And now Red Hands has used our pact against us.
He must have built a Seal for her, used her true name—Penelope—as the anchor, the way the fucking priest used Azhrael to bind me to this house. Red Hands must have studied the carvings in my basement when he killed one of his victims there. He must have wondered about it and gradually understood the principles to replicate it.
And now my Sera sits inside a cage of his making, her shadows trapped, her power contained, while I rage uselessly inside my own prison.
I gather what remains of my coherence and reach through the bond. Then I push outward, sideways, along the thinnest thread of connection I possess to the waking world beyond these walls.
The Mind. Eddie Crowe.
I have only visited him in his dreams while he slept here, made him aware of my presence and my power and my possession of Sera. She trusts him. She has touched him, spoken his name with intention, woven him into the fabric of her court.
I hope that’s enough to reach him.
I compress everything I have into a single pulse of feeling.
Cold fury. Sera's absence. Danger.Come.
I send it out like a flare fired into a storm, not knowing if it will reach him, not knowing if he will understand it even if it does. It costs me. The effort strips away another layer of coherence, leaves me flickering at the edges, my form thinning to wispy smoke.
But I send it.
Then I send it again.
And again.
On the lawn, James coughs. Blood sprays from his lips in a fine mist that catches the light from the broken window. His hand twitches, broken fingers clawing weakly at the grass. He is trying to crawl, still trying to reach the house.
"James." I press against the threshold, my voice barely a rasp that the night air swallows before it travels three feet.
He cannot hear me. Even if he could, what would I say?
She is gone. You failed. I failed. We all failed.
No.
Failure implies finality, and this is not final. She is still alive. I feel her stubborn, persistent heartbeat. The rhythm of a womanwho has survived worse than this and clawed her way back from the wreckage every single time.
She will survive this too.
She must.
I cannot lose her.
That would be worse than any hell. That would be worse than being trapped in the cracks of a rotting house for another century, another millennium, screaming into a void that does not care.
The house groans around me, responding to my anguish. Floorboards warp. Nails push free from joists with metallic shrieks. The temperature plummets until frost coats every surface, the very air itself crystallizing into a fog of ice particles that hangs motionless in the rooms.
I press against the threshold one more time. The doorframe groans, wood splitting along the grain, large splinters falling like teeth from a broken jaw. The barrier burns. The Seal hums its seven-fold command.
I retreat from the threshold because the effort has cost me dearly. My form is barely coherent now, more mist than shadow, more memory than presence.
Sera.
I whisper her name into the void between us. It falls into the muffled distance and disappears, but I say it again because her name is the only prayer I know. The only word that keeps the silence from swallowing me whole.
Sera.
Sera.
