This Quiet Resonance

Beacon Hills looks smaller from behind the Jeep’s cracked windshield. Smaller and too bright, like the sun decided to move closer while I was away. The familiar streets don’t rearrange beneath the tires, but something inside me does, a shuffle I can’t make stop. I park in front of my dad’s house and sit with my hands on the steering wheel, watching the dust drift in the late afternoon light as if it knows where it’s going.

The porch steps complain the same way they always have, and the front door sticks a little in the heat. The house smells like coffee, gun oil, and my dad’s aftershave. Relief hits me so fast it steals my breath. I lean my forehead against the cool edge of the door for a second, breathing in home like it might anchor me, like I could tie a knot around my ribs and stop the slide.

“Hey, kid.” Dad’s voice floats from the kitchen. I follow it, heavier than I should be, backpack bumping my leg. He looks older than the last time I saw him. Not in a dramatic way. Just a touch more silver at his temples, a deeper line at the corner of his mouth. He sets down his mug and crosses the room in two strides, pulling me into a hug that is warmth and flannel and everything I didn’t let myself miss.

“I thought you were coming tomorrow,” he says into my hair.

“Surprise,” I murmur against his shoulder, and it comes out rusty.

He pulls back and looks at me with that soft scrutiny that makes me feel ten and seen at the same time. “You staying long?”

“Indefinite.” The word lands between us. honest and heavy. “The program and I… we’re on a break.”

Concern flickers, then he nods. “Okay. You can tell me what you want, when you want.” He squeezes my arm and lets go before I can unravel. “You hungry? There’s leftover lasagna or I can make eggs—”

“Lasagna’s great,” I say, because this is normal, and normal is a blessing.

We eat at the kitchen table. The scrape of forks, the hum of the fridge, the muted sound of a baseball game coming from a neighbor’s TV through the open window. He asks about the drive, if the Jeep behaved, if I want him to look at the brakes. I ask about the station, if he’s sleeping, if Beacon Hills has decided to take up arson as a hobby again. He snorts, and the tension eases an inch.

Later, my room is exactly as I left it and not, a museum exhibit of a guy who thought leaving meant momentum. The string board is gone, dismantled in a fit of optimism last year before I left for Quantico’s pre-program. In its place, a blank wall. I toss my backpack on the bed and lie down beside it. The ceiling stares back, flat and clean, not answering the questions I don’t say out loud. The quiet presses at my ears, the kind that amplifies every heartbeat.

Morning comes early because my body refuses to give me grace. My dad’s shift started before sunrise; his note on the counter is neat and brief: Coffee’s on. There’s a spare key in the bowl if you go out. Be safe. I make toast and pour coffee into the chipped mug that still says Stilinski like it’s a title. I stand at the sink and look out at the backyard, the old oak tree, the swing that never got fixed. The world looks the same. I feel like someone moved half an inch to the left when I wasn’t looking.

Scott’s clinic is out past the hardware store, tucked into a building with faded paint and a cheerful sign that doesn’t match the exhaustion wound into the bones of everyone who works there. The bell over the door jingles, and a wave of antiseptic and wet fur hits me. Scott’s hunched over a German shepherd with a bandaged paw, talking to the owner in that soft tone that used to be for panicked teenagers and is now for worried pet parents. He looks up when I say his name. For a second, his face is sixteen again—open and startled—and then he’s on me, arms tight enough to squeeze air out of my lungs.

“You’re here,” he says, pulling back with a grin that makes my chest ache. “You didn’t tell me.”

“I didn’t want to jinx it,” I say, because that sounds better than I couldn’t say the words without choking. “How’s it going?”

He takes a breath like he knows the real question and answers the simple one. “Busy. Good. Mostly. Long hours.” His eyes flick to the examination rooms. The clinic hums around us, phones ringing, a puppy protesting from somewhere in the back.

We try to cram six months into ten minutes. He tells me about Mrs. Delaney’s cat who refuses to stop climbing onto the clinic roof, about interns who faint at the sight of blood. I tell him I came back to recalibrate, to figure out what’s next. He nods like this is an acceptable phrase for the space between two cliffs.

“You staying?” he asks finally, voice low.

“As long as it takes.” It’s the truth, even if I don’t know what it means.

He gets called away to consult on a lab with a mysterious rash, and the space beside me is empty in a way that mirrors the rest of the day. I linger anyway, watch him move through his world with a confidence that used to be ours together. When I leave, he presses a to-go coffee into my hand and promises dinner soon. The promise hangs between us, intangible and earnest.

On the drive home, Beacon Hills rolls by like a set I’ve seen a hundred times: the school with its cracked steps, the grocery store with the hand-lettered SALE sign that never changes, the reserve’s tree line standing stubborn against the sky. I tell myself that the quiet is good. That it means safe. That it’s okay to breathe.

I text Lydia out of habit, thumbs hovering before I type and erase three different openings. I finally settle on a picture of the Jeep hood ornament and the caption: Back in the land of questionable decisions. Ten minutes later, my phone pings with a photo of a whiteboard crammed with complicated symbols and a message: MIT is a jealous god. I miss your chaos. Be safe, idiot. Attached is a heart that she’d deny sending in court.

It makes me laugh, and then I’m blinking too fast. I swipe at my eyes and head inside, the air cool against my skin. The house creaks, and for the first time since I got here, the sound doesn’t hit like a phantom. I make another cup of coffee I don’t need and sit at the kitchen table with a legal pad I don’t have a reason to use. My pen hovers, ink ready to commit to something I can’t name. I draw a line. Another. A dumb little box in the corner, a roadmap of nothing that settles me anyway.

There’s nothing pressing. No alarms. No immediate danger demanding a plan. The absence should be relief. It’s a silence I can’t interpret, a gap where purpose used to sit. I look at the doorway that leads to the living room, at the couch where so many nights ended in exhaustion and adrenaline comedowns, and tell myself that the quiet is allowed. That I’m allowed to sit in it without leaping to fill it with motion.

I try. I fail. I stand up, can’t help the restless energy that spikes under my skin, and end up outside on the porch with the mug warm in my hands. The neighborhood is still. A dog barks once and then stops. Somewhere, a sprinkler ticks. The sky is wide and mild. I breathe, and it catches, but I do it again. Again.

I’m home. I say it out loud, softer than a whisper, like I’m afraid it will hear me and leave. The word doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t need to. It settles down beside the others and waits.

The call comes just after noon, cutting through the easy clatter of me pretending to care about daytime television. Dad’s voice sharpens in that way that means work switched on behind his eyes. He stands in the kitchen, one hand on the radio at his shoulder, nodding even though no one can see him. I watch the change happen—the shift into Sheriff Stilinski—and something tightens in my chest that’s not jealousy but maybe muscle memory. He hangs up and looks at me.

“Got to go out to the preserve,” he says, grabbing his keys from the bowl. “Hiker reported missing. Car found off Fire Road Twelve.”

The words preserve and missing start the engine I keep pretending I turned off. “I can come,” I say too fast. “I won’t be in the way. I’ll just—observe.” I lift my hands to prove how harmless they are.

He gives me a look that is equal parts amused and exhausted. “You just got back.”

“I also just accumulated a year’s worth of protocol and procedure lectures, which I will happily recite on the drive if it gets me a seat.” I don’t mention the itch under my skin, the way the phrase car found off Fire Road Twelve makes old maps unfold in my head.

He hesitates. That’s all the invitation I need. “I’m not going to touch anything,” I add quickly. “I’ll stay behind the tape and make insightful comments about chain of custody.”

“You’ll listen,” he says, pointing a finger at me for emphasis. “You’ll stay behind me. And if I tell you to leave—”

“I’ll leave,” I lie with a straight face. He knows it. He sighs and shoves a spare radio into my hand anyway.

The preserve is the same and not. The trees huddle like they’re sharing a secret, shadows pooled at their roots despite the bright day. Deputy Harper’s cruiser sits nose-first against a berm, lights turning lazily. There’s already yellow tape looped between two trees, flapping in the slight breeze. A dusty Subaru is parked half off the dirt track, windows up, doors closed, neat as a picture.

Harper meets us at the tape, jaw tight. “Sheriff. Car’s locked. No sign of a struggle around the vehicle. No footprints leading away we can find. Wallet in the console. Phone’s on the passenger seat, playing some… message. The girlfriend says he was supposed to meet her at the trailhead at ten. Didn’t show. She called it in at eleven-thirty.”

Dad nods, scanning, absorbing, the way he always does. He glances at me once to make sure I’m still on the correct side of the tape. I lift my hands again. See? Harmless. He ducks under the tape and I follow at a respectable distance, heat pressing at the back of my neck. Up close, the car looks almost too normal. Dust coats the windshield. There’s a map folded on the dash, a dangling pine-tree air freshener that gave up the ghost sometime last decade.

“Window’s got no sign of forced entry,” Dad says, mostly to Harper. He tilts his head, listening. I tilt mine too, catching it—the thin, tinny sound of a voice filtered through a blown-out speaker. The hairs on my arms lift.

It’s coming from inside the car. There’s a phone face-down on the passenger seat, screen lit, the voice muffled by upholstery and the glass between us. Dad tries the handle. Locked. He looks at me again. I hold my breath as he uses a slim jim from the cruiser to pop the lock, that practiced efficiency a strange balm. The door opens with a soft sigh that feels too loud.

He doesn’t touch anything yet, just leans in, eyes scanning. The voice gets clearer. It’s a woman’s voice, distorted around the edges, like it’s pushing through water. “Evan? Evan, can you hear me? I’m so—” The word breaks into static and then loops back, the same faulty start repeated. The timbre of it scrapes along something raw inside me. My stomach flips.

“Who’s Evan?” I ask, even though my mouth feels dry. I look at the registration on the dash—Evan Mercer, Beacon Hills address. Late twenties, if the photo on his gym card tucked in the console is current. He likes trail mix with M&M’s, if the open bag in the cup holder is a clue.

Harper consults his notes. “Girlfriend said he’s thirty. Teaches at the community college. Parents are deceased. Mother passed two years ago, cancer.”

The voice on the phone says his name again, and there’s something about the syllables that makes the back of my throat ache. I step closer to the open door, careful. The phone isn’t on a call; it’s a voice memo, the waveform bouncing as it plays the same thirty seconds on repeat. The contact name at the top isn’t saved. There’s just a number and the word Mom handwritten in the title. My breath stalls.

Dad shoots me a warning look like he can feel me unraveling. I swallow and point instead. “That’s not a call. That’s a recording. Someone sent him a file?”

Harper shakes his head. “No message received today. Latest was last week from his department head. This file was recorded yesterday at 2:14 a.m. on this device.”

“By who,” I say softly, even though I can read the answer. The metadata shows the creation on the same phone. We all listen again, helpless, to the way the voice thickens on I’m so— and resets. The smell in the car is the usual stale air of a sealed space and something under it like ozone after a storm. It crawls into my nose and sits there.

“No prints on the exterior,” Harper continues. “We’ll have forensics take it in. No scuffs, no signs of around-the-car activity that suggest panic. He parked, turned off the engine, listened to this, and then… nothing.”

Dad sets his jaw. He glances toward the trees, that familiar, resigned regret that he can’t smell the world the way my friends can. I can’t either, but I’ve learned to read emptiness. I force my voice to steady. “Dad.”

He straightens, eyes on me. I pull back an inch so I don’t crowd him. “This isn’t normal,” I say, because we both live in a town where that word is flexible. “It looks like he walked away from a locked car without leaving sign. He left his phone. You know as well as I do that people don’t go anywhere without their phones anymore unless they’re distracted or led.”

“Led by what?” Harper asks, more to the trees than me.

The voice memo clicks and resets. Evan? Evan, can you hear me? I’m so— The way the last word never completes hits like a near-miss. My chest tightens. “Grief,” I blurt before I can think better of it. Harper frowns. I barrel through. “Look, the voicemail loop—if that’s his mother’s voice, if he recorded it yesterday in the middle of the night, and if the only thing out here besides trees is the preserve—” I swallow back the rest because it sounds insane: and the preserve is full of things that know how to use our soft spots.

Dad watches me with that cop look that also used to be a dad look. “You want to see the rest of the file,” he says, already anticipating me.

“I want to help,” I say, and it’s not about adrenaline or the part of me that misses the chase. It’s the quiet in my room, the blank wall where a board might go. It’s the way that voice felt like a hand closing around my wrist from under cold water.

He hesitates again. The sun filters through the branches, dappling his uniform. Finally, he nods once, short. “Back at the station,” he says. “Not here. Not now.”

“Understood,” I tell him, and this time it’s not a lie. I step back, let him work, let Harper bag the phone with careful hands. The memo still faintly bleeds through the plastic. Evan? Evan—

The trees don’t answer. The air tastes like rain that never came. I wrap my arms around myself and pretend it’s because of the breeze. When Dad lifts the tape for me on the way to the cruiser, I duck under and draw a breath that feels a little too shallow.

In the car, as we pull away, I can’t stop thinking about how you lock a door behind you and walk into the woods to meet a voice that isn’t there.

The station is a hum of keyboards and stale coffee when Dad gives me the bare bones and a folder with half the meat stripped from it. He gives me a look that says he didn’t see himself hand it over. I nod like I didn’t see it, either.

By late afternoon, I’m back on Fire Road Twelve, unofficial enough to make my own tape with a line of mountain ash tucked in my jacket, just in case. The Subaru is gone. The tire ruts are a memory, softened by wind. The air holds the same faint smell from earlier—like an outlet blown, like the second before a storm cracks. Ozone threaded with something sweeter, thick behind my teeth. Regret, if regret had weight.

I stand where the driver’s side had been. I listen to leaves worry against each other. The preserve doesn’t like to be watched, but I have practice pretending I belong. I angle toward the treeline, following the feeling of pressure in my ears that isn’t altitude. It’s a push, a low hum somewhere under sound. Lydia would know the frequency and write it down to three decimal places. I just feel it like a splinter I can’t get out.

The trail doesn’t look like a trail. It looks like a choice. My boots sink into damp earth, and the trees crowd closer as if I’m letting them. I keep my palms open at my sides, which is ridiculous, but the quiet here feels like a church after hours, and I don’t want to announce myself with the wrong kind of noise.

There’s the snap of a twig to my left, the hitch of breath that isn’t mine. I roll my eyes at the universe and turn.

Derek Hale steps out from behind a pine like he grew there. His shoulders fill the space between two trunks. He’s in a dark henley and jeans that look like they’ve survived more than one argument with brambles. He’s got a few days’ worth of scruff that makes his mouth look sharper, or maybe that’s just my stupid heart making unhelpful notes. His eyes flick down my body in a fast, clinical sweep and then back up to my face. He doesn’t smell like ozone. He smells like rain on iron and smoke that never burned out.

“Of course,” I say, because my mouth misses me when I’m gone. “Because why wouldn’t you be here. Do you have a punch card for dramatic appearances in the preserve or do they just comp you at this point?”

His expression is the same one that used to make me talk faster in high school: tired patience stretched over something darker. “You’re trespassing,” he says. It’s not a growl. It’s just flat and infuriatingly adult.

“So are you,” I shoot back. “Unless the trees filed the paperwork and put you on payroll. Do they do direct deposit into brooding?”

He stares like he’s deciding whether to turn around and walk away. He doesn’t. “You shouldn’t be here.”

I throw a hand at the empty road behind me. “Says the guy who follows weird scents into the woods for fun.”

“Not for fun.” He steps closer. The hum under my skin spikes and then veers to the right, like a compass needle reacting to something I don’t have a name for. Derek’s head tips a fraction, the way he listens with more than ears. He breathes in and there’s the faintest flare of his nostrils. “It’s not gone,” he murmurs, almost to himself. “Just thin.”

The hairs at my nape go up. “You smelled it earlier, too?” I ask, even though that’s a stupid question. If Derek’s here, he smelled something.

He cuts his gaze to me, jaw tight. “I followed it from the car. I lost it. It isn’t a trail. It’s more like… a pressure change, like when a storm’s about to break.”

“Hey, look at that. We speak the same language now.” I point to the path he just emerged from. “I was headed that way.”

“You were headed nowhere.” He steps into my space, not touching, just there, the heat of him like a wall I would maybe lean against if I had terrible judgment. “Go home, Stiles.”

I don’t flinch. “You don’t get to tell me to go home.”

His eyes flicker, wolf bright for half a breath. He reins it back so fast I almost think I imagined it. “I’m telling you because the thing that did this doesn’t care about rules. You walk toward it with your brain full of… of that,” he says, gesturing at me like I am an overflowing mess, which, fair, “and it will use it.”

“My brain is excellent,” I say, because if I don’t push back I might say thank you for being worried and that sounds like a mistake. “And Dad asked for help, which he did not, by the way, from you, because he likes warrants and documentation and not his unofficial supernatural consultant making footprints all over his crime scene.”

Something almost like a smile ghosts over Derek’s mouth and vanishes. “You’re still making everything louder,” he says.

“And you’re still giving me orders like that works.” I shift around him and start toward where the pressure pushes. He makes a low sound that’s not a word, and a second later his hand closes around my elbow. His grip is firm and hot through my jacket. The jolt of contact shoots straight through me, inconvenient and distracting.

He drops my arm like it burned him. “Stiles.”

“Derek,” I mimic, and then sigh because fighting for the sake of it is exhausting and also, again, inconvenient, because the part of me that thinks this is a good idea enjoys his attention too much. “Look, I felt it too. The… pressure. The hum.” I tap my temple. “And I can help. I’m not seventeen. I know how to not die.”

He exhales slowly, eyes on the trees beyond me. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then enlighten me,” I say. “Use your words. What are you tracking?”

He hesitates. The pause stretches long enough that I think he’ll walk. Finally, he says, “It smells like static. Like old rain. And…” He swallows, the muscle in his jaw jumping. “Like grief. Not human, not like we smell it. Old.”

The word sits heavy. I nod once, my throat tight. “Yeah,” I say quietly. “I got that.”

He looks back at me and something eases, marginally, around his eyes. “Go home,” he says again, gentler. “I’ll call you if I need… if there’s anything to… share.” The last word looks awkward in his mouth, like he doesn’t want to give it shape.

I should push harder. I should stick to his side and make him admit that my research has saved his ass and mine more than once. But the pressure in the air shifts again, a flick of cold across my cheek, as if something walked by us in another layer of the world.

We both feel it. We both turn.

Nothing moves. The wind dies. The quiet presses in until my ears ring.

Derek’s hand lifts again like he’ll touch me, then falls. “Seriously. Go,” he says, eyes still on the trees. “If it wants you, it’ll find you. Don’t help it.”

My laugh is short and humorless. “That’s reassuring.”

“It’s honest.” He takes a step backward, deeper into green. “Stay away from this, Stiles. It doesn’t concern you.”

The thing is, that sentence has never been true here. Everything concerns us in Beacon Hills. It’s why I came home. It’s why my chest hurts when I hear voices that aren’t mine loop through empty cars.

I lift my chin. “Too late,” I say, and the air hums like it heard me.

He opens his mouth like he’ll argue, then closes it. He gives me one last look, unreadable and too long, and then he’s gone, swallowed by the trees without a sound.

I stand in the space he left, the taste of ozone sharp on my tongue, and try to slow my breathing. The pressure recedes a little, like the tide pulling back to gather itself.

“Okay,” I tell the woods, my voice small and stubborn. “Fine. We’ll do this the hard way.”

I don’t go home. I go to the only place that feels like a neutral zone—my room, the desk that still has a gouge from where I dropped a textbook sophomore year, the old laptop that wheezes but still boots to the FBI resources portal because I never remembered to revoke my own access. The house creaks around me in the careful way it does when Dad is at work and I’m alone with the sound of my own keys.

I pull up the public case reports first, the ones that got scrubbed of the strange. Missing persons, no signs of struggle, vehicles left locked or doors dead-bolted behind them. The dates sit there like lumps. I sort, filter, cross-reference with OCR’d PDFs of old Beacon Gazette issues, half the pages crooked scans that make my eyes ache.

Beacon Hills has always kept secrets in neat lines: ten-year cycles of violence, spikes in ER admissions, clusters of suicides people chalk up to seasonal affective disorder. This is different. The disappearances aren’t grouped by accident. They sprawl across time but fall into resonance. 1989. 1963. 1945. 1922. Each cluster follows a loss everyone knew but no one could fix. The mill fire that took four workers and left a town drowning in smoke. The flood that ate downtown. The war years when telegrams piled up. The Hale fire. My stomach turns. Of course.

I open another tab. FBI training wheels come with a database of anomalies. They teach you to de-mystify them by calling them patterns. There’s a section on influence phenomena—voices in empty rooms, suicides that look like contagion. I don’t need a profile to tell me the thing we’re tracking isn’t just smell and shadow. It’s a presence that knows how to lean.

I search the words that hum in my head: echo, grief, residual, siren. A handful of hits pop from other counties with too much history and not enough salt. A fisherman pulled from a calm lake after walking into the water fully clothed. A woman who stepped off a curb and into traffic without looking up from a voicemail that said, “I forgive you.” A preacher who locked his parishioners in to keep the voices out and then disappeared through a window that didn’t open. Notes mention electromagnetic spikes, localized cold, auditory anomalies mimicking dead relatives. The workups end in bureaucratic shrugs.

I swallow coffee gone bitter and start a spreadsheet, because I am my father’s son. Location. Time. Known communal event. Witness reports. Audio. Smell. Ozone keeps showing up as a word cops use when they don’t have other words. So does sweet. So does heavy.

Local folklore is quieter but sharper. Beacon Hills History Society has an archive no one uses unless they’re that kid on a field trip who doesn’t want to go back to class. I click through scanned pamphlets from the 1900s that talk about “the woman at the river that sang you into the mud” and “the sound under the wind you shouldn’t follow.” A handwritten marginal note from someone’s grandmother says, In winter we put bread under the door so the hungry wouldn’t come calling. The hungry. The Echo doesn’t eat flesh. It eats the space grief leaves.

I run a hand over my face and text Lydia even though I know she’s probably in a class surrounded by people who can reverse engineer aircraft in their heads. Do you believe in sirens? I add, Not like Greek, more like psychic. She sends back a string of question marks and a link to a paper she read last year on parasitic thoughtforms that hitchhike on community trauma. Of course she has a paper.

Does it mimic? I type. Make you hear what you want most or dread most?

Her typing bubbles appear and disappear. That tracks with banshee lore tangentially. Many cultures have grief entities. Did you hear something?

I stare at that. The car. Evan? The loop that made my bones ache. I type, Yes. Then delete it and send, Working theory. Will call later.

My cursor blinks on a map of Beacon County. I overlay population density, crime reports, Lydia’s old notes about ley lines, the Nemeton like a knot in a frayed rope. The clusters bloom around places with footprints made of mourning. Hospital. Cemetery. The reserve where they held the vigil after the fire. The old Argent house, now rebuilt but still a scar.

The Sheriff’s database has access to voicemail records with warrants. I don’t have a warrant but I have a password. I pull up the hiker’s last call log. One voicemail saved and played over and over the day he disappeared. Time stamps every ten minutes for an hour. My chest tightens. I put in a FOIA request with a fake name like that’ll go faster than the end of the world. While I wait, I cue up the audio from the initial evidence report the deputy forgot to redact. The file is corrupted, distorted by a buzz that makes my teeth ache, but under it I can make out a woman’s voice. Evan? I miss you. Evan, please. The way she says please makes the hair on my arms stand up. It’s not just grief. It’s hunger wearing grief’s clothes.

I scroll the Holt case from ’63. A man left a nail gun running and walked away. Witnesses said they heard the factory whistle blow, only the whistle had been removed after the accident the week before. A note in the margin: five other workers reported hearing “Mama” in cold air.

The deeper I dig, the less I want to stop. The more the pattern clicks, the more it feels like sitting with a puzzle I already know the picture of. Because, yes, of course it ramps up after big losses. After the fire. After Allison. After the nogitsune. After the nights we spent calling names into empty rooms and getting answers we didn’t want.

I stop typing and press my thumb into my sternum. It aches there, a phantom pressure like someone leaning. My brain offers me my mother’s voice, soft and tired. I shut my eyes and put my forehead down on my wrist until the urge to listen passes.

I write Echo at the top of the file in a font that looks like nothing. Under it I write: Lures with personal auditory hooks tied to community-level grief. Feeds by keeping victims in liminal state. Doesn’t like bright, clean lines. Might be tied to an object or event that acts as a conduit.

I need Derek’s nose. I need Lydia’s math. I need to not be alone with my hands on a keyboard pretending this is just research. But I don’t call. I don’t text.

The house settles. A draft fingers the curtains like someone peering in. I look at the window and see my own reflection, pale and stubborn. I see the shape of my mouth twist like I might say a name that would open something.

I push my chair back, print the map and shove the warm paper into a folder until the edges bend. The evidence lines up too neatly to ignore. Every time this thing wakes, it does so when the town’s heart is already bruised. It knows when to knock.

I don’t answer. I stack the files, throw on a jacket, and gather what I can carry: mountain ash, a pen, the leather-bound notebook Lydia gave me after we beat the last thing that thought it could make a nest in my head. I tuck the folder under my arm and breathe.

The spreadsheet sits open on my screen, the dates marching down, the names blank where they’re not supposed to be. I underline the last cluster—this year—and circle the places that hum under my skin when I think about them.

If the Echo wants resonance, I’ll find where the sound is loudest. If it wants me to listen, it can wait. I lock the front door behind me and step onto the porch, the evening settling around me like a hand I won’t let push.

I make it as far as the porch stairs before my phone buzzes with nothing and the air turns thin. The street is calm, Beacon Hills pretending at sleep, but the quiet has an edge. I tell myself I’m going to drive past the preserve, maybe swing by the lot where Evan Parker’s Subaru is still sitting impounded, like proximity could shake something loose.

By the time I circle back, Dad’s cruiser is at the station and the house is dark. I creep up to my room with my arms full of folders and salt and stubbornness. The window is cracked for the breeze. I leave the lamp off and lay things on the bed in neat lines, like order could keep me from hearing anything but my own breath.

I’m halfway through penciling the Nemeton darker on my map when the hairs on my arms lift. Not the cold this time, not the press of an Echo’s attention. It’s the feeling of being watched by someone with a pulse.

The window shifts. No rattle. No scrape. A shadow blocks the streetlight, and then Derek’s face is at the glass, pale in the dark, eyes catching what little light there is. He doesn’t knock. He doesn’t need to. My heart goes off like a trapped bird anyway.

I move to the latch and push it up the last inch. He slides the window open with two careful fingers and slips inside the way he always does—like he belongs there and hates that about himself. He’s soaked to the shoulders, leather jacket damp, hair flattened by fog. He looks older than the last time I saw him a few hours ago, like the woods took something as payment.

“You couldn’t use the door like a normal person?” I whisper, because whatever we are, we’re still us.

“Your dad’s home.” His voice is low and rough, not sharp. He looks at me, then the spread of papers. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

That knocks around inside my chest. I step back to give him room. He doesn’t move farther than two steps, like he’s keeping himself from crossing some line. Rain has soaked into his jacket. I reach for the closet without thinking. “I have… uh, a towel.” I toss it at him and he catches it easily. He rubs it over his hair, scrubs his face, the movement quick, controlled, like he’s trying to erase whatever chased him here.

“What happened?” I ask, softer now.

He takes a second. The room smells like wet wool and ash. “I tracked from the car,” he says, eyes on the map, not me. “Picked it up easy. Ozone. Sweet, but wrong. It went to the tree line. It kept going.” He swallows, Adam’s apple shifting. “Then it went nowhere.”

“Nowhere,” I repeat, because words matter.

He nods once. His jaw works. “I’ve lost trails before. Wind shifts. Water. But this wasn’t that. It didn’t fade. It just… stopped. Like someone lifted up the world and put it down with a different sky. I’ve never—” He breaks off, pulls in a breath like it hurts. “I’ve never had it vanish like that.”

The corner of my desk digs into my hip. I put a hand there, press down. “That’s new. Bad new.”

“That’s why I’m here.” He drapes the towel around his neck, fingers worrying the edge. He looks away from the window and directly at me. The force of his focus could pin me to the floor. It’s not anger. It’s raw and tired. “And you were right.”

I blink. “I’m sorry, what? Could you repeat that at a more reasonable volume for posterity?”

His mouth twitches, almost a smile but not quite. “You were right,” he says again, quieter, like the words don’t want to leave his mouth. “This isn’t something I can track like a normal predator. Whatever it is… it’s using what people feel to move. That’s your lane.”

“My lane is a spreadsheet,” I say, but something in my chest unclenches. “And a theory. Maybe a good one.”

He steps closer, close enough that I can see the fine tremor in his hands where they grip the towel. “Tell me.”

So I do. I tap the map and walk him through the clusters, the decades, the way grief hangs like fog over certain places. I explain what I read about parasitic thoughtforms and how an anchor could be keeping it here. I tell him about the voicemail, even the way it made my ribs feel too tight. His eyes flick up at that, sharp with worry he doesn’t say out loud.

He doesn’t interrupt much. When he does, it’s practical. “What does it want?” “How does it choose?” “Does it take from anyone?”

“Wants attention, I think,” I say, following the line of my pencil from the hospital to the cemetery to the preserve. “Wants the open door grief leaves. The people it takes are already standing in it.”

He nods like that adds up to his nose. “The teacher,” he says. “Ms. Rivas. Her room… I could taste it there. Old tears.” He swallows again. “It makes you hear things.”

“Yeah.” I keep my voice even. “I think it can’t manifest fully unless the place is loud enough with that kind of feeling. That’s where we focus.”

We stand shoulder to shoulder over my desk, close enough that his damp sleeve brushes my arm. The contact is small but my skin lights up under it like a switch flipped. He goes still for a breath, like he felt it too, then clears his throat.

“I don’t like the bait idea,” he says abruptly, like the thought ambushed him, like he’s already imagined me in front of this thing. “We’re not doing that.”

“Great,” I say, too fast. “Because I wasn’t offering. I have enough scars.”

His eyes flick down my face, lingering at my mouth for one heartbeat, then dart away. He pulls back a fraction and points to the ring I’ve drawn around the old Argent house. “This first.”

“We can do cemetery, too,” I say. “It’s quieter at night. Less interference. If you can handle—”

“I can handle it.” There’s no bite in it, just fact. Then, softer, “If you’re there.”

Heat spikes under my skin. The storm that’s been stuck behind my breastbone since the preserve shifts, becomes something steadier. “I’ll be there.”

He nods. The set of his shoulders eases a notch. He looks tired in a way that has nothing to do with muscles and everything to do with bone. I touch the towel still looped around his neck on impulse, fingers brushing the damp edge. “You okay?”

He lets out a breath that almost laughs and isn’t. “No,” he says. “But I will be. If we do this right.”

“We will,” I say, because I need him to believe it and because I do.

He glances at the window, then back at me. The quiet stretches, full of everything we aren’t saying. “I should go,” he says. “Before your dad wakes up.”

“Yeah.” My hand drops. “Come back…?”

“I will,” he says, already halfway to the sill. He pauses, turns, eyes catching on my face in the dim. “Text me the plan.”

I nod. He slips out the way he came, a shadow into night. The window slides down, and the room holds the shape of him like a warmed seat. I stand there with the towel in my hand, my heart a steady drum instead of a frantic thing, and outline the next steps in my head like I’m saying them to him.