The bookstore below Elara's apartment opened at ten, and despite the tumult of the morning, she made her way downstairs at nine thirty as usual. Work had always been her anchor, a way to maintain normalcy when everything else felt chaotic. Today, she needed that normalcy more than ever.
Eleanor Hayes, the elderly owner of Ravenwood Books, looked up from the register as Elara entered. "Good heavens, dear, you look like you have seen a ghost."
Elara managed a weak smile. "Just did not sleep well."
"Nightmares again?" Eleanor asked sympathetically. She was one of the few people Elara had admitted her sleep troubles to, though she had never shared what those nightmares contained.
"Something like that," Elara replied, moving to the back room to begin sorting new arrivals.
The familiar routine of cataloging books, shelving returns, and preparing displays provided a welcome distraction from thoughts of Sirens and werewolves. For a few hours, Elara could almost pretend her life had not been upended by Damon Blackwood's revelations.
At lunchtime, Eleanor insisted she take a proper break. "Go get some fresh air," the older woman urged. "You have been cooped up all morning. And you are as pale as a sheet."
Reluctantly, Elara agreed, slipping on her coat and stepping out into the damp streets. The rain had stopped, leaving behind puddles. She walked to a small café two blocks away, ordered a sandwich and tea, and found a quiet corner table.
As she ate, her mind inevitably returned to Damon's warnings and the pendant now safely around her neck. If what he said was true, if she truly was a Siren, a creature of legend, then her strange abilities suddenly made sense. The way her voice could influence emotions, the way electronics sometimes malfunctioned when she sang too powerfully, the way she occasionally glimpsed flashes of other people's thoughts when her music reached them deeply.
A prickling sensation at the back of her neck interrupted her thoughts. The distinct feeling of being watched. Carefully, trying not to appear alarmed, Elara glanced around the café.
Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. A couple chatting by the window. A student typing on a laptop. A businessman reading a newspaper. And yet, the sensation persisted, raising goosebumps along her arms.
She finished her tea quickly and left, the panic button Damon had given her a reassuring weight in her pocket. The streets seemed busier now, the lunchtime crowd providing both comfort in numbers and anxiety about unseen observers.
As she walked, memories she had long suppressed began to surface. The incident three years ago that had sent her running. That had changed everything. The night her voice had become a weapon rather than simply a tool of influence.
Her steps slowed as the images crowded her mind, more vivid than they had been in months.
The exclusive club in Chicago. The private room. The wealthy patron who had requested a personal performance. The way his eyes had followed her movements, predatory and entitled. The drink he had insisted she accept. The growing heaviness in her limbs as the drug took effect.
And then, when he had moved toward her, his intentions clear, the surge of terror and rage that had prompted her to do the only thing she could. Sing. Not a gentle melody, but a piercing note of pure fear and defensive fury.
The way his face had contorted, his hands clutching his chest. The blood that had trickled from his ears, his nose, his eyes. The terrible, gurgling sound as he collapsed to the floor. The absolute stillness that followed.
And later, the single black rose left at her apartment door. The note attached: "I know what you did. I know what you are. And I will find you."
Elara shuddered, forcing the memories away. She had killed a man with her voice. Not intentionally, not maliciously, but in desperate self-defense. And his brother had vowed revenge.
She had been running ever since. Changing her name. Her appearance. Her location. But the past always seemed to find her. Lurking in nightmares and shadows.
The feeling of being watched intensified as she approached the bookstore. A man across the street seemed to be looking in her direction, though his face was obscured by the collar of his coat. When she looked more directly, he turned and walked away, his movements unhurried but purposeful.
Inside the bookstore, Eleanor noticed her distress immediately. "What is wrong, child? Again, you look like you have seen the devil himself."
"Just thought I saw someone I knew," Elara lied, trying to calm her racing heart. "It was nothing."
The rest of the day passed in a blur of heightened awareness. Every customer who entered made her tense. Every sound from the street drew her attention. By closing time, Elara's nerves were stretched to breaking point.
"Are you sure you do not want me to walk you upstairs?" Eleanor asked as they locked the shop doors. "You have been jumpy as a cat all afternoon."
"I will be fine," Elara assured her, though she felt anything but. "Just tired."
Eleanor patted her hand. "Rest well, then. Things always look brighter after a good night's sleep."
Elara nodded, not trusting herself to speak. If only sleep offered her respite instead of fresh nightmares.
Alone in her apartment, Elara double-checked all the locks on her door and windows. The panic button Damon had given her sat on her bedside table. A reminder of dangers she had only just begun to understand.
She tried to distract herself with normal evening activities. Making dinner. Reading. Even attempting to watch a movie. But her thoughts kept circling back to Damon's revelations and the memories they had stirred.
Eventually, she found herself drawn to the piano in the corner of her living room. Music had always been both her solace and her curse. Tonight, she needed its comfort more than she feared its power.
Her fingers moved over the keys, finding a melancholy melody that seemed to rise from her subconscious rather than any song she had learned. As she played, she began to sing softly, her voice barely above a whisper.
The sound was pure and clear, filling the small apartment with an almost visible presence. The lights dimmed and brightened in time with the melody, responding to frequencies beyond human hearing.
Elara closed her eyes, allowing herself to feel the power flowing through her. Instead of suppressing it, she explored it cautiously, like testing the edges of a wound to see if it still hurt.
As the song built, she felt something shift inside her. A connection to something ancient and powerful. Images flashed behind her closed eyelids: women with voices that could calm storms or cause them, songs that could heal or destroy, melodies that could reveal truth or conceal it.
The pendant at her throat grew warm, pulsing in time with the music. And in that moment, Elara knew that Damon had been right. She was a Siren. A creature of legend. A vessel for power she barely understood.
The realization was both terrifying and oddly liberating. There was a name for what she was. An explanation for abilities that had marked her as different her entire life.
As the final notes faded, Elara opened her eyes to find her apartment darker than before. Several bulbs had blown during her song, leaving shadows in corners that had previously been illuminated.
She shivered, suddenly aware of how exposed she felt. If her music could affect electronics from across a room, who else might it be affecting? Who else might be listening, watching, waiting?
The thought followed her as she prepared for bed, haunting her movements. Despite her exhaustion, sleep seemed unlikely. She lay awake for hours, staring at the ceiling, listening to the occasional car passing on the street below.
When sleep finally came, it dragged her immediately into the depths of nightmare.
She stood on a cliff overlooking an ocean at night, singing a melody she had never heard before yet somehow knew perfectly. In the water below, faces appeared and disappeared. Pale, beautiful, with eyes that shifted color like opals. They sang with her, their voices twining with hers in harmonies that made the very air shimmer.
"Daughter of the deep," they called to her. "Last of the royal line. The sea remembers what the land forgets."
Then the scene changed. She was in that private room in Chicago again. The patron approached, his face twisted with lust and entitlement. She opened her mouth to sing the defensive note. But this time, she saw what happened with brutal clarity.
The sound that emerged from her throat was visible. A wave of pure energy that struck the man like a physical blow. Blood vessels ruptured beneath his skin. His eyes bulged, then burst. His eardrums shattered. And his heart, his heart simply stopped, crushed by the force of her voice.
As he fell, his face transformed, becoming not the face of her attacker but of his brother. The man who had sworn to find her. Jonah Thornwood. His pale eyes fixed on hers, somehow still seeing despite their ruined state.
"I know what you are," he whispered, blood bubbling from his lips. "I know what you did. And I am coming for you."
He reached toward her with hands already turning corpse-gray. In one, he clutched a black rose, its petals as dark as a starless night. "No one escapes judgment forever. Not even a Siren."
Elara woke with a gasp, her heart racing so hard it seemed to shake the bed. Sweat plastered her nightgown to her skin, and tears streaked her face. The nightmare had been more vivid, more terrifying than any before.
The digital clock beside her bed read three seventeen A M. The witching hour, her mother used to call it, when the veil between worlds was thinnest.
A sound from outside her bedroom drew her attention. The soft creak of a floorboard in her living room. Elara froze, straining to hear over the racing of her heart.
There it was again. A whisper of movement. Someone was in her apartment.
The panic button lay on her bedside table, just inches from her hand. But if she reached for it, would the movement alert the intruder? And how long would it take Damon's security team to arrive?
Another creak, closer now. Whoever it was, they were approaching her bedroom.
Elara's fingers inched toward the panic button, moving with agonizing slowness to avoid rustling the bedsheets. Her other hand went to her throat, closing around the pendant in what had become an instinctive gesture of comfort.
The doorknob to her bedroom turned, so gradually that she might have imagined it if not for the faint metallic sound of the mechanism releasing.
Her fingers closed around the panic button just as the door began to open. She pressed it hard, praying that help would come quickly.
Through the narrow opening, a hand appeared, pale and elegant, holding a single object.
A black rose.
The hand placed the rose gently on the floor just inside her room, then withdrew. The door closed as silently as it had opened.
Elara remained frozen, listening to the retreating footsteps cross her living room. The soft click of her front door opening and closing. Then silence.
Minutes passed before she found the courage to move. On trembling legs, she approached her bedroom door, switching on the light as she went.
The black rose lay where the intruder had left it, impossibly dark against the pale carpet. Beside it was a small cream-colored card. With shaking fingers, Elara picked it up.
The message was written in elegant script, the ink so dark it seemed to absorb the light:
"Three years, three months, three days. Justice comes to all who take what is not theirs to take. J T"
Jonah Thornwood? Here, in Ravenwood? Close enough to enter her locked apartment while she slept. To leave his calling card at her bedroom door.
The realization struck her hard. He had found her again. After three years of running. Of hiding. Of constantly looking over her shoulder, he had tracked her to this small town and this quiet life she had built.
Elara sank to the floor, the card clutched in her hand, the black rose a dark promise beside her. The nightmare had followed her into waking life. The hunter had found his prey.
And she had nowhere left to run.