Page 10 of Property of Scar

People sleep better when the monsters stay fake.

I crouch beside the rogue and strike the lighter. The flame catches fast once it hits old blood and dead flesh, crawling up his clothes in hungry orange waves. The stink hits a second later, smoke twisting into the rain while the fire chews through the evidence.

Then my attention drifts back to the photographs of the markings burned into the rogue’s skin after the flames start doing their job.

Long after, I check the human slumped against the wall and find him still breathing, pulse steadier than it should be after that much blood loss. Then I dump the burner phone in a trash can three blocks over, after calling emergency services anonymously.

My eyes stay on those images while I walk. At the same time, the industrial district thins out around me, and the city reasserts itself in the form of lit windows, passing traffic, and the ordinary, oblivious noise of people who don’t know what else lives in their city alongside them.

The order I trained with would have called this a standard extraction.

Rogue neutralized.

A human survivor

Zero exposure.

A clean night on paper.

The order was very good at making things look clean on paper, while everything underneath rotted. I walked away from the order that took me in when I realized the money wasn’t just buying politicians anymore. It was buying targets and permission. The hunt stopped being about monsters and started turning toward whoever got in the way of the people signing the checks.

Twelve years of training, of bleeding, of sharpening myself into something precise, dangerous, and useful, and they wanted to aim that at innocents because innocents had things worth paying for.

I walked out the same way I do everything, without ceremony or speech.

I just didn’t come back.

The code I live by now is my own, assembled from the wreckage of the one they gave me.

It isn’t complicated…

Supernatural creatures who prey on humans are my problem.

Supernatural creatures who keep to their own are not.

Which is why I don’t touch the Kings of Anarchy MC. I’ve heard the stories about what they run through this city, including money laundering, smuggling routes, and underground fight pits packed with monsters, where they bet on other monsters tearing each other apart inside cages lined with iron and runes strong enough to keep the bodies contained.

Not exactly a charitable operation.

Not exactly the kind of enterprise that wins civic awards.

But the Kings have rules, territory, and a hierarchy that keeps the chaos from spilling onto the streets, that keeps the thing that almost happened in that alley tonight from happening in broad daylight in a school parking lot.

Whatever the Kings of Anarchy are, they are not, categorically, people who make humans into victims for sport. And in my world, that distinction is the only one that matters enough to build a policy around. Besides, picking a fight with a club full of ancient vampires and supernatural beings is a good way to horrifically die.

My apartment is twenty minutes away, and my legs cover it on autopilot. The part of my brain that doesn’t shut off keeps turning the photographs over, keeps returning to the geometry of those scars like a tongue seeking the sharp edge of a broken tooth.

Someone put those marks on that vampire.

Someone who knew exactly what they were doing and exactly what they were building toward.

In the morning, I’ll start making calls.

Tonight, I walk through the dark city with ash on my boots, a question I don’t yet have a name for lodged in the pit of my stomach, and I let the hunter half of me, the part that was built for exactly this kind of trouble, start pulling at the thread.

The thing about pulling at threads is that shit tends to get unraveled.

Chapter Three