CITY OF WOLVES - The Awakening

Chapter 3 -Lena's Warning

Lena's Warning

Lena picked up on the second ring, which was unusual enough that Elias almost commented on it before he remembered why he'd called.

"I need your help with something," he said, keeping his voice light, walking fast toward home now with his collar turned up against a wind that had teeth in it. "Missing persons case. Woman named Sophie Mercer. There's a subway entrance in one of her photos that doesn't exist on any city record. Line 9. Ever heard of it?"

Silence stretched long enough that he checked the call hadn't dropped.

"Lena?"

"Where did you hear that name." Her voice had changed completely, gone flat and careful, all the warmth stripped out of it in the space of five words.

"The photo. Why, does it mean something to you?"

"Elias, listen to me." A door closed on her end, hard, and her voice dropped almost to a whisper, the kind of whisper people use when they're not sure who else is in the room with them. "I need you to stop asking about this. Delete the photo. Forget the woman's name. Forget you ever heard the words Line 9."

"Lena, what is going on with you—"

"Stop looking into the disappearances."

The line went dead.

Elias stood on the sidewalk with the phone pressed to his ear, listening to nothing, his breath fogging in the cold. In twenty-nine years he had never once heard his sister sound afraid, not during their parents' divorce, not during her worst breakup, not even the year their father vanished into his own private ruin and never fully returned to them. She had sounded afraid tonight. Afraid in a way that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the two words he'd said before she cut him off, and he realized with a lurch that he had no idea, not really, what his sister had been doing with her evenings lately, or who she had been talking to, or what she already knew that he was only now beginning to touch the edge of.

He tried calling back twice more. Both times the line rang out unanswered, and on the third attempt it didn't ring at all, cutting straight to a recorded message informing him the number was no longer in service, though he had called that exact number an hour ago and would have sworn on anything he owned that nothing about his sister's life could change that quickly.

The second disappearance broke on the morning news as a two-line ticker, the kind of story that vanishes from public attention within the hour, and Elias was the only reporter in the city who read those two lines and felt the floor tilt under him.

Marcus Deng, twenty-six, hadn't shown up for his shift at a downtown pharmacy. His roommate said he'd gone out Tuesday night and never came back.

Elias found Marcus's social media in eleven minutes. It took him another six to find the geotag on a photo Marcus had posted three days before he vanished, a moody black and white shot of an iron gate sunk below street level, captioned only with a single wolf emoji.

The same gate. The same station. A second person had stood exactly where Sophie Mercer stood, and now he too had been erased from the visible world.

Two lives that had touched the same patch of sidewalk above the same sealed station, weeks apart, with nothing else in common Elias could find. Different neighborhoods, different jobs, no shared friends, no overlapping social circles he could locate in an hour of searching. The only thread connecting them was a doorway that officially didn't exist, and a thread that thin should have snapped the moment he pulled on it. It hadn't.

Elias drove to the pharmacy, badged his way past a manager too tired to ask real questions, and got Marcus's roommate on the phone within the hour. The roommate was jittery, talking too fast, the way people talk when they're trying to convince themselves as much as you.

"He said he'd been getting messages," the roommate said. "Someone he met online. Said this person knew things about the city nobody else knew. He was excited about it. He wasn't scared, he was excited, that's what gets me."

Elias asked for Marcus's phone number, dialed it more out of habit than hope, certain it would ring into a dead line or a full mailbox.

It connected on the first ring.

No voice answered. Just three seconds of static, a sound like wind moving through an empty tunnel, and then a single text message arrived on Elias's own screen from Marcus's number, two letters and an exclamation mark that hit him harder than any headline he'd ever chased.

**RUN!**

He called the number again immediately, some part of him refusing to accept the text as final, and this time it didn't ring at all. It simply disconnected, a sharp electronic click and then silence, the particular silence of a line that has been cut rather than merely ended. He stood in the pharmacy parking lot with his phone still pressed to his ear long after the silence had nothing left to tell him, watching his own breath cloud the air, thinking about a subway entrance that shouldn't exist and two people who had photographed it and vanished within days of each other.