Page 12

“Jesus.” I swallow. “What the actual fuck?”

Because that wasn’t sound—it came through the current, through the invisible layer of the world that sirens spend their whole lives listening to. And whatever just moved through it hit hard enough to rattle my goddamn teeth.

What hit me just now started with a hellhound.

I know that much.

That deep, violent frequency was there beneath everything else.

But something else was riding inside it.

Something bright. Clean. Powerful enough that it should have clashed with the hellhound instead of moving with it.

Except the two weren’t fighting.

They were fused.

One sound, two powers that had absolutely no fucking business becoming one. And whatever they made together carried across miles of mountain and hit me hard enough to follow it.

The problem is, I know what almost everything sounds like.

But I have no fucking idea what that was.

I pull my hand off the wall and look at it. My fingers are trembling, not from fear—I know what fear feels like well enough to tell the difference—but from the kind of involuntary physical response that happens when something vibrates at a frequency close enough to your own that your body tries to match it. Like a tuning fork placed against a piano string. Like your own voice played back to you at double the volume.

Whatever that was, it came from the west in the deep mountain terrain.

Kings of Anarchy MC territory.

I cross to the window and look out at the tree line beyond the lot, the dark press of the Appalachians rising against a sky that’s going gray with early evening. The Kings of Anarchy operate out there, a motorcycle club that runs on something older and stranger than simple steel and gasoline. I’ve skirted their eastern boundary for six months without incident, which is exactly how I prefer things—distance, silence, nobody looking in my direction. The Siren Conclave’s trackers are patient hunters, and the best camouflage I have is a small footprint.

Getting curious about Kings’ business is the opposite of a small footprint.

I pull on my jacket and boots anyway. Because the thing is, and this is what I keep turning over, keep pressing against like a bruise to check if it’s real, that roar wasn’t clean. Most supernatural events finish. They detonate or dissolve, or close behind themselves like a door swinging shut. The soundscape settles back into its ordinary texture within minutes, sometimes within seconds, and the signature fades.

This one hasn’t closed.

Whatever tore open out there in the mountains is still open, still bleeding sound at a pitch I can feel from thirty miles east, still leaving a distortion my siren instincts keep catching on. It’s the supernatural equivalent of a wound that won’t stop. And underneath it, threaded through it, there is something else entirely.

Something that is calling to me.

Not compulsion because I know compulsion intimately. I’ve spent twelve years evading the Siren Conclave’s attempts to use my voice as a tool, and I recognize that easily. This isn’t that. This is quieter, stranger, and it crawls under my skin because I don’t know what the fuck I’m feeling. I’ve stayed alive this long by knowing when to run, and anything I can’t explain usually gets my ass moving in the opposite direction—so why the fuck does every part of me want to move closer?—but I am moving toward it.

My truck is parked behind the building, and I take the back stairs down in the dark, ingrained movement finding each step without a sound. Sirens are creatures of frequency. We hear what others miss, and we move through soundscapes the way other supernaturals move through shadow. Silence is not an absence for us but a texture, something with weight and direction. I have gotten incredibly good at making myself part of that texture. Years of running teach you to be extremely quiet, very small, and totally still.

The drive west takes forty minutes on roads that narrow and darken as the mountains swallow them, and I spend every one of those minutes arguing with myself about the seventeen different ways this is a catastrophically bad idea!

The Conclave’s last communication, delivered via a third party who tried to keep their hands clean and didn’t quite manage it, made their position extremely clear. My voice is classified as a Conclave asset under birthright law. My continued absence constitutes a breach of covenant. The longer I stay visible, the easier it is for Thessaly’s trackers to triangulate me, and Kings’ territory is not a place where a lone siren can count on anonymity.

And yet, I pull off the road where the asphalt gives way to packed dirt and cut the engine, sitting in the silence for a moment with both hands resting on the wheel. The signature is much stronger here. Close enough that I can feel its edges without reaching, feel the texture of something vast and unfinished hanging in the supernatural air. My body responds before I consciously register why, siren physiology recognizing the power of this magnitude and reacting the only way it knows how… with attention, orientation, and every internal compass needle swinging hard to point at the same thing.

I push open the truck door and step out into the mountain dark. Cold immediately bites through my clothes, carrying pine and damp earth while that unthinkably powerful frequency hums somewhere ahead of me.

Stronger here.

Much-fucking-stronger.

I leave the truck behind and start walking, following the pull between the trees as the ground climbs beneath my boots. Branches catch at my jacket and loose rock shifts underfoot, but every few steps that strange pulse rolls through me again, guiding me deeper into the mountain.