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Yesterday. When I pulled some sort of dark maggot out of a little girl in a hospital.

I shook my head. “The past few days?” Not really a lie. It was hard to lie to the fae, and Hanna had always been good to me. I hated having to lie to her.

“Anything in particular trigger the change?”

“Beyond the death of my mate, you mean?” I threw back.

“Is he dead? We never recovered a body.” Her tone was even, meant to soothe rather than agitate.

I flinched. No body because a nightmare was still gnawing on it.

“He is.” I couldn’t keep my voice from breaking.

“And his power is somehow still tied to you?”

“It’s not. I can’t raise or command zombies. I don’t know what any of that was.”

“And closing a Veil tear? What do you know about that?”

She’d read the lie easily if I told her I knew nothing about it, so I went for the basics. “The zombies closed the tear. Isn’t that what we all saw?”

Hanna’s gaze held mine for a long moment. “Everyone saw the zombies doing something. No one saw what was behind them doing what they did.”

“And zombies don’t close tears,” I finished for her.

“Nothing that we know of can close tears,” she corrected.

“But it’s happened. We’ve had reports of a tear, shown up and found nothing. Is it mending itself?” That had been the theory for decades. Smaller tears sometimes seemed to self-heal. I wondered if that was Zhenjun quietly fixing what he could. “Maybe there were zombies fixing it all along.”

“No one believes that,” a voice said through the speaker system. A minute later the door opened and I had to contain my scowl. Merrill. Our office’s only other SV.

He stepped into the room, the perpetual look of disapproval and disgust on his face leaving no doubt how much he disliked me, and any other shifter variant he was forced to work with. “Zombies don’t think. They are just reanimated empty shells after the electric jellyfish in their brains has exited.”

“Pleasant as always, Merrill.”

He didn’t acknowledge the jab. Just set a tablet on the table between us, its screen showing a grainy freeze-frame of the alley. Zombies. Shadows. And nothing else.

Hanna studied him, waiting. Merrill shook his head.

“If Holt is here, I can’t hear him at all.” He waved toward the mirror. “We’ve got equipment hooked up to monitor, and it’s finding nothing. Not a cold spot, or a flicker. Nothing.”

Did they know I could see Jude’s ghost?

“The team has been questioned,” Merrill added. “They claim Angel talks to him all the time. But none of them know if he’s really there or if it’s…” he hesitated. “A result of their broken bond.” The last words came out edged with disgust. “Perhaps it was too soon for Agent Mao to return to work.”

The team had talked.

Of course they had. What else were they supposed to do? Go to jail for me?

Still, the sting of betrayal cut deep. Even if they hadn’t lied. Maybe they thought I was hallucinating every time I said I was talking to Jude.

“Do you need more rest, Agent?” Hanna asked, ignoring Merrill’s suggestion.

“Rest won’t bring Jude back.” The dull ache in my arm throbbed up through my shoulder in reminder. Whatever this was, it seemed intent on taking me too. So be it. “I might as well work until I can’t.”

“Nothing brings the dead back,” Merrill corrected. “If Holt returns, he’ll be an animated corpse. Not your lover.”

I swallowed the response clawing up my throat and spoke to Hanna instead. “I’d like to keep working.”