Chapter 1 Eight Centuries Old Vampire
ESTELLA
The salt line across my threshold was thinner than it usually was.
I crouched down and fixed it before unlocking the front door, tracing a fresh line with my thumb until the ward settled back into place. Most people who walked into Ember & Ash saw a bookstore. What they didn't see was the six inches of protective ward under their feet, or the reason I checked it every single morning before I let anyone inside.
Lola always told me I was paranoid. I told her paranoid people were the ones who didn't get eaten.
By the time I flipped the sign to open, the coffee machine was already going, and I'd pulled my hair back and tied it out of my face. Six years of hunting had taught me plenty of things. One of them was that the last thing you wanted was hair in your eyes when something decided to attack you.
My sleeve rode up while I stacked the morning's shipment onto the front table, and I caught the pale lines on my forearm before I tugged the fabric back down. Old scars. I didn't linger on them. I didn't hide them either. They were just there, the way the counter was there, the way the bell over the door was there.
The bell pinged and someone stepped in.
Aldric coming to my shop a few minutes after I just opened wasn't a good sign on its own. The look on his face made it worse. I raised a brow when he came straight for the counter instead of browsing like a normal customer would.
"What do I get you today?" I asked. "You look like a man who'd buy a full bag of grimoires."
He didn't smile at my admittedly lane attempt to crack a joke.
"I'm coming from the Hunters Faction," he said. "We have a problem."
"What kind?"
"Grafter demons." He lowered his voice. "Three hunters reported the same thing this week. Their hosts didn't survive the possession."
I stared at him. I'd run into the same thing two nights ago. My Grafter had killed its host before I could get to it, and that alone should've been enough to bother me. Grafters fed off life force and moved on. They left their hosts hollowed out and missing a stretch of memory, that the Recovery team would find some way to replace, but alive. That was the entire nature of the species.
"If multiple hunters are seeing the same thing," I paused, "that's not a coincidence. More like a pattern."
Aldric nodded slowly.
Six years hunting in Portland, licensed by the Coven the whole time, and I'd never seen an entire class of demon change its behaviour overnight.
Of course different demons had different personalities, that was fine and expected. What wasn't expected was the whole species deciding to break its own rules at once.
"What do you think it means?" I asked when he didn't keep talking.
He lifted a shoulder. "Above my pay grade. Some digging's been done, though. They found something else at the scenes."
"Let me guess. Milky residue a few blocks out. Or a body."
"Both, actually." His eyes narrowed at me slightly. "You'd make a decent investigator." I let my mouth tip sideways at his words, but it didn't last. "One more thing," he said. "A vampire was seen hunting on Marchetti Street."
My eyes narrowed down to slits. Now that caught my attention, and not in a good way.
It wasn't actually, if we were talking about who owned Portland. But on the supernatural side of the city—the side unseen by mundane humans—Marchetti Street belonged to me. And the last thing I wanted was pale beings with fangs running around my place.
“Vampires stay in the Western Dominion, which is very far away from here,” I asserted.
"It is." Aldric hesitated. "But whatever this is, it probably isn't something only one race can solve alone." I knew where that was going before he said it. "Roman Montreux is in Portland," he said. "He's come to investigate personally. The Grafter disturbances are hitting vampires too."
I closed my eyes and swallowed a groan.
Roman Montreux. Eight centuries old, ruler of the Western Dominion, and apparently with enough authority to cross half the country without bothering to explain himself to anyone. I'd never met him, but I'd heard enough about the vampire king to know I had about the same interest in making his acquaintance, as I had for the game of golf. And now he was in Portland. Wonderful.
"That's all I have," Aldric said. "I should take my leave."
I gave him a curt nod. He left, walking out the same way he came in, his burgundy coat disappearing through the door. My eyes followed him through the outside crowd, filled with people who wouldn't know a real-life witch had just passed by them.
“That is one expression you have there. What is going through your mind?” Lola approached me with a steaming cup of coffee. Lola always came before me but didn't officially open, and instead arranged books. She must've seen when Aldric had come in and decided not to make an appearance.
“Thank you. Very much needed.” I accepted it, welcoming the burn of the coffee in my throat. “Bad news.”
“About your hunt?”
I nodded. She furrowed her brows. I could tell she wanted to ask more, but at the same time, she didn't.
Lola knew better than to ask twice. That had been one of the first rules between us. She knew I was a witch, knew what I did when I disappeared after closing, and knew enough about my past to understand that there were doors I kept locked for a reason. She had never tried to force one open.
It was why I trusted her as much as I did. In a world where secrets could get people killed, Lola had always known when to leave mine alone.
“I told you about the Grafter behaviour that was unusual,” I started. She nodded, coming to stand beside me. “Well, Aldric—”
The doorbell pinged, alerting us to the customer who walked in. We gave each other a curt nod, and she ran off to help them.
I lowered my voice when she returned, continuing; “—came with news that other hunters encountered the same behaviour. And possibly something bad is coming. Including the vampire king.”
“The eight-hundred-year-old one you told me about?”
"That one."
She shook her head and squeezed my shoulder. “You'll be fine.”
She gave me a smile before returning to aid the customer. I watched her for a moment, then looked back toward the door.
Strange Grafter behaviour. Multiple hunters reporting the same anomaly. Vampires moving through Marchetti Street. And Roman Montreux himself in Portland.
Those things might have looked unrelated to anyone else. To me, they were beginning to form a line. I had no idea what was at the end of it yet.
But I intended to find out before the Hunters Faction did.
The address came in two hours later — an abandoned lot off 9th, the kind of place developers forgot existed. I grabbed my kit from under the counter and told Lola I'd be back before close.
The lot was quiet when I got there. I found the scorch mark first, it took a wrong shape—Grafters didn't also burn, they drained, and whatever had scarred the concrete here had done it in a spiral instead of a straight line.
Someone had broken the ward here, snapped from the inside instead of forced from without.
Then I saw the body. I didn't touch it. I just stood there for a second, cataloguing what I was looking at. Whatever had been here wasn't following the rules anymore, and I didn't like not knowing why. I crouched to get a closer look at the scorch pattern, already reaching for my kit.
And then I felt it: the unmistakable feeling of not being alone in a place I'd been certain was empty thirty seconds ago. I didn't move yet. My ears twitched as I listened intently.
Someone was here. And they'd been here the whole time.
