Chapter 10
James
I dinnae need eyes for this.
The dark is a map under my skin now, a city of cold and heat. The hangar’s pillars are cooler veins. The table with the tools is a bright, careful rectangle of metallic chill. The Seal is a wound in the room. And at its heart…
My Prayer. A glow inside the deeper night. Faint, aye, but not gone.
“Easy, lad,” I whisper to the monster humming under my ribs. “We’ll nae spoil supper by eating the cook.”
Daddy climbs toward the ceiling and waits. I move like the shadows taught me, my body turned to patience. Eddie ghosts along the wall to my right, his gun carried low. We’re a proper wee procession, the Church of Bad Saints, come to collect a tithe.
The hangar door rolls again.
It’s him.
Red Hands.
The sight of him boils the rage inside me even hotter.
He wears a backpack and carries a flashlight, a wee, tactical thing, a tight white cone knifing through the gloom.
He enters like a man walking into his office, in no hurry whatsoever.
He sweeps the beam across the chairs, the table, the tools, the Seal, but nae at her.
He checks his theater before admiring his star.
The beam cuts right across where I was. I’m already behind him, close enough to smell something clean that irritates my teeth.
He doesnae ken something’s wrong yet.
I could end him. One reach, one wrongness of angle, and the light in his eyes would go out like breath on a match.
But there’s a covenant carved in my chest now, and it says: the queen sees the kill.
And she can’t do that right now, too close to death’s door.
So I wait. I let the dark tell him stories about who’s really in control…for now. I let the cold move across the floor slow as a tide, licking his boots.
And then I grow bored of slow and throw a little sound three columns over—the slide of my shadows over a loose pebble.
He spins. His shoulders go taut, and the animal in him has its nose up.
He turns back, and when he does, I’m three feet off, all teeth and fire.
He flinches. A full-body twitch that travels from his heels to his hairline, and the flashlight beam catches my face, my grin, my shadow-striped skin, my eyes burning with borrowed dark.
“Remember me?” I ask, friendly as communion.
His composure cracks, and I see it: the recalculation, the rapid revision of every assumption he walked in with. He thought I died on Sera’s lawn. He thought the beast bled out.
Surprise!
The shadows take him.
They rush up his legs like hungry dogs and drag him two strides sideways. He chokes on his own breath and stumbles hard, dropping the flashlight. It skitters under the table; the beam dies under a heel made of night.
Another of my shadows.
I lunge at him. We hit the concrete together, but it’s my floor, not his. I land soft; he bounces hard, though his backpack takes the brunt of his fall. His head clips a chair leg. The scalpel tray jumps and sings.
He’s quicker than I gave him credit for. The hooked blade’s in his hand between one breath and the next. He slashes blind where my throat should be if I were a good boy who stayed where light expects him to.
I am nae a good boy. Never have been.
He nicks my cheek anyway. The pain is a kiss I enjoy.
“Och, there we are,” I murmur, and my grin feels as bright as blasphemy.
He throws something with the other hand. In the dark, it looks like a wee grey egg, compact, dense. It bursts against my chest, and the world goes white and wrong.
Every hair on my arms lifts. My sinuses scream. My shadows scream louder.
What the fuck?
“Salt,” I snarl and shove off him.
It burns the nose without smell, a dust that is all edges. It sifts across the floor like winter ground to powder, and my shadows scream. Daddy makes a sound like steam. My eyes water; my skull rings.
Where the salt touches me, the dark hugs my body tight as if it could crawl back into my bones to hide. It cannae.
The dust kisses my knuckles, and the black bandages recoil, hissing. Pain ripples straight to my heartbeat and Daddy’s. The monster in my ribs snarls.
I fling myself past the salt into cleaner dark. The shadows resettle, wounded but intact. The burns fade to a dull throb.
Salt. Bastard brought salt to fight off monsters. The simplicity of it scratches over my skin.
Red Hands hauls himself up, breath sawn, eyes wide and calculating. He’s got another wee trick in the other pocket, I’d bet. More salt eggs.
What a fucking clever cunt.
Eddie’s voice cuts sharp across the red. “Hands on your head! Down on the ground! Now!”
Red Hands’s head tics toward the sound, the way prey twitches when the new wolf barks.
I’m on him before his next breath. My shadow-wrapped fist catches him square on the jaw. His face jerks sideways, and I feel the impact travel through the dark splints on my knuckles and up my arm like a hymn sung in the key of violence.
He comes back with the hooked scalpel again—Christ, the man doesnae quit—and goes for tendons, tries to make the hand I hit him with useless. Lands it, too. A hot line opens along my forearm, and blood wells dark against darker bandages.
“Och, that’s cheeky,” I say, and drive my forehead into his nose.
Crunch.
The cartilage gives with a sound like stepping on a walnut shell, and blood sheets down his face, turning his unremarkable features into something almost interesting. He staggers. The scalpel drops, ringing on concrete.
But another salt egg arcs in from his arm, the sneaky wee shite. A curtain of night slides into it midair and carries it like a sinner to baptism, dumping it into a tidy pile ten feet off. The salt hisses, and Daddy does too.
“Ye brought props,” I say, circling Red Hands. “I brought a church.”
He backs toward his table of tools without even looking. Lad can count distances in his sleep. He wants a hand on iron. I don’t let him get there.
Eddie doesn’t either. He ghosts left and puts a bullet into the concrete inches from Red Hands's leading foot. The ricochet sparks bright enough to print an afterimage on my retinas, and the crack of the shot fills the hangar with a sound that bounces off every wall and comes back meaner.
Not a miss. A message.
“Hands on your head, motherfucker,” Eddie says, voice low as a grave. “Or try me again.”
Red Hands tries him again.
He pivots, snatches the camera on its tripod in both hands and brings it up like a staff. I step in smiling because I’m a stupid man who likes to be hit. He obliges. The aluminum cracks against my shadow-ribs.
The impact registers as pressure, not pain. The shadows absorb it, redistribute it, turn the hit into a dull hum that my new body processes and dismisses.
I hook his ankle with my heel, and we go down together again. This time I keep the top and the tool. The hooked scalpel’s mine, stolen as we fell, and the camera’s his. I drive the hook’s point right up against his ear so he gets to hear the idea before it’s a fact.
He tries to turn away.
“Look at me,” I shout at him, and my accent goes thick as peat because I’m full of my monster now, and the hymn is loud.
His gaze flickers toward the Seal. Toward Prayer.
“Ah-ah,” I chide, and crack two of his fingers sideways.
The index and middle, bent at angles God didnae design, the joints popping with a sound like bubble wrap.
He gasps but doesnae scream. The man has some dignity under all that psychosis. For now, at least.
“James, we need him alive.” Eddie moves closer to the Seal’s edge, eyes on Red Hands, gun steady, breath a metronome. “We need him to talk. How many sites. What backups. What he’s got rigged in here. Everything.”
Daddy slides the darkness along the floor like a hand feeling under furniture and finds a neat grid of little gifts Red Hands has been hiding.
More salt eggs. Some glass vials taped to the sides of the beams. Wires meant to trip.
His dropped backpack, with a collection of demonology and folklore books that spilled out.
The shadows gather them and carry them into a corner.
Red Hands watches his contingencies float away, and something in him finally flickers.
A crack through the porcelain.
“Look at that,” I murmur, bending close enough for him to count my teeth. “Even your tricks want confession.”
His hand flashes for my throat.
He’s fast. I’m hungrier. I catch his wrist mid-flight and twist. The joint goes with a sound I could gift-wrap. He gasps. I put my knee on his chest and lean until his ribs protest.
“Ye need to fucking bow to the queen,” I tell him.
I rise, taking him with me, and drag him by the collar across the floor.
He fights with elbows, knees, and the dead-weight play, but I’ve moved bigger sinners.
We stop at the edge of the Seal.
Inside, my girl is a ruin the world does not deserve. Red on her nails like he already signed his name. Red on her skin like he tried to write a gospel there.
She’s awake, and she’s looking at him. Still lying down. Still starving. Still knocking at death's door hard enough to splinter the wood. But awake, and her eyes are open, and they hold a fury so pure and concentrated that it makes the shadows around her ripple in sympathy.
Och, my Prayer. I've never seen a prettier sight than her wrath aimed at the man who thought he could unmake her.
I haul him closer. “Bow to Sera.”
“Penelope,” he says, because that’s the name he carved, and he believes in nothing more than a thing he can cut into skin and stone.
Her eyes are all winter. “Wrong…girl.”
He ignores me and looks at Eddie over my shoulder. “You won’t shoot me,” he says. “You might hit your friend here. Besides, you need what’s in my head. You said so yourself.”
“You’re right,” Eddie replies. “But you don’t need both legs.”
With no hesitation, he shoots him in the calf.
Red Hands screams—a clean, high sound, stripped of philosophy, of composure, of every pretense he's ever wrapped around his violence. Just a man in pain. Just meat and nerve and the truth he's so fucking obsessed with, served back to him on a bullet.
He collapses onto his side, hands flying to the wound. Blood weeps through his fingers, but Daddy's cold shadows thread toward him and slow it to a seep, frost crystallizing along the wound's edges.
We cannae have him bleeding out, ye ken?
“Fucking bow to her,” Eddie shouts, and it makes my ears ring.
“Aye,” I tell Eddie without looking back. “There’s my detective.”
I squat, put my mouth by Red Hands’s ear, and let my voice go real low. “Listen to me. Do ye ken the liturgy? It goes like this: we do not worship at your altar. Ye will worship at ours, and we told you to bow.”
He groans a laugh through clenched teeth, still thinking he’s clever.
Sera’s breath hitches. “James. Eddie.”
I go still. Every part of me quiets at her voice. The sound of it is everything. Cracked and dry and barely there, but everything.
“What do ye need?” I ask her, nae taking my eyes off Red Hands. “Say it. I’ll fetch it, kill it, kiss it, whatever order ye like.”
Her tongue wets her split lip. “Water.”
From out of the darkness rolls a bottle of water, a gift from Daddy from…somewhere. Eddie is already moving toward it. He snatches it up, twists off the cap, and crosses the lines of the Seal, quick as ye like.
Gently, he tips it to her mouth. She drinks like a sinner forgiven. Her eyes close for one breath and open sharper.
“More,” she whispers.
“Slowly.” He gives her more, one hand cradling the back of her head, his fingers disappearing into her dark hair.
The line of her throat moves. What’s left of my soul tries to leave my body and go live in that swallow.
“Good girl,” I tell her, and the monster in me purrs because she is drinking and alive and looking at me like I’ve made a dramatic entrance back into life.
She coughs, looks at Red Hands, and something settles in her expression. Something final. “He’ll bow…when I’m upright.”
“Time to go,” Eddie says. “We’ll need him mobile.”
“I can carry him on a stick,” I offer brightly.
“Alive,” Sera croaks.
Her eyes don’t leave Red Hands.
“Aye, and then he’ll know for sure he’s failed.” I lean in so he can feel the cold that emanates from me. “Ye hear her? That woman ye thought was a canvas? She’s the painter. You’re the red.”
Daddy moves like a storm cloud learning to smile. The concrete floor vibrates beneath him, a purr that I feel in my shadow-splinted bones.
“Daddy,” my Prayer breathes before she passes out again.
“Right, then,” I say, standing. “We’ve had our appetizer. Let’s serve the main.”
I give Red Hands the merciful kindness of a boot to the temple, gentle as a lullaby. He goes out.
Eddie holsters his weapon. “You promise you’ll wait to kill him?”
The darkness inside me thrums. “I’ll try very, very hard.”