Page 151 of Property of Scar

And yet, standing here in the middle of it, the bond humming between us like a second heartbeat, Carnage’s distant whooping carrying from somewhere down the hall, this place that smells like leather, motor oil, something old and alive pressed into every wall, I am exactly where I’m meant to be.

Scar has many faults. This is not something I’m planning to let him forget. He’s cold when he means to be distant, controlled in ways that require careful navigation, and he has five centuries of complicated history that is going to surface at inconvenient moments for the foreseeable future.

But he chose me.

Deliberately.

Every day.

And I believe him.

And I am going to have so much fun keeping him on his toes.

But for now, I am just going to keep kissing him like my life depends on it.

Because there is nothing else I would rather be doing.

Epilogue

ECHO

Two Months Later

The roar slams into me hard enough to make me stumble. One second, I’m standing in my shitty rental outside Concord, the next, I’ve got a hand braced against the wall and my pulse trying to punch its way out of my throat.

“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 damn teeth.

I’ve felt powerful things before. Supernatural events leave signatures on the frequency layer, the way storms leave pressure in the air. You learn to read them, register them, and move on. A hellhound fight registers as a deep crack of percussion. A ward shattering sounds like glass losing its structural integrity all at once. A death, depending on what dies, can ring out like a bell, a dropped stone, or nothing at all.

This was none of those things.

This was something I have no category for, and the absence of that category sits heavily.

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 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 frequency layer 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 casting a frequency shadow that 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 of it, and I recognize the shape of it. This isn’t that. This is quieter, stranger, and significantly more unnerving, because I cannot name it, and I have built my entire survival around the principle that I do not move toward things I cannot name.

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, we move through soundscapes the way other supernaturals move through shadow, and 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. Twelve years of running teaches you to be extremely quiet, very small, and totally still.