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The room was small and cramped, the ceiling low enough that I could have touched it if I’d stretched. Shelves lined every wall, crammed with jars of varying sizes, their contents shifting in the dim light. Some held liquid. Some held what looked like ash or bone. Others held things I couldn’t quite make out, shapes that moved when I wasn’t looking directly at them.

One giant jar brought back the memory of my first time in this place.

Erlik’s larder.

Though instead of a hundred jars with people dissolving in them, there was only one, and the gold thread led right to it. I knew it before I saw it clearly in the darkness. I could feel it, a hollow pull in the space where my chest used to be.

My body.

Floating in murky liquid, pale and waxy, skin grey with the pallor of death, my face was slack, empty, the eyes half-lidded and glazed. The gold life thread Angel had severed pulsed in my grip as I stared at what was left of myself.

I couldn’t feel Angel, or anything beyond the cold stillness of the room. Did that mean he was gone? Was a floating corpse all that was left of me?

47

JUDE

I stared at my body floating in liquid. I’d looked at corpses a thousand times as a detective. I’d never have thought to study my own.

Having spent my life in the bowels of life and death, I could clinically examine my remains and say there was no obvious sign of death. Not a cut throat, or broken spine, or even a hollowed-out corpse withered to near dust. Just me, as if I’d gone to sleep and never woken up.

The prime way to go.

Only I wasn’t ready yet.

The gold thread pulsed in my grip, warm and insistent, a reminder. It should have faded after death, shouldn’t it? I wished I could ask Nat questions in that moment. Our many visits to retrieve souls had rarely touched threads at all, and none like mine.

I pressed my palm flat against the glass, almost willing the body to wake up. And wasn’t that a creepy thought right out of a horror movie. Since I was the body and the body was me.

“I don’t have time for another existential crisis,” I told the empty space. “Angel is hurt.”

Dying. Fading, but also under attack.

“And Ivan was being led away by whatever nightmare had clawed out our father’s gooey insides and is using him as a suit.”

Death hung in the air like perfume, pressing against my threads, seeping into the spaces between what I was and what I’d been. I could feel it in the shelves, in the jars, in the old grey motes that drifted through the dim light like dust motes in a sunbeam.

The space felt more like a trophy room than a larder.

Again, no door. What was it with this asshole and no doors?

The dim overhead light left long shadows to stretch between the shelves and cast eerie darkness over my still form. Maybe Erlik used the shadows to travel like the changeling did?

“Found my body,” I said to no one, as if Zhenjun could hear me. “Now what?”

I tugged on the gold strand, which merely pulled me toward the body.

Could I jump in it? Would it mend itself and leave me a puppet again?

I could fix it, couldn’t I? The whole Weaver thing? But again, would it leave me a puppet and force Angel to make another heartbreaking choice? If he was even able to do so this time.

I let out a breath and focused on the weave, not just mine, but the Veil itself, the fabric that made up all of reality. It was the one thing Nat had been pushing me to study through books, and each time I accompanied him on a retrieval. Not to manipulate the strands, but so I’d understand the overall picture.

The physical room fell away. Shelves, jars, dim light, even my corpse, all of it dissolved as the lines solidified in a strange array of dull threads. Gray and faded, most of the room had little life left at all. The few strands that pulsed with actual color were tangled and knotted, stretched like a spiderweb to encase everything. The larder itself, even this trophy room, was some sort of sprung trap in a larger web.

And at the center, my body.

Grayed out. Muted. Like a photograph left in the sun too long, only a touch of sepia adding any color to the lifelessness. Dozens of holes surrounded by thick, uneven stitching spattered the corpse, as if I’d spent my entire life repairing what had been stolen.