Page 6 of Property of Scar

The industrial district reeks of rust, diesel, and standing water rotting in broken asphalt. Rain drips from fire escapes and busted gutters while the city presses in cold and gray around me.

But underneath all of it, there’s something else.

Something old.

I pick it up before I even see the bodies these days. It is not a smell, but more like a weight sitting at the base of my skull, a low throb under my skin that tells me something dead is close but still walking the streets like a living thing.

My boots grind the pavement without sound.

That’s not effort on my part—that’s heritage.

The dhampir half of me, the vampire half, moves through dark spaces like it was born in them, because in every way that counts, it was. My mother was human. Well, she thought she was. Stubborn, bright-eyed, and fearless in the way that gets people killed. She carried a gene passed down through a lineage of witches that, when combined with a vampire, creates something unique—a dhampir, which is technically a vampire but still human. Killable, but with the strength, speed, abilities, and healing powers of a vampire, but thankfully, I don’t have the urgency to drink blood. I can survive without it. But if I do drink it, it enhances my abilities. My mother loved my father right up until he left her alone with a daughter who grew too fast, healed too easily, and stopped flinching at the dark somewhere around her seventh birthday.

My father left us because, in the eyes of the supernatural, I am an abomination.

I have made a career of not letting that matter.

Tonight, I’m not thinking about him.

I’m tracking something that wears the same blood he does without the conscience to go with it.

The signature pulses ahead of me, maybe a few hundred feet through a corridor of corrugated iron fencing and dead or flashing streetlights, past a loading dock that hasn’t seen legitimate freight in years. I can feel the rogue the way a compass needle spins to north, not a choice, just a pull. Vampires carry a resonance, a kind of electromagnetic signature that most humans never register, that other vampires sense only at close range. But dhampirs? We sit right on the edge of both worlds, close enough to human to pass, close enough to vampire to know. I read their signatures the way a bloodhound reads fear with distance, direction, and emotional state.

And this one is feeding.

I break into a run.

The tactical vest sits tight across my chest, magazine pouches flush at my ribs, the familiar weight of the crossbow at my back, and the twin holsters at my thighs pressing like old friends against my legs. My hair is pulled back so hard it aches.

The alley opens up on my left, and I don’t slow down to assess because I’m already reading it before I round the corner.

The rogue has a guy slammed against the brick wall like he weighs nothing, one hand wrapped around his throat hard enough to keep him upright. The human is barely there anymore, with his head hanging, fingers dragging weakly against the bricks like his body still hasn’t figured out it’s already lost.

The vampire feeds with its face buried in his neck, shoulders hunched, completely lost to the hunger. There is no control left, no thinking, only blood and instinct chewing through whatever used to make it civilized.

My stomach tightens.

Not in fear, but revulsion.

This is what it looks like when there’s nothing left but appetite. There is no code, control, or anything that makes the power mean something other than damage. I’ve seen it enough times that it should be clinical by now, filed under necessary, expected, and the kind of thing you don’t flinch at when you’ve been doing this job for as long as I have.

“Hey!” My voice comes out flat and deliberate, cutting across the alley the way sound cuts across a held breath. “Put. Him. Down!”

The rogue’s head comes up, and the face that turns toward me used to be a man’s face. There’s still the shape of it, the jaw, the brow, the pale skin that makes something human readable as a person. But the eyes have gone the color of old blood, and the mouth has given up entirely on anything that isn’t hunger. It makes a sound low in its chest, something between a hiss and a snarl, dropping its prey in the same way you’d drop something you’d already finished with.

The victim hits the ground.

He’s breathing. Shallow, fast, unsteady, but breathing. Good. He’s not my mission tonight, but he is not part of the body count either, and I’d like to keep it that way.

The rogue moves—fast, God, they’re always so fast—with the kind of speed that doesn’t look like movement so much as absence, one second empty space, the next they’re already there, already closing in.

I’m moving before it finishes the first strike.

Claws slice through the air where my throat was a heartbeat ago as I drop low, one knee hitting the concrete hard enough to jar up my spine. I twist under the reach, drive my elbow back into its midsection with everything I have behind it, feeling the impact travel clean through bone and muscle as it overshoots me.

It grunts, more force than sound, its body folding just enough to matter.

I turn into it, already shifting to follow through…