CALLEN

Every time her name echoes, someone else dies faster. And now they all heard it.

Rust & Thistle breathes like a throat like damp air, floorboards tense with something waiting. The kind of waiting that hums beneath the skin, like a scream you don’t remember giving.

Mara’s glitch trail led us here. Photo after corrupted photo, frost-touched corners and warped reflections, until the distortion bloomed into a shape. A location. This place. Half-buried beneath a liquor license and a boarded-up entrance on the edge of Hollowbrook.

No one speaks as we step inside. Even Ryke doesn’t joke. Ezra’s silence is the loudest, his shadow stretches too long behind Lira.

The bar’s interior is a grave. Not dusty. Not empty. Just paused.

Wooden beams overhead, warped from water damage. A cracked mirror behind the bar that doesn’t quite reflect us back right. Booths with red vinyl torn in claw shapes. Everything feels halfway erased, like someone pressed delete but the curse kept it in the cache.

I can feel  the bell humming under my ribs . Not ringing, not yet. But resonating. The tether tugs tighter with every step I take. My pulse syncs to a frequency no one else can hear.

Except maybe her.

Lira drifts closer to the bar, eyes distant, like she’s trying to decode air. Ezra follows, a step behind, always just a little too late.

The floorboards beneath us groan, not from weight but from warning.

Then the bell tolls.

It doesn’t come from above.

The toll hits sideways in a low, vibrating hum that threads through the floorboards and up into my spine. Not sound. Resonance. My bones carry it. The cracked mirror behind the bar ripples with pressure, and the glasses on the shelves tremble like they remember how to scream.

Lira flinches. Her hand flies to her chest, right where the resonance always finds her first.

No bell. No rope. No movement in the tower that should be miles away.

But the toll is here.

Staff lines ripple across the ceiling with thin black music marks threading like a web across water-stained beams. One of them snaps midair. No one else sees it.

Ezra stumbles, disoriented. “What the hell.!”

“Don’t move,” I snapped.

They freeze. Even Ryke stops breathing.

The toll deepens, grows inside the building, vibrating through nails and concrete, and then. A voice.

Not spoken. Not heard. Just there, inside the ring, like the bell is carrying a mouth.

The girl is the key. Burn the rest.

The words hit like frostbite behind my eyes. I stagger, shoulder catching the edge of the bar.

No one else reacts. No one else heard it.

The resonance fades too fast, like it burned hot and vanished. The glass on the shelves still tremble, then go still.

Lira turns to me. “Callen?”

I shake my head, slow. “Nothing,” I lied.

But inside, I’m already counting who won’t survive if that voice comes again.

The girl is the key. Burn the rest.

The words still echo, stitched into the base of my skull like someone branded them under the skin.

It wasn’t just a voice. It was his voice. The Ledger-Keeper. The one the cult follows like a religion stitched in ink and frost. I’ve heard his tone before, in other tolls, buried beneath glass shatter and heartbeat static. But never this clear. Never this aimed.

They’re done hiding. They’ve picked their anchor.

Lira.

My stomach clenches. Not with fear. With knowing. If they’ve named her, they’ve moved to phase two. No more “accidents.” Now it’s on fire.

And if she’s the key?

That makes me the lock or the flaw in the doorframe they’ll burn down to reach her.

I glance around. The others are talking again, Mara whispering to Pia, Ryke fidgeting like a tripwire, Ezra pacing behind Lira like a shadow with teeth.

None of them look at me.

They still don’t realize what’s changed.

Except maybe her.

Lira’s gaze catches mine, and for half a second, I think she knows. Not just the danger but me. The way the toll echoed in my ribs before it hit the air. The way I braced like I knew it was coming.

She takes a step toward me.

And then Ezra steps in front of her. Of course he does.

I don’t say anything. I just lean back against the bar and let the toll settle into silence, even though it’s still ringing under my skin.

They’re starting to believe me. That means they’ll start dying faster.

Lira steps outside first. I feel it before I see it,  the tug in my ribs slackens, like the building let her go but didn’t want to. The door creaks behind her, then clicks shut.

Ezra’s already following. I should stop him. I should go with her, but I don’t move.

I stand just inside the bar’s shadow, hands in my jacket, back to the cracked mirror, and watch through the fogged glass.

Outside, the night wraps Hollowbrook in its usual hush, but the air here is heavier, like the toll soaked into the sky. Lira stands near the curb, arms crossed tight like she’s holding herself together. Ezra steps into her space.

Too close.

He says something I can’t hear. She shakes her head. He says something else but sharper this time, then her shoulders drop. I can read his lips through the frost.

“If you choose him, he’ll destroy you.”

My chest cracks and Lira doesn’t answer. She just looks at him, really look and then she turns slightly, eyes flicking toward the glass. Toward me.

Not a decision, just a fracture.Ezra notices and his jaw tightens.

He reaches for her hand, but she doesn’t take it. She doesn’t take mine either.

I step back from the glass before she can look again. The mirror behind me shows nothing but fog and frost. No reflection. No truth.

They think this is about choosing.

It’s not. It’s about what the curse will take first and I already know the answer.

The door swings open behind me.Lira walks in, alone, her breath curls in the air like it wants to speak for her, but she doesn’t say anything. Her gaze flicks around over Mara, Ryke, the frost-bitten booths and then lands on me.

We lock eyes for just a second then Ezra enters behind her, slower, deliberate, like he’s daring the building to react. She stands between us now. Again.

And I can see it in her shoulders, in the way her fingers curl against her side, she hasn’t decided. She can’t decide. Or maybe she already did, and that’s why she’s shaking.

The bond between us tightens, not visible, not real, but there. A current humming under the floor, reaching for her through me.

But I don’t move, I don’t speak. I just watch her,  the girl the curse keeps writing in frost and ink and breath. The girl I’m tethered to in ways I never asked for. The girl I’d break the ledger for, even if it kills me, and she watches me back, like she’s asking me to say something. To pull her one way.

But I don’t, because if I do, if I claim her now, I become the thing Ezra swore I was.

A destroyer.

So I let the silence stand between us Ezra brushes past her toward the ledger. Lira doesn’t follow right away. Her body turns slightly toward me, one half-step before she catches herself, and that half-step ruins me.

I look away, and I don’t look back. Mara slips away during the tension, she’s always the lens, never the subject.

The bathroom door creaks open at the back of the bar, long enough for her to vanish into the dark. No one follows. Not yet.

Inside, the flickering fluorescent light sputters above the cracked mirror. Old tiles curl up at the corners. The sink runs for half a second, then stops without anyone touching it.

Mara steps toward the mirror her reflection doesn’t.

It’s subtle at first,  a half-second lag. Then the lag becomes a pause. The Mara in the glass keeps her arms at her sides while the real one lifts her camera.

She freezes.

“Okay, no,” she whispers, half-laughing, like she’s trying to dismiss it, to disprove her own fear.

The reflection finally moves, but it’s wrong, the wrong blink, the wrong angle, the smile that isn’t hers. Mara stumbles back, hand flying to the stall door, but the lights buzz once and die. Her camera flares with red blink, static flash, and in that split-second frame, the reflection tilts its head.

Not toward her but toward us.

Outside, the lights flicker as Mara stumbles back out into the main room, pale and wild-eyed.

“Something’s wrong with the mirror,” she says. “It..it looked at me.”

Ezra frowns. “What looked at you?”

But I’m not listening to them anymore, because the ledger was shoved between stacked bar menus and old cult flyers are moving. 

No one touches it but the pages riffle once, twice, like wind without air, then it stops.

One page turns and flips itself. Lands open, and in the center of the fresh page, the ink hasn’t written a name. Not yet.

There’s just an outline,a blank slot. Waiting.

Ezra steps toward it, but Lira beats him there, drawn like the book already knows her weight. Her fingertips hover just above the slot.

The frost curves along the edges, spelling nothing. Yet.

My chest aches, because the bell doesn’t just collect.

It decides, and the page? It’s not asking who’s next.

It’s asking who’s worth it.