Chapter 6
Sera
Time is a strange thing when you have nothing to measure it against.
No windows. No clock. No cell phone. The red exit light doesn't brighten, or dim, or cycle through anything so merciful as a day-night rhythm. Just that constant crimson wash, turning the world into a darkroom where the only thing developing is my own slow deterioration.
My mouth is sand. My lips have cracked at the corners, and when I lick them, I taste copper, which at this point is the closest thing to hydration I've had since before the needle went into my neck.
My stomach stopped growling hours ago and settled into a deeper, quieter complaint.
The kind that doesn't announce itself dramatically but just slowly, methodically begins to consume itself.
Red Hands is in no hurry. That may be the most terrifying thing about him.
Not the scalpels, not the camera now mounted on its tripod and aimed at me, not the footage of James playing on a loop on that laptop screen.
It's the patience. The absolute, serene certainty that time is on his side.
That he can simply wait until my body does much of his work for him, until dehydration and starvation and the Seal's slow drain on my energy strips me down to something manageable.
Something that can't fight back.
The Seal is hungry. That's the only way I can describe it. The longer I’m here, it’s a low, constant pull at the center of my chest, like something has hooked its fingers into place and is steadily, persistently tugging.
The shadows beneath my skin don't answer the way they should. When I reach for them, they come, but sluggishly, like wading through cold honey.
They’re leashed just as much as I am.
Every hour I sit inside it, the Seal pulls a little more, drains a little deeper, quiets the cold fire in my veins by another degree.
He's waiting for the fire to go out completely.
Then he'll begin in earnest.
While I drift in and out, Red Hands comes and goes.
Sometimes I hear him before I see him, footsteps echoing across the vast concrete floor of the hangar from some direction I can't quite pinpoint.
Sometimes he simply materializes at the edge of the Seal's boundary, already seated, already watching, as if he teleported in from whatever unremarkable life he lives between sessions.
He's been here four times since I first woke up. Or five. I've lost count.
The scalpels and other tools sit there outside the Seal and remind me of what he's capable of, what he's planning, what comes next when he decides my reserves are sufficiently depleted.
And the laptop continues to play.
Every time Red Hands comes in, he restarts the video. James's screams fill the hangar. The tinny speakers flatten the sound into something almost abstract, and it barely sounds human anymore.
James survived this. He had to have survived it. I will not accept any other version of events.
He's alive. He's alive. He's alive.
I press the words into my bones, let them become structural.
Sometime later, Red Hands sits in his folding metal chair just outside the boundary with his legs crossed and his hands folded and his unremarkable face arranged in that expression of mild, scholarly attention.
When he’s here, I make myself watch every second of every loop on the laptop because the alternative is looking away, and I refuse to give Red Hands the satisfaction of watching me flinch from the truth of what he did.
He's cataloging my reactions, measuring my resistance.
"The skin is the first lie," he says.
His voice is conversational. The tone you'd use to discuss the weather, to comment on a movie you'd seen recently, to make small talk at a party you didn't particularly want to attend.
"Skin contains us, defines our edges. Makes us believe we're separate from the world, separate from each other.
We spend our entire lives convinced we're discrete, bound, individual.
" He shakes his head. "But underneath, we're all the same.
Meat and nerve and bone. The same structures, the same chemistry, the same terrified animal screaming into the same void. "
I don't respond. I've been conserving words the way I'm conserving energy, spending them only when the expenditure might yield something useful.
"You're doing that thing again," he observes pleasantly.
"The strategic silence. Denying me data.
" He doesn't sound offended, just interested.
"Most of them talk compulsively by now. The isolation, hunger, and fear make them need connection.
Even with me. Especially with me, because I'm the only human presence available. "
He tilts his head. "You're different, though. You seem genuinely comfortable with silence."
"I live with a demon," I rasp, my voice like gravel. "He's not big on conversation."
He actually smiles at that. A real one, small and genuine, the first authentic expression I've seen on that forgettable face. It's somehow worse than his empty detachment.
"Yes. That's honest. That's the first genuinely unguarded thing you've said."
Something catches my eye in his hands. Nail polish. Eddie called the color Crimson Kiss. It’s Red Hands’s signature, one of them anyway. The mark he puts on all his victims’ fingernails.
The fear is sharp and immediate and real.
I won't pretend otherwise, not even to myself.
I've trained myself not to show it, not to let it read on my face, but inside my chest, it burns like acid.
The nail polish is a specific, concrete terror in a way the scalpels aren't. The scalpels are tools. The nail polish is a statement.
And that statement reverberates between my skull.
You are finished. You are complete. You are mine.
Vincent was worse, I tell myself.
I tell myself that because it's still true. Vincent was worse because it came without warning, without philosophy, without any framework at all. Just the sudden, nauseating destruction of every belief I held about the world and my safety in it.
Red Hands is just a man with too much time and a bad philosophy and an inflated sense of his own spiritual significance.
Just a man.
Men, I know how to survive.
"Why me?" I croak.
"Some women need what I offer, even if they don't know it.
And then you arrived…" He pauses. "You were obvious from the moment you drove into town. You move like you’re carrying something invisible and heavy.
You walk like a woman who's been broken and reassembled with the pieces in the wrong order. "
I don’t know what to say to that, so I say nothing at all.
"But it was also your house that interested me." He leans forward slightly, and I see it again, that genuine curiosity, the thing that lives underneath his psycho detachment. "The thing inside it. I felt it when I was there in your basement with one of my victims. It didn’t bother me. I don’t think it cared about me or what I was doing.”
He nods to the Seal. “But then I did my research, and that Seal, unbroken, means that something old and hungry lives there with you, and you didn't run from it. In fact, you walked toward it. And when I saw the shadows in your eyes at Gas N’ Go, I knew you let it inside you.
" A pause. "It sees something in you. Something real.
Something worth binding itself to. I want to see it too. "
"Maybe it just likes the way I fuck."
He doesn't react the way I want him to. He doesn't flinch or blush or show the flash of contempt or discomfort I was aiming for.
He just tilts his head. "Deflection. Crude humor to distance yourself from vulnerability. Another mask, and it's effective."
He stands and twists the red nail polish bottle between his fingers.
My heart slams against my ribs.
He turns and walks away, his footsteps fading across the concrete into whatever darkness waits at the far end of the hangar. I listen until I can't hear him anymore, until the only sounds are the distant mechanical hum of something industrial and the tinny loop of James's screams from the laptop.
Then I move.
The moment he's gone, I reach for my shadows with everything I have.
They come, but they’re sluggish, muted, fighting against the Seal's pull.
But they do come. Thin tendrils of cold dark coil around my fingers like smoke, testing the air, reaching outward in every direction simultaneously.
I send them along the floor, tracing the carved lines of the Seal, probing the cage the way a tongue probes a cracked tooth.
Looking for weakness. Looking for a fracture in the design.
The Seal pushes back. Every tendril that reaches inches from the carved boundary hits resistance, like a current running counter to the direction of my will.
It's exhausting to push against it. Every second of effort costs me energy I'm not replenishing. I don’t dare to try to cross the boundary again. I don’t have enough energy for that kind of pain.
But I keep probing.
Because this Seal has to have a weakness.
Red Hands is many things, but he’s not a symbologist with a lifetime of study and a genuine metaphysical connection to what the person who bound Azhrael had.
He's a simple man who “researched” the Seal with one book over the course of a few weeks at most, who understood the principles well enough to replicate the structure.
But understanding a thing and devoting your life to that thing is different.
There's a difference in the construction. I can feel it. The star is correct, the proportions are right, but the intent behind it is thinner. Like the difference between a wall built by a mason who's worked stone his whole life and one built by someone who read a book about masonry.
I find the first fracture at the third point.
It's small, barely a hairline, a place where the counter-current weakens by the smallest degree. My shadow tendril probes it, pushes, pulls back when the effort becomes too costly.
But it's there.
My shadows are extensions of my will, yes, but they're also extensions of Daddy's will.
That's the nature of our pact. We're intertwined.
His power runs through me like a second circulatory system, my will directing it, his ancient hunger fueling it.
Even here, even muffled by this cage, that connection exists.
He's there. I can feel him the way you feel a sound you can't quite hear, a vibration in my bones. The Seal muffles him, dampens the bond to below a whisper.
But he’s there.
And I have James and Eddie too.
My heart twists at thought of James, at the current image on the laptop screen.
His face is mid-scream, and his body is opened up like a text Red Hands was reading aloud.
The possibility that he's dead lives at the edge of my thoughts like a wound I won't probe, because if I probe it, I'll find out it's deeper than I can survive right now.
He's not dead. He's not dead.
He's too stubborn to be dead, too utterly, infuriatingly devoted to the possibility of my survival to let something as mundane as torture actually kill him. He stalked me from Kansas City to Wichita, followed my trail of rage from dark web forums to Gas N’ Go.
He's not dead.
And Eddie… He’s covered for me, lied for me, chosen my side over every cop instinct he possesses. He’s too devoted to me and my quest for vengeance to ever give up on me.
They're coming. I know they're coming the way I know my own heartbeat. Because I know them. I've learned the shape of their devotion, and it doesn't bend.
I'm not alone.
I find a second fracture at the fifth point of the star-shaped cage. Then a third fracture, barely perceptible, at the first point.
Three weaknesses in seven points. Not enough to break through, not without more strength than I currently possess, not while the Seal is draining me and dehydration and starvation are narrowing my world to a smaller and smaller circle.
But it's enough to know the cage isn't perfect.
No cage built by a man ever is.
Red Hands is waiting for me to run out of fight, watching the hourglass on my life running down.
He's not accounting for the fact that I rebuilt myself from the rubble of a woman who had everything taken from her, and I did it without a demon's power or a court of devoted men or any of the advantages I have now.
I know how to function on nothing. I've had years of practice.
So in the place where my rage lives and breathes and sharpens itself against the whetstone of every cruelty I've ever survived…
I wait.