Page 21 of Property of Scar

That woman hit something in me.

Something I keep locked down tight for a reason.

And the worst part is, I’m not sure if I want to tear the feeling apart to understand it or chase it to see what happens next.

Five hundred years. I have seen empires fall, saints break, and every permutation of human and inhuman nature laid bare under pressure.

I have not been surprised in those five hundred years.

I am today.

And I am fucking furious about it.

The sound of bikes on the street pulls me back into the room.

Ruckus rolls up with the cleanup crew, his voice carrying before he’s even through the door, assessing the destruction with a low whistle that expresses more than most sentences. He stops beside me, glances at the room, takes in the expression I’m wearing, and then turns toward the door she left through. “Who the hell was that?”

The word for what she is sits precisely in my mouth. “A goddamn complication,” I say.

Ruckus opens his mouth, and I already know a question is coming, so I shut that shit down by looking past him toward the back of the bar, where two more brothers are hauling equipment through the busted doorway.

One sounds like he’s trying to stomp holes through the floorboards with every step. The other won’t stop muttering under his breath, carrying on nonstop in the kind of running commentary that can wear down a man’s patience in record time.

Rhett and Bennett appear through the back door, each carrying a mop and bucket, looking around the devastated barroom with expressions that represent opposing poles of the same theological spectrum.

Rhett takes in the bodies, the demolished shelves, the bar itself, split in two places, glass glittering across every surface like some violent snowfall. “Jesus Christ.”

Bennett’s head snaps around so fast his halo would spin if he had one. “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain!”

Rhett takes that in, glancing around the trashed bar like he’s trying to find another phrase big enough to cover the level of fucked-up we’re dealing with here. “You’re right.” He draws a breath. “Satan’s asshole, this is a clusterfuck!”

Bennett thinks about it for a second, looking like a man slowly realizing his standards have been beaten to death by the life he chose. “Better,” he says finally. “Still blasphemous, but better.”

I turn, pull my phone to call Coil about the two bodies in the alley, and say without looking at either of them, “Less talking, more cleaning. Don’t forget you need to burn the bodies to make sure they stay dead. And if either of you gets blood on my bike, you’re walking home.”

There is a beat of profound, pointed silence.

Then the sound of a lighter flicking.

I step out into the night air, my jaw tight, the scent of her still threading through my senses in a way I am going to spend a very long time pretending is nothing more than irritation, and stare at the empty street where she was standing thirty seconds ago.

Better at killing me than anyone else.

I don’t like it, but I fucking believe her.

Chapter Six

CALYPSO

Three Days Later

The apartment never quite warms up, no matter how long I’ve lived in it. Three months in Manchester, New Hampshire, and I still haven’t bothered with curtains. The windows are bare, the walls are bare, and the only things that have any permanence here are the weapons—a crossbow mounted above the door, twin holsters on the hook beside it, and the row of stakes along the kitchen counter lined up with the precision of a surgeon’s kit.

A folding table does double duty as a desk and a dining surface, currently buried under maps, photographs, and the kind of research that would make a normal person’s blood run cold.

My blood has never run particularly normal.

I drop into the chair, pull the nearest photograph toward me, and stare at the ritual scarring from the rogue in the bar—the same scarring from the one in the industrial district. My phone now has six images, three different bodies, and every single set of marks is identical. The kind of identical that means someone is following a script written centuries before I was born.