Page 8 of Property of Scar

The change is immediate.

Final.

I catch him before he smashes into the pavement, fist bunching in the front of his shirt hard enough to hold him up for another second. Don’t mistake this for kindness. It is controlled because the last thing I need is a dead rogue hitting the ground loud enough to wake the whole damn block.

His weight collapses against me anyway, dead heavy and hollow all at once.

For a second, we’re suspended.

Then I lower him.

Letting him down instead of dropping him, my other hand already moving, already reaching for the blade at my thigh before his body fully meets the ground.

Because this part matters.

Because this is where mistakes get made.

A second ago, he was moving, hunting, thinking.

Now he is just… a body.

Don’t think about that.

The smell hits harder, not just blood but something older underneath it, something stale that clings to the back of my throat. It mixes with the sharp tang of metal, with the faint, dry scent of dust kicked up from the concrete, and for a second, it’s almost enough to pull me out of the rhythm I’ve been trained to hold.

Almost.

I crouch beside the body to begin the search that I always run—checking pockets, checking identification if there is any, logging the location in my head for the file I maintain out of habit and out of the stubborn, deeply unfashionable belief that records matter.

Then I see it.

The rogue’s shirt has ridden up in the fall, and what’s exposed underneath stops me cold in a way that nothing about the fight itself managed to. Carved into the torso—not a wound, not the aftermath of violence, but deliberate, the kind of mark that takes time and intention—is a pattern of scars so precise they read less like mutilation and more like language. Radiating lines, concentric curves, a geometry that repeats in variations across the pale skin with the consistency of something purposeful.

I’ve seen hunting trophies. I’ve seen prison tattoos. I’ve seen the brands that cults like to put on the people they have decided belong to them.

This is none of those things.

My phone is out, and I photograph the scars from three angles, moving with an efficiency that comes from knowing evidence is only as good as its documentation. Then, I step back and pull the knife from my boot strap.

Hunter protocol: Dispose of the body, leave no trace, file the report, move on.

I follow the protocol.

I always follow the protocol.

But a staked vampire isn’t finished.

That thought cuts clean through everything else.

It always does.

I shift my stance, adjusting the angle, my hand steady even as something in my chest pulls tight in quiet resistance, a reflex that doesn’t belong to the weapon I was trained to be, but to something softer that learned too late how to survive alongside it.

I ignore it.

I always do.

The knife comes free in one smooth motion, the metal catching the light just long enough to register before I’m moving again, stepping in close, bracing, lining up the angle without needing to think about it.