Da taught me that wee bit of dogma before I could read, like the flat grey litany of a backhand, the ringing psalm of a belt buckle to the shoulder blade, and the quiet benediction after, when the world goes dull and ye think:maybe that’s that; maybe the sermon’s done for the night.
Spoilers: it was nae done.
He was right about one thing, my father. Pain doesnae kill ye. It just redraws the map till suffering’s the only thing ye ken.
So when I think I’m dying, I dinnae think it like a prophecy. I think it like the weather.
Bit of rain today, eh?
Bit of dying tonight, eh?
The ceiling above me looks like a cracked altar, white plaster veined with darkness. For a long, floaty minute, I think I’m staring at the inside of my own skull. Fractured, leaking, a house with the nails knocked loose.
Cold moves over me in tides, but nae the night air or the wet lawn. I remember the lawn. Remember crawling it on hands that wouldnae hold, knees that buckled like paper, screaming her name through a mouth full of iron and spit.
This cold’s alive, though. Shadows slide across my chest like hands, testing where Red Hands opened me neat as a surgeon and peeled me like a bloody satsuma tree.
The flayed spots burn. The cuts—parallel, exact, insultingly tidy, like the bastard brought a ruler to my torture—throb to the beat of my heart, which is slower than it should be. I can feel the engine miss, the sputter and catch. Running on fumes, bad faith, and the stubbornness God gives all monsters.
My fingers are the worst, or what’s left of them. He took the nails one by one, pliers clean and cold. His tools smelled of rubbing alcohol. Considerate for a serial killer. Wouldnae want an infection stealing me before his wee sacrament was complete.
I drift. The ceiling blurs and comes back and blurs again.
Somewhere left of me, Eddie is on the phone. The man’s voice is a taut wire: clipped, careful, panic boiled down to the barest reduction so it doesnae spill over. I only catch shards, like “Seal of Dissolution” and “someone’s life depends on it.”
Sera.
Her name cuts through the fog like a blade dipped in lemons, and I’m yanked back into my skin with a full-body wince.
Where is she? Where is my Prayer?
Memory arrives in hard flashes. The lawn. Her face over me, her fear cutting clean as tears down her cheeks. Her hands cold on my ruined body. The way she said my name like it mattered.
LikeImattered.
Then the needle coming out of the darkness on a direct path toward her neck. Her eyes going glassy. The fold of her body like a marionette whose strings just snapped.
And me there, soft as church butter. Useless as a sermon to a wolf. My bones were matchsticks. My skin was a poor disguise for meat. And I couldnae stop it. Couldnae do the one job I gave myself ever since I saw her rage spilled onto the dark web:keep her.
All I wanted was to keep her. Watch her darkness and my darkness merge into a mountain made of sin.
But he took her.
He took her in front of me.
Something vast drops over me like a blackout curtain. At first, I think it’s the ceiling falling, but nae, this is thicker, darker. Two coals open in it, low-burning, patient with old hunger.
That’s Sera’s Daddy. The thing in the walls. The demon in the vents. The ancient bastard that hums in the floorboards and says “mine” in a voice that roars like a landslide.
I should hate him, and maybe part of me does. The stupid animal part that wants to be the only set of fingerprints on her soul.
But the rest of me’s more practical. I’ve seen what he does for her, how his shadows leap to console her, how his cold wraps her like chainmail. If that’s love…well, it’s nae the sort ye write about in Hallmark cards. But it’s the kind that keeps her breathing.
And right now, it’s keeping me…me.
I can feel him probing, staunching the blood, sensing why my lungs keep rattling.
“Dying,” he rasps, the word vibrating like a tuning fork struck off cracked bone.
