Page 17 of Love Her Ruin
Sera
Ifallasleepinthe arms of my court, my body sore, my lust sated, and wake inside a church that knows I shouldn't be here.
The dream doesn't start the way dreams usually start with a soft fade-in. One moment I'm pressed between James and Eddie with Daddy's cold coiled around my ankles, and the next I'm standing in the center aisle of Our Lady of Sorrows with my bare feet on stone.
You can’t be here, Penelope.
The whisper from the consecrated ground is here too, but it's smaller now, thinner, a voice shouting through a locked door, muffled to incomprehension. In the waking world, it pushed me back with the weight of accumulated faith, a wall of divine rejection that made my shadows scream and my blood try to exit through my skin. Here it's just sound, just syllables, just the memory of authority without the teeth to enforce it.
I smile at the empty air.What are you going to do about it?
Daddy is a presence at my back, not a form but a pressure, the architect of the corridor I walked through to get here. He can't fully enter, but he's here enough. I can feel him in the seams of the dream, holding it open, a patient god with his hand on the door.
I walk forward.
The church is wrong, warped, like some things are in dreams. The pews are where they should be, rows of dark wood with blue upholstered seats, hymnals tucked into the backs. The altar sits at the far end beneath a rose window that throws moon-colored light across the stone floor. The stained-glass saints look down from their panels with their painted grief and their gilded halos.
But the proportions lie. The aisle stretches longer than physics permits, the altar receding even as I walk toward it, and the vaulted ceiling blurs every time I look at it then snaps back into focus when I look away.
I pass a confessional. The door is ajar. Inside, a man in priest's robes sits with his head bowed, but when I look closer, I see the robes are empty, hollow, arranged around a column of dust that holds its shape.
This dream is already fucking weird, and it’s just begun.
The stations of the cross are mounted on the walls, but the scenes are all wrong. Christ carrying the cross is Christ carryingme—my body draped across his shoulders, my black hair spilling down his back. Christ nailed to the wood is Christ nailed to the dirt in an alleyway, the one where my life ended the first time. Christ laid in the tomb is Christ laid in my old home in Kansas City, beneath the dirt I clawed through for five years trying to find my way back to daylight.
The church knows what I am. The church knows what was done to me. And the church, built to repel things like me, is realizing that I am already inside.
I reach the transept, and that’s when I spot him.
Vincent is in the third pew from the front, on the left side.
He’s lying flat against the blue fabric, sound asleep. His mouth is slightly open, his chest rising and falling in the soft rhythm of a man who believes he is safe. His hands are folded across his stomach, fingers interlaced, the posture of a man lying in a casket.
Good. He's practicing.
I walk to him. The stone beneath my feet is cold, and the cold travels up my legs, blooms in my chest, and becomes the cold fire that has been my only source of warmth since I dragged myself out of Kansas City and decided I would rather be a weapon than a woman. A queen rather than an outcast.
I stop next to him and look down at the man who broke me.
In the waking world, he once was a sheriff. He had a badge, a gun, a uniform, a department, a reputation, and accumulated authority that he wore like armor. I took all of that away from him with help from Judge Callahan, now deceased, but Vincent’s still protected by every institution that has ever chosen a comfortable lie over an uncomfortable woman.
But here, he is a sleeping man in rumpled clothes with a stubble of grey on his chin and a line of drool at the corner of his mouth.
Here, he has nothing.
I have everything.
Touch, Daddy whispers in the back of my mind.
I reach out and touch his forehead with two fingers.
The world folds.
The corridor collapses inward, and I'm pulled through the contact like water down a drain, yanking me from the threshold into the humid interior of Vincent's sleeping mind.
The transition is violent and nauseating. For a single disoriented breath, I'm nowhere, and then I'm somewhere, and I wish I weren't.
I’m pretty sure I’m in Vincent’s house because I recognize the modern shape of it.
