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My hellhound recoils so violently I feel it retreat inside me, and across from me, Sentinel’s wings snap wide with a violent rush of feathers. Gold flashes along their edges.
Malgrave’s head tilts slightly.
Listening.
His mouth doesn’t move, but his throat does.
Once.
Like he’s swallowing words instead of speaking them.
Then it stops.
The pressure disappears, and the heat goes with it.
Malgrave’s eyes lock onto mine again.
Calm.
Still.
Like nothing fucking happened.
I saw it.
My hellhound sure as fuck felt it.
And when I look at Sentinel, the heavenly prick is staring at Malgrave like he just heard a whisper from somewhere he never expected to hear one.
He felt it too.
His wings go rigid. His head turns a fraction toward Malgrave, his gold eyes narrowing with the focus he usually saves for tracking something invisible. When his gaze cuts to mine, there’s a question sitting right behind it that has nothing to do with my missing voice.
I lift my chin at him. What?
He shakes his head once, barely, a promise to explain later folded into the motion.
Malgrave’s robes settle around him as if nothing happened at all, his voice sliding back into the room smooth as oil on water. “The binding holds until containment is engineered. I’ll be in contact.” He turns, unhurried, and walks back out through the doors he never touched to open, and the temperature in the hallway drops back toward normal the second he clears the porch.
I stand there working my jaw around a growl that isn’t there anymore, around a bark that used to be the first thing out of me in any fight, and all I get is silence and the taste of ash on the back of my tongue.
Sentinel falls in beside me as I head for the garage, my only sanctuary left when words won’t come. He doesn’t say anything until we’re clear of the clubhouse, until it’s just the two of us and the cold night air.
“That wasn’t magic,” he says quietly, eyes still fixed on the road Malgrave disappeared down. “Not the binding. Something underneath it. Dark, old…” He shakes his head, frustration pulling tight across his face. “It was there and gone before I could get a read on it.”
I stop walking and hold his gaze, letting the silence say what my throat can’t. Watch him.
Sentinel nods once, grim. “I’m already watching. I got this, brother.”
I should have known the winged asshole would be able to understand me even if I couldn’t talk.
Chapter Five
ECHO
The Next Day
The frequency doesn’t get quieter the closer I get. It gets heavier, like walking through water that thickens with every step, until even breathing takes effort. Six miles of dense pine and granite switchback separate me from where I left the truck, and by the time the tree line breaks apart into a scarred clearing, the sun has dropped low enough that the shadows stretch long and thin across the ground.
