Chapter 48
ANGEL
Before she could answer, the door she’d come through swung open.
Soldiers streamed in, a paramilitary tide in full combat gear.
They encircled us, rifles at the ready. For a heart-stopping second, I was sure I’d been a fool.
They weren’t here to talk; they were here to erase a problem.
What was a single shifter variant against the cold calculus of mortal security?
The answer walked in behind them, Major General Phelps. Dread, cold and familiar, coiled in my gut. The last time we’d met, he was attempting to legally abduct Jude, to bury his death magic in some black-site lab for the benefit of the military industrial complex. Our mate bond be damned.
Only a few weeks had passed since that encounter. Had he been planning this the whole time?
Sergeant Hanna rose to her feet, annoyance clear in her expression. “Major General Phelps,” she said, her voice dangerously quiet. “This is my jurisdiction.”
“Jurisdictions changed the moment Holt’s little secret came out,” Phelps stated.
Anxiety flooded through my veins. What?
“Necromancy does not automatically default to military oversight,” Hanna countered, her tone leaving no room for argument.
“Weavers do,” Phelps snapped. “The second his ability was verified, every prior agreement was null and void.”
The air left my lungs. My heart gave a single, painful stutter before hammering against my ribs.
My world seemed to shrink around me, the sterile walls closing in.
We’d had less than forty-eight hours with that truth, a secret held within the tightest circle of my trust. And now it was in the hands of the very people who would see him as a weapon first and a person never.
How did they know? There had to be a leak.
The Major General glowered at me. “Your mate is tearing holes in the Veil as we speak.”
I blinked; the words refused to make sense. “What?”
“His mate was attacked by the cultists we’ve been hunting,” Sergeant Hanna stated.
“Vanished, and the bond between them shattered. It’s unlikely that Jude Holt still lives.
” Her words landed like a knife in my gut, and I ground my jaw to keep from falling apart.
The cold calm that had been holding my sanity together began to shatter.
“Then his corpse is ripping holes in the Veil right now.”
Was the shadow god using him as some sort of puppet? Was he gone? Absently, I tried again to sense any trace of him. Only Nox’s gentle warmth remained, and the ties to my team. “He’s not dead…” I whispered, desperate for it to be true. We’d find him. Fix this.
It wasn’t possible for Jude to be out there, because I was holding the shattered pieces of him right here, inside me. The ghost of his power was a leaden weight in my chest. The devastating truth crystallized. He was gone.
“Angel,” Sergeant Hanna said, her voice carefully tight.
“If it is his corpse,” the Major General continued, “used as they did shifters in the past—then we’ll take care of him like we used to—decimating the remains until it no longer moves.”
I tried to stand, but the room swayed, and my legs gave out underneath me.
“Jude…” I whispered as the floor rushed up to meet me.
I landed hard, unable to breathe, tears stinging my eyes.
The cold of linoleum pressed against my cheek.
Distantly, as if from the end of a long tunnel, I heard voices raised in argument.
“—this is the worst time for theatrics, Phelps! A broken mate bond will kill them both.”
A buzzing overrode some of the words as my vision blurred.
“—asset is compromised, Sergeant, and a nightmare is tearing a hole in the Veil the size of New York City.”
From one blink to the next, the burning of my lungs pulled me into the dark.
The world resolved in a series of jarring sensations, the blare of sirens, the stale, metallic air of a vehicle, and the dull throb of a new headache. I blinked my eyes open, the lids gritty and heavy, to find Wade’s face filling my vision, his expression a careful mask of tired calm.
We were moving. The lurch and hum confirmed we were in a tactical van, the kind reserved for high-risk transfers. The sirens meant they were in a hurry. A cold dread pooled in my gut. Where?
My gaze swept the dim interior. Ezra, Wade, Bobby, and Victor were perched on the benches around me, all shackled with the dull gray cuffs designed to suppress supernatural strength. They were a portrait of grim solidarity.
Victor didn’t look at me, but I felt the tentative brush of his consciousness against mine, a ghost of the blood bond we’d forged as teammates, long before we led our own squads—mine the dayside, his mostly at night. Say nothing, his mental voice cautioned.
Jude? I sent back, the thought raw.
Unknown. The word was heavy with exhaustion. But we will find out soon.
Guilt, thick and acidic, rose in my throat. I’m sorry. For dragging you into this.
A flicker of something that wasn’t quite annoyance came down the bond.
Your team? The rest of mine?
Safe. Hanna has them. Kerry is scrubbing our records to purge any links of the others knowing.
Remi?
Unconscious, last I heard.
Ivan?
Protected by the Wolf.
That was a problem for a future I couldn’t envision. A future that required surviving the next hour.
And you? Victor asked.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.
How could I possibly explain that it felt like my soul had been hollowed out with a rusted, serrated spoon?
That the new power thrumming under my skin wasn’t a comfort but a tangled, chaotic snarl of unwound yarn.
The frayed and severed threads of the tapestry that was Jude, now lodged in the empty space where my heart used to be.
Every breath was a reminder of the void.
The words spoken by the Major General replayed in my head on a loop.
His corpse is ripping holes in the Veil.
It couldn’t be. I’d sense him if it were truly Jude out there, wouldn’t I?
The bond between fated mates was supposed to be an unbreakable tether, a compass point that always led home.
But my internal compass was spinning in a void, pointing nowhere.
There was only a hollow, silent ache where the warmth of his presence should have been.
We’d only just tied. The first, fragile strands of our bond, a delicate web of promise and potential.
We hadn’t had the time, the years or decades, to weave those strands into the thick, unbreakable cord that was the true root of a soul bond, the kind that could span realms and defy death itself.
A fledgling connection could be severed cleanly, leaving one alive but forever maimed.
Was that why I was still breathing? Because our bond was too new to drag me into the grave with him?
Not that I wanted that at all. I’d mentally battled the idea of giving myself over to him heart and soul, only to have any fight squashed by his steadfast and instant devotion to his grandfather, little brother, best friend, and our team.
He never hesitated to do the right thing and take care of others, no matter the cost. Reckless, yes, but a perfect fit despite my attempts to pretend otherwise.
What would be the point of continuing to live, knowing half my soul was permanently gone? How could anyone survive that?
I’d only just managed to whisper the words I love you without him pulling away in fear. His trauma had been a wall I had been patiently learning to climb. If he was gone, stolen before we could truly solidify our bond, did that mean I wouldn’t unravel, too?
And what about the Major General’s comment? Who, or worse yet, what was tearing the Veil? The shadow god? The image of Jude, my Jude, being used as a puppet, his beautiful power twisted into a weapon by the thing that wore his skin like a suit, was a fresh kind of hell.
The military dealt with zombies a lot like the movies instructed—total annihilation. There wouldn’t be enough of him left to bury. And that brought tightness back into my lungs, pressure in my chest, like a fist around my heart.
The van hit a pothole, jolting me out of the daze.
Victor’s silent presence in my mind soothed the panic, a reminder that I wasn’t alone in this nightmare.
But in the vast, silent landscape of my grief and this terrifying new uncertainty, I had never felt more scattered and unstable.
I couldn’t watch them rip Jude to shreds, even if his soul was no longer home.