“You sense him?” Wade clarified.
“He’s freaking out.”
“Can you tell where he is?” Remi asked. He examined the symbol in the tub. The team strewn around the apartment, all searching for my missing mate. He traced the air above the rune, gaze focused as if he could decipher it through sheer willpower, but his focus increased Jude’s panic.
“Don’t—!” I began, but it was too late.
Light erupted in a blinding wave that flooded the apartment. The world exploded with power, air turning to syrup, thick and heavy, as a cold energy crawled up my legs, leaching the warmth from my veins. A thousand icy needles pricked over my skin, draining. My knees buckled, but some unseen force held me upright, suspended in a cage of agony. I met Wade’s gaze, his face a mirror of my own tortured shock.
Trap.
Heart sinking as Jude’s fear melded with my own. He’d felt this coming seconds before we did. And now the entire team was caught, snared in a crackling web of purple energy that sucked the air from our lungs and the life from our souls.
I love you.
The words echoed through my mind like a whisper, fading to,I’m sorry.
I mentally tried to reach for Jude, to beg him to run, to do anything to get away from what I knew would be a gruesome end to us all.
A knife flared red-hot in my gut as something shifted. A cut that screamed for half a heartbeat of utter agony, then soothed as if melting into something else. My connection to Nox strengthened, the little dragon fluttering with power as it seemed to panic, too.
Then, the world remade itself.
The crushing wave of growing energy shattered, not outward, which I somehow knew would create a massive tear in the Veil, but imploded. The shards compressed until they formed a web of stars popping with color over my vision, linking together as if they were some supernatural highway of connections.
For one blinding heartbeat I wasn’t Angel. I was a nexus, an anchor, able to feel them all, the entire team. The magic wove a brutal, brilliant circuit, binding us together, stretching even into the distance where I vaguely felt Ivan’s bright spark and Nox’s panicked flutter. The power built to a screaming pitch, a pressure threatening to atomize me, and in that searing, pain-filled moment, I understood.
It wasn’t my soul imploding.
It was Jude’s as he tore himself apart to reweave our fate.
A silent scream tore through me for him to stop. But it was already done. Between one instant and the next, the spell trapping us was ripped away and rewoven, the lethal energy deflected by a shield made of my mate’s essence.
My heart gave a single, painful lurch as the world went black, and without my mate, I suspected only death would be kinder than waking up alone, and welcomed the darkness.
46
ANGEL
I woke in stages,swimming up through layers of thick, confusing dreams filled with a jumble of concrete walls and sterile, buzzing lights. A familiar voice sometimes cut through the fog, calling my name, but it couldn’t anchor me. Finally, the weight of exhaustion receded.
My body ached in ways I’d never known, a deep, cellular fatigue. For a disorienting moment, I felt stretched thin, my consciousness flickering in multiple places at once before snapping back into one bruised form. I opened my eyes.
And stared at a concrete cage in an all-too-familiar place. The bowels of the SED. A holding cell for rogue shifters.
My gaze drifted across the room, and my breath hitched. The walls were a mess of deep, parallel gouges, as if a wild beast had been trapped here. Dark, rusty-brown streaks of dried blood stained the concrete beneath the fresh scratches. A vague, dream-like memory surfaced—the sensation of shredding my fingertips against unyielding stone, the coppery taste of rage and despair.
The wild beast had been me.
I raised a hand, surprised to find it human but crusted with flaking, dried blood. My bones ached with a deep, phantommemory of violence, yet the skin was already healed. But as I stared at the evidence of my insanity, my hand shifted. Without my command, the fingers thickened, curling into obsidian claws, the shape flowing into something sleek and alien. A creature of shadow and sharp angles, not my familiar leopard.
A sharp gasp tore from me. I sat bolt upright, clasping the shifting wrist with my other hand. The change receded like dark water draining away, leaving my human hand trembling and cold. The last ghost of an ache in my joints vanished with it.
What the hell was that?
My gaze lifted from my now human hands. The evidence of my rage was everywhere. The gouges in the walls climbed higher than I could normally reach, culminating in the shattered, dark eyes of the security cameras mounted in the upper corners. Wires dangled like severed tendons. I’d taken out my fury on the eyes in the sky as if enraged they dared to view my grief.
One lens remained. A single, unblinking eye peering through the small, reinforced window in the thick metal door. Would they have seen whatever I’d become? Or this strange new shift? What did any of this mean?
