Chapter 3
James
Pain is a parish I was christened in.
Da taught me that wee bit of dogma before I could read, like the flat grey litany of a backhand, the ringing psalm of a belt buckle to the shoulder blade, and the quiet benediction after, when the world goes dull and ye think: maybe that’s that; maybe the sermon’s done for the night.
Spoilers: it was nae done.
He was right about one thing, my father. Pain doesnae kill ye. It just redraws the map till suffering’s the only thing ye ken.
So when I think I’m dying, I dinnae think it like a prophecy. I think it like the weather.
Bit of rain today, eh?
Bit of dying tonight, eh?
The ceiling above me looks like a cracked altar, white plaster veined with darkness. For a long, floaty minute, I think I’m staring at the inside of my own skull. Fractured, leaking, a house with the nails knocked loose.
Cold moves over me in tides, but nae the night air or the wet lawn. I remember the lawn. Remember crawling it on hands that wouldnae hold, knees that buckled like paper, screaming her name through a mouth full of iron and spit.
This cold’s alive, though. Shadows slide across my chest like hands, testing where Red Hands opened me neat as a surgeon and peeled me like a bloody satsuma tree.
The flayed spots burn. The cuts—parallel, exact, insultingly tidy, like the bastard brought a ruler to my torture—throb to the beat of my heart, which is slower than it should be.
I can feel the engine miss, the sputter and catch.
Running on fumes, bad faith, and the stubbornness God gives all monsters.
My fingers are the worst, or what’s left of them. He took the nails one by one, pliers clean and cold. His tools smelled of rubbing alcohol. Considerate for a serial killer. Wouldnae want an infection stealing me before his wee sacrament was complete.
I drift. The ceiling blurs and comes back and blurs again.
Somewhere left of me, Eddie is on the phone. The man’s voice is a taut wire: clipped, careful, panic boiled down to the barest reduction so it doesnae spill over. I only catch shards, like “Seal of Dissolution” and “someone’s life depends on it.”
Sera.
Her name cuts through the fog like a blade dipped in lemons, and I’m yanked back into my skin with a full-body wince.
Where is she? Where is my Prayer?
Memory arrives in hard flashes. The lawn. Her face over me, her fear cutting clean as tears down her cheeks. Her hands cold on my ruined body. The way she said my name like it mattered.
Like I mattered.
Then the needle coming out of the darkness on a direct path toward her neck. Her eyes going glassy. The fold of her body like a marionette whose strings just snapped.
And me there, soft as church butter. Useless as a sermon to a wolf. My bones were matchsticks. My skin was a poor disguise for meat. And I couldnae stop it. Couldnae do the one job I gave myself ever since I saw her rage spilled onto the dark web: keep her.
All I wanted was to keep her. Watch her darkness and my darkness merge into a mountain made of sin.
But he took her.
He took her in front of me.
Something vast drops over me like a blackout curtain. At first, I think it’s the ceiling falling, but nae, this is thicker, darker. Two coals open in it, low-burning, patient with old hunger.
That’s Sera’s Daddy. The thing in the walls. The demon in the vents. The ancient bastard that hums in the floorboards and says “mine” in a voice that roars like a landslide.
I should hate him, and maybe part of me does. The stupid animal part that wants to be the only set of fingerprints on her soul.
But the rest of me’s more practical. I’ve seen what he does for her, how his shadows leap to console her, how his cold wraps her like chainmail. If that’s love…well, it’s nae the sort ye write about in Hallmark cards. But it’s the kind that keeps her breathing.
And right now, it’s keeping me…me.
I can feel him probing, staunching the blood, sensing why my lungs keep rattling.
“Dying,” he rasps, the word vibrating like a tuning fork struck off cracked bone.
I try for a laugh, but it’s a wet gargle. “Aye. Reckon so.”
His outline flickers, all restraint and rage. He leans in, and those ember eyes bore into mine with a focus that should set me shaking. I’m past terror, though. Terror takes energy I’ve already bled onto the grass.
“Pact,” he says. “Like hers. Blood. Devotion. Your soul. Live.”
I blink up at him with the one eye that opens; the other is a plum someone stepped on. He’s offering me what he took from her and what she offered back. My soul on a rope. His cold darkness in my blood.
It’ll cost me everything, but the reward’s her.
Some choices are easy. Some math does itself.
I think of Sera, gone, under the hands of a priest of pain who thinks revelation’s something ye cut for, truth a thing that only shows its face when ye peel it off bone.
I think of him looking at her like he’s the first to see the woman under the mask when the truth is she wears her ruin honest. I like it that way.
I think of her smile. Nae the sharpened one for the rest of the world, but the wee secret curve that sneaks up when nobody’s looking.
The one like a bruise healing, like a room ye thought was condemned turning a light on again.
I’ve seen it several times, and it made me feel holy and filthy at once.
“Do it,” I grind out. My voice is gravel over glass. “Whatever ye need. Take it. Just let me live long enough to bring her home.”
Her daddy doesnae hesitate.
The shadows surge.
He opens me up with no blade, but all cold, and pours himself in.
It hits like drowning in a winter sea. No top, no bottom.
It races the old routes of veins and nerves, rewriting as it goes.
My finger bones grind and clack, and shards kiss and stick.
Then the ribs, the hairline fractures knitting with a bright-white pain that blanks out nearly everything.
Then the stripes across my chest, the skinned patches and tidy fillets of me.
Shadows sluice in, silk-dark and thicker than blood. They fill gaps, making bridges. He is a seamstress sewing meat.
I scream.
My back arcs. All my strings are pulled at once. The sound’s an animal getting brand-new instructions.
Blood. Devotion. Your soul. Live.
They’re nae just terms. They’re commands in my marrow. Blood: mine, already a lake on the rug. Devotion: mine to her, always her, and mine to him. Your soul: hardly a thing I think twice about. Live: both the chain and the permission.
It locks with a feeling like a key turned in a rib. Something gives, something admits. A door opens in the house of me, and cold walks through and hangs its coat on the hook. There’s a second heartbeat there now—slower, patient, hungry.
Then it’s done.
I’m on my back again, lungs hauling, staring up at cracked heaven. I tilt my head, and the world stays put.
My chest is wrapped in shadow, satin-dark lying where flesh was peeled. The deeper cuts are zipped with that same thick not-quite-stuff, the edges tidied. My nail beds wear wee black crowns made of darkness. My fingers are straight again. They’ll hold a blade. They’ll hold a throat.
My ribs glide easily with every breath, and the wet rattle’s gone.
I close my eyes for the space of a blink.
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the devil my soul to take.
Pretty nice deal, if you ask me.
In my dreams, I’m walking the ceiling, casual as a Sunday, easy as ye like.
Gravity’s taken a holiday, and I’m its replacement, whistling at my work.
My boots leave old-blood prints on the plaster.
I laugh, and the sound rings wrongside-up.
It feels like being unshackled from the stupid direction of down…
Down…
Down…
Sera walks there beside me, her bare feet making smaller stains next to mine. She’s smiling, and there’s no knives in it. This is the soft one, the real one. She takes my hand, cold as a sacrament, sure as a promise, and says—
“Where is she?”
My own voice drags me out by the scruff. I’m sitting up before I’ve decided to. That’s new. Minutes—hours?—ago, if ye’d offered me a million quid and your grandma’s pearl rosary, I couldnae’ve managed a twitch, let alone sat up straight.
I can feel him now. Nae just in the room, but inside me. That second drum, slower, older, patient as winter, thudding in the church of me. The echo goes down halls within me I’ve never lit before.
Daddy congeals near the buckled front door, a thin smear of night wearing eyes. Saving me, on top of breaking himself against the doorframe and screaming her name into stone, has leeched him into mist. His embers burn low, like he’s out of kindling.
“Where is she?” I ask again, stronger this time.
He shudders. The shadows bristle so hard the walls complain.
“Gone.” The next word’s bought with pain. “Sealed.”
A Seal. Like his? A star for a cage? Her true name carved into the lock? My Prayer tucked behind a pattern like a lamb behind stained glass while a zealot polishes the knife?
The rage that stands up in me is different now. Before, I burned. I was a bonfire that didnae care what the sparks landed on. Now I freeze. The anger’s a blade left in snow, hardened. I can kill neater with it.
Eddie shuffles in from the kitchen, phone in his hand, his face grey as dawn and twice as tired. He stops when he clocks me upright.
“You’re not dead,” he says.
“Aye.” I flex my shadow-capped fingers. “Far from it.”
His gaze flicks to Sera’s daddy and back to me. I see the man click the pieces together, but he puts his existential horror on a high shelf he’ll dust later.
“Dr. Reyes is pulling her research,” he says. “She’ll call back with instructions on how to break the Seal of Dissolution. Azhrael says he can find our girl if we free him.”
Azhrael… So he does have a name other than “Sera’s daddy.”
I nod and look at him anew. He’s a storm in a bottle, someone’s thumb pressed to the cork. The hunger in him rolls like winter surf.
“Then we break your fucking cage,” I tell him, “and ye go get our lass.”