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A gentle hand patted my back, and strangely a smile with jagged teeth didn’t send me screaming.

The memory dissolved. I gasped, my eyes snapping open.

Angel’s expression looked sad. “I want to hold you, comfort you,” he said, but his hands hovered over me, unable to touch.

I shuddered with the lingering memory. “What was that…” I stared at the motes, suddenly understanding what they really were. A broken memory. Or at least the remnants of one. They flickered around me in a rainbow of broken fragments, like they desperately wanted to return to the whole of the weave.

I held out my hand to them, and let them sink into place, surprised when the memory didn’t flare a second time, rather it nested where it was meant to be. Not a dream, but the return of something I’d lost.

“What happened?” Angel prodded, his palm cupping my face, though I couldn’t feel him and he couldn’t touch me.

“You mean the memory?”

He shook his head, motioning to the space around us, the home office of my memory, only not quite. Part of it was distorted, a wall warping with colored sparks and the familiar disruption of the weave. We were standing in the middle of a merge, inside my parents’ house. “You reappeared upstairs, then vanished again. We had everyone looking for you.”

And I’d reappeared in the office downstairs? How strange was my life right now?

“Holy fuck,” I gaped.

Angel sucked in a deep breath. “I thought I’d lost you again.”

“Oh.” I looked around, trying to understand how I’d gotten here. What was the last thing I remembered? Being in the library upstairs? “There was a Veil scar in my bedroom. I coaxed a mote from it.”

“The house is full of motes,” Angel admitted. He swallowed hard, a frown tugging at the corner of his lips. “The team is herding pieces that belong to you back. Lots of ghosts here. And runes, layers upon layers of runes.”

“How is this a merge?”

“Someone’s been covering it up.” He sighed. “It’s taken time to sort through which motes are you, and which aren’t. There’s a handful of Reapers outside trying to keep a Shepherd from sweeping through. Victor’s team is holding the SED off by scaring them with the Reapers presence.” Angel shrugged. “It’s sort of an urban legend. See a Reaper and become their next client.” He pointed at me. “And you sort of did.”

“Rude. You’ve seen Nat a lot more than I have.”

“Most don’t think of shifters as human,” he reminded me. “So maybe we’re immune?”

I snorted.

“Zhenjun was here. Fixed a scar that was fraying.” Angel hovered close. “We think you repaired the tear in your room as a kid.”

I let those words sink in. “Was here. Fixed a scar? And how did I do that as a kid?”

“You don’t remember that yet?”

I shook my head, searching my memory for anything related, and found, well… pieces. Snapshots of things that happened, rather than the full memory of them. The boy I played with as a child, which I was certain wasn’t a boy at all. Memories of the psych ward, and even Jason. “Um, wow. Great. Another piece of trauma I didn’t ask for.”

“Wanna talk about it?”

“I’ll have you know I spent thousands in therapy to deal with my trauma.”

“While not remembering half of it,” Angel added quietly.

I sighed. “I remember my mom and dad fighting. I was young, maybe five or six.” Nox batted a few more motes my way, and I welcomed them, letting them sink into the weave without lingering on them. At least that didn’t hurt, though the memories returned were still the consistency of Swiss cheese. “About me not being my dad’s.” I couldn’t remember how it had started, or even why I’d been there to witness it at all.

“Not Adrian’s?” Angel repeated, but now stared at the twisted office with a new outlook. “I wonder if your mom has something here about it?” Then he flinched, likely realizing what he was saying. “Sorry… but Adrian’s a dick. Probably good that he’s not really your dad?”

I flickered for a minute, feeling as if holding myself together strained something, but Wade entered the room, hands full of motes, which shocked me. His expression must have mirrored mine as he caught a glimpse of me, and released the motes my way.

“Jude?” Angel asked, voice careful as he lingered close.

The motes flocked to him first, as if drawn by a magnet, and I recognized the threads in my life they belonged to, even if they had no color or distinction I could see. Somehow my soul had been attacked by a cosmic hole puncher and left me scattered everywhere like the most unusual confetti ever invented.