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“One memory broke you,” Angel whispered. And he wasn’t wrong. But it wasn’t just the memory. Something had changed. Reawoken? “If you get back a thousand… will there be anything left?”

I flickered again—a strange beat of nothing, then back. “I have to do something.”

He reached out his good hand as if he could touch me, but even here, in this chaotic merge, he couldn’t. His jaw clenched, and I knew how much it cost him to stare at choices that weren’t really choices at all.

“What do we do?” I asked Remi.

“Don’t touch him,” Angel growled.

Remi held his hands up. “Couldn’t even if I wanted to,” he assured Angel. Then, to me, “We’ll use the shield you created to cast a net. Sort of like a magnet, to capture all the motes.” He looked a little worried when he added, “It may be a lot of memories at once.” He frowned at Victor. “It will draw from the team’s energy to power it.”

Victor sighed. “I’ll warn them.”

“But none of the memories have been complete.” The changeling had been taking pieces. Keeping some and discarding others. Which left me feeling like the worst piece of Swiss cheese in history.

I stared at the floating motes still drifting lazily around the room like they had nowhere better to be. They were mine, that much I knew. But putting them back one at a time? Not only did I not want to suffer through a thousand broken memories, it would take days. Maybe years. One big rush sounded painful, and maybe it would completely take me apart, but also, maybe it would put me back together.

“A door opened for me,” I told Angel.

“But you stayed.”

I nodded. “It’s either I do something here and now, or I go through that door.” We were out of time. That much I understood. I’d rather move on to a void of nothing or maybe even hell, than be tied to one of the grimoires as nothing but floating snippets of what used to be memories.

“If I could do this for you…” Angel began.

“I still wouldn’t let you.” I held his gaze. “But I love you. And if this doesn’t work out, I’ll see you on the other side, right? Even if it’s nothing but a void. We’ll drift together in the dark like the world’s saddest bath toys.”

He nodded, swallowing hard.

“Let’s do it,” I said, turning back to Remi.

Remi nodded, his movements stiff, but he traced a line of light through the air that sank into the weave like a blaze of color. Runes glowed in a complex array of amber and green. When they touched my strands—the tiny threads of the weave that created what was left of me—it felt a lot like acid. Hot and painful.

But fast.

For a heartbeat, I feared I’d been wrong to trust Remi. Thought he’d betrayed us, broken the bond, dissolved the shield. Instead, I sensed each anchor point of the net and felt it awaken.

The dark lines clinging to Angel, stopping his fade, detached and smashed into me like a battering ram. I staggered, and so did he. Victor reached for him, catching Angel, but also finding himself in the web of Remi’s magic too. The runes etched through our shield bond to pull strength from Victor and increased the magnet draw of the motes.

Then a flood of broken memory fragments snapped back, sinking into my threads like rain into thirsty earth. Grandma’s laugh. A scraped knee. The smell of hot pavement. Jason’s smile. My mother’s cold silence. My father’s fist. Grandpa’s worry.

The shield hummed like the screaming of cicadas in the height of summer, dragging me along it to where Bobby waited at the end of the hall, using his energy to gather the fragments and suction them back. Then on to Wade. Then Ezra beyond.

I could visualize each of them briefly, touch their energy to add fuel to the magnet pull, as a thousand tiny pieces returned. Some were so scattered I could barely pull together where they belonged in my past. The sheer volume of them made me worry how much of myself had been lost long before Erlik stole my remains.

But as the motes found their home, the weave lit up like someone had flipped a switch. A ripple of color shuddered through it, like a stone hitting still water. It was like one of those Magic Eye books, the kind you had to stare at cross-eyed to see the hidden picture. The longer I stopped trying to focus, the more I saw.

Dozens of dark, jagged little pins in the pattern where something had pushed through and left a scar, scabbed into a gathered knot of threads that didn’t mesh at all. Some were old, faded, gray. Others were fresh, raw, still pulsing with the wrongness of whatever had made them. Like wounds in reality itself.

Not tiny discarded emotions like the motes. These were chunks of my life that had been punched out. Stolen. Dark blotches of scabbed holes, unwilling to heal.

Fuck my existence. How did I become the tastiest lollipop in the universe?

And yet in every excision a trace of darkness remained, like a tracker. Or a beacon.

The changeling hadn’t just stolen my memories. It had left breadcrumbs to always lead it back to me. But that also meant a trail of dark threads leading from each scar back to the source. Back to it.

My entire life, it’d been tearing chunks out of me. No wonder I’d found myself adrift, unable to trust or heal.