“You’re talking to Nat?”
I growled, annoyed that Angel couldn’t see him too. “I was hoping he could see the way strings are pulling the edges of the tear wider, and if there’s a way to fix it.”
“Can they be restitched, like you did when you healed me?” Angel asked.
I stared at the widening gap, wondering if it could be that easy. Only one way to find out.
I shoved the grimoire into Angel’s hands. “Hold this. I want to try something.”
“Be careful,” Angel said as I focused on the edges of the tear, jagged and sharp as if slashed and haphazardly bound topull it open. Not random threads at all, but part of the cult magic within. Like my attempt to create a buttonhole on a shirt decades ago, messing it up and tearing through half the fabric. The spell wound invasive threads into hooks, relentlessly straining the fabric between realms.
I might be new to weaving and magic in general, but I knew how to fix a hole, pretty or not. Grandma taught me to sew a handful of stitches after my folks kicked me out. Small, tight stitches, which I later learned were called a satin stitch. Strong enough to mend most holes, at least for a while. Could I do the same with magic?
The threads appeared sharp, like they would cut if I reached for them, but I hadn’t had to physically touch Nat’s or Angel’s threads to weave them. With focus and willpower, I reached for the threads, sensing each one like a lightning rod in my mind, humming and wild. The raw power from the growing tear thrummed vast, ancient, and hungry, willing to devour everything it could touch.
I willed the threads to move, picturing them in my mind, threaded through an invisible needle and slipping from the top of the split to the bottom, tugging the thin membrane between worlds back together. They moved with invisible force—my will, magic, or whatever—slipping them together like spectral silk to weave tiny, tight stitches. I tugged carefully, slowly, feeling the tear close inch by agonizing inch.
A sharp pain pulsed behind my eyes, warning of a headache, but I couldn’t give in yet, not while focusing on each loop mending the split. Each stitch vanished as if reality itself was repaired with my weaving. I guided the threads, having to struggle for strength as the closer I got to the widest part of the tear, the entire thing growled and snapped at me.
“It’s working,” Angel whispered, voice full of awe, standing at my back. He slid his hand up under my shirt, his palm on myback, warm and grounding, stabilizing the growing backlash of the tear fighting back. But each tug quieted the belching chaos of the Veil tear.
I dripped sweat as I painstakingly wove stitch by stitch, focusing on thread by thread, rather than the whole. Like mending a wound on a thrashing giant, it lashed back with stinging magic, fighting me, threatening to rip the threads from my grasp, but I held it firm. Angel lent me steady focus and strength. Nox tickled my senses with a small push. My hands trembled with the effort of concentration. I wasn’t powerful enough to force it closed. I could only patiently, meticulously, mend it one tiny stitch at a time.
I lost track of time, my world narrowing to the next loop, the next stitch. Pull through. Again. Again. Until the howling power from the other side quieted to a whisper. With one final, psychic pull, I drew the last threads together and tied them off. The end of the tear vanished, returning to ordinary wall and the murders for cult magic beyond. With a pop, the spell within the apartment collapsed. The barrier fell, both over the door and the circle within.
The silence was sudden and absolute.
The ghosts stepped free. The Reaper version of Nat held out his hand to welcome the woman’s grip in his. The Reaper’s starlit gaze was fixed on me. He didn’t smile. But he gave one slow, deliberate nod of respect.
I swayed on my feet, utterly drained. Angel’s arm was around me in an instant, holding me upright.
“You did it,” he whispered into my hair, his voice thick with absolute reverence. “Jude, you actually did it. You closed a fucking Veil tear.”
“Wow,” I said, wondering if this were all a fever dream as a wave of dizziness zapped the last of my strength. If not for Angel, I’d have landed on the floor and taken an instant nap. “Whatabout the cop?” I asked more of Nat than Angel, but Nat was gone, and with him the ghost of the woman and her child. “Well, that was nuts,” I slurred and closed my eyes, passing out from one heartbeat to the next.
32
The sound of sirens,people, and general chaos roused me fast enough that I knew I wasn’t in the hospital again—small favors and all that—but outside, lying on a gurney in the back of an ambulance. If not for Angel’s hand grasped in mine, I might have panicked.
“Hey,” Angel murmured, bringing my attention to his face. While smudged with soot, his expression read calm and focused on me. “Breathe for a minute. You used up a lot of energy up there.”
I swallowed hard, blinking back grit and remembering that I’d somehow closed a Veil tear. “Did I—?” While I’d always thought of the Veil itself as a thin barrier between realms, I hadn’t realized it was literally a shroud of woven life threads holding back other worlds until today. And what did it mean that I could somehow fix the weave?
“Yeah,” he interrupted. His gaze flicked behind us, a warning that we weren’t alone. “The apartment is stable. Barrier is down. Our team and every other SED team in the Cities has arrived to comb through it.”
“I’m not bleeding this time, right?”
Angel blew out a long breath. “No. Thankfully. And you’ve already been given painkillers for the headache.”
“Still feels like my brain is mush,” I grumbled. A tiny pulse lit up my spine from Nox, as if he were apologizing for being unable to help. “But the building is safe? Everyone else got out?”
“Everyone except the cop who attacked you a few weeks back,” a familiar voice remarked from behind Angel.
I blinked past all the lights and Angel’s shoulder to find Christopher Hardy leaning into the ambulance. “Huh? You mean Cassidy?”
“I mean Derrick Bowman. The only other cop unaccounted for the night you were attacked and raised an empty lot full of dead bodies.”
“I didn’t raise the whole lot,” I muttered and settled my gaze on Angel. “Bowman?”
