CHAPTER ONE
THE  HUNT

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Phoenix wasn’t supposed to be this quiet.

Downtown usually throbbed at night, traffic, bass from packed clubs, laughter spilling onto sidewalks, but tonight the city held its breath. The kind of stillness that made predators bold and everyone else smart enough to stay on the main roads.

Harper Rayne felt it first.

A wrongness threaded under her skin, needling at her instincts as she moved off the main drag and into the narrow veins of alleyway behind the vampire district. Her Glock 22 sat low and ready in her hand, weight familiar and solid. Modified: silver-tipped rounds, tactical flashlight, extended magazine. Backup clip at her hip loaded with sedatives in case the job called for mercy, which it rarely did.

Dispatch had put out the call ten minutes ago; missing girl, sixteen, last seen near a vampire-owned club. Third one this month.

Harper didn’t need the address.

She’d turned down the first alley because something in her chest had gone tight. Turned left at the overflowing dumpster because the hairs on her arms rose. Cut across a side corridor no sane human used because her gut tugged hard, a silent pull that had saved her life more times than she could count.

Her training called it instinct.
Her grandmother would’ve called it something else entirely.

Now, the further she walked from the main road, the louder the wrongness hummed.

Too quiet. No music bleeding through brick. No drunk laughter. No clatter of bottles. Just the soft drip of some unseen leak and the distant, restless sigh of traffic.

At twenty-five, Harper was already one of the S.P.A.’s youngest, deadliest Enforcement Agents, a fact that pissed off more than a few older, less competent men. Tall and lean, she moved like she owned every patch of darkness that brushed her boots. Her golden-brown skin caught the occasional smear of neon from signs she couldn’t see, braid swinging between her shoulder blades as she cut down another alley.

People underestimated her constantly.

Too young.
Too pretty.
Too female.

Their first mistake.
The second was assuming she wouldn’t hit back twice as hard.

She paused at the mouth of a narrower passage, shadows pooling thick between two brick buildings. The air changed, cooler, metallic, tinged with the faint copper of blood and the sweeter bite of vampire.

Her pulse ticked up.

This was it.

Harper stepped into the alley, Glock raising a fraction.

She found the girl near the back exit of the club, sprawled on stained concrete like discarded trash. A pale, sharp-featured vampire crouched over her, one hand braced by her head, the other gripping her shoulder. His mouth was wet with blood, smeared sloppily across his chin like he’d never learned to eat clean.

He didn’t bother to hide what he was doing. That told Harper everything she needed to know about his intelligence level.

“Step away from her,” Harper said.

Her voice cut clean through the quiet.

He jerked, then turned, eyes flashing with irritation that curled into a slow, amused grin when he saw her.

“Who the hell are you supposed to be?”

The girl’s chest rose in shallow, uneven breaths. A cheap bracelet lay snapped beside her wrist, plastic beads scattered like little teeth. Alive. Barely.

Harper didn’t bother mirroring his smile. She was too tired for theatrics.

“Last warning,” she said. “Move away from her.”

He rose slowly, deliberately, like he had all the time in the world. “You S.P.A.?”

The way he said it, lazy, unimpressed made something cold slide through her.

“Enforcement,” Harper said. “Congratulations. You’ve met the part of your night that goes bad.”

He snorted. “They send you in that cute little outfit and expect me to be scared? You’re just a girl.”

“Wrong again,” she said. “I’m the last girl you’ll ever meet.”

He lunged.

Harper fired twice, center mass. The Glock barked, recoil snapping through her arms as silver-tipped rounds slammed into his chest. He staggered, snarl ripping free, then blurred forward faster than a human eye could track.

He hit her full force.

Her back smashed into brick. Pain exploded along her ribs, the impact knocking the air out of her lungs and the taste of copper onto her tongue. For a half second, her vision whited out at the edges.

Then training snapped her back into her body.

Holster. Draw. Spark.

Her pulse blade came alive in her hand, runes along the eighteen-inch alloy igniting in electric blue. The weapon’s hum vibrated up her arm, steady, grounding. Nothing like the unstable heat that had been simmering under her skin all night.

She dragged the back of her wrist across her split lip, straightened, and rolled her shoulders once.

“Come on, then,” she said.

He slashed at her with extended claws. Harper pivoted hard, boots scraping against gritty concrete as she let momentum carry her past the arc of his swing. Adrenaline snapped everything into sharp focus. Every sound. Every shift of his weight. Every ripple of his coat.

But something else rode beneath it, out of sync and wrong.

The shadows around her feet seemed to breathe with her. A high, thin ringing pressed at her ears. Heat crawled up her spine like someone had poured fire straight into her bones.

Something inside her cracked.

Her pulse stuttered, then surged.

Time thinned. Stretched.

She saw his next move before he made it, shoulder tightening, hand angling, weight shifting forward like she’d already watched this play out.

Harper stepped into the opening that shouldn’t have existed and drove her blade across his ribs.

The pulse flared on impact.

He screamed, stumbling back, smoke curling from the smoking line carved into his chest. His eyes went wide, not with pain, vampires were used to that, but with something much rarer.

Fear.

“What—what the fuck are you?” he choked.

Harper didn’t answer.

She didn’t know.

The energy under her skin didn’t feel like an adrenaline rush. It felt older. Deeper. Hungry. It pressed from the inside, humming along her nerves, eager for more.

He lunged again, desperate, telegraphing his movement like he’d suddenly forgotten how to fight.

Harper twisted aside, let him overextend, then turned with him, pulse blade driving between his ribs and straight into his heart.

The pulse detonated.

Light burst along the blade and through his chest. For a breath, his body held together and then it didn’t. He disintegrated from the inside out, flesh collapsing into ash that sloughed to the ground in a gray, drifting wave.

Silence crashed back in, heavy and absolute.

Harper stayed where she was, breathing hard. Her hands trembled around the hilt. Whatever had surged through her hadn’t faded. It pressed against her skin, hot and alive, like a door behind her ribs had been kicked open and left that way.

Slowly, she forced her fingers to loosen.

The blade dimmed and retracted with a fading hum.

Harper crossed the alley to the girl. Up close, she could see how young she really was, mascara streaked, a faint smear of glitter on one cheek, pulse fluttering weakly at her throat.

Cold skin. Thready heartbeat. But most importantly, alive.

Harper let out a slow breath and reached for her radio, forcing her voice steady.

“Rayne to dispatch,” she said. “I’ve located the missing girl. She’s unconscious, but breathing. Send medics to the service alley behind Vesper.”

“Copy, Rayne. Medics en route. Status of the hostile?”

Harper glanced at the drifting pile of ash, gray dust settling over cracked concrete.

“Neutralized,” she said.

The word sat wrong on her tongue. Too simple for what had just happened. For what it had felt like.

Because the thing in the alley wasn’t what had scared her.

The thing inside her still hadn’t gone quiet.

Harper Rayne had never been afraid of what lurked in Phoenix’s shadows.

Tonight, for the first time, she was afraid of herself.