Chapter 46
ANGEL
I woke in stages, swimming up through layers of thick, confusing dreams filled with a jumble of concrete walls and sterile, buzzing lights. A familiar voice sometimes cut through the fog, calling my name, but it couldn’t anchor me. Finally, the weight of exhaustion receded.
My body ached in ways I’d never known, a deep, cellular fatigue. For a disorienting moment, I felt stretched thin, my consciousness flickering in multiple places at once before snapping back into one bruised form. I opened my eyes.
And stared at a concrete cage in an all-too-familiar place. The bowels of the SED. A holding cell for rogue shifters.
My gaze drifted across the room, and my breath hitched.
The walls were a mess of deep, parallel gouges, as if a wild beast had been trapped here.
Dark, rusty-brown streaks of dried blood stained the concrete beneath the fresh scratches.
A vague, dream-like memory surfaced—the sensation of shredding my fingertips against unyielding stone, the coppery taste of rage and despair.
The wild beast had been me.
I raised a hand, surprised to find it human but crusted with flaking, dried blood.
My bones ached with a deep, phantom memory of violence, yet the skin was already healed.
But as I stared at the evidence of my insanity, my hand shifted.
Without my command, the fingers thickened, curling into obsidian claws, the shape flowing into something sleek and alien.
A creature of shadow and sharp angles, not my familiar leopard.
A sharp gasp tore from me. I sat bolt upright, clasping the shifting wrist with my other hand. The change receded like dark water draining away, leaving my human hand trembling and cold. The last ghost of an ache in my joints vanished with it.
What the hell was that?
My gaze lifted from my now human hands. The evidence of my rage was everywhere.
The gouges in the walls climbed higher than I could normally reach, culminating in the shattered, dark eyes of the security cameras mounted in the upper corners.
Wires dangled like severed tendons. I’d taken out my fury on the eyes in the sky as if enraged they dared to view my grief.
One lens remained. A single, unblinking eye peering through the small, reinforced window in the thick metal door. Would they have seen whatever I’d become? Or this strange new shift? What did any of this mean?
I hopped up and paced the short length of the cell, the concrete icy on my bare feet. My skin burned, raw and overheated, as if I’d been forced through one shift too many without rest and proper food.
Answers were in even shorter supply than space.
I reached for Jude through our bond, but it was a throbbing void in my chest, a hollowed-out wound.
In its place was something new, a more delicate, intricately woven connection.
Tracing its thread, my awareness snaked into the adjacent cell, landing on Wade.
He was curled in a corner, radiating a weary sadness, but whole.
Beyond him were Ezra, Bobby, Tiana, and even Victor.
A ghostly map of our teams, each occupying a cell in the SED’s limited dungeon.
The air left my lungs in a rush, a sucker punch of realization. My entire team, jailed. Was it for interfering on a closed case? Or had they seen the monster I became and locked us all away for safety?
I slammed a fist against the cold metal door.
The boom echoed in the small space. “Hey! Is anyone out there?” I demanded, my voice rough.
I needed someone to acknowledge me, to see the man and not the beast. Maybe now, clothed in human skin, they’d give me answers.
Or maybe they’d just transfer me to whatever nightmare prison the military built for monsters like me.
“Angel?” Wade’s muted voice trickled through the walls. If not for my sensitive hearing, I likely wouldn’t have heard him at all.
“Wade?”
“Yeah. You okay?”
No. The word echoed with a dozen different griefs. I’m not okay.
I let my head thud against the cold metal door, utterly drained. “No.”
Silence from Wade’s cell. I understood it. There were no words. When he finally spoke, it was just two, heavy with shared failure. “I’m sorry.”
Sorry for what? For not saving Jude? For failing to stop my rampage? For our own people throwing us in a cage?
“Everyone’s here” I whispered, my new, strange awareness painting a map of despair in my mind. Tired, hungry, grieving hearts. All except one. I focused, tracing the threads again, my blood running cold.
Remi.
His thread was missing. Not tied to us.
A snarl ripped from my throat; the sound barely human. Had I been right? Had he set us up? Was he the reason that shadow god stole my mate?
“Breathe, Angel.” Wade’s voice was a calm, steady command that cut through the static in my head, feeling more internal than physical. “Your control is better than this.”
“Remi,” I growled, the name a curse.
“He’s fine,” Wade assured.
He won’t be for long. I should have known better than to trust a practitioner, variant or not. Power corrupts. I’d seen it happen too many times, watched kind eyes hollow out and turn into something monstrous the second true power whispered to them.
“Unconscious,” Ezra’s voice cut in from a distant cell. “The magical feedback nearly liquefied his brain.”
A spell he had triggered. The unspoken accusation hung in the silence between us. Had he known? How could he not?
My legs gave out, and I slid down the cold metal door, collapsing to the floor.
My stomach roared, a hollow, gnawing ache as if I hadn’t eaten in years.
The cost of rapid, violent healing. But how could I think of food when Jude was gone?
Ripped from me? My heart lurched with the loss, sluggish and irregular in its beat.
But a phantom warmth lingered in every cell, a gentle, persistent hum. The ghost of his embrace, woven into the very fabric of my being.
“Jude,” I whispered, the name a prayer to the ghost in my veins.
A thrum of power echoed down the corridor like a warning shot. I winced as it slid over me, touch tentative, heavy, but familiar.
Xavier.
Only once before had Xavier used this kind of magic on me. I’d been younger, my mind fracturing under the runes carved into my skin, and his ancient power had pinned me to the floor like a butterfly to a corkboard.
This time, it slid right off. A wave trying to crush a mountain.
I fought back a snarl, my instincts screaming to lunge for his throat the second he drew near. But then a different energy trickled down the hall—a gentle, bright pulse that felt achingly familiar. My chest tightened.
“He’s not himself,” Xavier stated as the footsteps drew closer.
“Angel?”
Ivan.
“Hey, kiddo,” I breathed, the fight draining from my voice as I heard him stop by my door. “You okay?”
“No,” he whispered, the word small and broken, but I caught it.
“Safe?” I asked. Jude would want Ivan safe.
“He is safe with me,” Xavier answered, his power still pressing, a constant, grating pressure. It didn’t make me want to kneel anymore. It made my muscles writhe, threatening to force the new, monstrous thing in my veins to the surface.
“Stop,” Ivan grumbled, his voice sharp with an authority that surprised me. “You’re not helping.”
The oppressive flow of energy vanished. I could breathe again.
A heavy silence stretched through the hall.
“Maybe you should wait at the other end of the hall?” Ivan added, his voice small but firm.
“Not a chance, kitten,” Xavier replied.
“He won’t hurt me.”
“You don’t know that.”
The terrible truth was, neither did I. The beast that had shredded this cell was still coiled just beneath my skin, a trigger I didn’t know how to control.
But there was concrete and metal between us.
And while the scarred walls proved I’d tried with everything I had to get out, I’d ultimately failed. The cage had held.
The real failure was far greater. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save him,” I said, the words catching in my throat.
Ivan didn’t answer. For a long minute, there was only the sound of my strained breathing. Then, I felt the faint pressure of Ivan’s hand pressed against the wall where I leaned, our connection tightening.
Not gone.
The words whispered through my mind, a ghost of comfort in the crushing dark. Ivan’s voice in my head, linked through that delicate weave his brother had stitched to unmake himself and save us all.
I had a thousand questions, but a tiny candle of hope burned in my gut. A tickle of warmth snaked down my spine, thick with a liquid grace.
Nox. The little dragon’s energy coiled around my core as if he could help solidify the sensation of Jude’s touch.
“The SED and military are awaiting my answer,” Xavier said, voice tired, but pragmatic. “Your team’s fate relies on your sanity.”
“What? That’s not fair. I take the blame for everything.”
“Blame is hardly the issue here,” Xavier growled.
“When you changed,” Wade’s voice cut in from the adjacent cell, low and strained with a fear I’d never heard in him before, “you became something else.”
“And so did we,” Ivan whispered.