Page 49 of Property of Scar

“I was resting.”

There’s the slightest pause before he adds, “Your nose is bleeding.”

I don’t bother answering because I can feel it, the delayed warmth catching up, the line of it tracking down in a way that confirms what he’s already seen. I wipe it away with the back of my wrist without looking at it, because it doesn’t change anything that matters.

What does…

I turn back toward the hold.

The crate sits sealed and still, Bennett already stepping away from it, the last of that light gone from his hands, his attention moving forward without hesitation. The job we came here for is contained.

The rest of it isn’t.

“Worker,” I say, and start moving.

They fall in without comment, the three of us cutting through the hold in a straight line, the air still carrying the faint remnants of what was just here, sharp enough to track if you know what you’re looking for.

We find Anderson at the far end, behind a stack of unmarked pallets, exactly where the trail drops off. He’s on the floor, knees pulled in tight, hands pressed hard over his ears, his entire body folded in on itself like he’s trying to shut something out that isn’t staying outside. There’s a slight, repetitive motion to it, a barely-there rocking that speaks to something looping in his head, something he’s still hearing even now.

The hollow barely touched him, moved through him like a door that didn’t need to open, pushed on to richer sources. He’s shaking and conscious. He’s a mortal who came to work a night shift and ended up somewhere his understanding of the world has no map for.

I crouch in front of him. He looks up at me, his eyes carrying that shift that says nothing he believed a minute ago is holding up anymore.

My compulsion is in his eyes before he can form another thought. Anderson will remember a gas leak, a chemical smell that was disorienting, the kind that sends crews out of a hold fast. A brief evacuation, some confusion, and he signed off on the shipment before symptoms started. Checked, correct, cleared. He’ll have the paperwork in his hand with no memory of how it got there.

The dock workers get the same. The unconscious one first, then the man the hollow wore, who is already returning to himself, blinking at the container wall with an expression of profound and sourceless exhaustion.

Coil reappears at the entrance to the hold, fully human-formed again, unhurried. “Crates are on the truck. Paperwork’s clean.”

“The Voss family will be having a very interesting conversation with the club,” I say.

“I’ll arrange it,” Coil states.

“And Coil… every future Voss shipment gets inventoried by you personally before it crosses our border. Every crate, every seal… I want to know what else they’ve been quietly importing in our containers.”

He meets my eyes, reads what’s underneath the instruction, and nods once. “Understood.”

***

The van is quiet on the way back.

Rhett sits in the back and stares out the window at nothing. The hellfire in his eyes has guttered low, the night-tracking part of him still settling back into its case. Bennett is in the passenger seat, running a cloth over a knife that doesn’t need cleaning, the compulsive motion of someone winding down from a long expenditure of power.

And I drive.

I can still feel the edges of where the hollow was. Not a wound or any kind of damage, just like a fingerprint left by something that pressed too hard into memories I thought I had pushed far enough down to forget.

I’ll be fine by morning.

I’m always fine.

The highway unrolls ahead of us, empty and dark.

Then, from the back, Rhett pipes up, “For what it’s worth, what you did with that thing inside you. Walking it back like that—” He stops his voice, stripped of its usual grin, then starts again. “I don’t have a word for what that was.”

I don’t answer.

Bennett, still looking at the knife, says quietly, “It was… remarkable.”