Feed Her Fire (Her Monsters, Her Crown #4)

Chapter 1

Azhrael

She is gone.

Gone.

The word is insufficient. Gone implies departure, implies movement from one place to another, implies a destination that can be found and followed.

This is not gone. This is severed. A limb torn from the body. A frequency suddenly flatlined.

One moment she was here, her heartbeat drumming through our bond, her fear bright and electric and alive. Then Red Hands ripped her away, and several minutes later, something slammed shut between Sera and me. A wall. A barrier with intent.

I know the shape of that intent. I have lived inside it for over a hundred years.

Someone has sealed her in, the same way I am.

The understanding detonates inside me, and the house answers.

Pipes burst in the upstairs bathroom, water spraying against tile in a pressurized shriek.

Frost erupts across the living room windows, racing outward from the center in crystalline patterns that splinter the glass.

The kitchen ceiling cracks, a jagged line splitting plaster from wall to wall, raining white dust onto the countertops.

I throw myself against the black void framed by the open front door.

The threshold holds. It always holds. The Seal of Dissolution hums beneath the house’s foundation, its seven-pointed geometry vibrating with the smugness of a cage that knows it is stronger than the animal inside it.

I slam against the threshold again. The doorframe splinters. Wood shrieks. The porch light explodes in a shower of sparks and glass. But the invisible barrier does not yield. It flexes, absorbs, rebounds, and the pain of contact sears through my form like iron pressed to an open wound.

I reform into something as solid as I can get, fighting, clashing against the Seal, and then I dissolve into shadows once again. So I reform again. The cycle is agonizing, each dissolution stripping away coherence, each reformation costing energy I cannot spare.

But I cannot stop.

Outside, I can see the lawn. Can see him.

James.

Sera’s Fist lies in the wet grass ten feet from the porch, one bloody arm still reaching toward the house, toward me, toward the safety he almost reached before the darkness swallowed Sera.

His chest rises and falls in shallow, hitching movements. Too much blood pools beneath him, black as oil in the dim light. The cuts on his torso, arms, and face gleam. Red Hands's handiwork, a map of suffering carved into muscle and skin.

He is dying.

If I could cross the threshold, I could help him. Could wrap shadows around his wounds, slow the bleeding, drag him inside where my power runs strongest, despite the Seal. I could pour cold into his veins to dull the pain.

But I cannot cross.

Ten feet. He is ten feet from my reach, and it might as well be ten thousand miles.

To James’s right, a car sits dark and still in the driveway.

The woman inside—the one Eddie sent to guard what is mine—is slumped against her headrest. The foam at her mouth has dried to a crust. Her chest does not rise.

Her eyes are open, seeing nothing, reflecting the fractured light from my shattered porch.

She is already gone. The real kind of gone. The permanent kind.

I cannot help her either.

I turn my attention inward, grasping for the bond with Sera. It is still there, just barely. I cling to this fact. Sera's heartbeat pulses at the far end of our connection, faint and slow, drugged, but present.

But our bond is wrong, muffled, like hearing her through stone, through water, through layers of intent designed to contain exactly what she has become.

An entity, something other, still mostly human on the outside, so that she can wield shadows against her tormentors. In exchange, she promised me her soul.

And now Red Hands has used our pact against us.

He must have built a Seal for her, used her true name—Penelope—as the anchor, the way the fucking priest used Azhrael to bind me to this house.

Red Hands must have studied the carvings in my basement when he killed one of his victims there.

He must have wondered about it and gradually understood the principles to replicate it.

And now my Sera sits inside a cage of his making, her shadows trapped, her power contained, while I rage uselessly inside my own prison.

I gather what remains of my coherence and reach through the bond. Then I push outward, sideways, along the thinnest thread of connection I possess to the waking world beyond these walls.

The Mind. Eddie Crowe.

I have only visited him in his dreams while he slept here, made him aware of my presence and my power and my possession of Sera. She trusts him. She has touched him, spoken his name with intention, woven him into the fabric of her court.

I hope that’s enough to reach him.

I compress everything I have into a single pulse of feeling.

Cold fury. Sera's absence. Danger. Come.

I send it out like a flare fired into a storm, not knowing if it will reach him, not knowing if he will understand it even if it does. It costs me. The effort strips away another layer of coherence, leaves me flickering at the edges, my form thinning to wispy smoke.

But I send it.

Then I send it again.

And again.

On the lawn, James coughs. Blood sprays from his lips in a fine mist that catches the light from the broken window. His hand twitches, broken fingers clawing weakly at the grass. He is trying to crawl, still trying to reach the house.

"James." I press against the threshold, my voice barely a rasp that the night air swallows before it travels three feet.

He cannot hear me. Even if he could, what would I say?

She is gone. You failed. I failed. We all failed.

No.

Failure implies finality, and this is not final. She is still alive. I feel her stubborn, persistent heartbeat. The rhythm of a woman who has survived worse than this and clawed her way back from the wreckage every single time.

She will survive this too.

She must.

I cannot lose her.

That would be worse than any hell. That would be worse than being trapped in the cracks of a rotting house for another century, another millennium, screaming into a void that does not care.

The house groans around me, responding to my anguish. Floorboards warp. Nails push free from joists with metallic shrieks. The temperature plummets until frost coats every surface, the very air itself crystallizing into a fog of ice particles that hangs motionless in the rooms.

I press against the threshold one more time. The doorframe groans, wood splitting along the grain, large splinters falling like teeth from a broken jaw. The barrier burns. The Seal hums its seven-fold command.

I retreat from the threshold because the effort has cost me dearly. My form is barely coherent now, more mist than shadow, more memory than presence.

Sera.

I whisper her name into the void between us. It falls into the muffled distance and disappears, but I say it again because her name is the only prayer I know. The only word that keeps the silence from swallowing me whole.

Sera.

Sera.

Sera.