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Hellfire sits low inside it—that part I recognize now, dark and heavy enough to vibrate through my bones.

But the other power is still there too.

Bright, clean, and tangled so tightly through the hellhound frequency that separating one from the other is impossible.

I still have no-fucking-clue what it is.

I only know I’m getting closer.

The farther I walk, the stronger the residue becomes, until I’m not so much following it anymore as letting it pull me forward.

Somewhere ahead, beyond another wall of pine and darkness, something happened on this mountain.

Something big enough to tear through the supernatural soundscape for miles.

And apparently I’m stupid enough to go looking for it.

Not with my ears. Sirens don’t lead with their ears. We lead with something deeper, a sense that sits inside us in the throat and the soft place behind the teeth where song lives. I open that sense now the way you open a window and brace for whatever comes through.

What does come through nearly drops me to my knees.

The roar—even at its source, even as a residue of something already spent—it is enormous. It carries two things that have no business existing in the same space—a hellhound’s infernal bass, the kind of sound that belongs to fire, and the deep, old dark of Hell’s edge with something holy wound through it. Genuinely, structurally holy, the kind of divine resonance that makes every siren sense I possess recoil on instinct the way they do around angelic light. Except it isn’t hostile, and it isn’t burning me.

It’s just… there.

An intricate weave of power.

As natural in its context as a harmony is natural in a chord, but this is every bit as unnatural.

Something made this.

Something created a sound that shouldn’t exist and unleashed it hard enough to reach me from miles away.

And this is where it came from.

The earth beneath my feet has already been forced back together, a dark seam cutting through the clearing where something split it apart. But beneath what human senses can detect, the place is still screaming. That wrong note clings to it, faint now but unmistakable, hellhound tangled with something I don’t know.

I take a step closer.

It gets louder.

So, I keep walking.

The trees close around me, the mountain dark, swallowing the last of the road noise, and I move deeper into Kings’ territory with my pulse running loud and my siren instincts screaming at the same pitch that twelve years of alone have taught me to always, always heed.

And still, I keep walking.

Because that sound is unfinished.

I heard it the moment I felt the roar like a question that ended before the sentence closed. Like a note reaching for resolution and never finding it. I am a siren, and the Conclave has spent my entire life telling me that makes me their property, and every supernatural authority I have ever encountered has looked at my voice and seen a weapon, an asset, or a threat.

I have never, not once, moved toward something that called to me rather than away from it.

Whatever is out here in the dark and tore through every layer I can sense hard enough to send that inexplicable sound ripping across miles of mountain…

I need to understand it.

I need to find it.