Chapter 51
ANGEL
My dreams began with chaos, pain, and unrest. Fitful. The change came in a startling drop. I felt as though something had soothed the burning ache in my chest, and I could almost follow the severed thread of my bond with Jude back to him.
For half a heartbeat, I felt Jude tucked against me. The scent of his mandarin-orange soap cut through my dreams, and the clean warmth of his hair tickled my cheek. My arm curled instinctively around a weight that wasn’t there, our bond settled and calm, though distantly sad.
“Jude…,” I whispered, reaching for him.
Then, like a soap bubble popping, it vanished.
I swallowed hard, my heart pounding as I realized I was in an unfamiliar bed, alone.
The room was dark but clean, almost sterile to my heightened senses, and it made my soul ache.
I closed my eyes, trying to settle the racing beat.
Before the grief could rise to drown me, a weight settled on my chest. Small, insistent, and purring like a tiny engine.
I blinked my eyes open. Gleaming, gold-flecked eyes stared back from a fuzzy, gray-muzzled face.
Nox.
He headbutted my chin, his purr shifting to a concerned, low whine.
“Hmm?” I mumbled, not exactly fluent in fae dragon.
When I didn’t move, he nipped my chin with sharp teeth.
“Ow, you pest. Where’s Peanut Butter? Go bug him.”
Nox kneaded his claws against my bare chest, a blunt, grounding pain. I winced but sat up, knocking him off. He glared daggers at me, though I had no idea what his problem was. He’d never been mean to Jude.
My stomach roiled at the memory of Jude, strung up like a damn marionette. A lifeless doll. Soul torn to shreds to save me.
Tears stung my eyes, but I blinked them back as I heard the faint sound of cursing coming from the other room. Whispered, as if someone was trying to be quiet.
I got up and tiptoed to the open door, staring out into the apartment we’d borrowed from Xavier.
How I’d gotten there was a mystery, but I hoped it meant my whole team was safe.
Had we won out against the fae and the military?
Maybe now that Jude was gone, the military didn’t care what happened to me.
Ivan sat on the couch in the dark, a printer sitting on the coffee table in front of him, its buttons illuminating his face in a soft, ghostly glow.
“Ivy?” I whispered, using Jude’s nickname for him.
He jumped, a full-body flinch that reminded me of a spooked cat, all arched back and puffed tail.
“Sorry,” I said, moving closer. He looked guilty, hunched in the dark. “You okay?”
A stupid question. His face crumpled.
I sank down beside him. Peanut Butter was a warm, curled weight against his leg. Ivan fought tears, a battle he was losing. None of us were okay. I’d just been clinging to the ghost of a scent, trying to convince myself our bond wasn’t completely gone.
“It’s my fault,” he choked out.
I opened my arms, an invitation, not a demand. He stared for a heartbeat, then collapsed into the hug, burying his face in my shoulder. His frame shook.
“It’s not your fault,” I said, the words thick as I rubbed his back. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save him.”
The admission cut like a knife to my soul. If anyone was to blame, it was me. I’d cut his life strands, but he’d already been stolen from us, used, tortured, and lost in hopelessness.
He was my mate. My job was to protect him.
Instead, I’d spent what little time we had fighting my instincts, trying to slow a bond that terrified me with its intensity.
I’d told myself it was for him, to not scare him away.
The truth was, it scared me, too. Needing someone that much left me vulnerable and raw.
Without him, how long would it take for me to fade?
Would we be together again when that happened?
I hoped so. I wanted to apologize to him for holding back.
I’d have to move fast on plans for Ivan and Grandpa. Xavier would help, but that thought brought another complication. “Ah, you and Xavier…” I started. Was he even here? “Is he in the apartment?”
“It’s just us and Grandpa. He’s asleep. I think Keanan’s outside.” Ivan sniffled, pulling back to grab a wad of tissues. He’d clearly been crying for a while. “Everyone else left to get some rest.” He hesitated. “I pretended to be asleep so they’d go.”
At least he was still here. Jude would’ve been shattered if his brother had run again.
“Why fake it? You look drained.” Even in the low light, the exhaustion was carved into his face.
My mind turned to practical horrors, waking up early, planning a funeral.
Jude claimed he didn’t have many friends or family, but I knew there were more than a handful of people who respected him enough to grieve him.
“I’ll handle the funeral. All of it. You don’t need to carry that. ”
I glanced at the mess beside him, scattered papers, his phone dark on the couch cushion, a notebook filled with scribbles.
“We have nothing to bury,” Ivan growled, the sound raw and venomous. “That monster took his body.”
My brain short-circuited. The words just hung there, not making sense. “What? Took his… Who?”
“Erlik. The shadow demon who thinks he’s a god.
” Ivan’s eyes glittered in the printer’s glow, a hint of something glowing beneath them.
Was he fighting a change? “He’s not. I’ve been researching.
Nox has been helping.” He jabbed a finger toward the printer.
“Erlik’s just a petty demon on a power trip.
He’s got worshippers because he promises them things, but he’s nothing.
And I’m going to prove it. Nobody gets to take my brother and just walk away. ”
“Jude’s body is gone?” The question twisted like a blade in my gut. Destroyed? Or still clutched in the monster’s grasp? I sucked in a sharp, painful breath. The idea of not being able to lay him to rest, to give him that final peace, made it hard to think.
“The military is on watch for him,” Ivan said. “Like he’s gonna shamble back as a zombie to tear the Veil open again. But the tear sealed right after the demon dragged him through. I saw it. Would’ve done something if Xavier hadn’t held me back.”
I must have been out cold when it happened.
The memory surfaced in fragments, the shockwave, Wade’s face hovering over mine.
Could Erlik use Jude’s magic just by holding onto his body?
The thought turned my blood to ice. My training from the last demon war was brutally simple, you shred animated corpses until nothing big enough is left to move.
The room tilted. The image of Jude reduced to… bits… made the air too thin to breathe. I couldn’t do that. I’d already failed him enough.
A weight landed in my lap, and sharp teeth pinched my chin.
“Ow,” I whined, glaring at Nox. “What’s with the biting?”
“He’s helping me,” Ivan said, turning back to the printer as it whirred to life, spitting out pages. “Find Jude.”
“What?” I stared at the machine. “Like where Erlik has his body?”
“No. Jude. Across the Veil, there are thousands of realms, right? Some of which are part of the afterlife.”
“Ivan…” How could I explain it wasn’t that simple?
I’d lost plenty of people over the years.
And as far as I could tell, Jude was agnostic at best, more likely atheist. Which, in my experience, didn’t mean there was no place for him.
It just meant the destination wasn’t prescripted by faith, more that the soul returned to the greater whole of magical energy. Whatever that meant.
In the decades since I’d first met Nat, I’d learned a little about the beyond.
There were countless ways to die, and even more realms beyond the Veil to find yourself in.
A Christian wasn’t any more likely to wake up in Valhalla than an atheist was automatically damned to Hades.
What you believed mattered less, in the end, than what you were.
The weight of your soul, the nature of your magic, the debts you carried.
The afterlife, it seemed, ran on a different kind of ledger. One not made by the fallacies of man.
Ivan held up a freshly printed page, his expression fierce with a hope that felt fragile. I took the paper, examining a transcript formatted almost like a text thread.
Are you there?
Please. Just tell me you’re okay. Nox said you can talk to me this way.
I’m here.
Where?
Is it bad? Are you safe? Can I help? Please, Jude, don’t go yet.
I miss you. Don’t be sad.
:’(
Jude…
The words blurred. My throat tightened. “What is this?” My voice was raw. “This… this is a trick. It’s got to be.” Some cruel, haunted piece of tech preying on a grieving kid.
“It’s not a trick,” Ivan insisted, his voice trembling.
“The printer is from Xavier’s office. The really old one he keeps in the warded room.
Luca is always cursing at it and asking to take it down to storage, but Xavier refuses.
Nox dragged me in there and sat on it. It’s small enough to fit in my duffle bag, so I took it. ”
“You really shouldn’t take anything from Xavier,” I began, trying to think of how to caution him away from the demigod.
I tried to focus on the bonds I’d seen in the cell at the SED, but whatever power I’d gotten temporarily from Jude had vanished.
Ivan’s lines were invisible to me. “He’s more than he seems.”
Ivan waved a dismissive hand. “I asked Nox to help me find location spells. I can’t understand the books he brings, so he’s translating them. Through the printer.” He shoved a stack of papers at me, covered in arcane diagrams and dense, scribbled notes.
Nox sat beside the whirring machine, looking like a noble, miniature lion with his gray mane fluffed and his eyes glowing with an otherworldly light.
“Do not give the kid unsupervised access to magical theory,” I lectured the creature, my voice tight. “Or haunted office equipment.”
“We can find him,” Ivan insisted, his voice cracking with desperation. “Don’t you get it? We can find him.” He snatched up his phone, thumbs flying over the screen. A moment later, the printer hummed and a fresh page slid into the tray. “Bring him home.”
He held it out, his hand trembling. The transcript was stark in the glow of the buttons.
Angel’s here. He misses you.
Love him. He’s my heart.
The air left my lungs. I stared at the page, the words blurring. It had to be some sort of trick.
“You’re telling me,” I said slowly, the world tilting on a new, impossible axis, “that Xavier’s office printer is a Ouija board, and you’re using it to text your dead brother in the afterlife?”
“He’s not dead,” Ivan corrected, tapping the paper. “He’s there.”
“He’s answering vaguely,” I said, trying to convince myself as much as him.
“I’m here. It could mean anything. Or nothing.
” I sucked in a hard breath. “I cut his life thread, Ivan. Me. I did that to stop Erlik from using him. He’s dead.
” And I was one hundred percent to blame.
The memory threatened to unravel my careful control, but I had to be strong for Ivan.
Ivan stared at me for what felt like ages, then picked up the stack of spells. “You don’t have to help me. But I don’t think he’s mad at you.”
“Ivan…” How did I explain that dead meant not coming back?
Had he never lost anyone close before? I stared at the determined set of Ivan’s jaw, at the bizarre, purring creature beside him, and at the printer that had just delivered a message from a maybe-ghost. “Can you put a pin in this and let me do some researching? I know a few people who might understand this kind of thing.”
Ivan’s expression hardened. The glow in his eyes intensified. It wasn’t a reflection from the printer’s buttons. This was something rising from within, a deep, deep-sea blue, shot through with shifting currents, like dark waves moving beneath the surface.
Power. Not tears. He dropped the papers and pressed his palm flat against my chest, right over the silent, hollow scar of our bond. “He’s right here. Can’t you feel it?”
His touch burned like a live wire. Not heat, but pure, wild energy that surged through the place where our bond had been severed, and instead of a dead, numb stump, it resonated.
A thread, gossamer-thin and trailing into an impossible distance, faint but intact.
Not cut. Stretched thin to become a shield of impossible breadth, anchored and woven into every thread of mine.
I gasped, leaning back and breaking the contact. The shockwave of sensation faded to the ghost of a pulse, a phantom rhythm in the hollow space.
The glow in Ivan’s eyes dimmed to dying embers. He swayed, his face pale with exhaustion, as if that single act had drained every reserve. “Fated mate bonds,” he whispered, his voice thin but certain, “are unbreakable. You can’t sever a tether that’s woven into the fabric of your souls.”