Page 19 of Property of Scar

Good.

Because the next problem sure as hell doesn’t come from the alley.

Movement flashes from the side of the room fast enough to blur. I turn just as one rogue clears the end of the bar with another right behind it, both of them moving low and aggressive, eyes locked straight on the nearest living target.

Her.

The hunger rolling off them hits the room like a physical thing.

I’m already moving before either of them reaches her, stepping across the wreckage to intercept…

“I’ve got this,” she demands.

She doesn’t look at me when she says it. She doesn’t need to. The confidence in it is enough to make me pause anyway.

The first rogue reaches her in a heartbeat, coming in fast and vicious with claws out and hunger driving every movement. Most people would have stumbled back from that kind of attack, but she steps straight into it.

Not panicked.

Not hesitant.

Like she has done this before.

The rogue swings high, trying to tear through her defenses with pure speed and brute force, but she closes the distance before it can fully extend the strike, moving right into the danger zone where the claws lose room to work.

Her hand snaps up, catching its wrist mid-strike, redirecting the hit just enough so it skims past her shoulder instead of through it, and she uses the motion, turning with it, driving her other hand hard into its throat with a force that collapses the sound out of it.

It stumbles.

She doesn’t.

Her knee drives up hard into the rogue’s stomach, the impact folding it over just enough to break its momentum. Not a wasted movement anywhere. Every hit is clean, efficient, brutal, and she’s already moving before the bastard even finishes reacting.

The second rogue comes at her from behind fast and ugly, claws reaching for her back.

Or at least it tries to.

She drops low at the last second, twisting out of the line of attack so the rogue blows straight past her. Then she’s inside its space before it can recover, one arm snapping around its throat while the other locks against its shoulder to pin the movement.

No pause.

No struggle.

Just a vicious twist.

The crack of its neck snaps through the bar sharp enough to turn heads. The body drops before the sound fully dies out, collapsing in a heap of dead weight and broken limbs across the floor.

Then she’s turning back toward the first rogue in the same smooth motion, already on it before the thing can fully straighten up again. It drags in a ragged breath through a crushed throat, trying to recover enough to fight back, but she doesn’t give it the chance. Instead, she closes the distance hard and grabs a fistful of its shirt, holding the rogue in place like she’s about to make a point.

Her free hand moves, and suddenly there’s a stake in it.

I don’t even catch where the hell she pulled it from. One second, her hand is empty, the next, she’s got polished wood locked in her grip and lined up dead center on the rogue’s chest, then she drives it in.

Hard.

The impact punches through the torso with a brutal crack, wood splitting bone as the stake buries deep into the rogue’s chest and hits the heart clean. The vampire convulses violently against her grip, body jerking once like every nerve fired at the same time.

She doesn’t flinch.