Chapter 11
After confirming the perimeter was clear, we split watches.
Angel folded himself into the narrow bunk with me, our bodies slotting together like puzzle pieces.
Remi claimed the space above us, his breathing already slowing into a shallow rhythm.
With the curtain drawn against the necropolis’s eerie glow and the inside of the van, I finally dozed, half-sprawled across Angel’s chest, my cheek pressed against the steady beat of his heart.
I shouldn’t have been tired, but the constant buzz of energy made it hard to focus. My dreams fragmented and filled with voices, crowds murmuring in languages I’d never heard, their voices slipping through my fingers like smoke.
“My turn to sleep,” Wade said as he woke us for a late lunch, shooing us out of the bunk to curl himself in the tiny space. A few hours of sleep had barely taken the edge off.
“I’m going to run through some shielding with you,” Remi said as he devoured a sandwich as thick as my fist, filled with green things. “After we eat.”
My magic burned through calories like a furnace, leaving me perpetually ravenous.
Angel assembled sandwiches, turkey and Swiss with pickles for me (no mayo, gross) and the same but drenched in the offending white sauce for himself.
The scent of fresh bread and dill cut through the ever-present burnt-ozone stench of the Veil.
“You need to double your intake,” Remi said, eyeing my sandwich like it offended him. He speared a chunk of watermelon with his knife. “You’re going to be burning calories like a marathon runner.”
“I have been,” I said through bites of my sandwich. “I can only eat so much at once. You don’t eat meat?”
“Few fae do,” he said.
Interesting. I filed that away under “Things The SED Training Manual Conveniently Omitted.”
“My magic’s weirdly inconsistent. Runes and rituals work, but drain me dry. Why?”
He stared at me for a long minute. “That pattern suggests Non-human Variant lineage.”
“But I have a mark.”
“Yeah.” He ate a few strawberries, considering, then added, “It’s not uncommon for HVs to have some wild abilities. Less common for the structure stuff to be more strenuous.”
“Is that going to make shielding harder?”
“Yes, and no.” He glanced from me to Angel and back. “Technically, since you’re mate bonded, you can use your mate to anchor your shield.”
The idea of using Angel at all reminded me of his description of being controlled during the war. “I don’t want to do that.”
“Might be your only option if you can’t keep a shield up,” Remi said.
“It takes years for someone with wild magic to develop an internal well strong enough to support spells. For some, it never happens.” He wiped his hands on a napkin and tossed it on his plate.
“Think of it as external magic versus internal. Shifters are inherently internal magic users. Their ability to shift comes completely from the strength of the magic in their cores. External magic users gather energy from their environment to use, in your case, death energy, which sounds ominous, but comes from more than the newly dead.”
“Like?”
“Death energy isn’t just corpses and ghosts. It’s every fallen leaf, every crushed insect under your boots, every drop of blood ever spilled on this ground. And that’s the reason necromancers terrify people. Death isn’t rare. It’s the most abundant resource in existence.” Remi explained.
“Then shouldn’t I be able to pull energy to create a shield all the time?”
“No, because you’re trying to turn a firehose into a drinking fountain.” Remi leaned forward. “I heard about what you did in that field when those cops attacked you.”
I flinched.
“Pulling multiple new dead from the dirt and animating them—that’s opening the floodgates.
Setting it all free.” He shrugged. “A little like when you broke the seals in that otherworld prison. Your power was the sledgehammer, busting through barriers with little control. What you need now is plumbing. Your body’s the pipe.
Too much pressure too fast, and you’ll burst.”
Angel slid his hand over my thigh, warm and strong, but I could see the tension in him as he picked at his food.
“That sounds bad,” I sighed. “But I don’t want to use someone else. Can’t I learn to control this?”
“Shielding requires a constant controlled flow,” Remi said. “Sustainable energy.”
“How long will it take for him to learn control like that?” Angel asked.
“Most fae take a century or more.”
“I’m not fae. I’m not going to live that long.” Fuck, was there any hope of controlling this crazy curse? Angel squeezed my knee, his proximity keeping me grounded.
“But you have an advantage most of them don’t have,” Remi waved at Angel. “A shifter mate.”
“And how would using Angel help that?” I didn’t like the idea of pulling death magic or something from him.
“Shifters have a ridiculous amount of energy,” Angel said, unwrapping a slice of rainbow cake and shoving it my way. “It’s why we heal fast, adds to our strength, et cetera.”
“That,” Remi agreed. “Instead of your energy alone, you’d be pulling from him.”
“Draining him,” I shook my head. “No. He said shifting is a little death every time. I’m not going to force him to shift.”
“You’re not using your death magic; you’re using his energy as a focus. A valve, per se, to direct and control the flow of the energy you can pull from the world around you. It would be a low-level pull, and only until you work up enough endurance to hold a shield yourself.”
“I’m okay with it,” Angel said. “I’d rather you safe than struggling like we did crossing the river.”
“But what if something goes wrong?” Like it often did with this crazy power of mine.
“Then we cross that bridge when we come to it,” Angel said, unwrapping his own slice of cake.
“Your mate bond is unlikely to let you hurt each other,” Remi added. “I’ve heard stories of mates able to share power. Angel might be able to help you hold a shield or control your power if it goes wild.”
“Could I shift into something?” I asked.
“It’s not as cool as you think it is,” Angel said.
“Better than dragging bodies around and chattering ghosts keeping me from sleeping.”
“I’ve never heard of anyone borrowing their shifter mate’s ability to shift,” Remi said with a shrug. “But you’re full of all sorts of unusual surprises.”
“Like one of those blind-box toys that never give you the right collector figure,” I grumbled. “What do I have to do for Angel to help with my shield?”
Remi reached across the table and traced a symbol on the back of my hand. I shivered, surprised by the cold bite of his power and his fluttering, light touch, which felt more like a caress than a lesson. “Follow the line I’m drawing.”
“Fucking runes,” I sighed as I watched him trace the symbol a few more times. With my gaze half-lidded, I could almost see it glow with silver-blue light. Angel’s grip tightened on his fork as Remi’s fingertip left a glowing pattern on my skin, and his touch, the memory of a caress.
“Think of the energy as running through you like a river,” Remi’s touch trailed up my wrist, leaving goosebumps as I pressed further into Angel’s side.
“Uh...”
“A redirection of energy, like a port on the edge of the river as it winds through you.” He began to push my sleeve up, but Angel clamped his hand on Remi’s wrist.
“Enough.”
Remi’s power vanished in an instant, and I could breathe again. “Just trying to help.”
“Your help last time pushed a few too many boundaries,” Angel growled.
“And saved all our asses,” Remi snapped back.
Ezra appeared from the front looking annoyed. “The lovebirds are on watch up front.”
I’d never been more grateful to the grumpy shifter for giving me an out.
“On it,” I said, tossing the food remains in the trash. I grabbed Angel’s hand and tugged him toward the front of the truck.
He slid into the driver’s seat without a word, leaving me the passenger side, which was fine. The front of the vehicle felt more like a panoramic bubble than something military-grade. A dozen mini screens filled the dash, each flickering with a different angle around the truck.
“I don’t know why that guy gets under my skin,” I muttered, glancing back at Remi and Ezra arguing behind us.
“He’s fae. It’s what they do.”
“All of them? Or is that just a sweeping generalization?”
Angel stared into the dusky horizon. “Probably. I’ve only known a handful.”
“Sergeant Hanna’s fae. She doesn’t flirt with anyone.”
“She gets under your skin in different ways.”
“And Robin seems genuinely nice.”
Angel sighed. “Yeah. I get it.”
“Get what?”
“That I shouldn’t judge the entire species just because I want to strangle Remi.”
I smothered a laugh. “Glad we’re on the same page.”
Angel’s expression didn’t change, but his voice went low. “I don’t like how fixated he is on you.”
I waved a hand at him. “Mated to you, remember?”
He let out a breath like he’d been holding it too long. “Right.”
The bond between us was still fresh. Most of the time it lay quiet, barely there, like the faint warmth of sunlight through a window.
But then one of us would reach out, even unintentionally, and I’d feel it, a gentle brush of warmth, a soft nudge in my chest, like being held without touch.
It was comforting and familiar. Even if sometimes it scared the shit out of me how fast I’d come to need him.
I nudged his arm lightly with mine. “How does this watch thing work? One of us handles the windows, the other takes the screens? There’s a lot going on.”
“We split the screens. Truck’s got sensors. Any movement out there will show up here before you’d see it through the windows.” He tapped the central monitor, which displayed the opposite NHV truck in eerie infrared. The whole thing looked like a shadow in a void.
“Creepy how everything looks like another world here,” I noted.
“It’s another dimension,” Angel said. “Maybe a thousand dimensions rolled into one. At least that’s the theory. Keep an eye on the screens on the top on your side; they focus behind the other truck and out. They’ll be watching our backs the same way.”
“I’m looking for movement?”
“Only if it’s heading for the tear.”
I studied the strange, pulsing center of the barrier and the tear behind it for a few minutes, pondering just how and why it stopped.
It no longer looked like a pulsing lightning bolt of purple descending from the sky, more a scar hanging on the threads of reality.
Though since it was small and unmoving, I understood what they meant about the danger of it tearing further was minimal unless something forced its way through on this side.
I settled back into the seat, easing into the stillness, and slipped my hand into Angel’s, fingers curling instinctively around his.
His thumb brushed lightly across my knuckles, an unconscious gesture, but grounding.
He’d already proven he’d follow me across the Veil and into danger to keep me safe. And I planned to return the favor.