“Where is she?”
My own voice drags me out by the scruff. I’m sitting up before I’ve decided to. That’s new. Minutes—hours?—ago, if ye’d offered me a million quid and your grandma’s pearl rosary, I couldnae’ve managed a twitch, let alone sat up straight.
I can feel him now. Nae just in the room, but inside me. That second drum, slower, older, patient as winter, thudding in the church of me. The echo goes down halls within me I’ve never lit before.
Daddy congeals near the buckled front door, a thin smear of night wearing eyes. Saving me, on top of breaking himself against the doorframe and screaming her name into stone, has leeched him into mist. His embers burn low, like he’s out of kindling.
“Where is she?” I ask again, stronger this time.
He shudders. The shadows bristle so hard the walls complain.
“Gone.” The next word’s bought with pain. “Sealed.”
A Seal. Like his? A star for a cage? Her true name carved into the lock? My Prayer tucked behind a pattern like a lamb behind stained glass while a zealot polishes the knife?
The rage that stands up in me is different now. Before, I burned. I was a bonfire that didnae care what the sparks landed on. Now I freeze. The anger’s a blade left in snow, hardened. I can kill neater with it.
Eddie shuffles in from the kitchen, phone in his hand, his face grey as dawn and twice as tired. He stops when he clocks me upright.
“You’re not dead,” he says.
“Aye.” I flex my shadow-capped fingers. “Far from it.”
His gaze flicks to Sera’s daddy and back to me. I see the man click the pieces together, but he puts his existential horror on a high shelf he’ll dust later.
“Dr. Reyes is pulling her research,” he says. “She’ll call back with instructions on how to break the Seal of Dissolution. Azhrael says he can find our girl if we free him.”
Azhrael… So he does have a name other than “Sera’s daddy.”
I nod and look at him anew. He’s a storm in a bottle, someone’s thumb pressed to the cork. The hunger in him rolls like winter surf.
“Then we break your fucking cage,” I tell him, “and ye go get our lass.”
Chapter 4
Sera
Morefootstepsandaclick, then light drops out of the rafters in a hard white circle that pins me to the world.
He steps into it.
Red Hands.
I've never seen him before.
That's the thing that crawls under my skin worse than the Seal of Dissolution, worse than the surgical tools gleaming on that table behind him. I don't know this face. Have never passed it on a street, never scanned it across a crowded room, never put it in the mental filing cabinet where I store every potential threat.
He's nobody.
He’s average height, medium build, brown hair cut short and neat, and clean-shaven. Somewhere in his late thirties or early forties, but it’s hard to tell in this light. He's wearing a button-down shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, tucked into dark jeans. No jewelry. No tattoos that I can see. No distinguishing marks of any kind.
He looks like an accountant. Like a middle school history teacher. Like the guy who holds the door for you at the post office and you forget his face before you've finished saying thank you.
That's the horror of it, not the tools, not the Seal. Not the vast, empty darkness of whatever abandoned hangar he's brought me to. It's the ordinariness. The absolute, crushing dullness of the man who's been stalking me, who murdered several women, who carved James open.
You can't protect yourself from someone you don't know is watching. You can't build defenses against a threat that looks like everyone and no one.
Vincent, I know. Vincent, I can hate with specificity, with the intimate precision of a woman who has memorized every angle of her rapist's face. My court, I know.
