For one terrible second, I think it's Sera. The size is wrong, but panic doesn't care about proportions. It takes my brain several seconds to process what I'm actually seeing.
James.
He's face-down in the grass, one arm extended toward the porch like he was trying to crawl home and didn't make it. The grass around him is dark, and in the dim light from the autumn moon, it takes me a moment to realize the darkness isn't shadow.
It's blood. A lot of it.
“Fuck.” I sprint toward him.
A low, wet moan that barely qualifies as sound scrapes out of him. Air forced through damaged lungs. Pain made audible.
He's alive.
I drop to my knees beside him and roll him onto his back as gently as I can manage, which isn't gentle enough from the looks of him. He groans, a sound like grinding stone, and his one functioning eye rolls toward me without focusing. The other eye is swollen shut, the socket probably fractured.
"James. It's Eddie. Can you hear me?"
No response. Just a terrible, rattling breath.
I assess the damage with the detachment I’ve perfected over years of crime scenes. Still, I cringe internally.
His face shows the horrendous effect of brutal violence. Broken nose. Lacerations across his forehead and cheeks, some deep enough to show the white gleam of bone. His lips are split in three places, blood and saliva mixing into pink foam that bubbles with each exhale.
His shirt, or what's left of it, hangs in tatters. Beneath, his chest and abdomen are covered in cuts. Some are shallow, surface wounds that bled freely but didn't damage muscle and have since crusted over. Others are deeper, the edges of the wounds pulled apart to reveal layers of tissue beneath. Those wounds still weep blood.
This is Red Hands's signature work. Peeling back layers. Revealing truth through suffering.
Several fingernails have been removed, and his fingers are swollen, purple, bent at angles that make my own hands ache in sympathy. At least three are broken in several places.
The longer I assess him, the clearer the events coalesce in my head. Red Hands neutralized Rivera first, then used James as bait to draw Sera out of her house.
And it worked.
Because she would never, ever leave James like this on her lawn.
She’s gone.
Gone.
James outweighs me by sixty pounds easily. All of it muscle, even now, even broken and bleeding and barely conscious. Dragging him anywhere is going to be a nightmare.
But I can't leave him here.
From inside the house, something roars.
The sound isn't human or even animal. It's the noise a building makes when it's collapsing, if the building were alive and furious and screaming with a voice that vibrates in your teeth and makes your vision blur at the edges. The remaining intact windows rattle in their frames. The porch boards groan.
The thing known as Azhrael.
He knows she's gone. Of course he knows, and he’s screaming with her absence.
I look at the open front door. Shadows writhe just inside the threshold, churning like storm clouds compressed into a hallway. The cold pouring from the house is intense enough now that my breath fogs in thick white plumes.
“Enter,” Azhrael growls, and that’s all the prompting I need.
I hook my hands under James's armpits and heave. "All right, big man. We’ve got to get you inside to Azhrael."
James screams. The sound is wet and broken, and it almost makes me let go. But I don’t. Of course I don’t.
