"A child..."
He'd run through the worst possibilities on the way up here. This wasn't far from them.
But knowing something was possible and seeing it were different things, and what he felt looking at the shape in the silver-dusted air was something quieter than shock, a low, flat sadness that didn't announce itself.
Normal deaths didn't produce wraiths. Something had to go deeply wrong for a soul to calcify into something like this.
The finger resting on the trigger didn't move.
Rick looked back at him.
Whatever was left of the child seemed to register the hesitation. The frantic energy stilled. The two of them held the moment between them without either one resolving it.
*Drip.*
A drop of blood fell from the bullet hole in the ceiling, catching the light before it hit the floor.
Raphael's attention pulled toward it automatically.
Rick screamed.
The sound converted to force on contact, invisible, blunt, the pressure of it slamming into Raphael's chest like something swung rather than heard.
The gun barrel swung wide and his feet scraped backward several steps, carrying him past the nursery doorway and into the hall.
The cold rushed in briefly, that familiar invasive chill, and then pulled back out just as fast, as though it had somewhere else to be.
Rick materialized in the corridor.
Moving on all fours, those too-thin limbs carrying him with a silence that didn't match the weight of his presence.
He stopped a short distance from Raphael and watched.
Nothing else. No lunge, no scream, no second attack.
He just looked.
"...Hhh... hhh... hhh—"
The crying came softer this time, and the face, half-formed, abstract, more impression than detail, showed something that tracked down the contours of it and fell to the floor and disappeared before it landed.
Raphael looked at the nursery. Looked at Rick.
Something in the sequence arranged itself.
He reached back and took the door handle.
Pulled it closed gently, sealing the room again, the dust and the toys and the crib and all of it returned to the dark where they'd been waiting.
Rick went still for a moment.
Then he turned. Moved to the attic access on all fours without sound, and the door swung open on its own to receive him.
He paused at the threshold, just his head turning, one brief look back at Raphael, and then he went up, and the sounds of him faded into whatever was above.
Raphael lowered the revolver.
If it had been a wraith with no context, just a hostile entity in a house, the silver rounds wouldn't have waited this long.
But the inconsistencies in this family were stacking up in a way that put weight on the trigger he wasn't ready to accept yet.
And Rick's behavior, the retreat, the grief, the way he'd stopped, raised a question about what Ana actually wanted.
Eva's voice came through the earpiece before he'd finished the thought.
There was an edge to it, the particular energy of someone who'd just confirmed something they'd hoped they were wrong about.
"Everyone, I've got it.
Records confirm Lance family had a second child, hospital has a home death on file. The parents declined hospital involvement and handled burial themselves.
"The sound of keys. "
Here's the problem. Birth records show the child named Rick was born three years ago.
The haunting started recently."
More keystrokes.
"The Lance family was unremarkable prior to this. The oldest son, Steven, he's a futures trader on the commercial strip.
Mediocre performance. Average income. No real trajectory."
A brief pause.
"Until one month ago. Then something changed. He started calling every major move right, pulling in large positions, three promotions in rapid succession —
The kind of run that gets you a reputation. He's considered a rising star now. Significant future ahead of him."
A quieter beat.
"One month ago was also the day Ana Lance reported the infant death to the hospital."
Eva's voice dropped.
"I think this might be a—"
"Sacrifice."
Raphael had already said it. The word sat in the channel and nobody answered it for a moment.
"I ran every cemetery record in the 3rd District. Public, private, doesn't matter. There is no burial record for Rick Lance anywhere." Eva exhaled.
"The body was never interred. Which means it's most likely somewhere on or near the property."
Raphael looked up at the ceiling.
"The attic."
---
Downstairs, the warmth had gone entirely from Evelyn's expression.
She was still looking at Ana — watching the woman run a cloth over a picture frame with the careful attention of someone performing normalcy —
But her face had settled into something that made the temperature in the room feel like it had dropped several degrees.
Whatever had been gentle in her posture was gone.
Her hand had closed into a fist at her side without her deciding to.
---
Raphael opened the briefcase, swept everything still useful into his coat's interior pockets, and went up.
The attic door was ajar. Not closed, not locked, just resting against the frame, the broken lock mechanism lying on the floor beside it in pieces.
He took out Eva's device and mounted it on the door frame. Switched it on.
A projection bled into the air, Eva's form, rendered in faint translucent light, detail good enough to read her expression.
She looked different rendered this way, the habitual slouch gone, replaced by something more composed.
For a moment she stood with the fixed blankness of a system waiting for input.
Then she moved. A blink, a reorientation, something coming online behind her eyes, and the projection became distinctly, recognizably her.
She assessed the situation without needing it explained, rolled her shoulders, and pushed the door open.
"I'll go ahead and clear the space. Call you in once I've confirmed it."
"I can go in directly." Raphael kept his voice level.
"I've already made contact with the wraith. He doesn't attack on instinct, it's territorial, not predatory. He'll respond to the environment, not to presence."
Eva studied his face for a moment. Read whatever was sitting behind his expression.
She reached out and put her hand, or the projection of it, on his shoulder.
"Alright. Together then." A small, uncomplicated smile. "We're partners now, aren't we?"
He didn't answer that. He stepped through the door.
---
Complete darkness.
The attic windows had been sealed, not boarded, but riveted, the metal fastenings set so thoroughly into the frames that no gap remained, no possibility of leverage.
Whatever light had once come through here had been methodically excluded.
The smell hit first. Underneath the general damp and the particular staleness of a closed space, something else. Faint sulfur.
The edge of rot, not fresh, but old enough to have become ambient.
They moved together, Raphael's flashlight sweeping the space in slow arcs.
The attic was large in footprint but cramped in practice, every usable surface buried under stacked boxes, old furniture pushed against the walls, the accumulated weight of things kept because disposing of them required a decision.
Not far from the entrance, the beam caught a dark patch in the floorboards.
He crouched.
A bloodstain worked into the grain of the wood, old enough to have lost its color.
And around it, the faint medicinal trace of disinfectant over alcohol that hadn't fully aired out.
"Someone cleaned this. Not well enough." He kept his voice down.
"The alcohol content is low, probably church holy water, not a proper solvent. It's been sitting here long enough to concentrate."
The stain wasn't isolated. It continued, a trail of it, moving in irregular patches toward the far end of the attic, interrupted by the long parallel scrapes of something dragged.
They followed it to the ceiling beam.
The priest was still there.
Rope around the neck, suspended, feet hanging at a height that suggested the drop had been short and the process slow.
His eyes were fully open, the whites showing all the way around. The body had gone rigid some time ago.
Surface reading said wraith possession, self-termination.
Raphael moved the flashlight methodically across the body.
Then the beam reached the back of the skull.
He went still.
A wound. Deep, clean-edged, the kind of mark that came from something heavy brought down with intent. It had broken the bone and gone further.
"What—"
The shape of it assembled fast and without ambiguity.
The priest hadn't been possessed. The priest had been murdered.
He'd been brought here to remove a wraith, someone had come up behind him while he worked, and whatever was in the priest's hand at that moment had dropped to the floor when the axe connected.
He'd been hired and then killed for knowing too much about what was in this house.
Raphael turned around.
The flashlight found the entrance.
Ana's husband was standing in the doorway.
He hadn't made a sound coming up. He was simply there, watching them both, one hand at his side and one hand holding the axe he'd been using in the yard.
The blade caught the edge of the flashlight beam.
Along the edge, a patina of rust-colored residue that had dried into the grain of the metal and not come fully clean.
Not rust.