He asked me about my father. About the beast. He used that word—beast—before I ever said it, which means he'd done his homework, found the arrest records, the incident reports from Edinburgh where I put three men in hospital and one in the ground and walked away whistling because the dead one had touched a girl who didnae want touching.
He wanted to know when the beast was born. I told him it wasnae born. It was always there. It just got louder when Da's belt got faster.
He smiled at that. The same smile he probably gave every woman he opened. The smile that says:There you are. I see you now.
It breaks something loose in me that I didnae know was knotted there. The thought of him making her scream like that…again and again and again…
Aye, the hunger in me doesn’t come from the belly. It comes from my shadow-wrapped blood.
Ineedto kill Red Hands.
The phone rings.
I’m up the basement steps in a breath. Eddie already has the call on speaker, his hands flat on the kitchen table like he's bracing against a wave. Dr. Reyes sounds wrecked but awake. The woman’s been wrestling angels in her books all night and knows she grabbed one by the wrong wing.
“I think I know why it didn’t work,” she says.
“Youthink?” Eddie snaps, and it’s the loudest I’ve ever heard him, the edge in his voice like glass. “We’re running out of time.”
“I know,” she says, and she actually sounds shaken. “Listen to me. The seven points. You negated them because they’re commands. The Seal tells him what to be: diminished, constrained, starved, and so on. Those are commands. But the center—”
“Is a name, not a command,” I say. “Aye?”
"Yes. The name isn't telling him what to be. It's telling the Seal who to hold. It's an identifier, not an imperative. You can't negate an identity the way you negate a command. You can't un-name something by speaking its opposite."
"So 'heavenly' was the wrong approach," Eddie says, his voice forcibly steadied.
“Yes,” she says. “The center anchor uses his own identity against him. The lock recognizes only one entity, one voice. He has to speak it himself. He has to claim his name.”
Daddy hovers in the basement doorway, much denser now, much more there, like each broken point fed him a meal he’s not had in a century.
Eddie meets those ember eyes like a man staring down a train. “Okay.”
“Then let’s fucking go,” I say. “Ye say your name, Daddy. We’ll pick up the pieces ye blow apart.”
Back down to the basement we go toward the seven star points we’ve cracked and ruined.
And in the center, humming like a rotten halo in the dirt:AZHRAEL.
Without the use of legs, he surges toward his own name in a wave of darkness.
And then he speaks.
“Azhrael,” he says, his voice guttural and hellish.
The name fills the ribs of the house and the spaces between my flesh and bones.
The world detonates cold. It feels like a subtraction, the heat wrenched out of the air with both hands.
The packed earth splits in a starburst, and the name in the middle un-writes itself, letters shredding to grit under a sound my ears cannae hold.
Upstairs, every floorboard screams. The foundation groans like a spine cracking. Plaster becomes confetti. The house complains with a demonic wail and then abruptly shuts up.
And the shadows…
They erupt. A black geyser punches through the floor and the ceiling and the roof, and I swear I can hear Da laughing.
Eddie and I run up the stairs. Instinct, aye? Get above the flood before we drown in a collapsing house.
