His composure cracks, and I see it: the recalculation, the rapid revision of every assumption he walked in with. He thought I died on Sera’s lawn. He thought the beast bled out.
Surprise!
The shadows take him.
They rush up his legs like hungry dogs and drag him two strides sideways. He chokes on his own breath and stumbles hard, dropping the flashlight. It skitters under the table; the beam dies under a heel made of night.
Another of my shadows.
I lunge at him. We hit the concrete together, but it’s my floor, not his. I land soft; he bounces hard, though his backpack takes the brunt of his fall. His head clips a chair leg. The scalpel tray jumps and sings.
He’s quicker than I gave him credit for. The hooked blade’s in his hand between one breath and the next. He slashes blind where my throat should be if I were a good boy who stayed where light expects him to.
I am nae a good boy. Never have been.
He nicks my cheek anyway. The pain is a kiss I enjoy.
“Och, there we are,” I murmur, and my grin feels as bright as blasphemy.
He throws something with the other hand. In the dark, it looks like a wee grey egg, compact, dense. It bursts against my chest, and the world goes white and wrong.
Every hair on my arms lifts. My sinuses scream. My shadows scream louder.
What the fuck?
“Salt,” I snarl and shove off him.
It burns the nose without smell, a dust that is all edges. It sifts across the floor like winter ground to powder, and my shadows scream. Daddy makes a sound like steam. My eyes water; my skull rings.
Where the salt touches me, the dark hugs my body tight as if it could crawl back into my bones to hide. It cannae.
The dust kisses my knuckles, and the black bandages recoil, hissing. Pain ripples straight to my heartbeat and Daddy’s. The monster in my ribs snarls.
I fling myself past the salt into cleaner dark. The shadows resettle, wounded but intact. The burns fade to a dull throb.
Salt. Bastard brought salt to fight off monsters. The simplicity of it scratches over my skin.
Red Hands hauls himself up, breath sawn, eyes wide and calculating. He’s got another wee trick in the other pocket, I’d bet. More salt eggs.
What a fucking clever cunt.
Eddie’s voice cuts sharp across the red. “Hands on your head! Down on the ground! Now!”
Red Hands’s head tics toward the sound, the way prey twitches when the new wolf barks.
I’m on him before his next breath. My shadow-wrapped fist catches him square on the jaw. His face jerks sideways, and I feel the impact travel through the dark splints on my knuckles and up my arm like a hymn sung in the key of violence.
He comes back with the hooked scalpel again—Christ, the man doesnae quit—and goes for tendons, tries to make the hand I hit him with useless. Lands it, too. A hot line opens along my forearm, and blood wells dark against darker bandages.
“Och, that’s cheeky,” I say, and drive my forehead into his nose.
Crunch.
The cartilage gives with a sound like stepping on a walnut shell, and blood sheets down his face, turning his unremarkable features into something almost interesting. He staggers. The scalpel drops, ringing on concrete.
But another salt egg arcs in from his arm, the sneaky wee shite. A curtain of night slides into it midair and carries it like a sinner to baptism, dumping it into a tidy pile ten feet off. The salt hisses, and Daddy does too.
“Ye brought props,” I say, circling Red Hands. “I brought a church.”
