He pulled the blade free and looked across the arena.
Four artificial undead. All of them accounted for. The pieces were still scattered across the ground in configurations that suggested they'd had a bad evening.
Silver did things to undead that ordinary steel didn't, not just cutting, but severing in a way that the body couldn't argue with, the bone offering no more resistance than everything else. It was less like fighting and more like disassembly.
"Your swordsmanship was made for killing and nothing else." Jason's voice was flat and cold. "No elegance. No artistry."
"Not relevant."
Raphael drew the blade across his forearm to clean it. The silver caught the moonlight and threw back something almost iridescent.
"You waited until every one of your thralls was dead before walking out." He leveled his gaze across the distance between them. "How frightened do you have to be to do that? Coward."
Jason didn't react. His attention had moved past Raphael entirely, scanning the thorn walls around them with the careful assessment of someone identifying the real threat.
The man in front of him was dangerous, physically, undeniably so. But raw physical capacity was a category.
It had a ceiling. What warranted genuine caution was standing further back, behind the thorns, the witch, with her variable magic and her unreadable patterns. The arena was hers.
"The Jason inside the house, and you." Raphael stepped forward, the soles of his shoes leaving dark prints across the blood pooled on the ground. "Which one is the real one?"
He raised the .357 and kept moving, unhurried.
"Both. Or rather—" Jason's eyes tracked the thorn perimeter with the patience of someone waiting for the right moment.
"That is my corpse. Through the ritual, I discarded that weak vessel and built this one. I am the Bishop now."
His eyes shifted color. The green that came into them was wrong, deep and lightless, something luminescent about it that had nothing to do with warmth.
"And you, you ignorant heretics, you interrupted a sacred ceremony. You slaughtered the King's faithful."
The skin began to change. Grey spreading from the center outward, and where it spread, short black spines emerged, pushing through the surface of his face and neck and hands without breaking the skin so much as growing from it.
"My intention was to draw two Black Gloves operatives here. Feed them to the wraith, same as the priest. A simple arrangement." A pause.
"Instead I got two Red Gloves. But it doesn't matter. You'll both die here, and you'll both feed me."
Raphael's instincts fired before the reasoning caught up.
*Don't wait.* Whatever he's doing, don't let him finish it.
He closed the distance fast, calibrated the angle in the time it took to take two steps, and lined up the shot that would end the conversation.
Jason came apart.
Not collapsed. Not fell. The body simply ceased to hold its shape, dropping into a spreading pool of moving flesh that flowed outward across the ground, formless and directionless, impossible to aim at.
Raphael stood over it with his gun raised and no clear target.
The words came back to him. Discarded the human vessel.
Whatever was left of Jason Lance had already finished being something you could put a bullet in.
The ground shuddered.
The scattered mass lifted, not all at once, but in sections, pieces finding other pieces, surfaces pressing together and adhering. Limbs and torsos assembling themselves under pressure from something invisible, the joins forming with a wet sound that was worse for being quiet.
Two shapes stood up.
Wolf-sized. Low to the ground, spines arched, the posture of animals that had decided to charge.
Where two undead mouths had been, there was now one, the tissue fused together into a single aperture, the teeth from both combining into something considerably larger and considerably worse.
Raphael swung the barrel toward them.
His earpiece crackled. Eva, the signal cutting through urgent and fast.
"What's happening over there? I'm reading massive arcane fluctuations near your position, whatever's generating that, it's not low-tier—"
Pain, sudden and specific, directly inside his ear.
He ripped the earpiece out.
It came away with tissue attached to it. His tissue, the inside of his ear canal had begun to merge with the device, the flesh reaching toward the foreign material with the same logic the mass on the ground was using for everything else.
And it wasn't just the ear.
Every point where fabric touched skin, collar, cuffs, the back of his coat, a slow, adhesive dissolving, the boundary between clothing and body losing its definition, the material beginning to incorporate.
His range of movement narrowed by degrees. The suit of it was subtle and immediate and deeply wrong, and in the time it took him to register what was happening, the two creatures were already in the air.
The first one's teeth found his forearm. Went through the coat, through the skin, through the muscle, stopped somewhere near the bone.
The second hit his back.
When it pulled free, it took something with it. A section of him, flesh and fabric together, a chunk of his back that left white visible underneath where red should have been.
It moved to the edge of the arena, sat down, and started chewing.
The sound it made was a series of small, wet crunches.
Raphael's face did something involuntary. He breathed through his teeth and kept his eyes open and let the pain be information rather than experience.
His back was bad, he didn't need to see it to know what exposed bone felt like from the inside.
*[Analyzing... Complete.]*
*[Lv1: Lesser Ghoul.]*
*[Cardinal Sin: Gluttony.]*
*[Classification: Demon.]*
"You disgusting—"
He shoved the .357's barrel directly into the first ghoul's jaw, between the teeth, past the teeth, into the throat of the thing, and pulled the trigger.
*BANG.*
The .357 Magnum, at that range, inside that geometry, produced a sound less like a gunshot and more like a detonation.
His wrist torqued sideways with the recoil, the joint grinding at the edge of its socket, the impact traveling up his forearm and into his shoulder and arriving in his teeth.
Half the ghoul's skull came apart. The jaws stayed locked on his arm.
He fired again.
The other half followed the first. The body dropped, the legs continuing to pedal against the air out of some residual electrical instruction, but the grip finally released.
He grabbed his own wrist and reset the joint with a sharp push.
The muscle in his back was already moving, he could feel it, the fibers reattaching themselves to the exposed bone, layering over each other in ascending sequences, the damage walking itself backward.
The kind of wound that would have been a cause of death three times over for anyone else was, for him, a problem with a timeline.
He had enough blood in reserve from the fight to sustain it. Barely.
He looked toward the second ghoul.
It had finished eating. Its silhouette was measurably larger than it had been a minute ago.
Every hair on his body stood up simultaneously.
He was already moving when the wave hit him.
Not fast enough.
The flesh came from every direction at once, a tide of it, rising and closing, finding every gap, working through the fabric where it had already begun to merge and pushing past it into the skin beneath.
He was submerged before he could establish a perimeter, the material flowing around him like water that had decided to become something else, and the cold of it was absolute.
The dissolution started immediately. He could feel the edges of himself becoming negotiable, the boundary between Raphael and everything else beginning to lose its authority.
Like ice in the ocean, some part of his mind observed, with the particular detachment of someone who has gone too far past fear to maintain normal responses. Melting from the outside in.
Then something hit the mass from the side.
Thorns. Three of them, then more, driving into the flow and finding him and wrapping around whatever was still solidly him, and pulling.
The resistance was considerable. What came out the other side came out like something extracted rather than freed.
Whoosh.
He landed hard. Got one arm under him. Stayed there for a moment with his chest against the ground, breathing.
He raised his head.
His body was difficult to look at in the places he could see.
Large sections of skin stripped down to the muscle beneath, the surface of him a geography of exposed tissue and the remnants of fabric that had been trying to become part of him.
The thorns around the perimeter were moving.
They drew inward, gathering and overlapping and tightening until the entire arena had contracted into a single shape, a cocoon of interlocked bramble, green and dense and closed.
Then it opened.
Evelyn stepped out from the center of it.
Her eyes were already on the flesh-tide. The thorns arranged themselves around her without instruction, an orbit of them, patient and ready.
Above, the last of the cloud cover was pulling back.
The moon came through complete and white and entirely round, and the light it cast on the street below was clean and cold and absolute.
Tonight was a full moon.