“Good.” He pulls back enough to cup my face in his hands, his big, bright grin lighting me up from the inside. “That’ll nae happen again, ye ken? I willnae let it.”
I nod. “I ken. And I won’t let it happen again either.”
“My tiger stripes are gone. I wish ye could’ve seen them,” he says. “Fuck, I should have taken a picture.”
“Tiger stripes?”
“The shadows holding my skin together looked like tiger stripes, but my skin must’ve absorbed them.” He shrugs as though what he’s saying is normal. “Ask Daddy.”
The house creaks with Daddy. Filling the hallway behind James, filling the house, filling every shadow and every silence and every cold pocket of air with a presence so vast and so densethat walking through the front door feels like stepping into the chest cavity of something ancient.
He's here. In the house he no longer has to be in.
That fact hits me mid-step, and I stop in the hallway with my hand still on James's arm. The Seal of Dissolution is gone. I know this because he was there in the hangar with me but also because Eddie explained everything.
Azhrael is free. Genuinely, completely free. He could be anywhere. He could pour himself into every shadow in this city, this state, this continent.
But he's here.
He came back to his cage. Not because the bars held, but because I'm inside it.
The cold fire in my veins—guttered to almost nothing by the Seal, by near death—flickers, catches, andburns.
“Home,” Daddy says.
The word is his, resonant and final, and I know he’s talking about me, not the ruined structure we’re standing in. Home is the woman in the hallway with an IV bruise on her hand and hospital discharge papers crumpled in her pocket.
I smile and take a step toward him, but my knees buckle.
I don't go down. James catches me on one side and Eddie on the other, and for a moment I'm suspended between them. James's shadow-touched hand on my arm burns cold, Eddie touches his warmth to my back, and Shadow Daddy is everywhere else, pressing against my skin from every direction like being held by the dark itself.
"I'm fine," I say, which is a lie so transparent it doesn't even qualify as an attempt.
"Aye," James says. "Ye look positively radiant. Better than a corpse at a beauty pageant."
I squeeze his arm. "Thanks."
"It’s the truth. I wouldnae lie." His grin splits his face, boyish, dangerous, lit from within by something that used to be mischief and is now something sharper and deadlier.
The shadows behind him flex and settle, and suddenly understanding dawns in my woefully slow brain.
"So," I say. "Did you fuck each other, or…?"
Eddie snorts.
James's grin widens. "Sadly, nae. It was all very solemn. Blood and oaths and the sort of thing ye'd find carved on a monastery wall. Very disappointing, frankly. I offered, but the big man's got standards. Plus, I don’t think his dick swings that way."
The cold deepens, and Daddy’s shadows wrap around me tighter as if in agreement.
James flexes his fingers, and shadows ripple across his knuckles like dark water. "I gave him blood and my soul. He gave me life…and this."
He turns his hand over, and for a moment the shadows solidify into something dense, sharp-edged, a gauntlet of living darkness that fits his fist like it was forged for it. Then it dissolves back into smoke.
"I'm your Fist, your reach where ye cannae go, eternally bound to him and ye." Embers flare in his black eyes and then fade back to blue.
Eddie waves at him half-heartedly. "And your eyes can do that now."
"Aye. The eyes are a bonus." James winks. "Scares the postman something fierce."
