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Unnatural. Zhenjun called me the chaos knot, but this—this was a true knot of madness. Like some Frankenstein monster of restitched souls, it wriggled in the middle of the mass, half trapped itself, pulled in a thousand directions, and still trying to manipulate the strands as if it truly had power. A writhing tangle of gray strands, pulsing with a sickly light, still trying to pull more threads into itself, all dying and flaking away.

I felt the nightmare’s attention like a physical weight. I was one that got away. The meal that could have lasted decades and still wasn’t finished.

It smiled, and I heard, Let’s play, in my head as if it had spoken.

“Bet,” I agreed. “Let’s fucking go.”

The bond pulsed with warmth. Angel and Nox, a welcome flood of energy, hope, and love. As if magnetized, the gray strands flickered, a million tiny pieces all awakening with renewed focus.

“Come on,” I coaxed them, feeling the desperation of all those soul fragments to escape before nothing remained of them at all. “You’ve been eaten by this asshole for centuries. Don’t you want to bite back?”

They wanted to. I could feel it—a thousand tiny pulses of rage and grief and desperate, aching hope. But they were tangled. Bound. The changeling’s knot held them in place, threads wrapped so tight they couldn’t move.

So I reached through the weave and found the anchor points—the places where each soul was tied to the central knot. Then, one by one, I began to loosen them.

The mate bond pulsed with warmth. Angel. Nox. The team. Their energy flowed through me, giving me the strength to reach further, to touch more threads than I could have alone.

I wasn’t freeing them. I was giving them the tools to free themselves.

The first strand snapped away from the knot like a live wire. Then another. Then dozens. Each freed soul reaching for the next, pulling it loose, until there were hundreds, maybe thousands wriggling out of the knots tying them to the nightmare.

Erlik shrieked, clawing at them, but its grip was failing. The stolen pieces tore themselves free, and the knot began to unravel. Thread by thread. Mote by mote.

“You wanted to play, yeah?” I growled at it, willing them to let go and join me. “Here’s a new one. It’s called ‘everyone you ate gets a turn.’”

The changeling, shriveled and weak, snarled and tried to reach me, but Angel slashed at it, forcing it to yank itself out of the nest of threads it had woven around itself, loosening a growing storm of motes. Nox sprung at the changeling’s knot, biting and clawing at the fraying strands. The thing shrieked, trying to swat him away, but he was too fast.

I grabbed the remaining knot, clenching it between aching fingers as it burned with the energy of a supernova, and willed it to unravel.

The motes burst free, scattering in a pulsing wave that made everything around us wriggle and shake until it exploded.

I was airborne for a long minute, free of the darkness, soaring into the strange strobing lights of the merge outside my parent’s collapsed house. The ground rushed up to meet me, and then something soft caught me. A giant flower, petals curling around my body like a hand, cushioning my fall. Beau’s work. I’d have to thank him later.

I lay there for a heartbeat, staring up at the sky. Motes filled the air like ash after a volcano, drifting and swirling, catching the light of the pulsing tear as they gathered and reformed. Ghosts took shape in the haze, patchwork, barely visible, blinking at the world like they’d just woken up from a long nightmare, and they likely had.

The Reapers moved among them, guiding, sorting, herding. The Shepherd stood at the center of it all, their dark gaze sweeping the field, catching my gaze and nodding an approval.

Angel landed beside me, on his feet as cats usually did, Nox riding on his back like some furry jockey, both of them looking worse for wear but alive.

I pushed myself up, every muscle screaming, and looked at what was left of Erlik.

At the center of its remains, smoke rose from the grass as if everything had been hit by a bomb. Three things lay in the wreckage.

The first was a quickly scattering ash, but my gut flipped over in recognition, as it looked like me. The changeling that had spent its life feeding on me. It lay curled in on itself, shriveled and grey, turning to dust even as I watched. Its empty, black eyes glared up into the night sky as if betrayed—by me, by the world, by everything.

Then it crumbled away.

And the memories hit me.

All of them at once. A flood of stolen moments, slammed into my chest like a fist. I hit my knees, gasping, hands braced against the grass as decades of my life poured back into the holes the changeling had carved.

Every memory it had stolen, every fragment of my life it had taken, had been stored inside that shriveled, grey husk.

And now that it was dead, they were free.

My mother’s face. Jason’s laugh. A thousand pieces of myself, returned in a heartbeat, with no time to sort them, no time to breathe, no time to process.

Just the weight of everything I’d forgotten, crashing down at once. I gasped for air and Angel nudged my side. Nox sent me a wave of warmth, trying to ground me in the moment, and I breathed for a long minute, trying to focus on the quieting chaos of what remained of Erlik.