He's not dead.
And Eddie… He’s covered for me, lied for me, chosen my side over every cop instinct he possesses. He’s too devoted to me and my quest for vengeance to ever give up on me.
They're coming. I know they're coming the way I know my own heartbeat. Because I know them. I've learned the shape of their devotion, and it doesn't bend.
I'm not alone.
I find a second fracture at the fifth point of the star-shaped cage. Then a third fracture, barely perceptible, at the first point.
Three weaknesses in seven points. Not enough to break through, not without more strength than I currently possess, not while the Seal is draining me and dehydration and starvation are narrowing my world to a smaller and smaller circle.
But it's enough to know the cage isn't perfect.
No cage built by a man ever is.
Red Hands is waiting for me to run out of fight, watching the hourglass on my life running down.
He's not accounting for the fact that I rebuilt myself from the rubble of a woman who had everything taken from her, and I did it without a demon's power or a court of devoted men or any of the advantages I have now.
I know how to function on nothing. I've had years of practice.
So in the place where my rage lives and breathes and sharpens itself against the whetstone of every cruelty I've ever survived…
I wait.
Chapter 7
James
Waitingisahellmade special for lads like me.
I can fight. I can bleed. I can scream while a man breaks my fingers and call it Tuesday. But sitting on my arse in a house full of shadows while the woman I worship is somewhere else being fed to a demented philosophy?
Aye, that’s the bit that unspools me.
Night folds into day and then back again. The clock tries, bless it, but it’s the second heartbeat that marks the time. His. Azhrael’s. Slow as a glacier moving under my ribs, steady as a drum. Every so often I catch myself breathing to his rhythm, and I have to drag my lungs back to mine like I’m reeling a big fish.
The shadow-bandages have set into me, slick as second skin, black as confession. Where Red Hands peeled me open, the dark has sealed me shut again, not with scar tissue but with something that hums when I breathe. If I flex my fingers, the dark splints flex back, responsive, alive, like a creature that learned the shape of my bones and decided to stay.
It’s akin to tiger stripes all over my body, which is pure dead brilliant. It makes me look like I stepped out of a myth.
The shadows give me even more tricks up my sleeves. If I cannae trouble myself to reach for a glass in Sera’s cupboard, I send the shadows, obedient as tamed snakes. They curl around the handle, lift, pour, deliver. If I need to scratch my ballocks, the shadows will do it for me. It's like having extra limbs made of night.
It comforts me. The shadows. The cold. The darkness. The beginning of the separation of my soul from my grasp.
It’s no longer mine, and somehow that’s freeing, like it was holding me back. Like my soul was this wee anchor I'd been dragging along the ocean floor my whole life, catching on every jagged thing, like the memory of my father's hands, the sound of my mother not screaming because she'd learned silence was safer.
Put that on the list for my da, the priest, aye? My da would have all sorts of opinions on that bit, but I dinnae care. Selling your immortal soul to a demon? He'd have me on my knees reciting Hail Marys until my kneecaps wore through the floor while he whipped me with a heavy chain. But I dinnae care. The man couldn’t beat holiness into me, and all he taught me was that God has terrible taste in representatives.
Sera’s daddy and I coexist in the basement together, quiet-like, as comfortable as our explosive worry lets us be right now. Like da and son, in a weird way. The difference being I like this da well enough to bleed for him rather than kill him with a fire poker.
Eddie paces upstairs in the kitchen. He’s got that quiet panic prisoners get when the cage is double-locked and the key’s in someone else’s grasp. Every now and then he stops dead and breathes a prayer he doesn’t believe in but won’t risk not saying.
I dinnae sleep. If I close my eyes, I’m back in the chair, and I can hear my own screaming. Funny thing, I didnae know I could scream like that. Always figured I was more of a grit-my-teeth lad, take it quiet, swallow the sound the way Da taught me.
Don't you cry, boy. Don't you dare.
Turns out, under the right encouragement, like with pliers, hooked blades, the patient, methodical peeling of skin from muscle while a calm voice asks you questions about the architecture of your rage, I make choir music out of pain.
