She Let Him Think He Was the Predator

Two in the morning, and the Chatham County morgue hummed with the kind of silence that made you question your life choices. I'd been here since midnight, sorting through cold case files that had been gathering dust longer than some of the bodies in our freezers. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead like angry wasps, casting everything in that particular shade of institutional green that made even the living look dead.

Podcast, my one-eyed tabby, had claimed the corner of my desk, purring against the stack of autopsy reports I'd been reviewing for my Substack. 'Dead Letters' wasn't exactly pulling in subscriber numbers that would let me quit my day job, but writing about unsolved cases kept me sane during the graveyard shift. Tonight's soundtrack was Ethel Cain bleeding through my AirPods—'American Teenager' on repeat, because apparently I was feeling nostalgic for a youth I'd never actually had.

The first sign something was wrong wasn't the sound of splintering wood or the crash of the morgue's security door being torn off its hinges. It was the smell.

Sulfur. Sharp and acrid, like someone had struck a thousand matches at once.

I pulled out one earbud, every instinct I'd spent three centuries suppressing suddenly screaming to life. The scent was wrong—not the clean chemical wrongness of embalming fluid or the organic wrongness of decay, but something older. Something that made the sealed parts of my memory twitch like a nerve being prodded.

Then Sterling Voss dragged a corpse through my door.

He moved like liquid shadow, all sharp angles and controlled violence wrapped in an expensive black coat that probably cost more than my monthly rent. The body he hauled behind him left a dark smear across the linoleum—not blood, but something that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it.

Sterling's shadow writhed against the wall, independent of his movements, reaching toward me with fingers that weren't quite fingers. When he looked up, his eyes held the kind of cold calculation that suggested he'd already decided whether I was worth keeping alive.

"Dr. Sloane Ashford," he said, my name rolling off his tongue like he'd been practicing. "We need to talk."

I should have been terrified. Any normal person would have been screaming, running, calling for help. Instead, I felt a bone-deep weariness settle over me like a familiar coat. Three hundred years of hiding, and it all came down to this—a stranger in my morgue at 2 AM with a supernatural corpse and knowledge of my real name.

"Let me guess," I said, not bothering to remove my other earbud. "You need this to disappear, and you think the local medical examiner is your best bet for a cover-up."

Sterling's smile was all teeth and no warmth. "Smart girl. Though I prefer to think of it as a mutually beneficial arrangement."

He stepped closer, and his shadow stretched across the floor toward me. Where it touched my shoe, I felt something deep in my chest flutter—not fear, but recognition. The