Chapter Ten #2
I slide the blade from the holster at my wrist and lay it on the table between us. The room doesn’t stop moving, but a few conversations nearby dip to a quieter level, all the same.
Coil picks up the knife carefully, turning it once in his hand with the kind of respect that tells me he knows exactly what he’s holding and what it’s capable of cutting through.
Across from him, Maul watches the whole thing with his arms folded over his chest, gray eyes locked on the blade with that steady, patient focus hunters get when they’ve spent enough years chasing things that prefer staying hidden.
“Hunting vampires… how close do you have to get before the tracking kicks in?” Maul asks.
“Depends on the age of the blood. An old one, a couple of hundred feet. Something newly turned, I almost have to be on top of it.”
He nods, like I’ve confirmed something he suspected. “Same principle as ground scent. The older the trail, the broader the cone.”
I hadn’t thought about it that way before or in comparison to anything, because I’ve only ever done this alone.
Ruckus catches my eye from across the table, the warmth in his expression complicated by the set of his jaw.
He lifts his recovered beer in something like a salute.
“Takes guts, walking in here,” he says. “I’ll give you that.
Respect, darlin’.” He tips an invisible hat.
The gesture is so genuine that it almost undoes its edge.
Calder is sitting two seats down from me, young and careful, watching everything with bright-eyed wariness, still working out what he is in a room where everyone else already knows.
He leans forward when there’s a lull in the noise nearest us.
“Is it true you can track vampires by their scent?” There’s no guile in it, just a genuine want to know.
“Among other things,” I tell him.
Rhett, not looking up from his plate, tilts his head at me, a smirk telling me he’s about to say something idiotic. “Can you track annoyance? Because the angel over there is off the charts.”
Bennett sets down his fork. “I am going to pour holy water in your beer.”
“Children.” Scar’s voice comes from the other end of the table, flat and absolute, without him looking up from whatever he’s reading.
They settle. Immediately. Like a switch thrown.
I know what that kind of authority costs to build—five centuries of it, minimum.
The dinner continues around me. The noise doesn’t stop, it just stops being something I’m pushing back against. There’s something about the way they move around each other, the specific shorthand of it, the way nobody has to explain a reference or finish a sentence that does something to the muscle between my shoulder blades.
I work alone.
I have always worked alone, because the people I tried to work alongside either tried to use me or got themselves killed, and neither outcome is something I’m interested in repeating.
But here, in the warmth, the noise, and the chaos of this table, there is the unsettling sensation that the solitude I’ve always called a strategy is revealing itself as something else.
Eventually, the chair beside me fills. Ash drops into it with boneless ease, like she’s never once waited to be invited anywhere. She looks at my hands, at the burns across my knuckles, and the way my sleeves sit. Taking inventory again, but closer now, and without the table between us.
“Hunter,” she says, it’s not a question.
“Yes?”
Her eyes track to the scarring at the edge of my wrist, where the sleeve has ridden up. “You’ve been in a fire.”
My skin prickles. “Yes.”
“Did you run?” It lands between us with more weight than three words should carry. The room keeps going around us, and she waits with those amber-bright eyes, completely unhurried.
“No,” I say.
Ash grins. It starts slowly and builds, and in the light, her eyes glow faintly gold. “Good,” she says. “I don’t like runners.” Then she gets up, walking away, without looking back.
That’s all.
It should be nothing.
But it doesn’t feel like nothing.
Across the length of the table, Scar is watching. He has been, on and off, in that unobtrusive way of his, red eyes holding something that might be calculation and might be something warmer than that. I don’t let myself look for long before standing and walking.
Roxy catches me before I can get to the door.
She steers me into the corridor off the kitchen, out of the wall of noise, and turns to face me with her hands wrapped around her own cup and her expression stripped of its public warmth.
“They’re loud,” she says. “And crude and violent. But they’re good. You’re safe here, Cali.”
The word ‘safe’ moves through me like a splinter working its way to the surface.
“I don’t need safe.”
Roxy looks at me for a long moment. Not disagreeing but… waiting. “Everyone needs safe,” she says, quietly enough that it isn’t a debate.
Maybe she’s right.
I’ve been running and hunting on my own for so long that I have never had an idea of what safety truly is. I am standing in a corridor in an outlaw clubhouse that I have been in for approximately four hours, and I am no longer checking exits.
My shoulders are half an inch lower than they were when I walked through the door, and I don’t move them back up.
Maybe safety is something I can finally start to think about…
Maybe.