Beyond the Veil

“You updated the mate log, correct?” Xavier asked.

“Of course.” Who knew that fated mates were a thing? I hadn’t. “It’s mostly a shifter thing, right?”

“Mostly.” Xavier shoved a giant box across his desk, the weight of it scraping against the polished wood. “Add that to secured storage,” he instructed, barely glancing up from his computer screen. Behind him, the wild lights of the necropolis pulsed through the wall of windows, the sky choked with ominous clouds rippling with ethereal lightning.

Three months working for Xavier across the Veil, and I still hadn’t gotten used to the display. Unnerving. Breathtaking. A lot like my boss himself, with his sharp features, silver hair, and a presence that screamed otherworldly, no matter how human he looked.

“Luca?” Xavier’s voice snapped me back. His storm-gray eyes locked onto mine. How long had I been staring? “The sword?”

“Oh. Right.” I grabbed the box, nearly staggering at the weight. “It’s a sword?”

“’Curse Cleaver’ is a stupid name for a dagger. Take it to the secure storage for magical weapons.”

My nose itched just being near the thing; stupid, sensitive nose. A damn side effect of the “variance” that hit me after that mystery cold three months ago. One day I was human, sneezing my way through a nasty fever, and the next, I was a shifter with a nose that could sniff out magic like a bloodhound.

Getting fired from my accounting job was bad enough. Losing control of the change in the middle of the office? Worse. It was like pissing yourself in public. Except instead of wet pants and humiliation, you lost your thumbs, your voice, and any last shred of dignity as coworkers started cooing ‘Here, kitty kitty’ at your newly furry ass.

Ending up as Xavier’s personal assistant had been the only boon. The pay was divine, literally, but no amount of godly generosity could make hauling cursed artifacts, wrangling supernatural nutjobs, or enduring politicians who looked at me like gum stuck to their Italian leather shoes feel any less like glorified janitor duty. Especially when your boss could smite you with a glance.

“Be back in a few,” I muttered, hauling the box toward the elevator. Sylas leaned against the wall beside it, looking bored. His long red hair, unnaturally vibrant, like something out of an anime, marked his supernatural presence as one half of the twins. Yin and yang, though I had no clue which was really which of that dynamic. His brother, white to his red, was no doubt lurking nearby.

Kitsunes by nature, not at all native to the human world I’d been born in, were tricksters to the core, and they could be dangerous, or so Xavier warned, though neither bothered me. Sometimes clients disappeared around them, and I knew enough to be wary.

“I’ll escort you down,” Sylas said as I hit the button.

I eyed the box. “Should I be worried?”

“Not this time.”

Not ominous at all.

The doors slid shut, and down we went.

Sylas waited at the elevator while I made my way through the two shielded doors and to the weapons vault. What did Xavier need with an enchanted arsenal? I never asked. Rather I liked to think he was good for all of humanity, or non-humanity too, by keeping dangerous magical weapons contained. Maybe he was planning for the next war and gathering arms for his people, which I was now technically a part of as new shifter stock. But I tried to think positively of most people until they proved otherwise.

The vault hummed with spells and electronic wards as I heaved the box onto a shelf already crowded with blades: a rapier that whispered in French, a cleaver that dripped black ichor no matter how often it was cleaned, and a katana wrapped in something’s peeling skin. Gross.

Just another Wednesday.

I headed back up, humming absently along to Huntrix’s “Golden”, until the elevator lights blinked. Sylas growled. I took a step back. No one wanted to be stuck in an elevator with a grumpy kitsune, and what the hell was with the lights?

My watch buzzed with a reminder of a meeting. The Summer Court’s envoy had likely already arrived, and the meeting was in four minutes. Fuck. I hadn’t even had a chance to lay out refreshments.

The elevator doors opened as Keanan, Sylas’ twin, showed a willowy man with glowing gold hair and eerie butter-colored eyes through the loft toward Xavier’s office. The attire looked like something out of a high-end fantasy novel based in Europe, frumpy and filled with ruffles. But if I stared too long, the man flickered, an outline of wings fluttering before his appearance restabilized.

“Wrong time of year for that sort of bastard,” Sylas grumbled.

“Yeah?” I asked quietly as we exited the elevator.

“Summer fae rarely leave their court in winter.”

“Maybe it’s super important.”

“Hmm,” Sylas said without commitment.

The envoy held a painting, its shape obvious beneath the butcher paper wrap, and ignored our arrival as I rushed to beat them to Xavier’s office. I peeked in the room to ensure Xavier was ready. He was, though focused on something on his computer screen. Behind him, white flakes floated in the strange dark fluorescent ombre of the sky over the Veil outlined through the window. Snow across the Veil? The holidays were coming. My first as a variant, and I’d been avoiding my family for fear of being cast out.

“I’ll bring coffee and snacks,” I said. Happy to be busy, if nothing else.

“Tea,” Xavier corrected.

I flinched. Xavier hated tea. “Right away,” I agreed as I nodded to Keanan, gave the envoy a slight bow, and raced to the kitchen to turn on the electric kettle and gather up snacks.

I shoved a tray of shortbread into the oven to warm, hoping the smell would ease any tensions as dealing with the greater fae was never a pleasant experience. The electric kettle hissed like a pissed-off cat as I arranged tea on the tray. Not that Xavier had a lot of options beyond Earl Grey or Chamomile.

“Fucking fairies,” Sylas muttered from his post between the office and kitchenette.

I paused. “Uh… which kind?”

He shot me a withering look. “Greater fae. The kind who think riddles substitute for conversation.”

“Right.” ‘Cause I had a lot of experience with those? The timer dinged. I grabbed the shortbread, sliding one to Sylas, hoping to ease his grumpy mood. His twin watched from outside Xavier’s office doorway, silent as a shadow. I offered him a cookie as I passed with the tray.

He took it without blinking. “They’re arguing,” he said. “As if the fae have any power in Xavier’s territory.” He opened the office door for me. “And to arrive in the offseason of their power shows disrespect.”

Inside, the air hummed with tension. The envoy’s wings flickered at the edges of my vision, like a film reel glitching. I fixed my gaze on the teapot. Professional. Polite. Don’t stare at the goddamn wings.

Xavier leaned against the front of his desk, radiating disinterest, ankles crossed, arms folded over his chest, gaze above our heads. The fae paced the room. The painting leaned against the wall, no longer wrapped, a vibrant ocean at sunset scene. My gaze fell to it as if drawn by magic. I’d always been a sucker for bright colors and pretty art.

Molten gold bled into deep plum, the kind of sky that belonged to a world where the sun died after a heroic tale of vanquishing demons. Below, the ocean churned in a secluded cove, waves lashing at jagged rocks like they were trying to carve something new into the land. Memories, life, or consequences perhaps, as the stormy sea glowed an eerie dark teal of a deep-sea trench.

The brushstrokes sculpted with texture and movement, curled the waves in white foam crests, dark depths gaping between like a giant mouth swallowing all the secrets beneath. My younger days of art classes, hidden from parents who wanted a son more focused on business, reignited a passion to study the lines in the span of a heartbeat.

My breath hitched, hands tightening on the tray, and I couldn’t drag my gaze away from the scene. The water felt real. As if I listened hard enough, the sound of waves crashing would fill my senses, and something beneath, calling to me, like a siren song whispering to my soul.

“Luca.”

Xavier’s voice shattered the trance.

I gasped and swallowed hard, yanking my focus away from the art and to my boss. “Sorry!” I said, and rushed to set the tray down on the top of the desk.

Neither of them sat, though the fae stopped pacing.

Xavier waved at me to leave. I rushed for the door, half tripping over my own feet as I passed the painting, thinking I caught a glimpse of something in the water. Perhaps it had been a change of direction revealing a new detail?

“Consider it a token,” the envoy said. “A reminder of… shared visions.”

“I’m not certain our vision aligns,” Xavier said, his voice cool. “It feels more like a warning.”

The envoy sputtered. “Of course not. My Queen would never…”

The office door clicked shut behind me, sealing away their argument. In the kitchen, I cleaned the counters and restored the area to magazine-cover perfection, the memory of the painting’s detail and blazing color burned into my mind. Something about it felt… sad? Was it the sunset? Perhaps the distant hint of storm clouds rising?

The meeting ended abruptly only a few minutes later. The envoy swept past the kitchen without a glance, his form flickering from human back to something more bug-like the whole way. As if his agitation made it hard for him to hold his shape, or perhaps his glamour, as I knew fae were famous for that.

He didn’t take the painting with him.

Xavier stood in his office, towering over the painting, expression grim.

“It’s pretty,” I told him.

“On the surface,” Xavier said, “a lot of things are pretty.”

I stared at the painting, again drawn to the strokes defining the waves. The entire painting felt like it was moving, as though staring long enough would rock me to sleep. Or with the storm hinting in the corner, perhaps it would drown me in violent turbulence.

“You used to paint, didn’t you?” Xavier asked after a long moment, tearing my focus from the art.

I cleared my throat. “I guess. Before life got in the way. Work. Family expectations. All that. I was never very good.”

We both stood there another few minutes, the silence stretching awkwardly, and my gaze was drawn back to the painting. “Should I take it to storage?”

Xavier huffed, and I turned to meet his eyes, flinching at the restrained rage behind them. Had I done something wrong? “You like it, don’t you?”

I blinked at him, then glanced at the painting and back to him. “Uh, it’s beautiful. Sort of haunting. But the mastery of the strokes is something I’ve never seen outside of an art history book before.”

He gave an absent nod, then turned away, heading back to his seat at his desk. “Take it home with you.”

“What?”

“You like it. Take it home with you.”

“Won’t the fae get mad?”

“I don’t share their visions, and they aren’t allowed to take back gifts.”

I bent to pick up the painting, surprised by the weight of it. “It won’t attack me in my sleep or something, right? Drown my family or curse me with boils?”

“As if I’d give you something like that.”

Alrighty then. With the painting tucked under my arm, I made my way out of his office, planning to drop the painting off at home as I ran errands for him.

“Never question the prerogative of gods,” Keanan muttered as I passed him.

In the kitchen, Sylas crunched a cookie with deliberate loudness and laughed. Assholes. Both of them.

Fog blanketed the streets like a shroud, thick and suffocating, as Joe and I pulled up to Happy Toddlers Daycare. The building’s cheerful sign loomed with a grim energy. A line of uniformed officers formed a barricade in front of the entrance.

“We should wait for SED,” Joe said, his gaze locked on the building and his hand hovering near his holster.

“There are kids in there,” I snapped, already out of the car and striding toward the door. As detectives, we outranked the uniforms, and I wasn’t about to stand around while children were in danger.

“And zombies,” Joe called after me, his tone sharp. He pointed upward. Above the clouds, a jagged line of sparkling darkness flickered like a lightning bolt frozen mid-strike. It cut through the building, splitting open to reveal a gaping tear in the Veil. Beyond it, something shimmered, alien and wrong, peeking into our world from another realm. Some claimed it was the world of the dead, others a realm of unlimited supernatural creatures. All that mattered in that moment was saving those kids.

“And kids,” I shot back, unstrapping my taser from my belt. My gun stayed holstered; I wasn’t about to risk firing blindly in a room full of children. The uniforms shouted warnings as I approached, but I flashed my badge and pushed past them, my heart pounding in my ears. The door stood slightly ajar, and I kicked it open, bracing myself for the worst.

Blood streaked the lobby carpet like a bad paint job, toys lay scattered, and furniture was overturned as if a tornado had ripped through the room. The unnatural stillness turned my blood to ice. A chill crept up my spine. My breath hitched as I scanned the room. Where were the kids? The caretakers? Had they been pulled through the Veil?

The tear pulsed and writhed like a living thing, a mass of shimmering jellyfish tendrils descending through the ceiling and walls as though the building were no more than a mirage. It crackled with electricity, its edges flickering and unstable. A handful of uniforms filed in behind me, their guns drawn, using me as a human shield.

“We need to wait for SED,” one of them said, his voice trembling, gun up and pointed, finger on the trigger.

“Put your fucking gun down,” I barked, not bothering to look back. “There are kids in here.”

“And zombies!” someone else shouted. “The 911 dispatcher said zombies!”

I ignored them, my focus locked on the main play area ahead. I stepped carefully, avoiding the streaks of blood, my taser gripped tightly in my hand.

The overhead lights flickered, some shooting sparks where the Veil sliced the electrical lines, dimming the room to wobbly shadows. Small figures shuffled with jerky, unnatural movements. One of them turned toward me, and my stomach churned. Its face was a grotesque mask, skin sagging on one side, eyes black and empty, mouth hanging open in a silent scream. It was a child, or at least it had been. Had the Veil split done this to them?

Blood and viscera was splattered across the floor like macabre confetti. A caretaker’s leg, torn and mangled, protruded from beneath an overturned table. My throat tightened as I forced myself to keep moving.

The zombie toddler, a little girl with blonde pigtails, locked her hollow eyes on me. She chewed mechanically, a chunk of something pink and fleshy in her mouth. My grip tightened on the taser as she shuffled closer, her tiny hands clawing at the air. She let out a low, guttural growl and lunged, her fingers reaching for me.

I raised the taser, but my finger froze on the trigger. She was just a kid. “Stop!” I shouted. A jolt, like static electricity, surged up my spine and out with the word, and for a split second the very air between us shimmered.

She froze mid-lunge, her eyes wide and unblinking, her body suspended in a grotesque display of animalistic rage. The other children paused, slowly turning with a sway of broken doll heads to face me as if awaiting further instructions. Their blank expressions focused unnervingly on me.

I took a half step back, my mind racing. The command had worked—how? The distraction broke whatever strange focus the children had on me. In an instant, they moved, their small bodies jolting forward with unnatural speed.

“Fire!” someone shouted, and the room erupted in chaos. Gunfire roared, deafening in the confined space. Blood sprayed as bullets tore through the small bodies, and I rushed forward, as if I could somehow shield them from the horror.

“Stop shooting!” I screamed, but it was too late. The little girl leapt over me, and someone behind me shrieked in pain.

A jolt of electricity hit me like a freight train. My muscles seized and I crumpled to the ground, my head smacking the floor hard enough to send stars exploding across my vision. Gasping for air, I barely registered the screams and gunfire above me before darkness swallowed me whole, dragging me into unconsciousness. For a moment, there was no Veil, no zombies, no blood-soaked daycare, just blessed, silent oblivion.

It was all Angel’s idea. The hell week of hazing—or, as it was officially known, training for Tactical Field Work—left me sore, tired, and grumpy every night. Which lasted about as long as it took Angel to convince me to let him massage away the aches. Okay, so the man had magic hands, and I sort of melted when he touched me. Was it a mate thing, or an Angel thing? It didn’t matter. The coming promised three-day weekend—mandatory, as we’d be on call for a seven-day TFW rotation—looked like paradise, if I could get through this final rescue drill.

An unknown teammate hid inside a haunted, abandoned warehouse across the Veil, waiting to be rescued. The smiley face logo was even creepier in a world filled with ghosts and supernatural monsters. How did I know it was haunted? Because the fucking ghosts were everywhere and loud. Did they bother the rest of the team? No. Was I allowed my mate and lover at my side? Again, no. Angel wasn’t my target. Rather, he was the opposition, poised to keep me from completing my mission. And I hated every minute of it.

I crouched behind a stack of moldy, long forgotten storage containers, hounded by shades of wavering white. A headache formed behind my eyes.

“They keep walking through me,” one ghost complained.

“It stinks like people in here,” another groaned.

“You could point me in the direction of my target,” I told them, annoyed at the constant bitching. These weren’t like TV show ghosts looking for a guide to help them crossover. Nope, this was like Karen Central. Everyone had something to bitch about and no interest in fixing anything, not even to get me out of their hair sooner. At least the noisy bastards wouldn’t alert the team to where I hid.

If I was rescuing Remi again, I’d have to punch someone. He’d doused me with glitter last time, which meant I was still picking pieces off of every part of me three days later. The victory of rescuing him had been short-lived after the confetti bomb, as the team had slammed us both to the floor, and we lost, due to the distraction of sparkling bits not at all related to magic.

Alone, I could focus. Or at least I tried to. My power buzzed under my skin, restless and hungry, reacting to every supernatural presence in this godforsaken warehouse. The shades chattering like magpies, the building saturated with supernatural energy, and the nearby grumbling of bored hellhounds set as my guards. The most entertaining and terrifying fact about the hounds was their ability to vanish into shadows, unseen by anyone, even most NHVs, Non-human Variants. I could sense them, my demon magic alighted by their presence, but the rest of the team couldn’t.

My earpiece snapped and crackled. “You’re running out of time, Holt,” Angel said, sounding smug. “T-minus seven minutes to secure your target before we come in guns blazing.”

They were armed with paintball guns. Protocol demanded caution at all stages of training, especially across the Veil, but they’d pepper me with the colorful splats, not caring that they bruised, to prove a point. I was HV, a human variant, and not a physically strong one at that. That my boyfriend, a shifter who could climb walls like Wolverine, took pleasure in catching me, even while I was guarded by supernatural fire dogs he insisted I have on duty made me want to bite him, hard. And then maybe kiss him stupid.

“Eat glitter, Mao,” I growled into the mic, barely above a whisper.

“I have,” he teased back, reminding me that he had, in fact, found glitter in my ass crack.

“Flirt later,” Ezra snapped across the line. “T-minus four until we arrive, Holt.”

I exhaled, long and slow. Right. Target. Rescue mission. Professionalism.

The ghosts chose that moment to start shrieking like a flock of seagulls fighting over abandoned French fries. Someone was coming.

I stretched my senses and let the building’s energy wash over me. Somewhere to my left, a pipe dripped with the rhythm of a bad R&B solo. And directly ahead was a flicker of movement too graceful to be Wade, too quiet to be Remi. Possibly Victor? The asshole loved calling victory over me. Jealousy, perhaps, since Angel was mine and not his?

I crept to the edge of the boxes, searching for any sign of a living being. The warehouse was huge and far too open for my liking, and yet I’d been unable to find my target. Where the hell were they? Bobby had only once been my target, due to my magic seeking him out in seconds. Kerry had the same issue, as did most of Victor’s team. Demon blood and I were a bit like a hunting hound chasing a fox. Tiana remained in the vehicle during TFW, monitoring the camera feed. Angel and I had a bond that I could almost always trace, though he practiced shielding himself from me. I had yet to master the reverse, which meant the second they entered the building, he’d make a beeline in my direction.

“Get moving,” I muttered to myself. “Can’t find the bastard if you’re pinned in a corner.”

Keeping low and in the shadows myself, the slight scent of sulfur reminded me of the hounds. Were they following me? Had they smelled like that before? I glanced into the darkness, thinking that maybe it wasn’t wise if I wanted to stay hidden, and the edges of it looked like a dog.

At least at first.

The shadows wriggled with dark maggots of moving ink blots with rainbow oil edges. Was that part of the drill? I’d spent days with the hounds, trying to learn their secrets and tricks, finding myself more a cat guy than a dog man. Dogs in general had a little too much energy for me. They acted like giant puppies until you did something to piss them off, and then they dripped lava and snarled dagger-toothed smiles. At least with cats, the murder mittens stayed hidden until you rubbed them the wrong way.

The dog-shape shifted, its shadow limbs dissolving into smoke, then solidifying, as it grew. My gut flipped over in terror as I was reminded of the creepy kid turning into something the first time I’d stumbled across the Veil. And that something had wanted me.

“Let’s play.” The shadow-thing’s cackle slithered across my skin, the same bone-chilling sound that had haunted my nightmares since I’d first stumbled across the Veil.

Wait. Not a memory. Not a drill.

It loomed over me, a writhing mass of darkness with too many teeth and no actual face. My fight-or-flight instinct screamed run, but the bastard had me cornered between a pallet of rotting boxes and what smelled like expired demonic takeout.

Fuck it. I dropped the paintball gun and grabbed the Taser Angel had strapped to my belt for emergencies. The nightmare swiped, claws like obsidian switchblades reaching for my throat.

“Fuck me sideways,” I cursed and jammed the prongs into the creature’s outstretched arm as I ducked the swipe.

Blue lightning crackled and sparked. The shadow’s arm convulsed, bursting into smoke. It howled a wail like I imagined a banshee might. I scrambled over the nearest set of boxes, needing to be free, even if it meant being caught by every other thing hunting me in this building.

“Jude Alexander Holt,” it cackled, sounding pained and irritated now. “Play with me.”

“Fuck you!” I screamed at it. An icy hand clamped around my ankle, tugging me off the stack of crates, and I snapped, adrenaline overtaking terror as I slammed my second shot, the last Taser round, into the thing’s core. The blue crackle of lightning arced into a red and purple explosion of flickering color snapping through the shadow, and the monster leaned down to snarl in my face as it turned to smoke. I caught a glimpse of something beneath that made me nearly swallow my tongue.

Cassidy.

His face twisted in the darkness; his mouth stretched in a silent scream. Then the thing vanished, the force of the eruption of smoke and shadow exploding the crates around me in a thousand shards of rotted wood. I curled into a ball, praying to save myself from becoming a pincushion, but everything bounced off an invisible shield, my little fae dragon friend coming to the rescue.

I breathed hard, heart racing, gaze following any movement around me as the dust fluttered, showing the cleared warehouse, every bit of debris having exploded into a battlefield of wood daggers lodged in every surface. I hoped the rest of the team was okay.

“Jude!” Angel’s voice cut through the panic. “Babe?”

A half dozen pairs of boots tromped my way as I wheezed and stared at the scorch mark on the concrete where the thing had been. Hitting anything twice with a Taser should slow it down—it was why our guns had two cartridges. Apparently, it wasn’t enough for a shadow god and his minions.

Ezra skidded into view; real gun drawn. “What the fuck was that? Angel, he’s here.”

“A visit from a shadow god,” I coughed. “Not part of the drill.” I waved away the smoke, eyes stinging from all the dust. Angel owed me a shower and life-affirming sex after this crapshoot.

Angel skidded to a halt behind Ezra, with Wade, and Bobby on his six. He hauled me up, his hands scanning for injuries. “Are you hurt?”

“Shield up,” I said, still coughing on wood dust. “So much for your hellhounds.” I couldn’t sense them anymore. “He scared them off, I think, or maybe took over one of their forms? It morphed.” Not once, but twice. “And I saw Cassidy.”

A beat of silence. Even the ghosts shut up.

“Say again?” Bobby was the first one to ask for clarification.

“There was a shift in the shadows, and I saw Cassidy’s face underneath the darkness before it turned to smoke and blew up everything in the warehouse.”

“How?” Wade asked.

Remi’s voice erupted over our earpiece. “Guys, how immortal are vampires?”

“What?” Ezra snapped into his headset.

“Look up.” Remi crossed the warehouse in hurried strides, gaze pointing toward the ceiling.

Victor swung from the rafters above us, wrapped up in shimmering black tendrils like a shadow spiderweb.

Game over, whispered a ghost, then hummed the Mario Bros. end-game theme. Duh duh… duh-duh-duh duuuuhm.