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JACKSON

I f someone told me yesterday I’d be crawling through the shit-stained basement of a were-shifter-run nightclub with Seraphine Nightshade, Portland’s most dangerous supernatural underboss, leading the way, I’d have laughed in their face.

Then probably punched them.

Now?

Well. Here I fucking am.

The place reeks of iron, blood, and mildew. There’s something else too—something sour and cold, like the air right before a lightning storm. Magic. Real magic. And it coils down my spine like it’s sniffing me out, licking at the back of my neck, trying to decide if I’m prey or problem.

Seraphine walks in front of me, spine straight, steps silent even in heels. Her silhouette moves like it owns the goddamn dark. Shadows flirt with her ankles like they know her. She hasn’t said a word since we left the alley. Just texted someone on a sleek obsidian-black phone and started walking like she expected me to follow.

Spoiler alert: I did.

“Where the hell are we?” I ask, ducking under a rusted support beam.

She doesn’t look back. “Somewhere you’re too human for.”

“Charming. Is that your default setting, or just reserved for people who breathe oxygen?”

That earns me a glance over her shoulder, those strange green-gold eyes gleaming faintly in the dark. “Keep talking, detective, and I’ll make sure you stop doing that permanently.”

Jesus. She's intense.

“I get it,” I mutter under my breath. “You’re allergic to being questioned.”

She stops dead.

Shit.

I barely see her move, but suddenly she’s in my space—too close, all heat and steel and barely leashed magic. Her voice is low, dangerous.

“You want to stay alive in my world, Cole? Don’t mistake survival instincts for arrogance.” Her jaw flexes. She turns and keeps walking. That’s her tell—tension in her mouth when I hit a nerve. I file it away.

Eventually, we reach a steel door with runes etched into the surface—glowing faintly, like dying embers. She taps three fingers against a sigil near the top, and it swings open with a groan.

Inside’s worse.

The body’s pinned to the ceiling like some grotesque chandelier. Blood trails down in rivulets from slit wrists, pooling on the floor in perfect circles. Runes again—different ones this time. Cleaner. More precise.

“Shifter,” I mutter. “Wolf, maybe. Male. Early twenties.”

“You’ve seen this before?” she asks.

“Parts of it,” I say, crouching beside the nearest blood sigil. “Symbols aren’t just decorative. They’re converging. Precision spellwork. Someone knew exactly what they were doing.”

Seraphine’s silent. When I glance up, she’s watching me with a look I can’t quite place.

“What?”

“Didn’t expect you to know that.”

“Didn’t expect to get paired with a woman who talks to shadows.”

She snorts. Actually snorts. Jesus, there’s a human under all that armor after all.

“I grew up with a sister who thought she was a witch,” I say, shrugging. “Spent more time buried in occult texts than doing her math homework. She used to draw stuff like this in chalk on our garage floor.”

“She sounds unstable.”

“She was murdered by a rogue vamp when she was sixteen.”

Silence.

“I’m sorry,” she says finally.

I wave it off, standing and brushing blood-specked dust from my jeans. “Don’t be. That’s not why I’m here. I’m here because no one wanted a human poking around these murders, which means someone has something to hide.”

She folds her arms. “You think it’s me.”

“I think it’s someone like you or close to you, given what I know about your standing with the— Others,” I counter. “Someone who knows how to hide a murder scene with magic and make it look like a political hit.”

“You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that.”

“I’ve got facts. You’ve got shadows.”

She steps toward me slowly, deliberately, and goddamn if it doesn’t feel like the temperature in the room drops.

“You’re playing a dangerous game, Cole.”

“Good thing I like games.”

Another beat. Another stare. Then she smirks—slow and cold and oddly amused.

“You remind me of a wolf pup who thinks he’s hunting, not realizing he’s already in the dragon’s jaws.”

“I’ve been in worse jaws.”

We fall into a reluctant rhythm after that. She handles the magic—nullifying the residual energies, talking in hushed tones with someone who steps from the shadows like they were born in them. A warlock, I think. Pale, silver-haired, with a voice like cold air and sharp knives.

I take photos, measurements, samples. Cataloguing everything the way I would any other homicide. Except this isn’t normal. None of this is.

We leave the club through a service tunnel, and I finally break the silence.

“You know this is connected to the vampire, right?”

“Of course it is.”

“Well, care to fill me in before someone else ends up dangling from a ceiling fan like meat in a butcher’s freezer?”

“I don’t owe you my secrets,” she says simply.

“Then this partnership’s gonna get real goddamn inconvenient.”

She stops, turns, and steps in again—closer this time. She smells like smoke and cinnamon and something older, something earthy. Forests and bone-deep magic.

“This isn’t a partnership, Cole. This is a leash.”

I laugh. “You’re welcome to tug it, sweetheart, but I don’t heel.”

“I noticed,” she mutters. “That’s going to be a problem.”

“Not for me.”

We walk in tense silence for several blocks until she finally says, “The rune pattern was druidic. Not traditional witchwork. Whoever did this is using rituals from long-forgotten cults. That means time, money, and access.”

“Which screams political.”

She nods.

“And that means you’ve already got a suspect,” I add.

Another beat of silence.

“Maybe.”

“Name?”

“Not until I’m sure.”

I run a hand through my hair, frustrated. “You’re killing me, Nightshade.”

“Not yet,” she says, mouth twitching. Almost a smile. Almost.

We reach a blacked-out SUV parked under a flickering streetlamp. She pauses before getting in, looking at me like she’s weighing something.

“Tomorrow,” she says. “Be at the warehouse at SE 11th and Main. Don’t be late.”

“I’m not your intern.”

“No,” she says, climbing in and slamming the door. “You’re my liability.”

Then she’s gone.

And for some goddamn reason, I can’t stop grinning.