Raphael's footsteps echoed through the teaching building as he took the stairs three at a time and found the projection device lying in the stairwell where it had landed.
Intact. Still running, the status light unchanged.
"Eva's gone the same way Evelyn did, pulled in through the device somehow, projection and all."
He tried the shutdown sequence. The device didn't respond.
Every input he gave it came back to the same result: active, locked, refusing to close. He pocketed it and started moving through the building floor by floor.
Ground floor. Second floor. Classrooms, the pool facility, the rooftop access.
Nothing. Every room empty, every corridor silent. The only thing that didn't belong was a small scatter of dark animal hair near the main entrance, the same coarse, rigid strands he'd found in the sewer.
He was heading for the exit when the Doberman appeared in the street outside, planting itself directly in his path.
The dog's flank still showed the indentation, skin sunken inward over the missing rib, the surface of it wrong in a way that drew the eye.
It bared its teeth at him, saliva running along the gum line, and growled low in its throat. Then the skin split open of its own accord, peeling back from the muscle beneath in long strips, the fascia and tissue underneath glistening and mobile, the whole process looking exactly as disturbing as it sounded.
"Good dog. Except you're not a dog." Raphael studied it.
"And wherever you're supposed to be leading my attention, where did your owner go, ghoul?"
He recognized the animal. The sewer fight. And if it was here, its owner was close.
In the sewer, the Demon had used the ghoul as a distraction while something considerably larger came from a different angle. He'd almost missed it entirely.
Is this the same play?
He spun, drew, and activated Blood Frenzy in the same motion.
Lv6 dynamic vision processed the scene behind him in the time it took to raise the barrel, a figure, a mirror frame, black cloth half-fallen from the glass surface.
BANG.
The silver round punched through the hand holding the frame.
A sharp intake of breath, then blood, a lot of it, the .357 having gone straight through the palm without losing much enthusiasm on the way.
The figure grabbed the wounded hand with the other one, and the mirror frame hit the ground. The cloth fell back across the glass. Neither shattered.
Raphael got a clear look.
A boy. Eighteen at most, dressed in black with the hood up, face covered in freckles.
He was staring at Raphael with an expression that suggested he'd run several scenarios in advance and this outcome hadn't featured in any of them.
From where he was standing, Raphael had turned and fired in what must have appeared to be a single continuous instant.
Manson made a gesture to the ghoul, abandoned the mirror on the ground, and threw himself sideways into the landscaped shrubbery along the building's edge.
BANG.
Raphael's second shot caught him in the ankle on the way down.
A pained sound from inside the undergrowth, then movement, Manson pushing deeper into the cover, disappearing between the dense, overgrown hedges.
The ghoul launched itself at Raphael's back without waiting for further instruction, jaws open, the elongated finger-thin canines leading.
Lyndon's blade was already out.
Raphael didn't look. He read the displacement of air behind him, distance, angle, velocity, and brought the sword through a clean 180-degree arc.
Both of the ghoul's front limbs separated at the joint simultaneously.
"Too slow."
He reversed the blade and held it vertical.
The ghoul's own momentum carried it forward onto the point.
The silver went through the center of its chest and kept going.
Warm blood ran down the blade in a sheet and dripped from the crossguard onto his red glove, and in the reflection of the ghoul's eyes he could see his own face looking back at him, composed and unreadable.
The snapping jaws stopped one fist's width from his face. The ghoul screamed at him and couldn't do anything else.
Last time, in the sewer, he'd been testing himself, deliberately limited conditions, no Blood Frenzy, poor visibility. This time he was running at full capacity.
"I don't have time for this."
He torqued the blade sideways, carved a semicircle through the existing wound, dropped his weight, and drove the ghoul into the ground with the full force of his body behind it.
He planted his boot across its throat, pinning the jaws, and cut through the midsection with the methodical efficiency of someone completing a task, bone and muscle parting to the silver edge with a sound that was less violent than it should have been, the ghoul's writhing becoming progressively less coordinated.
Its internal organs found the gap in the torso and presented themselves to the open air, accompanied by the smell that was specifically and exclusively their own.
Raphael raised the sword and took the head off with a single clean stroke.
He set the head to one side and lifted the remaining half by what was left of the neck.
The blood thirst had been building since the fight with the Inquisitor.
Multiple Blood Frenzy activations across the evening, no replenishment, it had hit its ceiling now, the craving sitting at the base of everything he was doing and making its preferences known. His throat moved before he'd consciously decided.
The ghoul's blood came down warm and thick from the severed neck, and he drank.
It wasn't good, nothing about the flavor registered as anything other than blood, and ghoul blood was a specific variety of unpleasant, but the craving didn't have preferences, and what mattered was the biology of it.
His throat worked steadily, the red satisfaction spreading through him with each swallow, the edge coming off.
When the body had gone dry and flat he dropped it without ceremony. The gesture had the same energy as discarding a chicken bone.
*[Hunt complete.]*
*[Sin acquired: +16.8.]*
*[Clergy kill bonus applied: +16.8.]*
*[Sin acquired: +4.7.]*
*[Current Sin: 38.6 / 80.]*
He was already moving toward where Manson had gone when the numbers registered and gave him a moment's pause.
The first bonus was for the Inquisitor. He'd never learned her name. He turned that over once, then let it go, the thought was there and then it wasn't, the way unnecessary things went when there was still work to do.
He tracked the blood trail through the undergrowth, following the irregular drops that Manson's ankle wound had left across the pavement. The mirror was gone, Manson must have grabbed it in the chaos.
He hadn't seen him take it, but it wasn't on the ground anymore.
From somewhere in the dark ahead, a howl went up.
Long. Rising. The kind of sound that didn't ask for anything, it simply announced.
"Worffff—"