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His gaze shifted, lifting toward the air, almost like he’d sensed me watching. His eyes met mine, through the vision, through the Veil, through whatever impossible connection the changeling had forced open. Don’t follow.

Then the vision cut off like a knife through thread.

“Run to save him, tasty,” the changeling hissed.

But if I ran to Ivan, I’d abandon the team, and Angel.

A pained scream ripped through the night outside. A big cat’s snarl, sharp and wrong.

Angel.

He needed me. He was hurt.

I ripped away from the changeling as if it had burned me, landing hard on the floor. There in the office, with the room half warped through the merge, I caught the glint of another scar, this one bigger than the one upstairs, but just as hastily repaired. And a pinprick hole seeped with dark smoke. A hole in the Veil.

A thought occurred to me then. It wasn’t me the changeling had ever feared, no matter what my other self might be. I tugged on a thread dangling from the edge of the repair, widening the hole.

The changeling’s face, my face, twisted with something between fear and fury, gaze on the steadily widening hole.

It found us.

“Remi, run.”

His eyes were wide, focused on the dark mist creeping through the tiny tear, but he backed toward the door, feet stumbling over the uneven floorboards.

The smoke thickened, curling upward like a living thing stretching after a long sleep. The temperature plummeted. I felt it in my threads, in the weave, in the stolen motes that had just been returned to me, and all the holes remaining in my tattered soul. I reached for Angel, the red strand that barely held together as we’d only begun to form the bond before the universe tried to tear us apart.

Remi darted out the door. The changeling’s hand closed around my arm, strangely solid, though I was still little more than a ghost. A chittering laugh began to echo through the room, and then the house, shaking the foundation until it felt like an earthquake.

That laugh still echoed in my nightmares. Erlik.

The changeling’s black eyes were frantic, fixed on the growing tear in the Veil, on the dark smoke that poured through in earnest.

It shoved me toward the hole like a plug toward a drain.

“Fix it,” the changeling demanded.

I snorted. “You mean this?” I asked and yanked on the dangling thread, tearing the Veil wide and letting the darkness pour free.

The changeling shrieked and jolted away leaving me floundering in the rising dark nightmare. I scrabbled through the chaos, desperate, searching for Angel, for our bond, for the one thing that had always anchored me. And I found the red thread, faint but steady, pulsing with a rhythm I knew better than my own heartbeat because it was ours. I latched onto it, and felt the familiar warmth of Angel’s presence, distant and fading, but still there.

I could crawl to him, perhaps hide from the demon oozing free of the Veil tear because I was little more than a ghost, but that wouldn’t save the team, Angel, or my brother. No. I needed to be more than a wisp of a shattered soul. More than a million shattered fragments of who I should have been without a lifetime of stolen trauma as baggage.

But I wasn’t just a ghost. I was a Weaver. I could see the threads—the ones that held reality together, the ones that connected every living thing. I could touch them, weave them, use them, even follow them.

Right? Maybe I could find my way back to my body, back to Angel, back to myself and whatever power everyone seemed to think I had. I just had to follow the thread, and there was only really one thread I could find without hesitation. The red strand that tied Angel and I together.

I closed my eyes, and reached for the red strand. It was thin, fading, our separation causing it to wear before it could really solidify. But it was there.

And tied to the red strand, extending far into the ether, a gold fragment of ribbon writhed. The thread Angel had severed to save me from Erlik’s control. It had been weak and stretched to shield the team, and broken far too easily to release me from becoming a puppet of destruction.

I wrapped my fingers around it and pulled.

The world folded, and I was falling, tumbling through a spin of disorienting light and dark, the thread burning hot in my grasp as though it threatened to sear right through me.

I hit the ground hard, cold stone jarring through my ghostly form. For a moment, I just lay there, my threads humming with the aftershock of whatever the hell that had been. The thread in my grasp pulsed, hot and demanding, still tied to something, and demanding acknowledgement.

I pushed myself up, holding tight to the strand, and following its direction wondering if this was another trap set by the changeling.