The growl didn't come again.
Elena remained on the floor, her back pressed hard against the couch, every muscle locked. The cold in the air was palpable now, a winter-morning chill that seeped through her sweatpants and settled in her bones. The journal was a block of ice in her numb hands. She listened until her ears rang with the silence, straining for another scrape, another breath that wasn't her own.
Nothing.
It was the building. Old pipes groaning in a new way. An animal—a raccoon, a stray dog—somehow trapped in the crawl space. Her mind, wired raw from the journal and the day's strangeness, had supplied the rest. Hadn't it?
But the smell. It lingered, faint but unmistakable beneath the scents of her apartment: old brick, tea, cleaning products. It was feral, musky, layered with the coppery tang of blood and something else… ozone, again. The same electric chill from the shop.
She couldn't stay on the floor. With a effort that felt physical, she pushed herself up. Her legs were wobbly. She placed the journal on the coffee table, as if distance could nullify its influence, and crept to her apartment door. She pressed her ear against the cool wood. The hallway was silent.
Her phone was in her hand before she realized she'd picked it up. Who did she call? The police? "Hello, there's a growling smell in my building." The super? Old Mr. Henderson, who lived on the first floor and complained about the "youths" playing their music too loud? He'd hear nothing, smell nothing. She'd be the crazy girl in 3B.
Logic warred with a deeper, primal knowledge. Something was wrong. Something was here.
She spent the night on her couch, wrapped in a blanket, every light in the apartment blazing. She didn't sleep. She watched the shadows thrown by the bookshelves, waiting for them to move on their own. The journal sat on the table, a dark eye watching her back.
Dawn came, grey and slow. The normal sounds of the building returning—a toilet flushing, a door closing—felt like a rebuke to her terror. The strange cold had dissipated. The feral smell was gone, replaced by the mundane odor of brewing coffee from a neighbor.
By the full light of a cloudy morning, the fear of the night before seemed hysterical. Exhaustion made everything dull. She showered, dressed, moving through her routine on autopilot. The journal went back into the locked filing cabinet at the shop. She ignored the drawer as if it were radioactive.
The day at The Quill & Tomb was a blur of routine transactions. She fumbled change. She mis-shelved two books. The blue-haired woman's words—The Flicker. Ask for Wren.—echoed in the empty spaces between customers. She thought about the utility van. She thought about Marcus's too-calm gaze.
Most of all, she thought about the growl.
At closing time, her courage, or perhaps her desperation, crystallized into a decision. She couldn't live another night like the last one. She needed to know.
She waited until she saw old Mr. Henderson leave for his evening walk, then she took the master key ring from its hook under the counter—the super had given her a copy years ago for emergencies, trusting her steadiness. Her hand didn't shake as she selected the heavy, old-fashioned key for the second-floor storage unit. It felt cold, like the journal.
The hallway on the second floor was poorly lit, a single bulb casting a sickly yellow glow. The door to unit 2C was unmarked, painted the same drab beige as all the others. Silence pressed heavily here, thicker than in her apartment. The air was still and dust-choked.
She fit the key into the lock. It turned with a gritty, protesting screech that seemed far too loud.
The door swung inward onto darkness. A wave of air rushed out, carrying with it the smell. Not just the feral musk now, but something sharper, like burnt hair and spoiled meat. And underneath it, that same metallic, ozone charge that made the hair on her arms stand up.
Her phone's flashlight cut a wobbly beam through the gloom. The unit was small, about ten-by-ten, and should have been crammed with the detritus of past tenants—boxes, old furniture. It was nearly empty.
In the center of the concrete floor was a large, dark stain. It wasn't paint. It was porous, soaked into the concrete like old blood, but black in the beam of her light. Around it, the floor was scratched. Not random scratches. Long, parallel gouges, deep and savage, as if made by something enormous trying to gain purchase or claw its way out.
Her breath hitched. The beam of her light trembled, catching something in the far corner. A pile of… things. She took a step closer, the smell intensifying.
They were remains. A large, gnawed bone, too big for a dog. Clumps of dark, coarse fur matted with something sticky. And feathers. A mess of grey and white pigeon feathers, torn and scattered, some stuck to the wall with a substance she didn't want to identify.
This was no raccoon. This was no stray.
A low, rhythmic sound reached her ears. A drip. Plink… plink… plink. Coming from above. She slowly raised the beam of light toward the ceiling.
Something was drawn there. Not with paint or chalk. It looked burned or etched into the concrete itself. It was a symbol, a complex, asymmetrical knot of intersecting lines and sharp angles that hurt her eyes to follow. It was the same pattern as the clasp on the journal. At the center of the symbol, a dark, viscous liquid was slowly welling from a crack in the concrete, gathering into a fat drop before falling to the stained floor below.
Plink.
This was a place. A used place. A hungry place.
A floorboard creaked directly behind her in the hallway.
Elena whirled, her heart slamming against her ribs, the phone light flying wildly across the walls.
A man stood in the doorway, silhouetted by the weak hall light. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and he filled the space completely. It wasn't Mr. Henderson. It wasn't Marcus.
This man wore dark, practical clothing that seemed to absorb the light. His posture was relaxed, but it was the relaxed readiness of a predator at rest. She couldn't see his face in the shadow, but she could feel his gaze on her, heavy and assessing.
"You shouldn't be here," he said. His voice was a deep rumble, devoid of alarm, stating a simple fact. It was the voice that belonged to the growl.
Elena's mouth was dry. She couldn't speak. Her mind screamed at her to run, but her feet were rooted to the spot. The phone light, still raised, shook in her hand.
He took a single step into the room, and the light from the hallway caught the side of his face. High cheekbones, a strong jaw shadowed with stubble. And his eyes. In the erratic beam of her phone, they didn't reflect light like a human's. They seemed to capture it, holding a faint, molten gold glow deep within.
He looked past her, at the stained floor, the etched symbol on the ceiling, his expression grim. "It's been feeding," he said, more to himself than to her. Then those gold-touched eyes locked back onto hers. "And now it knows you've seen its den."
"What… what is it?" The words scraped out of her throat.
"A problem," he said, his gaze dropping briefly to her hand, the one still clutching the key ring. His nostrils flared, almost imperceptibly. "One you're not equipped to handle, Miss Vance." He knew her name. Of course he did. "You need to leave this city. Tonight."
The blunt command broke through her paralysis, sparking a flare of defiance amidst the terror. "This is my home. My shop."
A humorless, sharp smile touched his lips. "Not for long. The things that are waking up… they have a taste for what you are." He took another step closer. The air around him seemed to vibrate with a low, sub-audible pressure. The smell of him—clean, cold air, leather, and that wild, electric undercurrent—overwhelmed the rot in the room. "The flicker of power in you is like a beacon in the fog. They'll come. Or worse, the Conclave's Hounds will find you first, and they won't ask questions before they leash or put you down."
Every word was a hammer blow. What you are. Power. Conclave. Hounds. The journal's ravings were spilling into her world, given voice by this impossible man with animal eyes.
"Who are you?" she demanded, her voice stronger now, fueled by a desperate anger.
He was close enough now that she could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the absolute, unnerving stillness in his posture. "Kaelen Blackwood," he said, the name a statement of territory. "And you are standing in a world that will eat you alive if you don't run." He looked toward the hallway, his head tilting as if listening to something she couldn't hear. His expression tightened. "Too late. They're here."
A distant crash echoed from the street below, followed by the sharp, unmistakable report of gunfire. Not the pop of a handgun. Something heavier, more controlled. Then screams.
Kaelen Blackwood's hand shot out, not to grab her, but to push her firmly back against the wall, out of the line of sight of the door. His touch was like being shoved by a column of living granite. "Stay down," he growled, and the command in his voice was primal, impossible to disobey.
In the hallway, the single light bulb shattered, plunging them into near darkness save for the frantic beam of her dropped phone. From the stairwell came the sound of heavy, booted feet moving fast, and a new smell cut through the rot and the wildness.
Clean, sharp, chemical. Like antiseptic and gun oil.
The Purifiers had arrived.