Chapter 49
ANGEL
The scent of ozone and burning chemicals hit my nose before the van began to slow.
The smell clawed at the back of my throat, thick and heavy.
A weighty magical energy assaulted my new senses.
Even the air felt thin and oppressive. A brutal symphony of noise, the shriek of tearing metal, the groan of crushing stone, all underscored by a frantic, psychic scream of unraveling threads.
I could feel them snapping—bright lines of mortal terror, lives winking out as their strands were severed.
A heavy haze of layered wards pressed down.
A suffocating blanket of haphazard spells that made the air thick as syrup.
I had to blink rapidly, fighting to see my team’s solid forms through the visual static.
And beneath it all, a deeper horror spread, an invasive power, slick and cold, coating everything like a psychic oil spill.
I sucked in a ragged breath, my hands clenching into fists to anchor myself against the spinning vertigo.
Angel? Victor’s inquiry was a pinpoint of calm in the storm.
I gave the barest shake of my head. My control over my other half was solid; the beast within was the least of my worries.
It was the living nightmare outside. Writhing, broken threads of reality slurped down by something enormous and dark, as easily as spaghetti noodles.
Had Jude’s awareness been this stark every time we’d crossed the Veil?
No wonder he’d needed me as an anchor. I struggled to suck in air and keep myself upright as the chaos pressed in on all sides despite the dozens of wards.
The rear doors of the van were thrown open, military personnel barking orders and directing us out. The team moved as one, their muted power a hum in my senses, forming a protective wall around me. But their solid presence couldn’t shield me from the psychic onslaught.
My vision swam, the physical world ghosted by the violent tapestry beneath.
The threads of reality were taut, screaming a silent warning of imminent rupture.
The delicate mesh binding our world to countless others was strained to its absolute limit—one more tear, and the whole fragile structure would collapse, dimensions crashing into one another in an unstoppable cascade.
I stumbled, only kept on my feet by Wade and Victor boxing me in on each side.
Victor cursed, the phrase guttural and sharp with a terror that needed no translation. I tracked his line of sight, and my breath seized.
The necropolis had claimed the sky. Its heart a throbbing mass of violet and jet-black energy eclipsed the moon.
The Veil was tissue-thin, and each beat from that alien current landed like a physical blow, a deep, subsonic thump that I felt in my jaw, straining against the mutilated mesh between worlds.
The military’s shouted orders were lost to the guttural roars of things that should not exist. The tortured shriek of metal being twisted into abstract art alongside the staccato punch of high-caliber gunfire, all pulsed in time to the heartbeat in the sky.
A faceless soldier in body armor darted in, keying open the supernatural suppressant cuffs with frantic hands. He waved his rifle wildly toward the epicenter of the storm, his mouth moving with words I couldn’t determine. An order, perhaps? As if I would ever lead my team into that meat grinder.
I shook my head, but that sent me careening to the side, unsteady. Wade caught and held me against him, both a shield and an anchor. The team surrounded us, Bobby and Victor in front, Ezra at our back, all of us weaponless as a war raged around us.
Through the chaotic swirl of smoke and shimmering energy, a figure walked calmly through the open tear. Not a monster, but a human form. My heart gave a single, painful lurch. The silhouette was wrong, the gait unfamiliar, but for half a heartbeat, a treacherous flame of hope ignited.
Jude?
Then the figure stepped fully into the wavering light of our world, and the hope curdled into cold acceptance.
It was Nat.
The familiar, bookish archivist—the man with the curly hair and vested sweaters—flickered like a faulty projection.
In the space of a single, skipped heartbeat, he morphed.
A towering figure stood in his wake, shrouded in a cloak that seemed woven from the darkness.
Where a face should have been was a polished skeletal visage, reflecting the chaotic fires of the battlefield.
A low curse escaped my lips. The team shifted around me, their gazes following mine but finding only empty air.
I knew with a cold certainty that they couldn’t see him.
Just as I had been blind to his true form in the hall of Bowman’s apartment building when Jude had stared, transfixed, at a horror I couldn’t perceive.
He walked away from the weeping tear; his hollow gaze locked on me.
My heart hammered against my throat as I took a single step forward. If the Reaper’s purpose was my end, I would meet it without flinching. Wade’s hand clamped onto my bicep like a vise, and in that same moment, a ripple of gasps and curses from my team confirmed it. They could see him now.
The Reaper walked through multiple weakened points in the Veil, his form flickering across the battlefield as if reality itself couldn’t hold him. Soldiers raised their rifles, fingers tightening on triggers.
“Don’t shoot, you idiots!” Ezra shouted. “He’s already dead, here to collect what’s owed. You’ll just invite the monsters to join the party.”
“He can’t have you,” Wade whispered, his voice raw and close to my ear. But all I could think was that on the other side, Jude might be waiting. I would go in a heartbeat. “Please, Angel.”
My best friend’s desperate plea hurt. Did I have a choice? And how would I even decide?
Nat slid through the final stretch of distance like a phantom, his form weaving between the fabric of dimensions until he loomed over me, the air growing cold and still.
I stared up into the endless gaze of his skeletal face, unafraid, more resigned.
A dozen times in my life I’d have thought to stand here, awaiting judgment.
Wade tried to pull me back, though I knew he couldn’t see the Reaper anymore as we stood in a pocket within the mortal one.
“Jude?” I asked. One word. He’d know, wouldn’t he? Would he have been the one chosen to sever that final thread?
A long, bone-pale finger lifted from the folds of his cloak, pointing past me with an unnerving, deliberate slowness toward the epicenter of the rift.
My heart flipped over, a frantic, painful lurch in my chest, as I forced my gaze to follow the line of his finger.
And there, snaking through the chaos, was the remnant of my bond to Jude.
It was little more than a tattered ribbon, frayed and ghostly, waving and flapping in the metaphysical storm of the tear.
Its once-brilliant gold was now a dull, guttering flicker, a dying star in the unnatural night.
It stretched across the battlefield, not toward the puppet-creature mimicking his form, but to a point just beside it, where the Veil was thinnest.
And there, shadowed in the epicenter of the opening, silhouetted against the raw power spilling monsters into the mortal world, was Jude.
Jude.
My heart gave another sluggish, aching thud, a drumbeat of despair. He was suspended, limbs limp and head lolling, a grotesque marionette held aloft by invisible strings of shadow. The very type of nightmare all shifters who survived the last war feared.
His form was a pale, discarded shell against the raging energy, and dark tendrils converged around him, feeding a larger, monstrous shape that loomed beside him.
This nightmare, this thing, was using the last stolen dregs of Jude’s power, twisting his beautiful gift into a weapon to tear the very fabric of the worlds apart.
I was tempted to grab that battered, fluttering thread of our bond and let its fragile pull guide me through the hellscape to his side.
“Jude…” His name was a breath and a sob.
Wade’s arms wrapped around me from behind, his embrace a cage of friendship and fear, holding me fast to a world I was ready to abandon. Someone made a horrified sound, and I thought it might be Ezra, or maybe me. All I could see in that moment was Jude, being sucked dry.
A wall of soldiers formed a dozen yards from the shadowy behemoth and its puppet, their rifles rising in grim unison.
They planned to end this nightmare the only way they knew how, by cutting Jude down, round after round, until nothing of the vessel remained to be animated.
They would obliterate him to save the world.
My attention snapped back to Nat. He stood in silent vigil, his hollow gaze fixed on me. Then, with that same unnerving slowness, the tip of his skeletal finger gently touched the frayed, golden thread that connected my soul to Jude’s.
The meaning was devastatingly clear. The choice was mine, and mine alone.
I could let the bond hold, and cling to the last shred of him, and in doing so, allow Erlik to continue using his power, his very essence, until there was nothing left. Not a soul to reap, or a memory to honor, just a void where the man I loved had been.
Or I could do what Jude, in his desperate, self-sacrificing act, had only partially achieved. I could sever the last tether, freeing his soul from this profane puppet show and starving the nightmare of its power source. It would stop the destruction. It would be a mercy, and likely my end too.
Nat waited in that pocket of stillness, and held out a hand.
The moment my fingers brushed against the cold, non-substance of his, the world ceased.
Sound died. Motion froze. The soldiers were statues, their guns at the ready. The roaring monsters were paused mid-snarl, and the tear in the Veil itself seemed to hold its breath. Even Wade’s desperate grip on me was now a fixed, unmoving pressure. The only things that moved were Nat and me.
The power of a Reaper, terrifying and boundless.
He pulled me forward, and we did not walk so much as we slid through the static chaos in eerie silence. In a heartbeat that stretched into an eternity, we crossed the battlefield, arriving at the epicenter of the storm.
To my Jude.
He hung suspended, head lolled back, skin translucent and gray.
The dark tendrils pulsed like black veins, drawing light and life from his core into the towering shadow of Erlik.
The tattered remnant of our soul bond was attached to his chest, its final, frayed end flickering weakly against the darkness that consumed him.
He’d tried to free me before this nightmare took him. Now it was my chance to let him go.
Nat gave me a careful nod, his form shifting, the terrifying Reaper replaced by the gentle, bespectacled face of the bookstore owner and friend.
I slid my arms around Jude’s limp form, one hand cupping the chilling cold of his cheek, the other finding the faint, fading pulse at his throat. I pressed my forehead to his, my breath hitching. A thousand words of apology for failing him died on my lips. He needed none of that. Only the truth.
“I love you,” I whispered against his skin, the words a vow and a release.
Then I kissed him, gentle and warm, giving him the last breath of hope I could gather.
I poured every unsaid dream, every quiet morning we would never share, into that last touch, then carefully severed the tie and ripped the last threads out of Erlik’s hands, cutting the haphazard knots stringing the last of his soul to this world.
It shouldn’t have been so easy, or silent, as his life snapped away.
But the power using his body collapsed. The dark tendrils withered to dust. Puppet strings going limp as his power had been soul deep.
For a single, transcendent moment, I saw him, not as this broken puppet, but as he truly was, whole, radiant, and at peace. He smiled, a flicker of recognition in his ethereal form, just as Nat, the Reaper once more, took his hand and released mine.
Then time crashed back in.
The soldiers’ gunfire rang out, bullets streaking toward us. But before they could find their mark, the air around me shimmered. The golden, protective weave Jude had stitched into my very soul, his first and last gift, flared to life, a shield of pure love deflecting the storm.
The towering shadow of the god convulsed, its form destabilizing as it shrank in on itself.
It was as if every monster that crossed the Veil had been a thread of its being.
Tied to it through Jude’s wilting magic, and with the flow severed, its very substance unraveled.
The resulting roar of fury vibrated through my bones as the ground shook.
Jude’s body began to crumple, and I lunged forward, desperate to catch him, as a violent shockwave of untethered magic erupted from the tear with all the stealth of a taser, sharp and brutal. It threw me backward, and I landed hard, breath driven from my lungs.
The sky swirled above me, a nauseating carousel of fading daylight and that sick, otherworldly heartbeat that thumped in time with my own.
The world tilted on its axis, the screams and gunfire muffled as if I were submerged in deep water.
Blood pounded in my ears, a frantic rhythm, drowning out everything else.
Someone dropped down beside me. Wade. His face was a cracked mask of grief, tear tracks cutting through the grime. He said something I couldn’t interpret. The sound was lost as the darkness surged up from the cracked earth beneath me, pulling me down into a silent, weightless void.