Page 13 of Love Her Ruin
She is right. Power insulates. Systems designed to protect instead become fortifications for the very predators they were meant to contain. Vincent Harrow is not unique. He is a type, and that type survives because the world is built to let it.
Eddie sighs. “And if he does leave, he might just go somewhere else we can’t go.”
"So fire's out. The priest is out. Waiting's out.” James shrugs as he continues pacing. “What's left? We cannae touch the ground. We cannae cross the threshold. We cannae even get close enough to see the bastard without our blood trying to crawl out of our skin."
"Poison," Eddie says, and that draws everyone’s attention immediately, not because of the idea but who delivered it. "Food, water supply, something he'd consume without suspicion, though obviously there’s the risk of someone else getting to it first."
James grins. "Now you’re singing with the dark choir, but how do we deliver it? We can’t walk up to the church door and leave a poisoned casserole."
"A third party. Someone not connected to us. Someone the priest would open the door for."
"Who? We've got no allies in this town, and everyone asks too many questions."
They spiral. Each idea collapses under the weight of the same fundamental problem: the consecrated ground is a moat, and we are the creatures the moat was built to repel. Every approach that requires physical proximity fails. Every approach that relies on external actors introduces variables we cannot control. Every approach that demands patience risks the window closing before we can act.
I listen to all of it from the ceiling.
I have been quiet because I have been thinking about consciousness. In the rooms that exist between waking and sleeping, between flesh and memory, between the world the living inhabit and the world that inhabits them when their eyes close.
I know these rooms. I built corridors through them, and I visited Sera, James, and Eddie there. Sera first, in the dreams where I learned the shape of her rage and the taste of her name. Then James, in the fever-dark of his near death, where I offered the pact and he accepted with the reckless faith of a man who has never feared the wrong thing. Then Eddie, in the grey space between his last heartbeat and his first new one, where I found a mind so ordered that even death couldn't disorganize it.
The dream space is mine. Has always been mine.
The church exists in the physical world. The material plane. The domain of flesh and blood and the things that move through flesh and blood.
The dream space is not the physical world.
It has no geography that can be consecrated. No ground that can be blessed. No threshold that can be warded with salt or scripture or the accumulated faith of a dying congregation. It exists in the mind, and the mind has no church. The mind has no sanctuary.
In the dream space, there are no walls that faith can build.
"Dreams," I growl.
The word drops from the ceiling and spreads outward in a tremble, and the kitchen goes silent. Three faces turn upward—Sera's bruised and sharp, James's ember-lit and hungry, Eddie's grey and calculating.
Eddie speaks first because the Mind processes fastest. "You're saying you can put us inside Vincent's dream while he sleeps inside the church on consecrated ground that can't touch us because we won't physically be there."
"Sera," I say.
Because it needs to be her. She’s the only one who navigated my possession of her mind with ease. She didn’t fear walking on the ceiling in her dreams; she embraced it. She took control.
"And in the dream, what can she do?" Eddie asks.
Sera’s eyes are wide, the cold fire in them no longer banked but climbing, feeding on the possibility I have placed before her.
"I can reach him,” she says with certainty. “I can speak to him. I can make him see what I want him to see and feel what I want him to feel."
"Can you kill him?" James asks.
She looks to me, and I don’t have to say a word for her to know the answer.
“No,” she says. “The dream isn’t a cage. It’s a corridor, and the dreamer can always find the exit if they fight hard enough."
“The exit that leads to waking and running screaming out the door and into our waiting arms?” James grins like the devil himself.
Sera meets it with a sly smile.
"So you’ll be alone, but you’ll be in a dream,” Eddie says. “You can’t be hurt in a dream.”
