I try for a laugh, but it’s a wet gargle. “Aye. Reckon so.”
His outline flickers, all restraint and rage. He leans in, and those ember eyes bore into mine with a focus that should set me shaking. I’m past terror, though. Terror takes energy I’ve already bled onto the grass.
“Pact,” he says. “Like hers. Blood. Devotion. Your soul. Live.”
I blink up at him with the one eye that opens; the other is a plum someone stepped on. He’s offering me what he took from her and what she offered back. My soul on a rope. His cold darkness in my blood.
It’ll cost me everything, but the reward’s her.
Some choices are easy. Some math does itself.
I think of Sera, gone, under the hands of a priest of pain who thinks revelation’s something ye cut for, truth a thing that only shows its face when ye peel it off bone. I think of him looking at her like he’s the first to see the woman under the mask when the truth is she wears her ruin honest. I like it that way.
I think of her smile. Nae the sharpened one for the rest of the world, but the wee secret curve that sneaks up when nobody’s looking. The one like a bruise healing, like a room ye thought was condemned turning a light on again. I’ve seen it several times, and it made me feel holy and filthy at once.
“Do it,” I grind out. My voice is gravel over glass. “Whatever ye need. Take it. Just let me live long enough to bring her home.”
Her daddy doesnae hesitate.
The shadows surge.
He opens me up with no blade, but all cold, and pours himself in.
It hits like drowning in a winter sea. No top, no bottom. It races the old routes of veins and nerves, rewriting as it goes. My finger bones grind and clack, and shards kiss and stick. Then the ribs, the hairline fractures knitting with a bright-white pain that blanks out nearly everything. Then the stripes across my chest, the skinned patches and tidy fillets of me.
Shadows sluice in, silk-dark and thicker than blood. They fill gaps, making bridges. He is a seamstress sewing meat.
I scream.
My back arcs. All my strings are pulled at once. The sound’s an animal getting brand-new instructions.
Blood. Devotion. Your soul. Live.
They’re nae just terms. They’re commands in my marrow. Blood: mine, already a lake on the rug. Devotion: mine to her, always her, and mine to him. Your soul: hardly a thing I think twice about. Live: both the chain and the permission.
It locks with a feeling like a key turned in a rib. Something gives, something admits. A door opens in the house of me, and cold walks through and hangs its coat on the hook. There’s a second heartbeat there now—slower, patient, hungry.
Then it’s done.
I’m on my back again, lungs hauling, staring up at cracked heaven. I tilt my head, and the world stays put.
My chest is wrapped in shadow, satin-dark lying where flesh was peeled. The deeper cuts are zipped with that same thick not-quite-stuff, the edges tidied. My nail beds wear wee black crowns made of darkness. My fingers are straight again. They’ll hold a blade. They’ll hold a throat.
My ribs glide easily with every breath, and the wet rattle’s gone.
I close my eyes for the space of a blink.
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the devil my soul to take.
Pretty nice deal, if you ask me.
In my dreams, I’m walking the ceiling, casual as a Sunday, easy as ye like. Gravity’s taken a holiday, and I’m its replacement, whistling at my work. My boots leave old-blood prints on the plaster. I laugh, and the sound rings wrongside-up. It feels like being unshackled from the stupid direction of down…
Down…
Down…
Sera walks there beside me, her bare feet making smaller stains next to mine. She’s smiling, and there’s no knives in it.This is the soft one, the real one. She takes my hand, cold as a sacrament, sure as a promise, and says—
