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, bycutting 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.
