Chapter 45
ANGEL
I rifled through the dresser drawers, my movements sharp with frustration.
If Cassidy and Bowman were cult partners, there had to be a clue here.
Something the first SED team might have missed because they didn’t know what they were looking for.
Did they understand this cult at all? Not that I could say we did either, which made my irritation with Sergeant Hanna grow, knowing she hid things from us.
Two decades of trust thrown out the window. And her having boxes of redacted information delivered couldn’t repair that rift. If she hadn’t helped me protect Jude the second I’d revealed he and I were mates, I’d have left the SED already and taken my whole team with me.
My attention kept returning to Jude. Even shrouded in Remi’s shadow-walker spell, I could read the tension coiled in his lean frame.
A few weeks wasn’t long enough to truly know someone, but my instincts had been tuned to him since that first day in the lobby at work.
A hopeful knot in my chest, cursing fate for the timing, yet praying he was mine.
What was he sensing that I couldn’t? That had to be the most difficult part of our relationship.
I was used to being hyperaware of everyone and everything around me.
Part military training, part instinct borne from my cat half.
That Jude’s senses perceived things beyond the Veil made me worry.
How could I protect him from something I couldn’t see or sense?
He tiptoed into the bathroom, gaze searching the shadows, which made me glare hard into the corners. Nothing moved. The building was silent, empty of any heartbeats but ours. Remi’s steady rhythm in the living room, my own constant thrum, and Jude’s.
I paused, listening for the familiar cadence of his pulse. Comforted by the beat, I returned to my search, leaning down to peer under the bed. Nothing but dust bunnies and a dozen discarded kid toys. On my way back up, I froze.
Silence.
The familiar beat of Jude’s heart… gone.
My stomach lurched as I whipped around toward the bathroom, my vision narrowing as fear clutched my soul.
The bathroom was empty. Curtain pulled back to an empty shower, and no Jude.
He’d been right there.
I stalked across the room and into the bathroom, slapped the light on, blood roaring in my ears with rising panic. “Jude?”
Had he slipped past me? I bolted from the bathroom, through the bedroom, and into the living room where Remi still knelt by the markings.
Nothing.
No.
Remi glanced up. “Everything okay?”
No.
I raced through the apartment, throwing open every door, my heart a frantic drum against my ribs. Nausea and terror rose with every empty room, a silent scream building in my chest.
No, no, no.
“Did Jude pass you?” I begged, coming to a screeching halt in front of him.
“Uh, no? Wasn’t he with you?”
“He’s gone.”
“What?” Remi’s confusion snapped into sharp focus.
Ezra’s voice crackled in our earpieces. “What’s wrong?”
“Angel says Jude is missing.” Remi brushed past me to sweep the bedroom. A desperate, foolish part of me prayed he’d find Jude with some ridiculous flourish—ta-da! —hiding in a closet.
But the grim set of Remi’s shoulders as he searched only drove my heart further into my throat. He stalked from room to room, his lips pressed into a bloodless line, his entire frame rigid with a tension that mirrored my own rising dread.
“Fuck,” he cursed from the main bedroom.
I was behind him in an instant, my gaze darting past his shoulder into the brightly lit bathroom, half-expecting to find Jude’s body crumpled on the tiles. But the room was sterile, empty.
Except for a single, stark rune drawn in soap beside the drain.
“What is it?” I demanded, my voice raw. I’d have felt Jude’s death, that much I knew of the mate bond. It likely would have dragged me with him, even while our bond was still growing. This was something else. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know this rune,” Remi admitted. “It honestly looks like a half-dozen runes mashed together.”
My control snapped. I grabbed a fistful of Remi’s shirt and slammed him against the bathroom wall, the tiles cracking with the impact. “Your spell was supposed to hide him! Not make him vanish! Bring him back!”
“I didn’t do this!”
“What the hell is going on?” Wade demanded through our earpieces.
“Jude’s gone,” I snarled, not letting go of Remi, the only practitioner we’d had on our team. “Vanished!”
“I didn’t do this,” Remi repeated.
“We’re on our way up,” Victor said, interrupting the noise over the line. “Don’t kill the fairy boy, Angel.”
“I won’t if he gives me Jude back.”
“I didn’t do this,” Remi whispered.
“Breathe, Angel. You sense him, right? You have a mate bond,” Wade reminded me.
I sucked in air, the edges of my vision narrowing as the panic grew. Did I feel him? No? But maybe?
Footsteps pounded up the stairwell, a thunder of loyalty in the silent, empty building.
The team was coming, breaking every protocol and risking their careers without a second thought.
For me, and because Jude was theirs now, a part of this ragged family I’d stitched together over years of trauma bonding.
But he was mine first.
The thought was primal. A truth that seized my heart and squeezed. I kept my hold on Remi, my knuckles white, the urge to wring the answers out of him a tangible pressure in my muscles. His magic had failed to detect the cryptic symbol that had somehow stolen my mate.
The door burst open. The team flooded in, their voices calling my name. I sucked in a shallow breath, my vision narrowing to a pinprick of rage and terror, my grip on Remi the only thing keeping me from shattering.
“Angel.” Wade soothed, suddenly at my shoulder, a calming force in the storm of my panic. His hand hovered near my arm, grounding. “Breathe with me, okay?”
“I can’t feel Jude.”
“No?” He asked carefully. “Not at all?”
“Maybe.” It was faint. A trickle of something distant, burned beneath the strange sensation of the dragon bond he’d shared with me earlier in the evening.
“Nox?” I whispered, wondering if the fae creature could help me clarify.
But his touch, while warm, was just as ghost-like, undefined. “I can’t…”
“Breathe,” Wade instructed again. “Let go of the panic.”
“And me,” Remi whispered.
The void in my chest ached with growing pain and rising anxiety.
Remi held his hands up in a placating gesture, carefully unmoving in my grip.
My hands had half shifted, claws dangerously close to tearing out his throat, and a strange change as I’d never been able to do a partial shift.
Shifters had two forms, human and animal, nothing in between.
Yet there I stood, claws out, jaw aching as if my teeth shifted too.
“Breathe,” Wade repeated, careful hand on my shoulder, presence large and familiar at my back. “We’ve got you. We’ll find him. You trust us, right?”
I sucked in air, trying to will the claws back and finding it hard. What the hell?
“Let me examine the mark and search for him with my magic, Angel. I can’t do that if you crush my windpipe.”
Wade kept a firm hand on my bicep, not holding me back as much as grounding me. I trusted him, and the team, even if I suspected any practitioner that came our way. Remi hadn’t earned my trust yet, nor had he proven to be a traitor. Fuck.
I growled with the force required to pull back my claws. The bite of copper pennies tainted my tongue. Blood from a partial change. Impossible, and yet I was doing it.
With a shove, I released Remi and let Wade put himself between us.
Wade studied me with a cautious gaze. He might be bigger than me, but even his bear form was no match for my cat, and we both knew it.
“He’s mine,” I whispered, the words sounding strange as my jaw seemed misshapen.
“We’ll get him back,” Wade promised.
That he stared at me, unafraid, while obviously seeing some sort of change happening, gave me pause. My best friend for over a decade, I’d never hurt Wade. He was like the kid brother I’d never had. “Wade?”
“I’ve got you,” he said. “We’ll find Jude. Focus. Pull it back. Let the team help.”
Panic flooded my veins, a thread of pure fear that wasn’t mine, overriding the calm Wade offered. “Jude,” I slurred.
“You sense him?” Wade clarified.
“He’s freaking out.”
“Can you tell where he is?” Remi asked. He examined the symbol in the tub. The team strewn around the apartment, all searching for my missing mate. He traced the air above the rune, gaze focused as if he could decipher it through sheer willpower, but his focus increased Jude’s panic.
“Don’t—!” I began, but it was too late.
Light erupted in a blinding wave that flooded the apartment.
The world exploded with power, air turning to syrup, thick and heavy, as a cold energy crawled up my legs, leaching the warmth from my veins.
A thousand icy needles pricked over my skin, draining.
My knees buckled, but some unseen force held me upright, suspended in a cage of agony.
I met Wade’s gaze, his face a mirror of my own tortured shock.
Trap.
Heart sinking as Jude’s fear melded with my own. He’d felt this coming seconds before we did. And now the entire team was caught, snared in a crackling web of purple energy that sucked the air from our lungs and the life from our souls.
I love you.
The words echoed through my mind like a whisper, fading to, I’m sorry.
I mentally tried to reach for Jude, to beg him to run, to do anything to get away from what I knew would be a gruesome end to us all.
A knife flared red-hot in my gut as something shifted. A cut that screamed for half a heartbeat of utter agony, then soothed as if melting into something else. My connection to Nox strengthened, the little dragon fluttering with power as it seemed to panic, too.
Then, the world remade itself.
The crushing wave of growing energy shattered, not outward, which I somehow knew would create a massive tear in the Veil, but imploded.
The shards compressed until they formed a web of stars popping with color over my vision, linking together as if they were some supernatural highway of connections.
For one blinding heartbeat I wasn’t Angel.
I was a nexus, an anchor, able to feel them all, the entire team.
The magic wove a brutal, brilliant circuit, binding us together, stretching even into the distance where I vaguely felt Ivan’s bright spark and Nox’s panicked flutter.
The power built to a screaming pitch, a pressure threatening to atomize me, and in that searing, pain-filled moment, I understood.
It wasn’t my soul imploding.
It was Jude’s as he tore himself apart to reweave our fate.
A silent scream tore through me for him to stop. But it was already done. Between one instant and the next, the spell trapping us was ripped away and rewoven, the lethal energy deflected by a shield made of my mate’s essence.
My heart gave a single, painful lurch as the world went black, and without my mate, I suspected only death would be kinder than waking up alone, and welcomed the darkness.