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Rude.

“I met Phelps once,” I recalled.

“What?” Angel asked.

“When I was a teen. He assessed me for an ability and I guess found me lacking?” Because of the changeling? I still had a lot of questions. The motes were mine. A lot of them at least.

I held out my hands and closed my eyes, knowing they’d come to me. And they did, sinking into me like microscopic threads reknitting themselves into my soul with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the gut.

Grandma’s face. Worried. Behind her, a hospital room. Her eyes went from sad to surprised as I reached for her.

Then the feeling of a fist in my jaw. Pain. Surprise. Horror as my father stood over me.

A dozen more jolted through my mind—fragments of moments I couldn’t fully grasp. Fear. Pain. Hope. Love. And loneliness.

I staggered, gasping. I’d always considered myself a little broken. Spent years trying to cosplay as normal, and thought I’d succeeded. But the dizzying swirl of disjointed memories made me wonder just how shattered I’d always been.

And then there was the memory of that kiss. Jason Sanchez. My dad. Jason’s death while saving me.

Not a dream. Not even a nightmare. A memory.

I met Angel’s gaze, fearing there was so much more I’d lost, knowing even this most horrific memory was fragmented.

“My dad murdered Jason Sanchez when I was a teen,” I said. “And I think I raised Jason as a zombie.”

44

JUDE

Angel held my gaze with that steady, grounding presence that made me feel like I wasn’t falling apart, even when I clearly was. Every few minutes, I fritzed out, then came back, each time making Angel’s shoulders tense. Was it from getting the snippets of memories? Or was my body disintegrating, leaving the last bits of me to unravel?

And how could I have forgotten Jason? That night? The hospital afterward, everything…

No. I hadn’t forgotten. The memory had been taken from me.

I blinked out, shattered again for a beat, then back together, fragmented and flickering like some hologram gone wrong. Worry and fear clouded Angel’s expression.

“Breathe, baby,” he whispered.

“I’m dead. I don’t need to breathe. I need fucking answers.” I flickered again. “And to stop glitching like the Star Trek holodeck after a blaster attack. I’m not a hologram.”

“Take a minute anyway.”

“I raised someone as a zombie when I was sixteen, Angel. After my father murdered him.”

“Okay,” he agreed.

The memory was fresh. Raw. Jason’s face, his fear, the blood, and finally the hollow look in his eyes as he’d cast it on me—the moment I’d become his puppet master. The very thing Angel had been afraid I’d do to him.

“I don’t even remember it all. Just fragments. Snapshots of something bigger.” The icy touch of the changeling sliding into my brain to scoop out the memories before leaving me little more than a vegetable in the psych ward.

“What do you remember?” he asked gently.

Victor had his back to us, planted in the doorway like a very dramatic statue. I could feel his awareness. Not in how still he was, but an actual trickle of emotion. And beyond him, the rest of the team—a chaotic array of a dozen different emotions, and with it, a slow flow of energy. I could trace each one back to the team, one by one.

“What is happening?” I asked. “Why am I drowning in everyone else’s emotions?”

“I’ve sort of made them fellow Bastions.”