Chapter 7
Eddie
I wake to the sound of breathing that isn’t mine.
The room is dark, unfamiliar, with too many thick shadows. For a disorienting second, I don’t remember where I am. Then Sera shifts beside me, her bare shoulder pale against the blanket, and it comes back in a rush.
Her house. Her bed. This is the first time I’ve stayed overnight because I can’t seem to stay away from her.
My body is too fevered to resist her, and my mind is too affected by her, so much that she consumes most of my thoughts.
All I want to do is be inside of her, stay close to her, and ensure her safety.
I exhale slowly, willing my heart to settle. From the depth of darkness outside the window, I can tell it’s too early to be awake, so I close my eyes and try to drift.
Sometime later, I’m running across the walls. My bare feet leave bloody prints on vertical surfaces that shouldn’t hold weight. I’m chasing something—or being chased. The distinction blurs.
The hallway stretches impossibly long, multiple doors on the floor and ceiling, each one identical. Even though I don’t want to, I reach for one, and it opens.
Sheriff Vincent Harrow stands on the other side, holding a manila folder with my name on it.
“You know the rules,” he says. “You break them, you pay.”
I slam the door and run, but the hallway folds origami-style, and suddenly I’m back where I started. Yet again I don’t want to, but I open another door.
Sera sits at a table in an interrogation room, her hands cuffed. She looks at me with those pained, fathomless eyes.
“You could have saved me,” she says quietly. “Why didn’t you?”
“That’s not—“ I start, but the door slams shut on me.
I turn, and the walls are covered now, floor to ceiling, with evidence photos of crime scenes I’ve worked.
The ceiling lowers. The walls press in. I can’t breathe. Can’t move. The photographs peel away, and underneath is just one word, repeated over and over in blood:
MONSTER. MONSTER. MONSTER.
I jerk awake, gasping. My heart thunders against my ribs. Sweat slicks my chest.
Sera is propped on one elbow, watching me, her hand squeezing my shoulder.
“Nightmare?” she asks gently.
I blow out a heavy breath. “Yeah.”
She traces a finger down my sternum. “You were talking in your sleep.”
“What did I say?”
“Something about monsters, over and over.” Her eyes search mine in the dim early morning light. “What about monsters?”
I sit up, running both hands through my damp hair. “No idea. Just dream nonsense.”
She opens her mouth to say something and then decides not to, like she’s archiving this moment for later use.
“I should go,” I say. “I need to get to work.”
As I dress, pulling on yesterday’s clothes that smell like her house—earth and old wood and something indefinably her—I feel the web tighten another notch.
Then she kisses me goodbye, and I have to physically and mentally shut down my automatic response to her so that I can leave.
It’s too dark in the hallway to see shit, so I scrape my hand along the wall until I find a switch. When the light snaps on, I freeze.
On the wall beside the door, crawling up toward the ceiling in defiance of gravity itself, are footprints. Dark red-brown against the faded wallpaper. While my mind tries to process, I reach out a finger to touch one. Still wet.
They walk up the wall, across the ceiling, and disappear into the shadowed corners where the ceiling meets the far wall.
Just like in my dream.
I take a step back, then another, my eyes rejecting what they’re seeing.
“What the fuck.” I open her bedroom door without looking away from the hall. “What the actual fuck, Sera.”
“What?” she asks sleepily.
“Footprints.” I point. “There are footprints on the goddamn ceiling?”
“You see them too?”
Not surprise or shock, but a you see them too?
“What?” I whirl on her, wild, desperate. “Tell me I’m losing my mind. Tell me I’m seeing things. Tell me—“
“You’re not crazy,” she says quietly.
“Then what…” My hand goes to my gun instinctively, then falls away because what the hell am I going to shoot? “Who did that? How did they do that? It’s fresh blood, Sera. It’s still wet.”
The house settles around us with a groan. The temperature drops five degrees in the space of a breath.
Realization crawls over my skin like frost. I’m a detective. I’ve seen crime scenes, autopsies, the worst humanity has to offer. But this? This breaks the rules. This is other. This does not fit reality’s narrative that I’ve believed since day one.
In the footage James showed me, the house had quaked and the front door had flown open, but I chalked it up to wind, but…
“The thing in your house,” I say slowly, each word dragged from some place deep and dark. “The cold. The door. The shadows. You said… You called it…”
“Daddy,” she says, her voice steady. “I call him Shadow Daddy or just Daddy.”
I look at the footprints again, at the size and shape. My size. “What did he do to me?”
A long sigh heaves from Sera as she gazes up at her bedroom ceiling and sticks there. She must see something I don’t because she stares at it for several moments even though it’s just a regular ceiling.
Finally, she says, “I don’t know.”
***
I still feel shaken when I pull up to Michael Devlin’s house just as the uniforms are stringing yellow tape across the porch railing.
I kill the engine and sit for a moment, watching the scene through my windshield. Two patrol officers stand near their cruisers, talking in low voices. One of them laughs too loudly, forcing it with nervous energy. They’ve seen something that rattled them.
I have too.
I push the door open and step into the crisp morning air.
“Detective Crowe.” Officer Palmer approaches me. “We got the call at oh-five-hundred. Anonymous tip said this Michael Devlin guy got into it with David Farley at a bar, and it got pretty heated. Found it in the garage.”
“It?” I ask because I’m supposed to, not because I don’t already know.
Her face goes a shade paler. “You’ll want to see for yourself, Detective.”
I follow her up the porch steps, my boots hollow on the wood, making prints in the dirt. I shudder.
Inside, the house is dim, the curtains drawn against the morning. The strong scent of cheap lemons makes me want to vomit.
Palmer leads me into the garage, and there, inside a rusted toolbox, is Farley’s severed hand.
That fucker James really is insane.
I move closer, pulling on latex gloves. The hand is waxy-looking and severed cleanly at the wrist, fingers slightly curled. The skin has the grayish cast of something that’s been dead for days, but I have to admit that the preservation is remarkable.
My gut tightens.
I crouch beside the table and lean closer, tracking the clean line of the severed wrist. Something catches the light. A faint shimmer where the blood has dried around the wound. It’s too clean, too uniform, and I instantly know why.
I recognize that finish.
My pulse kicks up a notch. I glance over my shoulder. Palmer is by the door, her back to me, talking to another officer. The forensics team hasn’t arrived yet.
I strip off my right glove, just for a second. My bare fingertip brushes the edge of the wound, feeling for the texture I know I’ll find.
There. Grainy, almost glass-like. That distinctive polymer finish.
Adhesive No. 412-L.
The same rare, lab-only chemical I used three years ago on the Durley homicide. The same formula that requires federal clearance to access. The same adhesive that’s only ever been requested once in this jurisdiction.
By me.
You absolute idiot, James.
But even as the thought forms, another one follows, colder and sharper: How the hell would James even have access to federal-grade adhesive?
Unless he didn’t choose it. Unless someone handed it to him. Or unless…he’s a fed?
Later. I’ll find out later.
I pull my glove back on, my movements measured, controlled. The last thing I can afford is to look like the only man in this room who recognizes the mistake.
Because it is a mistake. A signature. A breadcrumb trail leading straight back to me.
I straighten, keeping my face neutral.
“Bag it,” I tell Palmer when she glances back. “Get forensics on this the second they arrive. I want prints, trace evidence, the works. Search the rest of the house behind me.”
“Yes, sir.”
I move on autopilot, noting details I won’t remember later. Upstairs bedroom. Unmade bed. Bathroom with a ripped floral shower curtain. All of it background noise to the roaring in my head.
They’ll find the adhesive. The forensics team will run it through their database.
And when they do, my name will light up like a flare.
***
Back at the station, I’m drowning in paperwork when Sheriff Vincent Harrow walks into my office without knocking. The file with photos of Sera’s car sits closed on my desk, unmarked, both the file and the car itself. I found no trace of Red Hands inside.
Vincent moves like he owns the air itself, his face blank, his shirt pressed, his badge mirror-polished. He’s carrying a thin manila folder just like he was in my dream.
I shudder.
“You’ve been busy.” He says it with a note of judgment, like it’s all my fault that we have a serial killer circling Wichita and other crimes that just won’t quit.
I set down my pen, keeping my expression neutral. “Just doing my job.”
“I pulled an old file of yours.” He sets the folder on my desk. His fingers rest on top casually. “You remember the Durley homicide?”
My throat goes dry. “Barely.”
Vincent’s smile is thin. “You used a rare chemical adhesive to lift trace evidence from a gun. Specialized stuff. Lab-only. Had to request it special from the feds.” He pauses. “Same one we just found this morning on that severed hand.”
He opens the folder, revealing photos of a different crime scene and my report. The highlighted word jumps out like a brand burned into paper.
Adhesive No. 412-L
Vincent watches me with those flat, empty eyes. The ones that have seen everything and felt nothing.
“Interesting coincidence,” he says softly.
My mind races. “If you’re implying I cut off Farley’s hand, I didn’t.”
Obviously I can’t explain the connection without revealing James. Without revealing Sera. Without unraveling every thread I’ve been trying to keep separate.
“I’m not implying anything. I’m just being thorough. I’ll run it up to the lab. Get confirmation on the chemical composition. Cross-reference it with every case file in the county.” He pauses. “Just to be sure. What do you think?”
“Whatever’s necessary.”
“I think it is,” Vincent says, eyeing me closely.
The silence stretches.
Finally, Vincent picks up the folder and taps it twice against my desk.
“You know what the difference is between a good cop and a dirty one, Eddie?” His voice drops to a murmur. “Nothing but the story people believe about them.”
He turns and walks away, his footsteps measured and unhurried down the hallway.
I sit frozen, staring at the space where he stood.
James didn’t just plant evidence. He tied me to it. Whether he meant to or not doesn’t matter, although I don’t think he did on purpose.
Regardless, the trap is set, and I’m standing in the center of it.