Chapter 9
Sera
I fall asleep in the arms of my court, my body sore, my lust sated, and wake inside a church that knows I shouldn't be here.
The dream doesn't start the way dreams usually start with a soft fade-in. One moment I'm pressed between James and Eddie with Daddy's cold coiled around my ankles, and the next I'm standing in the center aisle of Our Lady of Sorrows with my bare feet on stone.
You can’t be here, Penelope.
The whisper from the consecrated ground is here too, but it's smaller now, thinner, a voice shouting through a locked door, muffled to incomprehension.
In the waking world, it pushed me back with the weight of accumulated faith, a wall of divine rejection that made my shadows scream and my blood try to exit through my skin.
Here it's just sound, just syllables, just the memory of authority without the teeth to enforce it.
I smile at the empty air. What are you going to do about it?
Daddy is a presence at my back, not a form but a pressure, the architect of the corridor I walked through to get here. He can't fully enter, but he's here enough. I can feel him in the seams of the dream, holding it open, a patient god with his hand on the door.
I walk forward.
The church is wrong, warped, like some things are in dreams. The pews are where they should be, rows of dark wood with blue upholstered seats, hymnals tucked into the backs.
The altar sits at the far end beneath a rose window that throws moon-colored light across the stone floor.
The stained-glass saints look down from their panels with their painted grief and their gilded halos.
But the proportions lie. The aisle stretches longer than physics permits, the altar receding even as I walk toward it, and the vaulted ceiling blurs every time I look at it then snaps back into focus when I look away.
I pass a confessional. The door is ajar. Inside, a man in priest's robes sits with his head bowed, but when I look closer, I see the robes are empty, hollow, arranged around a column of dust that holds its shape.
This dream is already fucking weird, and it’s just begun.
The stations of the cross are mounted on the walls, but the scenes are all wrong.
Christ carrying the cross is Christ carrying me—my body draped across his shoulders, my black hair spilling down his back.
Christ nailed to the wood is Christ nailed to the dirt in an alleyway, the one where my life ended the first time.
Christ laid in the tomb is Christ laid in my old home in Kansas City, beneath the dirt I clawed through for five years trying to find my way back to daylight.
The church knows what I am. The church knows what was done to me. And the church, built to repel things like me, is realizing that I am already inside.
I reach the transept, and that’s when I spot him.
Vincent is in the third pew from the front, on the left side.
He’s lying flat against the blue fabric, sound asleep. His mouth is slightly open, his chest rising and falling in the soft rhythm of a man who believes he is safe. His hands are folded across his stomach, fingers interlaced, the posture of a man lying in a casket.
Good. He's practicing.
I walk to him. The stone beneath my feet is cold, and the cold travels up my legs, blooms in my chest, and becomes the cold fire that has been my only source of warmth since I dragged myself out of Kansas City and decided I would rather be a weapon than a woman. A queen rather than an outcast.
I stop next to him and look down at the man who broke me.
In the waking world, he once was a sheriff.
He had a badge, a gun, a uniform, a department, a reputation, and accumulated authority that he wore like armor.
I took all of that away from him with help from Judge Callahan, now deceased, but Vincent’s still protected by every institution that has ever chosen a comfortable lie over an uncomfortable woman.
But here, he is a sleeping man in rumpled clothes with a stubble of grey on his chin and a line of drool at the corner of his mouth.
Here, he has nothing.
I have everything.
Touch, Daddy whispers in the back of my mind.
I reach out and touch his forehead with two fingers.
The world folds.
The corridor collapses inward, and I'm pulled through the contact like water down a drain, yanking me from the threshold into the humid interior of Vincent's sleeping mind.
The transition is violent and nauseating. For a single disoriented breath, I'm nowhere, and then I'm somewhere, and I wish I weren't.
I’m pretty sure I’m in Vincent’s house because I recognize the modern shape of it.
And Vincent…
He's here.
This Vincent is between a woman’s legs, his body hammering into hers.
His shirtsleeves are rolled to the elbows, his pants bunched around his ankles.
Each thrust is a vicious, full-body slam that shakes the dining room table the woman lies on, the legs screeching against the tile.
He's fucking her with a mechanical, relentless rhythm, the sound wet and tearing.
The woman on the table isn't me. It’s not his dead wife, Evelyn, either.
I make myself look. That's the price of admission to a place like this, the toll the dream space charges for entry.
She's young and blonde like I used to be.
Her wrists are zip-tied to the table legs above her head, her mouth is taped, and her eyes are open and awake and so far past terror they've come out the other side into something blank and animal.
I don’t know her because she's not real. She's a composite, the sum of every woman Vincent has ever done this to stitched together by his sleeping mind into a single body he can fuck forever.
And he's humming.
He's humming.
The rage that rises in me is so clean it feels like grace. Something cold. Something with edges.
Vincent hasn't noticed me yet. In the dream, he's the dreamer, and I'm the intruder, and the rules here are mine to bend. This is my territory now, not his.
My bare feet leave the floor. My body rotates, slowly, until I am inverted. My black hair hangs toward the tile like a curtain of ink.
I walk along the ceiling toward him. Each step leaves a footprint, the same bloody-looking prints that climbed the walls of my house.
"Vincent." My voice drops down on him.
He freezes. The humming stops mid-note, and then he turns and looks around.
Then he looks up.
The sound he makes is smaller than a scream, more involuntary, a choked, wet intake of breath. His body jerks backward so hard that the table with the woman on it scrapes all the way to the wall.
His eyes lock on me. “Why are you here?”
"Because I want to talk about what you are," I say. “But put your sad little dick away first.”
The dream carries my voice, lets every splinter of wood hear the sound of the woman he raped.
His pupils dilate. His breath stops.
At his silence, at his stillness, I let the cold fire out.
It leaves me in a slow exhalation. It changes our surroundings so that we’re in the church again, but we’re both still locked in our dreams. My breath of winter frosts the pews and crystallizes the holy water in the font and sheets the stained glass in a skin of ice that cracks each painted saint across the face.
The temperature in the church plummets, and Vincent's breath clouds.
He tries to stand and finds that the pew has grown around him, the wood softening and flowing up over his thighs, his hips, locking him in place like a man set in amber.
"What…? This is a dream." He thrashes, but the pew holds him. “I can wake up.”
"Go ahead." I spread my hands. The shadows beneath my skin surface, coiling around my wrists and fingers in slow, dark ribbons that catch the stained-glass light and eat it. “Try.”
He squeezes his eyes shut. The effort ripples across his face, the concentration of a man trying to force himself awake through sheer will. His eyelids flutter. His jaw clenches. A vein pulses in his temple.
Nothing happens.
"You’re not safe anywhere, are you?" I tilt my head.
The movement feels wrong, feels like my neck bent farther than it should, and I see him register the wrongness, see the first crack of real terror spread across his face as I draw closer, leaving footprints on the frozen ground in my wake.
"How does it feel? How does it feel to know that you’re the prey now? "
I step closer. The stone aisle narrows to bring me to him.
His eyes pop open again, wide and terrified. “What do you want?”
"Let's find out what you remember, Vincent.” I smile as I lean over him, a dark one filled with too many sharpened teeth. “Let's find out together."
I reach into his head.
My hand passes through his skin, through his skull like all of it is made of water, and I close my fingers around the thing that powers him. When I squeeze it, memories spill out of him like ink.
I see myself.
Five years younger, blonde hair, forty pounds lighter, laughing at something a friend said in a bar in Kansas City, the laugh of a woman who still believed the world was basically fair. I see Vincent in tux at the next table, watching. A group of men surround him, obviously drunk.
I see his friend, David Farley, the man who testified against me in court and called me “confused,” cross over to me and slip something into my drink when my head is turned. I see my fall from grace when I slam that drink back.
I see the world tilt.
I see the alley. The dark.
And what follows…
I wrench my hand out of his head and curl my fingers into a fist.
And the thing that makes my cold fire burn white, the thing that almost breaks me even now, is that he remembers. Every detail. Every sound I made. Every word he said.
He has kept it all. He has never forgotten a single second of what he did to me. Because he liked to revisit it?
"I see you." My voice sounds like Daddy’s, like I’m gargling hellfire and blood. I lean in close again, and my breath on his ear is winter. "Now let me show you what else I see."
I reach back into his head. This time I don't take. I give.
I open my mind to him.
I give him me, rising from the ashes in Kansas City, my court, my pact, my shadows, and the basement in my demonic house. I give him every hour we spent there skinning Red Hands alive and piecing myself back together out of the shards.
I give him all of me. The full weight of what he made me. The thing that rose from the wreckage of the woman he destroyed.
His body convulses in the pew's grip, his back arching, his mouth opening in a scream that comes out silent.
I step back, and I take his brain with me.
I pull it out of his skull with a wet, tearing sound. Then I hold it up so he can see it. It's smaller than I expected. Grey and pink and threaded with dark veins that pulse weakly in my palm.
I let it fall.
It hits the stone floor and comes apart like wet sand, collapsing into a grey smear that spreads across the frost and dissolves into nothing.
He stares at where it landed, his breaths ragged.
“Wake up. Please wake up,” he whispers.
The pew releases him. He spills forward onto his knees in the aisle, retching, his palms slapping the stone, his body convulsing with the effort of expelling what I've put inside him.
I watch him dry heave. I watch him choke. I watch the shell of Vincent crack across the middle and begin to peel away from whatever is underneath.
He’s finally encountered a consequence he cannot escape, deny, reframe, or bury, and he’s acting like a little bitch.
Why am I not surprised?
I advance on him. “I want your heart next…or maybe your sad little cock.”
With a wounded animal noise, he backs away from me in a crab-walk, his hands and feet slipping on the frozen stone, his eyes never leaving my face. He makes it three feet before the floor beneath him softens, the stone turning into melted marshmallow.
His hands sink in to the wrists. He tries to pull them free, but the effort only results in a sucking sound. He tries again, sinks again. The floor doesn't want to let him go.
He stalls there, staring at me, his eyes filled with tears. Finally the predator sees the thing that has been hunting him, the thing he made, and he understands that he is not the apex of anything.
I bend at the waist and bring my mouth to his ear. “But I want to take your heart or your cock when you’re awake. When you can feel every second of it. When you can look into my eyes and know exactly why this is happening and exactly how long I've been waiting for that moment.”
I pull back just enough to see his face. His eyes are wide, glassy, the pupils blown so large there's almost no iris left. He's shaking, and the putrid scent of piss hits my nostrils before it soaks his pants.
"Wake up, Vincent.” I straighten. “And run."
His dream breaks, and his real body jolts upright, once again in the third pew.
Tears trail down his face, snot bubbles from his nose, and piss stains his pants. He now has the marrow-deep certainty that he needs to run out of Our Lady of Sorrows.
He lurches to his feet, his hand jamming into his pocket, fingers closing around car keys. His legs carry him down the real aisle, stumbling, lurching, his knee clipping a pew and spinning him half around before momentum carries him forward again.
He hits the church doors at a run and bangs them open against the exterior walls.
I smile in the dark of my own skull because I know a secret.
My court runs faster than he does.