James growls behind me.
He’s here. Red Hands is here.
I look up into the darkness where two points of ember light burn like dying suns, and I understand with absolute clarity that we are not rescuing Sera from Red Hands.
We’ve just set the trap.
And Red Hands is walking back into a building that is no longer a building.
It is a mouth.
And it is very, very hungry.
Chapter 10
James
Idinnaeneedeyesfor this.
The dark is a map under my skin now, a city of cold and heat. The hangar’s pillars are cooler veins. The table with the tools is a bright, careful rectangle of metallic chill. The Seal is a wound in the room. And at its heart…
My Prayer. A glow inside the deeper night. Faint, aye, but not gone.
“Easy, lad,” I whisper to the monster humming under my ribs. “We’ll nae spoil supper by eating the cook.”
Daddy climbs toward the ceiling and waits. I move like the shadows taught me, my body turned to patience. Eddie ghosts along the wall to my right, his gun carried low. We’re a proper wee procession, the Church of Bad Saints, come to collect a tithe.
The hangar door rolls again.
It’s him.
Red Hands.
The sight of him boils the rage inside me even hotter.
He wears a backpack and carries a flashlight, a wee, tactical thing, a tight white cone knifing through the gloom. He enters like a man walking into his office, in no hurry whatsoever. He sweeps the beam across the chairs, the table, the tools, the Seal, but nae at her. He checks his theater before admiring his star.
The beam cuts right across where I was. I’m already behind him, close enough to smell something clean that irritates my teeth.
He doesnae ken something’s wrong yet.
I could end him. One reach, one wrongness of angle, and the light in his eyes would go out like breath on a match.
But there’s a covenant carved in my chest now, and it says:the queen sees the kill.
And she can’t do that right now, too close to death’s door.
So I wait. I let the dark tell him stories about who’s really in control…for now. I let the cold move across the floor slow as a tide, licking his boots.
And then I grow bored of slow and throw a little sound three columns over—the slide of my shadows over a loose pebble.
He spins. His shoulders go taut, and the animal in him has its nose up.
He turns back, and when he does, I’m three feet off, all teeth and fire.
He flinches. A full-body twitch that travels from his heels to his hairline, and the flashlight beam catches my face, my grin, my shadow-striped skin, my eyes burning with borrowed dark.
“Remember me?” I ask, friendly as communion.
