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Let me keep you safe. It slipped around me, leaving me feeling like I was sitting in the middle of a blizzard, ice and cold biting into my skin.
I wanted to tell it to stop, but couldn’t speak. My vision blinked out, and I caught a handful of images—a little boy with dark eyes, a young man with a sweet smile and a kiss, another world with magic I could only dream of. Then it was all gone, something heavy covering those snippets in syrup and burying them as it yanked them out of me.
I flinched. A headache formed instantly. My stomach churned with nausea.
Footsteps approached.
The shadow retreated, melting back into the corner, but I could still feel its touch inside my head, an empty space where something had been.
The doctor stepped back into the room, followed by a tall man in a dark suit that looked more like a uniform than something formal.
“Jude,” the doctor said, “this is the specialist I told you about.” He paused, then jolted. “Oh, your nose is bleeding. Let me grab a nurse.”
Was it?
I lifted my hand and felt the heat of blood on my fingertips. The doctor darted away, but the new man remained. His face was defined, and I blinked through the fuzzy migraine stars along the side of my vision to study his expression.
The specialist studied me with cold, assessing eyes. He stared like I was a puzzle he was trying to solve, or a problem he was trying to dismiss.
Something shoved at the edges of my mind. A pressure, like a finger pressing against the inside of my skull. Intrusive. Painful, since I already had a headache.
I flinched, and the pressure vanished.
The specialist looked annoyed as he turned to the doctor, who had returned with a nurse. “He’s completely ordinary.”
The doctor frowned, then looked flustered. “I was certain there was something…”
“Nothing,” the specialist said flatly.
The nurse, this one I’d never met, slipped past them both and tipped my head back, pinching my nose.
The specialist waved a dismissive hand and left, as if annoyed he’d been bothered at all.
The doctor opened his mouth, closed it, then nodded and followed the man out.
The shadow in the corner pulsed once. A reminder of its presence, and of all the things I no longer remembered.
Maybe that’s why I wasn’t useful to the specialist.
Because there was nothing left to find.
I sucked in a deep breath and prayed for the chance to escape this new nightmare.
But the specialist’s face stayed with me. Cold eyes. Assessing. The way he’d pressed into my mind like I was a puzzle he was trying to solve.
I knew that face now.
Phelps.
42
ANGEL
I sank to the floor, back against the wall, and let my sight morph to the Bastion’s overlay. The threads spread before me in a complicated mess of knots, nearly broken strands, and unusual colors tied together in a dizzying display. How did anyone know where to begin? I wished Jude were here to explain it, but he was scattered, floating, perhaps remembering something.
The fragments glowed with tiny pulses of life, as if they weren’t willing to sink back into the Veil and become part of the weave. I held out my hand, and a few dozen little black soot sprites drifted toward me, their touch careful, almost desperate, as if they needed to connect.
Nox popped up from beneath my shirt, crawling out like he’d somehow fit there all along. He swiped at a few motes, oddly not batting them away, but drawing them closer.
