If I cage her—even gilded, even gentle, even wrapped in the silk of my devotion—I become just likehim.
The realization cracks through me like lightning through rotten wood.
She didn’t survivehiscage to live in mine.
The frost recedes.The lock mechanism clicks back into place, unfrozen.The temperature rises, degree by degree, until it’s just the normal chill of my presence.The door stays open.
But I don’t retreat.
Instead, I gather myself and pull the shadows into coherence, not fully solid, but present enough that she can see the shape of me in the dim light.A silhouette, a suggestion of form.
She turns to face me, but her expression is unreadable—that mask she wears so well.But her pulse kicks up.I hear it, feel it resonating through the floorboards.
“You were going to lock me in,” she says.
I could lie.I’m made of shadows and old sins—deception should come easy.But with her, I find I can’t.
“Yes.”My voice scrapes the walls and the inside of her skull.
She winces.“But you didn’t.Why?”
The question hangs between us.I struggle to find words—language is slippery, imprecise, inadequate for what writhes inside me.
She goes to her duffel bag and pulls out two sheets of notebook paper and a pen.Then she writes the alphabet in two neat rows across the middle.YES in the upper left corner.NO in the upper right.Numbers zero through nine across the bottom.
She sets an upside-down drinking glass in the center.
It looks like a makeshift Ouija board, a way of speaking when words won’t form properly in the air, when my voice is too fractured to make full sentences.
She sits cross-legged on the floor and places her fingertips lightly on the bottom of the glass.
“I’m listening,” she says.
I gather what strength I have and pull the shadows into something resembling intention.The glass trembles and slides.
H.U.R.T.S.
That word is not enough, and yet it’s everything.The humans have failed her.The world wants to devour her.And I—the monster who loves her—almost became another cage.
It hurts.
“You hurt…because you’re afraid?”she says softly.“Afraid they’ll get me?That you’ll lose me?”
I move the glass again.YES.
“I understand,” she whispers.“Why did you make Eddie and me walk on walls and the ceiling?”
Because I wanted them to experience what I experience.Make them understand, in the most visceral way possible, what it means to exist in my world and in this house.
I was a man once.I remember that much, though the details have dissolved.I remember choosing something.Or having it chosen for me.I remember the moment the house claimed me.Or I claimed it.The boundary has blurred.
I remember thinking I was being punished.
Now I think maybe I was being preserved, saved, kept in darkness until the right complementary darkness walked through my door.
Sera.
My ruin.My salvation.My fierce, broken thing.
