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Another shape formed, a second group of motes gathering. A man this time. Older. Weathered. He blinked at the sky, at the tear, at the monsters still pouring through.

Then a third. Smaller. A child, maybe eight or nine, staring at the chaos with wide, confused eyes. She reached for someone who wasn’t there.

They weren’t whole ghosts. They were patchwork, like Erlik itself. The bits left after finding themselves eaten by a nightmare.

Souls.

Enough of them to move on, maybe?

Nat appeared from the gate around the back of the house, as if pulled by the emergence of souls. Other Reapers followed, an array of hooded skeletal figures flickering from terrifying to human as they stepped from beyond the Veil and back, the yard peppered with merged sections of both sides of the Veil. The Shepherd followed, dark gaze on me, and I felt it almost like an accusation. Like I’d broken something and now they were here to clean up my mess.

I held my hands up. “I’m just the supernatural fix-it guy.”

Angel tore another piece off, throwing it at my feet. Erlik reacted by smashing him with another tentacle. Angel yelped, rolling and slowly getting back up, and I growled.

“That’s my mate, you know.”

I balled my hand into a fist, the wrapped threads of red and gold feeling like iron knuckles, and slammed my fist into the tentacle. It burst into a million motes, threads snapped, and motes scattered. Souls spilled out like light from a cracked lantern, and the Reapers were there to catch them.

A dozen more tentacles erupted as if cutting off one head spawned more.

Nox launched into the fray, breathing a stream of blue fire at the nearest tentacle. It recoiled, smoking, and he landed back on my shoulder with a chirp that sounded entirely too pleased with himself.

“Jude Alexander Holt,” it hissed at me, feeling like two voices in one. The changeling, and Erlik, shadow demon.

“Creepy bastard,” I answered, hitting another tentacle. If I had to break them all, this battle was never going to end.

“Little chaos knot, you have the most interesting ways of learning,” Zhenjun remarked as he appeared at my side.

“Oh, hey, Just Jon! Learning, right. More like trial by dumpster fire,” I shouted at him as I leapt onto another tentacle reaching for Victor and tore into it as if it were fabric instead of shadow.

“Is that not what you prefer?” Zhenjun inquired as he whipped out his sword and began slicing pieces of the monster, only for it to reform even more flailing limbs.

“Fuck!” A tentacle snaked past me and coiled around Angel. It snagged him around the middle, dragging him back toward the center. Angel roared, claws tearing into it. Wade leapt at the limb, digging in, and I snarled. “Oh, hell no. That’s mine.”

I dove at the limb, finding the shadow thicker than the previous ones. My fist glanced off it, and I cursed. This one wasn’t fraying like the others. It was dense, and solid. Protected.

But I’d been unraveling Erlik’s outer mass for minutes now. I knew what it was made of, the same stolen strands, the same patchwork souls, the same fragile weave held together by nothing but hunger and will. The thicker tentacles were just more tightly bound. More layers. More threads.

If I could find the core, find the knot that held it all together, then I could unravel it from the inside out.

“Into the fire, then,” I muttered, making my decision right then. It wanted to eat everything. Okay then. I decided in that moment to deliver exactly what it wanted—ultimate chaos. Because wasn’t that what I was?

I latched onto Angel, wrapping my arms around him, letting the tentacle drag us both toward the dark. Shadow closed over us like a fist. Cold. Suffocating. The smell of rot filled my nose, and I felt the mass trying to weave us into itself, thread by thread.

Angel roared, claws tearing into the shadow, but I held on. Trust me, I willed through the bond. Just trust me.

He stilled, waiting, barely breathing. He trusted me, and I really hoped I didn’t fail us both in that moment.

A snarling thread of inky ooze wrapped around us, sucking us deeper, toward a pulsing center. But the shield held. The shadow pressed against it, trying to weave us into itself, but my threads were my own—woven from my soul, my love, my stubborn refusal to let go. It couldn’t assimilate what it couldn’t touch.

I sent a pulse of energy through the cocoon of inky thread, shattering it into a thousand motes, which floundered to reattach. And there, buried deep in the mass, pulsing like a diseased heart, was a knot the size of a car. Tied to a tangled, writhing mass of shadow and teeth and too many eyes, all of them fixed on us.

The original Changeling.

Not the one that had chased me my entire life. That one was smaller. Thinner. A parasite that had fed on me in pieces, stealing memories and hiding in my blind spots. This one was older. Vaster. A creature that had been eating souls for centuries before I was even born.

The one attached to me was a scavenger. This was the apex predator.