Raphael's eyes sharpened.
He drew the .357 and listened.
*Click. Click. Click.*
Footsteps on wood. Slow and even, descending from above — and then, at the top of the staircase landing, they stopped.
A cold came first. Not a draft — something denser than that, carrying the smell of damp and rot, pressing into the room like water finding a crack. Then the door slammed shut on its own.
*BANG.*
"A ghost." He keyed his earpiece without hesitating. "This is Raphael. Check the stairwell."
He was already at the door, twisting the handle.
It didn't move. Tried again. Nothing.
Locked from somewhere that wasn't the lock.
"...Hhh... hhh... hhh..."
Crying. Broken and intermittent, like a signal cutting in and out. Coming from inside the nursery.
---
Downstairs, Ana had gradually settled under the weight of Evelyn's attention.
There was something about those eyes — clear and still as lake water — that made it difficult to stay agitated.
Ana had felt the irrational flicker of envy before the calm moved in around it.
A crash from the second floor cut through the quiet.
Evelyn was already turning. She ignored Ana's voice behind her and moved to the stairwell.
One straight corridor, open sightlines from ground floor to attic access. She took it in at a glance.
Nothing there.
She pressed her lips together. In her earpiece, Raphael's voice came through — measured, unhurried, no thread of panic in it.
"Ghost is with me. Situation is manageable."
"Do you need backup?"
She'd already taken two steps up the stairs. She stopped.
"No. Work the ground floor — Ana is lying about something. Eva—" A beat. "Run Ana's background. I want everything on the two children."
"On it."
She didn't ask anything further. She turned and went back downstairs.
*First rule of the Red Gloves unit: trust your partner's read.*
---
On the second floor, Raphael moved along the wall with his back to it, the revolver up, the briefcase in his other hand.
He wasn't moving fast. He was moving carefully — watching angles, checking corners, staying out of the center of the room.
The nursery had changed.
Footprints in the dust. A trail of them, small and distinct, leading from somewhere near the door to the base of the crib.
The old mobile hanging above it — the kind with cloth animals on short strings, silent for what looked like years — was turning. Slow revolutions. No air moving anywhere in the room.
"...Hhh... hhh... *Mama... Papa...*"
The crying came back wrong. Something underneath it that wasn't grief in any normal sense —
Too dense, too old, soaked through with something that had been sitting in the dark for a long time and had stopped being sad and become something else entirely.
*Snap.*
The mobile's thread broke. The whole thing dropped into the crib, the small bells giving one last clear ring before going quiet.
The crying cut off.
Then a sound like a valve releasing — pressure finding an exit — and the crying came back as a *scream.*
"*WAAAHHH—*"
The sound hit him like a physical weight.
Raphael's skull rang like a struck bell, blunt impact radiating from his temples inward, and his ears started ringing before the echo had even finished.
A drop of blood tracked from his nostril. His eyes felt pressurized, his breathing suddenly mechanical.
"*WHY?! WHY?!*"
The shrieking broke into words — almost words, the shape of them more than the sound, the meaning coming through somewhere below hearing.
And with it a force, invisible and rhythmic, shoving him backward step by step like successive waves hitting a seawall.
"*WHY DON'T YOU LOVE ME?!*"
Silence.
One full second of it.
Then the cold came — not from outside the room but directly *through* him, a wind that found no door and needed none.
It moved through his chest, down his arms, out into his fingers, and what followed it was the sensation of something else settling into the space his own will had been occupying.
"*Dammit—*"
It spread fast. Ice running up his limbs, down the channels of his spine, into the joints, and the world didn't go dark so much as narrow —
His body still visible from wherever he was watching but not quite reachable anymore, the signals from his hands arriving as observations rather than commands.
*[Analyzing... Complete.]*
*[Lv2: Wraith.]*
*[Cardinal Sin: Invidia.]*
*[Classification: Ghost.]*
His feet moved. He didn't make them.
One step. Two steps. Walking himself steadily into the nursery, the part of him that was still watching registering the direction with cold clarity.
The hand holding the briefcase — the fingers began to lift, one at a time. Something peeling them open from the outside.
*Slap.*
The briefcase hit the floor. The latches gave on impact and the contents scattered: blood bags, a vial of silver powder, ritual parchment.
The other hand — the one with the revolver — began to rise.
Slow. Jerky. Like a mechanical arm finding its calibration. The barrel describing a short arc through the air until it was pointing at a spot roughly level with his own temple.
For a vampire, a round to the head wasn't necessarily a death sentence. But it would end the fight.
It would end everything he could contribute tonight, and whatever was in this house would still be in this house.
His finger moved toward the trigger.
He stopped fighting the hands and looked down instead.
A toy ball. Child-sized, soft rubber, sitting directly under his right foot.
He shifted his weight onto it.
*Whoosh* — his center went, the floor coming up behind him as he toppled backward, and in the half-second his hand lost its purpose, the wraith closed the trigger.
*BANG.*
Silver round through the ceiling. Through the attic floor. Something up there received it with a dull impact.
Raphael hit the floor on his back, landing squarely on a pile of wooden blocks, the irregular shapes driving into his spine in a constellation of sharp, specific pain. He exhaled through his teeth.
The barrel was already beginning to track back toward him.
He looked at the silver short blade tucked against his hip.
No sheath. Bare edge, resting a few millimeters from his own thigh — a choice he'd made for quick access that was about to mean something different.
He made the decision without giving himself time to reconsider. He turned his weight into it and pressed down.
*Shhk.*
The blade went through his trousers and into the muscle. Not deep — a few centimeters, controlled — but the silver was in contact with his flesh, and that was the point.
"*AHHHHH—*"
The scream in his ear had nothing to do with his own pain.
And from his thigh came a sensation entirely out of proportion to a minor puncture wound — the deep, branded heat of red metal pressed to skin, the kind of burn that came from the inside out.
He breathed through it.
The cold in his hands was receding. He could feel them becoming his again — the current returning, the wraith's grip on his fingers loosening degree by degree as the silver contact held.
He waited it out.
Then the burning stopped. Just the clean sting of a cut, manageable, essentially irrelevant to him at this point in the evening.
He rolled clear of the nursery doorway immediately, stopping just outside the threshold.
He looked at the blade still half-embedded in his leg. Thought about removing it for a moment.
Left it where it was.
Some part of him recognized the tactical logic even if it looked slightly unhinged from the outside. The silver was doing something useful. Whatever *worked.*
"*AHHH— WAHH— AHHH—*"
Inside the nursery, something was moving. Fast and vertical and everywhere — a shape that the eye caught in fragments, brief moments of near-visibility before it dissolved back into the ambient dark of the room.
Mostly transparent. Mostly nothing. The revolver tracked left to right and found no angle.
He looked at the briefcase on the floor. Found the silver powder vial, picked it up, and threw it hard into the nursery.
Then he aimed at the vial.
*BANG.*
Glass detonated. The impact dispersed the powder in a clean expanding cloud, and the silver particles caught what was in the room and held it for a moment — gave it a surface, gave it edges, gave it a shape.
Emaciated. Moving on all fours, the posture of something that had forgotten what standing felt like. The head disproportionately large for the frame.
The body of a three-year-old child.