Chapter 1
Azhrael
Sheisgone.
Gone.
The word is insufficient. Gone implies departure, implies movement from one place to another, implies a destination that can be found and followed.
This is not gone. This is severed. A limb torn from the body. A frequency suddenly flatlined.
One moment she was here, her heartbeat drumming through our bond, her fear bright and electric and alive. Then Red Hands ripped her away, and several minutes later, something slammed shut between Sera and me. A wall. A barrier with intent.
I know the shape of that intent. I have lived inside it for over a hundred years.
Someone has sealed her in, the same way I am.
The understanding detonates inside me, and the house answers.
Pipes burst in the upstairs bathroom, water spraying against tile in a pressurized shriek. Frost erupts across the living room windows, racing outward from the center in crystalline patterns that splinter the glass. The kitchen ceiling cracks, a jagged line splitting plaster from wall to wall, raining white dust onto the countertops.
I throw myself against the black void framed by the open front door.
The threshold holds. It always holds. The Seal of Dissolution hums beneath the house’s foundation, its seven-pointed geometry vibrating with the smugness of a cage that knows it is stronger than the animal inside it.
I slam against the threshold again. The doorframe splinters. Wood shrieks. The porch light explodes in a shower of sparks and glass. But the invisible barrier does not yield. It flexes, absorbs, rebounds, and the pain of contact sears through my form like iron pressed to an open wound.
I reform into something as solid as I can get, fighting, clashing against the Seal, and then I dissolve into shadows once again. So I reform again. The cycle is agonizing, each dissolution stripping away coherence, each reformation costing energy I cannot spare.
But I cannot stop.
Outside, I can see the lawn. Can seehim.
James.
Sera’s Fist lies in the wet grass ten feet from the porch, one bloody arm still reaching toward the house, toward me, toward the safety he almost reached before the darkness swallowed Sera.
His chest rises and falls in shallow, hitching movements. Too much blood pools beneath him, black as oil in the dim light. The cuts on his torso, arms, and face gleam. Red Hands's handiwork, a map of suffering carved into muscle and skin.
He is dying.
If I could cross the threshold, I could help him. Could wrap shadows around his wounds, slow the bleeding, drag him inside where my power runs strongest, despite the Seal. I could pour cold into his veins to dull the pain.
But I cannot cross.
Ten feet. He is ten feet from my reach, and it might as well be ten thousand miles.
To James’s right, a car sits dark and still in the driveway. The woman inside—the one Eddie sent to guard what is mine—is slumped against her headrest. The foam at her mouth has dried to a crust. Her chest does not rise. Her eyes are open, seeing nothing, reflecting the fractured light from my shattered porch.
She is already gone. The real kind of gone. The permanent kind.
I cannot help her either.
I turn my attention inward, grasping for the bond with Sera. It is still there, just barely. I cling to this fact. Sera's heartbeat pulses at the far end of our connection, faint and slow, drugged, butpresent.
But our bond is wrong, muffled, like hearing her through stone, through water, through layers of intent designed to contain exactly what she has become.
An entity, something other, still mostly human on the outside, so that she can wield shadows against her tormentors. In exchange, she promised me her soul.
