Humans did not have red eyes – but she did, and they were not windows, they were walls. One wore leftover blue from an injury, still glassy, the other hard, comparable to a thousand-yard stare. She had the gaze of psychopaths. The look belonging to someone removed, someone unfeeling, and as far as he recalled, said look had always been. There was the culture-based rumor that her soul was a wad of old pieces from those gone, all their sufferings and hate combined. When she was born, thirty-three years back, the midwife declared she’d done this before, and wasn’t happily returned. Life broke spirits, and though she’d yet lived as a newborn, hers was already cracked.<br/><br/>She hadn’t cried, hadn’t wriggled, only stared; her mother wrote<i>Scarlett</i>on the birth certificate.<br/><br/>Riverdale was perhaps the Bronx’s most affluent neighborhood, and Fieldston was its heart. Century-old mansions kinged manicured yards and gardens, and oaks sprawled sidewalks. There were a lot of stone, a lot of brick, a lot of honeydew bushes and violet patches. At the city’s northern edge, distance quieted it from the New York boom, and there was not a taxi in sight. Her home was an 1890s Victorian, dollishly façaded, with a wrap-around porch behind lilacs. That’s where she was, with rum and cigar. The last she’d been seen was months ago, clearing a vampire sewer infestation. Under noses, they’d coalesced, and began preying on homeless. The sleeping disappeared from parks and alleyways, their bodies unfound, their disappearances unnoticed for a year. In that time, the bloodsuckers grew sloppy, became comfortable, and things began to slip. The la Sega were then alerted.<br/><br/>“Don’t stare.” Her voice was husky and accented. Until fifteen, she’d lived in the Dominican Republic, before the house decided her post. He wondered how her face had looked, when she was told she’d be moving. Actually no, he didn’t, as he already knew. Blank. Her expression was always blank, even then. She sat easily but was yet recovering. Torn muscles and dislocated joints took time to properly heal, and broken bones required more. Fights where hunters emerged unscathed were rare miracles. Scarr had somehow managed to keep her face, while the rest suffered abuse. Knuckles were scabbed and purple beneath fading makeup, there were taped punctures where shoulder met neck. Two different sets, she’d felt fangs twice. Still, she remained a tank, 5’6 and thick, as strong as mortality allowed. Her hair was loose and blonde down her back, last night’s lipstick tinged her mouth. He wondered if she’d been with somebody, maybe from Webster Hall.<br/><br/>“That what I think it is?”<br/><br/>He handed over the envelope. As anything digital left a footprint, paper was how he went. It could be shredded. It could be burned. It could be gone for good. She read, he stared around. She was a trophied biology professor at Columbia University. They must have afforded her the mansion. There were names carved in the banister, a list. “I’m the family matriarch, now.” Her mother had passed. Their lifestyle didn’t permit old age, for the most part; her body could take no more come fifty. “They want me back in Santo Domingo. They want me to find Solana.” She inhaled pinkish smoke, and when she exhaled, it smelled rosy. “They want this to be my last run.” She looked at him, but he didn’t look at her.<br/><br/>If that were her last, motherhood would become the new prerogative. La Sega believed the ability to hunt stemmed from the blood, their lineage, and as a woman no longer on front lines, propagation was duty. To some, it was respite, a chance to be human and normal. They would run the family from the old plantation, perhaps catch a job offsite to maintain appearances. One-nighters and dates, perhaps fullblown relationships and marriages, unions shaded in secret. She would get to be as millions of women were, beloved, heavy betwixt the hips and busied by the next generation. Early years would be simple, then age eight commenced training. That was what she’d have, eight birthdays to come to terms with what she was raising her brood to be. She had been unable to do so with Solana, and had been forgiven. Lots of the young and naïve couldn’t set their child up for beatdowns and certained death. He wondered of those thereafter, and if la Sega would be so empathetic again.<br/><br/>The envelope was laid in the middle of them. “I can’t decide if werewolves are worse than vampires or not,” she puffed, “especially an entire pack of them.” She pulled a burner from her chest, flipped it open. “Good thing for big families. I’ll need everyone I can get.” This time, their eyes clashed, and shadows were visible. Time and stress didn’t touch her, however, tiredness grew apparent. The lacklusterity could’ve been pain too, he was unsure. He stood, porchboards creaking, and she funnily extended her hand. He paused, but reached, her grip solid.<br/><br/>No, not funnily, he decided, this was goodbye.<br/><br/><div style="text-align: center"><b><span style="font-size: 18px">☽☽ ☾☾</span></b>​</div><br/>Half hour outside city limits, and the first was found – a feral. In limbo betwixt man and wolf, prisoner to its inner beast, it lumbered and foamed as if rabid, and Scarr gave chase. Legs blurred, feet barely found purchase before lifting again, she was fleet. In darkness, hardly disturbed by the full moon, she leapt logs and ducked branches, racing. Wolfsbane reeked from her flesh, along with silver, and in bite-proof kevlar, the feral recognized the danger. She only needed a straightaway to align lasersights and pull the trigger. All that kept her from doing so were overgrowth and overhangs. So, it boiled to endurance, keeping pace enough to maintain a visual, and holding from there. Stuck as the monstrosity was in malfunctioned form, it was easier done than normal. The hunter’s sprint was unhitched.<br/><br/>She leapt a ditch with a<i>thud</i>, didn’t miss a stride. Over an old rock barrier to divide forgotten properties, didn’t skip a step. Up a sudden hill, sharpened nails dug in soil, didn’t lose a beat. With that, the trees cleared enough for her to take aim. Augmented firearm rose in two hands, a red beam extended the thirty yards amid prey and predator, finding its mark. She squeezed, the silencer hushed the shot, and two incendiary bullets flew. They were made of silver, filled with silver, and once embedded, burned with silver. The beast screeched when struck, rasped at its misshapen body, and she was on it in seconds. Silver gushed, the air turned metallic and smoky as werewolf liquefied. It had seconds to wrench and wail before collapsing. It had a blink before she was above, glaring. She pulled again, and a bullet buried in each eye.<br/><br/>Stillness. A beast’s putrid odor. Her pants.<br/><br/>What followed was her kneeling and dissecting its skull. Through puddling eyesockets, she extracted tissue for test tubes, to be sealed. Scarr worked in biology in hopes of finding a cure. She wheedled into Columbia to secretly absorb resources, the first of her family to go beyond slaying. In three years, it’d so far proven futile. She could see were werewolf mashed human DNA, quilting it, then replacing it, but couldn’t separate the two without destroying the former. Man became wolf as much as wolf became man, the attachment was terminal. When the samples were pocketed, she snapped gloves, and examined the rest of the corpse. Its flesh darkened and thickened, grew hairy tufts, and its arm enlarged and lengthened. She pressed on soft bones that had yet to fully change. She searched for organs, outlining them with her fingertips, and recorded.<br/><br/>The night around her was unmoving. Then, there was noise – fleeing deer, galloping from a certain direction. The woods were suddenly on the move, and she stood, just as there was a howl. Coyotes existed in those parts, but not all out wolves, and that was exactly what she heard. A storm of snapping twigs, movement, flurry. Fighting. Her gut said the pack she was searching for, and she was off.  Wilderness ran together in black and gray, her footsteps a heartbeat. Where the deer evacuated, where owls and bats flew from, was where she went. Around this tree and that, splashing through a creek toward what appeared a mob, roaring within itself. Night-vision goggles articulated shapes and blood splatter; Scarr stopped in cover, marked her GPS. She had not come out there alone, others had as well, and it seemed they had their pack. She needed a minute and thirteen seconds, tops.