Page 38 of Property of Scar

Across the length of the table, Scar is watching. He has been, on and off, in that unobtrusive way of his, red eyes holding something that might be calculation and might be something warmer than that. I don’t let myself look for long before standing and walking.

Roxy catches me before I can get to the door. She steers me into the corridor off the kitchen, out of the wall of noise, and turns to face me with her hands wrapped around her own cup and her expression stripped of its public warmth. “They’re loud,” she says. “And crude and violent. But they’re good. You’re safe here, Cali.”

The word ‘safe’ moves through me like a splinter working its way to the surface.

“I don’t need safe.”

Roxy looks at me for a long moment. Not disagreeing but… waiting. “Everyone needs safe,” she says, quietly enough that it isn’t a debate.

Maybe she’s right.

I’ve been running and hunting on my own for so long that I have never had an idea of what safety truly is. I am standing in a corridor in an outlaw clubhouse that I have been in for approximately four hours, and I am no longer checking exits.

My shoulders are half an inch lower than they were when I walked through the door, and I don’t move them back up.

Maybe safety is something I can finally start to think about…

Maybe.

Chapter Eleven

SCAR

The library feels different after two in the morning.

It always has.

By then, the clubhouse has mostly burned itself out. The music dies down, and the shouting fades. Brothers either pass out drunk, disappear upstairs with women, or head out to handle whatever trouble owns the night. What’s left settles behind the walls.

And down here, the quiet changes shape. The dark stops feeling empty and begins to feel alive. Five centuries teach you that some places carry time differently than others, and this room is one of them.

The air smells like old leather and paper aged long enough to outlive the people who wrote it. Shelves tower floor to ceiling, packed tight with centuries of notes, journals, maps, rituals, histories, and things dangerous enough that most people would have burned them on sight.

I built these shelves myself during the winter of 1943, after one too many safe houses went up in flames and took pieces of my life with them. Turns out immortality makes a man real protective of his books.

I don’t look up when the door opens. I know Roxy’s footsteps by the softness of them, the way her magic arrives a half second before she does, like static charge that prickles along the back of my neck.

She sets a mug of something dark and steaming on the corner of the table beside me and doesn’t say a word, which is one of the things I respect most about her. She understands that silence is not empty. She eases into the chair across the table, tucks her feet beneath her, pulls the research toward her like a woman settling in for the long work, and lets her palms rest flat against the oldest of the texts.

Her magic answers immediately, rising in thin threads of pale gold that sink into the page like roots finding water. I watch it for a moment, transfixed, before returning to my own work.

“Here,” she says softly, not really to me, more like she’s had a suspicion confirmed and isn’t thrilled about it. She traces a line of text she shouldn’t be able to read. The language is Archaic Vampiric, not something taught outside old bloodlines, but her magic translates it in real time, the gold threads pulling meaning from the page and surfacing it in her understanding. “He was taking notes from the beginning. Every subject, every failure.” Her voice thins. “He called the failures ‘suboptimal outcomes.’ ” I set down my pen. “The ones who survived the early formulas…” she continues, turning a page with the kind of care that comes from knowing what you’re handling, “… weren’t freed. He refined the process using what he learned from them. He wrote about it like…” she pauses, searching for the word, “… like he was pleased with himself.”

“He was,” I say. “Mordain always was.”

The door to the library swings open without finesse, announcing Rhett before I even hear him breathe, and Bennett follows a precise two seconds behind, each carrying an armful of books from the cart in the hall, both clearly unimpressed with the assignment.

They begin shelving in silence.

That lasts approximately forty seconds.

“Can I ask a genuine question…” Rhett says, in a tone that suggests it won’t be. “Because I feel like I deserve an answer after shelving seven hundred books about blood rituals and regional demonic taxonomy.” He slots a volume into place. “Why do vampires even have libraries? Can’t you just…” he gestures vaguely, “… remember everything? You’ve got the centuries for it.”

I don’t look up. “Some of us value knowledge over running our mouths.”

“That’s not a no.” He pulls another book from the cart, squints at the spine. “I’m just saying… if I lived for centuries, I’d have everything memorized. I wouldn’t need a room full of fire hazards.”

“A concept…” Bennett says, without inflection, sliding a volume into its gap on the shelf, “… that is entirely foreign to hellspawn.”