Page 41 of Property of Scar

SCAR

The dock settles into place piece by piece as I step out. Lights cutting across steel, water shifting against the pylons, the low mechanical rhythm of a job running the way it’s supposed to. The shipment is in position. The customs agent isn’t giving anything away.

The air carries salt, rust, and cold iron.

And something else.

Blood.

Recent.

Human.

And something older than that.

Something with teeth.

Coil meets us at the chain-link gate where the container yard opens up into its maze of stacked steel, his serpent eyes already shifted to gold with vertical slits that catch the dock lights in two bright points. He’s been here longer than we have. Long enough to know it’s not a customs problem.

“The Voss shipment is in Section C,” he says, quietly and precisely the way he always is when precision is the only useful thing left. “Thirty-two crates. The agent, Anderson, entered the hold two hours ago with two dock workers to conduct the inventory check. Standard… none of them came back out. Their radios went dead twenty minutes ago.”

“Where’s your usual contact?” I ask.

“Transferred. Three days ago, suddenly, and with no notice. Anderson’s the replacement.” He pauses. “Clean record. No known arrangement.”

Rhett, who has been leaning against the van with his arms folded and looking deeply relieved to be doing something that might involve property damage, straightens up. “So we’re not bribing anyone.”

“We don’t know that yet,” Bennett says from beside him.

Rhett turns to look at him. “The radios are dead, Bennett.”

Bennett tilts his head, letting out an exasperated sigh. “Then we’re probably not bribing anyone,” Bennett concedes.

Good enough.

I check the weight of the dock lights overhead, calculate the shadows between containers, and make the call. “Coil, perimeter. Cut off the exits, south side, partial shift, and stay quiet.” He’s already moving before I finish the sentence, his form dissolving at the edges as he goes, scales replacing skin at the shoulders. “Rhett, Bennett… with me.”

“Finally,” Rhett says, the word dragging out like he’s been stuck on a leash for hours and just got cut loose.

Section C is four rows deep and seven high, industrial-yellow light cutting between the containers in flat blades.

We find the first dock worker slumped against a container halfway down the third row. No wounds or bruising. He is breathing, but barely, too shallow, as if his body made it back, but the rest of him didn’t. His coffee cup is still in his hand. Whatever happened, it happened in a moment… mid-step, mid-thought.

I crouch beside him, press two fingers to his wrist, and read his pulse. “Someone’s been in his head,” I say.

“Like magically?” Rhett asks from behind me.

“Like something fed on him and left the body intact because it wasn’t finished yet.”

“Cool,” Rhett says. “That’s cool. Greeeat news.”

Bennett says nothing, but the air around him has shifted, something watchful rising behind his eyes. Both of them feel it. Rhett, through whatever hellhound instinct reads the room before the mind does, Bennett through whatever celestial inheritance makes the divine flinch at the unclean. I trust that faster than I trust almost anything else right now as we all move deeper into the section.

The Voss crates are stacked in the back quarter of the hold, thirty-two of them, marked in the Kings’ private notation with a small scratch at the bottom left corner of each manifest tag.

Standard.

Sealed.