Page 23 of Property of Scar

They are back.

The Crimson Circle is back.

They are operating in my city, and they are producing weapons that the text says were nearly impossible to kill, even three hundred years ago, with the full force of a vampire coalition behind the effort.

And I’m only one woman with a crossbow and a folding table.

I sit with that for a moment instead of charging in headfirst like an idiot. Let the truth of it settle properly before I move. Because years of hunting monsters have taught me one thing better than anything else—the fastest way to die is rushing toward something before you understand exactly what’s waiting for you when you get there.

Three hundred years ago.

The phrase turns in my mind and lands somewhere useful. The cult was destroyed three hundred years ago. The vampire lords who did it, who knew them, who had the context to understand what the Crimson Circle was attempting, who would have studied the experiments closely enough to recognize the survivors, would have to be old. Genuinely old. Not two-hundred-year-old old. The kind of old that means they were already established, already powerful, already operating in the world when the Circle was at its height.

Five hundred years, I think, before I can stop myself.

The words I said to him come back to me with clarity. ‘Five hundred years old and still playing biker gang dress-up.’

I said it to provoke him, because provoking people into reactions tells you things that careful observation misses. And what I saw in his face when I said it wasn’t offense or amusement. It was something older than both, a stillness that comes from hearing you’ve been alive too long so often it stops landing at all.

Scar was alive three hundred years ago.

He was here, not in Manchester, perhaps, but in this world, in this war between supernatural powers, when the Crimson Circle was operating. When they were taken down, he may have known the vampire lords who formed that coalition.

Fuck, he may have been one of them.

The text in front of me has limits. It’s a hunter’s account, detailed but external, written by someone who understood the what of the Crimson Circle without ever accessing the why. The why is what I need, because the rogues in this city are not random. Someone is directing them. Someone who knows the old texts, who has access to berserker blood, who understands the ritual requirements well enough to replicate them three hundred and fifty years after the original practitioners were ash.

Someone who has a plan.

And I cannot dismantle a plan I do not understand.

My coffee has gone cold, but I drink it anyway, standing at the table, staring at the photographs laid out in front of me like some sort of constellation.

The smart thing to do is to go to someone who was there.

The smart thing to do is to go to someone who knows what the Crimson Circle actually wanted, beyond what’s written in secondhand hunter texts. Someone who carries centuries of vampire history in their bones. Who has the context I’m missing. Who, however infuriating, dangerous, and precisely the kind of thing I have spent my entire adult life refusing to trust, is still the only asset in this city with the lived experience to fill in the gaps.

I look at the door with the crossbow above it and the stakes on the counter. Every instinct I’ve got starts grinding against itself the second I realize where this is heading. Because the smart move here, the move most likely to keep people alive, means asking for help.

And I fucking hate that.

Not because it makes me weak, but because it drags up too many old ghosts I’ve spent years trying to bury. It reminds me exactly what it costs when you put your trust in the wrong hands.

My mother would have gone to him without a second thought. She would have looked at those red eyes, felt the pull, and followed it without question, all the way to the end of herself.

I am not my mother.

Which means I can walk into that vampire’s orbit with my eyes open, my weapons loaded, my head precisely where it belongs. I can use him the way I use every other resource this city has to offer—strategically, carefully, and without letting a single molecule of that ancient vampire allure touch anything beneath my skin that matters.

I pick up my phone.

Griggs gave me the contact number three days ago, and I’ve been looking at it ever since without touching it, the way you look at a weapon you haven’t decided to use yet.

I’m deciding now.

I type the text before I can reason myself out of it, three words and a location, nothing more than necessary, nothing that sounds like anything other than what it is.

Me: We need to talk. Same bar. Midnight.