Chapter Eight
CALYPSO
Three nights ago, this place was hit hard enough to leave it gutted.
No one has touched it since. The damage is still evident with splintered wood, shattered mirrors, and the jukebox cut off mid-song. It reads like a scene that’s been left open on purpose. Burns on the floor where the bodies of vampires have been disposed of.
The Kings own it.
Or what’s left of it.
‘Neutral ground,’ Griggs told me when I pressed him for a location. ‘Club territory, but open. They don’t conduct business there. It’s as close to Switzerland as this city gets.’
I arrived forty minutes early. I always arrive early, because the person who controls the space controls everything that happens in it, and I was not walking into a meeting with Scar in a room he’d had time to read first.
Now I’ve read it.
Every exit—two, front and rear, the rear partially blocked by a collapsed section of wall, but still passable.
Three windows, none of them intact, the frames gaping like open mouths above the street.
The bar itself provides solid cover if everything goes south faster than anticipated, which, in my experience, is how things tend to go when vampires are involved.
My crossbow is on my back, and both guns are holstered at my thighs. I have four stakes in my vest, two silver-core magazines already seated, my iron hunter’s blade attached to my hip, and the kind of bone-deep alertness that sits just below the skin and makes the air feel thinner.
I’m sitting on the bar.
Because when he arrives, I am not going to be standing in the middle of a room like I’ve been waiting. I am going to be exactly where I chose to be.
The clock on my phone reads 11:59.
The rear door opens at midnight.
On the damn second.
He doesn’t announce himself because he doesn’t have to. I feel him coming before he even steps through the door, that cold, heavy presence rolling ahead of him hard enough for me to recognize it on instinct.
Five centuries carry weight.
Not metaphorical weight. Real weight.
The kind that settles into a room and makes everything in it pay attention, whether it wants to or not. Most vampires feel sharp at the edges—predatory and dangerous—Scar feels ancient. Like standing too close to a storm big enough to flatten buildings and realizing it noticed you back.
He steps into the dark of the bar and stops.
Leather cut, dark jeans, heavy boots that make no sound on the grit-covered floor.
His eyes find me in the dim without effort, because, of course, they do.
He could probably find me in the dark from fifty feet away without trying, and for a moment, neither of us speaks.
He takes in the room the same way I did.
I can see it in the slight movement of his gaze, reading exits, reading angles, running the same calculation I ran.
And then his eyes come back to me, and they stay.
I don’t move.
“You’re on my bar,” he says.
“Your bar got destroyed,” I cut back. “I don’t think it cares.”
Something tightens in his jaw for half a second before it disappears again—a tiny movement that most people wouldn’t catch.
I do.
That’s his version of reacting. Not words or expressions, only that cold stillness he slips into when he’s locking everything down hard enough to keep it from showing. He moves farther into the room, stopping a few feet away from me, and the air between us goes sharp enough to cut.
It has nothing to do with the knives strapped to my body or the stake hidden up my sleeve.
This is something else.
Something electric.
Something that’s been simmering under my skin since the second he looked at me across this wrecked bar, and I am absolutely not unpacking that shit tonight.
I slide off the bar, landing quietly.
His gaze drops for exactly half a second to where my boots hit the floor, then comes back up, and there’s something in that small involuntary movement that tells me he’s calculating me too.
Not just the threat assessment—I’ve had enough of those to know what they look like—but something else layered underneath it, something more… complicated.
“You reached out,” he says. “That means you need something… so, talk.”
Straight to it, then. Good.
I reach into my jacket and pull out the folded papers, photographs, printed from my laptop, a dozen of them, research that took me four days, two dead ends, and one very unwilling goblin to compile.
I cross to the nearest table, the one that still has all four legs, and spread them out without invitation.
Scar follows, because he’s not someone who has to be asked twice to look at information that concerns him.
He stands at the opposite edge of the table, and we’re close enough now that I can see the details of his face in the dim light, the scar that bisects his cheek, the absolute stillness of his eyes.
For a moment, I wonder how a vampire can even have a scar with their rapid healing, but I push that question to the side and plant one hand on the table, pointing at the photographs with the other. “Crimson Circle,” I say. “You were alive three hundred years ago. You must know about them.”
The silence stretches out between us, and it tells me more than an answer would.
This is control. The kind people use when they’re deciding exactly how much truth they are willing to hand over.
His eyes drop to the photographs spread across the table, and something shifts in his face. It is tiny, actually barely there, but after centuries spent hunting monsters, I know how to spot the cracks people think they have hidden.
He recognizes the markings.
“I know they were destroyed,” he finally says, his voice flat and controlled enough to sound casual to anybody who doesn’t know better.
I know better.
“Apparently not.” I tap the nearest photograph, three sets of ritual scarring documented across three separate kills.
“These rogues are connected. This goes way past pack mentality. The scarring is deliberate, consistent, ritual…” I look up, meeting his gaze directly.
“So if anyone was hoping this was random, you can let that go.”
I tap the photograph again. “Some jackoff is rebuilding the Circle.”
I pause, letting that settle. “Someone with access to the original texts, berserker blood, and enough resources to run experiments across multiple kills without leaving a trail I could follow back to a source.” I smirk with a small, humorless smile.
“Which is going to make this fun for exactly no one.”
His eyes move over the photographs, taking in every mark carved into the flesh, as if he’s pulling old memories back up from somewhere deep and ugly. There’s nothing rushed about it, and no confusion either. That’s the part that crawls under my skin.
I’m watching somebody with centuries behind him recognize something he hoped he’d never see again.
The air in the room shifts with recognition. His jaw tightens a fraction and then tighter again. Tiny movements most people would miss completely, but I catch them because monsters always tell on themselves eventually if you know where to look.
He picks up one of the photographs. Holds it. His hand is completely steady. “How many kills?” he asks.
“Seven confirmed. Possibly more I haven’t found yet.”
He sets the photograph down. “I was part of the coalition.” The words come out level, stripped of everything extraneous, but there’s something underneath them that I don’t have access to yet and won’t push at tonight.
“The vampire lords who burned the stronghold. We were sure we killed their leader.” The quiet stretches, carrying more weight than the words do.
“A sorcerer who called himself Mordain. But… his body was never recovered.”
The name lands in the center of my chest like a thrown knife, and I let it settle there for a moment before I respond. “Then he’s back,” I say. “And if he perfects the formula—”
“He’ll build an army of unstoppable killers.” His eyes finally lift from the photographs and lock onto mine across the table, and what I see there isn’t fear.
I don’t think Scar experiences fear the same way normal people do. Whatever parts of him once worked like that burned out centuries ago and left something colder behind.
No, this is worse.
This is knowing.
Scar continues, “Ones that killed their own creators the last time. Ones that nothing short of a full coalition could bring down.”
The silence that falls between us is different from the one before. This one has weight, shape, and both of us are carrying it.
He’s looking at me now in a way he wasn’t before, still calculating, still watching me like he’s measuring where I fit in the bigger picture and whether I’ll become a problem later. I get the feeling Scar never really stops doing that.
But there’s something else mixed into it now too.
Something sharper.
Not trust.
We are nowhere near that shit.
But maybe the beginning of respect. The kind earned between predators who have realized the other one is dangerous enough to matter.
“We’re after the same thing,” I say. “We can kill each other later.”
His mouth doesn’t move, but his eyes do, just barely. “You’re asking for an alliance?”
“I’m stating a fact. What you do with it is up to you.”
His attention drops back to the photographs spread across the table, and I watch him work through whatever is turning over in that ancient head of his.
Most people eventually leak their thoughts with a twitch, a shift in posture, or something in their face that gives the game away.
Scar doesn’t.
If anything, he becomes stiller. The only movement comes from his eyes tracking slowly across the evidence, taking in every detail with a cold focus that he understands more than he’s saying.
It doesn’t feel like he’s studying the photographs.
It feels like he’s remembering them.
Then he looks up. “Temporary truce,” he says. “But you follow my rules in my territory.”