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18

JUDE

I lay there panting for a while, taking comfort in the flickering blue and red lights. I wasn’t ready to face that alien thing lingering in the shadows.

Was it terrible to realize I actually felt stronger? That the nightmare bits of stolen memories had given me back some semblance of life?

“What do you want from me?” I finally asked.

Silence stretched so long I wondered if it had left, but that strange inky wrongness lingered at the edge of my senses.

Finally, I heard the barest whisper. “Nothing.”

What the hell?

“Why torment me then?”

“Life is filled with pain.” A pause. “I could have taken the joy. Erlik takes it all.”

“So, I should be grateful for you only stealing pieces of my life?”

It hummed at me as a group of uniforms wheeled out a covered body on a stretcher. The sheet was pulled tight, hiding whatever was underneath, but an unusual flicker of shadow clinging to the corpse, like smoke refusing to rise, caught my eye.

Was that a ghost?

I struggled to my feet, swaying with dizziness and cursing my own mostly-dead state. My legs felt like they were held together by little more than stubbornness and stolen fragments.

I glared into the shadows. The changeling was still there. I could feel it watching, with that oily wrongness prickling at the back of my neck. But I made my way across the wide expanse of the warehouse, weaving between debris and broken pallets, heading toward where the team waited with the body. The uniforms were keeping the press back, containing the scene, and reciting lines about how this was “just another homeless death” until they knew more.

The flicker of shadow clung to the corpse.

I reached out with my senses; the way Nat had been teaching me. Tried to find the thread. The presence. Anything. Even my necromancer ability, if that was what helped me talk to the burned corpses from the last mass crime scene, and got nothing.

Not a ghost. Not a fragment. Not even the faint echo of someone who had once been alive.

Just... shadow. Smoke. A stain on the air that faded even as I watched.

What the hell was it? Why did it cling to the body?

I reached for it, thinking maybe it was best not to touch, but also fearing whatever nightmare secrets it might unlock. My fingers passed through the shadow, but it clung to me, sticking like glue.

A scream pierced my mind. A memory of pain, nothing more, but I tried to shake the thing off anyway. I stumbled back half a dozen feet, landed on my ass, and the shadow still refused to let go.

The changeling whispered in my ear, its voice curling through the dark. “Leftovers of the demon. We take a nibble, exist on it for lifetimes. It leaves only residue.”

I stared at the shadow clinging to my fingers.

Was it saying what I thought it was?

This thing used to be a soul. A person.

This was all that remained after Erlik took someone?

I stared at the shadow on my fingers, cold and clinging. Did that mean eventually this would be me?

The little slip of darkness finally let go, floating down as if just as tired as I was.

Beyond our stretch of shadow, across the warehouse floor, a dozen other bodies lay spread on the concrete. Surrounded by police, and flickers.