Page 50
I glanced at Victor, knowing he’d hear both sides of the conversation with his vampire hearing.
“What do you mean, missing?”
“He was headed home from the community center. Sylas was with him.” A pause. “A fog rolled in out of nowhere. Separated them. By the time it cleared, Ivan was gone.”
“Are you sure he’s not at the bakery? He was with Gwen recently.”
“No. I already called her to complain about her interfering.” A beat. “She hasn’t seen him. And they weren’t anywhere near the bakery. They were headed to your apartment.”
How did fog outmaneuver a few centuries-old kitsune?
“Fog?” I could track scents through fog. There was no way Sylas didn’t have at least as good a nose.
“Remnants of it remain in the park near your house. It’s smoke, but not, smells like earth after a rain, washing out everything.”
My gut clenched. Panic rose—raw and unfamiliar, the kind I hadn’t felt in years. I was on the verge of losing control.
Jude materialized at my side, barely solid. Eyes wide. Form wavering like smoke in a wind. His anxiety crashed into mine, and for a moment, we were just two desperate people tangled in a chaos neither of us could name. Relief that he had anything left at all was the only thing keeping me from shifting right then and there to search out my mate’s kid brother. But my mind spun with worries, each more damning than the last.
Erlik has him.
The changeling stole him.
The military snatched him.
The Fae finally came to collect.
I turned to Jude. “Ivan is missing.”
The words cracked my heart in half.
I’d failed to protect Jude. Now I’d failed to keep his little brother safe, too.
21
JUDE
The dust motes were having a crisis.
Not literally. They didn’t have enough consciousness for a crisis. More like... a very slow, very existential drift. They floated around the library like tiny dark question marks, bumping into each other, bumping into me, bumping into Nat’s carefully stacked bookshelves without any apparent purpose or shame.
I’d been trying to figure out what to do with them for hours. They were sort of like the soot sprites from Spirited Away—little dark flickers with too many legs and not enough sense. Except instead of being adorable and helpful, these were just... sad, and sort of useless. The leftover dregs of people Erlik had drained dry. Soul fragments with nowhere to go.
Useless might have been harsh. They weren’t completely useless. They could float. And pulse. And occasionally make me feel like I was drowning in someone else’s forgotten terror. So, you know. Not helpful.
They’d followed me from the warehouse, gathering in number until they really felt like an army of little sprites, flooding the library with dark flickers that would make any dark corner look like a horror movie. Even the hellhounds avoided them.
Nat couldn’t detect a direction for any of them. None of the doors opened. His inquiries to the higher-ups resulted in little more than supernatural shrugs of indifference. I was starting to think the universe ran on bureaucracy worse than the mortal world politics did, and the afterlife had the world’s worst customer service.
I was in the middle of pacing, my fifth lap around the reading table, Nat trying to ignore me and the scampering of dark shadows as he sorted books, when Angel’s panic hit.
It crashed through the bond like a freight train, scattering the dust motes in every direction. They swirled around me in a panicked cloud before settling back into their aimless drift.
What the hell?
Angel wasn’t the panicking type. He was the handle-it type. The shove-down-every-emotion-and-keep-moving type. And if I ever found myself back on the side of the living, I’d consider that a personality trait of his I’d need to work on.
But I tugged on the bond and let it pull me across the Veil.
