CHAPTER ONE
ANGEL
After a decade with the SED, I shouldn’t have felt like a rookie on his first day.
But walking through those main doors again, and waiting for Robin to call my arrival up to Sergeant Hanna, made my confidence wane.
My badge update had taken forever—just like the three-week “administrative leave” that was really a forced vacation to mourn my dead partner and renegotiate my existence with every bureaucrat on this side of the veil.
The military wanted their asset back. The Fae wanted their pound of flesh.
I now answered to a higher power: Xuan Que Zhenjun.
The Marshal of the Weave held the ultimate leash.
Jude had bargained for my freedom if he failed, but I knew the truth: if we botched this mission and I somehow survived losing Jude again, Zhenjun would simply erase us. A clean solution.
The move hadn’t helped. I’d relocated from Xavier’s warded sanctuary into my own place next door.
A necessary change, since Jude’s ghostly commutes to the between-realms library were fraying the demigod’s patience and his protective spells.
Packing Jude’s life, my life, and uprooting Ivan had consumed my days, leaving me to collapse into bed each night, haunted and exhausted.
The one bright spot: Wade had insisted on moving, too. We’d bought a four-unit building from Xavier. Having my best friend next door was the only thing that felt remotely like stability.
Victor had considered moving too, but his tastes ran more toward Xavier’s high-end lofts than the simple, sturdy apartments Jude and I preferred. But I wasn’t surprised when I found him waiting by the elevators at the SED, looking tired and resigned.
“We should head to the morgue first,” he said, after Hanna’s not-so-subtle reminder of my probation: keep the shadow-beast leashed and follow the damn rules.
“For what?” I asked. It wasn’t like Jude’s body had miraculously turned up down there.
We were chasing cold leads on Erlik’s larder, and every night I prayed we’d find what was left of Jude before the shadow god drained the last resonance from his bones.
The problem was Erlik’s shadow magic masked every trace of his location, leaving us blind.
If the larder was in a set location on the other side of the veil, we had yet to find it.
Which made us all suspect it was some sort of pocket realm.
“Cassidy.”
“He’s here?”
“His body’s been on ice since he dropped dead in Bowman’s apartment,” Wade said, joining us in the elevator and hitting the button for the lower levels. “Full autopsy’s done. Cause of death is listed as systemic organ failure.”
“A polite fiction,” Victor stated, without inflection. “The internal tissue was essentially soup.”
I grimaced.
Victor’s expression remained impassive, but Wade winced.
His gaze flickered around the elevator car, searching for the ghost who usually hovered at my shoulder.
Jude was there, but not here. His presence coiled with a ghostly chill around the ring on my finger.
A faint tug would pull him to my side, but in the mortal realm, our connection was staticky.
Seeing and hearing him was like tuning into a channel drowning in interference, a far cry from the crisp clarity we had across the Veil.
“The morgue is across the Veil, right?” I asked, trying to remember. I’d been through this building so many times the boundaries had blurred in my mind.
“Most of it,” Wade confirmed. “Bowman’s still down there, too. His family’s waiting on release until we finish our examination.”
“And Cassidy’s?” I vaguely remembered Jude mentioning a trust fund.
“Out of state. Unresponsive,” Victor said.
Wade cut in, “The team’s digging. They could be a direct link to Erlik’s network.”
“A troubling prospect,” Victor sighed, the sound weary. “Their extended family includes considerable mortal influence. Senators. Corporate heads.”
Perfect.
The elevator doors sighed open onto the sub-level. The sharp bite of antiseptic hit first, a brittle mask over the undeniable, cloying sweetness of decay.
We followed the hall toward the morgue. My mind turned, as it always did now, to Jude.
How would he handle this as a ghost? He’d been struggling after being chained to a table in the morgue to test his variant.
A nightmare that would give anyone PTSD.
Would it still overwhelm him? Or would his non-corporeal form help since it lacked the physical issues of nausea and vertigo?
Either way, I had to be steady for him. His weaver’s sight could see the patterns in the rot, the story in the ruin. Maybe even a path to trace back to Erlik.
Bodies weren’t my forte; clues were. That’s why Hanna had added him to our team in the first place.
And though she’d probably caught the worst of my fury over the Fae roadblock, she was still playing the long game.
Four-dimensional chess, where every piece mattered, especially the one who could see the board from another angle.
Wade pushed through the morgue door and spoke quietly to the ME on duty. The doctor nodded, gestured toward a steel table at the far end, then joined us moments later, tablet in hand. Without ceremony, she unzipped the body bag.
Cassidy lay on the slab, and he was all wrong.
On the outside, the body appeared intact, a little pale, and somewhat sunken, part time and part a lack of fluids.
The greyish, waxy pallor, normal, but the black edges around the mouth, nose, and Y-incision, restitched to prepare for release, that was strange for a body on ice.
The smell that escaped was earthy and foul, like spoiled meat and wet, forgotten soil.
“As noted,” Dr. Ling began, her tone clinical, “the internal organs show near-total liquefactive necrosis. Consistent with a post-mortem interval of several weeks, more likely over a month.”
Over a month. That timeline was impossible. It would mean Cassidy had been dead before he attacked Jude in the parking lot, before he’d been walking, talking, and kidnapping victims for Erlik’s cult.
“What could cause accelerated, and selective decomposition like this?” I asked, gesturing to the stark contrast between the ravaged interior and the relatively preserved exterior. “Something that targets the organs but leaves the rest?”
“There are documented cases,” Dr. Ling began, “involving cross-Veil parasites and certain terrestrial insects that consume soft tissues from the inside out. Some are small, like the so-called ‘zombie wasp’—it implants larvae that hollow the host while preserving the exoskeleton. But nothing on this scale or speed.”
“Larvae?” Wade repeated, the color draining from his face.
The doctor paged through her tablet. “We’ve run full-spectrum analysis and toxicology. No known parasites, contaminants, or toxins have been flagged.”
“And Bowman?” Victor cut in. “Does he show similar liquefaction?”
She shook her head. “No. His remains show rapid, advanced desiccation. Almost mummified.”
Was it because Erlik had worn Cassidy like a rotting puppet, but only siphoned Bowman’s energy?
I needed Jude’s insight, but that required privacy.
“Could we get a few minutes with the reports and the body?” I asked, knowing the ceiling cameras would still capture everything, but confident I could mask my conversation with Jude as talk to Wade or Victor.
Dr. Ling handed me the tablet, file already open. “Take your time. I’ll be in my office if you need me. Would you like me to open Bowman as well?” She gestured to the neighboring table and its black body bag.
“Please.” I didn’t know if Jude needed to see the actual remains, but it couldn’t hurt.
Dr. Ling unzipped the second bag, gave a nod, and retreated to her office.
As described, Bowman’s body was different, pale but not gray, with no dark staining around the mouth or the Y-incision marring his torso.
Erlik. The shadow god didn’t just kill. He consumed. He’d hollowed Cassidy out from the inside, taken the resonant energy, the life force, and left the biological machinery to collapse in on itself. A used-up battery, corroded at the core.
I tugged on the bond to Jude, hoping we were deep enough across the Veil for a strong connection.
A few heartbeats later, he shimmered into view beside me, arms crossed tightly, his expression grim.
He could phase into me, lending me his weaver’s sight and his unsettling communion with the dead, but the cost to us both was steep.
“What do you see?” I asked, directing the question vaguely toward Victor and Wade, but letting my gaze flick to Jude’s location.
“Nothing,” Jude said, his voice a cold whisper in my mind. “No life thread, no weave resonance, no echo of a soul. It’s just… hollow. Whatever they were has been completely erased.”
Only these empty shells remained, proof they had once lived, and a testament to what had unmade them.
I focused on Jude, searching for a way to translate what he saw into something I could explain to Wade and Victor.
Jude’s hand slipped into mine with a cold shock that bloomed into a shared vision.
It was like watercolors spilling across my sight, warping the world into layers of weave and resonance.
Not his full perception, but enough to see the patterns of life and death.
The two bodies were barely distinct from the cold steel beneath them. Cassidy’s form was a void, a hole in the fabric of the room. Bowman’s was only a slight ripple in the structure, like a table draped with a thin cloth. No soul, no echo. Nothing left that had ever been alive.
Wade moved closer, his tall frame a sudden shield between me and the overhead cameras. He touched my shoulder, his voice low. “Your eyes changed.”
In the reflection of a stainless-steel tray, I saw it: my amber irises swimming with faint, silver stars that spiraled and shifted like alien constellations. The Bastion’s mark. Proof I belonged to something older than the SED, something beyond any mortal chain of command.
The sigils faded as I looked away, but the chill in the room remained.
Through the quiet mental link I shared with Victor, I sent him the echo of what I’d seen, the emptiness, the stillness, the erasure from the weave, which was the whole reason Zhenjun demanded an end to Erlik.
Victor nodded and repeated what he saw as though he felt it through his vampire powers, phrasing it as though the loss of blood to the bodies left them more than just empty, but completely unnatural.
Beside me, Jude stiffened, his jealousy a cold spike in our bond.
I could feel him trying to shove it down.
Our mate bond had been too new to settle any disruptions caused by outside forces.
I could only hope that once we retrieved his remains, and stabilized his corporal form, we could fix that.
But Jude said nothing, and slowly pulled away.
His last touch leaving me with a wish that I could wrap my arms around him and comfort him.
Instead, he pulled away, taking his scattered emotions with him.
“Nothing that leads us to Erlik or the cult,” Wade said, the disappointment thick in his voice.
“No.” It was the same dead end we’d hit for weeks. First, bureaucratic walls; now, with the case wide open, just… nothing. The team had scoured every file on every cult victim and suspect, and it all amounted to zero. What now?
Jude paced beside me, his attention fixed on the door as if it were an exit from a nightmare. With his energy withdrawn, I couldn’t tell if it was the morgue unsettling him, or something else.
I shifted my weight, turning toward the door.
Jude winced, a flicker something crossing his face as he whispered, “Remi’s in the hall.”
My jealousy around Remi was as reflexive as Jude’s around Victor, though mine had a concrete cause.
The fae-touched practitioner had once kissed Jude to siphon his energy and seal a portal.
When Jude was taken by Erlik in Bowman’s apartment, I’d blamed Remi’s magic triggering the kidnapping.
But Remi had paid a steep price: the backlash from Jude unraveling Erlik’s death curse had nearly liquefied his mind.
He’d only been out of the hospital a few days.
I was trying not to be an asshole about it. Trying.
“Okay,” I said, offering nothing more as I moved toward the door.
Remi paced the hall outside the morgue. He didn’t approach until Wade returned the tablet and thanked Dr. Ling. Only then did his steps slow, his gaze lifting to meet mine. Oddly, his gaze swept to my side, where Jude stood. Could he see Jude?
“You wanted a link to the Changeling, right?” Remi asked, voice low. “Saw a patient in the hospital with that same dark stain. The one the Thayerson’s kid is left with.”