The dust settled slowly, and Raphael let out a long, quiet breath.
His body had gone soft in a way he wasn't used to. If the blade had missed, if it had needed a second pass, he genuinely wasn't sure he could have delivered one.
There was nothing left in the tank to deliver it with.
Without the caster, the flesh-dissolution spell lost its engine.
The damage already done stayed where it was, but the progress stopped at whatever point it had reached in that final second.
He coughed once.
"Hey. Let me take a little."
The thorns paused. What had been reflex a moment ago now had intention behind it, Evelyn's will coming back online, and the vines moved on their own, dragging Jason's remains across the ground and positioning them within reach.
"Thoughtful."
He bit into the carotid and drank. Deeply, without ceremony, the relief of it immediate and total.
The muscle across his body started finding its way back to where it was supposed to be, the flesh remembering its shape, the skin pulling taut again over what had almost stopped being a solid form.
He followed it with the second recovery draught, and the process accelerated, the red draining from his eyes in a slow tide, receding until it was gone.
Blood Frenzy ended.
He stood there for a moment, taking stock.
"No sin notification. Or rather, no kill notification." He looked down at what remained of Jason.
"Maybe there's something in the hunting ground for this. A contract equivalent, possibly."
Evelyn's footsteps came toward him. Uneven, slower than usual.
The recovery draught had done what it could, but a body that had been pushed past its limits didn't come back from that inside of ten minutes, and hers knew it.
Raphael steadied her with one arm. She didn't make anything of it, just leaned slightly against him, the way you do with someone you don't need to perform composure for, and looked at the wreckage spread across the street and yard and the crumbled remains of what had been a house.
"First mission together, partner. Exciting, wasn't it?"
Raphael exhaled through his nose. "The Red Gloves is harder than I expected. We almost didn't make it out of the first one."
She patted his shoulder lightly.
"You get used to it. When I first joined it was the same, if it hadn't been for our captain at the time, I might not be standing here right now."
The warmth in her voice shifted slightly when she said it. Something dimmed behind her eyes.
"I'm the captain now. I still don't know if I'll ever match what she was."
Raphael opened his mouth, thought of the A-9 team's previous Hunter, the empty chair that role had left, and then stopped.
Because he'd seen Rick.
The small figure was sitting at the edge of the garden, the grimy ball held carefully against his chest, watching them from a distance.
His gaze drifted, slow and weightless, toward Jason's severed head lying in the road.
Evelyn followed Raphael's eyeline and found him too. Something complicated moved through her expression and didn't resolve into anything clean.
Raphael walked over. He crouched down beside Rick and held out his hand, and Rick didn't pull away, there was something almost expectant in how he watched the ball change hands.
Evelyn let out a slow breath.
"We need to find his remains. To put him to rest properly, there has to be a burial, a real one. I know some pieces of a requiem. With a simple ritual around it, I can cleanse the wraith energy."
Raphael didn't answer right away. He crossed to the garden's sprinkler and ran water over the ball, washing away the layers of caked mud and grime until the surface underneath came back, bright color, still intact beneath everything that had accumulated on top of it.
He turned it over.
On the back, a seam. Rough stitching, the thread gone yellow with age, the tension long since lost, gaping open now, and through the gap, white.
Bone.
Small bones. The kind that belonged to a child. Disarticulated, broken into pieces small enough to fit, and forced inside.
Rick's remains. All of them.
Hidden in the one thing he'd loved.
"...God." Evelyn's voice went quiet. The words after it took a moment to come. "Those animals."
Raphael had suspected something like it. What he felt looking at the ball wasn't surprise so much as a grief that had been building since he read the wall.
Rick had died in that room blaming himself. Had promised he would be better.
Had never once, in anything he left behind, directed his anger at the two people who deserved every piece of it.
"Little one." Raphael's voice came out differently than it usually did. Not the flat operational tone, not the register he used when he was working.
Something quieter. "We'd like to take you somewhere else. Somewhere you can rest. Is that alright?"
Rick looked at the house.
Or what remained of it, the caved walls, the truck buried in the collapse, the dust still drifting from the wreckage.
He looked at it for a long moment, then back at the ball in Raphael's hands.
Raphael understood.
Eva's investigation had turned up nothing. No relatives who knew Rick existed outside the immediate family's lie.
No record of him anywhere in the outside world. Which meant there was only one explanation for how that was possible.
Rick had never left this house. Not once. Not in the whole of his short life.
The walls that had been his cage were also the entire geography of everything he had ever known.
He had been born inside them, grown inside them, and died inside them, and nowhere beyond them had ever registered his existence at all.
His whole world had been this small.
Raphael rose slowly and walked toward the back of the property.
Evelyn heard what he hadn't said, read the shape of the conclusion he'd reached, and followed without asking him to explain.
The back garden was quieter than the street. There were flowers planted along one edge, kept up once, overgrown now, but still in bloom in a few places.
Raphael found a spot near them and dug with his hands, opening the earth enough to hold what needed to be placed there.
He set the ball down inside, the remains and the toy together, the one thing Rick had chosen to stay close to, and began to cover them over.
The bright surface disappeared under the soil, a little more with each handful.
Evelyn knelt beside the small mound when it was done.
She bowed her head and began to pray, not the formal liturgy she'd never been formally taught, but something more personal than that. Her own words, shaped into a blessing.
Then she began to hum.
The requiem came out soft. It wasn't technically perfect, she'd learned it in fragments, from memory, but what it carried was something technique couldn't manufacture.
It was the gentleness of someone who meant it. The kind of warmth that moves like a hand through hair, unhurried, with nowhere else to be.
Rick's eyes blinked slowly. His head dipped. He curled at the edge of the mound the way a child curls when the weight of being awake finally becomes too much, and his eyes closed.
The dark, settled thing that had been living in him, the weight of it, the wrongness that had curdled grief into something with teeth, softened.
Came apart at the edges. Thinned into nothing.
The song ended.
Evelyn murmured a few words over him, quiet and unhurried, and meant every one.
Then both of them looked at each other. No coordination required. They said the last of it together.
"The painful dream is over. May your soul find peace."
Raphael closed his eyes.
"Sleep now, little one."
In the moonlight, Rick's form began to come apart at the edges, not violently, not the way the dissolution spell had moved, but gently, the way frost leaves glass in the morning.
Point by point, the shape of him softened into small lights that drifted upward and thinned against the sky until there was nothing left to see.
[Hunt complete.]
[Cross-level hunt bonus applied.]
[Sin acquired: +9.6.]
[Current Sin: 26.9 / 40.]
Raphael looked at the notification for a moment.
"Hunting." He shook his head, just slightly. Something bitter in it. "Is that what that was."
Maybe someday Rick would come back, as a contracted Demon, standing beside him in some future hunting ground.
He hoped, if that happened, the thing that came back remembered the flowers.
They tidied what could be tidied. Raphael filed a report back to headquarters covering the truck driver's losses. Then they got in the car and drove.
The road back was quiet. At some point they glanced at each other and didn't look away immediately.
A long time apart, and they were still exactly what they had always been.
[Crossroads of Fate: Witch — Evelyn Vigo.]
[Synchronization rate increased to: 21%.]