Heat surged through me like molten wire. My heart struck the inside of my ribs, too fast, too hard, a fist beating from inside. The corridor snapped into terrible focus. I saw every crack in the wet stone, every splinter of broken shelf, every bead of black-gold blood on Silas's hide. My muscles jumped under the skin, not with fear, with the drug. The pain in my ribs, my hand, my back, all of it receded to a far-off hum. I was not stronger. I was simply still able to move when I should have been dead.
Silas turned. The kitchen corridor groaned under his weight. He was still a grey mountain, cracked and black-veined, but the fury in his face had moved. Now he looked less like a beast and more like a man drowning in stone.
I snapped the Confessor's Lash low. The tails sang, a thin metal shriek, and bit into the hide below his right wrist. He bellowed. I pulled. My body moved before I could think, dragging him off balance.
"Come on, you great bastard," I heard myself say. My voice came from far away. "Walk where I put you."
Silas fought the pull. His feet scraped through the broken crockery, grinding glass into powder. I dragged him toward the cluttered side of the corridor, where the snapped Matrimony wires hung from the walls and the floor was a trap of broken shelves and fallen iron.
He staggered. One step. Two. The Lash shivered with tension. I looped it once around my forearm, took the strain in my shoulder, and wrenched him toward the worst of the wreckage.
His foot caught a loop of high-tension wire. The wire snapped taut around his ankle. He stumbled, roaring, and swung his free arm into the stone wall. Plaster burst. Dust filled the air.
"Again," I muttered. My blood was on fire. "Again, you slow son of a bitch."
I yanked the Lash to the side. He turned with it, legs tangling. I stepped in, not close enough to hit, just enough to force him where I wanted. He was stronger. He was bigger. But I was faster now, and he was wounded, and I was not going to let him choose the ground.
Genesis came up. I saw the opening under his left arm, where the stone plates did not meet. My finger found the trigger. The shot cracked the air. A silver-jacketed round punched into the softer seam. Silas's roar shook dust from the beams. Black-gold fluid sprayed across the wall.
I did not wait. I moved behind him, or tried to. He spun, too fast for his size, and I threw myself sideways. His fist passed over my head and smashed into an old cupboard. The cupboard came apart in a storm of wood and dust.
Caleb's voice cut through the noise. "Father! He's turning again!"
"I noticed!" I shouted back. My fingers were already on the Lash, pulling him away from Caleb, away from the half-built needle, away from everything except the narrowing path of wreckage.
He charged. I fired again. This time the bullet hit behind his right knee as he stumbled over a fallen door. The knee buckled. He went down hard, one hand slamming into the floor and cracking the stone. The sound was a deep, wet boom.
"Almost there!" Caleb yelled. The clink of metal and the squeak of a leather cap filled a brief gap in the silence. "The cap is in!"
"Get it ready!" I yelled. My throat burned. The drug was making my voice strange, too loud, too flat. "I need it now!"
Silas pushed himself up. The black-gold veins flared across his chest and arms. The wound under his arm had already closed, but the silver still burned inside him, slowing the flesh. I could see it in the way he moved. He was healing. He was also tiring.
He came at me again, lower this time, arms spread. I threw the Lash at his neck. The tails caught against the stone plates, found the gaps, held. I pulled. He gagged, stumbled, one heavy hand clawing at the metal.
I fired my third shot. It glanced off a rising vein near his collarbone and tore a long, ugly fissure. He screamed. The sound was not just rage. It was grief and confusion and pain.
Two rounds left. I knew it without looking. I could not kill him with two. I could only keep him down until Caleb was done.
"Slide it!" I shouted. My voice cracked. "Caleb, slide the damn thing to me!"
A scrape of metal on stone. Caleb was low behind the toppled table. He pushed the Last Rite's needle across the floor. It came through the dust, turning once, the silver tip glinting under the failing light. I saw the mechanical cap. I saw the shaft. I saw the weight in it.
Silas turned at the sound. He saw the needle. Some deep animal part of him understood what it was. He lunged toward Caleb.
"Not him!" I threw myself between them. My right hand caught the last free length of the Lash. I pulled. The serrated tails bit into the back of Silas's knee. He stumbled, one leg failing. I dropped to one knee, grabbed the needle, and shoved Genesis into my belt.
The revolver went in hard against my hip. It would have to stay there.
I stood. The needle was heavier than it looked, cold and greasy with machine oil. My left hand would not close around it. I pressed the heel of that useless hand against the side of the shaft. It was not a grip. It was a prop. My right hand found the cap.
Silas was trying to rise. I kicked the inside of his knee. He went down again. His back hit a broken shelf, and the old wood splintered under him. Dust rolled across the floor.
I stepped onto his chest.
The stone was warm under my boot. I climbed him like a man climbing a dead wall. One knee on his sternum, the other against his side. He thrashed, but the Lash still clung to his neck, and his strength was failing.
His stone hand rose, grabbed at my leg, then fell. The black-gold veins pulsed once, twice. He lay back, his chest heaving, his head against the broken floor.
For a second, there was no sound. Only my heart, too fast, too loud. Only the drip of black-gold from his wounds. Only Caleb's breathing behind me.
Then Silas's eyes cleared.
The grey film receded. The rage went out of him like air leaving a bladder. He looked up at me, not at the weapon, not at the blood, but at my face.
"Are you sad, Father?" he asked.
His voice was small, cracked, human.
I held the needle against his chest. My thumb found the trigger. I looked down at him. I thought of the boy somewhere deeper in the house, breathing wet through malformed lungs. I thought of the housemaid in the wood, wearing Iona's face. I thought of all the men who put the stitches in him.
"I don't deserve to be called that," I said. "You're the good father, Silas."
I pressed the cap.
The whine rose, thin and high, a mechanical scream. The piston slammed once. I felt it through the shaft, through my ribs, through him. The spike sank. The sound did not echo. It ended inside him.
Then silence.