Tiana glanced my way with wide eyes.
I sank into Angel’s arms as Remi relaxed into the bench behind us, too tired to do more. We were in shit shape for this first day of fieldwork, and I hoped we weren’t on the first round of watch, since as we finally approached the site of the apartment building and new tear, electric barriers humming and snapping, the place wriggled with a dark purple energy that set my teeth on edge.
I stared up at the building, which danced and flickered like a thousand shadows lingered inside. And maybe there were. I couldn’t recall which windows might have belonged to Brandon. Was there anything left of him? Would he be tied to this nightmare? Or was he truly a meat suit for whatever shadow thing had nabbed him? I wasn’t certain I wanted answers.
“Nothing like being haunted by the ghosts of boyfriend’s past,” I grumbled, not looking forward to the week ahead.
11
After confirmingthe perimeter was clear, we split watches. Angel folded himself into the narrow bunk with me, our bodies slotting together like puzzle pieces. Remi claimed the space above us, his breathing already slowing into a shallow rhythm. With the curtain drawn against the necropolis’s eerie glow and the inside of the van, I finally dozed, half-sprawled across Angel’s chest, my cheek pressed against the steady beat of his heart.
I shouldn’t have been tired, but the constant buzz of energy made it hard to focus. My dreams fragmented and filled with voices, crowds murmuring in languages I’d never heard, their voices slipping through my fingers like smoke.
“My turn to sleep,” Wade said as he woke us for a late lunch, shooing us out of the bunk to curl himself in the tiny space. A few hours of sleep had barely taken the edge off.
“I’m going to run through some shielding with you,” Remi said as he devoured a sandwich as thick as my fist, filled with green things. “After we eat.”
My magic burned through calories like a furnace, leaving me perpetually ravenous. Angel assembled sandwiches, turkey and Swiss with pickles for me (no mayo, gross) and the same butdrenched in the offending white sauce for himself. The scent of fresh bread and dill cut through the ever-present burnt-ozone stench of the Veil.
“You need to double your intake,” Remi said, eyeing my sandwich like it offended him. He speared a chunk of watermelon with his knife. “You’re going to be burning calories like a marathon runner.”
“I have been,” I said through bites of my sandwich. “I can only eat so much at once. You don’t eat meat?”
“Few fae do,” he said.
Interesting. I filed that away under “Things The SED Training Manual Conveniently Omitted.”
“My magic’s weirdly inconsistent. Runes and rituals work, but drain me dry. Why?”
He stared at me for a long minute. “That pattern suggests Non-human Variant lineage.”
“But I have a mark.”
“Yeah.” He ate a few strawberries, considering, then added, “It’s not uncommon for HVs to have some wild abilities. Less common for the structure stuff to be more strenuous.”
“Is that going to make shielding harder?”
“Yes, and no.” He glanced from me to Angel and back. “Technically, since you’re mate bonded, you can use your mate to anchor your shield.”
The idea of using Angel at all reminded me of his description of being controlled during the war. “I don’t want to do that.”
“Might be your only option if you can’t keep a shield up,” Remi said. “It takes years for someone with wild magic to develop an internal well strong enough to support spells. For some, it never happens.” He wiped his hands on a napkin and tossed it on his plate. “Think of it as external magic versus internal. Shifters are inherently internal magic users. Their ability to shift comes completely from the strength of the magicin their cores. External magic users gather energy from their environment to use, in your case, death energy, which sounds ominous, but comes from more than the newly dead.”
“Like?”
“Death energy isn’t just corpses and ghosts. It’s every fallen leaf, every crushed insect under your boots, every drop of blood ever spilled on this ground. And that’s the reason necromancers terrify people. Death isn’t rare. It’s the most abundant resource in existence.” Remi explained.
“Then shouldn’t I be able to pull energy to create a shield all the time?”
“No, because you’re trying to turn a firehose into a drinking fountain.” Remi leaned forward. “I heard about what you did in that field when those cops attacked you.”
I flinched.
“Pulling multiple new dead from the dirt and animating them—that’s opening the floodgates. Setting it all free.” He shrugged. “A little like when you broke the seals in that otherworld prison. Your power was the sledgehammer, busting through barriers with little control. What you need now is plumbing. Your body’s the pipe. Too much pressure too fast, and you’ll burst.”
Angel slid his hand over my thigh, warm and strong, but I could see the tension in him as he picked at his food.
“That sounds bad,” I sighed. “But I don’t want to use someone else. Can’t I learn to control this?”
