Chapter Six
CALYPSO
Three Days Later
The apartment never quite warms up, no matter how long I’ve lived in it.
Three months in Manchester, New Hampshire, and I still haven’t bothered with curtains.
The windows are bare, the walls are bare, and the only things that have any permanence here are the weapons—a crossbow mounted above the door, twin holsters on the hook beside it, and the row of stakes along the kitchen counter lined up with the precision of a surgeon’s kit.
A folding table does double duty as a desk and a dining surface, currently buried under maps, photographs, and the kind of research that would make a normal person’s blood run cold.
My blood has never run particularly normal.
I drop into the chair, pull the nearest photograph toward me, and stare at the ritual scarring from the rogue in the bar—the same scarring from the one in the industrial district.
My phone now has six images, three different bodies, and every single set of marks is identical.
The kind of identical that means someone is following a script written centuries before I was born.
The encounter at the bar sits in the back of my skull like a splinter I can’t reach.
Scar.
I push the name away before it can settle.
I push him away, the cold intelligence in his red eyes, the way he moved through those rogues like the violence was choreographed, like he had done it so many thousands of times that it had become something closer to breathing than fighting.
He’s dangerous the way storms are dangerous, not because they hate you, but because you are simply not a factor in their calculation.
I know what he is.
I know what all of them are.
The cold, beautiful, ancient architecture of them, and I know exactly what that pull is that travels up the back of my neck every time one of them holds my gaze too long.
My mother knew it, too, and look where knowing got her.
She looked at my father the same way I felt myself looking at Scar tonight, as if something in her blood recognized something in his, as if the half of her that was drawn to darkness finally found a shape it could call by name.
She followed that feeling all the way to her death, and I watched it happen from twelve feet away, small, frozen, and unable to stop any of it.
I will never be her.
I flip the photograph face down.
The hunter text is open on the table, cracked spine, pages the color of stained coffee, the kind of book that gets passed from hand to hand through orders that don’t have official records.
I found this one in a storage unit in Providence, belonging to a hunter who had the good sense to write everything down and the bad luck to be dead before she could act on it.
The section I’ve been working through for the last two hours is dense with old language and the kind of clinical detachment that only comes from someone who has seen something so terrible they had to strip all feeling from the words to write them down.
The Crimson Circle.
Even the name has weight. I can feel it sitting deep inside me when I read it, something old and rotten pressing outward from the page.
I read the passage again, slower this time, the way you re-read something when your brain keeps refusing to accept what your eyes are telling it.
The cult, known in the Eastern European territories as the Crimson Circle, devoted itself entirely to the perfection of the vampire form.
Their doctrine held that vampires were unfinished creatures, powerful, yes, but insufficiently evolved.
Their solution was to integrate berserker blood into the vampire system, a process they referred to in their records as ‘The Refinement.’
I set my coffee down very carefully.
The subjects of these experiments—berserkers acquired through force, purchased through black markets, or taken by deception—did not survive the process with their minds intact.
The Refinement produced warriors of extraordinary physical capability—stronger than standard vampire physiology, faster, and nearly impervious to conventional methods of neutralization. They did not feel pain in any meaningful way.
They did not feel fear.
They did not feel anything.
What the Crimson Circle produced, in the end, was not a perfected warrior. It was a weapon that had forgotten it was ever alive.
I have to stop reading for a moment. Not because I’m afraid, but because something in the phrasing catches on an old wound and tugs, something about what it means to hollow a person down until only the function remains, and I know that feeling from the inside.
I know it from the hunters who trained me, who beat the softness out of me so thoroughly that for years, I couldn’t tell the difference between discipline and erasure.
I know it from what I became after.
I turn the page.
The cult was destroyed in the early eighteenth century by a coalition of vampire lords who deemed the experiments an existential threat to the species, not out of mercy, but out of self-preservation. The created warriors were not controllable. They killed indiscriminately, their creators included.
The Circle’s compound was burned, their texts seized and hidden, their remaining subjects put down like animals.
It was believed that no member of the Crimson Circle survived.
The photograph is still face down on the table, so I turn it over.
Three sets of ritual scarring. Three rogues walking around Manchester with the Circle’s marks cut into their skin.
All of them moving with that fractured coordination I’ve never seen before, not quite feral, not quite coordinated, but something between the two that makes the hunter in me go very, very quiet.
The apartment feels smaller than it did an hour ago, the walls pressing gently inward, the weight of what I’m reading filling up all the available space until there is no room left for anything as comfortable as certainty.
They are back.
The Crimson Circle is back.
They are operating in my city, and they are producing weapons that the text says were nearly impossible to kill, even three hundred years ago, with the full force of a vampire coalition behind the effort.
And I’m only one woman with a crossbow and a folding table.
I sit with that for a moment instead of charging in headfirst like an idiot.
Let the truth of it settle properly before I move.
Because years of hunting monsters have taught me one thing better than anything else—the fastest way to die is rushing toward something before you understand exactly what’s waiting for you when you get there.
Three hundred years ago.
The phrase turns in my mind and lands somewhere useful.
The cult was destroyed three hundred years ago.
The vampire lords who did it, who knew them, who had the context to understand what the Crimson Circle was attempting, who would have studied the experiments closely enough to recognize the survivors, would have to be old.
Genuinely old. Not two-hundred-year-old old.
The kind of old that means they were already established, already powerful, already operating in the world when the Circle was at its height.
Five hundred years, I think, before I can stop myself.
The words I said to him come back to me with clarity. ‘Five hundred years old and still playing biker gang dress-up.’
I said it to provoke him, because provoking people into reactions tells you things that careful observation misses.
And what I saw in his face when I said it wasn’t offense or amusement.
It was something older than both, a stillness that comes from hearing you’ve been alive too long so often it stops landing at all.
Scar was alive three hundred years ago.
He was here, not in Manchester, perhaps, but in this world, in this war between supernatural powers, when the Crimson Circle was operating. When they were taken down, he may have known the vampire lords who formed that coalition.
Fuck, he may have been one of them.
The text in front of me has limits. It’s a hunter’s account, detailed but external, written by someone who understood the what of the Crimson Circle without ever accessing the why.
The why is what I need, because the rogues in this city are not random.
Someone is directing them. Someone who knows the old texts, who has access to berserker blood, who understands the ritual requirements well enough to replicate them three hundred and fifty years after the original practitioners were ash.
Someone who has a plan.
And I cannot dismantle a plan I do not understand.
My coffee has gone cold, but I drink it anyway, standing at the table, staring at the photographs laid out in front of me like some sort of constellation.
The smart thing to do is to go to someone who was there.
The smart thing to do is to go to someone who knows what the Crimson Circle actually wanted, beyond what’s written in secondhand hunter texts.
Someone who carries centuries of vampire history in their bones.
Who has the context I’m missing. Who, however infuriating, dangerous, and precisely the kind of thing I have spent my entire adult life refusing to trust, is still the only asset in this city with the lived experience to fill in the gaps.
I look at the door with the crossbow above it and the stakes on the counter. Every instinct I’ve got starts grinding against itself the second I realize where this is heading. Because the smart move here, the move most likely to keep people alive, means asking for help.
And I fucking hate that.
Not because it makes me weak, but because it drags up too many old ghosts I’ve spent years trying to bury. It reminds me exactly what it costs when you put your trust in the wrong hands.
My mother would have gone to him without a second thought. She would have looked at those red eyes, felt the pull, and followed it without question, all the way to the end of herself.
I am not my mother.
Which means I can walk into that vampire’s orbit with my eyes open, my weapons loaded, my head precisely where it belongs.
I can use him the way I use every other resource this city has to offer—strategically, carefully, and without letting a single molecule of that ancient vampire allure touch anything beneath my skin that matters.
I pick up my phone.
Griggs gave me the contact number three days ago, and I’ve been looking at it ever since without touching it, the way you look at a weapon you haven’t decided to use yet.
I’m deciding now.
I type the text before I can reason myself out of it, three words and a location, nothing more than necessary, nothing that sounds like anything other than what it is.
Me: We need to talk. Same bar. Midnight.
- Cali
I hit send.
Then I set the phone down, pull my jacket off the back of the chair, and start checking my weapons, one by one, methodical and precise.
Because whatever Scar is, whatever he makes me feel in the half second before I lock it down, he is still a five-hundred-year-old vampire, VP of a criminal empire, and walking into a conversation with him unarmed would be the last mistake I’d ever make.
And I do not intend to make it.