Red Hands wants to find what's real?
He's looking right at it.
And it's going to eat him alive.
Chapter 5
Eddie
Sevenpoints.Sevenwords.And in the center, the name that could end Sera’s suffering:AZHRAEL.
I've been staring at Seal of Dissolution for hours since Dr. Reyes called back at dawn with preliminary notes. Since I drove to the hardware store for a cold chisel and a two-pound hammer. Since I came back to Sera’s house and sat on the basement stairs trying to convince myself that what I'm about to do isn't the single most reckless decision of my life.
It is.
And I'm doing it anyway.
I’m freeing a demon or a devil to save my girl. Our girl.
James sits against the far wall in the basement, his back propped against the stone foundation. He looks like a man who crawled out of his own autopsy, which, given the shadow-bandages covering most of his torso, face, and hands, isn't far from the truth. The dark material Azhrael wove into his woundspulses faintly with each breath, a second skin that's keeping him alive through sheer supernatural stubbornness.
He hasn't said much since coming back from near death. He just sits there, flexing his shadow-wrapped fingers in slow, methodical cycles, testing their limits, preparing them for use.
He's waiting. We're all waiting.
My laptop chimes. Dr. Reyes's fifty-something-year-old face fills the screen, dark circles under her eyes, hair pulled back in a hasty bun, reading glasses perched on her nose. Behind her, I can see the cluttered chaos of her home office: bookshelves sagging under the weight of texts, printouts pinned to a corkboard, three cups of coffee sitting beside a stack of hand-drawn diagrams.
She's been up all night. I can tell because so have I.
"Detective Crowe." She nods and adjusts her glasses. "Can you show me the Seal of Dissolution again?"
I angle the laptop downward, tilting the screen until the camera captures the seven-pointed star carved into the earth. The image on my end shows her face going pale as she studies it once more.
"The binding is intact," she says. "The inscriptions at each point are still legible. The name in the center—Azhrael—that's the anchor. Everything radiates from it." She pauses, shuffles papers. "Detective, I need to be very clear about something before we proceed."
"Go ahead."
"Breaking a Seal of Dissolution isn't like picking a lock. It's more like defusing a bomb. The seven points are interconnected, and each one reinforces the others in a closed circuit of intent. The energy flows continuously between them, cycling through the binding commands, maintaining the cage. If you just scratch out the symbols, take a hammer to them, try to physicallydestroy the carvings, the energy has nowhere to go. It doesn't dissipate. It implodes. Collapses inward."
She pauses to let that sink in.
"And destroys whatever's bound inside," I finish.
"Yes. Along with anyone standing in the immediate vicinity, most likely. The release of compressed metaphysical energy from a Seal of Dissolution would be…" She searches for the word. "Catastrophic."
Behind me, Azhrael's shadows churn. The temperature drops.
"So how do we do it safely?"
Dr. Reyes pulls a diagram into frame. It’s hand-drawn, annotated in her cramped handwriting, showing a heptagram with arrows indicating directional flow.
"To safely dismantle a Seal of Dissolution, you need to reverse the binding sequence. The seven words—diminish, constrain, starve, forget, bind, hollow, silence—were spoken in that order when the Seal was created. They were layered, each command building on the previous one, tightening the cage incrementally. They need to be unspoken in reverse. Silence first. Then hollow. Then bind. And so on back to diminish. Each point must be physically defaced. Not just scratched, but erased while the counter-word is spoken aloud."
"What do you mean, counter-word?"
"The opposites. Conceptual inversions that cancel the original commands." She reads from her notes. "Voice for silence. Fill for hollow. Free for bind. Remember for forget. Nourish for starve. Release for constrain. Amplify for diminish."
I write them down on my hardware store receipt, my hand trembling slightly. Counter-words to undo a demon trap, scrawled in ballpoint pen between a listing for a chisel and a hammer.
