Chapter 2
Eddie
I wake with Sera's name in my mouth and ice in my chest.
It’s not a dream. It’s not the usual late-night anxiety spiral where I replay every mistake I've ever made.
No, this is different, a physical sensation, like someone reached through my rib cage and squeezed my heart with frozen fingers. A pulse of wrongness so sharp that it puts me on my feet before my eyes are fully open, and I’m grabbing my gun and my keys from my nightstand in the same motion.
My phone shows no missed calls or texts.
That doesn’t make me feel any better.
Seconds later, I'm in the car, driving with one hand and calling Sera with the other. It rings and then goes to voicemail. I call again with the same result. I try Rivera next, and the call goes straight to voicemail, no rings.
The cold in my chest spreads.
I drive too fast through empty streets, blowing through two red lights and a stop sign. But the feeling won't let up, like a frozen fist around my heart, squeezing in a rhythm that isn't mine. Like someone else's panic bleeds through walls I didn't know existed.
Sera.
I don't know how I know. I can't explain the certainty that something catastrophic has happened, that the woman I've been protecting and falling for has been taken from the one place she was supposed to be safe.
But the ice in my chest and her name echoing in my skull won’t let up.
I turn onto her street and see the house.
Every window is dark. The porch light is gone, the fixture reduced to a twisted metal stump trailing wires. The front door hangs open at a wrong angle, the frame cracked and splintered like something tried to punch through it from the inside.
Cold pours from the doorway in visible waves, misting in the night air like breath from a giant's mouth.
I’m no longer shocked to find the house like this because I’ve seen it this way before—when Red Hands waited inside Sera’s car and the devil inside her house tried to warn her.
Rivera's car is parked in the driveway.
My adrenaline spiking, I park behind it, kill my headlights, and draw my weapon.
I reach the driver's side and look through the window.
Rivera is slumped against the headrest, chin tilted up, mouth slack. A trail of white foam has dried down her chin and neck, crusted into the collar of her jacket. Her eyes are open and blank with that particular emptiness that tells me everything I need to know before I even check for a pulse.
I check anyway.
She's dead.
A Monster energy can sits in the cupholder. I glove up with a wadded pile I keep in my jacket pocket, reach past her, and lift the can carefully to my nose.
Beneath the chemical sweetness of the energy drink, there’s something else, almost like almonds but not quite.
Poisoned. Probably slipped into the can before she opened it or injected through the base with a syringe fine enough to leave no visible puncture. That likely required access and planning, a quick trip into Gas N’ Go and a sleight of hand.
I can only think of one person so prepared, so patient, so obsessive that he’d go to such lengths.
Red Hands.
I set the can down. Then I see the shape on the lawn.
For one terrible second, I think it's Sera. The size is wrong, but panic doesn't care about proportions. It takes my brain several seconds to process what I'm actually seeing.
James.
He's face-down in the grass, one arm extended toward the porch like he was trying to crawl home and didn't make it. The grass around him is dark, and in the dim light from the autumn moon, it takes me a moment to realize the darkness isn't shadow.
It's blood. A lot of it.
“Fuck.” I sprint toward him.
A low, wet moan that barely qualifies as sound scrapes out of him. Air forced through damaged lungs. Pain made audible.
He's alive.
I drop to my knees beside him and roll him onto his back as gently as I can manage, which isn't gentle enough from the looks of him. He groans, a sound like grinding stone, and his one functioning eye rolls toward me without focusing. The other eye is swollen shut, the socket probably fractured.
"James. It's Eddie. Can you hear me?"
No response. Just a terrible, rattling breath.
I assess the damage with the detachment I’ve perfected over years of crime scenes. Still, I cringe internally.
His face shows the horrendous effect of brutal violence. Broken nose. Lacerations across his forehead and cheeks, some deep enough to show the white gleam of bone. His lips are split in three places, blood and saliva mixing into pink foam that bubbles with each exhale.
His shirt, or what's left of it, hangs in tatters.
Beneath, his chest and abdomen are covered in cuts.
Some are shallow, surface wounds that bled freely but didn't damage muscle and have since crusted over.
Others are deeper, the edges of the wounds pulled apart to reveal layers of tissue beneath. Those wounds still weep blood.
This is Red Hands's signature work. Peeling back layers. Revealing truth through suffering.
Several fingernails have been removed, and his fingers are swollen, purple, bent at angles that make my own hands ache in sympathy. At least three are broken in several places.
The longer I assess him, the clearer the events coalesce in my head. Red Hands neutralized Rivera first, then used James as bait to draw Sera out of her house.
And it worked.
Because she would never, ever leave James like this on her lawn.
She’s gone.
Gone.
James outweighs me by sixty pounds easily. All of it muscle, even now, even broken and bleeding and barely conscious. Dragging him anywhere is going to be a nightmare.
But I can't leave him here.
From inside the house, something roars.
The sound isn't human or even animal. It's the noise a building makes when it's collapsing, if the building were alive and furious and screaming with a voice that vibrates in your teeth and makes your vision blur at the edges.
The remaining intact windows rattle in their frames. The porch boards groan.
The thing known as Azhrael.
He knows she's gone. Of course he knows, and he’s screaming with her absence.
I look at the open front door. Shadows writhe just inside the threshold, churning like storm clouds compressed into a hallway. The cold pouring from the house is intense enough now that my breath fogs in thick white plumes.
“Enter,” Azhrael growls, and that’s all the prompting I need.
I hook my hands under James's armpits and heave. "All right, big man. We’ve got to get you inside to Azhrael."
James screams. The sound is wet and broken, and it almost makes me let go. But I don’t. Of course I don’t.
"I know it hurts. But I need you to help me if you can. Push with your legs. Think lightweight thoughts. Anything."
Whether he hears me or whether it's pure survival instinct, one of his legs moves. A feeble push against the grass that barely generates force but shifts his weight just enough to help. I drag him backward toward the porch, leaving a dark smear of blood across the lawn like a slug's trail.
Ten feet feels like a mile.
My back screams. My arms burn. James's dead weight threatens to pull me down with every step. The grass is slick with rain and blood, and twice I lose my footing, dropping to one knee before hauling myself upright again.
The porch steps are the worst part. There are only three of them, three wooden steps that might as well be Mount Everest. I get my back against the railing, hook my arms under James's, and lift with my legs.
He slides up the first step with a thud that makes him groan.
Second step. His boots catch on the uneven sidewalk, and I have to kick them free. Third step.
We make it to the porch.
The cold hits me like a wall. My skin prickles, every hair standing at attention. The shadows inside the doorway churn faster, reaching toward us, tendrils of darkness extending to the very edge of the threshold but not beyond.
Waiting.
Finally, fucking finally, I drag James inside.
The reaction is immediate.
Azhrael's shadows swarm James's body like a living thing, like a thousand dark hands reaching out simultaneously to probe his wounds.
The temperature around James drops even further. Frost forms on his bloodied skin, on his tattered clothes, on the blood pooling beneath him.
James's breathing evens out slightly, still shallow, still wrong, but steadier.
I sit back on my heels, panting, my shirt soaked with James's blood. My hands are shaking. I clench them into fists and force the tremors to stop.
Azhrael materializes into a vague human shape by James’s head, more mist than shadow, his form flickering at the edges. His eyes still burn, but dimmer.
Those ember eyes fix on me with an intensity that makes my skin crawl.
"Can you find her?" My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "If you could leave this house. If the Seal was broken. Could you find Sera?"
The sound that comes from him is a howl, raw and primal and so full of anguish that the walls shudder and plaster dust rains from the ceiling. The misty shadows convulse, slamming against the walls, the floor, the threshold, a caged thing throwing itself against bars with everything it has left.
Yes, I translate for him.
Maybe he did say that in whatever language exists between a demon and the man stupid enough to stand in its living room asking questions.
But yes, if he could leave, he would tear this city apart brick by brick until he found her.
"Okay." I stand, wipe the blood from my hands on my jeans, and pull out my phone to call Dr. Camila Reyes, the symbology expert at Wichita State.
The woman who translated the Seal's inscriptions, who explained the seven points of the star pattern and the binding words and the true name carved at the center.
If anyone knows how to unmake the Seal of Dissolution, it's her.
I find her number in my contacts and dial. It rings four times, then five. I'm preparing to leave a voicemail that will sound completely unhinged when the line clicks.
"Ugh. Why?" Her voice is thick with sleep. "It's nearly three in the morning."
"Dr. Reyes, I need to know how to break a Seal of Dissolution. Right now." I look around at Sera’s house, and my heart clenches because she’s not in it. "Someone's life depends on it."