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The woman backed away from the scene, her eyes wild, body coiled like a cornered animal. But instead of running, she searched for her fallen purse. Found it. Her hands trembled as she retrieved her phone, her gaze locked on the zombies holding down her attacker.

She couldn’t see me or Nat anymore. Now that her thread was no longer shredding, we were just... wrongness at the edge of her perception. Shadows that shouldn’t be there.

But she could see the dead, shambling things that had crawled out of the warehouse because of me, with their hollow eyes and bruised skin and fingers wrapped around the wrists of the man who’d tried to rape and kill her.

Her breath came in short, sharp gasps. Her thumb hovered over the phone screen.

Call someone, I willed her. Run. Do something. I was pretty certain I’d already fucked something up in the timeline of reality that would get an angry Marshal on my ass.

She dialed.

“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”

Her voice was raw, shaking, but she forced the words out. “Zombie… saved me…” She swallowed hard and broke down into a sob, barely getting out any answers to the questions asked by the operator.

I blinked. “Zombie. Singular. I brought a whole crew. Where’s my credit?” I murmured.

Nat put a hand on my arm, tugging me away. Neither of us was necessary now. The woman wouldn’t be passing on. Sirens suddenly blazed through the quiet rain, growing louder, heading in our direction.

Holy fuck. I’d rewritten fate.

Zhenjun was going to murder me a second time.

I turned to Nat, braced for a reprimand, for horror, for the cold dismissal of a failed student. But his expression held only something deep and wary. Confused. Almost afraid.

“We aren’t able to change things,” Nat said, his voice low, almost a whisper. “We can’t rewrite fate.”

But I had. And I’d pulled zombies from the ground again. Not one, like from that lot of mostly burned remains, but half a dozen. And they’d done my bidding.

How was that possible when I was mostly dead myself?

Mostly dead, I repeated in my head. Yeah. About that. Pretty sure I just raised the dead while being dead. That’s either impressive or a paradox. Possibly both. Definitely gonna be a problem later.

13

ANGEL

Wade roused me from a dead sleep. For one long second, the empty space beside me didn’t register. Then it did.

Jude.

Dead. Mostly. A ghost who’d held me last night and vanished by morning.

My gut clenched. I blinked the burn from my eyes and sat up.

“Sorry,” Wade muttered. “We’ve got a tear, and…” He hesitated. “Zombies.”

I blinked through a slew of emotions—anxiety, exhaustion, confusion—before the words finally registered. “What?”

“There’s a tear,” Wade said again. “A big one. It’s in St. Paul, but large enough that all SED units are being called in. Thankfully it’s in a commercial area. Not much residential nearby.”

I tried to push myself up, but my entire right arm tingled like a limp noodle. The muscles refused to cooperate. I groaned and stared at it, finding the dark lines had spread. What had been black veins crawling up my forearm yesterday now reached past my elbow, winding toward my shoulder like creeping ivy.

Wade hissed. “That looks bad.” He grabbed my arm, turning it toward the dim light of the bedside lamp. “When did this happen?”

“Yesterday at the hospital.” I admitted, grimacing as he gently probed the edge of the discoloration. “When I pulled the stain out of that little girl.”

“You should have said something.”