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I stepped through after him, back into the cold St. Paul night. The hood settled around my shoulders. The dark fabric moved with me. But more than that—the world had shifted. As if wearing the cloak of a Reaper had redefined my vision into something more. Was this how Nat saw the world?

Everywhere I looked, strands stretched and wove together. Life and death. Past and future. A tapestry so vast it made my head spin. Colors I didn’t have names for. Shadows that pulsed like heartbeats. The buildings had breath. The pavement had bones. And threading through it all, the quiet hum of everything connected to everything else.

I could read the length of lives. The creation of new strands pending. And even narrow my focus to… disruptions.

I froze.

My gaze locked onto a knot in the distance, snarled through the weave so tightly that a dozen strands lay strangled in darkness, dying, ready to fray.

Fuck.

Was this going to be a tear?

“Nat.” My voice came out thin. “Do you see that? The snarl?”

He followed my gaze, then shook his head slowly. “I see the ends of strands I’m meant to touch. Nothing more.”

That could only mean one thing.

I ran.

The knot thrummed with dark, strangling energy—like a fist squeezing the life out of the strands. Behind me, Nat called, “Jude…” as if in warning.

But that section was seconds from fraying. Seconds from unraveling into a long slit that would pour supernatural chaos from beyond the Veil into the mortal world.

I slid to a stop at the end of an alleyway, rounding the corner of the building to find an old warehouse steeped in darkness. And easily a few dozen similar snarled knots woven through the center of it, pulsing, breathing, waiting, as if a dozen other terrible things had happened here, and all it needed was one more to make that final snip.

12

JUDE

I stared up at the warehouse, heart pounding as the things in the dark stared back. The knots pulsed. The strands frayed.

How did I fix something this big? Where do I even start? How had this happened?

My gut instinct screamed that this was a crime scene, and that I needed to wake Angel and call the team. The warehouse echoed with the finality of death. Were there souls inside waiting to be moved? But Nat didn’t see anyone. Why? Because they weren’t his?

And yet, something was there. I felt a pull low in my chest, like a thread tugging at my ribs. Not the strands I’d seen woven through the world. More like a presence calling out from underwater, too muffled to understand but impossible to ignore.

The knots pulsed. The darkness held its breath as if waiting for me to do something.

Nat’s gaze snapped to the distance. “We have to go. I need to collect someone…” He hesitated, glancing my way. “I can come back to get you after I’m finished.”

“Is it far?” I tried to memorize the area, noting the dark building, the broken windows, the shape of the alley. “I’ll return after we’re done and fix this, if that’s okay?”

Nat nodded and waved for me to follow. He took off in a jog down the street, tracing some path I couldn’t see.

Rain began to fall in a cold drip that chilled my soul to the core. Ghosts felt the cold? Or was it just me?

Since I didn’t want to distract Nat from his job, I shelved the question for another time.

A streetlight flickered half a block away, its sickly glow barely reaching us. Rows of dark, silent buildings leaned in on either side. I wasn’t certain I could retrace my steps again if necessary, as Nat wove through the unfamiliar side streets of downtown St. Paul near the river. The eerie late night adding a foreboding quiet to the drizzle and chill.

The woman’s muffled scream quickened my pace.

In the shuddering shadows beside a dented dumpster, a woman’s stifled cry cut through the rain. I turned to find a man hunched over her, his body a cage of brute force. He wasn’t just restraining her. He was smothering her. His hand clamped down viciously over her mouth and nose, his weight pressing her into the cold, wet pavement as his free hand tore roughly at the collar of her coat.

This was something slower, more intimate in its cruelty. He was stealing her breath before stealing anything else, silencing her into submission while he worked. Her thrashing was growing weaker, her struggles fading into frantic, shallow twitches as the world narrowed to the suffocating dark of his palm.