Chapter Four
CALYPSO
The Next Morning
Griggs’ pawn shop is less a business and more a dumping ground for every supernatural asshole in the city with blood on their hands and secrets they can’t take anywhere else.
Today, I am one of them.
The place sits wedged between a payday loan office and a shuttered nail salon on the kind of street that stopped trying years ago.
The sign above the door, ‘Griggs & Co. Collectibles,’ is faded down to a ghost of its original lettering, the G barely distinguishable from the grime.
No hours posted or bell above the door, just a handle worn smooth from a thousand hands that knew better than to knock.
I push inside.
The front of the shop smells like old metal and older deals, like every object on these shelves has passed through hands that didn’t want to be traced.
Display cases crowd the floor in no particular order, crammed with pieces that don’t belong together.
A jade figurine next to a cracked compass with runes etched along its face, taxidermy that doesn’t correspond to any animal a field guide would recognize, coins stacked in columns that subtly shimmer when the overhead light shifts.
The place is packed with the kind of random shit you only collect after a century of dealing in stolen goods and never once bothered to organize any of it.
Griggs lurks behind the counter, barely tall enough to see over the glass case. He looks like something dragged out of a swamp and taught how to run a cash register. Gray-green skin, huge dark eyes, and wet-looking in a way that makes people instinctively want to step back from him.
He blinks at me slowly and carefully, which tells me he clocked me before I even touched the door. Typical goblin shit. They notice everything and charge for it all.
“Hunter,” he sneers, by way of greeting. His voice sounds like gravel in a tin can.
“Griggs.” I move to the counter, set my forearms on the glass, and hold his gaze. “I’ve got somethin’ for you.”
His wide mouth curves, but there’s nothing warm in it. “You always do, bloodsucker.”
The word lands under my ribs like a knife slipped between them. My jaw tightens hard enough to ache, fingers curling against the glass before I force them still. Griggs notices, because of course, he does. The bastard’s eyes gleam darker with satisfaction.
Fucking goblin!
Always digging a thumb into the bruise to see if you flinch.
I pull out my phone and lay it flat on the counter between us, the photograph of the ritual scars from the rogue’s torso bright against the darkened shop. I watch his face instead of the screen, because that’s where the real information lives.
For a moment, he doesn’t react. The slow, considering blink, along with the faint tilt of his head as he takes in the image, but then…
something changes. It moves through him like a cold current pulled under the surface, a tightening across his brow, a stillness in those oil-dark eyes that has nothing to do with composure and everything to do with recognition.
The color that drains from Griggs’ face isn’t dramatic. It’s quiet, and that makes it worse.
Not the theatrical kind, the real kind, the involuntary one that happens when a body registers a threat faster than the mind can catch up to it.
He pushes the phone back toward me with one short, wide finger, like he doesn’t want it near him a second longer than necessary.
“Where in Satan’s scrap heap did you find this?” His voice comes out lower than before.
“Rogue vampire,” I tell him. “Third one this month carrying the same marks. Carved, not healed over. Deliberate.”
He says nothing for a long moment. “Crimson Circle.”
The words land in the space between us and sit there, heavy and still.
“Thought they were extinct,” he adds, almost to himself.
I lean in slightly. “Tell me.”
He doesn’t want to. I can see it in the way his hands settle flat on the counter, the way he glances toward the back of the shop once before he starts, like he’s checking the exits out of pure reflex.
“An ancient cult,” he says finally, his voice flattening out like he’s reading off a list he regrets memorizing.
“Vampire in origin. Older than most bloodlines still standing. The kind of old that should’ve stayed buried and nailed shut. ”
He makes a face, small but definite. “They were obsessed with what they called perfection. Decided the vampire line had gone soft and diluted. Started talking about rebuilding it from the ground up… like that ever ends well.” He stops, then adds, “Spoiler… it doesn’t!”
He pauses, and I let the silence sit, because pushing Griggs never gets you anywhere useful.
“They experimented,” he continues, and there’s a faint shift in his expression like he’s already regretting opening this drawer.
“Mixed vampire blood with other supernatural lines. Trying to build something that carried the best of everything and none of the weaknesses. Real ‘let’s fix what isn’t broken and see how badly it goes’ kind of thinking. ”
He gestures vaguely, like he’s flicking through a list he’d rather not have memorized.
“Fae, lycan, elemental. If it had power, they poured it in and hoped it didn’t explode.
” His wide mouth compresses, the humor thinning out.
“But it was the berserkers that really caught their interest with their rage and endurance. The way that blood doesn’t like being told what it is. ”
He exhales softly through his nose. “Berserker blood fights back. Against spells and control. Against anything that tries to cage it.” He shakes his head, like he’s trying to dislodge the thought entirely. “Most of the test subjects didn’t survive,” he says, quieter now. “And the ones that did—”
He stops there and doesn’t finish whatever terrible thought entered his Goblin mind.
The silence that follows isn’t empty. It sits heavy, like whatever he could say next would only make it worse.
After a beat, he huffs out a breath, dragging himself back to the point.
“The vampire lords at the time decided they’d seen enough.
Three hundred years ago, a coalition of them went in and burned the Circle down to the foundations.
” He tilts his head slightly, mouth pulling to one side. “Or so history says.”
My jaw is tight. I can feel it, the clench across bone that happens when something I already half knew solidifies into certainty. “But?”
“But the scars are here,” Griggs says, and his eyes find mine, flat, serious, and stripped of his usual mercenary detachment. “Which means either someone found the old texts and decided to try again, or the Circle was never as finished as everyone wanted to believe.”
The quiet that follows isn’t comfortable.
I pick up my phone, and I’m not looking at the photograph anymore.
I’m looking through it, past it, past the rogue’s carved torso, the dark alley, and the clean edge of the body burning down to nothing.
I’m looking at a kitchen table with a candle burning low, and my mother’s voice, the way everything that was ordinary and whole in the world stopped being those things in the space of one night when I was twelve years old.
A cult took her.
Not the Crimson Circle, a different name, a different obsession, but the same type of belief… that something sacred lived in blood, that the right ritual could extract it, and that the cost of the extraction was someone else’s problem.
She was human, mostly.
She was kind.
She had a garden with too many tomatoes, laughed too loudly at her own jokes, and she loved me in the uncomplicated way you don’t fully understand until it’s gone.
They didn’t know she had a daughter.
Or maybe they did, and it didn’t matter.
That question has kept me company on more nights than I can count.
My chest goes tight the second the memory closes in, locking up hard enough to feel like a fist closing around my ribs. I drag in a slow breath and shove it back down where it belongs, the same way I always do, and bury it deep enough it can’t get its claws into me again.
“I want everything you can find on them,” I say, my voice coming out level. “Old contacts, old locations, known ritual sites, anything you’ve ever moved that carried their mark. I don’t care how long it takes.”
Griggs stares at me for a beat that stretches longer than it should.
“You don’t want this fight, hunter. The Circle doesn’t leave survivors.
” He wrinkles his nose slightly. “That’s not a reputation.
That’s a body count going back three and a half centuries.
The kind that doesn’t need updating because no one’s left to argue the numbers. ”
I meet his eyes. “Then I’ll be the first.”
He holds my stare another second before finally looking away, and I know exactly what’s running through his head. He thinks I’m dead already. Just another idiot marching toward something bigger and meaner than she realizes.
But he’s also decided it’s still worth doing business with me.
That’s the thing about goblins. There is no fake sympathy or speeches. Everything comes down to cost, risk, and whether the payout is worth the trouble. Brutal, but honest. I’ve always trusted that a hell of a lot more than sentiment.
“There’s something else,” I say, before he can name his price. “The Kings of Anarchy. They run the underworld in this territory. Tell me what you know about them.” I watch his face shift, something between reluctance and professional reflex. “All of it.”
Griggs exhales through his nose as he picks up a cloth from under the counter and runs it along the glass case, a habit, I think, something his hands do when his mind is choosing words carefully.
“They’re not your enemy… unless you go out of your way to make them one,” he says, like he’s clarifying something that should be obvious but rarely is.
“And you’d have to really commit to that mistake.
They’ve got rules. They keep this city’s underworld from eating itself alive, which, for the record, is doing everyone a favor whether they appreciate it or not. ”
He sets the cloth down, slower this time.
“Their VP, Scar. He’s the one you’d run into first if you step even a little sideways in this territory.
” A brief pause, his mouth pulling like he’s deciding how honest he wants to be.
“Five hundred years old, give or take. Ran with vampire lords before there was an MC to run with. Been around long enough to see most bad ideas come full circle and is still standing at the end of it.”
His gaze lifts back to mine, steady and unreadable, in a way that feels deliberate. “Has a reach and a reputation that have never once needed correcting,” he adds, quieter now. “And in this world, that’s not normal. That’s… statistically concerning.”
Another small beat. “Stay out of his way.”
Five hundred years. I’ve heard the name in passing, the kind of name that moves through underground channels the way smoke moves through a building, present before you locate the source.
The Kings don’t hunt humans.
They have a code.
I don’t have a problem with them as long as that stays true.
But if this investigation leads where I think it’s leading, our paths were always going to cross eventually.
I push off the counter and slot my phone back into my jacket. “I’ll be in touch about the Circle,” I tell Griggs. “Get me whatever you have.”
I pull a small velvet pouch from my jacket and toss it onto the counter.
The contents, containing old vampire signet rings, two silver teeth, a casino chip from one of the underground demon pits downtown, a couple of dragon scales, and a blood contract from who knows where, hit glass with a heavy metallic clink.
Griggs’ eyes light up instantly as he rummages through the pouch.
Yeah. Better than cash.
Goblins always love the weird shit.
I shove back out into the street’s heat before he can start grinning too hard, letting the shop door slam shut behind me.
For a moment, I stand there on the pavement while the city moves around me, loud and alive in all its ordinary ways.
I think about a candle burning low on a kitchen table and the kind of love that teaches you what it means to lose something before you’re old enough to understand that you’ll carry the absence of it for the rest of your life.
The Crimson Circle is back.
And whatever it costs me, whatever it takes, whatever five-hundred-year-old VP ends up in my path…
I am going to burn them all to the fucking ground.