Chapter 7
James
Waiting is a hell made special for lads like me.
I can fight. I can bleed. I can scream while a man breaks my fingers and call it Tuesday. But sitting on my arse in a house full of shadows while the woman I worship is somewhere else being fed to a demented philosophy?
Aye, that’s the bit that unspools me.
Night folds into day and then back again.
The clock tries, bless it, but it’s the second heartbeat that marks the time.
His. Azhrael’s. Slow as a glacier moving under my ribs, steady as a drum.
Every so often I catch myself breathing to his rhythm, and I have to drag my lungs back to mine like I’m reeling a big fish.
The shadow-bandages have set into me, slick as second skin, black as confession.
Where Red Hands peeled me open, the dark has sealed me shut again, not with scar tissue but with something that hums when I breathe.
If I flex my fingers, the dark splints flex back, responsive, alive, like a creature that learned the shape of my bones and decided to stay.
It’s akin to tiger stripes all over my body, which is pure dead brilliant. It makes me look like I stepped out of a myth.
The shadows give me even more tricks up my sleeves.
If I cannae trouble myself to reach for a glass in Sera’s cupboard, I send the shadows, obedient as tamed snakes.
They curl around the handle, lift, pour, deliver.
If I need to scratch my ballocks, the shadows will do it for me.
It's like having extra limbs made of night.
It comforts me. The shadows. The cold. The darkness. The beginning of the separation of my soul from my grasp.
It’s no longer mine, and somehow that’s freeing, like it was holding me back.
Like my soul was this wee anchor I'd been dragging along the ocean floor my whole life, catching on every jagged thing, like the memory of my father's hands, the sound of my mother not screaming because she'd learned silence was safer.
Put that on the list for my da, the priest, aye?
My da would have all sorts of opinions on that bit, but I dinnae care.
Selling your immortal soul to a demon? He'd have me on my knees reciting Hail Marys until my kneecaps wore through the floor while he whipped me with a heavy chain. But I dinnae care. The man couldn’t beat holiness into me, and all he taught me was that God has terrible taste in representatives.
Sera’s daddy and I coexist in the basement together, quiet-like, as comfortable as our explosive worry lets us be right now. Like da and son, in a weird way. The difference being I like this da well enough to bleed for him rather than kill him with a fire poker.
Eddie paces upstairs in the kitchen. He’s got that quiet panic prisoners get when the cage is double-locked and the key’s in someone else’s grasp. Every now and then he stops dead and breathes a prayer he doesn’t believe in but won’t risk not saying.
I dinnae sleep. If I close my eyes, I’m back in the chair, and I can hear my own screaming. Funny thing, I didnae know I could scream like that. Always figured I was more of a grit-my-teeth lad, take it quiet, swallow the sound the way Da taught me.
Don't you cry, boy. Don't you dare.
Turns out, under the right encouragement, like with pliers, hooked blades, the patient, methodical peeling of skin from muscle while a calm voice asks you questions about the architecture of your rage, I make choir music out of pain.
He asked me about my father. About the beast. He used that word—beast—before I ever said it, which means he'd done his homework, found the arrest records, the incident reports from Edinburgh where I put three men in hospital and one in the ground and walked away whistling because the dead one had touched a girl who didnae want touching.
He wanted to know when the beast was born. I told him it wasnae born. It was always there. It just got louder when Da's belt got faster.
He smiled at that. The same smile he probably gave every woman he opened. The smile that says: There you are. I see you now.
It breaks something loose in me that I didnae know was knotted there. The thought of him making her scream like that…again and again and again…
Aye, the hunger in me doesn’t come from the belly. It comes from my shadow-wrapped blood.
I need to kill Red Hands.
The phone rings.
I’m up the basement steps in a breath. Eddie already has the call on speaker, his hands flat on the kitchen table like he's bracing against a wave. Dr. Reyes sounds wrecked but awake. The woman’s been wrestling angels in her books all night and knows she grabbed one by the wrong wing.
“I think I know why it didn’t work,” she says.
“You think?” Eddie snaps, and it’s the loudest I’ve ever heard him, the edge in his voice like glass. “We’re running out of time.”
“I know,” she says, and she actually sounds shaken. “Listen to me. The seven points. You negated them because they’re commands. The Seal tells him what to be: diminished, constrained, starved, and so on. Those are commands. But the center—”
“Is a name, not a command,” I say. “Aye?”
"Yes. The name isn't telling him what to be. It's telling the Seal who to hold. It's an identifier, not an imperative. You can't negate an identity the way you negate a command. You can't un-name something by speaking its opposite."
"So 'heavenly' was the wrong approach," Eddie says, his voice forcibly steadied.
“Yes,” she says. “The center anchor uses his own identity against him. The lock recognizes only one entity, one voice. He has to speak it himself. He has to claim his name.”
Daddy hovers in the basement doorway, much denser now, much more there, like each broken point fed him a meal he’s not had in a century.
Eddie meets those ember eyes like a man staring down a train. “Okay.”
“Then let’s fucking go,” I say. “Ye say your name, Daddy. We’ll pick up the pieces ye blow apart.”
Back down to the basement we go toward the seven star points we’ve cracked and ruined.
And in the center, humming like a rotten halo in the dirt: AZHRAEL.
Without the use of legs, he surges toward his own name in a wave of darkness.
And then he speaks.
“Azhrael,” he says, his voice guttural and hellish.
The name fills the ribs of the house and the spaces between my flesh and bones.
The world detonates cold. It feels like a subtraction, the heat wrenched out of the air with both hands.
The packed earth splits in a starburst, and the name in the middle un-writes itself, letters shredding to grit under a sound my ears cannae hold.
Upstairs, every floorboard screams. The foundation groans like a spine cracking. Plaster becomes confetti. The house complains with a demonic wail and then abruptly shuts up.
And the shadows…
They erupt. A black geyser punches through the floor and the ceiling and the roof, and I swear I can hear Da laughing.
Eddie and I run up the stairs. Instinct, aye? Get above the flood before we drown in a collapsing house.
The stairs sway beneath us, treads popping free, nails shrieking as the wood warps. I grab Eddie by the back of his jacket and haul him up the last three steps when one collapses entirely beneath his foot, the wood simply disintegrating into splinters and dust.
The living room is a black throat the shadows ripped through. Furniture has been shoved against the walls by the force of the eruption. The sofa is overturned.
We spill out onto the porch as the last of the shadows go screaming into the sky, a column of night with a comet tail, and then…
Then he’s standing on Sera’s lawn.
He makes the entire planet look so small.
He’s nae a man, but the memory of one burned into dark.
A pillar with shoulders. The vague suggestion of hands made out of absence, fingers long and tapered and ending in points that aren't quite claws but aren't quite not.
Eyes like dying stars. Frost webs out from his body over the grass, icing it white in a lace so fine I want to put it in my pocket.
The air around him hisses like a kettle ready to scream.
My mouth says “Christ above,” without asking me.
He doesnae look at us. His head turns east. He’s listening to something we cannae hear and hasnae stopped hearing since the day she walked into his cage for the first time. Listening for that beautiful heartbeat that gave him a reason to remember his own name.
Something clicks behind those ember eyes.
“Found her,” he says.
Two words. Clean as a carved epitaph.
And then he’s gone.
The space where he is becomes the shape of him not-being-here, a vacuum that pulls the air inward with a crack like a thunderclap, and the night tilts after him like it wishes it could keep up.
Eddie grabs my sleeve. “Let’s go.”
He’s got the engine turning before I get the door yanked, and we lurch out of the driveway and into the street with the tires complaining against the ice that Daddy left on the pavement. I’m half buckled, all feral, body leaning forward like it could shove the car faster with want.
“Follow him, James,” he says, jaw set, eyes bright in a way that tells me he’s not a calm man so much as a man who’s desperately good at wearing calm. “Plug yourself into him or something. Use your shadows.”
“I dinnae ken if there’s a manual for this,” I say, and then I close my eyes and try anyway.
The second heartbeat in my chest is not slow now. It’s predator fast, and it’s hunting.
He’s going to her.
A pull east, sure as iron under a magnet.
It’s a hook right under my sternum, dragging.
It’s a rope through the ribs of the house of me, running from my shadow-altered heart out through the night to wherever he is, wherever she is.
If I exhale, I can feel him move at the end of it, that other heart eating distance as if it’s food, courtesy of my new married-to-the-dark situation.
“Go east,” I say.
Eddie makes a sharp turn. “Please, please, please find her.”
I nod once. If my Prayer needs a god, let it be the one who just tore the roof off our world to reach her.
The city is a blur of sleeping houses. Dawn’s thinking about it, now a blue smear on the edge of the world.
Which means Sera has been gone for over forty-eight hours.
Forty-eight hours with a man who thinks suffering is scripture and a scalpel is a pen.
“Faster,” I say.
He doesn’t answer. The speedometer does. The needle climbs past eighty, past ninety, trembling at the edge of what the car can give.
I crack the window, and the early dawn air knives my face, cold and sharp. Somewhere ahead is my girl in the middle of a star that thinks it can starve a woman who’s learned to live on ash and spite.
Hold on, Prayer. We’re coming.
And Hell’s coming with us.