Chapter 1
“Jude…”
“You tasered me.”
Joe looked away. I followed him out the main hospital entrance and into the parking garage.
It felt strange to be outside, like I’d truly been released from prison.
The last two weeks—the voices were everywhere; inside me, around me, pulling me under.
I could see the morgue in my mind, the rows of steel drawers, the cold, lifeless bodies waiting for someone to claim them—had been surreal.
The betrayal burned, like everything I’d known and trusted for the past decade had been ripped away.
“They think I was commanding those things.”
“You were,” Joe said, almost too quiet to hear.
“What?” I grabbed his shoulder to keep him from walking away.
“They stopped when you said stop, like marionettes on a string.”
“I didn’t—”
“It’s not the first time, Jude,” he interrupted.
“I think I would remember corpses doing what I told them to. I’ve been in Homicide for over a decade!”
He clicked to unlock his car. “Not that, exactly. It’s hard to explain. I’ve been denying it for a while, but at the daycare, I couldn’t.”
“Denying what? Explain it to me,” I demanded as I got in the passenger seat.
He folded himself in behind the wheel with a heavy sigh. He said nothing for a while as he focused on guiding us out of the hospital parking lot. “I’ve been in this job for forty years,” he finally spoke.
“Okay.”
“The scene changes when you arrive. I didn’t notice at first because we’d show up together.” He hesitated a long minute, then continued. “After your grandmother died, I was already there. You remember that shooting we thought was a drive-by but ended up being a hit?”
“I didn’t do anything different at that scene.”
“I’d already been there a while. A couple hours, maybe?
You got there and it was like the whole scene lit up.
And you went right to a half dozen bullet casings we hadn’t found.
Then you wandered away for thirty seconds and found the guy’s wallet, which we’d had everyone scouring the area for. How’d you do that?”
“I didn’t talk to a corpse.” Since it’d had its head blown off, I didn’t think it could talk.
“So, how?” Joe prodded again.
“I don’t remember doing anything different. Instinct. That’s all.”
We hit the highway, the stretch through Eden Prairie silencing our conversation.
We held our breath as we crossed the section of the highway swallowed up by a tear in the Veil until we reached the other side and signs of normal life.
He took us to the precinct and parked next to my car.
The captain’s car was still there too. I got out and headed for the door instead of home.
“Jude…”
I tapped the variant-marking band glowing on my arm, the product of a microorganism that illuminated anyone with a variant ability.
“I’m forever marked, Joe. Do you know what kind of tests they did on me in that place?
If I have any ability, it’s so low it’s not registering. But this mark lasts forever.”
It all began with a demon uprising in the 80s, quelled by firepower and prayer, or so the stories said.
The world ran without another paranormal blip until the two decades prior to the new century.
Then came a slew of illnesses, inexplicably intense.
A curse of the demons perhaps? People died by the millions.
They gave it the moniker of Black Death 2.
0. It made the earlier demon uprising seem like a joke; a story told around the fire or before Halloween.
Everyone feared the flu, even the average cold, because it could evolve, but in the end, it was humanity that was meant to evolve.
People changed.
Some could become animals; shifters like in romance novels without the sweet drama.
Others woke to find out they could set things on fire, or drown people by accident, or read minds.
Many of those vanished into underground facilities, the government trying to quiet the fear over rising variants.
But they were quickly overwhelmed as the mass deaths turned to entire populations evolving with supernatural abilities.
Then the Veil tore.
The magic separating the ordinary human world and the supernatural realm split jagged rifts through the weave of the two realities in the hearts of New York City, Hong Kong, and Moscow.
The news spread terror and rage, sending armchair warriors to battle against legions of zombies, vampires, fae, and a thousand other types of cryptids caught in the strange overlapping of the worlds.
It was a bloodbath on both sides, and the more who died, the further the Veil cracked, spreading to other cities and freeing more supernatural horrors.
For the first time in centuries, the nonstop wars across the globe froze, everyone taking a collective breath of hope for the Veil to reseal itself.
The ripping of the weave paused, leaving fog over areas with weakened barriers and two worlds interwoven in undefinable ways.
Scientists and psychics alike sought to fix the merging realms, but as of yet, nothing helped.
Wars reengaged as resources diminished, and the Veil continued to unravel in unpredictable ways.
Our very existence was caught in the loop of chaos, never knowing when the next merge would drop some new terror on our heads.
Minneapolis and St. Paul, the Twin Cities of Minnesota—as with many other major metropolitan areas—was forced to create separate police forces specific to the overlap, mostly staffed by variants: shifters, mages, and a handful of brave humans known as the SED, Supernatural Enforcement Division.
They usually dealt with anything other. They policed the places where the Veil had merged both worlds.
Some said beyond the Veil, the Necropolis was vast; a maze of intertwined supernatural cities that any ordinary person would regret venturing into, and likely never return.
Every trip down that stretch of 494 overlooking a foreign world of terrifying proportions kept us from venturing deeper.
Everyone whispered that getting off the highway to 212 would mean never coming back. I hadn’t dared to try.
Joe stared at me, looking sad, and I glared. “I grabbed your sunglasses that day and told you to put them on because your eyes were red.”
“Because I’d been crying,” I said. “My grandmother died.”
“Not that kind of red.”
I blinked at him in horror of what he was telling me.
“It didn’t happen again, and you didn’t bring it up.”
“So, you didn’t tell me?”
“I thought you knew and didn’t want to tell me.”
“We’ve been partners almost a decade! I’ve spent holidays with your family.”
He nodded.
“And you thought I didn’t trust you?”
He gave me a sad smile.
“Did my eyes turn at the daycare?”
“Yes.”
“You were behind me.”
“You glanced back as I followed you inside. I don’t think anyone else caught it. But I did. Then they followed your command, and I knew.”
“And tasered me,” I said.
“Once you passed out, they stopped moving,” Joe said.
I gaped at him. “How is that possible? I wasn’t even there until… I wasn’t controlling them, Joe.”
“And that’s even scarier than knowing you could,” Joe said. “That maybe, if you had some training, you could have stopped all of this from happening.”
I couldn’t help my flinch. “You blame me?”
“No.” Joe shook his head. “No more than myself. I should have said something.”
“Like ‘gee, Jude, are you talking to dead people, making them get up and dance?’ Yeah, that would come up over the missus’ chicken pot pie dinner.” I sighed, turning away to head inside and talk to my boss.
It was only around two in the afternoon, and the precinct had been my home away from home while I’d buried myself in work.
How would that change now that I was variant?
Occasionally, some asshole gave me shit for being openly gay.
And there were a few dickbags at work that nicknamed me “Gothic Ken,” or “homicide twink.” Because I was blond and painted my nails dark colors?
Or because I drove a glossy black Honda, listened to heavy metal, and worked homicide?
I couldn’t imagine what terrible things they’d call me now.
I entered the precinct and let the buzz of normality wash over me; the scent of stale, burnt coffee, the buzzing of the computer lines and tapping of keys. Chatter. The phone ringing. Then it all stopped.
My heart flipped over as everyone stared.
Captain Kartwright leaned out of his office. “Holt, office.”
I stiffened and headed his way. Everyone’s gaze followed me, the silence deafening.
The mark on my arm glowed like a fucking beacon, and I wished I could hide it.
I stepped into his office and he closed the door behind me.
He patted the top of the chair across from his as he crossed to his own, and I sat.
“We’re moving you to SED,” he said, dropping another bombshell on me.
“What?” I gasped. I put my hand over the glowing mark on my arm which shone right through my fucking hand. “I’m not variant.”
The captain sighed. “It’s for the best, Holt. I hate to lose you. But SED is understaffed, and the command comes from the governor.”
“The governor? What does he have to do with any of this?”
“The Eagan merge has grown four blocks since the daycare event.”
I gasped. “What? How? Why?” They never grew that fast. Not after the initial tear.
“It’s a high-end neighborhood,” the captain added.
“So what? Money means they get to control where I go?”
His expression said exactly that.
“Fuck. It’s not fair.”
“No, it’s not,” he agreed. “I’ve got your desk packed. You’ll report to SED headquarters in Richfield on Monday. That gives you four days to prepare.”
“I never took the PNR division classes.”
He sighed, and sank down heavily in his chair. “You’ve been a great detective, Holt.”
“And I still am! This,” I waved at my arm, “doesn’t change that.”