I wrap myself around the building, and I wait.
Chapter 9
Eddie
Idrivelikeaman who has nothing left to lose.
The speedometer needle hovers at eighty on residential streets, ninety once we hit the industrial corridor, and I’ve already put the police lights on in my unmarked car. The steering wheel is slick under my palms. My jaw aches from clenching it.
Beside me, James sits forward in the passenger seat with his shadow-wrapped hands braced against the dashboard.
He should be in an ICU. Should be on a ventilator, hooked to bags of blood and saline, while surgeons try to reconstruct whatever Red Hands dismantled inside him. Instead, other than the clinging shadows striping his body, he looks brand new. Instead, he's radiating a focused intensity that makes the air in the car feel pressurized.
"Right.” His voice even has a new quality—rougher, colder, as if the pact with Azhrael deposited frost into his vocal cords. "He's pulling me right. Past the rail yards."
I take the turn without questioning it. Three weeks ago, I would have never followed the navigational instincts of a Scottish madman who's tethered to a demon through a blood pact forged on my girl’s living room floor.
We blow past the last residential block and into the industrial belt. The streetlights thin out here, spaced farther apart. Warehouses and manufacturing plants line both sides of the road, many of them shuttered, their parking lots empty, their chain-link fences sagging under the weight of neglect. Wichita forgot about this part of itself years ago.
It’s the perfect hunting ground for a man who needs privacy while he tortures.
"Straight," James says. "Then left at the grain elevator."
I take the left. The road narrows, pavement crumbling at the edges, weeds pushing through cracks. We pass a meatpacking plant, a row of storage units with rusted doors, and the skeleton of a gas station.
Then we arrive at the hangars.
Six of them, clustered at the far eastern edge of the city where an old municipal airfield used to operate.
"There," James says, and his hand comes off the dashboard to point. "That one. The dark one."
I see it, and the seeing makes something cold settle into my gut, because what I'm looking at shouldn't be possible. The hangar is windowless, set apart from its neighbors by a hundred yards of cracked asphalt, and the darkness around it is wrong. It’s not the natural darkness of predawn shadow or unlit concrete.
This darkness has depth and weight, just like it does at Sera’s house. It clings to the building, so dense it seems to absorb the faint light from the sky and the car’s lights I haven't thought to turn off.
I do that now and then park on the far side of the fourth hangar, out of sight. Other than Azhrael, no one else appears to be here, but looks can be deceiving.
The temperature drops as we hurry out of my car. The cold bypasses clothing and goes straight for the bones. Frost crystallizes across the windshield, patterns spreading from the edges inward like something is breathing winter onto the glass. My breath fogs in thick white plumes.
We slow, silencing our footsteps the best we can on gravel glazed with frost, and I can feel it: the presence saturating the air around the hangar. Azhrael isn't just inside that building. Heisthe building. Every shadow, every cold pocket, every square inch of darkness has been claimed and occupied and turned into a weapon waiting for a target.
"Is he here? Red Hands?" I ask, retrieving my gun from my belt.
James flexes his shadow-fists. “Daddy says nae.”
“Then tell him to ease up on the demonic darkness shit. If he does show, we don’t want to let him know we’re here.”
Instantly, the building lightens, returning to its original crusty-gray color. The temperature climbs, and my breath turns invisible in the air again.
James's grin splits his face. “Aye, you told him yourself. Now let’s go save our queen, and hopefully the bastard shows up.”
I nod and check my gun. Then I pull the backup piece from my ankle holster, verify the load, and tuck it into my waistband at the small of my back.
The few remaining shadows part for us subtly, showing us the way to the hangar's loading dock. We reach a rusted metal door, padlocked with a heavy-duty combination lock.
James steps past me and grips the padlock with his shadow-wrapped hand. For a moment nothing happens. Then I see it: tendrils of shadow flowing from his fingertips into the lock'sbody, seeping into the keyway, into the gaps between the shackle and the casing, into the mechanism itself. The tendrils probe, shift, apply pressure in places no pick could reach.
The lock clicks open.
