Page 12 of Love Her Ruin
And the ground still says no.
The way the world says no to every woman who has ever tried to reach the man who hurt her and found him protected by something bigger than both of them.
I turn around.
The walk back to the van is the longest of my life. Each step away returns something the ground took—a degree of warmth, a thread of shadow, a fraction of the cold fire that keeps me upright. By the time I reach James, my legs are shaking, but my spine is straight.
His arms wrap around me, and Eddie wraps his around me, and Daddy's shadows wrap around all of us and guide us onto the sidewalk. For a moment, we're just a knot of darkness outside a church that won't let us in.
"We can't go in because of what we are now," I say, discarding the plan and building a new one from the rubble. "The ground won't let us. Any of us. The pact and Daddy's power in our blood… The consecrated ground rejects it."
"Then we need to flush him out," Eddie says.
"Aye." James's voice is a low growl against my hair. "We need to make the bastard come to us."
"Let’s go," I say, pulling away. "We're not done. I guess we just need a different door."
Chapter 7
Azhrael
Theyargueliketheliving always argue—with urgency mistaken for strategy, volume mistaken for progress.
I watch from the ceiling. I am the ceiling, in part. The cold that lives in the walls and the dark that pools between the rafters and the slow, patient rot that has been digesting this house since before any of them were born. I spread myself thin up here, conserving what the consecrated ground at the church cost me, letting my form dissolve into something less demanding than a body while my court burns through plans like kindling.
"Fire," James says. He's sitting on the kitchen counter, shadow-wrapped fingers drumming a rhythm on his thigh that matches no music I can hear. "We torch the fucking place. Smoke him out like a rat. He comes running through the front doors coughing his lungs up, and we're waiting."
"Torch a stone church in the middle of a residential block?" Eddie says from the table, where he's drawn a crude floor plan of Our Lady of Sorrows on a piece of paper. "You want to commitarson in full view of thirty houses, two blocks from a fire station, and hope nobody calls it in before Vincent makes it to the exit."
James rolls his eyes. "I didnae say it was elegant…unless we cut the water main first."
Eddie stares at him. "That's your solution? Escalate the felonies? We can’t deal with Vincent if we’re standing in the middle of the church’s parking lot holding a gas can when the fire department shows up."
"Two felonies a day keep the doctors away, Mind,” James says, laughing. “You do ken that murdering Vincent is itself a felony, aye?”
Sera is quiet. She sits on the floor between them with her back against the refrigerator, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around her shins. The posture of a woman making herself small, though nothing about Sera is small. The cold fire in her blood pulses so profoundly that I can smell it from the ceiling, like the embers of a furnace waiting for fuel.
She has not spoken since we returned. The consecrated ground took something from her that isn't physical.
She is not defeated because Sera does not know that word. But she is recalibrating, and the silence she's wrapped herself in is the silence of a blade being sharpened, finding its edge.
"What about the priest?" Eddie taps the paper in front of him with his dying pen. "Father Nolan. He has authority over the building. We could approach him outside. Explain that Vincent is dangerous. Get him to revoke sanctuary.”
"And say what?" James drops off the counter and starts to pace. "Hello, Father, we're the shadow-possessed murder court, and we'd like ye to evict the sheriff from your church so we can gut him?”
“I could tell him Vincent’s wanted for questioning, which is the truth.” Eddie drags both hands down his face.
The shadows beneath his skin ripple with the motion, thin dark currents following the path of his fingers.
He's exhausted. Our pact sustains his body, but the Mind is still human enough to feel the weight of a night that started with dying and hasn't stopped escalating since.
"Or we could wait Vincent out," he says, but the words lack conviction. "He has to leave eventually. He can't stay in that church forever."
"He can stay long enough to make calls,” Sera says. “To arrange transport. To contact whoever owes him favors because he’s the kind of man other men protect."
Her voice is level, but the cold fire spikes. "Vincent doesn't need forever. He needs hours, maybe less. Then he's on a plane or in a car or buried in some new identity that his network provides, and he disappears the way men like him always disappear—into the system that made them."
The kitchen goes quiet.
