Page 13 of Property of Scar

I let the silence stretch. Some things need that space to hit properly.

“Scar.” Coil’s voice, efficient and flat, crackles over the radio on the wall. He doesn’t waste frequency on inflection. “Got a buyer waiting on the Seelie shipment we received from the Alaska Kings’ chapter. Their prez, Blade, said this was the real deal… the buyer claims he’s got Fae provenance papers on his end, but the name on the transfer doc doesn’t match the account number. Need your call before we move it.”

I lift the radio receiver. “Hold him. Run the account trace through Flux and get me the discrepancy in writing. Nobody moves anything until I’ve seen the documentation myself.”

“Copy.” The radio settles. Club business, always there, always running, the vast and complicated machinery of the empire that doesn’t care if I’m currently standing in a garage turning over a problem that has roots in blood magic old enough to predate most of this city’s foundations.

I look back at Roxy, who is still holding my phone, her expression tight, caught on something she hasn’t been able to shake. The magic shipment, the buyer, the pit—all of it keeps turning and running, the clockwork of the empire maintaining its own momentum the way it always does. But this, the photographs on that phone, the burn site in my alley, the shell casing in my pocket, the dhampir blood threading through warm June air—this is something different.

This is the kind of problem that doesn’t stay small.

“I need you to look at everything you know about blood channeling of this age,” I tell Roxy, and she nods before I’ve finished the sentence. “Whatever tradition this comes from, whoever is still practicing it, I want to know it before the next body shows up.”

Because there will be another body.

I’ve been in this world long enough to know how these things move, how darkness gathers momentum once it starts, how rituals this old and this deliberate are never isolated incidents. They are preparing for something that requires more than one kill to build toward.

Someone is constructing something in my territory.

And I intend to dismantle it before it’s finished.

Roxy hands me back my phone, her fingers warm against mine for a brief moment, and her eyes carry the same certainty I feel settling into my chest like iron.

“I’ll start tonight,” she says.

Outside, the city hums along, indifferent and unknowing, the way it always does.

And I?

Will begin the hunt.

Chapter Four

CALYPSO

The Next Morning

Griggs’ pawn shop is less a business and more a dumping ground for every supernatural asshole in the city with blood on their hands and secrets they can’t take anywhere else.

Today, I am one of them.

The place sits wedged between a payday loan office and a shuttered nail salon on the kind of street that stopped trying years ago. The sign above the door, ‘Griggs & Co. Collectibles,’ is faded down to a ghost of its original lettering, the G barely distinguishable from the grime. No hours posted or bell above the door, just a handle worn smooth from a thousand hands that knew better than to knock.

I push inside.

The front of the shop smells like old metal and older deals, like every object on these shelves has passed through hands that didn’t want to be traced. Display cases crowd the floor in no particular order, crammed with pieces that don’t belong together. A jade figurine next to a cracked compass with runes etched along its face, taxidermy that doesn’t correspond to any animal a field guide would recognize, coins stacked in columns that subtly shimmer when the overhead light shifts. The place is packed with the kind of random shit you only collect after a century of dealing in stolen goods and never once bothered to organize any of it.

Griggs lurks behind the counter, barely tall enough to see over the glass case. He looks like something dragged out of a swamp and taught how to run a cash register. Gray-green skin, huge dark eyes, and wet-looking in a way that makes people instinctively want to step back from him.

He blinks at me slowly and carefully, which tells me he clocked me before I even touched the door. Typical goblin shit. They notice everything and charge for it all.

“Hunter,” he sneers, by way of greeting. His voice sounds like gravel in a tin can.

“Griggs.” I move to the counter, set my forearms on the glass, and hold his gaze. “I’ve got somethin’ for you.”

His wide mouth curves, but there’s nothing warm in it. “You always do, bloodsucker.”

The word lands under my ribs like a knife slipped between them. My jaw tightens hard enough to ache, fingers curling against the glass before I force them still. Griggs notices, because of course, he does. The bastard’s eyes gleam darker with satisfaction.