The scent hit me before I entered the room. It was the sharp, metallic trace of blood, stale now, no longer pulsing with life, tangled with the bitter scent of sterile chemicals and the faintest trace of something floral. Jasmine, maybe. Or gardenia. I followed it through the double steel doors of the morgue, drawn not by duty but by something older, more instinctive. Something I had long buried beneath centuries of discipline.
Inside, the light was surgical—bright, unforgiving, indifferent. The dead man on the table looked young, but his chest was split wide, carved as though the killer had taken his time. Not just to kill, but to speak. The wounds told a story I had yet to decipher.
And there she was.
She stood over the body, humming to herself as though she were folding laundry or stirring tea. Her gloved hands moved with a kind of reverent efficiency, her blond ponytail bouncing slightly with each step. She wore no mask. She never looked up when I entered. She just kept humming, soft and high, like some little bird too stupid to know it had flown into a cage.
I did not move. I only watched. I studied her fingers, the graceful slide of her scalpel, and the way her lips curved upward in the corners as she spoke to the corpse.
"Poor guy," she said softly, almost laughing. "You died on a full moon. Bad luck, huh?"
The humming resumed. And I could feel it rising inside me, low and unfamiliar—heat.
She turned then. Saw me. Her eyes met mine. There was no fear in them, only curiosity. She tilted her head and grinned like she had just caught me peeking through her bedroom window.
"You the new cop?" she asked. "Or are you just here to spectate?"
I stepped forward. My coat whispered around my legs, brushing the cold tile like a second skin. I kept my hands behind my back, fingers locked tight as if that could restrain the urge clawing beneath them.
"I'm not a cop," I said. My voice always sounded too smooth when I spoke to mortals. They said it made them nervous. She didn't even blink.
"You here with the special unit? The one they brought in for the—" she gestured to the body without looking at it, "—carving?"
I gave a single nod. "Yes."
She pulled off one glove and stepped toward me. Her hand extended. "Addie Quinn. County coroner. They said you'd be creepy, but you're actually kind of pretty. In a gloomy, thundercloud-at-midnight sort of way."
I didn't take her hand. Not yet. I stared at it instead. Pale. Freckled. Warm. I could feel the pulse in her wrist from where I stood. Her blood spoke a language older than any she had learned.
Her fingers wavered slightly. "No handshake?"
"You don't want to touch me," I said, quieter than I meant to.
She lowered her hand. Didn't back away. Her smile turned crooked.
"I'm not made of sugar," she said. "You're the one who looks like you'd melt if I got too close."
I stepped toward her. Just one step. It was enough to make her look up at me, neck tilted, throat exposed. I inhaled sharply. My jaw tightened.
"I'm trying to understand," I said, "how someone so bright chose a job surrounded by death."
Her brows lifted; eyes wide with amused offense. "Wow. That's poetic. Or judgmental. I can't decide."
I didn't answer. I was too busy memorizing the shape of her collarbone. The curve of her lips. The way her hair was too bright for this place. Too alive.
She circled back to the body, pulling her glove on with a snap. "Well, Gloomy," she said, "you're just in time. The killer cut through the sternum clean and didn't even hesitate. Precision like that means training. Or madness. Maybe both."
I said nothing. I listened. Not to her words. To her blood. It moved like music under her skin.
When she leaned forward to adjust the Y-incision across the cadaver's chest, her hair shifted to one side. For a moment I caught sight of the skin just behind her left ear—pale and smooth, like pressed ivory kissed by the blue glow of overhead light, and marked by something small and dark resting delicately over the artery where her pulse would beat strongest. It was a tattoo, almost hidden by the trailing silk of her hair, but not quite concealed, as if she wanted it to be noticed by someone observant enough, or doomed sufficient, to see it.
Two scissors.
Black. Minimal. Precise.
The blades curved gently inward, pointed toward one another as though meant to cut through something invisible, perhaps through silence, perhaps through fate itself. The ink looked permanent, but not aggressive, more like a quiet challenge laid in plain sight, a riddle tucked against her most vulnerable place.
It struck me as either a joke made in poor taste or irony so sharp it had turned into a kind of weapon. Or maybe it wasn't a joke at all. Maybe it was something older, something instinctive, something symbolic that her waking mind couldn't explain. Something like fate, etched in the same spot where I would have bitten her if I were starving. If I were weaker. If I hadn't already decided she was dangerous.
I stood there staring, not because I meant to, and not because I enjoyed the view, though every inch of her drew the eye whether I wanted it to or not, because that tattoo, in that place, on that girl, felt like a message aimed directly at me. She hadn't looked up. She hadn't noticed that I'd gone completely still, that I was no longer watching the body on the table but studying the living one beside it, memorizing the curve of her neck, the scent of her skin, the way the blades hovered so close to the place where her life pulsed hottest.
I didn't ask her why she wore it there, that inked mark hidden in plain sight—those two small blades etched in black, tucked behind her ear like a half-whispered confession. I didn't ask what they meant, or who they were for, or how long they had been with her, because I knew that whatever answer she might give would be far too clean. Too simple. Too rooted in language, and not in the strange, silent place where truth actually lives.
I didn't say a word.
Because I didn't want the truth. Not really. I wanted the unknown that shimmered just beneath her skin like heat rising from pavement in the summer dusk. I wanted the mystery, the quiet refusal to be explained. I wanted the version of her that lived between instinct and ritual, the one who moved through rooms filled with the dead as if their silence were not something to fear, but something sacred. I wanted the part of her that hummed when she thought no one was listening, not out of habit, but as if it helped her thread herself into focus, as if melody could bind her spine straighter when the world asked her to see too much.
I wanted the strange, lovely truth of her without the ruinous weight of clarity.
Because there was something in that tattoo—those scissors, impossibly small and sharp and black as regret—that I understood without needing to interpret. They weren't symbols. They weren't art. They were tools. They were shields. She wore them not to be noticed, but to mark the line where the world was no longer allowed to follow. And somehow, impossibly, she had placed them on the tenderest part of her body, where the skin thins and the pulse thrums and the heat of life gathers, not as an invitation, but as a warning.
And still I looked.
A sign that she had already begun cutting her way into me. Quietly. Deliberately. Without ever lifting the blade. I stood there in the hall, chest heaving in shallow, soundless breaths, though I didn't need to breathe. Not really. Not anymore. But my body remembered the rhythm, the illusion of calm it brought. And right now, I needed every scrap of illusion I could hold.
Behind the door, she was still moving. I could hear it—not with mortal ears, but the way I heard everything: the soft friction of rubber soles against tile, the distant hum of her blood as it coursed under her skin, a lullaby of life that no stethoscope could catch. She didn't follow. She didn't call out. She simply... resumed. Like she hadn't just carved open a part of me I'd kept locked behind centuries of iron will.
And still, I didn't move.
I should've walked away. I should've vanished the way I always did when something threatened the edges of the mask I wore. But instead, I let the moment stretch. Let the weight of her presence linger behind that sealed morgue door, each second an anchor I couldn't tear myself free from.
What was she?
Not a siren. Her voice wasn't magic, and yet it called to something buried deep in me. Not a witch—though she wielded those blades like they were extensions of her soul, turning corpses into confessions, silence into scripture. She was no monster, no predator, no prey. Just a woman. Fragile in frame, young by mortal standards. And yet—undeniably—dangerous.
Not because she meant to be. But because I could feel the way she altered gravity in every room she entered.
I closed my eyes. Her scent was still there.
It wasn't the perfume. That was incidental. What clung to me now was essence—an imprint, carved into the ether like a fingerprint of soul. Some mortals carried that. A kind of resonance. Like their existence hummed at a different frequency, pulling those who lived in shadow toward them, not with force—but inevitability.
She had that hum.
She had it in spades.
I pushed off the wall and walked. Not fast. Not slow. Each step calibrated. Measured. The way I'd taught myself after my first century, when the hunger had nearly ruined me. When I learned that control wasn't instinct—it was practice. Repetition. Obsession. The habit of restraint worn like a second skin.
And yet, that second skin felt tight now. Like it didn't quite fit.
She'd looked at me.
Really looked.
Not with awe. Not with fear. Not with lust.
With interest. Curiosity. Recognition.
As if somewhere inside her, some instinct older than reason had whispered: You.
I hated that it thrilled me.
The corridor led deeper into the administrative wing of the coroner's office, a place I had no intention of staying. My assignment was simple. Consult. Observe. Profile the bastard who left artfully butchered victims across the city. Stay out of the way. Stay in control.
But how could I do that now, with her on the slab beside my thoughts?
I reached the stairwell and paused with my hand on the rail.
She wore scissors behind her ear.
She didn't wear gloves the whole time.
She hummed in the presence of death.
She smiled like she'd been waiting for me.
She called me pretty.
I stared at the concrete steps for a long time before I finally descended. Not because I had somewhere urgent to be. But because if I stayed, I would go back to her.
And I didn't trust myself not to touch.