The silence after the needle was worse than the sound.
I stayed on Silas's chest for a long moment, my thumb still pressed against the cap, my right hand locked around the shaft. The Eucharist had begun to fail. My arms shook. My breath came in short, wet pulls. The corridor swam in and out of focus, and the only thing I could feel clearly was the heat bleeding out of the stone body beneath me.
Then Caleb's hands were under my arms, pulling me off. I went down hard, not on my feet, but against the wall. My knees gave.
"Stay with me, Father." His voice was thin, urgent, somewhere above my head. "Don't close your eyes."
I did not close my eyes. I was too far gone to sleep. The drug was leaving my blood now, and it was taking the lie of strength with it. The pain returned, not as a single blow but as a wave. My ribs, my hand, my spine, all of it woke at once.
I turned my head and vomited onto the broken floor. It was mostly gin and blood.
Caleb did not flinch. He knelt beside me, one hand on my shoulder, the other already checking my pulse. I watched his face, pale and streaked with black dust, and I hated how young he looked.
"Silas," I rasped.
"Dead," Caleb said.
I nodded. It was all I could manage.
We stayed there for a while. I do not know how long. The house had gone quiet, so quiet I could hear the faint drip of water somewhere in the walls. My heart still hammered, but slower now, each beat a dull, sick thud.
Then I heard it: a wet, shallow breath, very close to silence. The son.
Caleb heard it too. He looked toward the dark doorway at the end of the corridor.
"Stay here, Father," he said.
I shook my head. "Help me up."
He did, though I could see he wanted to argue. With his shoulder under my arm, we moved through the ruined kitchen, past the fallen shelves and the snapped wires, into the cold belly of the manor.
The boy was in a small parlor, lying on a settee that had been dragged across the floor. He was small, too thin, his body bent in places that should not bend. His skin was the color of old milk. The black stitches on his back, visible through the torn shirt, made a line like a dead centipede.
Caleb let me down by the wall and went to him. The boy's eyes were open, but they did not see. His mouth moved, a small wet shape, but no words came.
I watched Caleb sit on the floor and lift the boy into his arms. He did it the way you would lift a bird with a broken wing. The boy's head rested against Caleb's chest. His breath hitched, then steadied, then slowed.
Caleb looked at me over the boy's head. His grey eyes were bright, but his voice was steady.
"I won't let him die alone," he said.
I did not answer. I leaned my head against the cold wall and closed my eyes.
Some time later, the wet sound stopped.
Caleb did not move for a long while. Then he laid the boy back down and folded the child's hands over his chest. I heard him murmur something. It might have been a prayer. It might have been the boy's name. I did not ask.
---
We buried them beneath the yew at the edge of the broken wall.
Caleb found a shovel in a lean-to behind the stables. The ground was wet and heavy, and he did most of the work. I tried to help, but my left hand was useless, and every time I bent, my ribs sent a white flare through my side. In the end, I used my one good hand to pull stones from the fallen wall and stack them beside the grave.
We dug as deep as we could. Not deep enough for a proper burial, but enough to lay Silas on his back and place the boy in the crook of his arm. The child looked even smaller against the grey stone of his father's chest.
I sat on the cold earth while Caleb filled the grave. The sky was beginning to lighten, the fog thinning to a pale, wet grey. A few crows watched from the broken wall.
Before we lowered them, I knelt beside Silas. The needle had left a wound at his sternum, still black with drying fluid. I worked my knife into the crack, not gently. The flesh gave. Inside, near the core of him, something glowed faintly.
I pulled it free.
It was a stone, perfectly round, the size of a robin's egg. Blood-red, warm, and smooth. It pulsed once against my palm, like a heartbeat, then lay still.
I looked at it for a long time.
"What is that?" Caleb asked. He was standing at the edge of the grave, mud to his elbows.
"The reason this happened," I said. "And they will come back for it."
I put the stone in my pocket, next to the one from the succubus. Two warm stones now. Both round. Both too clean to have grown inside a body.
Caleb said nothing. He only picked up the shovel again.
We covered them with earth and then with stones from the landslide, building a low cairn under the yew. I stood at the head of it and tried to speak a prayer. My mouth was dry and tasted of blood.
"Paternoster," I said.
The words stopped there. I could not make them mean anything.
Caleb bowed his head. We stayed until the fog brightened and the crows left.
---
We found the diary in a servant's room off the upper passage.
I had gone looking for clean linen to wrap my hand. Caleb went with me, holding a lamp, because I could not carry anything. The room was small, cold, and smelled of old lavender. A narrow bed. A washstand. A small chest under the window.
Caleb opened the chest and lifted out a book bound in dark leather. Its pages were warped. A black thread had been wound around the cover and tied in a knot. He held it up to the lamp.
"Her name was Agnes," Caleb said quietly. "She wrote in it until the end."
"Read it later," I said. I was too tired to feel much. "Keep it out of sight."
Caleb slipped the book into his coat. "Later," he agreed.
We left the manor before noon.
The walk back to High Moor was slow. My body was failing, and Caleb half-carried me for the last half-mile. The Shepherd's Rest was quiet. The innkeeper took one look at us and said nothing, only brought a basin and clean cloths.
I sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the wall. The two stones in my pocket were still warm. I could feel them through the wool.
Caleb sat on the floor with his back to the door. The diary lay unopened beside him.
"Father," he said after a while. "Did we win?"
I did not answer. Outside, the fog was lifting over the moor, and somewhere under the yew, the good father held his son in the dark.