And Hell’s coming with us.
Chapter 8
Azhrael
Iameverywhere.
I am the darkness between every molecule of air, the cold that lives behind every closed eyelid, the silence underneath every sound this sleeping city makes.
For too many years, I was a thing compressed. A fist clenched so tightly that the bones ground together. Seven words carved into stone, pressing down on me from every direction, collapsing my awareness to the dimensions of a rotting house, the boundaries of a single lot, the cage of a name I could not remember.
Until I did.
Now the cage is ash. Now the name is mine.
And I am starving.
The city spreads beneath me like a banquet. Every shadow is a doorway. Every pocket of darkness an invitation.
I could drink it all. Could pour myself into every dark space in this city and corrupt it until the hunger that has been eating me alive finally quiets.
But I do not feed.
Not yet. Not now.
Because she is east. And the thread that connects us—thin, muffled, dampened by the cage similar to mine—pulses with her heartbeat. Slow and stubborn, the rhythm of a woman who has decided she is not finished and will not be finished until she says so.
I follow.
The city blurs beneath me. I do not move through space the way the living do. I do not displace air, do not push against ground, do not negotiate with the physical world for passage.
I simplyamwhere the darkness is, and the darkness is everywhere, and so I flow east. Past the thinning neighborhoods where houses give way to chain-link and concrete. Past the industrial belt where factories sleep in their own rust. Through rail yards where abandoned cars sit on dead tracks.
I taste the city as I go. Every shadow I pass through feeds me something, but it is not enough. It is never enough. The Seal starved me for so long that the hunger has become structural, woven into whatever passes for my being. I will be hungry until the universe collapses back into the dark from which it came.
But I can be hungry later. I can feast later.
Now there is only the thread. Only her heartbeat. Only east.
The trail leads past a meatpacking plant, past a derelict grain elevator that stands against the predawn sky like a hollow tooth. Past rows of empty warehouses with broken windows.
Then…there.
Set apart from the others by a hundred yards of cracked asphalt and dead weeds. A collection of hangars, nondescript and windowless. Their the kind of structures that exist to beforgotten, to fade into the visual noise of industrial decay until the eye slides past them without registering their presence.
Clever. Red Hands understands camouflage the way I understand darkness.
But I see it. I see it because she is inside one of them, and her heartbeat calls to me through concrete and steel and the crude Seal he carved with her name inside.
I descend on the building like nightfall arriving early.
The shadows around the structure respond to me instantly. I thicken them, deepen them. The orange glow of the distant streetlight that barely reaches this far gutters and dies. The darkness becomesmine.
The temperature plummets. Frost crawls across the concrete pad surrounding the hangar, crystallizing the moisture in the air into a thin, glittering skin of ice. It races up the corrugated metal walls, cracking paint, popping rivets, the steel groaning as it contracts. The padlock on the loading dock door frosts over, the mechanism seizing as ice expands inside the tumbler.
I could tear the building apart.
The thought arrives with the hunger, twin impulses braided together. I could rip the walls from the foundation like peeling bark from a dead tree. Could peel back the roof like the lid of a tin can and reach inside for what is mine. Could collapse the entire structure inward, crushing everything within beneath tons of steel and concrete, and sift through the rubble for her heartbeat.
