The blade went in clean.
Eva drove it through Jason's chest without hesitation, and her wrist turned on instinct.
A practiced rotation, the kind that made sure the job was finished.
The silver should have done it. The silver always did it.
Jason didn't make a sound.
He didn't even blink. His expression stayed exactly as it had been, that flat, vacant indifference, and the axe came up anyway, the sweep cutting through the air with enough momentum to take a head off.
Eva was already gone.
She'd read the first hit the moment it failed and put air between herself and him before the backswing could find her, landing lightly with the bloody silver blade already angled for another approach.
She flicked the blood off it. Clicked her tongue.
"Undead."
She turned the word over, examining it.
"I thought so. Two ordinary people don't have the nerve to put an axe in a priest's skull."
She settled into a low stance, weight forward, body compressed and coiled.
The posture of something feline about to make a decision.
"Not human. Not quite a Demon either. Something sitting between the two."
Her head tilted. "You're a Thrall, aren't you?"
Jason came at her again, the axe raised.
"Let's see if you can take this."
The floor dented under her feet as she launched.
The speed was wrong, too fast, the kind of acceleration that belonged to something other than a human body.
And Jason brought the axe down in a vertical chop, the blade catching the light as it fell toward the crown of her head.
Eva smiled.
Her body turned in midair. No logical axis of rotation, no ground to push off, just a clean, fluid redirection that shouldn't have been possible, the movement unhurried and almost decorative as the axe edge passed through the space she'd occupied.
She came down without sound.
A single arc of silver through the air on the way.
Jason straightened up. Reached for his own neck.
Found a line there, so fine it was more sensation than wound, the kind of cut that takes a moment to decide what it wants to do.
His eyes found her again and he moved.
Eva just watched him come.
Slap.
A head hit the floorboards. It rolled, made two full rotations, and came to rest face-up.
Jason's expression, even in that configuration, remained utterly unmoved.
The body hadn't received the update. It continued forward under the last instruction issued before the interruption, swinging the axe on the same trajectory it had always been on.
Eva leaned slightly sideways.
The blade passed her torso by a centimeter, completed its arc, and buried itself in the floorboards with enough force to crack the boards beneath and leave a depression in the subfloor under that.
Then the body lay down.
It was still twitching.
"You're still going." Eva stared at it.
"You're actually still going. Like a cockroach. Is this fun for you? Is this a good time?"
She stepped onto Jason's back, raised the blade above the spine, and drove it in.
The body went rigid.
Footsteps behind her. She half-turned.
Raphael had emerged from the back of the attic.
He was holding something, a small ball, filthy, deflated, cradled in both hands with a carefulness that had nothing to do with the object's apparent value.
The half-second of distraction was enough.
Jason's arm moved. The bone torqued with an audible, grinding crack, the joint rotating one hundred and eighty degrees through an angle joints don't go, and the axe swung horizontally at Eva's midsection.
No blood. No impact sound of the kind that should have followed.
Just the strange, weightless sensation of something passing through something else that had no real resistance, like a blade through foam, like a hand through smoke.
Eva's upper half separated from her lower half and dropped to the floor.
Her lower half remained standing.
"Oh, for—" She craned her neck upward from the floor and looked at Jason, who was raising the axe again.
Her expression had moved past surprise and arrived somewhere in the territory of deeply personal offense.
"Are you serious?"
Whoosh.
The axe came down vertically. Her upper half split along the same line, the two pieces falling apart with that same unreal, bloodless quality —
Clean white cross-sections, the texture of something that wasn't quite solid to begin with.
Eva lay in four pieces on the attic floor and looked extremely annoyed about it.
"Raphael." Her voice came out stuttering slightly, cutting in and out as the projection struggled.
"Help me. Kill him. The device — he cut the device — it's broken, I can't—"
Her eyes moved to the stairwell.
"Actually. Don't worry about me, I'm fine. And downstairs, downstairs is done."
Her pieces dissolved. Between one moment and the next she simply stopped being present, the way things do when they were never entirely there to begin with.
Raphael looked at Jason.
Jason's arm cranked back through its unnatural arc, pulling the silver blade free from his spine.
The contact seemed to register as discomfort even if nothing else did, he released the blade like something that had burned him, and it skidded across the floor.
He was still standing.
Even headless, even exsanguinating, even with the structural damage that had accumulated over the last several minutes, still operating, still issuing the same instruction on loop.
Raphael set the ball down gently on the floor.
His eyes went red.
He planted his foot on the hand holding the axe.
[Analyzing... Complete.]
[Lv1: Artificial Undead.]
[Cardinal Sin: Gluttony.]
[Classification: Demon.]
"Go confess your sins in hell, executioner."
He dropped low and bit down.
No precision this time. No careful placement, no consideration for the recipient's comfort.
The fangs went through the carotid with blunt force, and what followed was the opposite of restraint —
Blood Frenzy running at full output, pulling every drop Jason had left with the single-minded efficiency of a drain.
Jason's body registered something it hadn't registered yet.
Maybe the proximity of actual termination communicated itself differently than mere damage.
The thrashing started, violent, desperate, the body finally throwing everything it had at something it understood was ending it.
Lv4 physical functions held him down without effort. The blood left.
The body followed, skin drawing inward, pulling against the skeleton, the whole structure desiccating visibly and rapidly until what remained looked like something left in the sun for a very long time.
Nearby on the floor, the severed head was no longer indifferent.
Fear had found it. Real fear, the kind that looks out from the eyes and actually sees what's happening.
"No— please—no—"
Raphael didn't look at it. He held the position until the body went entirely still.
[Hunt complete.]
[Sin acquired: +5.4.]
[Current Sin: 7.3 / 40.]
He straightened. Spat blood onto the floor.
"Disgusting." He wiped his mouth. "Cold and rancid. Of course. Of course it is. Undead."
What remained of Jason Lance had the texture of something that had been drying for years.
Raphael picked the ball back up. He carried it downstairs with the careful deliberateness he'd carried it with since the back room, like it was the only thing in the building that deserved handling gently.
Evelyn was waiting at the bottom.
They looked at each other.
Neither of them said anything for a moment. Then they both let out a breath at almost exactly the same time.
"I found this." She held up a small black book, slim, the cover worn.
"Doctrine of the Gluttony Church. Their theology, their rituals — all of it documented in here. Including a specific ceremony called 'Child Offering for Prosperity.'"
She opened to a marked page.
"Once the sacrificial subject dies, the ritual breaks. And the officiating priest of the ceremony is immediately notified."
Outside, the street lights began to flicker.
One. Two. Several in sequence, and then all of them at once, extinguishing in a wave that moved down the street until the neighborhood went fully dark.
Raphael looked toward the window.
"So we're not at the end." He watched the darkness outside settle. "We're at the beginning."
They came out of the shadows one by one, moving with no particular urgency, figures in rough linen robes, faces white, expressions empty.
Not hurrying. Not hiding.
Just walking toward the house from every direction, as though they'd simply been waiting for the lights to go out.
The anger that had been sitting in his chest with nowhere specific to go for the past hour suddenly had a very specific destination.
The people who'd given the Lance family their doctrine. Who'd written the ritual down in a book with a title.
Who'd taken payment, presumably, for their theological services, and gone home feeling righteous about it.
They'd come to him.
He looked up at the window.
Through a break in the clouds, the moon had emerged, not quite full, but close.
Half a circle of pale cold light falling across the street and the robed figures moving through it.
Raphael reached into his coat. Found the cigarette he'd been carrying since the morning and hadn't had occasion to light. He put it between his lips, struck a match.
Exhaled smoke toward the ceiling.
His eyes were already red. His fingers had gone long, the nails drawn out to edges that could open skin without effort.
Everything in him that was borrowed from a dead monster was fully awake and had already selected its targets.
"Hunting time."