He backs toward his table of tools without even looking. Lad can count distances in his sleep. He wants a hand on iron. I don’t let him get there.
Eddie doesn’t either. He ghosts left and puts a bullet into the concrete inches from Red Hands's leading foot. The ricochet sparks bright enough to print an afterimage on my retinas, and the crack of the shot fills the hangar with a sound that bounces off every wall and comes back meaner.
Not a miss. A message.
“Hands on your head, motherfucker,” Eddie says, voice low as a grave. “Or try me again.”
Red Hands tries him again.
He pivots, snatches the camera on its tripod in both hands and brings it up like a staff. I step in smiling because I’m a stupid man who likes to be hit. He obliges. The aluminum cracks against my shadow-ribs.
The impact registers as pressure, not pain. The shadows absorb it, redistribute it, turn the hit into a dull hum that my new body processes and dismisses.
I hook his ankle with my heel, and we go down together again. This time I keep the top and the tool. The hooked scalpel’s mine, stolen as we fell, and the camera’s his. I drive the hook’s point right up against his ear so he gets to hear the idea before it’s a fact.
He tries to turn away.
“Look at me,” I shout at him, and my accent goes thick as peat because I’m full of my monster now, and the hymn is loud.
His gaze flickers toward the Seal. Toward Prayer.
“Ah-ah,” I chide, and crack two of his fingers sideways.
The index and middle, bent at angles God didnae design, the joints popping with a sound like bubble wrap.
He gasps but doesnae scream. The man has some dignity under all that psychosis. For now, at least.
“James, we need him alive.” Eddie moves closer to the Seal’s edge, eyes on Red Hands, gun steady, breath a metronome. “We need him to talk. How many sites. What backups. What he’s got rigged in here. Everything.”
Daddy slides the darkness along the floor like a hand feeling under furniture and finds a neat grid of little gifts Red Hands has been hiding. More salt eggs. Some glass vials taped to the sides of the beams. Wires meant to trip. His dropped backpack, with a collection of demonology and folklore books that spilled out. The shadows gather them and carry them into a corner. Red Hands watches his contingencies float away, and something in him finally flickers.
A crack through the porcelain.
“Look at that,” I murmur, bending close enough for him to count my teeth. “Even your tricks want confession.”
His hand flashes for my throat.
He’s fast. I’m hungrier. I catch his wrist mid-flight and twist. The joint goes with a sound I could gift-wrap. He gasps. I put my knee on his chest and lean until his ribs protest.
“Ye need to fucking bow to the queen,” I tell him.
I rise, taking him with me, and drag him by the collar across the floor.
He fights with elbows, knees, and the dead-weight play, but I’ve moved bigger sinners.
We stop at the edge of the Seal.
Inside, my girl is a ruin the world does not deserve. Red on her nails like he already signed his name. Red on her skin like he tried to write a gospel there.
She’s awake, and she’s looking at him. Still lying down. Still starving. Still knocking at death's door hard enough to splinter the wood. But awake, and her eyes are open, and they hold a fury so pure and concentrated that it makes the shadows around her ripple in sympathy.
Och, my Prayer. I've never seen a prettier sight than her wrath aimed at the man who thought he could unmake her.
I haul him closer. “Bow to Sera.”
“Penelope,” he says, because that’s the name he carved, and he believes in nothing more than a thing he can cut into skin and stone.
Her eyes are all winter. “Wrong…girl.”
