Page 42

The first cooler broke open. The door slammed against the metal wall with a deafening clang, and a body tumbled out. Gray flesh. Hollow eyes. Still wearing the tag on its toe.

It landed in an inelegant heap, then began to crawl, dragging itself across the floor toward me.

I screamed, raw and desperate, unable to find words for the terror. A zombie gripped one of my wrists in an iron hold while the cuff bit into the other, pinning me in the middle of the nightmare.

“Jude Alexander Holt.” A voice hissed in my ear, close enough to raise the hairs on my neck. “I could have kept this piece.”

I choked and half blacked out from panic, the jolt shifting everything around me from the nightmare, to darkness, and then a vaguely familiar warehouse on a dim street, surrounded by rotating red and blue police lights.

Warehouse?

Oh shit, the tear…

I looked around in panic, fearing I’d find a gaping wound between realms, but even the lightning flicker had vanished.

No splice between worlds, and no morgue filled with zombies, though I could still feel their bony fingers on my skin.

“Could have kept that one. Tasty,” a voice whispered close again.

I jumped, spinning around, hands up for a fight, but saw nothing. Shadows, maybe, but as I could see the ground through the ghostly cast of my feet, I remembered that I was little more than a shadow myself. “I’m going crazy,” I grumbled to myself.

“Are you?” a voice asked from my other side.

I spun and swung again, finding nothing but air, or maybe my ghostly form couldn’t fight whatever it was, though a chill raced through me, vaguely familiar.

“Jude Alexander Holt.”

“Fuck me,” I groaned, realization hitting as I caught the barest outline of something in the dark. Little more than a shape with too many teeth. “You’re the changeling, right?”

It snorted, as if it didn’t care for my need to label things at all.

“What do you want?” I demanded.

“Ungrateful.”

“What do I have to be grateful for? The nightmare?” I laughed, brittle and sharp. “Thanks, but next time keep your sick, twisted dreams to yourself.”

“Not a dream, Jude Alexander Holt.” Its voice slithered through the dark. “Memory. Life. Returned.”

“Not true. That never happened. Nothing moved.”

“No? Or perhaps the memory was taken from you?”

Its words dug into my brain with all the gentleness of an ice pick through the eye. “What?” I asked, but found myself flipped back into the dream, memory, and bodies surrounded me, while I screamed until the dark shadows of the warehouse returned again.

I panted, the stolen snippet of my life returning to the place in my brain I hadn’t realized had been cut free. The variant test. The doctors had sedated me and told me it was a reaction to the chip. A hallucination.

Not a hallucination at all.

“What did you do to me?” I demanded.

“Took that which you didn’t want.” The changeling sighed, long and put-upon. “Dozens of fragments. Removed to save you pain. You should be grateful.”

“Sure. Sure.” I laughed without humor. “Grateful for less trauma. Wonderful. What’s the point? Torture? My insanity? Why give it back now?”

“You fade, Jude Alexander Holt. Every thread you stitch, every tear you close, burns through the last of your threads. And you have nothing left to spend. Erlik gnaws on one end, you set fire to the other.” The changeling’s shape shifted, resolving into something almost human. “I returned a fragment I stole to add moments to your threads.” A hollow laugh rang from it. The police lights painted its face in alternating red and blue, making it look like something from a horror movie. “You are not so unlike us.”

“What are you? Some sort of vampire of memories?”