Emory was halfway through calculus homework he didn’t need and couldn’t focus on when his phone lit up at eleven forty-three with a number he didn’t recognize.
He answered anyway unknown numbers were the only kind that mattered anymore and a man’s voice came through tight and fast, the kind of fast that meant someone was packing a bag while they talked.
“not safe here, I don’t care what you said, I’m leaving tonight”
Wrong number.
Had to be.
Except the voice kept going, and every muscle in Emory’s body locked, showrunner-sense catching a beat about to break.
“your people said I’d be fine if I kept quiet but that cop came asking about the facility, about visitors, and I know what that means, I know exactly what that means”
The facility.
Peter’s facility.
Emory’s tip.
The man hung up before Emory could say a word.
He sat there with the phone cooling against his ear and his heart doing something complicated against his ribs.
The Hum, low and interested, purred.
Emory pulled up the browser.
Searched the number.
It took thirty seconds to confirm what his gut already knew: the number belonged to a man named Aaron Repovich, formerly of the Beacon Hills Fire Department, retired early after the Hale house fire six years ago with a medical settlement nobody quite believed.
The fire-list.
Peter’s list.
And Emory’s tip had just flushed him.
He was in the truck before he finished thinking it through, keys in the ignition, the mapped half-memory of where retired firefighters went when they ran rising up like smoke.
North.
There was a sister in Redding, he thought, or maybe that was a different name, a different season’s victim.
The map was fog and he didn’t have time to sort the fog from the truth because the road north cut through the Preserve and if Peter wanted a man running scared into the open
The truck didn’t go fast enough.
Emory took the curves harder than the rust-bucket wanted, one hand on the wheel and his teeth already aching with the tell that meant the Heat was rising, the Watchers leaning in from wherever they watched some stranger in another reality leaning forward in a seat right now, wondering whether the boy would arrive in time to undo the harm his own cleverness had done. Get faster updates on g.com.
He hated them for that most of all.
The Preserve road cut a long empty line through the trees, no streetlights, just the high pale moon and the truck’s failing headlights washing the asphalt gray.
Emory’s foot was flat on the gas when the smell hit.
Fresh blood.
Adrenaline.
The iron-and-wet of a body opened to the night air.
He slammed the brakes.
The truck shuddered, slewed, and he was out the door before it finished stopping, legs carrying him toward the shoulder where the scent pooled thick and wrong.
The Alpha crossed the road in no hurry at all.
It was massive, dark-furred and wrong-jointed a body held in the shift too long, warped by it red eyes catching the sodium spill from the one distant streetlamp in two flat discs of light.
Aaron Repovich though what lay on the gravel wasn’t Aaron anymore, just meat cooling in the dark had made it almost to the tree line before the Alpha caught him.
Almost.
The Alpha paused.
Tilted its head toward the empty forest, toward nothing, as if checking an angle for an audience that wasn’t there.
Then it dropped its muzzle and finished what it had started, quick and thorough no hospital after this, no lie that could cover it.
When it loped back into the trees, the road went quiet.
Just wind and the wet sound of something that used to be a person settling into the asphalt.
Emory smelled him before he saw him.
Aaron Repovich.
Fifty-four.
Retired firefighter.
The file rose up from the fog, sharp and merciless: walked out of the Hale house fire with a medical discharge and a limp, kept his mouth shut six years about what he’d seen that night.
He’d been fine would’ve been fine, Emory was almost sure, in the version of this week he half-remembered until a scared kid with a phone and a plan decided to be clever.
The body lay crumpled on the shoulder, one arm flung out like he’d tried to catch himself on the way down.
Asphalt under him, black and slick.
Claw-work, not a bite.
Emory stood there with his hands shaking and his nose full of iron and the sour-bile smell of a man who’d died running from something he couldn’t outrun.
The Hum swelled under his sternum, fat and obscene, a rolling purr that said yes, this, exactly this, and Ember flooded in, warm and good and utterly unbearable, because the crowd in their far-off seats had just watched a boy race a monster to a killing and lose, and that
That was a beat.
A boy racing a monster to a killing and losing tragedy, neat and whole.
The Watchers gorged on it.
Emory doubled over and threw up in the ditch.
It didn’t stop the warmth.
The Hum kept purring, pleased as a fed cat, and the Ember sat heavy in the coal-sense at the bottom of his gut, lodged there, unwanted, impossible to cough back up.
He spat bile and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the body that was his fault his tip, his move, his idea to be three steps ahead and understood, clean and cold, that the map wasn’t a cheat sheet.
It was a fuse.
And every time he acted on it, he lit another one.
The wind moved through the trees.
Somewhere far off, a coyote called, thin and high.
Emory pulled his phone out with shaking hands and dialed 911, and when the dispatcher answered he said, “There’s a body on the Preserve road, two miles north of the old lumber mill turnoff,” and hung up before she could ask his name.
He got back in the truck.
Sat there with his hands on the wheel and the Heat cooling in his chest and unwanted Ember sunk heavy behind his ribs where he couldn’t cough it out.
The fog in his head whispered that Aaron Repovich had survived this week, once, in a version of events that didn’t have Emory Voss in it.
That version was gone now.
And the man on the road was just the first body left behind by a boy who thought he knew better.
Emory started the truck.
Drove home.
Didn’t look in the rearview mirror, because looking wouldn’t change what he’d left on the shoulder or what the Alpha had made sure he’d see.
The message was clean.
Peter knew exactly who’d flushed his prey into the open, and exactly what to do with a second Beta who thought he was being clever.