"Damn you! damn you!"
The Inquisitor's voice dropped into something low and tight.
Her eyes were dark with it. But she was out of options, and she knew it, and after a moment she let the truth out with the particular grace of someone swallowing something they'd rather not.
"Fine. I received intelligence that a witch was operating in this area.
Like you, witches fall within our jurisdiction, unlike you, she's considerably higher priority." A contemptuous sound.
"The little creature concealed herself somehow. I could sense her proximity and couldn't locate her. Then you arrived, hunting for her without the faintest awareness of your surroundings. Convenient enough."
Raphael turned that over.
So the Inquisitor had come for Evelyn. And if she'd been sensing a witch's presence in this area, that meant Evelyn was close, somewhere near this intersection, hidden in a way that blocked direct detection.
That narrowed things considerably.
He kept the gun where it was and moved to the next question.
"My father. What do you know about him? Where did he go?"
The old woman's laugh was short and without warmth.
"He abandoned you so thoroughly that you don't know where he is, and you expect me to?
I have no idea where that man went." She held his gaze. "But I'll tell you what I know, in exchange for ten meters. You step back ten meters."
She closed her mouth and waited, reading his expression with the patience of someone who had spent decades learning to read rooms.
Raphael glanced at her ankles. A fraction of a second, then away.
"...Agreed. If you're confident you can outrun a bullet, old woman, you're welcome to try. I'd suggest hoping your legs still have what they used to."
The Inquisitor's brow came together. The words read as taunt, but the angle of his gaze had suggested something more specific than taunt.
He considered which question to spend the distance on.
"In your records, what kind of man was my father?"
She made a sound of contempt, then answered honestly enough.
"What else? A criminal, a butcher, a killer with no meaningful count to his name, a thoroughgoing madman.
That's the external consensus, from the police, from the church, from IFSA. General and impressionistic." She drew a breath. "The Tribunal kept more specific records."
A pause, as though deciding how much to give.
"Falcon Alanster is not his true name, it's a composite, a call sign merged with the surname.
He operated as a contract killer in the underground world. Whoever paid, he served. Confirmed kills exceed eighteen hundred, with no arrest to date.
The most severe case on record, the one the Tribunal classifies as worst in conduct, occurred on a rainy night.
He entered an orphanage under church administration and murdered a priest named Noa Roge. Methodically and without apparent difficulty."
Her jaw tightened.
"The Tribunal investigators found additional bodies at the scene. Children from the orphanage.
The youngest was seven years old. The oldest was twelve. They had futures. They had possibilities.
Your father, the one certain people call the White Death, took all of that and left nothing."
She added the last piece through her teeth.
"Satisfied? That is your father. A complete and irredeemable piece of human waste. A man who would kill anyone for money, including a priest who spent his life helping children."
Her eyes moved over Raphael's face with open assessment. "Like father, like son, I've always found. You may not be there yet, but you'll arrive. Better I remove you now, before the damage is done."
Raphael listened to the whole of it in silence. When she finished, he drew a long breath in and let it out slowly.
He stepped back. Ten meters, as agreed. The gun didn't move.
"Second question. Your history with him."
The Inquisitor glanced behind her, measuring the distance, calculating the geometry, then answered.
"I'm just another person he destroyed. Nothing exceptional about it." Something shifted in her voice, the contempt losing its edge to something older and flatter.
"I was a young nun. Twenty years old, under a vow of celibacy, and completely unprepared for my own curiosity about the world outside the vow. I encountered your father by chance. He was injured. I happened to know some recovery-based incantations."
A short, self-mocking pause.
"He was striking in the way that cold-featured men can be. I was twenty and foolish and I let him in. I bandaged his wounds, cooked for him, gave him a place to rest.
God only knows what was in my head. I told myself it was Christian charity and believed it because I wanted to."
The certainty in her expression softened into something more complicated, briefly.
"After that first time, your father used the church as a base of operation. He came and went, returning whenever he needed wounds treated. I didn't understand what he was.
I kept doing my duty, healing him, caring for him, telling myself whatever I needed to tell myself. Perhaps I believed it was love. Twenty-year-olds believe remarkable things."
Her voice went flat again.
"One night he came back badly damaged. More serious than usual, bones broken, blood loss, the kind of injuries that take real effort to address.
I treated him. And shortly after, Tribunal investigators arrived at the church. Harboring a heretic. Proof of faith required."
She looked somewhere past Raphael's shoulder.
"That was when I learned who he actually was. I took a ceremonial sword from the vestibule, found him, raised it. But my arm had nothing behind it. I was crying. I told him I couldn't do it. I told him to run."
A thin sound that wasn't quite a laugh.
"He took the sword. One stroke, no hesitation, no particular expression. I went into shock and unconsciousness from the blood loss. When I woke, he was gone.
What the surgeons gave me back looked like this." Her hand moved toward the scar, not quite touching it.
"The congregation flinched when they saw me. The other sisters talked. The children wouldn't come near me.
Everything that had made my life what it was, gone. Because I was foolish enough to feel something for a man who registered me as a resource and nothing more."
She tilted her head slightly.
"I joined the Tribunal afterward. That is the honest accounting of the hatred. Are you satisfied?"
She began to step back. Slowly at first, then with more deliberateness, each step placing more distance between them. Ten meters became eleven. Twelve. She kept going.
"Stop."
Raphael's voice came out cold. But the finger resting against the trigger didn't move. The command sat in the air and the action that should have followed it didn't come.
The Inquisitor spread her arms wide. The gesture was theatrical and genuine in equal measure, the performance of someone who had reached the outer edge of caring.
"Then shoot. Kill me. Let my life end inside the shadow of you and your father, same as it began."
She kept walking backward.
The gun stayed level. The finger stayed where it was.