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“You could help more,” Nat snapped at Zhenjun.
“You overstep, Reaper. Even you cannot save him from this.”
“I’d take him to rest if I had the ability,” Nat huffed.
“Until his remains are destroyed or retrieved, you cannot take him anywhere. Neither can I solve this for him. He stretched himself thin. I did not do that.”
I winced. Yeah. This all went back to the spell I’d desperately woven around Angel, Ivan, and the team before Erlik grabbed me. Would they all be dead if I hadn’t?
I shuddered at the thought. But I’d do it all over again. For Ivan. For the team. For Angel. Consequences be damned.
6
ANGEL
My fingers ached as we made our way upstairs, a dull throb that felt like icy needles traveling through my veins. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught flickers of darkness—little blots that seemed to leap at me, clinging to my skin before dissolving.
I flinched, swatting at nothing. But they were already gone.
The hospital around us was too quiet, leaving my senses acutely aware of every sound. A thousand heartbeats. Breathing. The beeping of machines. The buzzing of lights. Everything.
I sucked in a breath, trying to filter it out. Trying to focus. But the blots kept coming, drawn to me like I was a flame and they were moths. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe I was the moth, and they were the flame, and I was about to get burned.
Wade’s hand on my shoulder kept me steady as our team made its way up to another ward, this one the complete opposite with muted walls, and geriatric patients. A musty scent of something lingered in the air, like death itself waited. And for a few seconds I wondered how many ghosts lingered.
My Bastion senses refused to retract, and the team remained a wall around me.
Gerald McKaley was a sketch of a person. Thin. Parchment-pale. Laid out under a thin blanket while machines beeped and sighed around him in a mechanical lullaby.
I lingered in the doorway, gaze searching for a dark blob of otherness like I’d seen downstairs. But there was nothing.
Remi appeared at my elbow; expression tight. “The stain’s gone.”
Wade thumbed through his phone; voice low. “Public story is he beat cancer after his wife died. Private truth is the rapid mental decline over the last few months. Shouting. Paranoia. Then a heart attack a week ago. He should’ve woken up by now.”
“He was in the psych ward for observation a couple days before the attack,” Remi added quietly. “Ranting about rituals and demons.”
I stiffened. “Why were you in psych?”
Remi’s gaze didn’t waver. “Standard procedure after variant chip placement.”
A cold knot formed in my gut. I looked at Ezra. “Is that new?”
“Last decade or so,” he confirmed.
My attention snapped to Wade. My best friend. My brother in everything but blood. “You never told me that.”
His jaw tightened. “You got your chip during the war. You were thrown into battle. I hardly think a few hours in psych is worse than war.”
The silence that followed was louder than any machine.
They’d all been through it. Locked away. Studied. Deemed stable or unstable before being tagged and sent back into the world like cattle rather than people. And I’d never known.
Jude had told me about the morgue. Handcuffed to a table. Disorientation. Nightmares that bled into his waking hours until reality felt like a frayed thread. I’d thought his ordeal was special. A cruelty reserved for a necromancer. Now I wondered if it was just SED protocol. If they’d all been through some version of that soul-scrubbing hell.
Bile and rage climbed my throat. I forced them down.
The man on the bed wore no glowing armband. He’d never been chipped, or it hadn’t taken. What did that mean now, with the stain gone? In fact, any actual sense of him was also noticeably absent as well. As if the man’s coma wiped out his entire existence. Or maybe not the coma at all.
