Chapter 43
A shrieking, mechanical wail interrupted my dream, ripping me from sleep as if someone was about to drop a bomb on my head.
I bolted up, sheets strangling my legs, and tangled up with Angel as I half fell out of bed.
The wailing continued with an added strobe light.
In duplicate. My phone and Angel’s were both screaming, shaking, and wobbling across each nightstand.
My heart raced in terror as I yanked up the phone to silence the noise, a thousand possible horrors tearing through my brain as I thumbed open the screen.
“Fuck,” Angel cursed, silencing his alarm seconds before mine, and scrambled out of bed. I sat half sprawled against the side of the bed and night table, blinking at the screen, reading:
SED Priority One Activation. Full Mobilization. All units.
Angel raced around the room, throwing clothes on the bed beside me, ear pressed to his phone as he spoke. “Up, Jude. Dressed. We have to go.”
“What is happening?” I tugged on underwear, tactical pants, and an undershirt, hands shaking. I was grateful the buttons were minimal. Were we going up against some kind of supernatural god?
Angel dressed fast, pulling from the go bag I hadn’t realized he’d brought in. “Victor is two minutes out. We’ll need to suit up.”
I swallowed hard and tugged on my socks and shoes, trying to calm my sprinting pulse. The clock read 5:12 a.m., but I felt like I could use more sleep, though I knew we’d gone to bed before five last night. Maybe using my power burned through more energy than I thought?
A heartbeat later, Angel dragged me out the door, his grip iron-tight on my hand. The elevator doors barely had time to open before he hauled me inside, jamming the button for the lobby. My pulse thundered in my ears, still sluggish from sleep.
“Victor?” I managed; my voice rough.
“Closest agent.” Angel’s jaw was set, his usual, easy charm replaced by something sharper.
“Where?” I asked. No coffee. No clarity. This was going to be a problem.
Angel turned, his dark eyes locking onto mine, and his expression softened. He leaned in, brushing his lips against my cheek. “The apartment building with the rift we scouted.” His voice dropped. “It’s been overrun by a Veil tear. And since it happened at night…”
Casualties. The unspoken word hung between us. My stomach twisted.
“What? How?”
“Wade’s light on details,” Angel said, already moving as the elevator doors opened.
Outside, the flashing lights of an SED SUV painted the lobby in strobing red and blue.
I sprinted after him, and we both vaulted into the middle seats.
Victor had the wheel, his knuckles white, while Wade rode shotgun, his face grim in the dashboard’s glow.
The vehicle moved the second Angel closed the door behind us.
Wade thrust two steaming cups toward us. I clutched mine like a lifeline, gulping down bitter salvation.
“Vests behind you,” Wade said. “Full arsenal onsite.”
Angel reached over the seat, tossing me a Kevlar vest before grabbing his own—oddly contoured.
I frowned.
“I’ll be in my cat form,” Angel said to my unasked question.
Was that safe?
“I’ll shift once we’re onsite. Bobby will go through the gear breakdown.”
I nodded, swallowing down coffee despite the burn, desperate to break my mind out of its sleep-filled fog. Victor wove through thickening traffic like a man possessed, sirens screaming as early commuters scrambled out of our path.
“You’re on rear guard,” Victor said, eyes glued to the road. “Newbies stay back.”
I swallowed a protest. “I could have used some training if this was going to be a thing.”
Wade sighed. “We were hoping to start that next week, but I guess the Veil had other plans.”
“The good news is that we knew within minutes that the Veil opened, so the tear is fresh and only half an hour old,” Victor said.
“We may save lives with this much notice,” Angel agreed.
“Why does that sound like there is bad news too?” I asked.
Wade’s grip tightened on his own coffee. “Ezra was inside. His call is the only reason we got a heads-up. The Veil split minutes after his warning.”
“He was supposed to have gone home,” Angel cursed.
“Sounds like he was trying to find a lead on his own.”
“Or debunk me,” I said, A chill crawled down my spine. “Is he out?”
“Signal died mid-transmission. He’s missing,” Victor said. “His locater isn’t working either.”
The coffee turned to acid in my throat. Did that mean he was dead?
“He could just be on the other side of the Veil,” Wade said. “Electronics are notoriously unpredictable on the other side of a fresh tear.”
“Can one of the vampires track him? Or another shifter?” I wondered if he had some sort of tie like Angel did.
“Ezra is very much a lone wolf,” Victor said.
I studied Angel’s worried expression. “We can find him though, right?” If he was alive. If he was dead, well, maybe I’d be the one stuck finding him. That did not sit well.
“The practitioner Hanna hired is missing too. Vanished right out of the field he was reviewing like he’d been sucked through a black hole,” Wade added.
“What the fuck?” How big was all of this?
The tires crunched over cracked asphalt as we neared the site.
A heavy and eerie weight lingered in the air, like the entire block held its breath, fearing the tear would spread.
Firetrucks and squads lined every road, blocking it off as a long trail of ambulances began to line up as far from the tear as they could.
The scent hit me first, slipping through the vents of the SUV in a thick layer of burnt ozone, sharp and wrong.
But I was beginning to understand what it meant.
The Veil had a distinct scent, or, at least, the wriggling magic within did.
Maybe that was what Angel meant when he said he could smell things most couldn’t.
As we pulled in close, the air shimmered unnaturally with energy I wasn’t certain anyone else could see, and some power crawled along the edges of my skin like ants. Did Angel smell the change?
The building itself looked normal enough, a high-end condo complex with fancy balconies and more than a dozen floors.
But the air crackled with energy, the rip in the Veil going right through the center as if reality itself had broken apart at the seams. As I stared up at the building, the flickers of energy surprised me.
Not the central, purple slashes of lightning at the tear itself, but the pops of chaos around the entire building as if the whole thing would be swallowed any second.
“I need you to trust me,” Angel said as Victor parked the SUV in a long line of other SED vehicles. “Jude,” Angel repeated after a long minute, the air heavy between us.
“I don’t know that I trust myself. Does that make sense? None of you could see what I was seeing before. Can anyone see it now? Is it all in my head?”
He stared for a long minute as Wade and Victor jumped out, heading for a set of black SED vans lined up together. “I trust you.”
“Angel.”
“No, seriously. I do, and I need you to trust me. My job is to keep you safe in the field. If you see something I can’t, I need a warning.”
I exhaled an annoyed breath, mostly angry at myself for the hesitation, and described the building and the entire area in detail.
From the crackling energy of the split, an ombre of purple and black tearing through the building, to the snaps of color wriggling through the air like supernatural insects stuck in a giant bug zapper.
Angel listened attentively, waiting until I was finished.
“Do you see any of this?”
“I see the basics of the split. Your description makes it sound a lot worse,” Angel said. He put a careful hand on my thigh. “We’ve got this. Our team is trained to handle this.”
“Except me.” His touch slid through my soul with a need to wrap myself around him and draw that soothing comfort inside me. I had to fight back the desire to leap across the seat. His soulful brown eyes met mine and held them without judgment.
“Don’t wonder whether or not I can see it.
Assume I can’t and describe it anyway. That you’re seeing these pops of color a good distance from the tear could mean the whole building is going to be dragged across soon.
We’ve never had warning like that. I’d like to see if we can use it to our benefit. ”
I swallowed hard and stared at him.
“My sense of smell tells me there is ozone in the air, and magic. I can tell by scent who is on the scene.” He pointed at the line of trucks.
“Most shifters can. I can also scent a change in mood, or a handful of NHVs who aren’t ours that might show up to a scene.
But if you’re seeing something?” He waved his hand at the air.
“I need to know. Not many can perceive more than the split itself.”
“No one else can see the magic in the air?” I stared at the waves of electricity, knowing what they were, mostly. Magic, or at least something science didn’t have a grasp on yet.
“Not that I know of.” He squeezed my thigh, then patted it gently. “Look at you, making a difference already.”
My biggest concern, I feared voicing for a lot of reasons. Mostly, I was afraid of making it come true. “What if I see Ezra and you can’t?”
He stared at me for a long minute. “It’s better to know than not. So tell me. We’ll work on recovering him either way.”
“What color are my eyes?” I asked, thinking for a half second that it was stupid. What if they were my normal blue?
“Black,” he said.
“Fuck,” I cursed. Did that mean demons? “Do you know what that means? Is it because of the split, or something else?”
“I don’t know.”
“DVs aren’t common.”
“Not since the war.”
“And I suppose they were on the wrong side?”
He stared out at the shifting lights for a few seconds, then said, “I’m not certain there ever is a right side.”
“Protecting people is the right side.”
“And if both sides need protecting? The NHVs didn’t ask for us to come through the Veil, nor did we drag them through. We’re forced to mingle.”
“How do you know, then? If something’s dangerous or not?”
“If it’s trying to hurt us, it’s not on our side. We are going in as search and rescue, not to destroy.”
“And beasties know the difference?”
He shrugged. “Best we can do. You’ve done breaches before?”
“Yeah. Not usually search and rescue. Apprehension, mostly.” Usually, I’d had SWAT breaking doors to collect suspects, but I had my fair share of experiences.
“I took all available combat and recovery courses I could. I’ll never be the guy who shoots first, or even goes for my gun first, but I’m first-aid certified. ”
“Most things from across the Veil won’t go down from a few bullets anyway.
A taser sometimes interrupts their magic.
Like, a vampire using mind tricks on people.
Hit them with a jolt and it breaks their concentration.
Shifters are more susceptible to electricity than most other supes.
Veil tears like this can go two ways. Either, it’s easy, and we are just shuffling people out, or the building will be filled with things from across the Veil that are just as confused as people.
They aren’t always violent, but it happens more often than not. De-escalation is important.”
That didn’t sound terrible.
“Sometimes…” Angel paused. “I won’t mince words with you. Sometimes, it all goes to shit because something big has found its way through.”
“Something big? Physically?” I pictured a giant, or something like the security guard, golem-like.
“Supernaturally speaking, big would be a high-level demon, demi-god, or powerful fae.”
“So, the cosmic equivalent of a surprise audit. Fantastic. How will we know?”
“Sadly, it will look like a warzone inside instead of regular rescue. It would be more about recovery. The nastiest stuff snuffs out human life as if they are flames to be blown out on a birthday cake. Bodies everywhere tells us it’s bad, but it may attack us first. Some of the worst feed off negative energy, or life force.
Encountered one once that sucked people dry and left them as brittle husks. ”
“Great,” I said.
“If we can get whatever it is to move on, we clean the place up and close it. Humans naturally avoid the Veil, and anything from the other side has to have more energy to cross at all without burning up in the tear.”
“We’re not trying to catch it?”
“Do you have any idea how to contain a god?”
“Uh, no.”
“As far as I know, it’s not possible. Don’t try. If I’m running away…”
“I’m hauling my ass in the same direction,” I said without having to be told.