Ryan's POV
The blue light from my monitor had been burning my retinas for six hours straight, but I could not look away. Something was wrong with my code. Not wrong like a bug that crashes the system. Wrong like finding a stranger's fingerprints in your bedroom while you sleep.
My name is Ryan Kane, and I build the eyes that watch Blackridge city. Every camera mounted on street corners, every sensor embedded in traffic lights, every facial recognition system that tracks criminals through crowded subway stations, they all feed into the network I helped create. SentinelTech pays me good money to make sure those eyes never blink, never miss a detail, never let the bad guys slip through the cracks.
Except now those eyes were hunting something I never programmed them to find.
The office around me hummed with the sounds of a tech company at work. Keyboards clicking like rain on metal roofs. Someone's music leaking through cheap headphones. The coffee maker in the break room gurgles its morning ritual. My coworkers moved through their routines, oblivious, normal, human. They had no idea what I really was. What I became when the moon climbed high and my bones started their monthly rebellion against my skin.
I scrolled deeper into the code, my stomach tightening with each line I read. Recognition protocols. Biometric scanning. But not for criminals. The parameters were searching for biological irregularities. Heat signatures that burned three degrees hotter than baseline humans. Bone density measurements that exceeded normal ranges. Healing rates that happened too fast to be natural. Movement patterns that suggested enhanced strength, impossible speed, predatory awareness.
My hands started shaking. I shoved them under my thighs to make them stop.
Someone had weaponized my surveillance system. Turned it into a hunting algorithm designed to identify and track supernatural beings. People like me. People who hid behind human faces and human jobs, who paid taxes and waited in line at grocery stores and pretended the monster was living under their skin was just a bad dream.
The modification timestamp said the code went live at midnight. Twelve hours ago. Twelve hours of the system learning, watching, cataloging every person in Blackridge who moved wrong, who healed too fast, who gave off heat like a furnace wrapped in flesh.
My phone vibrated against my desk, making me flinch hard enough that my knee slammed into the underside of my workspace. I grabbed it, saw Victor's name on the screen, felt my heart drop into my shoes.
Victor Cross did not call me at work. Victor, who owned three nightclubs in the entertainment district, who had lived through the French Revolution and the Civil War and two World Wars, who only contacted me when something had gone catastrophically wrong in the supernatural community, never called me at work.
I answered, keeping my voice low. "Yeah?"
"Three of my people are dead." Victor's voice came through tight and controlled, but I could hear the rage underneath, cold and ancient and absolutely terrifying. "The safe house on Merchant Street. Sunlight lamps activated at three a.m. Full spectrum UV. They burned to ash before they could scream."
The office felt too bright suddenly, too exposed. I stood up, my chair rolling backward and hitting the cubicle wall. My coworker Jenny glanced over, concerned about creasing her forehead. I forced what I hoped looked like a smile and mouthed "bathroom" at her.
"I'll call you back," I said into the phone, then hung up before Victor could respond.
I walked toward the exit on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else. The hallway stretched longer than it should, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead like trapped insects. Every camera I passed felt like an accusation. I built you. I made you smart. I never meant for you to kill.
My father's voice echoed in my memory, words he had spoken the night of my first transformation when I was twelve and terrified and convinced I was dying. "The world is not ready to know we exist, Ryan. Fear makes humans dangerous. Fear makes them cruel. You must hide what you are. You must never give them a reason to hunt you."
Too late, Dad. Someone was hunting us now. Using the tools I had built. Using my code, my algorithms, my surveillance network that was supposed to keep people safe.
The cold air outside hit me like a slap, a shocking sensation back into my numb face. I walked fast, not running but close, putting distance between myself and the office. Between myself and the crime I had accidentally committed by being too good at my job.
I found a coffee shop two blocks away, one of those places that tried too hard to look vintage with its exposed brick and mismatched furniture. I ordered a black coffee I would not drink and claimed a table in the back corner where I could see both exits. Another lesson from my father. Always know how to run.
I called Victor back. He answered immediately.
"Where are you?" His accent became more pronounced when he was stressed, traces of old French creeping into his English.
"Coffee shop. Safe. Tell me everything."
He did. Three vampires, all young by vampire standards, only a century or two old. They had been sleeping in their safe room, protected from sunlight by blackout curtains and reinforced walls. The room's smart lighting system was connected to the city grid for backup power. At exactly three a.m., every lamp in that room switched on, overriding all safety protocols, flooding the space with UV light intense enough to ignite vampire flesh.
"The system knew they were there," Victor said. "The system knew what they were. This was not random, Ryan. This was a targeted execution."
My coffee sat untouched, steam rising in lazy spirals. "It is worse than that. I found modifications in the surveillance code. Someone added recognition protocols designed to identify supernatural beings through biometric markers. The system is not just killing. It is hunting. Learning. Building a database of every vampire, werewolf, and witch in Blackridge."
Victor was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice had gone very soft, which was somehow more frightening than if he had yelled. "Can you stop it?"
"I don't know. The modifications came from outside the company, from an IP address that should not exist. Whoever did this has resources and skills that rival mine. Maybe exceed mine."
"Then we have a larger problem." Victor paused, and I heard voices in the background, urgent and overlapping. "I am not the only one who has lost people. The Eastside wolf pack is missing two members. The witch coven in the financial district lost one of their elders in a house fire that locked all the exits. This is coordinated, Ryan. Someone is moving against all of us simultaneously."
The Eastside pack. Blake Morrison's territory. My stomach twisted tighter. Blake, whose grandmother still cursed my father's name at pack gatherings. Blake, who had every reason to blame me for this because I built the weapon being used against her people.
"We need to meet," Victor said. "All of us. Every faction. Tonight."
"Where?"
"My club. Midnight. I will send word to the others." He hesitated, then added, "Ryan, be careful. You built this system, but you are still one of us. Still a target. Your Alpha blood will not protect you forever."
He hung up. I sat alone in the coffee shop, watching normal humans live their normal lives, completely unaware that a war had just started. A war I had inadvertently armed with the most sophisticated surveillance technology in the world.
My phone buzzed again. A text from an unknown number.
"Blake Morrison. Victor gave me your contact. Two of my pack are missing. The cameras tracked them before they disappeared. We need to talk. Alone. Tonight before the big meeting. Foster warehouse, nine p.m. Come by yourself or don't come at all."
I stared at the message, my wolf stirring restlessly under my skin. Blake Morrison wanted to meet. The woman whose family hated mine. The woman who had every justification to tear my throat out for getting her people killed.
But she was right about one thing. We needed to talk. Because buried in my father's papers, hidden in a metal box under my apartment floor, were notes about a secret research facility that he had discovered five years ago. A facility where supernatural beings disappeared into cages and experiments. A facility that had gotten him killed one week after he tried to warn people it existed.
The same facility that I was now certain was behind the weaponization of my surveillance system.
I typed back a single word: "Okay."
Then I finished my terrible coffee and started planning how to survive a meeting with someone who might want me dead almost as much as she wanted answers.
The city cameras watched me leave. I could feel their electronic gaze tracking my movement, recording my face, analyzing my gait and heat signature and all the tiny biological tells that marked me as different. As others. As prey.
My father had been right about fear making humans dangerous. But he had never imagined that fear could be automated, programmed, turned into an algorithm that never slept and never forgot and never stopp
ed hunting.
I had built the perfect predator. And now it was coming for all of us.