Page 44 of Property of Scar

And then it pushes just a fraction further.

Enough to break it completely.

My spine goes rigid before the rest of me even catches up, every instinct I’ve got reacting first while my brain is still trying to process what the hell I’m looking at.

Because that smile…

There’s nothing human inside it.

No recognition, emotion, and no real awareness behind it at all.

Just teeth stretched into the rough shape of a grin, like something wearing a man’s face, learned that smiles are supposed to make people feel safe but never understood why.

It pulls too wide across his mouth.

Stays there too long.

And the whole damn thing is pointed straight at me.

Run, my instincts say, which means stay and fight.

“Formation,” I declare, low and flat. “Rhett, I need your position sense. Track where it goes. Call it.”

“You got it,” he says, and his voice has dropped to the register he uses when the hellhound is closer to the surface than the prospect.

“Bennett, I need you to compress it. Push it into a smaller space. Can you hold that?”

Something settles in Bennett’s expression, like he’s slipping into the thing he was built for. “Yes.”

“Then do it.”

Bennett’s wings manifest without drama, white feathers edged in light that doesn’t belong to this dock, this city, or this world. Divine authority pours out of him in waves, and the temperature in the hold spikes upward by ten degrees as he pushes, not physically but in some other register entirely, compressing the space the hollow has to move through. The dock worker’s body staggers, and the hollow inside it screams through his throat, the sound high and jagged, sharp enough to set my teeth on edge.

Rhett tracks it. He’s half shifted, shadows gathering around his boots, eyes burning orange-red and cutting through the dark. Every time the hollow tries to move, to jump, to find a new host, to retreat into the unlit spaces between containers, Rhett calls it, “East, south, doubling back, trying the rafters… no, going low. It’s fast,” he grits out. “It’s really, really fast—”

“Direction, Rhett.”

“I’m giving you direction! I’m also having a very bad time!”

It works, barely. Bennett holds his line, pouring everything he has into a single, stationary wall of divine containment, his face white with effort and utterly expressionless, the angelic serenity stripped back to something rawer underneath. Rhett calls it move for move, voice tight, the hellhound’s instincts doing what five centuries of training couldn’t prepare anyone specifically for.

And I calculate.

The containment crate.

If it went in, it can go back. Psychic entities follow appetite before logic, and the oldest, deepest appetite is the one that pulls toward the richest source available. I am five hundred and forty years old. My mind has held things that would dissolve a younger consciousness.

Languages dead before this country existed.

The texture of every war I’ve outlasted.

Grief compounded over centuries into something unrecognizable as grief anymore. It is dense, layered, and exactly what a starving hollow would reach for.

So, I offer myself as bait.

“Rhett,” I say. “Get to the crate. The moment I walk it back, you close it.”

“Walk it back?” He stops, reading what I mean before I say it, “Scar.”