Men, I know how to survive.
"Why me?" I croak.
"Some women need what I offer, even if they don't know it. And then you arrived…" He pauses. "You were obvious from the moment you drove into town. You move like you’re carrying something invisible and heavy. You walk like a woman who's been broken and reassembled with the pieces in the wrong order."
I don’t know what to say to that, so I say nothing at all.
"But it was also your house that interested me." He leans forward slightly, and I see it again, that genuine curiosity, the thing that lives underneath his psycho detachment. "The thing inside it. I felt it when I was there in your basement with one of my victims. It didn’t bother me. I don’t think it cared about me or what I was doing.”
He nods to the Seal. “But then I did my research, and that Seal, unbroken, means that something old and hungry lives there with you, and you didn't run from it. In fact, you walked toward it. And when I saw the shadows in your eyes at Gas N’ Go, I knew you let it inside you." A pause. "It sees something in you. Something real. Something worth binding itself to. I want to see it too."
"Maybe it just likes the way I fuck."
He doesn't react the way I want him to. He doesn't flinch or blush or show the flash of contempt or discomfort I was aiming for.
He just tilts his head. "Deflection. Crude humor to distance yourself from vulnerability. Another mask, and it's effective."
He stands and twists the red nail polish bottle between his fingers.
My heart slams against my ribs.
He turns and walks away, his footsteps fading across the concrete into whatever darkness waits at the far end of the hangar. I listen until I can't hear him anymore, until the onlysounds are the distant mechanical hum of something industrial and the tinny loop of James's screams from the laptop.
Then I move.
The moment he's gone, I reach for my shadows with everything I have.
They come, but they’re sluggish, muted, fighting against the Seal's pull. But they do come. Thin tendrils of cold dark coil around my fingers like smoke, testing the air, reaching outward in every direction simultaneously. I send them along the floor, tracing the carved lines of the Seal, probing the cage the way a tongue probes a cracked tooth. Looking for weakness. Looking for a fracture in the design.
The Seal pushes back. Every tendril that reaches inches from the carved boundary hits resistance, like a current running counter to the direction of my will. It's exhausting to push against it. Every second of effort costs me energy I'm not replenishing. I don’t dare to try to cross the boundary again. I don’t have enough energy for that kind of pain.
But I keep probing.
Because this Seal has to have a weakness. Red Hands is many things, but he’s not a symbologist with a lifetime of study and a genuine metaphysical connection to what the person who bound Azhrael had. He's a simple man who “researched” the Seal with one book over the course of a few weeks at most, who understood the principles well enough to replicate the structure.
But understanding a thing and devoting your life to that thing is different.
There's a difference in the construction. I can feel it. The star is correct, the proportions are right, but the intent behind it is thinner. Like the difference between a wall built by a mason who's worked stone his whole life and one built by someone who read a book about masonry.
I find the first fracture at the third point.
It's small, barely a hairline, a place where the counter-current weakens by the smallest degree. My shadow tendril probes it, pushes, pulls back when the effort becomes too costly.
But it's there.
My shadows are extensions of my will, yes, but they're also extensions of Daddy's will. That's the nature of our pact. We're intertwined. His power runs through me like a second circulatory system, my will directing it, his ancient hunger fueling it. Even here, even muffled by this cage, that connection exists.
He's there. I can feel him the way you feel a sound you can't quite hear, a vibration in my bones. The Seal muffles him, dampens the bond to below a whisper.
But he’s there.
And I have James and Eddie too.
My heart twists at thought of James, at the current image on the laptop screen. His face is mid-scream, and his body is opened up like a text Red Hands was reading aloud. The possibility that he's dead lives at the edge of my thoughts like a wound I won't probe, because if I probe it, I'll find out it's deeper than I can survive right now.
He's not dead. He'snotdead.
He's too stubborn to be dead, too utterly, infuriatingly devoted to the possibility of my survival to let something as mundane as torture actually kill him. He stalked me from Kansas City to Wichita, followed my trail of rage from dark web forums to Gas N’ Go.
