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Now I’m starting to wonder what the hell happens if I start following her song.
Chapter Nine
ECHO
The Next Morning
Something’s shifted in the clubhouse since last night, and I can’t decide if it’s the building or me.
I find a woman in the kitchen before the sun is fully up, hunched over a ledger with a mug of something that smells like burned cinnamon, her dark hair twisted up and held with what looks suspiciously like a bike part. She doesn’t glance up when I sit across from her, just slides a second mug in my direction like she’s been expecting company.
“Hey, I’m Roxy… couldn’t sleep either?” she asks.
I wrap my hands around the mug and let the heat bleed into my palms, watching steam curl toward the exposed beams overhead. A faint hum still lingers beneath my skin, an aftershock from last night, from Carnage’s mouth against mine and the silence where his voice should have been. I press the memory down before it can climb any higher. “Hi… Echo.”
She weakly smiles back at me. “I know. You’re the new hot thing around here.”
Inhaling deeply, my mind shifts back to Carnage. “I need to understand what happened to him.”
Roxy sets her pen down, the hint of amusement around her mouth disappearing as she looks at me. Something in her expression changes, the easy warmth from a second ago giving way to something far more careful. “I assume you mean Carnage? What do you already know?”
“That a Hellwarden bound his voice.” My thumb traces the rim of the mug. “That the council called it containment.”
“That’s the polite version.” She leans back, her chair creaking beneath her, and gives me a long look like she’s trying to work out what the hell to do with me. “You felt it, right? When you tracked the tear in the Appalachians. What his roar actually was?”
“Hellfire braided through something holy.” Saying it aloud puts a weight in the room that wasn’t there a second ago. “I’ve never heard anything like it. No siren has, not in generations of history passed down to me.”
“Because it’s never existed before.” Roxy’s fingers curl around her own mug, her knuckles paling. “Carnage didn’t just make noise. He fused two forces that are supposed to repel each other on every-fucking-level. Heaven and Hell don’t mix, Echo. They’re not supposed to. And he did it by accident, trying to save trafficked kids, and it terrified every supernatural authority within a thousand miles.”
My stomach drops hard enough to make me feel sick, tension pulling through my body before she even finishes. “So, they silenced him instead of asking why?”
“They silenced him because it was easier than admitting they don’t understand what he is now.” She exhales through her nose. “Malgrave volunteered to do the binding. Nobody assigned him. He heard what happened, and he was here in hours, moving like he already had the paperwork drafted before the council even finished arguing about jurisdiction.”
The name hits, and every muscle in my body pulls tight before I can stop it.
I know that name.
My grandmother used to talk about Malgrave when I was little.
Never loudly.
I remember sitting on the stone floor at her feet while she spoke to the older sirens, blowing warm air into my frozen hands and only catching pieces of what they were saying.
Malgrave brokers.
Malgrave collects.
I didn’t understand what any of it meant back then. I knew the adults got quieter whenever his name came up, and that was enough to tell me he was someone I never wanted to meet.
I learned the rest when I got older.
Fae courts had spent centuries killing each other until Malgrave stepped between them and somehow got both sides to stop. Vampire bloodlines that should have wiped each other out had put down their weapons because he told them to.
But Malgrave never did anything for free.
Every deal came with something owed at the end of it, and nobody ever seemed to know when he’d come looking for payment.
That was the part my grandmother made damn sure I understood.
