move it.”
I lift the radio receiver. “Hold him. Run the account trace through Flux and get me the discrepancy in writing. Nobody moves anything until I’ve seen the documentation myself.”
“Copy.” The radio settles. Club business, always there, always running, the vast and complicated machinery of the empire that doesn’t care if I’m currently standing in a garage turning over a problem that has roots in blood magic old enough to predate most of this city’s foundations.
I look back at Roxy, who is still holding my phone, her expression tight, caught on something she hasn’t been able to shake.
The magic shipment, the buyer, the pit—all of it keeps turning and running, the clockwork of the empire maintaining its own momentum the way it always does.
But this, the photographs on that phone, the burn site in my alley, the shell casing in my pocket, the dhampir blood threading through warm June air—this is something different.
This is the kind of problem that doesn’t stay small.
“I need you to look at everything you know about blood channeling of this age,” I tell Roxy, and she nods before I’ve finished the sentence. “Whatever tradition this comes from, whoever is still practicing it, I want to know it before the next body shows up.”
Because there will be another body.
I’ve been in this world long enough to know how these things move, how darkness gathers momentum once it starts, how rituals this old and this deliberate are never isolated incidents. They are preparing for something that requires more than one kill to build toward.
Someone is constructing something in my territory.
And I intend to dismantle it before it’s finished.
Roxy hands me back my phone, her fingers warm against mine for a brief moment, and her eyes carry the same certainty I feel settling into my chest like iron.
“I’ll start tonight,” she says.
Outside, the city hums along, indifferent and unknowing, the way it always does.
And I?
Will begin the hunt.