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Victor fell first, another shot tearing through his shoulder and spinning him away from me as the world tilted.

Jude.

I reached for the house, as if I could somehow will him to me before I fell again, dying in the grass of his childhood home. Victor lay unmoving behind me, and Wade launched himself at a tentacle, ripping it like paper. For a heartbeat, I thought he was winning. Had a heartbeat of hope that some of the team would survive. But another tentacle lashed out, swiping him across the middle, and a bloody gouge of innards spilled out of him as he staggered.

“Wade!” I tried to scream, but it came out as a whisper.

Bobby was there a second later, claws out, fangs bared, looking more vampire than I’d ever seen him. He swiped at the tentacle rising toward Wade, buying time, buying space⁠—

And then a gunshot rang out.

Bobby’s head snapped back. His body followed, crumpling to the ground like a puppet with cut strings. A soldier—one of Phelps’s men—stood twenty feet away, rifle raised, a look of terrified triumph on his face.

He’d shot Bobby in the head.

“No,” I breathed. “No, no, no⁠—”

My team was dying, one by one, while I lay useless in the grass, bleeding, barely breathing, feeling more alone than I ever had in my life. Everything hurt. Everything was blood and pain and the distant, fading echo of the bond.

Jude.

I couldn’t feel him. I couldn’t feel anything.

We’re dying. We’re all dying.

I closed my eyes, sucking in what I was certain was my last breath, knowing I’d failed everyone, and feeling as if my body were on fire.

Angel.

His voice echoed like fire inside me, through my bones, blood and to the very hollow center of where our connection used to be.

Don’t you dare leave me, Angel Mao, you stubborn, sexy bastard.

I would have snorted at his command if I could breathe and hadn’t thought it might be all in my head to hear him at all. But his soul tugged on mine, willing me to unravel myself in his hands. And while it felt insane to do it, I let go, gave it all up to him, letting him burn through whatever of me he needed with all the subtlety of a supernova.

The fire raced through every wound, every failing organ, every place where my body had given up. Healing and reweaving. Thread by thread, cell by cell, knitting me back together with something stronger than flesh and bone.

The heat branched out like lightning through the team. One strand to Wade, crumpled in the grass with his insides spilled. One to Bobby, headshot, unmoving. One to Victor, bleeding out beside me. One to Ezra, one to Remi, one to every single one of us.

Wade’s wound closed. His eyes flew open. He rolled onto his hands and knees, coughing, shaking, alive.

Bobby’s body jerked. The hole in his head sealed. He blinked, sat up, stared at his hands like he’d never seen them before.

Victor stirred beside me. His eyes fluttered open, glassy and confused, then sharpened with awareness. He looked at me, eyes wide.

I gasped, my body arching off the ground as the last of the reweaving settled into place. The world snapped back into focus sharp and bright. The pain vanished beneath a settling warmth. My soul entwined with a golden thread that pulsed in the distance like a heartbeat, and opened like a slice in the Veil. Jude standing haloed in the brightness, looking almost godlike in the middle of all this chaos.

He looked like something out of a fever dream. Dark clothes that fit like they’d been tailored by shadows from the latest runway. K-pop goth, I realized. His pale blond hair was matted with dust and blood, his jaw set with that familiar stubborn line, and in his hands he held two threads—one gold, one red—wrapped around his hands like brass knuckles. Backlit with a light as bright as the sun, which I realized had to be the weave in all its insanity.

Our eyes met across the battlefield.

The bond between us flared, hot and bright, and I felt him. Exhausted. Determined. Alive. Not a ghost. Jude back in his body, ready to kick ass and take names.

A shadow leapt out of the dark, landing on his shoulder—a tiny dragon. Nox.

“You started the party without me!” he shouted.

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. He was alive.