Eden:Something wrong. Need backup.
My hands are already pulling up the camera feeds before my brain finishes reading the sentence. The exterior cameras show the parking lot, a handful of cars, nothing unusual. I route past them to the interior feeds and find the main room, and what I see lands in my chest with the weight of something I’ve been dreading for weeks.
A woman.
Standing in the center of the bar floor with three people down around her, bodies positioned like they haven’t fallen, like they’ve been placed by something else, quickly, efficiently, with no regard for how the landing looks. Her back is to the closest camera. Her body moves the way feral new scions move, the jerky, overcorrected instability of a nervous system running on vampire blood without the cognitive structure to manage it. Both hands raised, fingers spread, the defensive-offensive posture of something that has no idea what it is yet and is solving the problem by attackingeverything.
She’s gone before I can lock in a clean image for analysis. One frame, she’s there. The next, the frame shows an empty floor and three people who aren’t getting up.
Eleven seconds of footage.
Three humans.
Dead.
Eden behind the bar, pressing herself flat against the shelving, alive.
I’m already on comms before I have a conscious plan.
“Scorch, Dread…” I key both channels simultaneously, routing the feed to their earpieces. “Sins & Spirits. Active incident. Feral scion, now exiting. Three down. Eden is on site.”
“Already en route.” Scorch’s voice is immediate. He and Dread had been heading in that direction for the night. Right place, completely wrong time. “ETA four minutes.”
“She’ll be gone in four minutes,” I say.
A pause that communicates what neither of us wants to confirm out loud, we’re not chasing her. Not this one. She’s too fast, she’s too feral, and the humans between her and wherever she goes next will be on their own.
“Yeah,” he says. “I know.”
I keep the feeds up—monitor and document. The human paramedics will arrive within fifteen minutes once someone calls it in, and right now the building is empty enough that no one who’s still alive is in a position to use their phone. Twelve minutes, maybe. I have twelve minutes to capture everything the cameras caught before emergency services arrive and the scene becomes someone else’s problem to manage.
My fingers are already running the capture sequence, pulling every frame of footage and scrubbing it clean of the supernatural markers before it can sync to any external server. The human world will get CCTV footage of a violent incident involving a suspect who moved too quickly for the cameras to resolve clearly—a blur, an anomaly. Whoever the lead detective is will decide that the footage is corrupted or that the camera system malfunctioned.
The Coven’s Human Liaison Office in this city will get something slightly different, but that’s a separate headache for a separate conversation.
I redirect two-thirds of my attention to the data Eden’s panic message carries, buried in its metadata. Her technomancy is nowhere near my level, but she knows how to trip a signaturewire, and the one she embedded in the message resolves into a rough biometric capture of the scion.
I run it against my database of recent supernatural incidents.
The match takes forty-three seconds.
Which is long, by my standards.
But the result is worth the wait, in the way a diagnosis you already suspected is worth the wait, not good news, but confirmation of the thing your gut already told you three incidents ago.
Scorch’s voice crackles back through comms eight minutes later. “On scene. She’s gone. No scent trail. She moved through the drainage system. Whatever instinct these things run on, it’s smarter than feral should be.” He pauses. “Three dead. Eden’s okay. Shaken, but okay.”
“Tell her I’ve got the cameras,” I declare. “Human authorities will see a hardware malfunction and a fast-moving suspect. Tell her to call it in, stick to the script, and come home.”
“Copy.”
The call ends.
I pull up the fourth screen and open my incident log. The fourth screen is the one I don’t show anyone unless I have to. The one I’ve been building for three weeks with the obsessive focus I reserve for patterns that don’t want to be seen. Data I’ve gathered attack by attack, incident by incident, layering the spatial and temporal data until the shape underneath becomes impossible to argue with.
I open it now and add tonight’s entry.
Attack Four:Sins & Spirits bar, Eternal Sins MC territory.
