The stairs sway beneath us, treads popping free, nails shrieking as the wood warps. I grab Eddie by the back of his jacket and haul him up the last three steps when one collapses entirely beneath his foot, the wood simply disintegrating into splinters and dust.
The living room is a black throat the shadows ripped through. Furniture has been shoved against the walls by the force of the eruption. The sofa is overturned.
We spill out onto the porch as the last of the shadows go screaming into the sky, a column of night with a comet tail, and then…
Then he’s standing on Sera’s lawn.
He makes the entire planet look so small.
He’s nae a man, but the memory of one burned into dark. A pillar with shoulders. The vague suggestion of hands made out of absence, fingers long and tapered and ending in points that aren't quite claws but aren't quite not. Eyes like dying stars. Frost webs out from his body over the grass, icing it white in alace so fine I want to put it in my pocket. The air around him hisses like a kettle ready to scream.
My mouth says “Christ above,” without asking me.
He doesnae look at us. His head turns east. He’s listening to something we cannae hear and hasnae stopped hearing since the day she walked into his cage for the first time. Listening for that beautiful heartbeat that gave him a reason to remember his own name.
Something clicks behind those ember eyes.
“Found her,” he says.
Two words. Clean as a carved epitaph.
And then he’s gone.
The space where he is becomes the shape of him not-being-here, a vacuum that pulls the air inward with a crack like a thunderclap, and the night tilts after him like it wishes it could keep up.
Eddie grabs my sleeve. “Let’s go.”
He’s got the engine turning before I get the door yanked, and we lurch out of the driveway and into the street with the tires complaining against the ice that Daddy left on the pavement. I’m half buckled, all feral, body leaning forward like it could shove the car faster with want.
“Follow him, James,” he says, jaw set, eyes bright in a way that tells me he’s not a calm man so much as a man who’s desperately good at wearing calm. “Plug yourself into him or something. Use your shadows.”
“I dinnae ken if there’s a manual for this,” I say, and then I close my eyes and try anyway.
The second heartbeat in my chest is not slow now. It’s predator fast, and it’s hunting.
He’s going to her.
A pull east, sure as iron under a magnet. It’s a hook right under my sternum, dragging. It’s a rope through the ribs of the houseof me, running from my shadow-altered heart out through the night to wherever he is, wherever she is. If I exhale, I can feel him move at the end of it, that other heart eating distance as if it’s food, courtesy of my new married-to-the-dark situation.
“Go east,” I say.
Eddie makes a sharp turn. “Please, please, please find her.”
I nod once. If my Prayer needs a god, let it be the one who just tore the roof off our world to reach her.
The city is a blur of sleeping houses. Dawn’s thinking about it, now a blue smear on the edge of the world.
Which means Sera has been gone for over forty-eight hours.
Forty-eight hours with a man who thinks suffering is scripture and a scalpel is a pen.
“Faster,” I say.
He doesn’t answer. The speedometer does. The needle climbs past eighty, past ninety, trembling at the edge of what the car can give.
I crack the window, and the early dawn air knives my face, cold and sharp. Somewhere ahead is my girl in the middle of a star that thinks it can starve a woman who’s learned to live on ash and spite.
Hold on, Prayer. We’re coming.
