One minute earlier. Ground floor.
Click.
The front door opened. Jason Lance came through it drenched in sweat, the axe still in his hand.
He ran his palm over the stubble on his jaw, gave Evelyn a flat, indifferent look, and moved toward the stairs.
Evelyn was on her feet immediately.
Ana stepped into her path.
The smile on her face had no warmth in it, just the shape of one, stretched over something else entirely.
In her hand, a meat cleaver. The blade was wet.
"Two demons wearing human skin." Her voice had changed. The exhausted, careful presentation from earlier was gone. "
Tell me — what did it feel like? Sacrificing your own child?"
The corners of her mouth pulled higher.
"Rick died exactly as he should have. He was worth it.
His sacrifice bought us good furniture. A sports car. Champagne.
He gave this family its dignity back, we don't have to bow to anyone anymore, we don't have to smile at people we despise and ask for their approval.
We can go where we want. Do what we want. Live how we want."
The words were accelerating, the pitch climbing with them, the control she'd maintained all afternoon coming apart at the seams.
"All of that requires money. I gave birth to him. I raised him. I gave him everything.
This was what he owed me this was his obligation, his debt repaid!
One child, sacrificed, for the happiness of the entire family."
A sound that was almost a laugh. "He would have wanted that. He would have."
Evelyn said nothing.
Ana's voice faltered. The silence coming back from across the room wasn't the silence of someone listening —
It was something that pressed outward, and Ana felt it before she understood it, the smile stuttering, a thread of something that was not quite fear but was adjacent to it moving through her chest.
Then the fear arrived properly.
From Evelyn's sleeve, one thorn. Then a second. A third.
They kept coming, silent and unhurried, curling outward like something that had been waiting in there for a long time and had finally been given permission.
They spread and thickened until she stood at the center of a dense lattice of them, each one catching the light.
Then they moved toward Ana.
Evelyn's eyes reflected the expression on Ana's face with perfect, untroubled clarity.
A drop of red landed on Evelyn's cheek.
---
In the attic, Eva's projection turned its attention to Jason and made a short, dismissive sound.
"Jason Lance. You're the one who killed the priest."
Jason looked at them both. His face hadn't changed since he'd walked in, the same flat affect, the same absence of anything that resembled doubt.
He kept walking, the axe hanging loose at his side.
"Yes. I don't know how you got in here, but it doesn't matter. Three bodies is fine. Three is better."
Eva stared at him for a moment.
Then she laughed, genuinely, briefly, the way you laugh at something that's too stupid to be insulting.
"You're going to try to kill Red Gloves? With that?"
She reached sideways without looking and pulled the silver blade from Raphael's hand.
"Hey." She nudged him with her elbow. "New partner. Let me deal with this one. Don't say no yet, I know you want to hit him. I can see it."
She tilted her head toward the far end of the attic.
"I can't see it clearly, but I can feel something deeper in the room. Another wraith. That's got something to do with my contracted Demon, sensitivity comes with the territory."
She turned back to Jason. The silver blade spun once across her knuckles and settled into her grip.
"You've already made contact with him. For something like that, the right move is a cleansing — let the soul rest properly."
A glance back at Raphael over her shoulder. "Don't disappoint us, new partner."
Raphael stepped back and let the shadows take him.
Eva looked at Jason. Clicked her tongue.
"Tell me something. What does it feel like, killing your own child? You ugly, pathetic butcher."
Jason's expression didn't shift. When he spoke, his voice was completely level, no anger in it, no defensiveness, nothing at all underneath the surface.
"I didn't kill him. I just stopped paying attention to him."
"That's not even—"
Eva's voice stopped.
She moved. A single burst of forward momentum, the blade driving straight and precise toward Jason's heart.
---
Raphael went directly to the back of the attic.
A door frame with no door. The door was on the floor, the latch mechanism shattered, hardware scattered across the boards around it.
Inside: a small rug. A low table. Nothing else.
Rick was curled on the rug, knees drawn toward his chest, the burns from the silver powder still faintly visible as a shimmer along the edges of his form, enough to make him barely perceptible in the dark.
When Raphael entered, he looked up once. Then he looked away.
Raphael swept the flashlight around the room.
The back of the fallen door stopped him.
Bite marks. Nail marks, layered over each other in overlapping grooves, the frantic record of something that had been here for a long time doing the same thing over and over.
Dried blood in the channels where fingers had torn through to the skin beneath.
Click.
His foot found something small and round. The flashlight found it.
A ball. Child-sized, the original color buried under a crust of grime and filth, the rubber deflated and sunken in on one side.
He looked at Rick.
Rick was already looking at the ball. He crawled to it, that same all-fours movement, silent, deliberate, and gathered it against his chest, then went back to the rug.
His arms wrapped around it carefully.
"You like that, don't you." Raphael kept his voice low. "Little one."
No response. Rick stared at nothing, the ball held against him.
Raphael moved further in.
The smell had been present since the doorway but it concentrated here, in the far corner, and the flashlight found its source without difficulty.
Dried excrement. Beside it, the pockmarked scarring of stomach acid eaten into the floorboards over time.
He looked at the arrangement. The position. The proximity of the two things.
"Waste and vomit in the same spot." He said it quietly, the logic assembling itself. "Because he couldn't move away from—"
The thought landed.
"Oh. Oh, God. Oh, you—"
He stopped. Stood very still for a moment with his jaw tight.
Rick hadn't been killed. Not directly. Not with anything that would leave a mark on a medical examiner's report.
He'd been put in a room and the door had been locked and he had been left there.
Raphael turned the flashlight down. The floor came up to him in layers of detail he hadn't wanted.
Small handprints in dried blood. Everywhere, the record of a child moving through the space on his hands and knees, leaving traces of himself wherever he'd gone.
The trail of them led to the far wall, where a book lay in the corner, its cover almost entirely obscured by the same small prints.
A children's dictionary.
He raised the flashlight.
The wall was white once, or had been. It was yellowed now, the surface covered in marks that resolved, at this distance, into letters. Uneven.
Unpracticed. Written in what had been left to write with, by someone who had only just learned how letters worked.
The marks occupied exactly the space a small child could reach standing on his toes.
*Daddy, Mommy, I'm sorry.*
*Why did you lock the door it's so dark*
*I'm a bad boy I'll do better I promise*
*Where did everyone go. It's only Rick here.*
*I'm so hungry my tummy hurts so much Daddy Mommy please let me out.*
*Why*
The blood stopped there.
Raphael stood in front of the wall for a long moment.
His hand was shaking. He noticed it distantly, the way you notice something that's happening to someone else.
The red had come back into his eyes without him deciding it would, and the room felt very quiet and very far away, and the marks on the wall stayed exactly where they were.
---
Downstairs, the living room looked like it had been turned inside out.
Every cabinet pulled open, bags and documents spread across the floor, the contents of the house laid out in a chaotic sprawl. Someone had been looking for something.
As for Ana, she was evenly distributed across the floor. The thorns had been thorough.
Evelyn stood in the middle of it, holding a photograph.
The edges had worn soft, the surface dulled under a layer of dust, something kept not on the wall or the mantelpiece but tucked away somewhere, forgotten or deliberately hidden.
It wasn't a family of three.
Between Lance and his wife, between the couple and the young man in the suit, there was a fourth. Small. Very young.
A birthday hat crooked on his head, his face wearing the specific, uncomplicated joy of a child who doesn't yet know that happiness is something that can be taken away.
In his arms, held against his chest with the reverence of someone who had just received the best thing in the world.
A small, colorful football.