Chapter 21
Sera
My house is a house again.
James replaced all the windows himself. Eddie sanded the front door until it sat flush in its frame, no gaps, no warping, no space for the night to slide its fingers through. And Daddy didn’t break it all down again.
The floors still creak. Bloody footprints still stain the floors, walls, and ceiling. The basement still smells like blood and sex.
But it's solid, and when the wind hits, nothing rattles.
I'm in the living room sorting through the dark web messages James's been filtering, the first trickle of prayers from women who found the door he built in the places only ghosts read, when I hear Eddie's car in the driveway.
The engine cuts, and his door opens and shuts. Then another door, the back one, which is unusual because Eddie doesn't keep anything in his back seat.
Then I hear the nails.
Click-click-click-click on the porch steps, the sound of something other approaching my front door at full speed.
Eddie opens the door, and there’s the detective, my Mind, wearing his leather jacket and jeans, his dark hair flopping over one blue eye. He’s holding a leash, and at the other end of the leash is a huge dog with tawny fur, a black mask, and ears like satellite dishes.
And it’s looking at me like I'm made of bacon.
Its tail is going so fast it's a blur. Its whole back end is swinging with the force of the wag, and its tongue lolls out. Its eyes are an enormous, liquid brown, radiating a joy so pure and so total that it borders on unreal.
"This is a K-9 washout," Eddie says. "She failed the program because she couldn't assess threats. The trainers said she'd run up to an active shooter and try to lick his face."
The dog sees me looking at her and loses what remains of her composure.
She lunges forward with the desperate, full-throttle enthusiasm of a creature who has decided that I am the most important thing that has ever existed and the three seconds of leash between us is an injustice she will not tolerate.
Eddie lets the leash go.
She hits me like a furry cannonball. Paws on my upper thighs, nose in my neck, tongue everywhere, whimpering and wriggling and pressing her entire body against mine like she's trying to climb inside my skin and live there.
Her fur is warm and coarse under my hands, and she smells like dog breath and grass.
She sees me—not Sera Vale, not Penelope, not the queen or the victim or the weapon—just the warm body in front of her, and she has decided with her whole uncomplicated heart that this body is hers to love.
The tears come before I can stop them.
They come from somewhere I thought was dead, a room in my chest I sealed off and boarded up the way James and I boarded up the windows. The door to that room is splintering now, broken open by seventy pounds of failed police dog, and what's behind it is so bright it hurts.
Pure happiness.
I didn't know I could still feel it. I thought that part of me died, killed by the same man who killed everything else soft in me. I thought the best I could hope for was satisfaction, vengeance, the dark pleasure of watching monsters fall. I thought all of my happiness receptors had burned out.
But this dog is looking at me like I hung the moon. The sound coming out of my throat is something between a laugh and a sob, and I am so fucking happy I can't breathe.
"Hey." Eddie is beside me, his hand on my shoulder, voice dropping into a quiet, careful register. "Hey, Sera. If you don't want her, I can take her back. It's okay. I just thought—"
"Don't you dare," I manage, my voice wrecked.
He blinks. Then his face breaks into a rare, real smile, the one that transforms him into something even more edible than he already is. "Okay. She's yours."
"What's her name?"
"The program called her K-9 Unit 7,” he says, chuckling. “She doesn't answer to it for some reason."
"Of course she doesn't." I hold the dog's face in my hands, my thumbs stroking the velvet fur beneath her ears. She gazes at me with those uncomplicated brown eyes, tail still going, tongue still reaching for any exposed skin. "You need a name, don't you?"
She licks my chin, and I take this as agreement.
"Nyx," I say.
The goddess of night. The mother of shadows. It fits her, not because it matches what she is, but because it matches what she's walked into. She's the softest thing in a house full of darkness, and naming her after the night feels like a benediction.
Nyx barks once, sharp and joyful, and her tail hits the coffee table and scatters my opened bag of forgotten jellybeans onto the floor.
James appears in the kitchen doorway, drawn by the sound of a bark in a house that has never contained a bark. He takes one look at the dog, at my tear-streaked face, at Eddie standing there looking quietly triumphant, and his grin splits wide.
"Och, you've done it now," he says to Eddie. "She's going to love that dog more than all of us combined."
"So long as they’re both alive and safe," Eddie says.
James crouches, and Nyx immediately diverts from me to investigate, her nose working overtime, tail wagging hard enough to generate a breeze.
She sniffs his shadows and doesn't flinch. She licks his hand—the one that's held knives, carved bones, carved me—and James laughs, boyish and delighted, and scratches behind her ears with the tenderness of a man who understands exactly what it means to be the thing nobody wanted.
"You’re a wee disaster, aren't ye?" he murmurs. "Aye, you'll fit right in."
The temperature drops. The shadows in the corners of the room deepen, thicken, and Daddy's presence swells the way it does when something has invaded his house and he needs to assess it.
I feel his attention settle on Nyx with the weight of something hellish and vast examining something small and warm and entirely outside its frame of reference.
Has he even seen a dog before?
Nyx looks directly at the darkest corner of the room, where the shadows are densest, where Daddy's presence is most concentrated. Her ears rotate forward. Her nose twitches. Her tail slows from manic to cautious, a measured wag, assessing.
Then she sneezes, wags harder, and trots over to the corner to sniff the baseboard.
The shadows recoil slightly.
I feel Daddy's displeasure through the bond while he’s being evaluated by an animal that failed obedience school.
Nyx finds a spot on the floor near a vent, where Daddy's cold breathes into the room, and lies down on it. She rolls onto her back, paws in the air, belly exposed, tail sweeping the floor in long, lazy arcs.
She has claimed the coldest spot in the house. Daddy's spot. The place where his presence is most concentrated, most himself.
The vent sighs. A long, resigned exhalation of cold air that ruffles Nyx's fur.
My heart feels like it might burst.
* * *
Later that night, Nyx sleeps at the foot of my bed, curled in the crater between my feet, nose tucked under her tail, making small whuffling sounds in her sleep while she dreams happy, pure dreams.
Eddie is on my left, arm across my waist, breathing deeply. James is on my right, sprawled and shameless, one leg hooked over mine, his face buried in my hair. Daddy is everywhere, in the walls, the floor, the cold that settles over the bed like a second blanket.
Our shadows pulse in time with our shared heartbeat, slow and content, predators at rest.
I lie awake for a while, which is not unusual. What's unusual is the reason.
I'm awake because I want to remember this.
The weight of them around me. The warmth of Nyx at my feet. The cold of Daddy in my walls. The way moonlight comes through the new window and lays a silver stripe across the footprint-stained floor that looks like a path leading somewhere I might actually want to go.
I want to remember what it feels like to be full. I was not broken in simple ways. I was shattered and reassembled by hand, by rage, by two men and a devil and a dog that failed at everything except love.
I’m not healed because I can’t be healed. So I’ll be this—scarred and sharp and full of dark fire, a woman with a court and a cause and a dog named after the night.
That's enough. That's more than enough. That's everything.
* * *
When I wake the next morning, Nyx is gone, her warm crater at the foot of the bed replaced by a rumpled indent in the sheets.
I pad downstairs with bare feet to investigate, following the smell of coffee, and I’m greeted with blinding sunshine and odd sounds from the backyard.
James is at the counter, pouring coffee into my favorite mug. Eddie is at the table with his laptop. Both wear grins that grow wider when they see me.
A soft yip comes from the backyard, and I look through the kitchen window. The grass is still patchy, half dead from the autumn season and half alive from stubbornness.
In the middle of the yard, Nyx is in a play bow, front legs flat, back end up, tail going like a propeller. Her eyes are locked on something in front of her with laser focus, like she has found the single greatest thing in the universe and will die before she looks away from it.
In front of her, hovering six inches above the dead grass, is a bright-green tennis ball.
Completely ordinary except for the fact that it’s suspended in midair by a tendril of shadow so dark it looks like a crack in reality.
The tendril extends from the ground, from the deep shadows beneath the shed, and it holds the ball with the delicacy you'd hold a soap bubble.
The tendril flicks.
The ball launches across the yard in a low arc. Nyx explodes after it, ears pinned, legs a blur as she covers the distance in three strides. She catches the ball on the first bounce, skids in the dead grass, whips around, and sprints back to the spot where the tendril waits.
She drops the ball at the base of the shadow.
The tendril picks it up and holds it with a weighted pause.
Then, flick. The ball flies, and Nyx launches yet again.
I stand and watch my demon throw a ball for my dog, and something in my chest cracks open for the second time in two days.
Another wall crumbles, a deep one, the wall that said, You will never have a normal moment again.
You will never stand in a kitchen in the morning and watch something so stupid and so beautiful that it makes you want to cry.
Nyx brings the ball back, and the shadow takes it. There's a brief, dignified pause, and then the tendril strokes the top of her head once. Nyx's tail wags so hard her whole body shakes.
With a content sigh, I lean against the windowsill. James slides my coffee cup into my hand, and the corner of Eddie’s mouth is doing the thing it does when he's trying not to smile.
The morning light comes through the window, and I let myself bathe in it. I let it find me, a woman who’s not quite broken and not quite whole.
She’s free.