That means we’re the same, James and me, blessed with darkness and missing pieces of ourselves we decided to discard long ago.
I let my men, my monsters, guide me through the wrecked living room to the kitchen, where someone has cleared thebroken glass from the windows and set a mug of tea on the counter that's still steaming.
James grins at me. “I made it like me. Excessive, sweet, and very wrong.”
Chuckling, I pick up the mug. The tea is too dark to be just tea, but I wrap my hands around it and drink. It’s pitch black, shockingly sweet, and oh so right. The cold fire in my veins steadies to a low, constant burn that feels like coming home after a year in exile. I feel better already, stronger even.
Deadlier.
When I finish, I announce, “Okay, I’m ready. Show me.”
James opens the basement door with his shadows. They flow from his fingertips to the handle, turn the latch, and swing the door outward in a single fluid motion that makes the hinges whisper instead of scream. He steps aside and gestures down the stairs.
"After ye, my queen. Your guest is waiting."
The smell hits me three steps down, body odor mixed with the chemical tang of fear. And underneath it, Daddy’s cold, deep and pervasive, the temperature of a crypt in January.
The stairs have been patched—new wood against the old, dark supports. Someone did this quickly, functionally, without care for aesthetics.
Below, I find the basement transformed. The shadows are alive, dense and layered, creating walls within walls. They float away as I take the steps down. In the center of the floor, where the Seal of Dissolution used to be, a circle of darkness holds a man.
He's sitting on the packed earth with his back against nothing—just shadow, solid as stone behind him, keeping him upright. His wrists are bound in front of him with tendrils of darkness that pulse faintly. One leg is splinted with what looks like a broken chair leg and strips of torn fabric, a bullet wound in hiscalf crusted dark, the flesh around it swollen and angry where Daddy's cold has slowed the bleeding but not healed it. Both wrists are swollen, the angles all wrong. So are the angles of several of his fingers.
Other than a deep gouge on his temple, the ordinariness of his face stops me on the bottom step. Once again, it strikes me that he’s just a man with the kind of face you'd see behind you in line at the grocery store and never think about again. There’s nothing that broadcasts the architecture of what lives inside.
Every woman he killed saw this face. This nothing face. This face that slides through the world without friction, without memory, without the decency to look like what it is. They saw it, and they didn't run because there was nothing to run from.
Because he looks like nobody.
I descend the last step. A fresh light bulb hangs from the ceiling and sways from its cord in a nonexistent breeze. Daddy's presence thickens around me, not restraining, just accompanying. A dark entourage for a dark homecoming.
I walk toward Red Hands.
Eddie moves to my left, positioning himself where he can see Red Hands and me at once. James flanks my right, his black eyes smoldering with hell fire. Daddy spreads out everywhere.
My court. My monsters. Every piece exactly where it belongs.
“You like names,” I say to Red Hands. “You think they’re cages. Are you going to tell me yours?”
“They are cages,” he says hoarsely, through panting that’s more than pain now.
The fear in his eyes is the first honest emotion I’ve seen there. It could be because of his shattered wrists and the bullet wound in his leg and the fact that he's caged in sentient darkness in the basement of a house that wants to eat him. It could also be because he's finally on the other side, and the view is nothing like the view from behind the scalpel.
“But names also reveal the truth,” he says.
“What number am I?” I demand. “How many were there before me?”
He shuts his eyes, and when he opens them, I know he is building a lie.
Shadows snap out of my fingertips, surge toward him, and break the rest of his fingers.
He screams. Eddie doesn’t flinch. James grins like a madman. Daddy drinks in the sound and feeds it back as cold.
“Do not,” I say, “waste my time.”
Red Hands blinks. Somewhere inside the parts of his head that are not ritual and rot, a calculator kicks over. He looks at me, at Sera, at Penelope. He must see something he wasn’t expecting.
Because in the next instant, he breaks.
