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Chapter Text

The sun had yet to set, but it somehow felt that the night had already begun: the air already hummed with the manic energy that attended the hunt. 

And what Eileen had heard skittering around the corner was no beast.

Age had yet to dull her hearing, and her instincts were well-honed. She knew how to tell beast from man. All the doors around her were already locked tight, all the respectable people tucked away safe in their homes, and so Eileen drew her blades: but slowly, carefully, she reminded herself. It wouldn’t be the first time some poor defenseless soul had found themselves trapped on the streets with night closing in.

She rounded the corner. Empty: a dead end, with looming coffins piled haphazardly, casting their broad-shouldered shadows in the fading light. Nobody in sight. One coffin sagged on its side, almost horizontal, and bore no lock.

“Ah, then,” Eileen said. “Come out, now: I’ll not harm you if you don’t harm me.”

She didn’t give her prey time to surprise her. She opened the lid, and found two frightened brown eyes staring up at her out of a small, familiar face. 

It took Eileen a moment to gather her wits.

“Of all the things to find in a coffin,” she finally said. “Adele Gascoigne, what in the world have you done?”

“Auntie Eileen!” The child’s voice cracked with relief. “I didn’t know who was coming, I was frightened –” She scrambled out of the empty coffin haphazardly, clinging to Eileen’s arms for balance; Eileen took care to hold her blades well away. Once Adele was on her feet, she sheathed them, and gripped her tightly by the wrist.

“Of course you didn’t know who was coming. What’re you thinking, girl, out by yourself on the night of the hunt? Where’s your father?”

“I don’t know,” Adele said. She reached out with her free hand and clung to Eileen’s feathered cloak, as though trying to keep her from flying away. “He hasn’t come home, and Mum went out looking for him, but she’s not back, and it’s been ages – we were scared she’d be stranded somewhere, locked out, I was just going to ask our neighbors if anyone had seen her, to listen for her if she came back – or to see if I could find Granddad – or – or –” Tears filled her eyes as the evening’s terrors caught up to her.

Eileen scarcely noticed. Gascoigne gone – that was nothing good, not the way he’d been heading these last months. She tried to think if she’d seen any trace of him, but she’d been after different quarry tonight. A rogue hunter was its own trouble, but for Viola to have gone after him – she must have been truly frightened, frightened enough to abandon her usual firm good sense. The woman knew how to handle a firearm, but she’d always refused further training from her husband’s friends, unwilling to be drawn further into the world of the hunt. Eileen had respected the decision, so long as Viola knew enough to keep herself out of harm’s way. But now … Gascoigne vanished, possibly turned, his wife alone and almost defenseless with the night of the hunt closing in: and two little girls left behind. 

“Hush now,” Eileen said, giving Adele a gentle shake. “Hush. Where’s your sister?”

“B-back at the house. I told her to w-wait, not to let anyone in.” Adele sniffed frantically.

“All right. We’ll go back to the house and we’ll see what can be done. Come on, now. Don’t cling to me like that – I won’t be able to reach my blades.”

But the streets here were quiet enough, this early, and the house was close. Once, down an alley, they saw something moving and heard panting, inhuman breath, but they passed quickly by and it didn’t follow. Adele trailed just behind and surreptitiously held a bit of Eileen’s cloak between her fingers. Eileen didn’t like to be tethered, even so lightly, but she held her tongue.

Adele pulled her away from the front door once they reached her family’s house.

“I told Laure not to let in anyone who knocked at the door,” she said. Instead she brought them around to a side window and tapped on the glass.

Laure must have been waiting close by, because she answered almost immediately.

“Addie?”

“It’s me, Laure, and I found Aunt Eileen. Open the door.”

They could hear the chair scraping against the floor as Laure launched herself from the room. They met her at the door and Adele began refastening the locks almost as soon as they’d slipped inside.

“Auntie Eileen!” Laure reached for Eileen’s hands and clung to them.

“Hello, little one. Let me take off my mask.” The girls had carefully tended the sticks of incense in the entryway and the house was filled with its rich scent; she could afford to be without her mask’s protection for a few moments.

“Do you know where Mummy and Daddy are?” Laure demanded. 

“No, Laure. I didn’t even know they’d been missing. When did you see them last?”

Adele closed the last bolt, straining on her tiptoes to reach it. “Dad left for the last hunt and didn’t come back. Mum went out this morning, and she said she’d send word to us around lunchtime. But she didn’t, and the servants all left, and they said they’d send word if they heard anything, but we haven’t had a message from anyone all day.”

“I see.” Eileen’s frown deepened. “And how has your father been, these last days?”

Both girls were quiet for a moment, before Laure finally said, “Not well.”

Adele went to her sister’s side and took her hand. “Aunt Eileen, what should we do? The house is locked tight, but we’ve already used an awful lot of incense. And the beasts came so close, last time, and there were so many of them …”

Eileen looked at the two girls, side by side, their faces pale and imploring: Adele, with her neat blonde hair and tidy dress, and Laure, glossy brown ringlets framing her still-chubby cheeks. They looked like the saintly protagonists of some belabored children’s story, the girls who listened their parents and said their prayers and reaped their rewards, while Wicked Winifred stuffed her face with sweets and died of the ashen blood.

She couldn’t leave them here. They might well be fine, hunkered down through the night and there to unbolt the doors come morning; but if anything were to happen, if the incense ran low, if the beasts grew bold … Adele was barely eleven, Laure not yet eight. They could not be expected to defend themselves or even to keep their heads come a crisis.

But Eileen had work of her own tonight. She could almost feel the sun creeping lower in the sky, taste the mounting madness in the air. She had a target – perhaps two, now – and with the night so unsettled already, no doubt there would be more. She could not keep the girls with her.

“Do you have any darker clothes?” she demanded, eyeing Laure’s white dress and Adele’s pale gray. “Those will only reflect the light.”

“We have our mourning-dresses, from Grandfather’s funeral,” Laure said. “Our real grandfather, not Granddad,” she clarified, as though Eileen might otherwise be convinced Henryk had been dead for over a year.

If only.

“Put them on, quick. Tie your hair back and see if you can’t find ash to dirty your faces.”

Laure started towards the stairs, still clutching Adele’s hand, but Adele hung back. “Are we leaving the house?” she said. “Where are we going?”

“I haven’t decided yet. Go on, now.”

They disappeared up the stairs and Eileen began to pace.

She opened the doors to the parlor. One small lantern burned next to the window, Laure’s watching-place; Eileen blew it out and cast the room into the gold-and-black shadows of early evening. The air was thick and heavy from the doors and windows having been shut up tight, but everything was neat, with only a fine layer of dust, and much as she remembered it from the years when this house was a lively late-night meeting-place for hunters of all stripes.

Viola had borne the constant barrage of hunters into her tidy little fortress with good grace, and only sighed when they sat on her fine furniture in their bloodied clothes. On nights of the hunt she often sent the servants to bed and waited up all night herself, and had a good thick stew ready come sunrise. She sat through all of their meetings, listened intently, asked and argued with the rest of them. Though she refused to join the hunt herself, she insisted that she would know what her husband did, and have some say in it.     

Gascoigne’s house was not the obvious choice for a rallying point. The hulking priest often gave the impression of a being a man of brute force and little else. Eileen herself had often been surprised when she called on the house and found him intent on his scriptures, the holy book dwarfed in his enormous hands. But the meetings proved him a man of lively opinions. 

She well remembered one night – a night at the beginning of the end, as she thought of it now – when respectful debate about the growing scourge had devolved into a blazing row, as it did with increasing frequency in those days. Gascoigne, furious, almost roaring, had brandished his holy text; Djura, equally riled, already well over the precipice of his own madness, had slapped it out of his hands. For a moment it had looked like they might come to blows – and then the kitchen door had swung open, and there stood little Laure Gascoigne. One hand on the door, the other on her hip, she had coolly surveyed the roomful of bloodstained killers and said, with the prim confidence of a child who has found an ironclad excuse to order around the grown-ups:

“Would you all please keep your voices down? Adele can’t sleep, and you are going to give me nightmares.”

Gascoigne had quickly bundled his daughter back off to bed, and Djura had slunk out the back door before he returned. But while they kept their voices low from then on, the conflicts between them only grew. The scourge was spreading rapidly, the beasts growing bolder and more fearsome; the hunts were more frequent and the nights were longer. More and more hunters succumbed to the blood. Wherever they gathered together, Eileen could feel the other hunters’ wary eyes on her, staring when they thought her gaze was elsewhere, as if they expected to see their comrades’ blood soaking her clothing still. The late night meetings, once a source of weary camaraderie, became smaller, less frequent, more fractious. And finally they stopped altogether.

Eileen could hear Laure and Adele’s footsteps upstairs. Where to take them? Who was left? Who could she trust?

She passed into the kitchen, remembering that night when a little girl in her nightdress had unwittingly saved them all from bloodshed. She hadn’t seen Djura since he’d vanished into Old Yharnam, though she had heard him, once or twice, as she stalked her targets through the abandoned quarter. That tower of his might well be one of the safest places in the city, providing you could reach it; and he’d known the girls, and cared for them, as they all had. She didn’t think much of the old fool, but did she trust him? She supposed in a certain way she did. She trusted him the way she trusted a clock set to the wrong time: she’d never set her own watch by it, but she knew exactly what it would do, and when, and why. 

Eileen heard footsteps shuffling down the stairs, and went back to the entryway to meet the girls. They had obviously succeeded in finding their mourning-clothes, though the year-old dresses looked to be uncomfortably small on them both, and the hemlines shorter than they ought to be - though that much, at least, might well prove a blessing if they needed to move quickly. They had tied back their hair and smeared their faces with ash, as instructed, though Laure seemed to have taken to the task with more relish than Adele, and was more thoroughly coated: her hands were still black. Eileen removed her own gloves, scraped some of the ash from Laure’s hands, and ran it through Adele’s pale hair for good measure.

“There, now. You’ll be harder to spot this way. Do you remember Djura? We’re going to the old part of the city, to find him. You’ll be safe with him till morning comes.”

“Uncle Djura?” said Adele. Her face lit up briefly, and well it might: Djura hadn’t quite managed to spoil the Gascoigne girls rotten during his visits, but it certainly hadn’t been for lack of trying.

“He’s made his nest in a big old clock tower in the old quarter,” Eileen said. She slipped her mask back on, fastened it tight. “Stay close to me, girls, and be silent.”

“And you’ll look for Mum and Dad, won’t you, Auntie Eileen?” said Laure.

“I will. I promise.” Eileen undid the bolts and locks on the door and ushered the girls out onto the step. Adele grasped her cloak again; Laure nestled almost against her side.

“Daddy said Uncle Djura had gone mad,” Laure said, with the same neutral curiosity with which she might have said, Daddy said Uncle Djura went on a long trip to the tropics.

“Yes, well,” Eileen said, “We all wear madness differently. You’ve nothing to fear from him.”

“I know that,” Laure said, sounding slightly insulted.

“Come along, then.” Eileen took each girl by their shoulders and swept them out into the gathering darkness.

Eileen heard the beast just in time. She flung the girls behind her with one hand while the other sliced her blade through the air. It interrupted the beast’s lunge, sank through skin and muscle just beneath its throat, and sent it tumbling backwards. Some small, alert part of her consciousness heard the girls go crashing into the doorway behind her: safe, then, for now, so she lunged forward and attacked before the thing could find its footing. Three swift slices across its neck: and then it was still.

She stood still, panting, every sense on high alert. Only now did she register exactly what had attacked them: one of the enormous wolf-creatures, the kind that often traveled in packs. There were several shadowy alleyways that fed into the little courtyard they were passing through, offering plenty of dark corners in which another beast might lurk. She waited, ears straining, but heard no other movement, and finally turned back to the girls.

They were huddled on the stoop, eyes wide, clinging to each others’ arms.

“Is it dead?” whispered Laure.

“Yes. It’s dead.”

“Did it bite you?”

A moment’s confusion: then Eileen remembered that the thing had tried to get its teeth around her arm, as she was finishing it off. In the heat of the moment she’d paid it no mind. She examined her left forearm: the sleeve was torn, and drenched in slobber, but she could already tell that the beast hadn’t broken skin.

“No. I’m fine. And in any case I’ve blood enough to fix worse than that,” she said, touching the vials at her waist.

Adele’s gaze was riveted on the corpse. “It came so fast,” she whispered. She climbed slowly to her feet and pulled her sister with her. “Are there more?”

“In Yharnam? Yes, many.” Eileen knew that wasn’t what Adele was asking, but she was unsettled. The wolf-creatures were purely animal, deep in the throes of the scourge; she was not accustomed to see them in the streets before midnight – not here in the central district, and certainly not with the sun still hanging low and red in the sky. The hunts had grown ever more chaotic and unpredictable of late, but she had never seen anything like this. She felt a tense, anxious chill in her chest that she struggled to shake.

“I don’t hear any others around,” she told Adele, “but we’ll have to be much more careful as we go.”

“How much farther?” said Laure.

“A ways yet. Though –” Eileen paused, thinking – “there may be a faster way. Come along, now, quickly, before any others come.”

Adele was still looking at the slaughtered beast with mingled revulsion and fascination; her face was pale beneath the ash. It was certainly a ghastly sight – teeth exposed in a snarl and slick with the thing’s own blood, the gashes in its throat gaping open to reveal wet pink layers of flesh and glimpses of white bone. Such things had long since ceased to bother Eileen, or even attract her attention; but she seemed to see it afresh through Adele’s eyes. There was no sense in coddling the girls, of course, and yet …

“Adele,” she said, a little more sharply than she meant to, “come along and let’s be gone.”

Laure was already at Eileen’s side and reaching for her arm – but she drew her hand away, quickly, and looked at the streak of blood across her palm.

“Oh,” she said softly.

“Yes,” Eileen said, “it’s blood, I expect I’m well-coated in it; be glad it’s his and not mine. This is what hunters do, little one, your father included. It’s grim work but it must be done.”

“I know,” Laure said bravely.

“Hush, then, both of you, and follow me.”

The girls had hardly been cheery before, but their silence had a stunned and solemn quality to it now. Eileen led them out of the courtyard, across a plaza, and down a flight of steps, her senses straining to detect the slightest sound or motion from the shadows. They came to a rusted gate recessed low in a wall, just large enough for an adult to crawl through. It bore a lock, but Eileen knew it had long since rusted and broken; she tugged the gate open now with little resistance.

“We’ll go through the sewers,” Eileen said. “We can cut a straighter path that way. Follow close behind me, now.” This was a gamble, but Eileen felt confident in the odds: while nasty beasts festered in some of the darker corners of Yharnam’s elaborate sewer system, the main paths were generally kept clear by the many hunters who used them to move quickly through the city. There was a stretch that would allow them to cut straight across the otherwise labyrinthine streets above. They could cut their travel time in half, and give the beasts less opportunity to surprise them besides. 

Eileen struck a match, lit her lantern, and clipped it carefully to her belt. Then she crouched through the gate and began to crawl.

“The sewers?” said Adele behind her. Eileen could almost hear her nose wrinkling.

“The sewers!” said Laure, sounding delighted with the adventure, and she went scrambling forward.

They crawled a short way through the sludgy runoff from the last rainstorm, until Eileen felt her way to a ladder and climbed down. They had descended no more than halfway when Laure above her suddenly hissed, “Oh! It stinks!”

“It’s a sewer, Laure,” said Eileen, almost amused. “It’s not for draining rosewater.”

The incense and herbs in her own mask protected her from the worst of the scent, but by the time her boots squelched unpleasantly into the marshy mixture below, even she could feel something heavy, humid, and cloying pressing against her nose.

“Jump off, Laure,” Eileen said impatiently; Laure had stopped on the bottom rung, one hand clamped over her nose and mouth, obviously unwilling to step into the muck.

“Go on, Laure,” whispered Adele from above, who had used the pause to pinch her own nose closed.

Laure screwed her eyes closed and hopped off the ladder, letting out a little moan of misery as her boots sank in. Adele followed. Both girls stood now with their hands clasped over their faces, their eyes watering; Eileen suddenly felt ever-so-slightly guilty for the fact that she alone wore a mask.     

“It won’t be so bad once you get used to it,” she improvised, rather doubting that this was true. She waved them forward and they left the shelter of the small dead-end alley where they had climbed down and entered the surprisingly lofty space beyond. Eileen had once known a pair of hunters who had trained with Byrgenwerth scholars before they’d decided they preferred the thrill of the hunt; they hadn’t quite managed to put academia behind them, and Eileen vaguely remembered them rambling on about how the sewers were a sterling example of Yharnam’s archaeological layering, having been catacombs long before, and perhaps sacred ritual spaces even before that. Eileen hadn’t paid much attention. Those two hadn’t lasted very long.

While this part of the sewers was blessedly open, with few dark corners where beasts might lurk, the smell was no better, and Laure was beginning to whimper as they waded through the ever-deeper layer of Yharnam’s night soil.

“Couldn’t we –” she started to say, when suddenly she let out a strangled, panicked noise and lurched off-balance. Adele reached out and caught her and suddenly began to tug – it took Eileen a moment to make out the slop-coated figure of a sewer ghoul with its grotesque fingers wrapped around Laure’s ankle. Eileen lunged forward, drew her blade, and sliced its hand clean off its wrist before she could even think; once her senses had caught up with her, she drove her sword into the thing’s throat for good measure. The blade lodged and Eileen kicked out with her foot to pry the thing off; it flew backward, half-severed head flopping grotesquely.

“Gods’ blood,” Eileen swore, “damn it –“ 

Eyes wide, hands clapped over her mouth, Laure was taking sharp, panicked breaths, drawing in more of the foul air, which in turn only upset her further – Adele, bracing her sister, arms wrapped around her waist, looked desperately at Eileen. Eileen didn’t give herself time to think. Her fingers scrambled for the fastenings of her mask and she tugged it off her face. The stench made her eyes water, but she held it over Laure’s face – “Here, Laure, just breathe this, just breathe” – and began to fasten it. 

“There’s only one – ” she started to say to Adele.

“Just give it to her, “ Adele said bravely, “It’s all right, Aunt Eileen.”

The mask was much too big, of course, but Eileen fastened it as tightly as she could and Laure held it in place. The reek of the sewage was almost overpowering, but Eileen thought that she could smell something else, too, underneath it, something rank and sour: the smell of the beast.

Just imagining it, just imagining it, you silly old thing, Eileen told herself, trying to subdue her own mounting fear. You won’t be snarling and slobbering after only a few minutes.

Her own mouth tightly closed, Eileen gestured to Adele and grabbed at Laure; half-dragging her, half-carrying her, she surged forward, Adele close beside her, and the three of them took to their heels and ran.

Chapter Text

The doors to Old Yharnam shuddered and groaned as Eileen threw her weight against them. She left them open just wide enough for her and the girls to slip through, and then closed them tightly again. She paused for just a moment, bracing her hands against the rotting wood, to catch her breath. It wasn’t as though they were much safer here than on the other side of the door, but she still felt comforted to have closed themselves off from whatever might have been lurking behind them.

They’d dashed pell-mell through the sewers and had climbed back up as soon as they’d found a ladder, having covered a little more than half the distance Eileen had initially hoped to. They’d stopped to wash their boots in a fountain’s brackish water and to regain their wits. It had been foolish of Eileen to lose her head, and she’d cursed herself for it as they picked their way slowly through the streets. The ghoul had surprised her – she had never seen beasts in that part of the sewers – but that was no excuse. And she’d allowed the loss of the mask to unsettle her further. The mask offered some protection from the scourge, yes, but she was beginning to cling to the thing like a child to its favorite blanket, and that was unacceptable; she had children enough to account for already. Still, she had donned it again as soon as they were safe. Tomorrow, she swore to herself, tomorrow she would work on breaking her attachment to the thing: but first let the three of them survive the night.

Laure and Adele were looking wide-eyed at the charred beast-corpses, wandering towards the overlook.

“Wait, girls,” Eileen called. “No further.” She scanned the skyline and found the old tower, its clock face glowing eerily in the sun’s last crimson rays. She couldn’t make out a figure on top, of course, but she had no doubt Djura was there, nor that he had already noticed the intrusion on his territory.

“Laure, hold still a moment.” She half-knelt to grasp the smaller girl around her middle and hoisted her up, almost high enough to sit on her shoulder; her old bones groaned with the effort.

“What’re you doing?” Adele asked, as Laure made a little sound of surprise.

Eileen kept her gaze on the tower. “Making sure Djura can see who’s here.”

She herself was likely unmistakable, with her cloak and her cap, but she doubted that Djura would grant her safe passage for old times’ sake. She doubted, too, that he would be able to recognize the Gascoigne girls at this distance, and after so long. But whether he recognized them or not, she knew the soft old fool would never open fire on children.

She held Laure up a moment longer. Djura didn’t call out, at least, likely still baffled by the presence of their strange party. She set Laure down and nodded to Adele.

“You see the tower, there? We’re going that way. There will be beasts about here as well – we’ll be quick and quiet, and try not to fight them.” 

As they crossed the bridge, Djura finally gathered his wits. His voice echoed across the rooftops:

“Eileen! Whatever you’re planning, stay well away from the beasts. If you harm them …”

What, Djura? Eileen thought. You’ll mow me down, and these poor wee babes with me? Not likely. Djura didn’t finish his threat, obviously aware that she’d backed him into a corner.

“Why doesn’t he want us to harm the beasts?” Adele whispered.

“He protects them. Hush,” she said, to cut off further questions she could see bubbling up. She kept the girls pressed close to the walls as they edged past a beast that still looked almost human. As it wandered dangerously close, Eileen grasped a plank of wood from one of the still-burning pyres and held it in front of them. The beast shied backwards, cringing, making a pained and guttural whimper. Eileen would never understand why Djura thought it a kindness to leave them like this, shambling and grotesque, when one clean cut with her blade would put the thing out of its misery forever.

Still, she kept the girls skulking along the edges of the streets, dragging them down alleys and through burnt-out buildings to avoid crossing the paths of the beasts who roamed Old Yharnam. There was no sense in antagonizing Djura, and in any case – well, the girls had likely seen enough blood tonight to last them a lifetime. The abandoned quarter was quieter than those above, at least: no screams, no panicked laughter, no echoing scrape of blade on stone. Just the groans and growls of the beasts, and the crackling flames. Ash coated everything. It muffled their footsteps, settled over the girls’ hair and skin. Eileen had them hold their collars over their mouths where it was particularly thick, to keep them from breathing it in.

She’d been there the night it burned. They all had. It was a desperate move, one she couldn’t even call a gamble – there had been no calculation, no careful assessment of the odds. It was a frantic lashing-out by an animal that had been backed into a corner. Oh, the Church had made a pageant of it, had proclaimed it a great and noble crusade. But they had all been realizing that the scourge wasn’t slowing, that the beasts were beginning to outnumber men – especially here, in this cursed district the ashen blood had already decimated. And look who had won that night, under that unearthly red moon, for all the hunters’ crazed and panicked violence: beasts ruled the streets here now, not men. Some hunters had died that night, others vanished; more began to crack. Djura certainly had. And all for nothing.

Still, Eileen remembered all this with a certain dispassion. What was done was done. They had tried, and they had failed, and little by little they had fallen apart. What she found most difficult to reconcile, now, was the fact that they had ever thought they might win a decisive victory in this fight. It had been a long time since she’d expected anything but small successes: this endless war between order and chaos whittled down to the crash of her blades against those of her blood-maddened opponent. And even those human-scaled victories were no longer so certain as they once were.

The sun slipped beneath the horizon as they walked; the sky turned purple and on the streets the shadows darkened and stretched greedily to swallow everything they could reach. They had nearly reached the base of the tower when a hooded figure stepped out of the darkness to block their path. Eileen almost swore aloud.

“No further,” the man said. He took her in, the children next to her. “What’s your business here?”

He looked familiar, but only vaguely; newer blood, she supposed, brought in after everything began to crumble, not one of the old veterans who would have frequented the Gascoignes’ house. She knew that Djura had swayed a few devotees to his mad crusade, but she’d never met one and hadn’t expected to find her path barred. He must have retreated to the tower when he heard there was an intruder. 

She drew the girls closer to her. “I have a delivery for Djura.”

“I know what sort of thing you deliver, Hunter of Hunters.”

Eileen laughed sharply. “Is that what this is about? I’ve no interest in your master. As long as he keeps to his den here he’s no concern of mine. These girls are the children of a mutual friend and they require his protection. As soon as they’re safe, I’ll be gone.”

The hunter eyed the girls warily. “Old Yharnam is no place for children.”

“Yharnam is no place for children. Especially not tonight. You won’t allow the hunt to come here – where safer, then?”

The hunter considered it, his eyes glittering under his hood as he looked at Laure and Adele. Eileen prayed that the sort of man who would throw his life away for Djura’s cause was the sort of man who might have a tender spot in his heart for a pair of frightened children, and she silently willed the girls to look as sweet and defenseless as ever they could. Finally he said, “I’ll speak to Djura. Wait here.”

He climbed the ladder. The girls were uncharacteristically quiet as they waited, sagging against Eileen, their heads drooping as exhaustion caught up with them; Adele fiddled absently with the feathers on her cape. At last Djura’s ally descended again.

“Eileen, he says he’ll speak with you. Leave the children here.”

“The girls stay with me,” Eileen said firmly. Before he could react, she pressed her advantage and ushered them towards the ladder. Well done, Djura, she thought. I expect you’d feel less guilty blasting me off the tower if there weren’t children there to see it? Or did you think seeing their sweet little faces would make it too hard to refuse?

The girls quailed at the base of the ladder.

“All the way up there?” Laure said weakly, craning her head.

“You’re great big girls now,” Eileen said. “You can climb a ladder. Go on – you go first, and I’ll follow behind. Then if you do fall you’ll have a nice soft landing." 

They didn’t laugh, but Laure bravely steeled herself and started up, and Adele followed behind. They climbed at a steady pace, and Eileen kept a watchful eye to make sure they didn’t flag. When Laure finally reached the top, she heaved herself up with a great burst of energy and blurted in a great rush:

“Please-Uncle-Djura-may-we-stay?”

Eileen climbed up after Adele and with some effort got her feet back under her. Laure was frozen halfway across the rooftop, looking as though she had started to run towards Djura and then thought better of it, and Eileen didn’t blame her. The younger girl’s memories of him must have been fuzzy to begin with, and even a quick glance in the dying light showed him haggard and much the worse for the wear: clothes tattered and faded, hair unkempt. He’d obviously lost his eye patch and had replaced it with a bandage that looked none too clean. Adele lingered just behind her sister, equally hesitant; she reached for Laure’s hand.

Djura, for his part, looked no less surprised. “Eileen,” he finally said, “what the hell is going on?” 

“You remember Gascoigne’s daughters,” Eileen said calmly. Behind her mask she eyed the stake driver he wore on his right arm: a clumsy weapon, by her reckoning, but Djura always was attached to it, and the tight quarters here atop the tower would let him use it to good advantage. “Gascoigne’s gone missing, and Viola after him. The girls were all alone in the house. I already have work tonight, perhaps more than I planned on; they can’t stay with me.”

“You want me to keep them here?”

Djura was looking rapidly back and forth between her, and the girls, and the rooftop itself, likely considering its unsuitability as a nursery.

“We’ll be very good, Uncle Djura,” Laure said softly, uncharacteristically shy.

“Just until the sun rises,” Eileen added.

“And then what?”

“And then the sun will have risen, and things may well look different. Or they may not. Either way, I’ll be back for them.”

Djura still looked vaguely baffled, and Eileen almost pitied him: cut off from almost all human company for years, only for her to barge in with two children in tow and demand that he play nanny for the evening.

“You will look after them? They’ve nowhere else to go.”

Djura paused. Finally: “I will.”

The last pale light was leaching from the sky and the buildings below were draped in shadow; it was time to be gone. Eileen touched Laure and Adele lightly on their heads.

“You’ve been very brave tonight, both of you. Mind Djura, now, and I’ll see you come morning.”

Laure reached for her hand. “And you’ll find Mum and Dad, won’t you?”

Eileen squeezed her little hand. “I will do everything I can.”

Before she began to climb down the ladder, she paused and turned back.

“Should anything happen – I expect you’ll find me in Cathedral Ward this evening.”

Then she gathered her cloak and descended.

Djura stood looking at his two charges, stiff and awkward and grasping for something to say. The Gascoigne girls looked back at him shyly, huddled together as if for warmth. The silence stretched out between them, awkward and empty, until he finally closed the distance and gently lifted Adele’s chin with his free hand.

“Well, now, what’s she done to you, eh?” he said. “You look like little chimney-sweeps.”

He was rewarded with two quick, hesitant smiles.

“Auntie Eileen told us to put ash on,” Laure said. “It made us harder to see.”

“Ah. Clever, that.”

Under the soot, he could recognize now the familiar faces of children he’d known since they were babes-in-arms. Time was he’d always keep sweets in his pockets when he knew he’d be passing by the Gascoigne house, to sneak into their chubby little fingers when their parents weren’t looking. But they looked a bit too old to be bought off with a piece of licorice, now.

“You’ve shot up since I’ve seen you last,” he said, still scrambling for conversation. “Doesn’t it hurt, to grow so quickly?”

“We haven’t seen you in ages,” Laure corrected, in a scolding tone. “Have you been here the whole time?”

“Well – yes.”

“Why?” she demanded.

“I – I protect the beasts." 

“But why?” she repeated. “And what’s that?” – pointing to the Gatling gun. “And why is everything all burnt? And who was that below?” 

Djura, reeling, ill-practiced at any kind of conversation, looked helplessly at Adele.

“Aunt Eileen never tells us why,” the older girl said, in defense of her sister. “She just tells us to do things and then says ‘Hush.’”

“'Hoosh,’” Laure said quietly, imitating Eileen’s accent. 

Adele suddenly giggled. “Hoosh,” she repeated. “Hoosh.”

Both girls started giggling now, hoosh-ing each other back and forth. It had a manic energy to it, a desperate release valve for whatever ordeal they’d gone through to get here – which must have been no little thing, Djura thought, mentally tracing the route from their house to the old quarter.

Adele suddenly reigned herself in and tugged on her sister’s hand. “We shouldn’t make fun,” she said, fighting back her smile. “It isn’t kind." 

Ah, serious little Adele. Djura could still remember when she’d been a little babe scarcely big enough to hold up her own head: Viola would hold her in her lap while she received guests in the parlor, and Adele would survey them all with a furrowed brow and a suspicious air. Henryk was the only one, besides her parents, who could ever get her to smile or laugh; she loved to grab at the feathers dangling off his cap. There was another hunter back then, Albert, who was full of mischievous energy, devil-may-care and something of a rake; baffled by Henryk’s success, he’d tried every trick in the book to get the same response out of her only to be met with a stony glower. They’d howled with laughter – She’s got you figured, hasn’t she? Clever lass!

And then along had come Laure, different from her sister as day from night: smiling and sunny, affectionate, adventurous, and not nearly so fussy. When she was angry, though, it was something to behold: she’d throw herself on the floor and arch her back, red in the face, limbs flailing; her parents had worried she might do herself harm. When she was a little older, her tantrums were rare but formidable. Once, back before the Church had put a stop to such things, Djura had stopped by the house to drop off some blueprints, but when an exhausted-looking Gascoigne opened the door he’d heard Laure’s stormy screams and wails from within. 

“Two hours and counting,” Gascoigne had said, and shut the door in his face.

Around the other hunters, though, Laure and Adele were good as gold, and why shouldn’t they have been? They were everyone’s little darlings. Calloused and battle-scarred hands were always reaching out to pet their hair or pass them presents, and they received it all as their natural due. Few hunters had children. Fewer still were able to raise them in such a domestic idyll. And among the ordinary folk, many young families had begun to flee Yharnam, preferring to take their chances in a strange new place than to risk their loved ones’ lives on the beast-infested streets. Gascoigne alone seemed invulnerable to Yharnam’s creeping rot: husband, wife, and two healthy, happy daughters lived out their days in a warm and tidy house, beasts or no beasts. And after the long nights of slaughter, there were few hunters who didn’t want to escape into that world for a little while, who didn’t relish the chance to drown their troubles for an hour or two in cheerful little-girl chatter. Djura didn’t come as often or stay as long as some, but he’d liked to think that he’d endeared himself to the two of them by acting as engineering consultant on their fortresses when they played knights and castles, and bringing them gifts of little cogs and shiny bullet casings to act as decorations.

“This is a Gatling gun,” Djura said now. “Come have a look.” 

A bit of blessed quiet stole across the tower as the darkness deepened above. Laure had been if anything a bit too interested in the Gatling gun, and had felt strongly that she ought to be allowed to give it a try; Djura had only just managed to distract her from this with the offer of food. He’d headed down the trapdoor and rifled through his store of preserves scavenged from the burned-out houses below. Though the girls professed to be starving, he’d been unable to interest them in a jar of green beans, which had seemed like a healthy sort of thing to offer growing children. After they’d picked listlessly at it for a few minutes, casting him doleful looks, he’d finally given up, eaten the beans himself, and offered them a jar of sticky-sweet jam instead. They’d dipped his hardtack into it, and gnawing and wrestling with the tough biscuit as they struggled to get a bite had kept them occupied for long enough for Djura to remove his stake driver, sink into a chair, and wonder what on the gods’ green earth he’d gotten himself into. 

After they’d finished, the girls had wanted to go back up and look at the view, and now they had settled contentedly on the edge of the roof. Djura had a vague feeling that perhaps they shouldn’t be allowed to sit with their legs dangling above a lethal drop, but they seemed steady enough, and Adele had a good grip on her sister. Laure seemed like she was beginning to drowse, her head sinking against Adele’s shoulder.

Djura wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself. He was accustomed to spend his nights in meditative silence, drumming out absent-minded rhythms on the Gatling gun or lovingly repairing his weapons, interrupted only by the occasional foolish hunter who ignored his warnings; he slept during the day, mostly, and used what sunlight was left to go scavenging through the streets while the beasts were quieter. His days had a simple rhythm to them: unconscious, automatic, almost – he had thought more than once, with an ironic smile – dreamlike. He could hardly remember the dream anymore, just vague images: a field of flowers, a pair of cool white hands. Pleasant enough, compared to the dreams he had now of smoke and blood dripping from his fingers. 

The rhythm of his life here kept all that away from his waking mind, kept him skimming lightly along the surface of his consciousness: but those two little figures perched on the edge of the roof had unsettled him. He paced awkwardly back and forth, scanning the horizon, listening for the sound of any disturbance below, jittery and self-conscious. He finally looked again at the girls, sighed, and went to join them. 

He eased himself down awkwardly next to Adele. She was on his right, where he had no peripheral vision; he had to turn his head to look at her. She was regarding him with that funny grave expression of hers, but when he caught her looking she quickly glanced away. But after a moment’s silence, she finally spoke:

“Why don’t you want anyone to harm the beasts?”

How many times had he tried to explain that very thing before he finally retreated to Old Yharnam – not least to the girl’s own father? But it had been so long since he’d had to explain himself. He’d forgotten how. Still, he reached for words, and they finally came, clumsy and blunt.

“They’re people,” he said wearily. “They’re just people. They’re sick, Adele, do you understand? They don’t mean to do harm. They don’t know what they’re doing. It’s not right, to kill them, just for that.”

“Oh,” Adele said. She paused, turning this over. “What about if they attack you? Is it wrong to hurt them back, if you’re only trying to get away?” Her tone was thoughtful, philosophical, not argumentative in the least. “We had to fight a few, on our way here. They might’ve killed us if we hadn’t.”

Djura tried very hard not to picture this – the girls at the mercy of some shadowy beast, the beast at the mercy of Eileen’s blades – and did very badly at it.

“It’s just – the hunt. You’ve never seen it. Sending out hunters armed to the teeth, night after night – it’s not right. They’re just people.”

After a moment’s thoughtful pause, Adele said, “I’ve seen my dad, when he comes back from the hunt.” Djura waited, but she didn’t say anything more, and he couldn’t tell whether she had meant to argue with him or agree.

From their seat they could see the lights in the windows of the city above, more and more flickering to life with every passing moment. There weren’t so many now as there had been a mere six months ago. But compared to the skyline above, Old Yharnam at their feet might have been an utter wilderness, dense and dark and echoing with the cries of beasts.

“Are they sick like Daddy’s sick?” Laure said.

“What’s that?” Djura said, surprised: he’d thought Laure was asleep.

“The beasts,” Laure said. “My dad’s sick, too, but he and Mum won’t tell us what’s wrong, not really, and Addie says I shouldn’t ask because it upsets them. Is he sick like they are? Because he forgets us, sometimes, and he doesn’t know –” She gasped, a small sharp noise.

“Addie,” she said, seizing her sister’s arm, “Addie – the music box.”

Adele went very still beside him.

“She must have taken it,” she said, “she must have, she’d remember –”

“It was on the mantel!” Laure said, her voice rising high with panic. She scrambled to her feet – “Careful, Laure,” cried Adele at the same time as Djura shouted, “Easy, there” – but she found her footing and began tugging urgently on her sister. “It was on the mantel, Addie, upstairs, where we were getting the ash – I saw it, I know I did, I can see it there –” 

Now Adele was standing, too, her eyes wide. “She didn’t have it with her, did she?” she said frantically. “When she was leaving this morning – she took the gun but not the music box, and it’s big, she would have had to carry it in her hands, we would have seen it –”

“Uncle Djura, Uncle Djura,” Laure said, “we’ve got to go back – Mum doesn’t have the music box.”

“The music box,” Djura said, getting to his feet, facing the two frantic little girls. He had no idea what they were talking about, but he’d never seen them so frightened – it would be one thing if excitable little Laure were the only one upset, but Adele looked like she might faint – and there was a sliver of ice that had been sliding down his spine ever since Laure had asked if the beasts were sick like Daddy’s sick.

“It plays Daddy’s favorite song,” Laure said urgently, “and when Daddy forgets us we play it for him so that he remembers – he doesn’t mean to hurt anyone, he doesn’t, but it’s just like you said, sometimes he doesn’t know what he’s doing – but if Mum doesn’t have it – he might – he might –” 

Laure didn’t finish her sentence. She didn’t need to. 

Gods damn it all.

Gascoigne, of all people – the man was a rock, an anchor; there was a reason the hunters had gravitated towards him, had congregated at his home, doted on his children, and it wasn’t all to do with Viola’s cooking. He and Djura had never been what Djura would call friends, even before everything had started to go to hell, but there had been many a hunt when Djura had been comforted to know that Gascoigne was on his side. He had been everything a hunter was supposed to be, devout and nigh-invincible – which was to say he’d been everything Djura despised after he’d finally recognized the hunt for what it was. And even so, he was shaken to think of the man succumbing to the scourge. 

But there was something else, too, a piece trying to click into place in his beleaguered brain – he kept getting distracted thinking about Viola wandering defenseless into the reach of her own scourge-addled husband, and gods damn it, he’d liked Viola, not that that should make any difference – but no, that wasn’t it – what was it Eileen had said? 

I already have work tonight, perhaps more than I planned on.

They can’t stay with me.

Shit.

Shit.

Eileen was going after Gascoigne. Of course she was. Her usual charge was hunters lost to blood, not beasthood, but gods knew the kind of damage a powerful cleric like Gascoigne could do if he turned, and in some sick way Eileen probably felt it was her duty to finish off her old friend. Djura lifted his cap and began to run his hand through his hair, tugging at it frantically.

“This music box,” he said. “You say it helps when he … ?”

“Yes,” Adele said urgently. Her face was graver than ever, her eyes boring into him; he could sense how hard he was trying to convince him to take her seriously. “Please, Uncle Djura, we have to go back and get the music box, and find Mum –“

Djura didn’t know about finding Viola; trying to track a lone woman through the city, one no doubt clever enough to avoid leaving traces behind, sounded like a fool’s errand. But a scourge-maddened Gascoigne might just be easier to track – certainly Eileen must think so – and if the girls did know a way to save their father from a hunter’s blades …

That was madness, of course. To think of forging his way back through the city above, with two children in tow – leaving Old Yharnam unguarded – well, not entirely unguarded – but surely it was much more secure here with two of them manning the post than one –

Laure darted forward and seized his hand. “Please, Uncle Djura, we’ve got to save Mum,” she begged. Her little fingers were warm in his hand, and her eyes were beginning to leak panicked tears, and Djura knew that he was done for.

“Give me a minute,” he said, “just give me a minute, to make ready here –”

He threw open the trapdoor, to get his weapons and his powder and everything he’d need for going above.

Chapter Text

The last time Djura had seen Gascoigne had been on a night of the hunt. The days and nights before had blended into each other in a sleepless frenzy in which every sound, every scent called back that night in Old Yharnam: a door slamming above cracked like a gunshot, the meat pie his poor old housekeeper tried to foist on him reeked like burnt flesh. Djura had paced and mumbled, frantic and uneasy as he felt the hunt drawing closer, until finally he could stand it no longer and headed down the narrow stairs of the boarding house to stand on the stoop, cling to the railing, and breathe the moon-scented air.

Gascoigne had a way of being invisible. It had something to do with his size and his stillness. It wasn’t that you didn’t see him so much as that you took him for granted as part of the scenery; your eyes slid over him the same way they’d slide over a lamppost. So when he spoke, Djura was startled.

“Djura,” he said, and Djura saw him for the first time in the gathering shadows across the narrow street, all cloaked in black with his hunter’s axe sheathed upon his back.

“Will you hunt?”

If Djura had had more of his wits about him, the question might have struck him as strange. Not even a week before he’d been in the man’s house, shouting at the top of his lungs, throwing the priest’s holy book to the floor and begging that he listen, that everyone just stop and think, think about what they were doing, recognize this madness for what it was – for what that night in Old Yharnam had so clearly shown it to be. Here’s a bit of theology for you, Father: the beasts are people, as we’ve long known, and so are we hunters people killing people or beasts killing beasts – and then which commandments have we broken, in the eyes of the gods who have so clearly abandoned us?

But that night, Djura hadn’t stopped to wonder why Gascoigne would ask him such a thing. He had just said: “No.”

After a moment’s pause, Gascoigne said, “The Kegs’re catching the worst of it, for what happened down below. Church’s trying to pin it all on them.”

“On us?” said Djura bitterly. “Who’s even left to blame?”

They should’ve seen it coming. The Church had been shunning the Kegs for years, passing down more and more edicts that outlawed their weapons, edged them slowly but surely out of its ranks. And then suddenly they’d needed them: your weapons, your techniques, they’d said: you, you, only you can help us be rid of this blight in Old Yharnam! And they’d run straight into the Church’s outstretched arms, and hadn’t felt them for the strangling trap they were until far too late. The old quarter wasn’t the only inconvenience the Church had planned to purge itself of on that night.

Gascoigne grunted. The brim of his hat was pulled strangely low over his eyes, which combined with the gathering shadows made him impossible to read. For the first time Djura realized he might be in danger: had the priest been sent to flush the last Powder Kegs out of their hiding holes? Gascoigne had always held himself apart from the pettier rivalries within the Healing Church. He had no patience for squabbles and feuds when there was work to be done, and his home had remained open to Powder Kegs long after many would have urged him to cut ties, for his family’s sake if not his own. Perhaps it had something to do with his being an outsider himself; in any case, Djura had always liked him better for it. But even Djura, isolated as he was now, could sense the political winds were shifting in the wake of the Church’s failure in Old Yharnam. The city was in an uproar, ugly truths brought out into unflattering light, and for the Church bringing the city back to order required drawing more rigid lines between enemy and ally. If the Church had ordered Gascoigne to bring Djura to justice, could he really refuse?

But Gascoigne did not draw his weapon. Instead he said, in his gravelly voice: “D’you think there’s some kind of cure, is that it? Some way to bring them back?”

“No,” Djura said. “If the blood can’t cure them, what could?”

“Then by the blood, Djura, why not just put ‘em out of their misery?”

Djura was taken aback by his sudden vehemence: he’d never heard Gascoigne utter an oath before.

“Was that putting them out of their misery, what we did?” he finally said. “Was that mercy? Did we act out of the kindness of our hearts? We slaughtered them like beasts, like we were beasts – blood-drunk, moon-drunk, just drunk, some of us – we gloried in it, Gascoigne. I don’t know what we should do. I don’t know how to help them. But not like that. Gods above – not like that.”

They were silent. Somewhere far distant, something inhuman screamed: in victory, in defeat, it was impossible to say. The sound echoed off of the narrow streets, faded into the night.

“Stay inside, then, if you’re not going to hunt,” Gascoigne finally said. “It’s going to be ugly tonight. And for the gods’ sake don’t get in our way. The Church is really out for blood.” Gascoigne realized what he’d said and barked out a short, incongruous laugh. And then he turned and left, his footsteps echoing behind him long after he was out of sight.

Djura had abandoned the city above shortly after, and hadn’t thought much on that strange conversation. The most he could make of it was an attempt at a warning, for old times’ sake, or a pastor’s last effort to bring a lost sheep back into his fold. But now, as he made his way back through Old Yharnam and up to the Ward above, he couldn’t stop turning the scene over in his mind. Had Gascoigne sought him out for another reason that night? When he’d asked if Djura thought there was a cure, had he truly meant it? Did he realize, even then, what was happening to him? The thought made Djura’s heart clench. He really was a soft old fool: all his old anger at Gascoigne had evaporated, replaced by pity. If there was any way to save Gascoigne, he had to find it. He owed him that much – him, and his wife, and the girls trailing behind him now.

They took the route through the old crypt – most of the others had been sealed off by now – and emerged finally onto the streets of Cathedral Ward.

“Damn,” Djura said, stunned, when he finally got a good look around him. “Damn.”

Yharnam had always been a ramshackle place, in the way of ancient cities: new buildings heaped haphazardly on top of old ones, newfangled gas and running water entwined uneasily around ancient catacombs and aqueducts. As a young man Djura had always enjoyed its restless, chaotic energy. Keeping a city like Yharnam running required ingenuity, risk-taking, and a fair bit of luck: trying to keep the water flowing, the gas on, and the buildings standing tall and steady was like a high-speed, high-stakes game of chess against a wily opponent with millennia of experience and nothing to lose. And Yharnam was a dreadful cheat who kept plenty of tricks hidden up her sleeves – hidden tunnels and crumbling temples and ancient burial-sites, secreted within her depths and ready to be revealed at the most inopportune moment to exasperated builders and engineers. But Djura knew well that she might slyly grant her favorite children a peek at what she was hiding, if they were clever and curious – and Djura always had been dreadfully curious.

The Healing Church, of course, would have none of it. The Ward was always as pristine as anything could be in Yharnam, and new construction did all it could to iron out the inefficiencies of the old. But the street before them now was filthy, stained with mud and blood and other less pleasant things – it smelled like a sewer pipe might have burst somewhere. Weeds shoved their way between cobblestones as crooked and jagged as a peddler’s teeth, and at the end of the block a carriage sagged on its side, abandoned and rotting.

“What the hell happened?” he breathed. The girls just looked at him, wide-eyed and uncertain, apparently more taken aback by his language than the miserable state of the Ward. Oh, yes, that’s right: we don’t use foul language in front of little girls was one of those rules that respectable people who didn’t squat in burning wrecks generally followed.

“All right,” he said, pressing down his surprise and trying to get his bearings. “All right. We’ll take the southern bridge back to the main city, and that should take us right to your house, shouldn’t it? You’re certain the music box is there?”

“Absolutely certain,” Laure said.

What they’d do after they had it, of course, was more of a question. Eileen had said she’d be in the Ward, so perhaps they’d better make their way back – but then what? Wander aimlessly? Tracking Gascoigne had seemed like such a simple prospect back in Old Yharnam, but now the reality was sinking in. Some hunters had a knack for tracking down their prey, but Djura had never been one of them. Subtlety never was his style.

And with every passing second as they pressed their way cautiously through the streets, Djura grew more and more unsettled. It had been years since he’d left his sanctuary down in Old Yharnam. The abandoned quarter held its own horrors, but Djura had embraced them; and as for the beasts, he’d learned their rhythms almost by heart. He’d let Old Yharnam become his whole world, as penance and protection both, and now up above he felt like a stranger in a strange land. Once he might have boasted that he knew every corner and dead-end alley of this labyrinthine city, and perhaps he did still: he took no wrong turnings, as far as he could tell. But every sound, every moan of unfamiliar beasts, set his teeth on edge. A couple times shots rang out in the distance and set his heart pounding. The sights and scents of recent human residence; the occasional rush of a whisper or laugh behind a window; the trembling gaslight illuminating streets both familiar and strange – for brief flickering moments he felt unmoored, like he was in a half-remembered dream. And then in others, still brief as a blink, everything felt sharply, unbearably real, and he was overwhelmed by a strange malevolent feeling and the impression that he wasn’t wanted here. More than once he thought of turning back.

But of course he couldn’t. It was only his weary, battered old mind playing tricks on him, and he did his best to rein it in – he could still do that, when necessary, though he’d fallen out of practice down below. The girls, at least, were good, swift and silent and determined; they never complained or fell behind. The destruction all around them seemed to leave them completely unfazed. Had this become normal for them so quickly?

They were lucky with the beasts, at least: Djura had grown skilled at avoiding their notice, and in any case those gunshots would seem to suggest that most of the action was taking place in other arenas at the moment. The thought of the bewildered creatures falling gutted and torn before some blood-crazed hunter’s blade turned Djura’s stomach, but with the girls in tow he could hardly begrudge the distraction. He could only trust that if those poor people still had their wits about them, they would be glad to know they hadn’t died in vain.

All grew quieter still as they grew close to the plaza that opened onto the bridge. “This music box,” Djura said, still distracted, trying to ground himself better in the present moment with the sound of his own voice. “What happens when you –” He stopped short as they rounded the corner.

The bridge was gone. The plaza opened into nothing: the broken cobblestones gave way to bare, jagged stone and then emptiness, a precipitous drop where there had once been a bridge that connected the Ward with the rest of the city, always busy with carts and carriages and decked out with stalls on market days.

“Shit,” he said. “Shit.”

“Uncle Djura,” hissed Adele.

“Sorry,” he said, “but what the – the bridge is gone. Why is the bridge gone?”

They shook their heads at him, seeming perplexed by the question: it was gone because it was gone, clearly; if they couldn’t remember a bridge then there was no reason for one to have ever been there in the first place. Well, he’d never been much for current events at their age, either, but it was becoming clear to him what must have happened, as he cautiously approached the drop and poked along the rubble: they’d demolished it. Those damn cowards, huddling in their cathedrals and cloisters – the mess they’d made was spinning out of control and so they’d torn down the bridge, forcibly quarantined the rest of the city, cut off the people who relied on them. And a fat lot of good that’s done you, he thought, feeling a fierce new satisfaction at the ruin of the Ward.

He looked to his right: the ceremonial bridge to the north still stood, presumably due to the enormous gate that could be slammed in the face of approaching beasts and angry citizens.

“All right,” Djura said, gritting his teeth; if nothing else, the shock of the demolished bridge had succeeded in focusing his mind on the present. “All right. Southern bridge’s closed to foot traffic this evening. We’ll use the other. Come on.”

There was nothing he wanted less than to plunge back into the streets, but at this point they were closer to the bridge than the old quarter.

“Easy now,” he said, as they moved quickly down a side-street, “just along this street here, should be a straight shot …” He continued muttering to himself as they forged their way north, a bad habit he’d picked up in Old Yharnam that the girls quickly learned to tactfully ignore. But the three of them froze on a street corner as they heard footsteps – heavy footsteps, footsteps that struck the ground with inhuman force and sent vibrations shivering up their legs. They darted behind a heap of boxes and crates that had been abandoned in the streets.

A church giant lumbered past, its heavy axe scraping against the ground. The thing was much bigger than Djura remembered, and its clothing was ripped to shreds, and he supposed at this point he shouldn’t be surprised that it was wandering freely, with no handler in sight. But not freely enough, he realized a moment later. The giant moved away from the alley, fortunately, and out into the courtyard: but there it stayed, its back to them but nonetheless blocking their path.

After a moment’s silence, Laure whispered, “Is it one of the big ones? The big pale men?”

“Yes,” Djura said. “Have a look, if you’re careful; he’s not looking at us.” Laure and Adele poked their heads out cautiously, and then retreated to the safety of their hiding spot.

“What do we do?” Adele asked. “Do we – we don’t try to hurt it?”

“No,” Djura said. This crouching was hell on his knees; he shifted position. “No. Look, he’s not minding us. He’s just doing what he’s meant to do – he’s keeping watch, you see? He thinks he’s keeping people safe.”

“He won’t keep us very safe if we try to go out there,” Adele said doubtfully.

“No, he won’t,” Djura admitted, “but it’s not his fault, he doesn’t know any better. We’ve got to know better. I don’t think we can make it past him so we’ll go around – follow me.”

There was a roundabout route that would bring them back to the bridge, Djura was fairly certain, though he began to question himself as the path started to slope sharply upward. Had they blocked off streets since he was here last, or had he simply forgotten the way? Either seemed quite possible, but since no other route presented itself he pressed on. He could tell the girls were starting to get anxious, shooting him rapid glances as though they wanted to beg him to hurry but kept losing the nerve.

Just as Djura was beginning to be certain he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere, a shot rang out from somewhere very close, followed by a metallic clash of blade on blade. Djura ducked instinctively and then lowered to a crouch, trying to determine where the sound had come from; it was much too close for comfort. And then came a cry of pain, low and angry, one that even after all these years Djura recognized instantly.

“Was that Auntie Eileen?” gasped Laure. And before Djura could react, she darted forward, up the steps and towards the sounds of the fight.

“Laure!” cried Adele, and took off after her instantly, and Djura leapt to his feet and followed frantically behind.

“Get back here – get down,” he hissed, panicked, as he rounded the bend and saw the two smudgy little figures dart through a narrow gap in a gate left ajar. Djura dropped his blunderbuss and forced his way through the gate, cursing the bulky stake driver and the screeching hinges, until he finally got his hands on the scruffs of their necks and pushed them down to a crouch behind the stone railing. The sounds of combat still crashed up from below, the metal-on-metal echoing off gravestones and stone walls like the cacophonous chimes of some frenzied otherworldly bell, and Djura realized they were looking down at the Tomb of Oedon.

A figure lunged out from behind the monument, the jagged feathered cape and twin blades unmistakable; Eileen’s opponent followed, and she turned deftly to fend off a blow from his saw cleaver. They froze for a split second, blades locked, enough for Djura to take in the silhouette of the other hunter’s tricorn cap, its long feathers waving crazily behind.

“That’s Granddad!” gasped Laure, only seconds after Djura recognized Henryk himself. Her voice brought Djura back to his senses: before they could protest he hauled the girls roughly back through the gate and to relative safety.

“Laure,” he panted, one hand firmly on the back of her collar so that she couldn’t slip away again, “what were you thinking –”

“That was Granddad,” Laure said, eyes wide and stunned, struggling to make sense of what she’d seen.

“It was Granddad,” said Adele, a look of dawning horror on her face. “Uncle Djura, what’s going on, why are they fighting –”

“I don’t know,” Djura said, “I don’t know. Just – just give me a minute –” Gods, Henryk too, steady implacable Henryk – was nothing sacred anymore, here in the gods’ chosen city?

“They have to stop,” Laure said, insistent and certain. An instant later Henryk cried out below, almost screamed, his pain palpable, and then came a furious flurry of blows.

“They’re hurting each other!” Adele cried. She seized his wrist. “I don’t understand, why are they fighting –”

“Listen to me, girls, Henryk – Eileen isn’t –”

But the girls were beyond reason, with two of the most beloved people in their little world wrenching screams of agony out of each other below. Laure grasped the front of his shirt, tugging frantically.

“Uncle Djura, make them stop!” she begged.

“Please, you’ve got to, Uncle Djura!”

“All right!” Djura said, dimly aware that he was about to do something very stupid but unable to think of any alternative. “Just – get in the carriage, you two.” He half-dragged them down the street to another abandoned carriage, and after quickly checking to make sure nothing nasty lurked inside, heaved them in. “You stay there, do you understand me, or I’ll have both your hides, and then Eileen’ll have mine for good measure.” He received quick nods of assent before he closed the door, retrieved his gun, and plunged back through the gate.

He hugged the wall as he slunk down the stairs to the Tomb. Henryk and Eileen were still at it, unaware of his entrance, and he paused for just a moment to catch his breath. This was blood-madness, no doubt; there was nothing bestial about Henryk’s movements. If he’d lost himself enough to become Eileen’s target, Djura wasn’t sure if there was anything he could do – anything he should do – to stop the fight, but the thought of going back to the girls and telling them he’d failed …

Eileen slammed suddenly into one of the tombstones, narrowly avoiding one of Henryk’s blows, and yelled in anger and frustration – Eileen, who was usually so silent, so deadly focused when she fought. She rolled out of the way of Henryk’s blade too slowly, and the saw cleaver tore into her shoulder; she yelled again, staggered away, one hand scraping the ground as she stumbled clumsily to her feet, and Djura realized that Eileen was losing.

The shock spurred him to action. Only half-thinking, he raised his blunderbuss, retreating back up the stairs for a better shot. He didn’t want to see Henryk dead but the man was clearly long-gone, and the thought of Eileen the unconquerable falling to one of her blood-addled targets was simply impossible; his mind refused to accept it. He took aim at the whirling figures, waited for an opening, and fired. The shot roared out, the gun jerked in his hands, the familiar scent of gunpowder and smoke filled the air. Henryk crumpled below: Djura had aimed true and the shot had lodged in his calf.

There was nothing for it - they both knew he was here now, and a shot that might cripple anyone else wouldn’t slow a blood-mad hunter for long. Djura hurried down the stairs, hoping that Eileen would press her advantage, yet still hoping that she might not press it too far, that there might be a chance to keep Henryk alive.

Focused entirely on the two dueling figures, Djura stumbled over something at the base of the steps. He looked down and saw a claw, a great shaggy arm: the corpse of an enormous beast lay slumped in the curve of the stairs. Djura stepped around it and raised his gun again, moving low and hunkered behind the tombstones. Sure enough, Henryk was back on his feet, limping but still swinging his cleaver savagely towards Eileen. She darted forwards, kept him off-kilter, her blades a furious blur. But Henryk pressed his own advantage – Eileen was staggering herself, obviously injured, and Henryk clearly had no real thought for self-preservation: he fired wildly, missed, but followed it with a devastating swing of the cleaver that sent Eileen sprawling as she twisted to avoid it.

Djura took aim again.

The crack of the shot jarred in his ears. The bullet struck Henryk in the chest, just above his heart; he sank to his knees, and Eileen sprang to her feet and lunged forward, and dispatched him with one clean cut across the neck.

Silence.

Eileen stood stooped, blades dangling at her sides, her breathing loud and jagged. Djura was panting, too, and slick with sweat. His ears still rang with the noise of the shots. Eileen’s masked gaze raised from Henryk’s corpse to Djura himself, and there it stayed, uncomprehending. As she took him in, her shoulders heaving with each heavy breath, she reached to her side, to the handle of a knife that was lodged there, and yanked it out. It came free in a rush of blood and Eileen seized a blood vial and slammed it into her leg.

“Djura,” she said, as her wounds began to close, in the tone of one who is finally accepting the evidence of their senses despite all logic to the contrary. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Eileen didn’t get angry often. She didn’t need to.

She was angry now.

Djura rose from his crouch and edged his way slowly forward. “Eileen,” he said. “The girls –”

“Where are they?” she snarled.

“They’re safe, they’re just up above,” he promised; if his hands weren’t full he would have raised them in supplication. “They were frightened for their mother – there’s this – they said there’s a music box Viola uses, when –”

“When Gascoigne starts to turn,” Eileen said grimly.

“Yes. She didn’t have it with her tonight, and they wanted to bring it to her …” The more he spoke, and the more Eileen silently seethed as she waited for him to explain himself, the more pathetic his excuses sounded. “They were afraid for her, Eileen, and after hearing what’s happened to Gascoigne I was too,” he insisted, “and frankly I worried for Gascoigne as well, I thought you might have him in your sights –”

“Well you needn’t have worried about that,” Eileen snapped, and jerked her head towards something behind Djura. He turned, and saw only the corpse of the beast. He looked back at her, confused; and then comprehension dawned.

“No,” he said.

Eileen nodded once.

“That’s –” Djura turned to look at it again, the unrecognizable heap of dark fur. “You can’t be certain, surely?”

“Henryk was certain, when I found him here,” she said, her voice tense. “I don’t know how he knew, but he knew. I think that’s the last real thing he ever understood.”

“Damn,” Djura said, exhausted. He rubbed at his forehead, resettled his cap to feel some of the cool night air on his flushed head. “Damn.” He turned away from Gascoigne’s corpse, from Henryk’s, paced a few steps forward. “And – and you didn’t – you weren’t the one who …”

“I didn’t kill Gascoigne, if that’s what you’re asking,” Eileen snapped. She followed Djura, twitching the edge of her cloak away from Henryk’s bloody corpse. “Some other hunter. Newblood, I suppose, but powerful, too – I doubt the good father was anything to sneeze at, fully turned.” Her words were casual, steady, but the tension was still there in her voice, and a low throb of anger - though not, perhaps, directed at him alone. They stood looking out the lower gate of the Tomb, towards Central Yharnam beyond, clearly neither of them relishing the prospect of turning back to the fallen prey behind.

“No,” Djura said wearily, “no, I just – the girls …” Gods, the girls. Yes, little ones, your father’s dead and your granddad too, but your auntie only has the blood of one of them on her blades – cold comfort, that.

“We’d better go get them,” Eileen sighed. “That was a damn fool thing to do, Djura, leaving them like that –”

A scream, very close behind them. High, and shrill, and magnified in the enclosed walls of the tomb – a child’s scream.

Laure and Adele hadn’t listened to him. They had clearly grown tired of waiting – or frightened – had slipped out of the carriage and down the steps while his and Eileen’s backs were turned – because they were there, now, on the other side of the Tomb’s central monument, and they were looking at Henryk’s corpse.

Laure’s scream cut off abruptly; she seemed to swallow it, rejecting what was in front of her, reaching instead for her sister, whose face was blank and pale as she stared at Henryk’s mutilated body.

“That’s Granddad, that’s Granddad,” Laure said, over and over, her voice high-pitched and breathy with panic; she clung to the front of her sister’s dress. “Addie, that’s Granddad …”

Adele hardly seemed to notice. Her gaze dragged slowly upwards from Henryk’s body to Djura and Eileen, questioning, imploring. Djura’s heart seemed to have stopped: he was frozen in mute horror.

“Girls,” Eileen said, “listen to me –”

“He’s dead!” Laure shrieked, panicked tears starting to spill from her eyes. “You killed him, you killed him!”

“Laure –” Djura tried, but as he took a step toward them Laure scrambled backwards and Adele offered no resistance as she was dragged along. Her hand closed over her sister’s.

“I told you to make her stop!” Laure cried. Her face was flushed with fury and desperation, horror and betrayal, emotions too big and powerful for a child’s features. She was trembling all over, trembling from the force of them: she looked fearsome and fragile both, clinging to her sister and yet standing guard before her fierce as a lion, her eyes blazing.

“Hush now, hush now,” Eileen pleaded desperately, uselessly, her arms outstretched. “The beasts will hear us, just - be a good girl now, and come quickly, my –”

“No!” Laure shrieked. “No, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you both –”

Laure stumbled in her retreat, and turned, and saw the corpse of the beast looming behind her. Its sudden appearance shocked her into a moment’s silence, a moment in which Djura could hear snarling, and broken guttural speech, and powerful footsteps that meant half the beasts in Yharnam must have heard Laure’s screams, and were making straight for the Tomb.

“That’s Daddy’s shawl,” Adele said softly.

Laure screamed again, the ragged wordless keening of a child in bewildering pain.

Something lunged at the lower gate, snarling.

Eileen was frozen, arms still reaching, like an altarpiece sculpture of a supplicating saint.

“We have to go,” Djura said, “Eileen –”

They raced forward, gathering up the girls. Laure twisted and writhed away from them, her scraping sobs dissolving into pleading – “No, no,” she cried, over and over again, “I want Mummy, I want Mum!” But Djura at least managed to get an arm around her and half-hoist her, and Eileen took hold of an eerily unresisting Adele. They sprinted up the stairs, ears keen for the slightest sound of a beast, and left Gascoigne and Henryk’s blood to water the graves of Oedon below.

Chapter Text

Above the Tomb, down a dead-end alley, there was a gate set into the wall; with the sounds of approaching beasts echoing down every other avenue, Djura yanked it open and the four of them darted through, into what looked like an abandoned cistern. There was a ladder, though, of sturdy metal, obviously of recent make. They waded through the chilly water and climbed.

Laure had gone silent, stunned. When they emerged into a strange wood-paneled study, she stood numbly beside her sister, both of their gazes unfocused, not meeting Eileen or Djura’s eyes; when the two adults decided with a few terse words to press onwards, up the stairs, the girls needed a gentle push between their shoulder blades to be shaken out of their stupor.

Eileen went first. When they reached a sealed door, she nodded to him, and Djura readied his blunderbuss, almost automatically, to cover her as she pushed the door open. But nothing lunged from the darkness beyond: they proceeded forward cautiously into a large space, dimly lit by clusters of candles and heavy with the scent of incense.

“This is Oedon Chapel,” Eileen said, surprised.

It was. Djura recognized it now – looking a bit worse for the wear since he’d seen it last, but not so decrepit as some of the buildings they’d passed outside; surprising, since the Church had abandoned the chapel back when Djura was still a hunter.

“H-hello? Is someone there?”

Eileen’s hands flew to the hilt of her blade and Djura gripped the handle of his stake driver, adrenaline still surging from the fight in the Tomb and its aftermath. But he relaxed when he saw the human-shaped heap of rags amongst the jars of incense; whatever it was, it was clearly not lunging to attack.

“Sorry,” came the voice again, and the rags moved accordingly – “only the incense makes it hard to smell – did that hunter send you? Or are you hunters yourselves?” His eye adjusting to the dim light, Djura could make out a form, now, beneath the tattered red cloak – badly hunched, with blackened and distended limbs grasping aimlessly into thin air. A face, too – similarly disfigured, with milky, sightless eyes. His heart twisted with pity.

“Yes and no,” Eileen said warily, her hand drifting away from the blade’s hilt. “One of us is a hunter, at least, but no one sent us. Why? Who are you?”

“Oh!” said the man. His voice was nervous and fluttering, like a moth beating against a lamp. “I’m nobody, nobody at all, I only look after the chapel, y’see, and try to make it a safe place – you’re welcome to stay, all of you, there’s lots of incense, keeps away the beasts – only, how many of you are there?”

Eileen looked warily at Djura – he assumed, at least, that she was wary, behind the mask – and answered, “Four.”

“And – sorry, but – d’you have children with you? It’s only I thought I heard – footsteps, you know, lighter footsteps.” The man’s withered head was straining forward now, tilted slightly, as though trying to see or hear some answer to his question.

Eileen rested a hand protectively on Adele’s shoulder, drawing her and Laure closer, but evidently saw no way to avoid the question. “Yes,” she said curtly.

“Oh, that’s wonderful! We haven’t seen children here in – well, in a long time, and it’s just good to see ‘em safe. Well, not see ‘em of course, not for me, ha, but – I’m not so far away from the houses here as I can’t hear what happens sometimes, durin’ the hunts, and sometimes you hear – the screamin’ – just happy to have ‘em safe, is all,” he said, and dissolved into high-pitched, nervous laughter.

Djura edged closer to the girls as well, for good measure.

“Yes,” Eileen said. “We’ll not be staying. Let’s –”

“Eileen,” Djura said, his voice low – he didn’t know why he bothered, the man could surely hear him regardless – “we’ve got to have a rest somewhere. We don’t have a plan, and they –” He looked down at the girls, who still seemed lost in their own world; tears were coursing thick and fast down Adele’s cheeks without her seeming to notice. Guilt squeezed him painfully. “They need to rest. It’s quiet here, there’s plenty of incense, and –” He broke off, but looked meaningfully at the man, and hoped Eileen would understand: And the biggest threat here can't even stand upright. “There are worse places to decide what we should do next,” he finished.

Eileen was silent for a moment. He could sense her seething. Well, he didn’t like it either, but he wasn’t dragging the girls back onto the streets until he knew how they planned to keep them safe. Finally she spat, to him and the blind man both: “Very well. We’ll stay a few moments, but then we’ll be gone. I’ll find a comfortable place for the girls, and then, Djura – a word.”

Eileen was pacing.

She couldn’t help herself - her heartbeat hadn’t slowed since her fight with Henryk, the blood was still singing in her ears. Every couple seconds she cast a glance back to the girls, who were huddled in a corner up near the altar – she didn’t like leaving them so close to the warden, whoever or whatever he was, but she could see them from here, at least, and she didn’t want them to overhear.

“What,” she said finally, once she’d reigned in her anger enough to form words, “the hell were you thinking?”

Djura looked at her wearily. She wanted to hit him.

“Eileen –” he started.

“You were safe at the tower!” she hissed. “All you had to do was stay there until sunrise, instead of – of dragging them out onto the streets – gods’ blood, Djura, what was so bloody difficult about that, that you couldn’t – you couldn’t just –” She stopped moving for a second, breathing heavily. She was scattered, not in control of herself, but it was hard to think clearly when every time she closed her eyes she saw Laure and Adele’s faces, back in the Tomb, when they’d realized what she’d done.

“They were so frightened,” Djura said sadly, “I didn’t – I thought if we just got the music box, that –”

“That you’d prove yourself right?” Eileen spat out bitterly. “That you’d show all of us wicked hunters that you’d been right all along, that if you give the beasts a sweet lullaby they’ll be gentle as lambs?”

Djura was silent. After a moment he said, “I didn’t know how bad it had gotten up above.”

“You knew what the hunts were like.”

The incense in her mask and the incense burning in the censers were becoming almost overwhelming, and part of Eileen wanted to rip the mask from her face and get a breath of fresher air – but exposing her face to Djura, letting him read the distress that must surely be written there, was unthinkable. He for his part was slumped on the crumbled base of a statue, cap pulled low, half his face swathed in bandages and the other draped in shadow – and so there they were, facing each other and faceless.

Eileen closed her eyes automatically, trying to think – and saw them again, Laure and Adele, standing over Henryk’s body, looking at her like she was some kind of monster, some kind of –

“What do we do now?” Djura said.

Gods, she wanted to strike him. Sitting there weary, dejected, penitent, like some kind of hair-shirted saint – poor kind-hearted Djura, weighted down with the miseries of the world. Well, that was all well and good for him, but some didn’t have the luxury of self-flagellation. Some simply had to grit their teeth and do what needed to be done, so that others could wax philosophical as the world burned down around them.

“What can we do? Go back to Old Yharnam, I suppose. Perhaps you’ll manage to stay there this time.”

He flinched slightly but didn’t protest. “We could stay here,” he offered, sounding slightly doubtful himself. “There’s incense enough, good strong walls. It might be better than setting off again.”

“So you’d like to throw yourself on the mercy of the Church, you old heretic?” She lowered her voice. “I don’t trust that … thing up there.” Whatever had ruined the blind man – the scourge or natural deformity or even some last taint of the ashen blood – she prayed that if she ever succumbed in the same way, someone would have mercy on her and grant her a swift death.

Djura bowed his head in agreement. “I don’t suppose you think there’s any chance that Viola … ?”

Viola. She’d nearly forgotten.

“I don’t know,” Eileen said. “She’s clever enough. But I doubt it.”

“She might have gone back to the house by now,” Djura said. “If she’s alive, surely she would be trying to get back to the girls.”

There was a thought. They were closer to Gascoigne’s home than they were to Old Yharnam, certainly. Whether Viola was there or not, there were secure locks, and they might bring some of the incense …

But Djura was shaking his head. “Gods, what happens come sunrise? They’re orphans, like as not. Shall we drop them on the Church’s doorstep?”

Eileen started to pace again, more slowly this time. She might disagree with Djura on many things, but his feelings on the Church were closer to hers than perhaps he realized; while she saw little purpose to the Powder Kegs’ more bombastic forms of sacrilege, there was very little love lost between the Hunters of Hunters and Yharnam’s most powerful institution. The Church had the blood, of course, and it would take a stubborner soul than hers to doubt its divine origin. But their hierarchies, their rituals, their influence like a creeping vine strangling every part of the city: Eileen found it distasteful at best and dangerous at worst. They’d certainly had nothing like it where she was from, and were much the better for it – inasmuch as she could remember, at least. And that orphanage of theirs … Eileen knew little about it, and Djura was of course being mocking, but the merest suggestion of the girls going there made her stomach twist in anxiety. This city wasn’t kind to children with no one to protect them.

“They don’t have any relations in the city, as far as I know,” Eileen said.

“Don’t Viola’s parents … ?”

“Frederick died a year and a half ago. Marta moved out of the city, to her house in Iskierka.”

Djura paused to absorb this information. “Iskierka’s not so far from here,” he said cautiously. “A day or two by carriage, isn’t it?”

“Longer, walking.”

“The stables in Hemwick –”

“Hemwick’s a ruin. Nothing left but rotting shacks and cultists so mad even the Church won’t own them.”

“Damn,” Djura said. “Still …”

Still. The girls had to go somewhere. Perhaps Viola was alive; probably she wasn’t, or soon wouldn’t be. Eileen wasn’t willing to make a plan based on the barest thread of a hope.

She pictured it. That was a dangerous thing, to let yourself picture something like that: but she did, for a brief flash of a moment. She saw a sleepy little hamlet in the early dawn, the brisk morning air flushing the girls’ cheeks as they walked down a street that had never known the taste of blood between its cobbles. She had passed through Iskierka briefly decades ago, while traveling to Yharnam. It had been charming and provincial in the way all those little villages were, but Eileen had been in no mood to be charmed in those days.

Nor should she let herself be charmed now.

“The streets are thick with beasts,” she said. “Truly, Djura, I’ve never seen anything like it. This is not a night to take chances. Wherever we go, we have to be smart, and we have to be quick, and then we have to stay put and stay safe until morning. We certainly can’t afford to go blundering into Hemwick. We’d never make it out.”

“What about the Pilgrims’ Gate? Is that still closed off?”

Eileen paused her restless pacing for a moment.

“Yes,” she said slowly, catching his meaning. “Yes, it is.” The Church had closed the old processional gates behind the Grand Cathedral for good back before Old Yharnam had burned. They claimed the gods had revealed that passage through them should be reserved for the jubilee years, but few were fooled. Pilgrims were becoming rarer, Yharnam less able to live up to its promise as the gods’ chosen city; meanwhile, the Church was becoming more paranoid, more tightfisted. They wanted any travellers to pass through the bottleneck of Hemwick, where they had agents lurking in every inn and stable, rather than walk freely through the old Pilgrims’ Gate.

Which meant that the gate itself would likely be close to deserted, and, if they could manage to get it open, would offer an alternate route out of the city.

“There’s a tunnel that runs beneath the gate,” Djura said. “I used to muck around down there when I was a boy. I heard the old priestesses used to use it, a thousand years ago, if they needed get out of the city quickly and quietly. The Church fixed it up and they still use it, at least last I saw. It opens right out onto the road out of Yharnam. Even if we can’t get the gate open, we could try to get out that way.”

“And then what?” Eileen said. “We’ve no supplies. We’d be on the road for days. Maybe you and I can put up with a hard walk on a hungry belly, but the girls can’t.”

“It’s not a wasteland out there,” Djura said. “We could find enough, on the way.”

“And what would you know about that?” she demanded. Have you ever slept a night outside in your life? she wanted to continue, but she supposed these days he probably had. But surviving down in Old Yharnam was a different matter than surviving out on the road. Djura had been born and raised in the city; she wasn’t sure he’d ever seen more than three trees together at any one time, let alone a real wilderness.

“Nothing,” Djura admitted. “But surely you might?”

“I might,” she said curtly.

Gods’ blood, now he had her really thinking about it: the open road, the open sky, the crisp fresh air. There was food and water and shelter to be found if you knew what you were doing, she had to admit that: she would be out of practice, to say the least, but not totally incompetent. They had their guns. Hunting deer and rabbit for a few days sounded a great deal more appealing than hunting beasts and fellow-hunters.

Your vows, Eileen, your vows, she told herself.

Yes, my vows, she answered, looking for the hundredth time up to the girls: look how well they’ve served me tonight, how well I’ve served them. She thought of Henryk and Gascoigne, of their bodies cooling down in the Tomb, of this slaughterhouse of a city gorging on their blood. She felt suddenly sick. The incense was dizzying. Her stomach churned. She hadn’t felt ill in this way since she was a young woman newly-arrived in the city. The thought of just huddling with the girls in some damp cellar, listening to the sounds of carnage above, only to emerge into another dreary Yharnam morning and prepare to do it all again in a few nights’ time, was suddenly unbearable. And Djura was right, for once: the girls had to go somewhere when morning came. She couldn’t take care of them. But she had to know that they would be with someone who could.

Here in the chapel, they were closer to the Pilgrims’ Gate than to any of the alternatives. You could almost call it a practical choice.

Get out. Leave the stench of blood and beasts behind. Avoid Hemwick. Strike out on the open road, to the gentle little town over the hills beyond. See the girls safe in the arms of their grandmother, know that they would grow up happy and cherished and far, far away from here.

She had her vows. But she could return. She would return. As soon as they were safe.

“If we were to go,” she said, “I suppose you think you’d be coming with us?”

Djura glanced up at her quickly. “Of course,” he said, wary, ready for a fight.

Eileen didn’t intend to give him one. As far as she was concerned she’d rather send him straight back to the burning slum he’d crawled out of, but there was no denying that the girls would be safer with two trained hunters protecting them than one.

“If you’re going to come with us,” Eileen said, slowly and clearly, “you have to be willing to protect them.”

“Of course I –”

“From anything,” she said.

Djura scowled and didn’t meet her eyes. Finally he said: “I protected you, didn’t I?”

Eileen gritted her teeth. You should’ve left well enough alone, she wanted to say, you should’ve just stayed out of it. But she couldn’t, of course. If he hadn’t been there in the Tomb, she would be dead now, like as not, and there would be no pretty little doll to nurse her back into consciousness this time. Henryk was no beast, and Djura had made no promise, but she felt she’d made her point nonetheless.

“Very well,” she said slowly. Some small part of her whispered that she was being rash, and she promised herself that she would listen to it, once her stomach had settled and her head had stopped swimming. Once the grim tableau down at the Tomb had stopped lurking at the corners of her vision.

“Very well,” she said again. “To the gate, then, and to Iskierka.”

Laure had exhausted herself in her tantrum. She had settled heavily against Adele, her wet face pressed into her lap, her eyes open but otherwise as still and silent as if she were fast asleep. As Auntie Eileen and Uncle Djura’s low, hissing voices echoed up from the nave below, Adele absently undid her sister’s hair ribbon and began to rhythmically run her fingers through her loose curls.

She kept seeing Granddad. Not him, but his body, the way it had looked down in the graveyard. His neck had been sort of twisted, and his arms all askew, in a way that looked totally uncomfortable, unnatural. There was a great big cut all across his neck, and the skin on either side was flapping open, sort of like that beast that Auntie Eileen had killed on their way to Uncle Djura’s. There had been an awful lot of blood - staining his clothing, pooling on the ground. Smeared across his face. Soaking into her shoes. Did she have that much blood inside her? Or was it just that Granddad was bigger?

He had another wound, too, in his shoulder – it had been hard to see with all the blood, but it was small and circular, just a neat little dark hole, so she supposed it was from a gun. Granddad’s hat had fallen off, and his eyes were open – like he was staring at something. She had thought people’s eyes closed when they died.

Adele turned all these details over in her mind methodically, repeatedly; it was like she’d found a strangely-shaped rock and kept running her hands over all its bumps and crannies. None of the details seemed to matter, really, in the way she supposed things like this were supposed to matter; and that image of Granddad all dead and bleeding and broken felt like it had very little to do with the hot tears that were streaming steadily down her cheeks.

She thought about his hat again: that wonderful feathered hat that always looked so very dashing, like a gallant knight-errant from her storybooks. Sometimes he used to bow to her very seriously when he came into the house or before he left for a hunt, so much so that it made her embarrassed, until she saw the way his eyes were crinkled up behind his mask. Sometimes when he did this before the hunts she would give him something of hers, a doll’s fan or a chestnut she’d found outside, just like the ladies in the stories were always giving away their handkerchiefs: this was called a “favor,” she’d explained to him, and he had nodded solemnly.

But thinking about this was making the tears come thicker and faster, so she supposed she had better stop.

Her nose was streaming too. She wiped it messily on her sleeve, and wished she had a handkerchief.

Thinking of her handkerchiefs made her think of the shawl, the one that had been all draped and tangled over the body of that enormous beast: because her handkerchiefs at home had Mum’s neat embroidery on them, pretty flowers and the letters AG, and so did the shawl – not flowers, of course, but the little flourishes that Mum had added. She wasn’t really supposed to do it, Adele didn’t think, since none of the other churchmen she knew had designs like that on theirs: but it looked much nicer like that, anyway. So that was how she’d known that the shawl was Daddy’s. Which meant the beast must be him, too. Which meant that he was dead.

Maybe it was supposed to surprise her more, to think that her father had turned into a beast. But even though she never might have guessed it before tonight, she felt at the same time like she’d always known. It was the way he’d been acting, ever since he had started to wear the bandages on his eyes – because, he said, the light had begun to hurt them. It was the way he would stop, sometimes in the middle of talking, and sniff the air, or cock his head, listening, like a dog. The way he would stagger back from the hunts and go straight to the spare bedroom without speaking to them, and sometimes not emerge until late the next afternoon or evening. The way that he would back away from her sometimes when she had sought him out to ask or show him something, and tell her in a strangled voice that she needed to wait until later, and almost flee to some other part of the house, and slam the door behind him.

It was the way that sometimes he didn’t get away in time, and he stopped speaking like her dad, or acting like her dad, and would crouch low and sniff the air and stalk towards them; or would seize his gun or his axe because he said that there were intruders in the house, thieves or beasts, only he didn’t see it was them and he thought they were the intruders; and then Mum would send them out of the room, her voice high and panicked, and they would hear the tinkling of the music box as they huddled on the stairs; or once or twice when Mum wasn’t home and they had to find the music box and play it themselves, and their father would sink to the floor clutching his head. And when the song had finished and all was still he would cover his face with his hands and begin to sob, low and quiet, and she and Laure would sneak out of the room and with silent looks would swear to never say anything about it. Because they were safe, so it didn’t matter, and it would only upset him to talk about it: and they knew he would tell Mum anyways, because they could hear them talking in their bedroom late at night, though only Laure was brave enough to sneak down the hall and press her ear to the keyhole, and she could never make much sense of what they were saying.

And all of this had been normal to Adele, in a strange way; that was simply how things were, and only rarely did it occur to her it might be in any way unusual – usually when she was reading her books, where the heroine’s family was always blandly pleasant and rosy-cheeked, or otherwise they were wicked stepparents who made her peddle matches on the street-corner.

And the truth was that Adele had been a little frightened of her father even before the bandages, before the strange episodes, for almost as long as she could remember. It wasn’t that he hit them – he never did, not even when they were being really naughty, and he hardly ever yelled. It came from something he used to do when he returned from the hunts. She had been little then; Laure wasn’t born yet, or was still just a baby. He would come home, and hang up his axe and his gun and his hat, and kiss her mother carefully, at arm’s length, trying not to let his blood-splattered coat stain her dress. And then he would go to Adele – she would have been awake, she guessed, in her room, or hovering by the kitchen door – she couldn’t remember the details, but she could remember how she would be suddenly swept up into his lap, and be half-cradled in his arms as he fervently kissed her hair and forehead.

“Adele,” he would say, in his low, low voice, “my little Adele …”

He never called her Addie, like her mother and sister did. Only Adele.

And Adele’s cheek would be pressed to the sticky blood on his coat, and as gentle as he was with her she would only be able to think of how wild and fierce he had looked when he walked in the door; and being swept up in his strong arms should have made her feel protected, but instead it made her feel the opposite, like he needed something from her, like he was desperate for something that only she could provide. She would stay totally still, like a rabbit or a mouse caught in the gaze of something big and strong and hungry, and smell the strange rank scents that clung to his clothing.

He stopped doing that as she got older. Maybe he’d realized that it frightened her. Or maybe he’d known all along, but thought that when she was littler she wouldn’t remember so it wouldn’t matter. But she did remember. She remembered every time he came through the door soaked in the blood of beasts.

And sometimes she would get that same feeling, back when her parents used to have visitors all the time, when she’d come downstairs to find other hunters filling the kitchen or dining room or parlor. Most of them had been part of her life for as long as she could remember, grownups that she wasn’t related to but that she’d always called auntie or uncle – there was one old lady with silver hair and a very straight back that she’d called Nana, and there was Auntie Eileen, who came to the house much more often than the others; and Granddad, of course, though he was such a part of the family that he deserved a category all his own. Some came and went – Uncle Djura had stopped coming years ago, and Nana well before that. She had died, Adele knew, while she was out hunting – no one told her that but it wasn’t hard to guess. Laure couldn’t even remember her, but Adele could: she’d had a sharp voice but a kind smile, and had carried an elegant scythe.

Hunters died all the time. Adele knew that, even though all the grownups liked to pretend she didn’t. She had figured privately since she was quite young that that was why they were always spending so much time at her house: they knew that it was safe there, and that it wasn’t outside. And now she was older and much more sophisticated, and the hunters hadn’t come to her house in big groups like that for a long time, but she still felt that perhaps her younger self had been right, in a way. Even for her, who never had to go out where the beasts were, the house was always so warm and cozy and bright that it was easy to forget how dangerous it was outside.

But still, there was always that feeling. The hunters were kind to her and to Laure, most of them, at least; and the ones that weren’t simply left them alone. The others really did act like aunts and uncles, or at least what Adele imagined aunts and uncles should act like: they often had presents, and they always had questions and praise and gentle jokes. But there was still something in the way that the hunters sought them out, some desperate need lurking behind their attention that even they seemed unaware of; something grasping in the way that they would reach out to pat their heads or shoulders; something hungry. They wanted something from her and from Laure, some comfort or relief that only they could provide; and Adele understood dimly that this had something to do with the fact that there were very few children in Yharnam any more. Auntie Eileen and Uncle Djura did it, and Granddad, and yes, her father. And as much as Adele loved them, there were times when they made her feel once again like something very small staring into the gaping maw of something very large, something that in its grasping desperate need might someday swallow her whole.

Footsteps. Auntie Eileen and Uncle Djura had stopped talking and were mounting the steps back towards the altar. Adele wiped at her eyes, embarrassed that they wouldn’t stop streaming. The other hand still curled protectively through Laure’s hair.

She looked blearily up at Auntie Eileen, who hovered awkwardly before them, apparently wanting to say something but not knowing how. Adele felt she perhaps ought to say something herself, and then she thought of Eileen’s blades dripping with Granddad’s blood, and a small vicious part of her decided that she would say nothing at all. Uncle Djura leaned against the stone railing a little behind, his posture stiff, looking not at them but at the ugly man among the incense pots.

“We’ve decided,” Auntie Eileen said finally, “that you should go to your grandmother’s house, in Iskierka.” She seemed to expect some response to this, but Adele had none to give, and only looked at her as steadily as her watery eyes would allow. Eileen finally continued, “We think you’d be safest there. It’ll be several days’ walking.” She hesitated again. “Do you need anything? Are you hungry, thirsty? Hurt? Tell us now, before we leave.”

“No,” Adele said. Her voice croaked and she felt a wave of humiliated anger. Stop looking at me, she wanted to say, can’t you see I’m embarrassed, can’t you see I’m not presentable, just stop looking at me and leave me alone.

“And Laure?”

Adele looked down at her sister, who had not moved or responded to the conversation. Her eyes were still open, though, her brow slightly furrowed, her hand almost-imperceptibly tightening its grip on Adele’s thigh: she was listening, even if she wanted everyone to think she wasn’t.

“She’s fine,” said Adele, her voice still low and husky but not cracking.

“All right,” Auntie Eileen said. “We’d best go now, then. The longer we wait the more beasts there will be.”

It took Adele a moment to understand something was being asked of her. “Laure,” she finally said. “Come on, Laure.” Laure didn’t answer, though her grip tightened further. Adele shifted her legs to dislodge her, got one hand under Laure’s head, careful not to catch any of her loose hair.

“Sit up,” she said. “I need to put your hair back.” Laure finally complied, slumping into a sitting position, her furious gaze averted and focused on Adele’s lap; Adele felt it might burn a hole straight through her skirts and stockings. She tied Laure’s hair back, quick and efficient with no loose strands, and as she guided her to standing she lightly squeezed her back, a little older-sister warning: Behave. I’m not in the mood for this.

They stood, looking at the two grownups; and in her stubborn silence Adele felt a grim little thrill of power, of control. She thought she understood why Eileen might have killed Granddad, and why she might have killed her father, too, if indeed she had. That didn’t mean she was ready to forgive her for it.

Still, she grasped Laure’s wrist and followed quietly, out of the perfumed air of the chapel and back onto the streets of Yharnam.

Chapter Text

They had only traveled a couple streets when they found the first bodies.

A man and a woman – husband and wife, brother and sister, two strangers, perhaps, but slumped close together in death. The corpses were fresh; under her neat white servant’s cap the woman’s cheeks still seemed almost rosy, in defiance of the blood that spilled from her chest and her stomach.

Arms and legs, too, Eileen realized as she drew closer to inspect the bodies: both the man and the woman were fairly lacerated with slices from a sword or similar bladed weapon. Not a saw cleaver, though - the cuts were too clean for a serrated edge. Both of them had suffered many more injuries than would have been necessary simply to dispatch them.

Eileen knelt beside them. One at a time, she gently raised their upper lips to expose their teeth: slightly crooked, but of the correct size and shape. Carefully, almost tenderly, she removed her glove and lifted their half-closed eyelids, manipulating their chins with her other hand to turn them toward the light. Their pupils were neat, with no sign of the ragged edges that foretold the onset of the scourge.

“They weren’t turning,” she said grimly. “And it wasn’t any beast that did this to them.”

Djura was behind her, no doubt trying to keep the girls from having to look too closely at the corpses.

“A hunter, then.”

“Yes.” The scene had all the telltale marks of a blood-maddened hunter’s work. On any other night, it would have been a call to arms for Eileen: a part of her already itched to keep poring over every mark on the victims’ bodies, every splash of blood around them, to begin tracking down their killer.

She could hear the awareness of this in Djura’s voice when he asked cautiously, “What will you do?”

Eileen squeezed her eyes closed for a moment, then gently took the woman’s hands from where they had fallen askew and placed them neatly in her lap.

“I stay with you,” she said. “It would be too dangerous. And –” And look what happened the last time I put my vows before the girls’ safety, she thought, but could not say. “But we’d best both be on our guard. It’s not just beasts we have to be wary of tonight.”

“It never is,” Djura murmured, and angry as she was with him she could hardly argue.

She shifted the man as well, sitting him at a more dignified angle: she let his shoulders brush the woman’s, for all the comfort that might give. Then she rose and rejoined Djura and the girls. Laure still refused to look at her, and Adele did so in only quick glances. Both stayed close to Djura, having apparently forgiven him any role in the deaths at the Tomb, or at least judged him the lesser of two evils. Fine, then. As they set off again, Eileen took the lead, letting the other three follow behind.

She wished she’d thought to clean her blades.

Though she tried to stay alert as they pressed their way along the streets behind Oedon, she could still see the man and the woman in her mind’s eye: they would receive no proper funeral, and that pained her. It had always pained her, the few times in her long career that she had been forced to abandon a body. Grim as it might seem to others, performing the rites for the fallen had always brought her peace. There was a tenderness to it that was in short supply elsewhere in her life in Yharnam, a generosity and a quiet reflection. And now four bodies left behind in one night, two of them belonging to men she counted as her closest friends – she really was growing too old to carry out her duties, it would seem.

She could at least comfort herself that on a night such as tonight, undertakers and body-snatchers would be more concerned for their own hides than those they would usually be collecting. Henryk and Gascoigne would likely be left in peace for some time. Perhaps, if she were very lucky, she might be able to return in time to gather what was left of their bones, to grind them down and mix them with milk for the crows. Even if she couldn’t, she could at least be content to know that most of them – their hearts and minds and good strong flesh – would be carried away, free, in the bellies of birds and beasts, or turned to nourishment for the earth, and not left to rot in the stifling stink of some Yharnam charnel house. It was the least they deserved.

The whole damned city was a charnel house, she’d often thought to herself in her blackest moods. As she’d grown older she’d trained herself out of indulging in these fits of pique – fear had its place in a hunter’s life, and anger, but resentment and despair were worse than useless – but as a young woman she’d often felt viscerally disgusted by the crowded, clammy claustrophobia of the city. The ugly heavy buildings jutted over the streets and stabbed at the sky as if personally offended by the existence of clean open space, and leered down at her in judgmental condescension like some pompous parish priest. Tangled in the snare of Yharnam’s streets, the winged cape she’d fought so hard to earn often felt like a mockery: try to fly back home, crow, and see if these tattered wings will bear you.

But home was a far-distant dream, in more ways than one. Yharnam, insatiable, gorged itself on more than just blood. There was a reason that pilgrims rarely lingered here after their ailments vanished. The longer you stayed, the more things like faces and names, familiar street-corners and beloved hearths, began to slip away: the city, a jealous god, had a way of swallowing up everything in its supplicants’ minds that did not pertain to itself. Its heavy dark presence crowded out all that came before. Eileen could no longer remember voices or faces from her birthplace, no buildings or signposts or anything solid. When she thought of the place she’d come from now, all she really saw was light: the kind of late-afternoon sunlight so rich it seemed like you could drink it, thick and sweet as honey. There was no light like that here.

But perhaps she was being foolish. She was old now, and had come to Yharnam when she was young: there was very little that came before Yharnam for her, compared to the time she’d spent within its walls. No doubt there were many others of her age for whom little memory remained of their childhood.

Now, though, the promise of leaving the city - even for a short time - hovered before her. And out on the streets, away from the incense-clouded air, she could hear more clearly the voice that insisted that she was acting rashly. The promise of freedom might well be overwhelming her better judgment. There was still time to turn back and form a less ambitious plan.

But back meant the Church, and the Tomb, and all the things about this awful place that she had borne for decades and felt now that she could stand no longer. And the gates were so close – and the thought of sparing the girls a lifetime in this cursed city was so sweet …

Perhaps it was only that living in Yharnam made leaving Yharnam – the mere thought that there was anything outside of Yharnam – seem impossible. Imagining a world outside the gates was like a sea creature dreaming of a world without water.

Circles and circles, and she arrived at no conclusion: let it lie, then. She would stay the course for now, and keep her wits about her, and do whatever needed to be done.

And in any case her whirling thoughts threatened to distract her from the pressing task of keeping their little party out of danger. The further they traveled from the chapel, the more feral, shambling forms lurked around street corners or shuffled down alleys. Unwelcome as she was in the group behind her, Eileen had become the scout for the others: she kept her blade drawn and in one piece, one hand resting on her pistol’s grip, and peered carefully into every alley, cross-street, and doorway before waving the other three forward.

The path to the Pilgrims' Gate sloped downward, and as they descended a fog began to gather. Eileen rarely came to this part of the city anymore – there was little reason to, with the gate sealed tight – and she paused when she came to an unfamiliar turning, and reluctantly turned back to look at Djura. He pointed to the right. They crept down the street, Eileen straining her gaze through the mist, trying to orient herself.

Then something enormous moved down the way: a hulking dark shape she’d taken for a statue shifted and stood. The church giant lumbered across the street, far enough away that it didn’t spot them but still far too close for comfort. Two strange beasts followed in its wake - human-sized, draped in cloth, and carrying something on their backs. Eileen squinted. Was it her imagination, or was whatever they were carrying writhing?Unnerved, she looked back at Djura, who obviously shared her sentiment. They retreated quickly and he drew them down a side route instead.

Here, far enough down the slope from the Grand Cathedral and its lofty neighbors, the churches and chapels of the main avenue gave way to tightly-packed rows of houses: the homes of high-ranking servants and low-ranking clerks. They passed down a narrow street – more of a path – between the backs of two of the rows, hedged in on either side by the low walls that marked off the houses’ tiny cobbled yards.

The fog grew yet thicker here, but Eileen could hear a low chorus of growling and moaning from somewhere up ahead. She gestured for the others to slow and move silently as she strained to place the group of beasts somewhere in the misty warren before her. Then a sudden guttural cry was followed by several others, savage and loud, and the sounds of a struggle – somewhere much closer than she would have guessed.

Eileen gestured for the others to stop and crept forward. She rounded the bend, pressing close to the corner. A few steps led down to another tight squeeze of a street, and a small, cramped square beyond: hazy through the mist, Eileen could see a writhing mass of beasts, all locked in a snarling fight around the plaza’s fountain. It was unusual for beasts to turn on each other, but not unheard of – especially not in cramped quarters such as this, where it seemed any human prey had already fled to higher ground. The houses here all looked abandoned, the windows dark and censers unlit. The beasts’ bloodlust was distracting them for now, but there were far too many of them – perhaps the fog was playing tricks on her, but they seemed packed in almost wall-to-wall.

She retreated to the others.

“They’re having themselves a scrap,” she said, in response to Djura’s questioning look, “and blocking our route besides.”

“Let me see.”

“Quietly,” she urged, as all four approached the corner again. She didn’t like to bring the girls any closer to the fray, but neither did she like to leave them out of her sight.

“I don’t want to double back,” she said, thinking of the strange beasts that had forced them down this route in the first place, “but I don’t like the odds of fighting our way through that mess.”

“No, no fighting,” said Djura, beginning to pat at his pockets.

“Djura –” she warned.

“I mean we don’t need to,” he snapped, and produced a small bottle from one of the innumerable pouches on his person. “We can use fire to corral them. I have to use this trick down below sometimes – toss a Molotov in just the right spot and they’ll run away and clear the path.”

It was, admittedly, not the worst idea Eileen had ever heard. But she still put a quelling hand on his wrist, to stop him from assembling the thing and hurling it over her head before she’d had the chance to get a word in edgewise. It had been a long time since they’d been together on a night of the hunt, but she remembered well Djura’s tendency to jump from proposing a plan to executing it within the space of two breaths.

“We’d have to plant it right at the mouth of the alley,” she said, “else they might scatter in our direction, and that’s too close for my liking. I trust your aim but not the flame’s. And the only way to drive them is in the same direction we’d be walking. No, I don’t like it. But –” she paused to scan the line of row-houses at the corner – “if we could go through one on this side of the street –” She looked up at the sky, trying to get her bearings. For some reason, after a moment’s staring at the moon, she felt a bit dizzy; her head buzzed and the edges of her vision lurched strangely. She shook her head sharply to clear it. “If we can get through one of these houses that should put us right at St. Anezka’s, shouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” Djura said, “all right. Let me see.” He tucked the bottle away and crept across the street, vaulting awkwardly but silently over the low wall and into the tiny yard of one of the houses. Eileen urged the girls onward, darting a quick glance at the skirmishing beasts: their angry shrieking had not abated. She reached down automatically for Laure, to lift her over the wall, but Laure jerked away furiously and almost slapped Eileen's hands away. Eileen withdrew her hands as if they’d been burned. Then she gritted her teeth and reached for her again.

“Hush now,” she hissed, as Laure squirmed, “don’t be foolish.” She hated the callousness in her tone, but she managed to hoist Laure over the wall, and Adele after her.

Eileen herself landed with an ungraceful thump and froze, casting a quick glance towards the mob of beasts. By the time she’d reached Djura, he was already shaking his head.

“No good,” he said – “lock’s like new, there’s no getting it off without making a racket. Next one.”

Up over the wall again, into the next little yard, this one scattered with filthy linens that must have been hung on the line when its owners left. They were closer to the beasts now, and the sounds of their furious fighting were amplified tenfold as they ricocheted around the narrow space. Please, this one, Eileen thought, growing nervous – how long until the beasts tired of their civil strife and started looking for more interesting targets? Let this one give, let’s go no closer – 

“It’s not even locked,” Djura whispered, with triumph in his voice. “It’s jammed, though –”

The door looked half-rotten; the whole doorframe was sagging. Djura began to carefully press on it, testing its weak points. Down the street, a beast howled in something that sounded like victory.

“Quickly, Djura,” Eileen said, and went to press her weight against the door. At her urging, Djura shrugged and readied himself.

“One,” he said, “two –”

They slammed themselves into the door and it burst open with surprising willingness. Djura went stumbling into the darkened house.

“All right,” said Eileen, “inside, girls, quickly –”

What happened next happened very quickly indeed. One moment Eileen was urging the girls through the door; the next there was a tremendous crash and the world turned to dust and thunder around her. She acted on mere blind instinct, and when she found herself sprawled on the dirty cobblestones seconds later, she had to replay the scene in her mind’s eye to understand what had happened: she had given a shove to the little form closest to her and hurled herself backwards, away from the crashing rubble and back out into the yard. The wall above the door had simply collapsed, crumbling stone and rotting timbers jarred loose by the force of opening the door. Even now rubble continued to shower down from the new gaping hole in the side of the house.

“Laure!” Eileen cried, her heart in her throat, “Adele –” She leapt to her feet and began to paw uselessly at the heap of stone blocking the entryway.“Laure! Adele!” 

“They’re fine!” Djura’s voice came from the other side of the wall, and Eileen sagged against the stones with relief. “Both fine, Eileen, are you – ?”

“Not hurt,” she said.

“Listen, don’t move anything, don’t dislodge it, you might just make it worse –”

Everything had gone quiet.

Djura was still talking, but that was all: the beasts’ war cries had stilled. Eileen was still, too, for another heartbeat, knowing what would come and yet somehow still childishly believing that if she only stayed very still and quiet they wouldn’t find her.

But something wolfish howled through the mist, far, far too close: and then she could hear the beasts surging forward.

“Get through the house!” Eileen yelled. “I’ll meet you on the other side!”

She seized her pistol and ran.

Djura pressed a useless hand against the blocked doorway, listening to Eileen’s retreating footsteps and the snarls of the pursuing beasts. Dust was still drifting through the air and he quickly buried a racking cough in his elbow to muffle it from the beasts’ sharp ears. He sank down, groping half-blind for Laure or Adele, whichever he could reach first, and Adele obediently let him grasp her shoulder.

“Are you all right?” he said, once his throat had cleared. They were both conscious and breathing, and seemed unhurt, but there’d been no time for more than a cursory check after the world had stopped shaking.

“Laure’s bleeding,” said Adele, and for a split second Djura’s heart stopped as he pictured her lying ripped open in a pool of her own blood – but then he managed to locate Laure amongst the rubble, who was quite whole and unhurt but for a gash on her upper arm, which she was examining with a furrowed brow.

“There now,” Djura said, relieved, “let me see that –” He crawled over and took her arm in his hand. It was bleeding quite a bit, actually, possibly enough to be worrisome. Laure, still stunned, looked like she was trying to decide whether or not it merited tears.

Djura ripped one of the flounces off of her skirt and sponged away the blood as best he could.

“Oh oh oh,” he said automatically, meaningless soothing noise, trying to prevent a torrent of tears he wasn’t sure he could handle. It was the same kind of lilting nonsense he’d tried to use once or twice to calm the beasts in Old Yharnam, with extremely limited success. “Let’s just have a look at that,” he pressed on anyway. “There now, not so bad once it’s been cleaned up, is it? Look, it isn’t deep. Nothing to waste a blood vial on, hey? Here, we’ll just wrap it up like so –” He ripped off another scrap of cloth and tied it over the cut. “There, and now when it’s healed you’ll have a great big scar, and won’t all your friends be jealous – or is it only little boys who like to get scars? I’d’ve been green with envy –”

“Girls like scars too,” Laure said, incensed. It was the first time she’d spoken since the Tomb, and seeing her little face go lively again – even for just a moment – was a better balm than the blood itself.

“Well, then,” he said, “there you are. All’s well that ends well, eh? Now we just –” The dust caught in his throat and he coughed again, an awful hacking old-man cough.

“Gods,” he said, “I sound like my grandfather. All right, up you get. Step carefully, now.”

The sounds of the beasts had faded. That was one hell of a pack, but if anyone could get out of that scrape alive it was Eileen. She’d always been unflappable, invincible – even Djura, who had once known her about as well as anyone could, had sometimes forgotten that under it all she was just ordinary flesh and blood, same as any other hunter. When she put on the mask and cape and took to the streets with such elegant efficiency it was easy to forget that there was an ordinary woman underneath, one who tired and bled and sweat, who had a weakness for chocolates and used to coo at Laure and bounce her on her knee when she thought no one was looking. Which of course was just how she liked it.

These days it seemed Eileen’s invincibility wasn’t quite what it used to be, but he could do nothing for her now.

They were in the house’s kitchen, or what was left of it after their little misadventure with the door. The stove peeked out half-buried beneath the rubble. Djura tread carefully as he crossed the room – his time in Old Yharnam had taught him a thing or two about getting around abandoned, half-collapsed buildings, not that you’d be able to tell by the way he’d battered his way in here. He should have known better. Eileen always used to gripe about the way he charged into situations without giving them a moment’s thought.

Fortunately, the kitchen’s other door was clear of the rubble. He carefully eased it open. It led into a small dining room: table, chairs, sideboard, a half-stocked china cabinet. The floor here was wood, but not yet rotten, so far as he could tell. Still, the table was thick with dust. There was a single window, but it was barred, useless as an exit.

The door to the next room was ajar. Djura reached out for it, hesitated; glanced back at Laure and Adele, who were so thickly coated with dust now that they looked like little ghosts. Both were watching him, but quickly averted their gazes when he met their eyes. Finally he pressed the door open, slowly. He held his breath, and it was only then that he recognized the reason for his reluctance, the refrain echoing in the back of his head:Please no bodies. Please no bodies. 

Healing blood or no, no one in Yharnam was a stranger to death. Djura had seen his fair share of corpses before he’d ever signed his hunter’s contract. He’d never quite got used to it, the way others did, or pretended to. But there were ways of reconciling yourself to it. You said a prayer or closed their eyes and satisfied yourself that you and your weapons were keeping the city safe, that for every death you couldn’t prevent there were three more you had. Oh, yes, a hunter could deal with it very neatly.

Most of the bodies of Old Yharnam had crumbled away on unceremonious funeral pyres that night. They resurrected into ash and took what revenge they could, billowing from the flames to coat the streets and the insides of the onlookers’ throats. But there were others who had escaped the initial purges but who hadn’t escaped the advance of the flames. And when Djura went scavenging through the ruins, sometimes he found a blackened corpse or two inside the houses, surrounded by the ruined remnants of their lives. It was to be expected. And sometimes he was able to gather himself and block it out and press on. And sometimes he wasn’t.

Out in the yard, among the scattered linens, there had been an infant’s christening gown that Djura had stepped around and the others had trampled without noticing.

Please no bodies. 

The parlor was blessedly empty. Some signs of hurry, of disarray - a drawer half-open, a book knocked to the floor – but none of struggle. Like the dining room, it was small, modest, and coated in dust. Another doorway led to the little hall, with stairs here leading up to the second floor, and the front door itself – but this was thick, locked, and heavily bolted. Whenever the people here had fled, they’d gone out the back way.

Djura pressed a frustrated hand against the door and then risked twitching the curtain aside from the parlor window, to see what was happening on the street. Through the bars he could see the house facing this one across the way, and the more open space of St. Anezka’s square to the right; but no sign of Eileen.

Something four-legged and large loomed across the window. Djura swore and dropped to a crouch, his back to the door. Laure and Adele had hunkered down automatically by the sofa. He gestured to them to stay where they were and listened intently. The beast paused briefly by the front of the house but then ambled onwards.

Djura counted off a minute just to be safe and then rose.

“No getting out this way,” he said, his voice pitched low. “Look around and see if you can’t find the keys.” They likely would have been on the same ring as those that unlocked the back door, and therefore carried away in someone’s pocket, but there might be a spare set somewhere about. Djura began to open the drawers of the end tables and feel through the pockets of the dusty old coats still hanging on a stand, while the girls crouched to peer under the sofa and chairs.

Djura pawed through the remnants of these strangers’ lives - notepads and pencils and memoranda-books, spools of thread, stray marbles and a single mute alphabet block separated from its fellows. One of the end tables displayed two fuzzy photographs as proudly and prominently as any Cainhurst noble had ever showed off his expensive oil portrait. Djura quickly and surreptitiously laid them facedown before he could get a good look, pretending to be checking their backs. He couldn’t afford to get distracted now.

When a stray needle managed to stab him through his gloves he accepted the rebuke and withdrew.

“No luck?” he asked the girls, who shook their heads. Dust-pale and ragged, they still wouldn’t meet his eye for more than a moment or two at a time; their gazes rested naturally on the floor, Adele’s slightly unfocused, Laure’s intent. Djura knew he ought to say something, do something, but what exactly? Sweep them into a hug and promise everything would be okay? They’d probably try to bite him, and he’d deserve it.

“We’ll just quickly check upstairs then,” he said, the forced briskness in his voice almost ghoulish. Not that he could see it doing much good, but what else was there to do? He was starting to get worried for Eileen. There’d been no sight or sound of the pack of beasts she’d had on her trail – likely she’d tried to lead them on a little chase to give the three of them some breathing room, but he wouldn’t have minded having some idea of where the hell she was.

The stairs, like the rest of the interior, were still in decent repair, but Djura edged his way up slowly, sticking close to the wall, just to be safe.

“Don’t know why I’m going up first,” he grumbled, as he tried his weight on the next step. “It’ll hold your weight before it’ll hold mine …” He glanced quickly back at the girls, but they didn’t react. Not that he blamed them. It was just that Djura knew what felt like to have the rug pulled out from under your feet like that: he’d felt it himself, and had seen it happen to countless others. In the moments after, there was a desperate scrambling for normalcy, reaching out for anything that might slow your descent. He’d always been good at providing that: distracting jokes, mindless conversation, sometimes the grim gallows humor so common among hunters. He didn’t know if that was what Laure and Adele needed right now, but under the circumstances it was the only thing he knew how to offer.

He kept his blunderbuss ready as he edged into the upstairs hallway. If there were anything unwelcoming up here it surely would have descended on them already, but it made him feel less powerless, more able to protect the girls, and less focused on that refrain that had picked up again in this new territory: Please no bodies, please no bodies. 

There wasn’t much to see up here. A little water closet, a linen closet, the master bedroom: he shuffled through the sheets and bedside tables and cabinets on the half-hearted hope he’d find something of use. There was a crib in the master bedroom which Djura gave a wide berth. The bed itself was unmade, and there was something unsettling about that. The disarray of the sheets made it too easy to imagine they way they’d been thrown off, to picture shadowy faceless forms jerking out of their sleep at the sound of – what? An alarm bell ringing, a skirmish on the street below? Or something worse, something closer, that made those heavy bolts on the door into jailers instead of guards?

He was falling into the trap again. Picturing things. That wasn’t an option now, not with the girls hovering in the doorway, relying on him. He left the bedroom to try the final door at the back of the hall. It was locked, but not nearly so solidly as the front door: just an everyday lock, the door itself relatively flimsy and clearly installed back when its primary purpose would have been privacy, not security. Djura suspected it might give if he just rammed it hard enough, but after the disaster at the back door he wasn’t about to risk it. Instead he set down his gun and knelt down to squint at the lock.

“There were some hairpins back on the dresser in the bedroom,” he said, more to break the silence than anything else. “Go fetch me one, would you?” There was no reason he couldn’t fetch it himself, but he wanted the girls to have something to do. To not just stand there silently, staring.

They didn’t say anything, but they obeyed: both together, Laure trailing only slightly in her sister’s wake. Djura rested his head against the door, guilt clawing at him. Father and grandfather dead, mother vanished. No wonder they clung to each other: that was all they had left of their little family. That, and a sour old crow, and a half-blind hermit with more bullets than sense.

He thought of Old Yharnam. Djura had always been reckless, even by the Kegs’ standards. He knew how his decision to protect the purged quarter must look to others, but to him it had seemed to be almost the first truly responsible thing he’d ever done. Accepting his actions. Honoring his lost friends. Standing for something, something more than the typical aimless Keg blasphemies. It was one thing to use holy books as door-stops and pen drunken ditties about the blood saints’ erotic appetites. They’d still brought out their weapons every time the hunt drew near, purging Yharnam’s streets for as long as the Church allowed them to. If more of his friends had survived the atrocities in Old Yharnam, would they have understood what Djura had? Would they have joined him? He liked to think so.

But they hadn’t, and there was only him and the few allies he’d been able to scrape together, other hunters who had grown blood-sick and weary of violence. Ally, singular, now. What would he think when Djura failed to return? Well, the obvious thing, of course. Watching friends leave and not come back had been part of daily Yharnam life for a long time now.

Deciding to protect the people of Old Yharnam was the one worthwhile thing he’d ever done, and now he was going back on that promise. For however long it took to get to Iskierka and back, at least. If he did make it back, his friend was going to kill him himself for the worry he’d caused.

When, he told himself. When I make it back.

No, if. Djura wasn’t that stupid.

But the beasts would still be protected in Old Yharnam, and that was the important thing. It wasn’t as though he felt returning was really an option at all - not after what he’d done tonight. The feeling of having abandoned his post was simply another kind of guilt to gnaw at him. That, at least, was familiar enough: just add it to the pile, then. Djura wondered vaguely if they would ever cancel each other out, all the various sins and penances that pulled his strings these days. Actions and their equal and opposite reactions.

“Uncle Djura,” said Adele.

Djura blinked. Laure was holding out a hairpin for him.

“Yes,” he said. “Oh, good. Yes. Good.” Focus.

He took a breath, gathering himself, and went to work on the lock. The hairpin wasn’t an ideal lockpick, but then the lock itself wasn’t exactly top-of-the-line: with a little finesse he soon heard a soft click.

The door was barely open a crack when a sudden strange breeze carried a horrifying stench into the hall. All three of them covered their mouths and noses; Adele stumbled backward, dragging Laure by her dress.

“What is it?” she hissed, her eyes watering.

Djura felt weary, weary. “Stay here,” he said softly, and pushed his way in.

Here in this bedroom, at last, was the evidence of their clumsy entry: the back wall was half-crumbled away, allowing the night air to pass into the house. Djura could just imagine how bad the smell would have been before the room was opened to the air. There were two twin beds here with neat white linens, one of them splattered with red. More alphabet blocks were spilled across the floor, scattered around a knocked-over doll with its porcelain face caved in.

The corpse was between the two beds: a beast, smaller and sleeker than most; bipedal, humanoid. Though it was well-rotted by this point, Djura could see signs of injury on its shoulder and leg. But the cuts looked clumsy, not deep, and there wasn’t much blood pooled around it. The beast was thin, though, bony. Emaciated.

Djura looked away, covered his face, sagged against the wall. Focus, focus, he told himself, but he could feel it coming over him. The overwhelming horror and anger and despair: this disease that it seemed everyone else was immune to, the scourge of seeing, of feeling, the little voice plaguing him that said this isn’t right, this isn’t right. 

He had to gather himself, go back out to the girls, find another way out of here. There’s no time for this, said that brisk exasperated voice in his head that always sounded just a bit like Eileen. It might have taken him a bit longer, though, if something hadn’t suddenly dropped on the roof overhead with a nerve-rattling THUD.

Djura was out the door like a shot, back into the hallway, his heart pounding, reaching for a gun that wasn’t there. The girls were fine – of course they were, whatever it was was upon the roof – and after a frozen moment craning his neck upward, listening for more sound, he looked back down and saw that Adele had seized his blunderbuss.

She was holding it quite competently, too. It was obviously heavy for her, the butt sinking toward the ground, but she a good firm grip on it that wasn’t going to blow off any bits of her if she did pull the trigger.

They all listened for a moment more. There was a slight scraping sound, but nothing else.

“Going to take a shot with that, were you?” Djura finally said, holding his hand out for the blunderbuss.

“I know how to shoot a gun,” Adele said mulishly, as she handed it back to him. “My dad taught me.”

This was obviously new information for Laure. “He didn’t teach me,” she said, with a note of disbelief in her voice.

“You’re too little.”

“I am not!”

“And anyways you’re not responsible,” continued Adele, prim as a schoolmarm.

“Yes I am – Uncle Djura –”

“Adele – be nice to your sister. Laure – if you behave yourself maybe you'll get some lessons later.” The sheer absurdity of what he was saying registered only after he said it. He took a shaky breath. Truthfully, it was so good to hear them bicker with the energy and everyday pettiness of two ordinary sisters he could have gladly let them go on forever.

But before the discussion could continue, he closed the bedroom’s door tightly behind him and waved them down the stairs; he suddenly had an idea of what they might have heard up above.

“Let’s go down,” he said. “I think Eileen might have caught up with us.”

Sure enough, Eileen’s feathered silhouette was lurking just outside the parlor windows. Djura pulled the curtain aside so they could see each other. She looked perfectly well, if a bit winded. The glass between them made it difficult to hear and they didn’t dare raise their voices too high; Djura pointed to the front door and shook his head, and in response Eileen pointed downwards, below where he was standing.

Well, of course. It seemed obvious now. He nodded and let the curtain fall.

“Good thing we’ve got Eileen, hey?” he said as he led the girls back to the kitchen. He still wanted to fill the silence, to stoke those sparks of liveliness that he’d seen up above. “She’s clever, your auntie. Feel around for a door down to the cellar.”

The girls obeyed, but he saw something mutinous flash in Laure’s eyes when he said Eileen’s name, and Adele’s shoulders tensed.

They were lucky: the trapdoor leading down to the cellar hadn’t been covered by the rubble. It took only a moment’s scrabbling in the dust to find it.

The root cellar smelled of rotten, moldy vegetables, but after the stench above Djura wasn’t about to complain. Especially not since it had two windows on the far wall: brushing the ceiling, just above ground level, and small enough that the owners hadn’t bothered to put bars over them. The moonlight filtering through from above was just enough to see by. Djura tugged over a crate and began pressing on it to see whether the wood was rotten. It would hold, he decided.

“Well, here we are,” he said, more of that awful forced briskness in his voice. “Eileen will be glad to see the two of you safe and sound, that’s for sure. I’m not so certain about me.”

He looked at them out of the corner of his eye before he stepped up to begin fiddling with the window latch. There it was again: tension, anger. He took his foot back off the crate.

“Eileen didn’t kill your father,” he said.

Gods, what a terrible thing to say. He winced as soon as it left his mouth. But it was obvious - it had been obvious all along - that there was nothing he could do now that would give the girls any comfort. So he had decided, in a split second, to offer the truth instead: clarity, at least, might be a small blessing for two children in a world that had turned itself inside-out. And he could at least start with something that might make the world just slightly less horrifying than they had been imagining.

Adele flinched and stared resolutely at the ground; Laure’s nostrils flared.

“She killed Granddad,” Laure said.

“Yes,” Djura said. “Yes. I – we – we both did. I helped her.” Gods, what was he doing? He gritted his teeth and pressed onwards. “I helped her,” he said, “because your granddad was sick, and he wasn’t going to get better. And he would have killed her if she hadn’t killed him first. I – that’s –” He sank down onto the crate, rested his elbows on his knees, started to rub at his forehead. “And if you’re angry then you’re angry, and if you hate us then you hate us, and I’m not trying to change that. But you should understand, at least, exactly what was happening. Your granddad was a good man and he loved you and he got sick and he hurt people. And Eileen – and I – stopped him.”

“The beasts hurt people,” Laure said, her voice low. “But you said we shouldn’t hurt them back.”

“Yes, I did. I said that. I did.”

A rap on the window above: Eileen, wondering what the delay was, urging them to hurry up. Djura raised his hand, a quick I hear you signal. He looked back at the girls and saw the expression on Laure’s face as she looked up at the window. And he realized that it didn’t matter whether she’d understood before that Djura had helped kill Henryk, or whether she understood it now: Eileen had started it, Eileen had been fighting him before they’d even arrived, Eileen had stood there with blood dripping from her blades. Djura hadn’t known Laure as long as Adele, but she’d always been stubbornly confident, more so than most children. She made up her mind about something and that was how it was, common sense and evidence to the contrary be damned. He supposed she got it from her father. Djura hadn’t stopped Eileen from killing Henryk, but Eileen was the one who had actually killed him: that was the end of it, as far as she was concerned.

And Eileen, bless her poor stubborn soul, was the last person who might ever manage to win back Laure’s trust after this. Her blunt, uncompromising nature suited her well to her chosen faction, but no one could ever accuse her of being a hypocrite: Eileen never expected forgiveness from others any more than her targets might expect it from her. If a hunter went blood-mad then they received her blade; if she did something wrong then she received the injured party’s hatred or retribution. It was a simple equation for her. Simple, and immutable.

Djura could still remember the first few times he’d seen Eileen. Hunters of Hunters didn’t mingle much with other factions, for obvious reasons, but back then there had been a bit more cohesion between the various groups nonetheless; and Eileen, the new acolyte, without her badge or her wings, had often been dispatched to attend any important meetings.

Eileen’s exact age was one of many details Djura had never been able to pry out of her, but there couldn’t be more than a few years between them, in one direction or the other. In a room full of gray and graying hair Djura had noticed her immediately, this young stranger with the sad eyes, lurking on the outskirts of the room, trying to look aloof and unconcerned and succeeding only in looking miserable. He hadn’t been able to resist the challenge of trying to draw her into conversation, to make her smile, to tease out the details of her past. And in spite of Eileen’s best efforts, more and more he had been rewarded with reluctant smiles and good-natured eye-rolling. If not for him he doubted Eileen would ever have begun moving in other hunters’ circles, would ever have made Henryk and Gascoigne’s acquaintance and been halfway adopted into their family.

And of course all that had ended in Eileen slaughtering one over the corpse of the other, so what the hell did he know?

“Eileen –” he said now. “I know you’re angry, but she –” She what? Wants what’s best for you? That was what adults always said, when you were young, and you rolled your eyes and didn’t believe them and swore you’d never say anything so idiotic. Phrases like that must be some kind of disease you only became susceptible to past the age of twenty.

“Enough,” Djura finally sighed. “Enough. You don’t need to hear me bleating. You know what happened now, that’s all.”

He stood, and undid the latch, and flipped the window open: it would be just barely big enough for him to pass through. Adele pushed Laure forward first, and Djura reached out for her and hoisted her up. She scrambled out and onto the ledge, and for the split second it required, at least, she allowed Eileen to help pull her out.

When Djura turned back for Adele, she didn’t move toward him right away. She was looking at him with that familiar intense expression. He couldn’t guess what she was going to say next, but he guessed that he wasn’t going to like it.

“Mum’s dead, isn’t she?” she finally said.

Oh, gods.

“I – I don’t know, Adele.”

Her eyes narrowed. “If she were alive we’d be looking for her. You’re not even trying to find her.”

“I don’t know,” Djura repeated. “I’m not lying. I’m not trying to coddle you. I honestly don’t know. Eileen doesn’t either. If she’s alive she can reach you in Iskierka.”

“But you’re not going to look for her. You think she’s dead.”

Everything in Djura wanted to lie, to not deliver this next blow. But he could tell when he was being tested.

“We don’t think it’s very likely that she’s alive, no. You’re right. We don’t. And we know that she would rather us keep you safe than risk your lives trying to find out.”

Adele nodded slowly, eyes, on the ground, turning this over.

“You’ve been so brave,” he said quietly. “I’m –”

“No I haven’t,” she said suddenly, fiercely. “Don’t say that. I haven’t. Things have happened to me. Things can happen to anyone. That doesn’t make me brave.”

“All right,” Djura said. “You’re not brave.”

She nodded again. Then she stepped up onto the crate and let him lift her into his arms. His back groaned under the effort.

“You’re big, that’s for damn sure,” he grunted, “you’re not allowed to argue with me on that.”

Her mouth twitched, ever so slightly. He hoisted her up.

It took some doing to get himself out the window: he had to pass out his gun and his stake driver and Eileen had to grab hold of his arms while he scrambled up from below. But he finally got himself out onto the cobblestones.

“Took you long enough,” Eileen said, as he was refastening the stake driver to his arm.

“How the hell’d you get away from all those beasts?”

“I flapped my wings and flew.” Her voice was deadpan. “All the way over the rooftops.”

“Careful, Eileen,” he said automatically, “someone might think you’re making a joke.”

“Mm.”

Eileen had a vast catalog of mms, to cover an astonishing array of human emotion, ranging from I suppose that could work to What you just said moved me deeply to Make one more thing explode and I’m going to toss you off this bridge. Historically speaking she tended to deploy these mostly when Djura was around, for some reason. He was a bit rusty at reading them, but this one didn’t seem too angry.

As if aware that she might have betrayed herself, Eileen continued briskly, “You're coated in dust, all three of you. Brush yourselves off before you catch the attention of every beast between here and the gate.”

Adele began to half-heartedly brush at her dress, and Laure, after a moment's sharp glance at Eileen, followed suit. Eileen took an automatic half-step towards them, moving to help. But then she stopped herself, jerked her hands back, and clenched them tightly at her sides. Djura pretended not to notice.

Instead he looked over their ragged little band, weary and bedraggled, and thought: to hell with it. We’ve made it this far. Eileen’s going to keep us alive and I’m going to keep us together and the girls are going to despise us for the rest of their days but damn it, they are going to be safe. We are going to pull something precious out of this rotting hulk of a city if it is the last gods-damned thing we do.

“City's filthy enough,” he finally said, forcing liveliness into his voice. "I'm sure we'll be black as pitch with some delightful substance or other within a minute or two. Let’s just try not to topple any more buildings as we go, shall we?”

“Mmm,” said Eileen; he could almost hear her eyebrows raise.

They set off once more, the moon bright overhead.

Chapter Text

From St. Anezka’s the path to the Pilgrims’ Gate continued to slope downwards, through the thickening mist. For a stretch the streets were clear of beasts – and well they ought to be, thought Eileen; she still felt short of breath from her little romp. She’d led the pack practically back to Oedon before scaling a rectory and making her way across the roofs. Effective as it was in shaking the beasts, that was a young woman’s game, and her knees were chiding her for it with every step.

Djura certainly seemed to have recovered his spirits. Or at least was pretending so, for the girls’ sake. Eileen didn’t know what had happened inside that house while she was off leading her little chase, but the girls seemed more themselves now, more alert, more talkative even – it took a bit of cajoling on Djura’s part, but they had begun to respond to his steady stream of inane chatter. Eileen was still in the lead, but the other three walked closer behind her now, and she could hear him prattling aimlessly about the trouble he used to get into here as a boy – swiping bottles of holy blood and baptismal oil from that church on a dare; leaving a firecracker under the counter of that shop after its owner whacked his friend with a broomstick for a smart reply.

If it weren’t for the girls Eileen might have told him to shut up. The streets seemed emptier the closer they got to the gate, yes, and he kept his voice low: but she didn’t like to leave her guard down. Especially not after finding those bodies in the streets behind Oedon. On her sprint back up the hill she had thought she’d seen another corpse – fresh, and not torn up the way a beast’s victim would have been – but of course she’d been moving too quickly to really tell; she’d looped back on her rooftop route, but hadn’t been able to get a good look from her perch, and had been unwilling to risk descending.

And the night still felt wrong. Unsettled. Nights of the hunt were known for that manic tinge in the air, but this felt deeper, more profound. There was something bothering her that she couldn’t put her finger on, something about their path through the city, through the Ward; something felt … distended, somehow; that was the only word she could reach. But the more she tried to identify it the more elusive it became, like water leaking through her cupped fingers.

“I want to be a nurse for the Church,” Adele was saying quietly behind her, in response to one of Djura’s questions. “My friend’s sister is one, and she has her own rooms in a boarding house with all her friends, and she gets to help the sick people that come here.”

“I’m going to own a sweet shop,” Laure announced. “I’ll only sell the good kinds, no peppermints, and I’ll give them out for free on holidays.”

“That’s very ambitious, both of you,” Djura said. “When I was your age I wanted to be a pirate.”

“Well,” said Eileen – in spite of herself – “you’ve got the eye patch now.”

She glanced quickly over her shoulder to see his expression, a sly look on her face that the more intelligent part of her knew he couldn’t see. He raised his remaining eyebrow and gave her a tight-lipped, sarcastic smile.

“Between the jokes and the high-wire act I think our Eileen’s planning to join the circus.”

She snorted and turned around, back to the business of checking down a side-street for beasts. Gods above, hadn’t she just been wishing he’d stop talking? And now she could practically hear him smiling smugly behind her, proud of having drawn her out.

Djura, damn him, had always had an infuriating ability to make her act the fool out of her own volition. He’d first latched onto her at those miserable old meetings called by the Church. She’d had no friends or allies in the crowd, no way to shake him; in fact she thought she had made it quite clear that she had no interest in mingling with these groups of sneering strangers. But suddenly this young man with a mad glint in his eye was at her elbow, peppering her with questions: where was she from, how far was it from Yharnam, what was it like there – how did people speak, what did they look like, what did they wear? His curiosity for information about the world outside Yharnam was insatiable. It felt at times like being pursued by a particularly precocious toddler: What is that? What does it do? Why? Why? Why?

But while it was easy enough to get angry with Djura, it was impossible to stay that way. He seemed to exist in a state of constant good humor, with a mouth like a sailor and a flair for telling jokes so filthy they’d make a whore blush. Sometimes, watching him careen around the pub making friends with everyone he brushed up against, Eileen had wondered whether he’d somehow wandered in from some other Yharnam, where the evening pastime involved a pleasant diverting sport and not carving out beasts’ viscera.

But that Djura had died in the purge of Old Yharnam. Someone else had climbed back out of the wreckage, someone with a drawn and haunted look who flinched at small noises and lashed out at the slightest provocation. The Djura she’d known had never missed an opportunity to mock the Church’s moralizing; this new man might have been a minister himself for the way he fixated on their supposed sins. Old Yharnam was ugly business, Eileen would never deny that, but the way he had shadowed her, pleading with her like priest and penitent both – one moment trying to extract a confession and the next begging for some rite of penance that she wouldn’t know how to administer even if she wanted to –

It had hurt. Eileen would never have admitted it, was barely willing to acknowledge it even now, but seeing Djura like that had wounded some secret part of her that she had thought was impenetrable: a little walled garden buried in her heart of hearts where she tended vague memories of open sky and golden sunlight, things that made her remember what life was like outside of Yharnam’s walls. Goodhearted laughing Djura had reminded her of that too. But when that withered and died she had done what she always did: clipped it off and cast it away. Left him to rot with his beasts down in Old Yharnam, if that was what he wanted.

But now that Djura was back, or some shadow of him at least, leading the girls in a weary but dedicated imitation of his old madcap dance. It was good for the girls to have him, she finally admitted to herself. She couldn’t give them what they needed right now. He could.

“Ah, don’t let her growling scare you,” he was saying to them as he gave Laure a playful nudge. “I’ve seen your auntie in her cups. She giggles like a schoolgirl.”

All goodwill vanished and Eileen was ready to throttle him.

After a contemplative moment, Laure said loyally, “I think you’d make a very good pirate, Uncle Djura.”

“Thank you. I’m flattered.”

“Hold on a moment, Djura.”

The Pilgrims’ Gate was below them at last: the portcullis closed tight, and swathed in mist, but its wide arch welcoming nonetheless. The street here was wide, lined with shops and inns to welcome pilgrims passing through – all shuttered tight now, though a few windows still flickered from candlelight within, and a few doors still bore a lit censer.

The urge to make straight for the gate was almost irresistible. But there was a grocer’s shop to their left with shattered windows and a door hanging ajar.

“There might be some things worth having in there,” Eileen said. “I want to have a look.”

Djura looked suddenly wary. “Is that a good idea?” he said. “Last time we tried to force our way in somewhere …”

“Last time the door wasn’t hanging off its hinge already. We need supplies.”

He nodded, conceding the point, but said “I’ll stay out here with the girls if it’s all the same to you. I’ve poked through enough strangers’ things this evening.”

“Suit yourself.”

The windows were more than large enough for them to keep an eye on each other. Eileen pushed through the door and into the shop, striking a match and lighting her lantern to scan over the dim space. The light illuminated the tins on the shelves and reflected faintly off of the brass scales and jars of penny candy on the counter. Sacks of potatoes slumped on top of each other in the corner: she lifted the top one, which was nearly empty, and overturned its contents. They’d need a bag for the supplies.

The potatoes fell to the floor with solid thumps and scattered. One struck her foot on the way down, surprisingly hard. Eileen knelt and lifted it. It was firm, not rotten. None of them were.

Eileen stood slowly, casting the lantern’s light over the window display. The carrots were still orange, radishes still red, the lettuce wilted but not withered: all of it still firm to the touch, nothing moldy. She had assumed the shop had been abandoned for months. What wouldn’t be, down in this part of the city? But none of the produce could have been set out much earlier than this morning, given how fresh it was. There were lanterns still lit on the street, after all. Maybe enough to keep a small shop in business.

Which meant that the broken windows, the forced door, must have happened tonight.

Eileen cast the lantern’s light over the shop again in a slow sweeping arc. No dust on the shelves or counter. No signs of struggle either, everything as neat and tidy as though the shop had just closed for the night. But no – something glinted on the floor just behind the counter, something dark and liquid. Eileen drew closer.

The body was slumped against the shelves behind the counter, its head drooped on its chest, its grocer’s apron slashed open in an X that let the blood pool across its lap and onto the floor.

A body, whether left by man or by beast, was nothing new to Eileen. So why was this one frightening her so, why was it making her chest tighten and her head buzz with dread?

Because of a door left ajar. An open door promising exactly what the four of them needed most in that moment. An invitation.

Eileen pressed on the man’s forehead and lifted his head into the light. The dim flickering glow, paired with the upward movement, for a moment made her think the body was vomiting, spilling forth dark bile: but no. There was something stuffed in its mouth. Sleek black feathers.

Crow’s feathers.

Eileen leapt to her feet.

“Djura –” she cried, seconds before a shot rang out.

Djura watched Eileen push her way into the shop, saw her lantern’s light bobbing along in the windows. He ought to join her, but the thought of picking through the rubble of another Yharnam tragedy exhausted him. Besides, it wasn’t as though he had a clue what to look for. That tunnel under the gate was the farthest he’d ever been from the city.

He scanned the street now. The tunnel could be accessed through the gatehouse – he couldn’t make out the door through the mists, but he knew it was down there – but there was another entrance too, hidden off of a square with a fountain. Come to think of it, they’d likely already passed it. Between the gate, the gatehouse, and the fountain entrance, they had three options for getting out of the city: not the worst odds he’d ever heard, certainly.

He felt a little tug. Adele was hovering close to him, fiddling with one of the tatters on his shirt without seeming to realize she was doing it. Her other hand was firmly on her sister, as always. He reached out idly to rub the top of her head; she drew closer and let it rest against his side. He’d felt like a right idiot rambling on like that as they walked, but the chatter had worked to shake them out of their gloom. They were ready for a distraction now. He’d gladly fill that role.

Something shifted in the fog down by the gate. He frowned and squinted, but almost as soon as he wondered if someone was there, it vanished – and then reappeared an instant later, closer than before.

“Djura –”

Hearing Eileen shout his name brought back every hunter’s instinct he’d ever honed. He seized the girls even as he went crashing to the ground. The shot cracked somewhere overhead – in the confusion he wasn’t sure if it would have hit, or missed, or if it had even been aimed at them, but he certainly wasn’t going to waste time figuring it out.

“Go, go,” he shouted, shoving the girls forward towards the shop. He scrambled to his feet, casting a quick glance over his shoulder and catching another glimpse of that figure down by the gate – he reached for his blunderbuss, fumbled, decided not to waste time or bullets taking wild shots, and crashed through the door.

“Where – ?” Eileen said, reaching out and grabbing the girls to her.

“Down – down by the gate –”

“Can we make it back up the street?”

“What? No, no cover –”

She threw open the door at the back of the shop and they raced into the storeroom. The back door opened easily, out into a little alley behind the shops, but for some reason Eileen hesitated.

“Wait,” she said. “I don’t want to be flushed straight into a trap –”

“We can’t just sit here –”

“There must be rooms above the shop.”

Eileen obviously knew more about what was going on than he did. There was another door next to the one that led to the shop, and he followed her lead as she tugged it open and dashed up a flight of stairs and into the little apartment above. The windows of the grocer’s sitting-room looked over the alley to the back: it was narrow, especially here on the second story, with the opposite building’s back windows pressed close.

“Do you think we could make it across?” Eileen said.

We’d damn well better, Djura thought, seeing as they’d otherwise managed to trap themselves up here very neatly. He said nothing, though, and raised the sash instead. The distance to the other window wasn’t even as wide as he was tall: with a bit of a jump he and Eileen could probably make it, and they might pass the girls across – if they could get the opposite window open.

Against the wall there was a little devotional altar, with a statue of St. Anna and a vial of the blood and a thick, imposing copy of the scriptures and the catechism.

Djura pocketed the blood and hefted the text. He forced his shoulders through the window, took aim, and threw. It was an awkward angle, but the heavy book shattered the opposite window and left a sizeable hole in its center: there would be something to grab onto when jumping, now, though with all that broken glass the landing certainly wasn’t going to be pleasant.

“Let me,” Eileen said, pushing him aside. “The stake driver’s going to throw you off-balance.”

Djura was quite accustomed to navigating Yharnam’s challenges with the stake driver attached, but he had to admit that Eileen was nimbler than he was, not to mention taller.

“Have some blood ready,” he warned, but she’d made the leap almost before he’d finished speaking. She clung to the window ledge, grunting in pain. Her right arm had landed right on one of the largest shards: it had no doubt gouged her nearly down to the bone. But she dragged herself inside, bringing more glass with her as she went, stood, and immediately began clearing away what glass remained in the window with her good arm, heedless of the new lacerations that the shards sliced into her skin. Once the frame was clear she jabbed herself with a blood vial and reached out.

This was going to take a bit of maneuvering. Djura lifted Laure up, bracing the window awkwardly with his shoulders: he’d never admit it to Eileen, but this probably would be easier if he had time to get the stake driver off.

“Go on and reach out there,” he grunted to Laure. She did the best she could, her fingers just brushing Eileen’s: if he let go now Eileen would catch her easily, but might wrench her arm out of her socket in doing so. He made eye contact with her through the mask, raising his eyebrow slightly – Should I …? To which Eileen nodded: Go ahead.

He tossed her. Lightly, just enough to send her safely into Eileen’s arms, and quickly enough that she didn’t have time to squirm: she looked slightly baffled as Eileen pulled her through the window, still unsure how she’d gotten from here to there.

“Your turn,” he said, turning to Adele. At least this one had started her growth spurt. Evidently the same thought had occurred to her, because she brushed past his proffered hand and scrambled onto the ledge herself.

“I’ll do it better on my own, I think,” she said politely, and then launched herself across. Eileen caught her – “Good girl, good girl,” she said as she hauled her up, Adele’s feet scrabbling against the wall.

Djura squeezed himself through the window and jumped. He wrenched his shoulder a bit grabbing the ledge, but Eileen helped him up and into the room. Broken glass crunched beneath his feet as he crouched panting for a moment, trying to get back his balance and his breath. Eileen was holding up a hand: they all stayed where they were, balanced precariously above the shards of glass, straining to hear over their own ragged breaths. Nothing. No sounds of pursuit, no shadowy figure bursting through the window after them. When Eileen finally lowered her hand, Djura drew out a vial and took a quick nip of blood.

“Right,” he whispered, offering up the vial as he felt the pleasant rippling not-pain of the blood spread through his shoulder. “Everybody in one piece?”

“Laure’s cut is bleeding again,” Adele whispered back. She was inspecting her sister’s makeshift bandage.

“She’ll live,” Eileen said. “Too much blood isn’t good for children.”

“He asked,” said Adele, but without much vigor: she and Laure both looked stunned, unsteady. Your first time being shot at would do that to you.

Djura looked at the broken window behind him as he tucked the vial back into his belt. Their path wasn’t exactly untraceable, but it should at least be unpredictable, and relatively quiet: if their pursuer had expected them to head down the alley, then they might well have succeeded in shaking him.

The little room they’d landed in was bare and dusty, its only furnishing the holy book now flopped unceremoniously on the floor. Eileen stepped silently around the shattered glass and began easing open the door.

“I don’t suppose you have any idea what the hell just happened?” Djura said as he went to cover her.

“What did you see?” Eileen said urgently.

“Something in the fog.” The little hall was bare. “A person. Just for a second. I couldn’t get a good look. What did you see?”

Eileen opened the door across the hall and crossed the room to peer out the window. The street below was more typical of Yharnam, narrow and shadowed: Djura couldn’t make out anything that looked like the figure in the fog, though there was another of those bizarre beasts slumping past, carrying a sack on its back.

“A message,” she said grimly. “For me. Crow’s feathers.”

“Shit. Are you sure?”

“Stuffed into the mouth of that shopkeeper’s corpse.”

“Shit. Do you think he – she – whoever did this – is one of … yours? Those bodies that we found, I mean … ?”

Eileen passed back into the hall. “Probably,” she said, her voice tense. “We’re so damn close –”

“Do you think we should try for it?”

“I don’t know.” Eileen paced back and forth, opening the other doors – one to another empty room, one to a set of stairs leading down. “I think he might know what we mean to do, though I can’t imagine how.”

Djura shook his head, overwhelmed. “Charming company you keep –”

“Djura,” Eileen warned.

“There’s another entrance to the tunnel back up the hill,” he offered. “Hidden just off that square with the big fountain dedicated to what’s-his-name, Logarius – no telling if it’s open, but …”

“Mmm,” said Eileen: You’re telling me this now? “We need to keep moving regardless. We haven’t put enough distance between us. But that’s exactly why I don’t want to just blunder out onto the street, he may have guessed we’d come through this house –”

“We could go through the rafters,” said Laure.

Djura blinked. He hadn’t even realized Laure was behind them. But there she was, pointing up to a door set into the ceiling above their head. She fixed them with a calm, self-possessed look as she explained; Djura was struck by the sudden image of a professor holding forth from a lecture stand.

“Our friend Camilla – the one whose sister’s a nurse? She lives in a house like this, all in a row. If you go up to the attic there’s a little door you can crawl through, and then this sort of tunnel along the rafters that goes all down the whole row – if you’re quiet you can hear what people are saying.” She paused, thoughtful. “And if you’re not you get into very big trouble.”

Eileen and Djura looked at each other.

“It’s true,” said Adele. “I mean, maybe these houses wouldn’t have it, I don’t know –”

“We can sure as hell give it a try,” said Djura, even as Eileen was reaching up to tug down the attic door.

Eileen lit her lantern once they were up above. The attic, like the rooms below, was empty; the light passed over nothing but the sloping walls and dusty floor. Laure immediately spotted a little door set into the wall, hardly taller than she was. She swung it open and peered in, waving to Eileen to bring the light closer. Then she nodded and turned back to the two adults.

“You have to be careful to only step on the wood,” she warned, “because if you step on the plaster you’ll go crashing straight through. Also, it might be a bit small for you,” she added, looking at the grownups doubtfully.

“We can crawl if we have to,” Eileen said.

Laure regarded her coolly for a moment, then said, “You’d better give me the lantern. I can hold it standing up, and I should go first, because I’m the smallest.”

“No,” said Adele, exasperatedly, “give me the lantern, you’ll drop it, Laure –”

“I will not, Addie, don’t be awful –”

“Girls, honestly, this is not –”

“Addie can hold the lantern and Laure can go first,” said Djura.

Eileen made a grumbling little mmm of protest, casting him what he assumed was a dark look, but she handed over the lantern and let the girls duck down through the door.

“You next, I suppose,” she said, “as long we’re putting the smallest in the lead …”

“Petty,” Djura said, but he followed.

The space was indeed cramped. There was a damp brick wall to their right and to the left the sloping roof itself; the girls could stand quite comfortably, but Eileen and Djura both had to crouch and brace their hands awkwardly on either side. As Laure had said, there wasn’t a true floor here, just the thick wooden rafters interspersed with ceiling-plaster. It took some doing to avoid putting a foot wrong when they couldn’t even manage to stand up straight.

The light of the lantern bobbed along steadily ahead. There were more little doors spaced out evenly along the brick wall, leading into other attics. The girls darted lightly across the rafters, while Eileen and Djura scraped clumsily along behind as the wood groaned under their weight. Just as Djura was starting to think his back was going to be permanently bent, the girls paused.

“This is the last door,” Laure whispered.

“Stop and listen, then,” said Eileen from behind him. They were quiet for a few moments; Laure pressed her ear to the door and finally shook her head.

“You open it slowly, now,” Eileen said.

Laure obeyed and peered out. She looked back to them and shrugged: empty.

“You can see clearly?”

“There’s nothing there at all.”

“All right. Step softly. There may be people below.”

“They’d have heard us already,” Laure said, but she still moved carefully out through the door. Adele followed, and Djura after.

His back and neck sure as hell wouldn’t have minded a bit of blood after all that, but better not to waste it: he stretched slowly instead, and Eileen did the same. If it weren’t for the different slope of the walls, they might have stepped back into the very same attic they had just left: this space, too, was empty and abandoned.

Laure suddenly reached out and snatched the lantern from Adele’s hands. Adele lunged to grab it back, mouth opening to object, and Djura quickly stepped in.

“Well done, Laure,” he said, nodding to the passage. “That was clever.”

Laure smiled a quick, cunning little smile, glancing at him out of the corner of her eye before primly turning away, as though too magnanimous to do anything so vulgar as bask in his praise; in other circumstances it might have been funny. It was quickly replaced with a sour expression when he held his hand out for the lantern and passed it back to Eileen.

There were no windows up here, so there was nothing for it but to drop the ladder, head down, and hope the rest of the house was as unoccupied as it looked.

The upstairs hallway, at least, was as bare as the other had been, and a quick check showed similarly empty rooms. Eileen peered out the window of one of them, checking the street again.

“I don’t see anything,” she said. She paused for a moment, hand pressed to the glass, and then admitted in a low voice, “I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse.”

Djura drew closer. “It doesn’t seem like they’ve been able to follow us, whoever it was.”

“Exactly. Why wouldn’t they have pursued? We were right where they wanted us.”

“Don’t get paranoid.”

“You didn’t see –”

“I know. I know.” He wanted to put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “But what can we do?”

“Mmm,” she groaned, leaning slightly against the window, the beak of her mask pressed to the pane: Don’t you start that with me, this one said. But after a moment she answered wearily: “We do what we can, as carefully as we can, with the information we have.”

That was the gist of it, of what hunters said to each other in different forms and inflections all across Yharnam on nights when the hunt was on and the moon was hanging low and heavy in the sky. However careful you were, you could never know when there’d be a beast around the corner, or when you’d turn to find your fellow’s knife pressed to your throat. There was no way to win the game, really. No strategy. No reward for being clever or skeptical or trusting or brave. You went moment by moment and did what you could with what you had. And you reminded your companions of that when they were in danger of becoming paralyzed but the sheer brutal randomness of it all. Eileen and Djura had done it for each other before, in desperate moments when they were stalked and trapped and outnumbered. What a strange pair they’d been, those times they’d found themselves on the hunt in each other’s company – thrown together not by faction or shared technique but by something that might have been friendship.

A million years ago. Before Old Yharnam. He’d tried to make her understand, as he had tried to make everyone understand. He’d wanted her to understand so badly, wanted to believe that she, at least, might recognize what they’d done. But Eileen had refused to listen: he was grief-maddened, she’d told him with infuriating condescension, overwhelmed by the loss of the Kegs. When he’d tried to remind her of what they’d seen – what they’d done – she became angry, cut him off. For all her old whinging about Yharnam’s many faults – and gods, how she used to make him laugh as she listed them off in her funny sullen way, those nights when he could coax her into an outing at the pub – she had certainly made herself into a true Yharnamite in the end, as he himself had bitterly informed her.

“All right,” she finally sighed. “I don’t see anyone. Let’s head down, and you can show us where this other entrance is.”

Eileen listened at the door at the base of the stairs for a moment. All seemed quiet on the other side, so she didn’t extinguish her lantern: better not to waste the match. She edged the door open slowly, and held up the light.

Something human-shaped lurked at the other end of the room. Eileen inhaled sharply and drew her pistol. She took aim, throwing out an arm behind her to prevent the others from advancing.

The figure didn’t move. There was something odd about it, and not in the way of someone half-transformed: another moment and suddenly understanding clicked into place. It was a dummy, a mannequin, draped in a cloak – it didn’t even have a head. The shelves on either side of her were piled high with folded clothing and bolts of fabric. They’d emerged into the back room of a tailor’s shop.

“Easy,” Djura said gently. He rested a hand carefully on her left arm, urging her to lower the gun.

“Don’t easy me,” Eileen muttered, her heart still pounding. But she holstered the gun, took a breath, and stepped out into the room.

Don’t get paranoid.

The fabric on the shelves glittered in the candlelight. Eileen lifted the lantern, curious in spite of herself. It was all fine stuff, rich colors embroidered with threads of silver and gold. The mannequin she’d almost shot was sporting an elaborate set of heavy robes, layered with a cape and shawl: antique executioner’s garb, no doubt highly prized by the shop’s owner.

“This is Jehlicka’s,” said Eileen, the pieces falling into place as she realized where they were relative to the street outside. “The vestment shop.” She recognized now the deep crimson-and-gold of the garments worn by ministers on festival days, and even the white-and-silver of vicars’ robes; the next shelf held the more practical white and black of Church hunters. There was an expensive newfangled sewing machine in the corner, a sign of the shop’s prosperity. Jehlicka’s was far from the only vestment shop in the Ward, but it was certainly the most famous.

“They still in business?” asked Djura.

“I haven’t the faintest.”

She rubbed her fingers over the machine.

“Not much dust,” she said. “Might still be in use.”

“They’ll be home for the night, in any case,” said Djura. “Shall we?”

He eased open the door that led to the shop proper.

The storefront was large: outside the lantern’s light, mannequins were silhouetted and shadowed against the moonlight through the windows, looking half-human once again. The walls were lined with shelves of dark wood, and lower shelves ran mazelike across the shop floor, piled with fabric.

Something growled.

Eileen, stupidly, looked at Djura first, as if to confirm that this danger wasn’t in her head: but he had gone alert too, as had the girls. She reached for her pistol.

The sound came again: half-growl, half-pant; low, not snarling in attack, but undoubtedly coming from inside the shop. Eileen quickly clipped the lantern to her belt and drew her blade. They were behind the shop’s counter, and a low shelf of cassocks blocked their view.

They were still for a moment. So was the rest of the shop. Nothing moved, nothing lunged. Djura caught Eileen’s eye and nodded towards the door.

She edged out from behind the counter and rounded the shelf, leading with her pistol. As she rounded the corner she thought she could hear a low, whining sort of pant. It crescendoed into a snarl – something lurched toward her – Eileen yelled and fired.

She knew even before its bellow reached her ears that the shot had gone wild, but the beast let out a strange whimpering screech of pain nonetheless. As the gun smoke cleared, Eileen finally made it out on the floor ahead of her. It had clearly come out the worse in a struggle with Jehlicka or one of his people: one of the heavy shelves had toppled over on it and pinned it to the ground. Only its torso and head were visible, and from the awkward way it was twisted, the whining painful pants as it tried to move, the shelf must have broken its leg, perhaps even its hip.

Djura was at her side, stake driver primed and blunderbuss drawn. He let out a little sigh of relief when he saw that the beast was pinned. It lunged at him, or tried to, but succeeded only in dragging the shelf a few inches forward and squealing in pain.

“All right,” Djura said. “Let’s keep moving. The whole street’ll have heard the shot. Laure, Adele, come on, towards the door –” He began to usher them past the beast, and they crept quietly along.

Eileen took aim again.

“Eileen, let’s go,” Djura said.

She pulled the trigger. It clicked, that was all: had she used up all her bullets, failed to reload? That wasn’t possible. She’d shot at Henryk, yes, and maybe once or twice at the pack of beasts pursuing her, but she wouldn’t have forgotten to replace them. That was the worst kind of amateur mistake. She reached into her pocket for the carton of quicksilver bullets.

“Eileen, just leave it.”

Blood was pounding in her ears. She slid the bullets into the cylinder with shaking hands.

“For the gods’ sake, Eileen, it’s not hurting anyone, just leave it –”

“I’m making sure it won’t hurt anyone,” she snapped, taking aim again.

“Don’t, Eileen, please.” He was moving towards her, reaching towards her, doing something – she jerked away.

“I’m not just letting it lurk here in wait for whatever poor idiots stumble in next. Get out of the way, Djura.” He wasn’t in her way, precisely, but he had put a restraining hand on her shoulder: she shook it off and hoped he could feel her glare through her mask.

“Look at it, Eileen, it’s not doing anything. Haven’t we done enough tonight already –”

“Stop fighting,” said Laure behind them. “Stop being stupid, let’s just go, please let’s just go.”

“Laure, get back –”

First there was a tremendous crash. Then something slammed into Eileen and knocked her off her feet. The pistol flew from her hand and clattered to the floor: at the same time she heard snarling, felt sharp claws pressing into her stomach, and even through her mask smelled the thick stomach-churning scent of beast. Then the thing launched itself off of her, and for a dizzy moment she heard the others screaming as she lay gasping on the floor, her lungs laboring for air. Then she was scrambling to her knees, reaching for the gun, not finding it, reaching for her blade instead.

The beast had broken free of its trap. The escape had obviously cost it; it was sagging and lopsided, resting all its weight on one canine leg, hunched over something on the ground – what was it, was it Laure, Adele, Djura –

A gunshot. The beast reared back, screaming, blood spilling from a wound in its shoulder. It turned its attention now, crouched to lunge at a different target. But before it could do so, Eileen was on her feet and lurching forward with a single haphazard thrust that skewered straight through fur and flesh and muscle and out the other side. The beast screamed again, writhing. Eileen yanked out her blade and used the momentum to deliver a savage kick to the thing’s broken leg that sent it sprawling to the floor. She raised her blade and plunged it into the beast’s heart, and then for good measure drew it out and sunk it in again. When it had stopped twitching, she finally pulled the blade free.

The first thing she saw as she looked wildly around was Adele: Adele, holding Eileen’s pistol with one hand, smoke still uncurling from its barrel. Her other hand was clamped uselessly over her ear. Her eyes were wide, her breathing ragged and panicked. The gun shook in her grip. Djura was near her, curled over in pain, one hand pressed to his abdomen. And where was –

“Laure,” screamed Adele, casting the pistol carelessly aside and racing to where her sister lay huddled on the ground. “Laure, Laure, Laure –”

Laure was curled over, gasping for air. There was blood all over her – was it hers, or the beast’s? Something was badly wrong: Eileen tried to shift her slightly, searching for a wound, but Laure shrieked in pain. Eileen pressed her hands to her little side and Laure whimper-sobbed: an internal injury. Eileen could already see red bubbling up from her mouth.

“Blood,” said Eileen, her hands flying to her waist. Her head was cottony, her mind somewhere beyond panic and distress, somewhere purer and more profound. “Blood, blood –”

Djura was pressing a vial into her hand.

“Adele,” Eileen said. “Djura, move her –”

Adele shrieked as Djura pried her off of her sister, but he wrapped his arms tightly around her and held her back even as she wailed. Eileen tore open Laure’s sleeve and pressed the tip of the needle to one of the veins beneath her pale skin. Careful now, said her mind, through its strangely calm buzzing: a child’s dose, remember. She sank the needle in just enough for her little arm. Laure squeaked, somehow feeling the needle’s bee-sting even through her pain.

“Shh,” Eileen soothed, “whisht. Whisht.”

Now there was a strange word. Strange and familiar at once: something about it brought back the scent of woodsmoke and the drumbeat of steady rain against a cottage door. The sound of it made her dizzy mind see double. There was Laure in front of her, her face screwed up in pain, laboring for air while Eileen began gentle pressure on the syringe. And there, too, was a lap spread across with a scratchy woolen blanket, lit and warmed by the hearth’s nearby glow, and a voice up above saying Whisht, child, whisht.

“There now,” Eileen said through the strange image, “there now. There’s my brave girl.” She continued her gentle pressure on the syringe, keeping an eye on the amount of blood left in the vial: not too much, now. Slow and gentle. “There’s my love.” Already, Laure’s labored breathing was beginning to ease. “Have you ever taken blood before?” Laure shook her head weakly. “Well then. It’ll only be a moment and you’ll be right as rain. There now, can you feel it? My brave girl, my little one. Well done.”

She pulled the needle out, wiped away the little spurt of blood from Laure’s vein. Laure shifted slightly, then a little more: exhausted, but no longer in pain. Djura released Adele, whose screams had faded to low moaning sobs. She slumped down to lie beside her sister, one hand curled tightly in the back of her dress.

Djura was extending his hand toward Eileen. She passed him the blood vial and he sank it into his thigh and drained the rest of it. A hideous-looking gash across his chest and stomach finally began to close.

Eileen rested one hand on Laure’s damp hair and closed her eyes. The buzzy cottony feeling was fading: she felt again the labor of her own breathing, the beat of her pulse, the pricking pain from punctures the beast had left in her stomach. She was shivering. Little tremors radiated from her spine outwards, making her shoulders tremble. It suddenly seemed a great effort to hold herself upright. She wanted to lie down, curl herself around the girls, and sleep. Awaken to sunlight and birdsong.

Djura was pressing a shaking hand over his face. Minutes ticked by, minutes in which any number of things could have happened: beasts could have come searching, the blood-mad hunter could have tracked them down. The remaining residents of the Ward, the last soldiers of the Church, might have burst into the shop, searching for the sound of the shot and finding the heretic hunter and the forsworn crow. The roof might have caved in over their head, the whole Ward might have collapsed beneath their feet, burying them forever just as they were: frozen in this tableau, silent and shaking. Eileen, for the moment, could do nothing about it. If they came then they came. If the world ended then it ended.

But for once the gods were kind.

Chapter Text

The light in Eileen’s lantern had gone out in the fight. There was only moonlight now, pooling across the floor where the shadows didn’t reach. The shop was silent and still.

Djura was trying to mend his shirt. Might as well try to patch up the gash left by the beasts’ claws, as long as they had the supplies in easy reach: he’d taken a needle and thread from the back, and cut himself a bit of black fabric from one of the bolts. He squinted at his sewing, holding it up to catch the pale light, and painstakingly added stitch by uneven stitch to the preexisting patchwork.

He’d had to remove some of his pouches, and their contents were spread on the floor in front of him: bullets and blood, alcohol and oil and carefully-packed gunpowder. He really ought to take stock of it all.

Eileen hadn’t moved since she had sunk onto the floor across from him, her back to one of the shelves, on the opposite side of the shop from where the girls lay together, whispering. Eileen’s finger curled slowly up and down where it rested on her knee, and her head was tilted to keep Laure and Adele just barely in her line of sight: but for that she might have been asleep.

It was no good. The light was too faint.

“Pass me a light, would you?”

Without shifting her gaze, Eileen held out her lantern, and a match after it. One of its panes was shattered, but there was still a bit of oil in the well. Djura coaxed out a flame and went back to his sewing.

Laure’s breathing was steady. Adele kept one hand on her side and kept count by how it rose and fell. She felt light-headed. Her chest had that shaky buoyant feeling that comes after crying, and her face was still streaked, but she didn’t want to let go of Laure to wipe at it. Her hands were buzzing, as though they were still caught in that moment when she’d pulled the trigger and the gun had roared to terrifying life in her hands. She’d shot guns before. But this had been different.

She’d had to, though. She’d had to. Because Laure had been hurt. Laure had been lying there, small and hurt and helpless. Lying there with the beast over her and its jaw was open and it was about to do it, to bite down and to kill her, to open her up and turn her inside-out just like all those other bodies tonight.

Adele rubbed her hand slowly up and down Laure’s side. “Does it hurt at all?” she whispered.

Laure shook her head.

They were still on the ground, lying side by side, curled up, their foreheads almost pressed together. The beast’s dead body was somewhere behind Laure; Adele could see its dark looming shape if she looked upwards a bit, but she didn’t want to. She only wanted to look at Laure and feel her breathe.

She shifted slightly, curling her knees a little closer to her chest, and felt the unpleasant stickiness of the cooling blood that coated the wooden floor. She reached up to tug a few stray strands of hair free from the pool that was congealing by her head. Its smell reminded her of milk that had turned, of fruit that had gone soft and mushy. It smelled a little like Daddy.

Laure was covered in the beast’s blood. Her clothes were still damp with it, and her face was streaked with red. Adele had blood on her too: the beast’s, from the ground, and also Uncle Djura’s on her back: the beast had clawed him deeply across his stomach, and he’d been pressing her back against the wound while Auntie Eileen was helping Laure. And she probably still had some of Granddad’s blood on her shoes, and maybe her father’s too.

She turned her head towards the ground, so her nose just brushed the sticky wet, and closed her eyes and inhaled the sickly rotten scent of the beast-blood.

Laure was still breathing. Her side rose and fell steadily: one, two. Three, four. In, out.

“You have taken blood before,” Adele told her.

Laure’s eyes fluttered open. “No I haven’t.”

“Yes you have. You were too little to remember. You were really sick.”

Laure had been two or three when she caught the fever. People didn’t get sick much in Yharnam, because the blood and the Church protected them. When sicknesses like this one did go around, Camilla had informed her while they were playing dolls, it was because of the foreigners: they came in from all over and brought lots of nasty diseases.

“My dad’s not from Yharnam,” Adele had said, after she’d had a few minutes to think this over. “He doesn’t have any diseases.”

“Well my dad told me it’s the foreigners,” Camilla had said, and then Adele wasn’t sure how to say anything without making Camilla think she was insulting her father. After another moment Camilla had conceded, “But I’m sure your dad is all right,” and Adele had swallowed down the strange lump in her throat and gone back to fixing her doll’s hair for the fairy ball.

But then Laure had caught the fever, and suddenly everything turned upside down. Adele hadn’t understood why she couldn’t just get better straight away: that was what the blood was for, wasn’t it? But she hadn’t wanted to ask her mother, who looked suddenly frighteningly pale and drawn, with deep circles under her eyes; and she scarcely saw her father, who spent all his time shut up in Laure’s sick-room – where Adele was not to go, under any circumstances – when he wasn’t shouting at the doctor. It was that shouting that gave Adele her only clue: the doctor kept insisting that it could be dangerous to give the blood to children that young; her father, from what she could tell, was insisting that he do it anyway.

It had felt like Laure was sick for a very long time, but Adele supposed now that it might not have really been so long at all – barely a week, perhaps. It had felt longer because Adele had been left to herself, quite forgotten in all the confusion; when someone passed by she would duck away, not wanting to be a bother. Sometimes the kindly old maid would notice her lurking in the corners and press a biscuit or bit of fruit into her hand and pat her head, saying, Ah, poor pet. But for the most part Adele tiptoed through the house unnoticed, sneaking food from the kitchen table and keeping to the empty rooms. The time passed slowly: it seemed wrong to read her books or play with her toys. She tried to pray a few times like she was supposed to, but it didn’t feel like the gods were listening.

Once, when the day’s light was starting to fade, when the doctor had left and her mother was fretfully napping, when the whole house was still in a way that felt like it was holding its breath, Adele had slipped into her sister’s sick-room. The burning orange sunset was pouring through the window, and everything was too warm and bathed in strange unnatural light; the room was stuffy and had a sickly unpleasant scent. Adele felt as if she were wading through marmalade instead of walking through air.

Her father was sitting up with Laure. She was sleeping, and he had just barely managed to curl himself up into the bed so that he could hold her. His gaze was intent on her face; he must have heard Adele come into the room, or at least seen the door open out of the corner of his eye, but he gave no sign of it.

Adele crept around to the other side of the bed. When her father didn’t stir, she carefully climbed up onto the bed, and peered over her father’s dark bulk: it felt like scaling a mountain. She waited, but he didn’t tell her to go away. She looked down at her sister. Laure’s face was mottled white and pink, pale as paper with a livid red flush on her cheeks and lips. The sheen of sweat on her skin made her glow in the strange light. She didn’t look real. She looked like a paint-and-ink girl, an illustration in a storybook or advertisement, just a little plumper and prettier and brighter than real children ever were.

Adele had leaned against her father’s side and felt it rise and fall, rise and fall. She watched her sister’s breathing too, and the way a stray strand of hair fluttered around her mouth. She tried to match her breathing with theirs. One, two. Three, four. In, out.

That was when she had understood something very important. It hadn’t come with a flash or a spark; it had simply seeped into her bones there in the sticky orange light. Eventually she had rested her head against her father, but her eyes, like his, remained trained on her sister: her pretty round face, her pretty brown curls. Laure was the pretty one. Adele was too skinny, her hair too straight and limp. And Laure was funny, and charming, and brave. Even then, when she was so little. Laure was never scared of anything or anyone. Before she had even learned how to speak she would babble away to anyone she met: Granddad, the new maid, the fishmonger down the street. Adele was careful around new people or places; Laure charged straight towards them. She had a way of smiling, and looking, and acting, that made everyone love her. Adele couldn’t understand it. She tried so very hard to be good and polite, always, but people never seemed to like her as much as they liked Laure.

But looking down at her sister then, so beautiful and so fragile in her father’s arms, Adele had finally understood: it didn’t matter. The understanding made her feel peaceful and content. It didn’t matter that everyone else loved Laure better, because Adele could still love her best.

And so that was why, when Laure had taken just a little bit of the blood, and she was better and lively and back to her usual mischief, Adele didn’t mind when everyone paid her more attention, and gave her more compliments and more gifts. She didn’t complain when Laure was hardly ever punished for being bad, even though she could be really dreadfully naughty sometimes, and Adele was often scolded for things so much smaller. She didn’t fret when Laure managed to make people adore her just by smiling and talking with them, even though when Adele tried to do the same thing people found her strange and off-putting. That was what Camilla’s mother had said once to Adele’s mother, when she thought they were alone: I do worry about Adele, Viola dear: she’s a bit strange, isn’t she? She has a way about her that some might find … off-putting. Not like little Laure, bless her.

But all that was all right, because Adele had Laure, and she loved her. They played together all the time, and their games were much more exciting and interesting than with Adele’s friends: Laure never minded when Adele took a long long time to write the whole history of the fairy court, or when she made it as dark and strange as it was supposed to be. And Laure was very good at playing the villains and the rogues, and made everything feel really truly dangerous during the exciting scenes, and used to make Adele fall to pieces laughing when she acted out the romances. Laure never thought that Adele was odd.

And meanwhile Adele took care of Laure, as best as she could. She wasn’t brave like Laure, but she watched Laure closely when she was about to do something reckless and daring, and begged her to be careful; she stayed close to Laure whenever she could, and fussed and nagged, even though Laure didn’t like it.

And every once in a while, there came moments when Adele had to do something truly frightening to protect her. And then she would try to do it, without complaining. So earlier that night, when their father was gone, and their mother was gone, and the servants were gone, and the hours were stretching on and on and the sun was setting outside the windows – Adele had told Laure to be careful, and locked all the doors and windows, and checked all the censers, and then taken out to the streets. All by herself. Even though she could hear things echoing down the streets that made her shake with fear. Even though the only place to hide was a great dark looming coffin that looked like it wanted to swallow her alive. She did it, because she loved Laure, and that meant that she needed to protect her.

Adele took one of Laure’s stray curls in her hand and started to work at unsticking it from the rest of her bloodied hair.

Laure looked thoughtful. She never liked being told about things that had happened to her when she was little; she was so stubborn that sometimes she would argue and argue, just because she couldn't remember and that meant it must not have happened at all. Adele thought she might argue now, but when she spoke, she said, “I’m worried about Mum.”

She paused, and when Adele didn’t say anything, continued, “Do you think she’s gone back to the house?”

Adele made a little I don’t know hum and avoided Laure’s eyes.

“How will she know to find us with Grandmother? What if she’s frightened? Maybe we should have written a note.”

Adele swallowed. Don’t ask me that, Laure, please. Laure always asked the very worst questions. Adele didn’t want to think about Mum. She didn’t want to tell Laure what Uncle Djura had said. And more than that she didn’t want to not tell her, to have to think Mum’s not coming back all on her own and feel some little scared miserable thing in her start to wail at the thought of Mum’s gone, Mum’s gone and not have anyone to wail along with her.

But she was too big for wailing anyways and if she started she wouldn’t stop and she had to protect Laure.

She stroked Laure’s hair for a minute and then finally whispered, “Auntie Eileen and Uncle Djura will come back and tell her.” Her stomach lurched: a feeling like she’d pushed far back on a swing and lifted up her feet and there was no telling when she’d have them back on the ground again. 

Laure’s nostrils flared at the mention of Auntie Eileen. She set her jaw in a way that Adele recognized well. Adele kept working at her hair.

Finally she whispered, “I’ve killed something too now.”

The words gave her a strange guilty thrill. It wasn’t that she was glad she’d shot the beast, exactly, or that she’d enjoyed it. Just thinking about it – remembering the crack of the shot, and the jerk of the recoil, the smell of the smoke and the way the beast had screamed and writhed – made her feel dizzy. But even if it made her feel dizzy, she’d done it. She’d hurt it. She’d kept if from hurting Laure. And in those words – I’ve killed something too now – there was power. It was like a spell. Like the fairies, or the witches, who could use their magic to change things in the world. Or to keep the world from changing them.

“Did you really kill it?” Laure whispered back. Her eyes were wide, now, wondering; Adele’s wrist was against her neck, and Laure’s pulse quickened beneath it.

“Auntie Eileen killed it,” Adele admitted. There was relief in that – I didn’t do it, it wasn’t me – but also a sense of diminishment: the spell’s force leaking away. “But I helped. I shot it.”

“What does it feel like?” Laure said. “When you shoot something?”

“It felt like …” Adele licked her dry lips. It was hard to explain. “The gun sort of jumps in your hand, when you shoot. And so – when it hits something on the other end – with the way it jumped, it felt for just a second like I’d gotten shot too. I mean – I was frightened for a moment because I thought, I pointed it the wrong way and I shot myself instead. It was like it was all one thing. I couldn’t – I couldn’t really tell who was screaming. I think it was the beast. It might have been me.”

Another thought wormed its way into Adele’s head.

“Should I not have?” she said. “Was it wrong, do you think?”

“It’s a beast,” said Laure, baffled.

“I know, but – Uncle Djura said it’s a person.” She paused and thought of the big dead beast down at the Tomb of Oedon. “They are people, I think.”

“It was trying to eat me,” said Laure, very practically.

“I know.” Adele inched a little closer to her. Even now, she knew that she’d never forget the image of the beast in its animal crouch and her defenseless sister below. There were a lot of things about this night that she would never forget. They’d been carved into the layers of her mind and would never smooth back out, no matter how hard she might try. And Adele considered them now, thumbing through them like the pages of a book, and she especially lingered on Granddad’s body. And then she whispered – and she knew it was a betrayal, and that Laure would see it as such, but low and quiet she whispered it anyway –

“Granddad was trying to hurt Auntie Eileen.”

Laure stiffened. “That’s different,” she hissed.

“Why?”

“It is.”

“But shouldn’t Auntie Eileen have fought back?”

“He wasn’t a beast,” said Laure. An angry flush was rising in her cheeks. “And anyway he was – he was Granddad.”

A day ago – a few hours ago – that might have felt like an insurmountable argument. But Adele’s hands were still shivery, still echoing from the blast of the gun.

“Maybe that beast had somebody who loved him too.”

“Then they’re stupid,” said Laure. She was getting riled now, and when Laure got riled she said awful things, things that even she might be scolded for. “Who cares about them?”

Who cares about us, then? Adele thought. It was a strange, jarring place for her mind to go. And yet – wasn’t that just what Laure was saying? And didn’t it feel true? She felt that lurching, swinging feeling again. Who – and what – did care? Her whole life she’d felt so safe. Laure cared about her, and so did her parents, even if they liked Laure better; so did all the hunters who used to come visit, and even the people they would meet on the streets who would smile and say, What charming girls! The world had seemed kind – more than that – it had seemed like it existed to look after them and make sure they were well. But tonight, it didn’t. It felt like the plaster had chipped off and revealed bare ugly wood underneath. Auntie Eileen hadn’t cared about them when she killed Granddad. Granddad hadn’t cared about them when he attacked Auntie Eileen. Whoever had killed her father hadn’t even known that he had two daughters who loved him, and her father hadn’t cared about them when he’d let himself become that horrible thing. The city where she’d grown up, that had always been hers in the same way her bedroom and her dolls and her daydreams were hers, belonging to her own private world – now it was cold and cruel. Uninterested. Unaffected. But wasn’t that true of everyone? Weren’t they all equally unlooked-after, then? Why should anyone else care about the two of them and what they’d suffered, when they certainly weren’t bothered by the suffering of faceless strangers they’d never met?

It was a very lonely frightening thing, to suddenly realize how small and meaningless she was, in a big indifferent world that would keep turning with or without her.

She sat with that for a while. She let it slowly curl its way into her chest: a cold and empty feeling. And so she reached out for Laure again, first putting her hand lightly on her arm – an apology – and then reaching for that strand of hair. She curled it through her fingers protectively, possessively.

“All right,” she said softly. “All right.”

The shirt was as fixed as it would ever be. Djura kept his hands poised for a moment, needle extended, thread taut. He had always liked to have something in his hands. It channeled the restlessness. Kept him from driving whoever was nearby mad with his chatter.

His hand was starting to shake on the needle. Just a little tremor.

He swallowed, and tied off his stitch.

Now that he’d put down his weapon, the silence in the shop surged forward, bristling with accusations. He was defenseless against it: nothing left to busy himself with, no soothing repetitive motion to lull his thoughts into submission.

He swallowed hard against the torrent of words pushing against his throat: All my fault. Unforgivable. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.

The girls were still whispering, huddled close together where Laure had first fallen; they were oblivious to the world around them, to the puddle of blood where they rested their heads. Their voices were like a spider web: gossamer-thin, otherworldly.

Eileen hadn’t shifted.

The pressure built at the base of his throat. The urge to say something – anything – was unbearable. The silence was pressing up against him now, shaming him, goading him.

His hands clenched and unclenched in his overshirt’s coarse fabric. Somewhere in the wall, a pipe chugged to gurgling life and then subsided.

“Eileen,” he said. His voice rasped.

She turned her head slowly, wearily: she didn’t look at him, but she was listening.

“I – I’m so –” He swallowed; all the words he ought to say were pressing so hard on his throat that they were suffocating him. “That was –”

“I know, Djura.”

Eileen’s voice was low and almost soft.

“I know you know. I just –” He closed his eye, wincing under the weight of everything he’d done. What were you thinking? Eileen always asked him, and the answer was always, I wasn’t. Usually it was funny. And when it wasn’t in the moment, it often was two weeks later with a mug of blood-laced beer in the tavern or a cupful of Viola’s stew. But of course it wasn’t really funny, just more of his damned foolishness that was bound to put somebody in danger sooner or later. And now – here – he hadn’t been thinking at all, he had just seen the beast and felt its pain and wanted to spare it something – even in Old Yharnam if he’d found some poor soul in a similar state he might have put them out of their misery, but in the moment he’d let himself get worked up and stop thinking, and now look what had happened –

“It was my fault,” said Eileen.

Djura blinked.

“Well, it was a little bit your fault too,” she continued, and there was something almost wry in her voice. But then she sighed, and her entire form sagged wearily back against the shelf, her shoulders sloped and her head bowed low.

“I should’ve just listened. There was no reason to make a scene. I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I feel so –” She lifted her hands, gestured vaguely. “I don’t know how to do this.” She looked over her shoulder, back at the girls. “This is the one thing that matters. The one thing I’ve tried to do since I came here that might actually be worth a damn. And I can’t do anything right. At least you can be a comfort to them. I can’t – can’t make a single right decision, and now I can’t even think clearly. I feel like –” Her hands clenched on her knees. “I feel like I’m drowning.”

Djura slid off his stool to face her more clearly, fighting the urge to reach forward and put a reassuring hand on her arm. “I understand,” he said, though he wasn’t sure he did.

“No,” she cut in, and he heard frustration in her voice. Frustration, and fear. “I don’t mean – I mean it feels like I’m underwater, like –” She brought her hands up to hover close to her head, fingers splayed as if she were indicating some pain, a headache of some kind. “Everything just feels – I can’t think straight. I can’t focus on what’s important. When I saw that beast I just felt so …” She trailed off.

“Do you need blood?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know. We’d better not waste it. How much do we have left?”

His little pile of supplies was near to hand now. He turned them over. “Three full vials. One little one. You?”

“I don’t know. Two or three.” The fact that Eileen hadn’t kept careful count of her vials felt even more alarming than her rambling talk. Djura sat still for a moment, turning over what she’d said.

“I think,” he said very carefully, “I might have felt the same way – that kind of underwater feeling – after …” He trailed off. This was the forbidden subject, the one like a wall that lay between their past and their present, the one that had split everything apart. Eileen must have known what he was alluding to, but she kept silent, and in a rush of boldness Djura pressed on.

“After Old Yharnam it felt like I’d lost my mind,” he said. The words deserved careful deliberation but instead they came galloping out, tripping over one another in their eagerness for release. “It was like I was still there, and everything around me was this weird dream that I was going to wake up from any second and be back – back with the flames – I couldn’t pay attention to anything or think of it as real, the only thing that felt solid was the memory of that night – what happened – what we –”

“Djura,” said Eileen wearily. “Don’t.”

Djura swallowed. He nodded. He bowed his head and took a breath and forced it all back down. Back to the place he tried to keep it all penned up, when he had work to do and he needed to focus. Then shrugged his shirt back on and began to gather his supplies and put them back where they belonged.

The silence started to steal back in again, looking for scraps to chew on.

“Have you ever been through Iskierka?” he said evenly. “What should we expect?”

He was quiet, to let Eileen answer. He didn’t add that he used to try to picture what they might be like, those provincial villages built from wood and thatch that Eileen would describe to him sometimes when they’d had a long night and a few drinks. It wasn’t easy for him to imagine, having lived all his life in the carved stone canyons of Yharnam. Like Hemwick? he’d asked her once, and she’d pursed her lips and shook her head and said, No, not like Hemwick.

He didn’t say that there was a place that he had used as a reference when he tried to picture the buildings she described: a little neighborhood down in Old Yharnam, just a tiny tangled knot of streets, where the new construction had yet to reach and the buildings were low, made of timber and plaster, with gabled roofs and tiny windows with warped and bubbled glass. He didn’t mention how when he was fourteen and fancied himself an artist he’d often gone down there with his paper and charcoal and tried to sketch: because the houses looked different, and their strangeness appealed to him; because it seemed their small frames ought to be a easier to get on paper than the elaborate spiraling structures above; and above all because there was a woman there with a stall that sold food fresh from her kitchen – pancakes loaded with meat and cheese and mushrooms, or berries and cream if you wanted something sweet. Even when he was older, and had realized that he was a draughtsman at best, he still liked to walk there on cold days and buy a warm flaky chimney cake, perfumed with cinnamon and nuts, from the grandmotherly old vendor, and cheerfully dodge her questions about when he was going to find a nice girl to settle down with. And in the summertime he would perch by the little fountain in the main square – that was when it was still safe to have a sip of the good clear mountain water from the public fountains – and watch the world go by, and look up at the funny old buildings. They were the closest thing he’d ever seen to those engravings from his treasured childhood book, Lands and Peoples of the World, that showed — among many, many other things — some of the towns of the hinterlands. He’d pored over that book as a child, before he could even puzzle through the dense text, just looking at the illustrations: animals that looked like storybook monsters, and buildings unlike any he’d ever seen in Yharnam, and people in strange and beautiful clothing. Things he’d imagined he’d go see for himself one day, when he was grown.

And he didn’t tell Eileen about how the St. Sarka’s day festival always sprang up in that little square in Old Yharnam, right when the last snows had melted and the sun’s heat was still mellow and kind. The Church had tried to stamp it out – Sarka was no true saint, they insisted, just an old peasant superstition – but every year the maypole mysteriously raised itself overnight, the market stalls decked themselves in flowers, and the dancing began that morning as if it wasn’t the result of hundreds of individual actions but a natural force as irresistible as the rising and setting of the sun. There was one dance where the women circled around, clapping, as the men executed a simple step in the middle: when the music changed, whichever man the woman was facing became her partner, and the sheer number of elbows thrown as Yharnam’s fair maidens tried to position themselves to best advantage made Djura joke that the Kegs ought to use the festival as their recruiting grounds. Only Yharnam, he would say as he sipped his warming beer, could turn a mating dance into a blood sport. And he would laugh, and his friends would laugh, and all the men and women would be laughing too as they twirled round and round just as their parents and grandparents had done before them, in the sheer giddy delight that spring had somehow come again.

He didn’t tell Eileen that he could still hear that laughter sometimes, on the bad days, echoing down the burnt-down streets. He didn’t tell her that sometimes those figures danced right into his dreams, their whirling frenzied, spinning faster and faster under the red moon’s light until they caught like tinder and burst into flames.

He didn’t tell her any of that. She didn’t want to hear it.

They roused the girls easily enough. Eileen tugged one of her gloves off to lay the back of her hand on Laure’s forehead, and then pressed two fingers against her pulse. She made soft shushing noises as she guided Laure to sitting and then to standing. Her hands fluttered over Laure’s shoulders and chest and stomach, if to catch any pain herself before Laure could feel it. But the blood had obviously done its work, though Laure was still too stunned and exhausted to put up any resistance to Eileen’s touch.

While all this was happening Djura half-knelt next to Adele, lightly touching her arm and drawing her to stand. It might be the last bit of tenderness he could afford before they were back on the beast-infested streets and he’d need both hands on his weapons. Adele had retreated into that same still, silent place she’d gone after the fight at the Tomb. Though her face was coated in blood and filth, Djura had an image of her turning to marble, cool and pale and impervious as the statues that lined the streets outside. Don’t, sweetheart, he thought wearily. Please don’t do that. I couldn’t bear it if we did that to you.

It felt wrong to say anything. He hoped the girls could feel the apology in their touch and in their silence. We’re sorry, he thought, looking down at their drawn, tear-streaked faces. We’re old and we’re tired and we’re sorry. Just put up with us long enough for us to keep you safe, that’s all we ask.

They weren’t far from the entrance by the fountain. They crept carefully out of the shop and up the street, every sense straining. Djura knew – they both knew – that to be as on edge as they were, starting at every little sound, was hardly better than stumbling around oblivious. But Djura’s nerves were strained to the point of snapping, and they were so close. Just up the street, over two blocks, and through the unassuming little gate in the corner of the square. Then they’d be in the tunnel with the road straight before them.

Djura was keenly aware of the girls beside him; that was the only reason he didn’t jump out of his skin when Adele slipped closer and spoke.

“Uncle Djura,” she whispered. “I’m very hungry.” She hung her head as she said it, like she was confessing something shameful.

“Of course you are,” he murmured, reaching out to brush a strand of hair out of her eyes. For her to speak to him, call him Uncle Djura, grip a bit of his sleeve in her hand, even after everything - it made his throat feel tight, with gratitude and shame alike. 

“Just a little farther now, and then we’ll see what we can find.” It wasn’t quite a lie. The Church must have thought of using the tunnel as a secret barracks at some point, because Djura had found weapons and bedrolls and dusty old bins of dried meat when he’d poked around down there. That was decades ago, of course. He’d walked away with an oil urn tucked in his pocket as a prize, and who knew what else scavengers might have stolen away since then, or if the Church had fitted it up for another purpose. Hell, for all he knew it might be full of Church hunters even now. But it didn’t feel like it. It had felt so dusty and quiet, like one of those places that Yharnam had reclaimed for herself, quietly unweaving its thread from the memories of those above and pulling until it came loose.

Just let us pass, Djura thought, keeping a protective hand on Adele’s shoulder. He was praying, he realized with some surprise: not to the saints or the gods but to Yharnam herself. You let me find this place. Let me do some good with it. I’ll give you whatever you want as long as you let me keep them safe.

Something hurtled into Eileen. A blur in the mist: she was too surprised even to cry out, and it wasn’t until the sound of metal clashing on metal reached his ears that Djura’s brain caught up to what his eyes were seeing. The assailant had knocked Eileen almost into the opposite doorway, but Eileen had managed to escape the close quarters and was pressing them against the wall instead. Djura couldn’t make out the figure behind Eileen’s billowing cape.

He froze, torn between grabbing his gun and ushering the girls to safety. Adele tugged on his wrist – “Where should we go?” she asked. They both looked up and down the street, but the mist was clouding his vision and he could see no likely hiding place along the storefronts.

“Just –” he started, priming his stake driver with his other hand.

“Never mind,” Adele cut in. “We’ll find a place to hide – come on, Laure –”

“Stay close,” he shouted to their retreating backs, already fuzzy through the mist as they pelted up the street. He was already turning to the fight – he had to be quick, had to get this over with, had to get back to the girls – please, please, we’re so close.

A shot echoed through the narrow street and Eileen reeled back from the blast. But no, Eileen was still pressed back against the doorway, smoke curling from her pistol – it wasn’t Eileen he’d been looking at; the mad hunter, their attacker, was also wearing a crowfeather cape.

Djura didn’t have time to be baffled. He darted forward and plunged the stake driver into the hunter’s back with all the force he could muster. The tremor of the blow burst up his arm as the stake drove through muscle and bone with punishing force, and then leapt eagerly back, trailing viscera. The hunter staggered and Eileen took the opportunity to dart back out into the street. She and Djura stood side by side, allowing themselves a split second to watch as the other hunter stumbled forward a step, trying to adjust to the gaping hole in his abdomen. Besides the cape, he was wearing some strange antique helmet, and he wielded a slender sword and a pistol.

Eileen started to lunge forward again – as long as he was on his feet, he was still a threat – but she froze in surprise as the hunter raised his blade and stabbed it into his own wound. He hunched for a moment, and then drew it back out, and while they were both too startled to move he slammed a blood vial into his thigh and attacked.

Though he aimed for Eileen, the blade whistled close enough past Djura’s head that he could smell its singed scent. As Eileen ducked away, he fired a shot that lodged in the hunter’s shoulder; Eileen changed her evasion into offense with a graceful roll and landed a blow that crashed off of his helm. Djura gripped the stake driver’s handle and lunged, and then staggered and stumbled as his blow met no resistance. The hunter had vanished – simply disappeared, dissolved into the mist. There one second and gone the next. Djura had only an instant for surprise before a shot rang out and he tumbled to the ground. A few seconds later he felt the hot, pulsing pain of the bullet that had lodged in his thigh: he swore and scrambled backwards on his hands and good leg, out of the fray.

Duck into cover. Heal. No – bullet first, don’t be stupid. Sometimes the blood’ll take care of the bullet but better not to risk it. Djura tugged off a glove with his teeth, jammed his fingers into the wound, and rooted around, hissing with pain. He pried the thing out and sank a blood vial into his thigh. As the pain started to fade he took another precious second to observe. The hunter had reappeared further down the street and was bearing down on Eileen, his blade ducking and weaving expertly between hers – unable, for the moment, to find much of an opening, but still driving her mercilessly back. His elegant, upright bearing, the finely-hewn rapier – paired with Eileen’s usual grace, they might almost have been dancing.

All right then, Djura thought, yanking his glove back on. You want to dance?

The oil urns he carried were small, but they would do. He crouched low, shuffled down the street, took aim, and threw.

The urn shattered with a satisfying crash against the hunter’s back, its contents soaking into his cape. Djura tossed his lit match – no time for any more satisfying pyrotechnics – but before it could land, the hunter vanished again. Djura could see it fully this time: he really did simply disappear, fading to smoke. The match fell into a puddle and the mist swirled in to fill his place.

Djura darted to Eileen’s side. They aimed their guns, covering each other’s backs, waiting for the hunter to reappear. Djura strained his eye and tried to quiet his breathing.

Nothing. The mist swirled in languid eddies. There was no sound, other than the soft rustling of Eileen’s breath behind him. It felt foolish to speak, but as the seconds ticked by with no new attack he wasn’t sure what else to do. He waited another strained moment and finally said softly, “The girls are hiding up the street.”

“Slowly.”

They did go slowly, still facing in opposite directions, guns still drawn.

“He had a cape,” Djura said through gritted teeth.

“I noticed.”

“Friend of yours?”

“Not likely.”

Something skittered away down an alley: they both froze, ready for an attack, and then continued moving when silence fell again.

“That thing on his head,” said Eileen.

“It looked like one of those old helmets from Cainhurst, didn’t it?” They’d made it far enough up the street that Djura began to scan for any sign of the girls’ hiding place.

“If you say so.” After a moment she added, “A Cainhurst crow.”

“Is that even possible?”

“It shouldn’t be. But this city doesn’t seem to give a damn about what I think is possible.”

Farther up the slope, there was a mess of pallets and wooden crates piled outside a shop, like someone had been planning to build a pyre. They both paused for a moment, scanning the street.

“Gods damn it all,” Eileen said softly. “He could be watching us right now.”

And he could appear at any second, it seemed, without warning. The hairs were rising on the back of Djura’s neck, but he made himself say evenly, “Don’t get paranoid.”

“What the hell is his game?”

“Toying with us. Your people do that sometimes, don’t they? Part of the madness.”

“Yes,” said Eileen, low and urgent and almost pleading. “But when they did it before I felt like their scolding mother, not one of their playthings.”

“We’re not his playthings,” Djura said, forcing confidence into his voice. He waited a moment, and when Eileen didn’t say anything more, and no threatening sights or sounds emerged from the mist, he backed slowly toward the pile of crates.

“All right,” he said, rounding it to peer into the little hiding-hole underneath. “Let’s move –”

The girls weren’t there.

Fear shot up his spine, liquid and queasy. He looked to Eileen, trying to calm it. This was the first place they’d checked, after all; he had simply been assuming this was where they’d hidden; perhaps they were just a bit further up the street. But as soon as Eileen craned her neck to look behind her, and saw his face, she holstered her pistol and started striding rapidly up the hill.

Djura hurried behind her. At the very end of the street, there was an overturned cart surrounded by scattered, rotting beets. They peered inside, only to turn immediately around and hurry back down the way they’d come, straining their gaze for any alley or hiding-hole that might have escaped their notice through the fog.

“Adele,” Eileen was calling softly. “Laure, come out, where are you –”

Djura kept his gaze trained along the ground, looking for drains or hatches or any likely spot two small people might have hidden themselves. The mist seemed to be growing like some living thing, choking his vision, but through it he spotted something: a flash of white on the ground.

A little white hair-ribbon, spattered with red.

Eileen saw what he was holding. For a second they were both still. Then –

“Laure!” Eileen cried, whirling to sprint back up the street. “Adele!”

He ran behind her, letting her do the crying-out, just scanning desperately for anything else, any hint, any clue. The street ended in a little square with other streets radiating out like wheel-spokes.

“Girls!” Eileen called, pleading, as she ran to the well in the square’s center, turning frantically in all directions. “Girls!”

Djura lit a match and dropped it into the well’s inky blackness, hoping to see two little faces peering up from below: but all he saw was an empty shaft descending, cold and careless, into Yharnam’s depths.

Eileen continued to call the girls’ names, taking two steps in one direction and then darting towards another only to turn around once more, unable to decide. Her voice was growing high and breathy. Djura was trying to think, trying to imagine which way they might have gone or been brought, but he was useless: Eileen was the tracker, not him.

The mist started to burn.

That was it looked like, at least: it began to glow red-orange, faintly at first and then stronger. Djura looked around for the source of the fire – there must be a fire, somewhere, a fire from his nightmares that had escaped somehow into reality. But then the mist cleared: very quickly, as if it had suddenly dispersed down the streets in search of its own prey. It only lasted a few seconds, but that was time enough to see the well’s stone glowing red, and the cobbles and puddles, and Eileen’s dark cape and mask limned in crimson. The fog started to creep back in, but not before they had both turned their heads upwards, seeking the source of the light.

Djura’s grip on his gun slackened. The breath stole out of his lungs, and he fought the urge to sink down to the street.

The night sky had turned the livid purple of a bruise, and the moon was red and bloody.

Chapter Text

Eileen’s glove tightened on the ribbon. She swept her gaze across the street, one side to the other, back and forth, as her boots pounded on the cobblestones to the same steady rhythm as the pounding in her head.

“Laure!” She stopped again to call out. “Adele!”

A beast squealed in anticipation down the cross street. It hurtled towards her and straight into her waiting blade. She dispatched it with four precise thrusts and was peering through the fog again before its body had hit the ground. The mist was thinner here but still it mocked her, tricked her, made her doubt her eyes – there, had something moved? No. The crimson moon throbbed above. Something had her head in a vice grip and was squeezing, releasing, squeezing.

She pressed on again, farther up the red-lit street.

Djura was still behind her: she could hear him scrabbling along, stopping to peer beneath abandoned carts and down drains, then hastening to catch up. He drew nearer now, reached out.

“Eileen –” he said. She jerked her shoulder away, but he grabbed her again.

“Eileen, we need a – we need a plan, at least. Where are we going?” His voice was strained.

“Oedon,” she snapped. The answer came so readily that surely she must have had it all along. She shook him off, furious that he’d made her break her stride. “We rested there. It’s central. If they were to go anywhere – to meet us –” Pathetic. Contemptible. Why hadn’t they agreed on a place to meet if they were separated? The most basic thing – the simplest precaution to keep them safe, and she couldn’t even manage that much –

She pushed on.

Up another block.

Head swimming.

“Adele! Laure!”

Onwards.

Oedon was occupied. Eileen stopped short when she realized. There were people here now, not just the old blind warden: they huddled sullenly in the nave, keeping their distance from each other. A man and a woman, both elderly; another woman, a nun, tucked in the corner, apparently oblivious to their arrival.

Eileen swayed, thrown off-balance in her surprise. Her vision lurched. And then hope flared: if these people were here, if this was a gathering place, then surely the girls might have found it. But Eileen saw no little figures anywhere.

The warden was not alone, up by the altar. Some other refugee, a woman in a rich gown, was hunched near him, curled over in pain, her hands pressed to her stomach. The warden’s reedy voice was raised in concern, his hands hovering around her as if he wanted to help but was afraid to touch.

“No,” the woman was saying, “no, it isn’t like – ah.” She let out a strangled cry of pain and curled closer around herself, then broke off entirely when she saw Eileen and Djura approach.

The warden’s fingers fluttered in agitation. “Who is it?” he asked, head tilted to catch the sound.

“Two people,” the woman began, “a man and –”

“We were here earlier.” Eileen cut her off. “We had two little girls with us. Have you seen them? Did they come through this way?”

“No,” said the warden. “N-no, no children at all – has something happened? Are they all right?”

“You’re certain?” Eileen turned to the woman now.

“I’ve been here for hours,” she replied. “We haven’t seen any children come.” Her voice was low and strained, and as she spoke her hand pressed to her swollen belly – and how odd, that Eileen hadn’t noticed before that the woman was clearly with child. Something pulsed behind her eyes.

“Oh, the little ones,” said the warden, voice growing high with distress. “Are they lost? Maybe someone here can help. Where did you see them last? When the hunter returns, I’ll –”

But Eileen was already turning away even as the woman cried out again, louder this time, her hands flying upwards from her perfectly flat stomach. “My head,” the woman said, “gods, it’s worse in my head –”

Eileen’s own head felt pinched. Squeezed. The chapel’s interior billowed.

“Have you seen any children about,” she asked the old woman, and then turned and spoke more loudly: “Any of you – two little girls?”

But the old crone and the nun ignored her, and the man just stared from beneath his hat’s brim and then deliberately spat on the ground. And Eileen imagined ripping his damn heart out with her bare hands – three quick cuts and she’d have it, warm and dripping and heady with scent –

Djura was prying her hand from her blade. She had a feeling that he had been speaking for a while.

“—not here, we have to keep moving …”

She strode out the door, back into the red-bathed square. Just past the threshold, something tickled the back of her neck. It was the barest suggestion of a touch, brushing her vertebra with a crackle and a buzz like when lightning brewed before a storm. She spun, craning her head upwards, but saw only Oedon’s façade, and the sickly purple sky, and the great bloodshot eye of a moon. She wanted to strike it. Gouge it out. Make it stop staring.

“Did I hear you were looking for two little girls?”

She didn’t know where the man had come from. He must have been behind them, somewhere, lurking by the doorway, among all the detritus. The upper part of his head was swathed in bandages, and his chest was bare and streaked with dirt; he looked like any number of the beggars that had once haunted Yharnam’s streets.

“Terrible, terrible,” he said when Eileen didn’t reply. “On a night like this – you must be beside yourselves. Tell me, where’d you see them last? Folk like me – we don’t look like much, I’ll grant you that, but we know how to keep our ears to the ground. All kinds of nasty places that children end up, on a night like tonight. Lucky to have hunters such as yourselves on the lookout, but a little more help can’t hurt, eh?”

“Yes,” Eileen said. “I –” She broke off, confused, and looked to Djura. They oughtn’t tell him anything, she knew, but she was having trouble thinking of why. Yharnam beggars always did know a great deal; pass them a coin and you’d learn all kinds of things. She used them hunting her marks, all the time – was it a mark she was hunting? – but she had no coin –

Again. There was something on the back of her neck again. The fine hairs raised, her spine buzzed, and she turned and looked upwards. And – 

Hands –

Tendrils –

Head like a honeycomb –

Tentacles, and –

Eyes eyes eyes eyeseyeseyeseyes

“Eileen!” Djura barked. He had a hand on her elbow. He said something over his shoulder that she didn’t catch, and then he was steering her out of the courtyard, walking briskly.

“Eileen,” he said urgently, more quietly. “Please. Talk to me. I need you to talk to me. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” said Eileen. The footsteps of a gigantic beast thundered down one of the side streets; Djura pulled them down another. There was a dagger lodged above her left eye, a searing spike of pain. One of Henryk’s, maybe.

“I thought I saw something,” she continued, and she had the strange feeling of telling a story to herself, hearing about it for the first time even as she said it. She had seen something, hadn’t she? But not – not the girls. Not some trace of them. Something else.

But there were all sorts of unpleasant things to see in Yharnam. It didn’t do to dwell.

“I’m fine,” she repeated. “Keep moving.”

It smelled.

The sack smelled of sick and rotten fish, and Adele had already retched once. Only a little bit came up – strawberry jam, she’d thought blearily – and then just clear spittle that she’d nearly choked on. She wasn’t hungry any more.

She didn’t know where she was going. The thing that had grabbed her was still moving, and she jostled against its back. Its hands had been so clammy, and they’d wrapped around her mouth and kept her from screaming and filled her nose with the scent of rot. She’d just barely seen Laure be swept up into another bag before the sack had closed over her own head, and she hoped that Laure was still beside her – she thought she could hear another set of footsteps beside those of the beast carrying her. There had to be another beast. Because she had to be near Laure. She had to protect her. Laure probably wasn’t scared, or at least wasn’t as scared as Adele was. But that was why Laure needed protecting: she was never scared of the right things. She never kept herself safe.

But Adele didn’t want to protect Laure any more.

She didn’t want to be worrying about Laure. She didn’t want to be thinking, What will I do if they let me out and Laure isn’t there. What will I do if she is. How will I keep her safe.

Adele didn’t want to think about Laure at all.

Adele was alone and she was scared and everything smelled foul.

What Adele wanted was her dad and her granddad. She wanted the axe and the cleaver that had hung by their doorway like gargoyles: frightening to look at, but if you knew them you understood that they were guardians. She wanted to hear those weapons whistle through the air and sink into the stomach of the thing that had her, and to drop to the ground and crawl out of the bag right into her father’s waiting arms, and see Granddad beside him – they would look so grim and so serious, and they’d carry her home and no beast at all would stand a chance on their way.

She wanted to not be in the sack at all. To be safe already. To be sitting on her dad’s shoulders as he walked around the house and pretended to forget that she was there, bumping her head against the doorframes – never hard enough to hurt – and then leaning over suddenly to pick something up so that she shrieked and laughed as she started to lurch forward, feeling that she was going to fall but knowing that he’d never let her.

She wanted everything safe and warm as it had always been, enveloped in the clean cozy house, with the sound of all the hunters’ voices below – not arguing like they had sometimes later, but happy, the way they had been before, when she was little. Talking and laughing and sometimes bursting into song too loud and off-key, until someone said, Quiet, you’ll wake the girls, and she and Laure giggled from where they perched on the stairs. She wanted to sneak down and wait for them to notice her lurking in the doorway and smile patiently while they pretended to scold. They would all be there, safe and content, unarmed and gentle. Uncle Djura and his jokes and the way he smiled at her and mussed up her hair. Auntie Eileen and her strong hands and warm eyes and her voice that dipped and crooned like a lullaby.

She wanted her mum. Those cool dry hands brushing her hair from her face. The little wrinkles around her eyes when she smiled. The tuneless melodies she used to hum when she was distracted, just notes in random order, that used to make Adele so confused when she was little – What song is that, Mummy? she’d say. Mummy, I don’t know the song – what song is it? And Mum would say, It isn’t any song at all, Addie, just Mummy being silly. Which was, itself, silly, because Mum was never silly. Adele would frown and Mum would reach out and squish her face between her thumb and her other fingers and say, Poor Addie! Life’s terribly difficult when you’re such a serious little girl. And Adele could never quite tell if she was teasing, and then Mum would kiss her head and say something like, Thank goodness we have Addie, to make sure we all mind our p’s and q’s. We’d be quite a band of barbarians without her.

She wanted it to be one of those days when despite all her trying she couldn’t be good at all, when she was cross and contrary and sulked around the house. Because sometimes on those days, in the evening when everyone – Dad and Laure and the governess and the maids – was at their wit’s end with her, Mum would come and scoop her up without a word and drop her in a warm bath, and scrub her until she was pink. Then she’d put on her own nightdress and curl up in her bed and tell Addie that they’d read anything she wanted, any of her books or the stories that she’d written herself. And that was all they’d do for the rest of the night, just lie there and read stories, with the warmth of the covers and Mum's clean laundry-and-powder scent and the beating of her heart under Adele's ear. And Laure would sleep in the spare room so that all night long it would be just Addie and Mum, Addie and Mum, and Mum, Mum, where are you, please Mummy. Please.

“Eileen, wait.”

They were in some plaza, somewhere. Eileen had stopped trying to map everything out, to fit everything into her understanding of Yharnam’s streets and landmarks: she just knew north and south and east and west, and was covering them methodically.

“Stop for a minute. Just stop and tell me what you’re – what we’re doing.”

There was a desperation in Djura’s voice that made her look back at him. He’d planted himself in a way he hadn’t before, when he was hurling questions at her back as she charged onwards: he looked frightened and defiant, determined not to move.

“I need to know what the plan is,” he said. “I need to know that we – that you have a plan. What are we doing, Eileen?”

“We’re finding the girls,” Eileen hissed out from behind clenched teeth. Every second was precious. They didn’t have time for his idiocy.

“How?” Djura begged. “We’ve just been tearing around – we have to stop and think, Eileen, to – to figure out where they’d have gone, or who might have taken them –”

Eileen closed her eyes at that, against the horrible crimson light, because taken was the one thing she could not bear. If they were hiding then all might be well, if they’d had to run off, if they’d dropped the ribbon on purpose as a clue – but taken by something shadowy and sinister, taken for some mysterious purpose on a night when the moon was red and there was madness in the air …

“There’s no time for that,” she said, opening her eyes again, but Djura didn’t move.

“There’s no time to be running around blind, Eileen! We have to think – please –” He lurched forward, his hands outstretched like a beggar looking for alms. “I need to know that you have a plan,” he said. He hesitated for an instant, fingers grasping the air, then reached out and seized her arms, looking up at her, his face half shadow and half a nightmarish red. “I need to know that you’re with me, Eileen. I need to know that – that this isn’t happening again.” He said the last words in a desperate rush. And her vision was blurring, and she was seeing him on another night long past, in the same supplicating pose, saying Eileen, please, you were there, you saw – Eileen, I can’t bear it, I’m going mad with it …

And she did what she’d done then, and shrugged him off. “Nothing is happening again,” she said, cold and remote. In control. Above all she must always be in control.

“Eileen, the moon –”

“Nothing is happening,” she snarled, “and if you’re going to slow me down you can stay behind.”

“You’re already leaving me behind,” said Djura, and now panic was cracking the edges of his voice. “I feel it, Eileen, same as last time, and you’re already half-gone – do you even know where we are?”

“Of course I know where we are!”

“Where?” he demanded. “Can you point to Oedon? To the gate?”

She knew where they were, damn him. They were in – they were in Yharnam, in the city of the blood. Far from home. Go to Yharnam, girl, you’ll find work enough there. This isn’t a charity house. How could she ever forget where she was? There was work in Yharnam but there was no grass, and no true sky. She was young and lost and alone and a woman was saying, Go to Yharnam.

“Eileen, you have to stay with me.” The sound jerked her roughly back to the present, but his voice was soft and cajoling now. Like she was a high-strung colt that might shy away. Like she was one of his damn beasts. “Please,” he said, in that infuriating coddling tone. “We can’t do this again.”

Again, again, always again –

“Do what again, Djura?” She shoved him away from her. Her hands balled to fists at her sides. “Do what, precisely? Do what needs to be done? What must be done? What we did that night? What you’re too soft to do, what I’ve done over and over again?”

“‘Must be done,’ Eileen, there was no must.” He looked devastated, wounded, and seeing his face crumple made her thrill with pleasure. “That wasn’t putting down some blood-mad lunatic –”

“You didn’t used to be too soft for it,” she hissed. “You were there, same as all of us.”

“I know I was there!” he cried. “I know. Gods, I know.”

“Because you used to be worth something. You used to understand what it meant to be a hunter, that it meant making sacrifices –”

“Sacrifices,” Djura said. He staggered backwards as if she’d struck him and looked at her with open horror.

“Sacrificing yourself!” she shouted, furious that he hadn’t understood, that he was trying to twist her words. That he was looking at her as if she’d sprouted fur and claws and fangs. She screwed her eyes up tight so she wouldn’t have to see it, but then instead of blackness she only saw the ministers on that long-ago night, the hunters and the priests, whipping them up into a frenzy under the red moon, promising glory and honor, a return to the days of Ludwig and Laurence. She opened her eyes again but everything was still drenched in red and Djura was still recoiling. She had to make him understand. She needed him to finally understand.

“Everyone thinks they’re going to play at knight in shining armor when they get their weapons and badge,” she said. “Everyone thinks they’ll be Yharnam’s noble savior. But if you get that badge, you’re not a hero. You’re a hunter.” She was trying to speak clearly but her voice was growing wild and pitchy with desperation. “And the sooner you accept that you’re just a glorified butcher the better, because once you’ve stopped believing that you’re good at least you can be useful. That’s how you keep everyone else safe, by being willing to do what no one else will –”

“Keep them safe?” Djura said. “Did we keep the people down in Old Yharnam safe? Are they so much the better, for what we did?”

“We did what we had to!” she cried. “We didn’t know, how could we know?”

“We knew well enough that we weren’t killing fucking beasts!” His voice, so gentle moments before, ricocheted around the square, shouting their shame to anyone who could hear. Now it was Eileen who backed instinctively away, and she wanted to cover her ears as he continued, relentless: “Men and women dragged out of their beds, slaughtered on the streets like animals –”

“Enough, Djura, enough –”

“Barring up the doors when the flames came, hearing them scream inside – I saw hunters pinning people down and pulling them apart like they were pulling the stuffing out of a toy, slowly, enjoying it, smearing it all over themselves, I saw people thrown on the pyres still alive, I smelled it! I saw –”

“I know what you saw, Djura!”

“Because you were there, too, but we didn’t just see it, did we, Eileen? We weren’t standing by and shaking our heads as they strung people up and gutted them open and left them hanging there –”

“Something had to be done!” she pleaded. “Something – we didn’t know – we didn’t understand, were we to just leave the streets to the beasts?”

“So it was worth it,” he said, his tone vicious now, mocking. He spread his arms to the crimson-bathed streets, damp with mud and blood and rot. “Look at this beautiful city we bought for ourselves with all those innocent souls. Not a bad price to pay, I suppose, for such a great reward.”

Eileen’s head was throbbing, her vision shaking. She wanted him to stop. Please, Djura, stop. I can’t bear it.

Her hands were up by her head, clutching at it, as though trying to protect it from a blow. She forced them down. “So they suffered,” she finally said, when she had swallowed a few times and regained some control of her voice. “Maybe they were innocent, maybe they weren’t. Everyone’s suffered. If that was their lot then so be it.”

Djura was looking at her, and the mockery was gone, and the anger.

“Children, Eileen,” said Djura. “Children.”

It was very still in the square. Eileen’s breathing was heavy and hot inside her mask. Djura was still looking at her, and the worst thing was that somewhere underneath the guilt and the horror and the sorrow there was still a scrap of hope. For her. For her understanding, for her compassion.

“Go to hell,” she told him.

She turned on her heel and started walking again.

He had to follow her.

The thought broke through at last, through the visions crowding his sight. If not for the force of long habit he might have stayed there till the end, lost to his memories and the hallucinated stink of blood and burning. But – always, in the end, he followed Eileen. He was a reckless fool but Eileen always knew what to do. He had followed her countless times before and he would follow her now.

So after some time – seconds, minutes, it was hard to say – he stumbled along after her, shouting her name. There was a time not so long ago when they wouldn’t have raised their voices for anything, desperate not to attract attention, but that seemed like a petty concern now.

He stopped short at a junction, looking around frantically. He thought he might have heard her footsteps down one street, but he wasn’t sure – and the brisk motion had shaken off some of his delirium, and he was remembering himself now, and where he was and when he was and what he needed to do. The girls. Oh, gods, the girls, what could be happening to them – “Eileen!”

He pressed onwards through the bloody red-lit streets; something lunged at him from a doorway, a clawed hand raked across his shoulder, but he stumbled onwards and it didn’t pursue.

They were too far from where they’d lost the girls. He never should have let Eileen bring them such a long way. But to turn back now was useless – they’d lost too much time – the girls could be anywhere, anywhere, and all he could think to do was follow Eileen. If he thought of anything else he would think of Adele and Laure, terrified, bleeding or broken – or worse, kept whole for something else, some sinister purpose. Everyone knew the Church took the children that no one would miss.

Not them, he thought, prayed, as he followed the sound of footsteps down another alley. Can’t you see they’re the only ones who don’t deserve it. You can’t take them.

The alley spat him out into a wider intersection, and he saw her. Eileen was standing in the middle of the street, a dark shadow among the red. She didn’t turn at the sound of his footsteps: her gaze was riveted on another figure, lithe and menacing, silhouetted at the top of a broad flight of steps.

Eileen and the mad hunter were still. His blade was drawn but he made no move towards her. They seemed transfixed in each other’s gazes, two masks regarding each other intently while some hidden calculation played out beneath. Djura didn’t dare cry out, because he could feel them winding up like clockwork, and the moment some unseen hand lifted itself from the spring he knew exactly which way Eileen would lunge.

Shoot him, you idiot.

Djura began fumbling, as quietly as he could, for his gun. What Keg worth his badge would just stand there gawking with his target right there and ripe for the taking? Everyone else said it wasn’t honorable but honor won’t get you anywhere in Yharnam but six feet under and do you want the damn things dead or not –

Eileen let out a cry.

And she seized her blade, and charged forward, and the other hunter drew back slowly, languorously. He didn’t disappear, because he wanted her to follow. Because everything was going exactly as he’d planned it.

“Eileen,” Djura yelled, “don’t!” But she charged unhearing up the staircase, and the other hunter finally turned and ran and she gave chase.

“Damn it,” Djura half-sobbed, “damn it, Eileen – please –”

But she wouldn’t listen. She was gone already. He was alone again and he didn’t know what to do and everything was red, red, red.

He holstered his gun and ran after her, ignoring the stich in his side and the ache in his knees. He followed the sound of her pounding steps and her wild shots through widening streets until he could actually see her up ahead, down an avenue that had once been well-paved, and he could follow her billowing cape and that of the hunter beyond, deeper into the Ward, towards the looming tower of the Grand Cathedral and into the heart of the Church.

Chapter Text

Adele’s head hurt. It rattled. It felt like the jostling of the beast’s steps had shaken something loose inside her skull, and when the thing finally swung her off its back and overturned the bag and sent her tumbling onto a clammy stone floor, she had to blink furiously as her vision swam and then slowly settled. She heard rather than saw the two beasts stomping away.

She blinked away tears until her hands came into focus, braced on the ground beneath her.

“Addie?” came a whisper.

“Laure,” she said, and crawled over to her sister. Laure was wide-eyed and frightened, and she reached out and nearly flung herself into Adele’s lap, clinging tightly. She didn’t have to speak for Adele to understand what she was thinking: I thought I might be all alone here.

After a moment, and with an uncharacteristic sniffle, Laure whispered, “I don’t feel very well.”

Adele didn’t either. She rested a hand on her sister’s hair and turned her gaze upwards. Everything still looked a bit blurry, but she could see now that they were in some kind of cage – or a cell, like in a dungeon, the kinds she thought only existed in books. It was big, and the ceiling was high, and she couldn’t see anything moving on the other side of the bars. No beasts or guards. Everything was made of damp stone and the slick chilly grime was already soaking through her skirt and stockings.

Someone was in the cell next to her. A spike of fear drove into her back when she noticed. Her hand clenched tightly on the back of Laure’s dress and only then did she realize that the person wasn’t moving, and their slumped position was too uncomfortable for sleep. Oh, he was dead. That was all right then.

But if he was dead and no one else was near, what were those voices? She could hear them faintly. Whispering? Singing? Somewhere up above, perhaps.

Her head hurt.

“What do we do?” whispered Laure. “Addie, what do we do?”

“I don’t know.” Her throat was dry. I don’t know, Laure, why would I know? I don’t know anything at all. She turned her attention back to Laure’s head in her lap. Laure had lost her hair ribbon, and her curls were wild and matted. Adele ran her fingers over them, through them, drifting along the tangles like a boat in a current.

It was only when Laure finally shifted position that Adele remembered that had to do something. She was the oldest. It was her job. Even though her head still throbbed and she wanted to just sit there and float, to rub the coarse sticky strands between her fingers and try to make out the words in the song. She dislodged Laure and crawled closer to the bars – it felt safer to be low to the ground – and peered out. She still couldn’t see anyone, or hear footsteps; just those faint whisper-voices, far off. There was an open archway on one side of the room, and stairs leading up and curving away. She could just make them out if she pressed her forehead against the bars.

The cell they were in was large, and the two of them were small. The bars were too close together to slip through, but Adele crept along them and found a place near the far wall, close to the ground, where they were broken and bent, leaving a little hole too small for anyone fully grown to pass through – but not too small for them.

“We should go,” said Laure. She had gathered herself and was peering through the gap. “They’ll kill us if we don’t, won’t they?”

“I don’t know,” said Adele. “I don’t know why they brought us here. What if – what if they’re waiting right out there?” The thought of creeping around that curve in the stairs only to run into those big hooded beasts and their long, rotting fingers froze her in place.

“Maybe we should stay here,” she said. “Auntie Eileen and Uncle Djura can find us if we stay in one place –”

“But they can find us too,” Laure insisted. “Come on, Addie, we’ve got to, before they come back.”

She didn’t want to. But Laure was going to go no matter what Adele said. She had that tone in her voice, the one that said I know I’m right and I won’t listen to anything else. She never listened. And Adele had to protect her. So she pushed her way through the hole – the jagged edge of one of the bars caught her dress and for a terrible moment she thought something had grabbed her - and Laure came through after her.

The light was strange. Adele had thought it was just her eyes, which were still streaming and bothered, but she realized as they snuck closer to the archway that it wasn’t just that: there were windows set high in the ceiling over their heads and the light coming through them was painting everything a weird queasy pink. Like insides, she thought: it was the same color as people’s insides, when you cut them open. She’d never seen that color before tonight and now it was everywhere.

Laure reached for Adele’s hand as they mounted the first step. She squeezed it, as if to say, It’ll be all right, Addie. I’m here, we’re together. And Adele thought – Oh, stop that.

It was dark on the stairs, but oddly not too difficult to see: something about the strange light made it easy to peer into the shadows. And it was quiet, other than the singing, and as they carefully rounded each bend there was nothing lurking ahead to grab them. The staircase widened as it went, and they passed another hall. Something big and dark was slumped in its shadows, sagging on the floor. Dead. They both held still and stared at it. It was too big to be a person, and wearing a strange robe. When Adele looked closer she could see a sack still resting loosely in its horrible hand.

“That’s what grabbed me,” whispered Laure. “Why is it dead?”

Adele shook her head and pressed a finger to her lips. She thought she could hear rustling coming from down the corridor. Maybe a hunter had killed that beast, one of the good brave ones. But there were too many other things that could have done it too. She pulled Laure onwards, up the stairs.

They emerged into a big room, one of the biggest Adele had ever seen, with stone pillars stretching up to a ceiling so high she couldn’t make it out – like the Grand Cathedral, but without any pews or candles. It was very, very dark, and empty, and quiet – except for the singing, which sounded louder here. Still far-off, but not so far as it had been below.

There was an open door all the way on the other end of the hall. Adele could just make it out. There was nothing in between that she could see, but she imagined Auntie Eileen saying Go slowly, go quietly. So she and Laure crept to the side of the room, where the shadows were deepest, and only then did they try to cross.

But after a few steps, the stone floor disappeared: instead there was only some kind of grate, or the top of a cage, looking down onto a shadowy space far below. Adele knelt and peered down. Then she reared back when something shuffled past – something hunched and ragged and awful, groping along down there, something that would be able to see her if it only looked up. She dragged Laure back with her and they waited, perfectly still, Adele’s hand locked onto Laure’s dress so that she couldn’t run off and do something stupid. The shuffling footsteps of the thing moved farther away, and then it made a wet snuffling sound that caught in its throat and rose to a high moan. It could hear them – it could smell them – Adele knew it could. But the steps moved onward until they blended into the rhythm of the chant and faded away.

Laure looked back at her and tugged on her hand. Adele shook her head.

“Let’s go,” whispered Laure. “It’s gone.”

Adele shook her head again, but Laure tugged and dragged her closer to the edge of the stone floor. Adele leaned her weight against it as if Laure were trying to drag her over a cliff. It didn’t matter if the beast was gone or not. The metal bars were close together, but all she could imagine was her foot slipping through and getting stuck. She would try desperately to free herself, but she’d be trapped, and Laure would run off and leave her all alone, waiting and waiting until sooner or later she would hear something moving towards her in the darkness, or would feel a clammy hand reach up and wrap around her ankle.

“No,” she said. “Laure, stop it.”

Laure pulled harder “Come on, Addie –”

“No,” Adele said again; her voice cracked. She wrenched herself out of Laure’s grip and looked behind her instead. There was an altar there, or something that looked like one – the highest she’d ever seen, so high she couldn’t make out what was on top, with curving steps leading up to it on either side. Perhaps there was another door there. But as she looked upwards, and squinted to make out the head of the strange statue above, her head suddenly squeezed. That was what it felt like – like somebody had grabbed it – and there was some kind of heartbeat pulsing behind her streaming eyes. Not there, not there, not there, she thought. Was it her who thought that?

Laure was prying her hands away from her eyes. “Are you all right?” she said. “Come on, Addie, let’s go quickly.”

“I don’t want to,” Adele sobbed. Her head was on fire with pain, and she couldn’t go forward, and she couldn’t go back, and she couldn’t stay still because something might find her, and she’d never been so frightened in her life.

“We have to,” Laure snapped, “we can’t stay here. Stop being stupid.” She pulled, so hard that Adele couldn’t help but stumble after her, and then the stumble became a run. She felt the bars beneath her feet, and the gaping empty space between them, hungry to swallow her up. She didn’t dare stop. If she stopped she would trip and she would fall. She ran as Laure yanked her forward, half-blind with tears, choking on her own panicked gasps.

And then there was firm stone under her feet again, and a column to lean against, and the open door in front of her. She clawed at the column’s stone while she tried to swallow her sobs.

And then Laure said, “See? We’re fine.”

She was so smug, standing there with her hands on her hips. Stupid Laure. She always acted like she was so brave, and now she wanted to pretend that she could take care of Adele, but she couldn’t. It was always Adele who had to take care of her. And now Laure was going to take all the credit just like she took everything else.

“I don’t need your help, Laure,” Adele said, and wiped at her eyes.

Quick as a flash, Laure’s face pinched up. “Yes you did,” she said. “You couldn’t even –”

“I don’t need your help,” Adele said again, louder.

All the cloying fake concern had vanished from Laure’s expression, just like Adele knew it would. “Fine then,” Laure snapped, scowling. And then –

She was bad, she was always bad; she was rotten and no one could ever see it. Because she just turned and vanished through the door without another word, without even looking, and now Adele had no choice but to run after her.

Djura could hear the gunshots from below as he pelted up the cathedral’s steps. One – two – he prayed they were Eileen’s, that he wouldn’t arrive too late. The cathedral’s massive doors were swinging wide, and Djura sprinted through them and up the stairs as the sound of clashing blades joined that of the shots. He stopped only when he could get a view of the two dueling figures – both still upright, thank the gods, because if one of them were going to fall it would surely be Eileen. His first instinct was to try to make out which she was through the swirling frenzy of their capes. His second was to get the hell out of their line of sight.

He shouldered his way through a door on his left, into a narrow spiraling stairway that would lead up to the gallery and the choir loft, and then paused for just a second to catch his breath. His head was pounding and his lungs burning, but for the moment he had two precious advantages that no Keg would waste: access to the high ground, and an enemy who didn’t know he was there.

Bunch of bloody idiots, someone said. Djura faltered on the first step. Marching in straight lines with their swords out, the familiar voice continued, like the beast’s going to give them credit for fair play. Djura blinked and reached to the wall for balance; the stairs were pitching like the deck of a ship, and Eduard was waving a butter knife mockingly as all of them laughed together, trying to take the sting out of the vicar’s latest snub. Djura stumbled, his fingers brushing the step above as he scrambled to find his feet and keep moving. Whatever we do, Eduard continued, pressing a pious hand to his breast, we mustn’t dishonor ourselves in front of the great slavering monsters. What would Mother say?

It was only the brief resistance of forcing open the door at the top of the stairs that brought Djura back to the moment, out of the memories that echoed from somewhere behind his eyes and ears. He shook his head once and then twice: he was here, not there; there was stone beneath his feet, and he could reach out and touch the balustrade overlooking the cathedral below, and lean his weight against it. Eileen yelled, loud enough to knock the lingering images loose and let him see clearly what was happening beneath him. She was still locked in a desperate, lurching struggle with the other hunter; even as he watched, the hunter vanished and her blade sliced through empty air. She shouted something, but Djura couldn’t make it out and a blast from the hunter’s pistol cut her off. She staggered.

Djura reached for his own gun, reloaded, and took aim – but then thought better of it. Eileen had regained her footing and was attacking again. He had an opportunity, and he couldn’t afford to waste it. We’re Kegs, said another voice, laughing. We don’t do subtle. He holstered the blunderbuss again and knelt to the floor to make sure he couldn’t be seen, and started patting through his pockets.

There, an oil urn: he unscrewed the flask and dumped its contents heedlessly on the stone, then ripped one of the tatters off his shirt and used it to soak up the remaining oil inside. There were votive candles in the niche behind him; he stood briefly to grab one of them, blew out the flame, and began to work the wax with his hands, starting at the already-softened top, until the whole mass was warmed and pliable. Now the powder: he crouched again, dug it out of its pouch, and began to handle it with not half as much care as it merited. But that was nothing new: Oh look, said Anja, watching him tinker, Djura’s trying to blow out his other eye so he won’t have to look at our ugly mugs anymore. And Aleksey cheerfully said Can you blame him, and Djura threw up a rude gesture, and then they both burned in Old Yharnam and he had to remember that this was not real. He had to ignore what his eyes and ears and pounding head were trying to tell him, to focus only on what he could feel with his hands. He closed his eyes and pulled his gloves off to feel the urn’s scratchy cat-tongue surface and the gunpowder’s grit. You don’t need eyes or ears for this, Djura. Pack the powder with some small measure of care. Smash an empty blood vial and pack in the shards of glass for good measure. Feel the pain of the sudden slice in your finger and let it remind you what you’re doing. Now the seal: work in the wax, shape it into a barrier. Good. Use the oil-soaked strip of fabric for a fuse. Tie it off. Now you can look.

Djura hefted his makeshift bomb in his hand, rose to his feet, and looked over the balustrade.

Eileen was sprawled on the ground below. Sudden panic took almost made Djura throw the bomb immediately, but then she dragged herself to the side just in time to avoid a killing blow from the hunter’s sword. She lashed out with her foot and caught his ankle, a lucky hit that bought her a moment to clamber to her feet. But she was unsteady and on the retreat, and barely managed to parry the hunter’s next flurry of blows.

All Djura needed was an opening. They were too close, though, damn it all – and as Eileen found a second wind and darted towards her opponent, the blur of their capes once again made it hard to tell which was which, or even that they were two separate things at all. Turning a match over and over in his fingers, Djura watched them fight, his heart and head both pounding. They were too close now, two crows an almost indistinguishable blur of black wings, and all he could do was stand there with the bomb in one hand and the match in the other. Waiting. Blinking to clear his streaming eye and focus on the red-stained battleground below.

The hunter did his vanishing trick again and, reappearing several feet behind, delivered a shot that sent Eileen tumbling back to the ground. Djura thought, Please, Eileen, be quick. And he struck the match and lit the fuse and threw.

The blast echoed across the cathedral. Djura instinctively shut his eye against the flash of light, but he opened it in time to see a spray of red mist settling over the ground below. It was soaking the hunter’s prone body, which twitched and jerked on the ground. His hand moved, reaching for his sword, but there was a gaping hole scooped out of his abdomen, and it was only seconds before what was left of him was still. And Eileen – Eileen was still on the ground but she was whole and moving, slow and stunned, her hand thrown up before her to protect her from the blast.

Djura waited. Five seconds. Ten. It seemed like surely the hunter would rise, somehow, would have some other strange magic up his sleeve. But the body did not stir. Eileen was shifting slowly onto her knees. And finally Djura descended.

Adele ran through the door, after her sister, out onto the street. And then she stopped short, and stared upwards.

The moon was red. Red and enormous in a purple sky, looming above unfamiliar towers and spires, so close it looked like Adele could reach up and touch it. She pictured that – imagined her fingers brushing against the swollen sphere – and she could feel her hand coming away slimy and foul. Fear choked her. The moon wasn’t red, just like the grass wasn’t blue: the moon was white or yellow and it was small, remote, not massive like this, looking like it would sink to the earth and bury them all beneath it.

Laure, a little farther ahead, had paused to look at it too. But then she darted across the street, into the shadows on the other side. Adele started instinctively to run after her, but then she stopped and looked up and down before she crossed. She didn’t recognize any of the buildings. The chanting was louder out here, and she could hear other things, moans and movement. She looked down the street to her left and saw massive, writhing figures some distance away, hunched as if they were feeding. But they weren’t watching her, and after another moment Adele darted across the street and into the shadow of an abandoned carriage, where her sister was poking at something.

A body. Laure was crouched over it like it was some interesting insect on the sidewalk, and had lifted up its cloak and was rummaging through the pocket inside. The hand that was visible on its lap was shriveled and dark, but Adele still covered her nose at the faintly rotten scent that clung to the corpse.

“Stop that,” she hissed. “What’re you doing?” She reached out with her other hand to drag Laure back.

“You stop it,” said Laure, and jerked away from Adele’s grasp. And then she darted off again, and Adele couldn’t even safely call after her. She just had to run, out of this patch of shadow and into the next, crossing through red moonlight that felt like it burned on her skin. She didn’t look up. She wouldn’t look at the moon-thing, even though she could feel it looking at her. Mum and Dad always said you should never lock eyes with a beast. That would make it angry.

There were more bodies here. Most of them were out on the street, in the light, curled over like they were praying or trying to hide. But there was another dead person lying sprawled across the steps of one of the buildings, and this one still smelled very, very bad. Under the brim of his hat, his skin was whitish-green, still soft. His jaw was sagging open so far that his chin touched his chest; he would have looked like he was screaming if not for the blackened tongue lolling out. Everything he wore was soaked in dark, dried blood.

Laure was working at one of his hands, prying his fingers one by one off of something he was grasping.

“What are you doing?” Adele said, through the hands covering her mouth.

Laure didn’t answer; she was holding her breath, her cheeks puffed out almost comically, like she was doing it for show. But finally the dead man’s hand gave away and she held up her prize: a knife. It was small compared to Auntie Eileen’s swords, but much bigger than a kitchen knife, and it looked wickedly sharp.

“Put that back,” Adele said, but Laure only backed away – keeping the body between them – and used the knife to hack off a long strip of her skirt. She tied it around the knife’s hilt, so that the blade dangled in the middle of the ribbon, and then wrapped the whole thing around her waist and tied it off like a belt. She patted it down, and the knife at her hip all but vanished into the skirt’s pleats and flounces.

“That isn’t yours,” Adele said. And she heard how silly it sounded, and felt even angrier at Laure because of it. Laure rolled her eyes and turned around and ran off again.

“Laure!” Adele didn’t dare say it above a whisper and she had no choice but to run after her again, into the sickly pink light. Her head was throbbing and her breath was coming in short gasps, and Laure was being horrid and not listening. She never, ever listened. She always thought she knew what was best.

Adele followed her down the street, towards the gates at the end that were swung open wide, the ones all those bodies were facing. Laure stopped dead, at least, at the threshold, and stood and stared at what was beyond. Adele caught up, ready to chastise her. And then she stopped too.

Something was reaching for her: a human hand, scarcely a foot from her face. She jerked backwards, but the hand didn’t follow: it stayed where it was, immobile. And Adele realized that the hand was made out of stone, and so were the arm and body attached to it. There was a person in the wall, clawing outwards like he had been trapped and was desperately trying to escape. He wasn’t the only one. Both walls, on either side of the gate, were full of people – figures frozen in jostling disarray, piled on top of each other, climbing over each other, heads and arms and torsos jutting out from the stonework and then blending back in, like they’d sunken into cement, like it had been poured over them. By her own feet Adele could see a tiny shoe poking out, one lace untied, and closer to her eyes there was a woman’s exposed breast and part of her neck and chin above, held taut as she writhed. The rest of her was consumed by stone. Maybe they were stone, Adele thought, as she backed away from the closest one’s grasping fingers and hollow-eyed stare. Just strange sculptures carved into the walls.

But they weren’t. They weren’t, Adele knew that. They were people. And they were everywhere before her. All down the wide street beyond the gate, all the grand buildings - the cathedrals and chapels, the sweeping overlooks and solemn statues - had those people at their base, built into their foundations, writhing in silent agony; in the far distance they were impossible to distinguish from one another and melted into a seething mass. There were men and women and children, old grandmothers in their white caps, all of them with their mouths open wide. Screaming. Everything was built on top of them, over them, of them, as if they were brick or stone, just base lifeless things to build a church upon.

The chanting was very loud here.

Not there.

It was hard to see what was at the other end of the street.

Not there not there not there.

“Not there,” said Adele.

“There’s nowhere else to go,” said Laure. “They’re just statues, Addie. Don’t be scared of statues.”

“No!” said Adele, too loudly. “They’re people. They’re people, Laure. We can’t go in there –”

“You’re scared of everything,” Laure snapped. Hateful Laure, her face all flushed red in the awful light. “Stop being stupid and just be brave for once.” And she reached for Adele’s sleeve.

Adele slapped her.

The crack rang out loud as a gunshot in her ears. Laure’s head whipped to the side and Adele felt the force of it jarring up her hand, her wrist, her arm. And then came the stinging pain in her palm, and it felt good. She watched with pleasure as Laure stood there, still, with her hand to her cheek, tears welling in her eyes. Finally she raised her head.

“You’re awful,” she said, her voice low. “You’re always awful to me, Addie, you’re always horrid –”

“Good,” said Adele. “I hate you. I wish you’d never been born.”

Laure’s face twisted and her chest started to rise and fall rapidly. The vicious pleasure only grew as Adele waited for Laure to react – to hit her, shout at her, knock her down – so that Adele could hit back. So she could make Laure pay for being the brave one, the pretty one, the funny one. The one that everyone loved better. She hoped Laure would strike her or bite her, draw blood perhaps. She waited impatiently for Laure to make her hurt so that she could hurt back.

“Oh dear,” said a voice behind her. It came from the other side of the gate, the side they’d just come from. “What a terrible place for two children to end up, on a night like tonight. You’re lucky I found you, m’dears.”

A man had come up behind them: dirty and half-naked, with the upper part of his head all wrapped up in bandages.

“Why don’t you come with me, then,” he said, “and we’ll get you home safe and sound.”

Eileen was still kneeling when Djura reached the bottom of the stairs, though she’d drawn closer to the hunter’s corpse. Something looked wrong, and it was only as he drew closer that he realized what it was: she had taken off her mask, and held it limp in one hand. Her gray hair had come unbound and was flying wild around her face, swaying with each stuttering breath.

Djura approached her slowly. Without looking at him, she raised her blade and drove it straight down, into the corpse’s breast. She left it there, her hands clasped on the hilt like an old knight swearing an oath. The red light streaming through the windows illuminated her like stained glass. Still she didn’t speak, or look up to acknowledge his presence as he crossed the floor towards her. But she made a huffing noise – her shoulders began to shake – and the noise grew higher, and Djura realized that she was laughing.

“Eileen,” he said.

Her laughter subsided. Almost lazily, she tilted her head so that she could look at him. It was a strange, sad shock, to see her face for the first time in so many years. Gods, we’re old, he nearly said.

Instead he asked, “Are you hurt? Have you taken blood?” She was still hunched over in a way that suggested some pain; she was covered in the red spray of the other hunter’s blood, and the red light besides, and it was impossible to tell whether she was still bleeding herself.

“You were right,” she said. And then she laughed again: not her usual laugh. High, almost musical, as if it were climbing a scale. “Djura was right,” she added, with humor in her voice, looking upwards as if she were addressing somebody else.

“Was I?” he said cautiously.

“It’s all the same,” she continued in a strange drawling tone. “You were right: all this time it’s a civil war we’ve been fighting. Hunters and beasts. There’s no difference. We two know that best of all, don’t we?”

Djura knelt beside her and put a steadying hand on her shoulder. “Easy,” he said. “Easy. Can you stand?”

“The hunt makes hunters mad,” she said softly. “No one can resist it, the intoxication. We’re just the same as all the rest. The beasts are just people. The people are just beasts.”

“Come on, now,” Djura said. “Try to stand. Lean on me.” He didn’t know what good it would do, but he wanted Eileen up, moving, not just kneeling there and swaying and saying strange things. He took her by both shoulders and started to raise her and she followed, clinging to him for support. Once she was on her feet she reached for her sword and half-leaned into him for balance as she pried it slowly loose.

“It has to end,” she said. And then louder, fervent: “It has to stop.”

“It will,” Djura soothed. “Let’s just move, Eileen. Just to the steps and then we can sit down again if we need to. Have you taken blood?”

Eileen didn’t budge, but she did look at him. Her eyelids were fluttering, her posture still unsteady, but as she looked at him her gaze focused into something like its usual sharpness. “Poor Djura,” she said. “Poor pitiable Djura.”

She raised her sword and drove it through his side.

Djura looked down at it: the beautiful siderite blade, now buried in his gut and staining rapidly red. He took one hand off of Eileen’s shoulder to touch it, just to check that it was real; it looked so odd, merged with his flesh.

“Eileen,” he said, in a tone of mild surprise.

“Locked himself all away down below, waiting for some god to smite him like he deserved,” Eileen continued, her voice no longer dazed and dreamy but a piercing hiss.

Djura had never been impaled before. He’d been injured, he’d died many a death, been clawed and gutted and bitten and blown up: but he couldn’t remember ever having been impaled.

The pain finally came.

“You want to be punished so badly,” Eileen snarled, as agony bloomed in his stomach, as his knees buckled and his grip on the sword grew slippery with his own blood. He reached for her instead, grasped the fabric of her shirt to steady himself, and she yanked on the blade and he cried out.

“Well here’s your punishment, Djura. Your punishment is death.”

She kicked him away from her and the blade dragged back through him, its vicious curved point ripping and tearing through him as Eileen pulled it free. He fell and scrambled backwards, one hand pressed to his side to hold in whatever was left, if there was anything left.

“Eileen,” he choked out again. Eileen didn’t answer, only loomed over him, feathers and hair silhouetted black against the scarlet light.

“Who are you?” Adele asked. Behind her, she felt Laure take a step closer as they both stared at the stranger; Laure's skirt brushed against her own, and Adele could almost sense the heat coming off of her.

“A friend,” said the strange man. He shuffled closer to them; he was blocking their way back through the gate. His eyes were covered, but she sensed that she was being closely observed. “There’s a whole bunch of us up at Oedon, taking care of each other,” he went on. “Trying to make it out of this night in one piece. We heard two little girls was missing.”

Adele wanted to look back at Laure. Her thoughts were swirling, her pulse high; her hand still stung from her blow. A second ago she’d struck her sister, but now there was a stranger here. A stranger, and the two of them facing him; she in front, Laure behind. She wanted very, very badly to look at Laure.

She didn’t.

She swallowed instead, and said, “We’re a bit lost.”

“Of course you are,” the man said, clucking his tongue sympathetically. “Don’t expect you ended up here on purpose.” He stooped down, and Adele could smell his breath, and it made the buzzing that had filled her head since she got here sharpen into a single high keening note. “Your gran’s real worried about you,” he confided. “She sent me to fetch you. I had a feeling, I did, about where a couple of little ones might have ended up tonight.”

Adele looked him up and down. His clothes and bare skin were streaked with mud and blood. He held himself in a strange way, shoulders hunched forward, head extended and tilted at an angle, like a dog straining to hear. With every detail she took in, her mind felt like it was settling. Sharpening. She couldn’t hear the singing anymore, just that warning note that even now was fading as her thoughts condensed into more solid shapes. She could hear Laure’s breathing, and felt her angling slightly towards her. But she held her gaze steady, and stood as firm as she could.

“You have cloth over your eyes,” she said. “Can’t you see anything?”

“Oh, I get around fine,” said the man. He smiled a wide, sharp smile. “The light just hurts my old eyes, I’m afraid. Never get old, m’dears. It’s rotten business.”

Adele was more alert with every passing second. Her head still felt strange, but now it was funneled into keen attention rather than confusion: like a big puddle of rainwater finally rushing down a gutter, gathered together and charging forward in a single direction. She devoured every detail of this stranger, his ragged beard and dirty bandages. His scent.

“The same thing happened to our daddy,” she said. “Before he died.” And she sniffled a little for good measure.

“Poor lambs,” said the man. “All alone in the world. Don’t you worry, I’ll get you out of here. But we’d better hurry, eh? Lots of nasties about. Wouldn’t want to go toe-to-toe with any of them.”

Adele reached back with one hand, just far enough to brush against Laure: she touched the folds of her skirt and one of her knuckles, and Laure pressed back. The man probably couldn’t even see the gesture, it was so small; but they maintained the steady pressure on each other’s hands as Adele spoke again.

“We’re going back to Oedon?” she said. She looked up at the skyline of spires above the street, and realized that she knew where Oedon was as easily as she knew where to find her nose or her ankle. “It’s that way, right?”

The man followed her pointed finger. “Yes,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. “You’re a sharp one, eh? Your gran must be proud.”

Finally, Adele turned to look at Laure, who met her gaze evenly. In the shadows and the red light it was hard to even see the mark that Adele’s hand had left on her face. All she could see were Laure’s dark eyes, steady and intent, so like her own. They said a great deal to each other in that brief moment’s gaze, reading each other’s faces as easily as they might each other's handwriting. Finally Laure raised her chin slightly, and pushed her left hand further into her skirt’s folds, and gave a tiny nod.

“All right,” said Adele, turning back around. “I think you’re right. We’d better leave before something tries to hurt us.”

The man smiled again. “Very good, ducks. We’ll be safe in no time. Just follow me.”

They did.

Chapter Text

She missed.

Djura managed to roll away from her blow just in time, and instead of cutting his chest open her blade only crashed against the floor. No matter. She would try again. He wouldn’t be able to stay away from her forever.

She was alight with pure, clarifying purpose. It was liberating, to understand everything, to know what she had to do.

The nightmare must end.

She’d been blind before and now her eyes were open: she saw it all, the sheer madness of the hunt and of their futile flailing efforts that only ever dug them deeper into the mire. It is madness, Djura, you were right. Isn’t that funny? You were right.

Eileen, stop.

She didn’t. She lunged again, and again he managed to avoid her blow, this time by toppling almost to the ground; she wondered if he would manage to get up, but after a moment he did. He was using a blood vial. That didn’t matter either. He only had so many, and she had all night. That was funny too, wasn’t it? All night. It was all night, now.

He was keeping a careful distance from her, wary, in a fighting stance. Why are you fighting, Djura? The hunters must die. We understand that best, don’t we, we two hunters of hunters. We have always understood each other so well.

Eileen—please—

Vile butchers. Murderers. A hunter is a beast who hasn’t yet grown fangs. Worse: a hunter enjoys the bloodshed. At least a beast doesn’t understand what it does.

She lunged. He shot her. She reeled back, forced off her feet; she hit the ground hard and rolled.

Listen to me, please. I don’t want to hurt you.

But she wanted to hurt him. She wanted him to suffer. For being weak. For forcing her to remember. The hunters must die and she would begin with him. He should be thanking her. Wasn’t this what he had wanted? He understood the weight of what they had done, and the kind of fate they both deserved.

Her head was water. It churned and flowed, slippery. If she did not focus all she had on the point of her blade and on her prey before her—if she did not marshal her thoughts towards this single purpose—there was nothing solid to moor her: her mind’s eye ranged everywhere. She saw the red walls of the cathedral, and she saw the moon, and she saw the Yharnam skyline melting and dissolving like chalk in a rainstorm, and she saw things with yawning mouths and gaping eyes, with slimy curling appendages arced like lightning strikes across the heavens. She saw Old Yharnam ablaze and Old Yharnam banked to embers, and she heard screams and she felt the weight of a little hand clinging to her cape as she seized a burning plank to ward off a beast, and—

Why was Old Yharnam still burning?

She staggered.

Eileen—

Get away from me, Djura.

She lashed out with her blade.

Get away.

Eileen, the girls.

The girls. A weight on the back of her cape. No, no, no. No. She struck out again. Move, don’t think. Act. End it. She was balancing on a razor’s edge, and on the one side there gaped a chasm of moon-creatures and eyes like galaxies and fires that burned for years without a soul to tend them—

That burned like a memory—

That burned like a nightmare—

And on the other side was a little hand dragging her towards a plummet to hard unforgiving earth, and she could not allow either to win. She must stay dancing on the blade’s edge, because now she had a purpose, and now she could not fail.

Only I can stop this madness.

Madness, all of it. And for a while we both believed. We truly believed, didn’t we? But surely even we two couldn’t be so blind.

Oh, Djura. Did we really think this city would let us leave?

Impossible. They belonged to Yharnam. They were infants in its womb: there was nothing beyond, no daylight or air, only the slow-shifting waters and unceasing drumbeat of a distant heart. Hadn’t she, in the end, made herself Yharnam’s most devoted daughter? Night after night, hadn’t she poured out blood onto the city’s altar, slaked its undying thirst with her offerings? Hadn’t she given herself? No ancient priestess had ever offered a more zealous sacrifice. She had given her life over and over again, had hurled herself willingly upon the altar, cut out her own heart, set herself aflame, died again and again and again only to awaken to new life and make her offering anew. She had given Yharnam a thousand deaths. No mother could ask for more.

But then the betrayal: but then Old Yharnam. In a single night, the slaughter of countless of Yharnam’s children, and scar that would never fade burned across the city’s face. When it suited them, the Church sometimes preached about the gods’ infinite mercy. But Yharnam was not one of their gods. She would not forgive.

Djura was grappling with her. He was close, but he would not use his weapon. He still didn’t want to hurt her. He was always such a fool. Couldn’t he see that they were beyond hurting each other? This was the end of everything. She could feel the city’s foundations crumbling, could hear the feral cries of the beasts that now ruled the streets. It was over now. There was no penance, no absolution. There was only death, sooner or later. Why couldn’t he see that? Why was he still fighting?

Why couldn’t he understand that this was mercy?

The man went first, and then Adele, and then Laure behind. The man didn’t like crossing the moonlight either; he skulked in the buildings’ shadows, hugging tight to the walls. Though perhaps that was only because he didn’t want to be seen. They were closer now to the big beasts that were feeding farther down the street, close enough to see that they weren’t single beasts at all but masses of bodies all writhing around, like the human statues they’d left behind them. Adele shuddered. But the man was afraid of them: that was good.

“How will we get back up to the chapel?” Adele asked.

The man pressed a hasty finger to his lips, and turned so that they could hear his voice more easily.

“Quiet! Don’t want any nasties to hear us, do we?”

Adele shook her head and walked a few more steps. Then—“But how will we get back?” she persisted, in a whisper so loud she might as well have simply spoken.

The man shushed her again, emphatically. Then, to cut off further questions, he turned and traced with his finger a path of ascending stairs and balconies that climbed jaggedly up the buildings’ faces. All of it was out in the open, as far as Adele could see; they wouldn’t have to go inside the buildings, where it was dark and hidden, where nothing would be able to hear or reach them. That was good, too. And the path did lead in the right direction, up towards the Grand Cathedral’s tower. Adele nodded her understanding and turned back to Laure, to make sure that she’d seen the route; Laure met her gaze, her expression sharp, and nodded back.

As they drew closer to the writhing beast-bodies the man began to stoop into a half-crouch, bent nearly double, pausing every few moments to cock his head and listen. But the low moaning and the wet, churning noises of the beasts’ movements continued unabated. They slipped up a set of stairs to a high portico and crept along, pressing as far as they could into the darkness against the wall. The beasts were big enough that if they had eyes—or if the dozens and dozens of hollow sockets could somehow still see—the three of them would have been perfectly at their eye-level, and Adele knew for a certainty that she did not want these beasts to spot them here; she pressed a hand over her mouth, both to cover the sound of her breathing and to protect her nose from the gaseous stench that billowed out from the massive bodies. She reached back for Laure, who obligingly touched her hand—just lightly, not grasping, so as not to throw either of them off balance. They reached the end of the portico, and the man waved them on urgently to dart through a patch of moonlight and mount a set of stairs that led to a balcony far above.

They began to climb. The beasts’ throaty gurgling faded away beneath their feet. The man relaxed in front of them; Adele could actually see the way the muscles loosened in his bare back, though he remained alert. The man moved differently than Auntie Eileen or Uncle Djura. He was careful, yes, and clearly listening, but his gait was more fluid and sure. And he didn’t have any weapons.

The balcony skirted beneath the rose window of one of the churches, and then, beyond it, yet another set of stairs climbed higher still; it wrapped around a spire and led to a narrow bridge. Adele couldn’t see much further, but it looked like beyond that the path met the rocky cliffs above. The man paused at the base of the stairs, and turned slightly towards them so they could hear his voice.

“Awfully narrow here, loves,” he whispered. “Why don’t the two of you go up ahead, and I’ll follow behind.”

Adele looked up the stairs, which were narrow; they would have to go single file, and she knew that the man must not be allowed to go behind, where they couldn’t see him. She wondered if perhaps the moment was now—but then she listened. She couldn’t hear anything very close, but the man was keeping his voice low for a reason. There were things lurking around every corner here; she could feel them. And beasts’ senses for sound and scent were keen. Better to wait, to be higher. And to be sure they knew the rest of the path, and could walk it without a guide.

“Oh please,” Adele said, loudly, “it’s so frightening—won’t you go first?”

He made a hissing, shushing noise. “Keep your voice down. There’s nothing to be frightened of, just go on up.”

“It’s so dark,” Adele protested, raising her voice, “and so high up, and I can’t see what’s around the bend—”

“Hush! Shh! Something will hear us—”

Adele wailed even louder, and tried to make her voice waver a bit.

“I don’t want to! I’m scared!”

Laure was at her side; Laure joined in.

“It’s awfully dark,” she added loudly, in her high clear voice, and that did it: something across the balcony, down the stairs they’d just ascended, let out a gleeful anticipatory roar. The man swore, and then for a second he swayed, as if he was trying to decide whether to run from the beast or towards it; his hands were curled in a strange way, not clenched into fists but tensed in a shape like he was leaving room for claws that weren’t there.

But a second set of footsteps joined the first, and then came a high yip, and a shambling figure appeared on the balcony flanked by two low doglike things, and something harder to make out behind. The man swore again, and then turned and bolted up the stairs. Adele looked quickly at Laure before she seized her hand, and Laure smiled, triumphant.

They ran, hands locked together. The stairs were too narrow for them to pass side by side, but Laure surged ahead and kept a hold on Adele behind, even as she kept her other hand pressed to her skirt; Adele hoped her knots weren’t coming loose. The man was very fast ahead of them, running crouched so low that his hands reached out sometimes to brush the steps ahead. The stone pressed close on their left, and the iron railing and then mere open air to their right, and the sounds of pursuit echoed behind. It was thrilling to go so fast at such a dizzying height; it was better than a swing, probably better than even a merry-go-round. Adele had always imagined that if you pitched yourself off a tall building, before you hit the ground, before even you realized what you’d done and began to feel afraid, there would be one glorious moment of weightlessness and giddy acceleration. This was like that, except it went on and on. Her feet and legs didn’t tire, and her lungs thrilled at the exertion of gasping for air; Laure’s grip on her hand didn’t falter, and she imagined those dog-things nipping at her heels, and had just barely enough presence of mind to stop from laughing aloud.

It was over too soon. They ran like that up the stairs, across the bridge, and then up yet another, shorter flight; then, finally, the man slowed to a stop at a balustrade right on the edge of the cliff’s rocky precipice. She and Laure slowed after him, and let go of each other. Adele could feel her pulse like a rumbling earthquake in her throat; she hoped she wasn’t smiling. That would look odd. She looked behind her: she couldn’t hear anything over her pounding heartbeat and greedy breaths, but their pursuers had apparently given up the chase.

The man was agitated. He paced to the balustrade and looked over the cliff’s edge; turned around to look upwards towards the trail and the city above, and made like he was going to turn towards them; then made a strange snorting noise and returned to the balustrade.

And Laure tugged Adele’s hand, and gave her a meaningful look. Thoughtful, Adele looked at the man leaning over the railing; she turned and looked up at the abandoned chapel they were facing, and then further up, to the city above, still so far away. She considered; then she turned back to Laure and shook her head.

Not yet.

Laure screwed up her mouth, but after looking around a moment herself she finally nodded, and pressed her hand deeper into the folds of her skirt.

The man finally turned back around.

“Right,” he snapped, his voice throaty and low. “Hope you’re pleased with yourselves, the two of you—look what happened, because you couldn’t be quiet. Don’t know why I bothered. I ought to—I ought to just leave you right here.” He bared his teeth, and started to lurch towards them, and he seemed bigger than before; Adele’s euphoria vanished as suddenly as it had come and she was filled with ice-water fear that they’d made a terrible mistake.

“No,” she squeaked, “we’ll be good—”

“Good as gold,” Laure agreed, calm and composed. She gave a quick tug on Adele’s sleeve. Then she bolted.

She vanished into the abandoned chapel before Adele could blink; she was frozen in fear a moment, wondering if Laure had ruined everything, but at least the man froze too, in surprise. And she saw what Laure had, through the chapel’s open door: a sliver of red light on the other side—an opening. It was possible to go through the chapel, then; and the path from there must lead up.

“Laure!” Adele called after her. “I’d—I’d best go and fetch her,” she said quickly to the man, and before he could react she started running too, after her sister’s footsteps ahead; and it wasn’t long before she heard his footsteps behind, hot on their heels.

She lunged for him. Again. He was still quick. He always could fight, when he wanted to. And she was growing tired: tired of all of this endless fighting. She had been fighting for such a long time. Did you get tired too, Djura? Is this how you felt, before you ran away? I’ll end it soon, I promise. We can stop. Finally, we’ll both be able to stop.

Just hold still.

He didn’t. He was reaching for something in his pockets. No, we won’t be having any of that, thank you. Too tricky by half, you Kegs. No wonder the vicar didn’t trust you further than she could throw you. She feinted to the left and rallied for a flashy flurry of stabs and slashes, then lunged to the right: she got him right on the wrist, and he cried out and fell back, cradling the wounded hand to his chest.

I’ll end it, this horrible hunt. For both of us; for all of us. But you should go first. You’ve been holding out for such a very long time—

Clatter. Crash.

Clatter.

Crash.

Lightning through a window. Thunder shaking the cottage walls.

Whisht—

It was the stake driver. That was all. Djura had thrown the stake driver to the ground, abandoned his beloved weapon so that he could have full use of his one good hand.

There was no thunder. No lightning. No cottage.

There’s no such thing as—

Gran, it’ll get me—

Eileen! Please—the girls—

No, no, no. She staggered backwards, still half-blinded by the lightning in her head. Not them. Please, not them. Don’t make me think of them. Don’t make me remember.

She swayed. Where had Djura gone? He had been in front of her—now he was behind. He had a clear shot but he wouldn’t take it, still. Well, if he wouldn’t take it then she could rest; just for a moment she could rest, until the world stopped spinning, until she could take a step without sinking to her knees.

Make it stop spinning.

Listen to me, please. You know me—you don’t want to do this.

Rain against the thatched roof: a soft, soothing patter. The rain was nice; it was the thunder that was frightening. The thunder sounded like the hill-giants rising from their tombs, their bones grinding like a landslide as they shook off their sleep.

Whisht.

Get away from me, Djura. She rose with a yell and swung her blade; he ducked it easily.

Think of Laure and Adele. Please. They need you.

No. She couldn’t. She couldn’t bear it.

Whisht.

Thunder. Light. A fire in the hearth, so small next to the lightning’s brilliance, but so warm, too, compared to its cold distant glare. A lap with a scratchy wool blanket, and gentle pressure on her head. Whisht, child, whisht. ’Tis only wind and weather. You’re a great big girl now; don’t be frightened. There’s no such thing as monsters.

Eileen shuddered, rocked by a sudden tremor. She almost dropped her blade, but grasped it again at the last moment.

The girls, Eileen. You can’t—you can’t do this until they’re safe. Please.

No, not them. Don’t make me remember. Not them, not them. Her hands clutched at her hair, trying to pull out the memories by their roots, but still they came: a round little face lit with mischief; a pair of solemn dark eyes, too old for their frame; five chubby little fingers wrapped around one of her own, brandishing it like a prize. Please, no, not this, Djura. You’ll tear me in two.

He didn’t stop. He was still talking.

We deserve this, but they don’t.

His voice was weary.

You have to remember. They need you.

But she couldn’t remember. Didn’t he understand? She couldn’t risk it. She had finally transcended. She didn’t need the mask anymore. She was the crow, now—no longer a silly child playing make-believe, pretending to be big and strong and safe. She was the crow, and she dispensed mercy, and nothing could touch her because there was no her to be touched. She was safe, finally.

As long as she didn’t remember.

If she remembered—

If she remembered—

Then she laid herself bare. All the layers of siderite and steel that she’d wrapped herself in were stripped away, if she let herself think of the old half-forgotten nursery rhymes she used to croon as she bent over a crib. She would be broken open like the earth after winter if she remembered imperious little hands tangling in her hair and tugging, and the way that she had laughed and cooed. To think of that meant being routed out of her every hiding place, being exposed pale and cowering in the daylight. If she remembered, then she remembered that somewhere inside her a there was a heart that beat like any other, and lungs that breathed no better or worse than the thousands around her, and a stomach that cried out for sustenance or sighed in satisfaction like all other stomachs before. If she remembered, then she admitted that the hands that dealt death night after night were only ordinary hands. That she was not a machine or a monster, but human. Only human. Always human.

A hazy gaslight glow. A little figure at her knee. You’re up late, little one. Does your mother know? A sly smile: we both know Auntie Eileen won’t tell. She is Auntie Eileen, now. When she is here she is Auntie Eileen. Out there she is someone else. Here, someone small and soft does not hesitate to approach; does not think to hesitate; does not imagine that hesitation is possible. She looks at rough hands that have been shaped to hold a blade and sees only a source of comfort and kindness. She sees a lap that is ripe for sitting and a chest that ought to have a little head resting upon it, that will rise and fall with the ocean’s gentle rhythm until she is pulled under and sleeps.

She reaches up, and is embraced.

Eileen hurt everywhere. Her knees, hips, spine, neck: all ached. Other pains, more urgent, lit up like a constellation across her body. She stared at her hands in her lap, curling and uncurling her fingers as if to check they were still there. There was a silvery curtain in front of her face: hair, she realized, her hair hanging in front of her drooping head.

Djura’s ragged voice, close by:

You’re here, Eileen. You’re here with me. Just—rest for a minute.

He had approached while she drifted, and was kneeling at her side. Djura: beaten and battered, one hand still limp and bleeding profusely. Djura, who she had attacked and driven back and hurt again and again. Still he approached. Still he drew closer instead of backing away. Idiot. Fool.

She leaned her head against him.

Adele ran through the abandoned chapel, skirting around the old baptismal font, keeping Laure always in sight. She could hear the man’s rough breathing behind her, growing ever throatier, closer to growling, and her pulse leapt in her throat as she thought, It will have to be soon.

Laure pelted up a steep, rocky trail: the ornate streets below had vanished, and now they climbed up the side of a cliff, towards towers of Yharnam above. Laure looked back once, and slowed her step: Adele shook her head. Too narrow here—she had only instinct to guide her, instinct and a few half-assembled principles from watching Auntie Eileen and Uncle Djura all this long night; but she felt they needed somewhere wider. Laure turned again and pressed onward. Adele had stopped crying out after her, stopped pretending. They were just running, now. Running with the man’s footsteps echoing close behind.

The path opened. Carved into the cliff face, halfway between the city above and the city below, there was a dilapidated square, with a well in the center and a little chapel hugging the stone. It was wide here.

Adele stopped.

Laure heard her and stopped too. She turned back and looked at her, and Adele started to make a sign, and then too late she heard the footsteps behind her, and a hand reached out and seized her by the back of her dress, and hauled her roughly in.

“None of that,” the man snarled, his awful rank breath enveloping her. She screamed; she froze. She felt like a rabbit or a squirrel, twitching and terrified as it locked eyes with something enormous and powerful—a timid grass-eater unable to comprehend the horror of a thing that ate flesh to live. Laure was shouting, and the man’s ragged fingernails were digging into the back of her neck, and still Adele couldn’t move. She couldn’t move. She was going to die and Laure was going to die and she was so stupidly scared that she couldn’t even react. They were going to be two more bodies just like Dad and Granddad, just lying there in the muck for someone to find and wonder over if they stopped to look at all. All because she couldn’t move—

And then she could. Just like that. She screamed again, and the sound of her own voice filled her with fierce resolve, and she twisted, lashing out with her hands and feet. She writhed like something possessed; a hand came near and she sank her teeth in it, hard, and felt flesh break like the skin on a fruit, and a burst of sticky sweetness in her mouth. At the same moment her foot made contact, and the man howled and wrenched his hand free and flung her away. She hit the ground, scrambled to her feet, and ran straight to the cliff’s edge.

I’m not a rabbit, she thought. I’m not a squirrel.

The drop loomed below her. The red moon pulsed above. Her heart was pounding in the good way again, the thrilling way.

I eat flesh too. We both do.

She turned to face him.

Come and find out exactly what we are.

The man was crouched and glaring straight at her, and he lunged forward with canine grace. He was bigger now than he had been before, his shoulders broader; he charged straight forward, and she didn’t move.

Because he hadn’t even bothered to look at Laure.

Adele stood firm, glaring, as he closed the distance between them, his mouth open in a snarl. She stayed where she was, because none of this mattered: the rocky outcrop, the dangerous man, the red moon. Those were details; details changed. But one thing was always true. One thing lay beneath everything else and would never, never change.

The man was almost upon her.

And then he reared back and screamed, and a splatter of blood burst from his stomach and sprayed on her face. And she could see the very tip the knife that Laure had buried in his back, jutting out of his bare stomach and glinting in the moonlight.

Adele crouched low and ran around him, to where Laure was clinging to the knife’s hilt. Laure’s face was screwed up in concentration; she was trying to get the blade out as the man thrashed and began to turn. She braced one foot on the back of his leg and tugged, and the knife tore free with an arc of dark blood seconds before she might have been swept right over the cliff’s edge. She staggered backwards and nearly fell. Then she caught her balance, lurched forward, and stabbed him again.

The knife went into his side this time, close to his hip. It didn’t lodge as deeply as the first blow; the man was yelling, jerking around to try to shake Laure off, but he didn’t reach down to grab her. He was growing bigger now, and dark hair was sprouting all over his body. As he twisted Adele could see his face, and she saw his teeth start to grow long and his legs start to warp, lengthening and doubling backwards. She tried to run to her sister, but one arm swiped at her and she stumbled back.

Laure didn’t notice. She wrenched the knife out again, and before he could reach for her she plunged it deeply into his stomach, and dragged on it with all her weight to tear open a deep, jagged cleft. He screamed again and reared back in pain. Laure yanked it out—more easily this time—and stabbed it in again. Blood poured out of the wounds, bursting outwards every time she yanked the knife free. The man staggered. Laure stabbed. She was yelling, inarticulate angry noise, and with every thrust of the blade she grew more steady and sure. She forced it through his thigh once, twice, and he collapsed to one knee; she stabbed it through his calf, and dodged around to his other side, and lodged it high in his shoulder, and sawed it back and forth. His growth had stopped; he was moving more weakly. Laure stabbed him again, and again, and again.

The man collapsed to his hands and knees. He tried to speak; he opened his mouth and blood poured out, and a gurgling sound. He tried to crawl forward, but Laure kept pace easily, and the knife carved into him, unceasing.

He stopped moving.

Laure kept stabbing.

She was soaked in blood; her mouth was open a wild half-smile. She reared back, and paused for a moment, searching for a fresh place to sink her blade. She found one near his shoulder, and drove it in again. She stabbed his upper arm, next, and then drove the knife through his hand, briefly pinning the clawed, dark-furred palm to the earth.

Adele walked to Laure’s side. She wrinkled her nose at the sight and the smell; she reached up and delicately wiped the blood from her cheek and mouth.

Laure was slowing, but still working: she was more methodical now, circling the man-beast’s corpse, and occasionally, judiciously breaking open patches of virgin territory when she found them. She was panting heavily. Adele followed quietly in her wake. There was nothing near; Laure could take as long as she liked.

Finally, Laure let the knife sink to her side as she studied her handiwork. Then, after a moment, she approached the head—slowly, almost reverently. The nose had become more like a snout, and too-long teeth crowded outwards; the bandages had come undone in the transformation, and one warped yellow eye was staring blankly at them; but still, Adele thought, still she could see the features of the man beneath.

Laure grabbed a fistful of hair at the top of the man-beast’s head, and lifted it up, and in one quick stroke slit his throat. She dropped the knife in time to cup her hands beneath and catch the blood that gushed out.

It really was amazing, Adele thought, how much blood there was in a person.

Laure held the blood up to the red light, examining it, tilting her hands this way and that to watch how it moved. Then she lifted it to her lips and drank.

She kept her hands near her mouth for a moment, licking her lips thoughtfully. Then she looked up and met Adele’s gaze. And Adele saw triumph in her eyes—wild, ecstatic triumph, yes, and anger smoldering beneath it.

Adele nodded.

Laure walked to her, and held out her cupped hands. Adele raised them to her own mouth and took a long sip. The blood was thick and warm, and burst on her tongue with a rich, cloying sweetness. She swallowed, and nodded again, and let go of her sister’s hands.

They simply looked at each other for a moment, breathing quietly together. Adele reached out to wipe at the blood on Laure’s cheek, and succeeded only in swirling it around. But that was all right.

“Are you hurt?”

Laure shook her head. “Are you?”

Adele shook hers.

“You’d better go and get the knife,” she finally said, and Laure nodded and went to retrieve it from where she’d dropped it, under the corpse’s throat.

Adele looked up, at the path that led towards the Grand Cathedral’s tower. It was so much closer than before. And they really had better start moving again: they had been gone for a long time, and they needed to find Auntie Eileen and Uncle Djura.

“Don’t worry,” she said to Laure, who was looking at the body again. “I won’t tell.”

After all, somebody had to protect them.

Laure tied the knife back around her waist. Adele took her hand, and squeezed it briefly; then she let it drop, and they turned their backs on the beast, and began to walk up the path, towards the city above.

Chapter Text

Eileen could barely walk. Djura had to support her as he went, bearing some of her weight as they stumbled out of the cathedral together. If she had taken blood, it wasn’t working. And he had no more to give. He had wrapped his injured wrist in a piece of Eileen’s cloak, as tightly as he could, but the dark cloth was already soaked through, and the hand was numb and lifeless. His left hand, his good hand, the one he wrote and sketched and ate with. Fine, he thought. Fine. You can have the hand. I don’t care about the hand. But you can’t have them.

Though she’d stopped trying to skewer him, Eileen was still drifting somewhere; she moved along beside him without resistance, but her eyes were unfocused and she sometimes mumbled things under her breath that he couldn’t catch. He steered them across the threshold of the cathedral and then stopped dead at the shrieking chorus of howls and cries that met his ears, as all-encompassing as if they were rising from the stones themselves. There were two enormous wolf-beasts straight across the square, tearing into some unidentifiable corpse; something small and quick and four-legged darted up the steps at the square’s entrance and raced past them, and one of the big beasts snarled and snapped its jaws. Another figure lurched into view, bipedal and human-shaped; it stumbled toward the wolf-creatures, raising the hatchet in its hands, and then staggered, confused. It dropped its weapon, bent to a crouch, dug its hands into the beasts’ kill, and ate.

The smell of beast was everywhere, rank and rotten. Djura had never quite grown used to it down in Old Yharnam, but this was a stench as concrete and uncompromising as a brick wall—a barrier that warned all intruders to keep their distance. Gods above, Djura thought, this is really is the end. It really is over now.

Just go. Step by step. You can’t rest yet. He shouldered more of Eileen’s weight as they began to pick their way down the stairs. Maybe if you’d stayed down below, maybe if Eileen had never barged through that door tonight, you could have just closed your eyes and waited. Too bad. You can’t now. Eileen’s still moving and you’re still moving, because you can’t be done.

Not yet.

It had really been very easy to get back into the city. Adele and Laure had splashed their way along the muddy path back up the hill and met with no resistance; the bloodshot moon still glared at them, now that they were out in the open with nowhere to hide, but although Adele was still not stupid enough to meet its gaze, she kept her head held high and her pace steady. Go on now, she wanted to say. We’re not afraid of you. Go and find someone else to bother.

The stairs led them up the steep slope with the Grand Cathedral towering above them. As they drew closer, their view of the lofty tower ceded to the strong, solid walls beneath, steady and true. And then, at last, they were at the great old building’s side, the walls before them and flagstone at their feet. Adele reached out and pressed a hand against the wonderful, worn-out stone. When they went to mass, she had always liked to touch the grooves and pockmarks and imagine all the hands that might have touched it before. The builders who had laid the stones and the priestesses who had blessed them; the knights and ladies who trailed their fingers along on their way to worship; the hundreds of little girls just like her, dressed in funny old-fashioned clothes, whose hands might have reached to exactly the same place, exactly the same height.

She thought of the statue-people down in the secret city below, and squeezed her fingers uselessly against the pebbled surface. I’m so very sorry, she thought, and leaned forward and pressed a sorrowful kiss against the stone.

“Addie,” said Laure.

“I’m coming.”

When she was back at Laure’s side, Laure nudged her with one shoulder, and at the same time turned her head and butted her lightly in the forearm, in a gesture that might have been an affectionate kiss if she hadn’t connected with her nose instead of her mouth. Adele nudged her back and they started walking again; she could hear everything Laure had said. We shouldn’t be dawdling, and Stop kissing buildings, you big silly, and Oh, Addie. Addie.

They rounded the cathedral to stand at the base of the stairs that led up to its enormous doors. Below them, the steep slope of the cathedral’s hill swept downwards, leading into the city below. The mist was beginning to gather even up here; Adele could see it forming round the gate beneath, creeping upwards like a river swelling over its banks after a rainstorm. There were a few beasts lurking in one of the shadowy corners below, just ahead of the mist, but they were busy feeding and paid them no mind.

Uncertainty flickered in Adele’s chest. It was a big city, and they had very little time. “We have to find them,” she said, half-statement, half-question.

Laure tugged her hand and pointed to something on the ground, though it was only when she pulled Adele closer that Adele could make it out. While she’d been looking out at the city Laure’s eyes had been on the ground at their feet, and she’d spotted a streak of blood at the base of the steps, fresh and gleaming in the red light. Laure pointed upwards and Adele could see more spots like it leading from the doors of the Great Cathedral down: a trail. But it was only when Laure reached up a step, and picked up something lying on the worn stone, that Adele noticed this other object: a long strip of dark fabric, tattered on the edge. Adele reached out to touch it, to confirm: rough and stiff and slightly waxy. And feather-shaped.

Laure smiled, and Adele smiled back. She shouldn’t have doubted.

Laure started down the steps, and Adele followed, keeping a respectful step behind her sister so as not to muck up the bloody trail she was tracking. The blood, and a couple more crow-feather tatters, led down the staggered flights of steps; they crept quietly past the feeding beasts, who did not look up as they passed. Through the gate, and down into the mist. They had to press closer together here, but as long as they were careful they could still follow the streaks of blood, sometimes tamped down in the shape of a boot’s toe or heel, every few feet down the cobblestones.

There were beasts everywhere, of course. Adele could hear them, growling and panting and stomping down the streets and alleys beyond, and smell them too, though after the stench of the monsters down below the rotten-sweet scent of these beasts was almost comforting, almost home. And they saw beasts too, shambling in the shadows or scurrying across the streets. They always paused and held still when they noticed these shaggy forms, and between the mist and the debris littering the street, the beasts never noticed them. It was really very easy not to be seen, when you were small.

Onwards and downwards, tramping down the slope, until finally they heard something that wasn’t a beast: a scrape, a crash, and something—just a faint sound—that sounded unmistakably like a human voice, even if Adele could never have said why. It was like how she knew her family’s footsteps: when she was playing in her room she always knew who had come up the stairs, Dad or Mum or sister or Cook or Elsie the maid, even if she never could have explained it to anyone else, never could have tapped out the distinctive rhythms. It was just a sound that had been with her all her life, that made her ears prick up and say, Ah! That’s one of mine!

Laure heard it too, and sped up, and Adele followed behind her, trying not to think about Mum or Dad or Elsie or Cook, or her bedroom and the staircase that might even now have some awful drooling beast tramping through them. There came a sound that was unmistakably a gunshot, coming from just around the bend, and then a voice again—one that sounded more familiar than before, even—

And then a beast loomed across their path, padding down from a door that hung ajar over the front stoop of a darkened home. It was one of the ones that looked like wolves and not like people, four-legged and shaggy, and its ears were pricked up, its attention tuned to the sounds coming from below. It wasn’t looking at them but it was close to them—less than one house-length close—and there was nowhere to hide, and even if there were, the beast would hear them move. She and Laure stood still. The beast paused partway into the street, its nose twitched; slowly the great head turned, its yellow gaslight eyes found them. They stared at each other. Never lock eyes with a beast, Adele thought, but their eyes were locked already. So she held her gaze steady. I’m not prey, she thought. I’m not prey and I’m not frightened.

The beast was still, one paw raised. Its head tilted, its ears and nose twitched; it stayed like that for a long time, staring at them, trying to decide. And while it was still sniffing the air and sizing them up, the mist began to pool around their feet, cool and wet as a fresh rain-puddle. It rose around them, cloaked them like a veil, until the beast was only a faint shadow. After another moment’s hesitation, the beast lowered its paw, lowered its head, and padded onwards, not towards them or towards the noises from below, but across the street and down an alley: the click of its claws on cobbles faded and was gone.

Adele breathed in and the velvety mist coated her tongue, smoke-sweet.

Laure tugged at her wrist. They hurried onwards, out of the dense pocket of mist, back into Yharnam, chasing the sounds that they’d heard. As they rounded the bend and turned down a side-street, they heard more and more noises. Human-noises, home-noises; booted footsteps on cobbles and a voice that was clearer and clearer all the time, and they burst out into a plaza and saw them there: Auntie Eileen, and Uncle Djura trying to pull her up from the ground, and the corpse of the beast they’d just killed. Uncle Djura turned towards them, and so did Auntie Eileen a second later. They froze for an instant, still as statues, and then Auntie Eileen was lurching up onto her knees even as Uncle Djura pelted towards them. He was holding one hand awkwardly to his chest, and it made him look off-balance: that was the only thing she had time to really notice, before he grabbed her and pulled her in, clumsily, not like he was trying to hug her but like he was trying to snatch her out of something’s jaws. A rough kiss pressed to the top of her head; the smell of gunpowder and sweat; Laure squeezed close beside her and the familiar voice above, saying things that she ought to pay attention to but that just for the moment she wouldn’t, because just for the moment, she didn’t have to.

They were safe. They were alive and they were in one piece and they were filthy and some of it was blood, but it wasn’t their blood, as far as he could tell with his clumsy one-handed probes.

“Are you all right?” he demanded, as he brushed at their faces, their wrists, searching for injury. “Where were you—what happened—are you all right?”

As he repeated his questions, Adele was looking at him wide-eyed and yet with something detached in her gaze, like he was speaking a foreign language and she was trying to decide which it was and whether she knew it. Laure was looking at him more intently, and finally he turned to her and begged, “Laure, what happened?”

She, though, glanced at her sister, who suddenly seemed to remember that she was fluent. “Something took us,” Adele said, very calmly. “Something grabbed us up while we were hiding, and took us somewhere strange, down below in the city. A big prison, with bars. A man helped us to escape but a beast attacked him on the way. We ran away and we found you here.”

There was something about the cool, blank way that she recited this information that made Djura pause. He reached out to wipe at the blood and grime on her cheek, as though by removing that obscuring layer he would somehow see what lay underneath her even expression.

But then Eileen behind him said, “We have to go.”

She had dragged herself to her feet. She looked dreadful, her face gray and her posture slack. She was looking at the girls but speaking to him as she said again, “We have to go.”

Djura understood, glancing back at the slaughtered beast behind them. Yharnam was choked with them now, lurking in every corner, and they had no more time to waste.

“We do have to go,” he said, turning back to the girls who were so miraculously alive. There was no time to celebrate that. Perhaps there would be later. He would tell himself that, for now, at least. “One more try.”

They nodded, understanding immediately. He turned to Eileen. “We should cut through St. Alzbeta’s. It’ll give us more room to maneuver.”

She nodded.

They went.

Sometimes she still saw them. The beasts—when she heard a rustle of movement or saw a shadowy form. It was hard not to with their scent everywhere, so powerful, and no herbs or incense pressed against her nose to drown it out. Her mind slipped loose so easily and she flapped her black wings and swooped across Yharnam’s rooftops and saw the beasts everywhere, milling about like the people used to.

But these flights came and went in instants, like dreaming a lifetime in five minutes of snatched slumber. What was important—what Eileen fought tooth and nail to feel and focus on—was her feet tethered firmly to the ground and her hand on her pistol and the footsteps all around her: Djura’s, and the girls’, and the beasts’. Djura knew the way and so she had to follow him; she could spare no thought for where they were heading. But she could listen, and smell, and see. Even as the pain pulsed in her wounds, her senses felt sharper than they ever had before. There was an acrid scent wafting from one door hanging ajar, and a gut-churning stench rising from the sewer grates; and somewhere too close for comfort, something was squelching and dragging itself down a parallel street.

Djura had only his gun, but he wouldn’t allow her to go first. He thought she might collapse. Perhaps she would.

And the girls? Yes, the girls. They were there. They had reappeared smelling metallic and raw, and Laure carried something that glinted at her side. They kept glancing up at her now. She must look frightful; she was sorry for it. But she was very glad that they were here, and that they were whole. When her mind slipped through its tethers the sound of their footsteps helped to call it back.

There had been a man who kept hawks. He had lived down the slopes, on the border between the wide stony fields and the forest, and sometimes he brought them fowl or rabbit when he had caught too much to keep. He had shown her once, stooping down to her level, letting her stare into the keen yellow eyes of the bird that perched on his leather glove. But how do you make him stay? she had asked, transfixed. When he goes hunting why does he come back? The man had said, When he was very young I took him from the forest, and I sewed his eyes shut, and I wouldn’t let him sleep. For three days and three nights we stayed up together, him all blind on my glove, and I kept him awake and kept myself awake, just walking up and down, and when we finally dreamed we dreamed together. Then I opened his eyes again.

The girls were still before her. Their steps were steady.

I am trying to keep my eyes half-seeled for you, my little ones.

St. Alzbeta’s square was full of beasts. Hooded ones with hunched backs and tall, thin, pale ones, like church giants half-grown, and things that shuffled on two feet like men but had only tentacles spurting from their neck, waving in the air like they were trying to catch a scent. Djura held them back with an upraised hand, his gaze roaming over the square, looking for another route. Is there another way, she thought of asking, but he would answer regardless, and sure enough he gestured for them to retreat. But they hadn’t made it as far as the nearest cross-street when something monstrously tall and thin lurched across their path. Its white spindly fingers brushed the ground, sweeping for prey, and its empty sockets somehow peered down the street, craning at the end of an elongated neck. That was all she saw before something dragged her backward, behind a cluster of statues: Laure’s hand on her cape. Adele was there as well, the three of them pressed tight behind the hooded marble forms. Across the street, Djura had ducked into a recessed colonnade, gripping his blunderbuss tightly.

The beast was quiet. Though it was large, its footfalls were soft as it moved languorously down the street. Then—a crunch and a crash as it heaved something up, crates or a cart, and tossed it aside; and then its soft whispering shuffle resuming when it didn’t find what it was looking for. Through the crook in the statue’s elbow, Eileen could see its distended hands sweeping across the cobblestones, moving steadily towards their hiding place. She looked at Djura across the way, and put a hand on each of the girls’ backs, and by one consent all four of them crouched low and began to crawl back towards the square. Bending over in that way lit up pain like hot brands in Eileen’s abdomen, but that was only her body, and not worth heeding. She kept crawling behind Laure and Adele. They and Djura were all in deep shadow; there was only a thin sliver of red light in the street.

She could smell the beast keenly behind her: a curious blend of wet earth and harsh chemist’s tincture. Her naked nose felt half-assaulted with it. The scent made her restless mind shake off a few more of its binds, and even as she moved cautiously across the slick stones, she could see the beast behind her, probing the statues where they’d hidden. And then the inevitable: its hands sweeping farther down, its head raising, hearing a rustle, catching a scent. Then the scream. A loud, high shriek, mingled victory at its discovery and fury at having been eluded.

They scrambled to their feet and ran. The girls needed scarcely a brush of her hand to urge them onwards, and they bolted pell-mell toward the square. Eileen’s own ascent sent her head spinning; the pain in her side, newly urgent, half-toppled her back into the wall. Djura had crossed the street and paused for a split second, reaching for her. She shoved his outstretched hand in the direction the girls had gone, and he nodded and went. Eileen rallied after him, shoving herself off the wall and lurching forward. Bounding steps echoed behind her and the beast’s hand grasped at the back of her cloak, but not strongly enough. She dove to the ground, let gravity do the work of snatching her out of the thing’s grasp, and then clumsily half-rolled and got back to her feet, her vision blurred with pain as she pelted back into the square.

She heard more than saw the other three ahead of her. The alley-beast’s shrieking had roused all of Alzbeta’s beasts, and they were answering with cries of their own, snarling and keening as their attention turned to the intruders in their midst. Eileen had her pistol in her hand and she fired into the mass. Ahead of her she could hear Djura doing much the same, wild one-handed shots. There was no time to aim. Jaws snapped at her cloak and her heels, fetid breath washed over her; she could hear and feel the beasts turning to the chase. Something lunged across Djura’s path ahead and he changed direction, scrambling for the girls as he veered and pelted away. Eileen shot at it as she followed. Something with long, grasping tendrils swiped at her knees. She fell and hit the ground hard; she expected to roll back to her feet and it took her a moment to realize that she hadn’t, that her shocked body had refused to comply. The tentacle curled around her ankle, but its slick skin was slippery on her boots, unable to grab hold. She shook it off at the same moment that she felt Djura’s hands hoisting her onto her feet. They staggered down a narrow alley; the girls were waiting at its mouth but plunged ahead at their frantic gestures.

The alley was small enough to stymie many of the larger beasts, but that still left too many panting at their heels as they ran. Eileen’s lungs burned. Laure and Adele and Djura were still blurry figures through dim vision. Every step rattled up her legs. Her blood was drip, drip, dripping into the cobbles, shaken lose with her running, and that had to be enough—it must be sufficient payment, for the moment. Yharnam was a vicious creditor but Eileen could not pay her back in full just yet.

Djura and the girls kept turning back to look at her. They were very far ahead. No, they mustn’t slip away just yet—but they mustn’t turn back, either; please, please don’t stop.

Djura reached out for her and yanked her down a yet-narrower street, a mere breath of a lane between two houses. Djura held up a hand and all four of them stopped. It took a moment for the patter-thump sounds of pursuit to catch up to them. Dark shapes rushed past the alley’s mouth, past their hiding place. When the sounds had just begun to fade Djura waved them on and they crept along, placing each footfall so that it wouldn’t so much as scrape the ground; when the beasts realized they had lost their prey they would come sniffing back.

The street let into a square, and there was a statue before them, large even by Yharnam’s standards. Its back was to them, but the executioner’s helmet was unmistakable. Then Eileen noticed the basin at his feet, and realized that this was a fountain, not a statue. Djura had done it. Through all the chaos he’d managed to lead them to his hidden entrance. 

Djura hadn’t paused. He was hurrying steadily across the square, looking hunched-over and small as he cradled his injured hand to his chest. They followed; the slight scraping of their shoes on the street sounded brazen in the fragile quiet. A pain in Eileen’s side that had been a mere murmur before burst suddenly to life, and she stumbled against the fountain’s rim, smearing blood across it as she braced herself. The girls turned and she waved them on, furious at herself. She shoved off and stumbled across the street. She was too loud. She couldn’t pick up her feet the way she needed to, or place them carefully. That was what came of dragging herself along on the ground this way. As if her wings were broken. 

Something was moving. Not close, but not far. How did she know? The faintest whisper of motion, the subtle scent of wet fur; a shift in the currents of the breeze. Something was prowling nearby, and it would not be the only one for long. Beasts didn’t give up the chase so easily, not when they were whipped up into a pack-frenzy.

Djura had stopped in front of a little gate—unremarkable, recessed into an anonymous wall, overgrown with greenery; it looked like it ought to lead into a wealthy home’s garden. He was stooped over something he held in his good hand: a large iron padlock, holding the gate closed. He tried, very carefully, to pull on it, to see if the rust that flaked over its surface had penetrated to the mechanism; but at his slight touch, the gate shifted and its neglected hinges shrieked. 

Djura dropped the lock, which only made it clang against the gate. His breathing was panicked, strung so tight that Eileen could hear it laboring. 

There was more than one something now, in that not-near-not-far range, padding their way through the streets that fed into the square. 

Djura swallowed hard. “Do you have something I can pick it with?” he whispered, patting haphazardly at his pockets with his one good hand. As he did, the other arm—the one that now sported only a useless lump of flesh at its end—kept twitching, trying to answer the call to action before stopping in pain at the motion.

“You won’t be able to pick it,” Eileen said, watching this. 

“I have to.” Voice tight. 

Eileen turned back towards the square; she listened, she sniffed the air. She would not have been able to manage this with her mask on, but it was delicate, this effort to keep her mind from roaming too far. She could feel them circling nearer, could taste their hunt drawing closer. They would come, no matter what the four of them did.

“Blow it,” she said.

“What?”

“Blow the gate open.”

“They’ll hear—”

“And I’ll stop them. I’ll buy you time.”

She held his gaze. He was surprised, for just a moment. After everything, he was still surprised, and then sad. But he looked up from her to the red moon above, and back to the gate, and nodded. 

“Laure, Adele, back away. Eileen—help me.”

The girls hesitated, but retreated, back into the red light of the square.

Djura rummaged once more through his pockets, passing her a bottle to unscrew, a container to hold as he measured and poured its contents, something to tie off; she did so automatically, focusing not on her hands but on the fine strains of scent in the air. She needed to give them as much time as possible and for that she needed to know where to be, and whether to begin with her pistol or her blade. She shook her mind free and soared.

Then Djura’s voice: “All right. Stand off, now.” She stood, laboriously, and limped to the girls, who were looking at her now, at least: they didn’t shrink away or scowl but looked at her openly, meeting her eyes. She reached out and brushed their shoulders, drawing them back farther. Through her gloves she felt the fine bones, the swell of their breath, the warm steady rush of their pulses in their necks. She kept her fingers there, her touch light, grounding herself for just this brief moment. When she opened her body’s eyes, she had time to see Djura casting one last glance back at her. It would probably have been correct to offer him something, a smile or a nod or a sorrowful expression, but by the time she had considered this he was already tossing the match and sprinting back towards them, and if her face had expressed anything at all then she didn’t know it. 

The explosion rattled her bones. All of her injuries leapt up at once, clamoring for attention. She had looked away but still it took a moment for her eyes to adjust, and the clattering rumble still echoed in her ears; or perhaps it was only that some pieces of masonry were still tumbling to the ground. The gate was gone and so was half the wall. She could just make out the grave monuments beyond. 

She gave Djura his nod now. It was not the worst way for this to end. He could feel that too, surely; in any case he was not making a scene, for which she was grateful. The back of her neck was rippling. She could feel the beasts gathering all around, could hear the scrape and squeal as they changed direction, heading for the sound of the blast. 

“Go with Uncle Djura,” she said. Her hands were still on Laure and Adele’s shoulders. She gave a little push, like so many she’d given before. Just gently sending them away from her, onwards.

It would have been gentler to rip her fingers out by the roots than to create that hair’s-breadth distance between them.

And then to feel it growing wider, wider; they were going away from her, going obediently towards Djura, though with perplexed glances backwards. Those glances snared her, or some part of her, some pulsing painful thing at her core; and for once she wished that she could stay tangled there forever. Clip my wings, break them; it would be kinder.

Laure ran back. Serious and purposeful, she broke from her sister and closed the gap again, and reached for Eileen’s wrist, and gave a little tug, to make sure she was looking at her. Those big dark eyes, fierce. 

“I don’t hate you,” Laure said. Her grip on Eileen’s wrist was strong. “I said that I did, but I don’t.” 

Eileen reached out with her other hand, lightly touched Laure’s cheek. “I am very glad,” she said. 

Laure nodded and dropped her hand and ran back to Adele, and took Adele’s wrist instead, and tugged her onwards, towards Djura and the ruined wall. Adele looked back, but Laure did not. And Eileen let go. Whatever thing in her was tangled up with the three of them, she released her grip on it; it sprung free from her tight-wound chest, relieved to be out where it could breathe, and it went with them, to keep them company. Djura reached out for the girls and shepherded them over the rubble and into the courtyard beyond.

Eileen turned away. 

The beasts were coming.

Everything was confusion. Djura’s heart felt like it was jangling out of his chest; there was so little time. He grabbed for the girls, urged them up over the mound of rubble. Eileen was not coming with them. They had to go.

A few of the graves in this private little plot were buried now under the collapsed wall, but the one they needed was farther in: an unassuming stone sarcophagus near the back. Djura shoved at the lid one-handed, and it began to budge, but too slowly; he tried to add with his left hand, but the pain half-blinded him, and so he went back to desperately shoving with his right. Adele, just tall enough, began to help, and the lid inched farther.  

“Laure, watch for beasts,” he said. If she saw any, there would be nothing they could do. The graveyard was a dead end. But perhaps some warning would give enough time for him to throw himself into their path, let the girls hide or scale the wall. He was too frantic to be able to hear anything, the blood rushing in his ears. 

Little by little, the lid slid aside. He and Adele dashed from one end to the other, trying to jimmy it off. Finally it tipped and then tumbled to the ground, revealing not a body but hidden stairs that descended into darkness. 

Eileen had the lantern. He fumbled for his matchbook and handed it to Adele as he swung one leg up and over. Even with his injured hand tucked close to him, he’d managed to smear fresh blood all over the stone. A trail. Nothing to do about it now, and no way to get the lid back on. Not with his injured hand, not without another adult to help him. He just waved the girls to follow after him and descended. The stairs were unpleasantly slick, and the red moonlight soon faded; Adele lit a match behind him and came to his side, lighting the way. The match burned out just as they reached the bottom of the stairs, and Adele didn’t let go quickly enough. She hissed in pain but swiftly cast it aside and lit another. 

He’d had better light the last time he was here, but what he could see of the tunnel was much as he remembered it: unspectacular in all but its secrecy, with worn but well-shaped walls of stone, interspersed with arches leading to shadowy rooms beyond. Moisture seeped from the walls and gathered in puddles on the floor. He held out a hand to stop the girls for a moment, holding his breath to quiet his breathing and try to listen for the sound of anything that might have taken up residence here. Nothing came from the tunnel but a damp chill. He thought, though, that up above them, he heard something like a roar.

It was the little one that got her. She was distracted, focused on the enormous lumbering trolls, and the agile wolf-man with his pike behind them. She had started near to the gate, or where the gate had been moments before—this was a large plaza, and many streets led to it, and there were so many angles from which the beasts might come. She could not risk one slipping behind. 

But there was reason and there was reality, and when the snarling pack began to pour from all sides it was no easy thing to hold her position. She ran out of bullets in a matter of moments; after that, she judged that the best thing was to make herself interesting prey, and lead them farther from the graveyard. She had plenty of fresh wounds already, and the sharp copper scent of her own blood was the only thing cutting through the nauseous smothering cloak of the beasts’ odor. So once she knew they had her scent she had let them have a little chase, charging out into the square. And then, when her focus was on the things that towered above her, something small and cunning had launched itself forward and closed its jaws around her calf. Its teeth were sharp, its bite strong. It punctured through the leather of her boots and her trousers and sank into flesh. 

Eileen could taste the blood, just for a moment, hot and delicious. 

But the pain came, and brought her back to herself. One of the big ugly trolls had wrapped its greasy fingers around her throat. It lifted her, its disgusting breath assaulting her nose as it roared, and for that split second there was something nearly comforting about her sheer helplessness. Like letting out a breath. It had to happen sooner or later, and now it had come, and there was nothing she could do. 

The troll’s anger won out over its bloodlust. It hurled her, and she crashed into the lip of the fountain, the hard stone corner striking her upper back. She lay on the cobblestones like a fish on a dinghy’s deck, limp and gasping. Her lungs paralyzed, petrified, useless. And then they cracked back open and the air rushed back into her chest. She raised her head weakly. She had just enough presence of mind to wonder why she wasn’t torn to pieces already. But when her vision came back into focus, she saw that the pack had stilled. Something enormous and dog-like was slinking in the other direction, away from her, towards the demolished wall. And the other beasts were watching it, and beginning to catch the same scent. Something fresher and more interesting than the weary old bones they’d been chasing so far. 

Eileen rolled to her hands and knees. Something inside her ribcage scraped against something else in a way that  made her vision go white. She braced a hand on the fountain’s edge and pushed, and pushed, and got herself up high enough that she could wedge one foot beneath her, the one connected to the calf that was intact rather than flapping uselessly against her shin.

It was too late. The quickest, cleverest beasts were already surging forward, the crest of a wave gathering strength behind them.

“Hey!” she cried. She stumbled forward another step; she drew her pistol and hurled it at their retreating backs. They paid its clatter no notice. 

Eileen sank to one knee, and then to her good hip, and then let her head rest against the fountain’s rim. 

It was like letting out a breath. I’ve done all I can for you, she thought, and now I can stop.

Go quickly, please. Because I have to stop now.

Djura pushed the girls into a run. Too much to hope that the beasts wouldn’t find them. Not when they were the only fresh blood left in the whole damn city.

They splashed through the murky puddles, passing archways and the rotted remains of what had once been doors. Adele still had the matches. She had begun spacing them out more conservatively, without needing to be told. When one burned down, she cast it aside and then they ran in darkness for a few steps, or more—however long she thought they could make it, without tripping on the uneven stones beneath. 

There was no telling how long the tunnel stretched on ahead. It seemed that they ought to have gone a long way, and yet Djura could hear noises from somewhere far, far too close behind. Scuffling feet, angry snarls. Adele’s match went out; they staggered onwards; she lit another. The sounds were closer. The tunnel’s darkness was impenetrable. They could have travelled fifty feet or five hundred, with fifty or five thousand to go. He had lost all sense of space. 

A muffled howl poured down from somewhere above, and then the scraping clatter of clawed feet descending stairs, somewhere at the other end of the tunnel. He had just time to see Adele turn to him, eyes wide, before her match flickered out. He grabbed her wrist to make sure she didn’t light another, then reached out again for Laure, to make sure she was beside him in the darkness. The beasts had found their bolt-hole. 

He gave both of the girls a little tug towards the wall, and then let go so that he could press his good hand along the damp stone. Beasts had keen eyes and noses, but perhaps by being silent they could still take advantage of the tunnel’s darkness, delay the discovery by a moment longer. 

His hand brushed over a recess in the stone: another door. He applied delicate pressure and the moisture-softened wood gave, allowing him to push the door open with only the slightest sigh of air. 

Inside, he listened: the click-click-click of claws on stone, and some awkward heavy steps, but they were far away, still echoing from the other end of the tunnel.

“Light,” he whispered.

Adele lit the match, cupping her hand to one side of it to try to contain its feeble glow. It illuminated a small storeroom filled with barrels. Djura wiped at a trickle of liquid running down one of their sides and sniffed it: oil. 

Down the tunnel, the sounds were drifting closer. 

Djura took a slow breath.

Eileen was drifting. 

The moon above wavered, rippled, bled. A coin tossed into a pool. A blot of ink spilling across a page. It faded; pulsed back to life; faded again. He was sewing up her eyes. No more dreams, she thought. 

Someone laughed far off. Not in madness or terror. A warm, rich laugh, like fresh-churned cream. She licked her lips, tasted it on her tongue. They had kept a cow, an ornery old creature who would tolerate only a select few. Stand farther off, silly thing. If she kicks she’ll do your head in. But she was always allowed the first sip of milk from the pail, still body-warm and vital.

She remembered to breathe, and then wished she hadn’t. Forcing air into her lungs felt like peeling skin from flesh. The pain brought her back to the cold stone of the fountain’s rim, grinding into her head and shoulders where she sank against it, and the slick of blood and damp seeping through her clothes.

But she only broke the surface for a moment, and now she sank again. Whisht, whisht. Come along now. It’s time to rest. 

Come along now.

Oh, that voice. Scratchy homespun skirts and the smell of hay and willow bark. Sink deeper: let the air out of your lungs, drop like a stone. Let the blackness take your eyes until it bursts like struck flint and lights again, mellow and warm: not a vision but a hazy dream drenched in golden sunlight. A burst of powdered sugar on her tongue, and a woman’s voice, laughing and sing-song. Come along then, Nell, you silly thing, it said. Come along, Nelly-girl. And Nell lifted up her skirts and ran, bare feet slapping against the warm cobblestones. 

A sob clawed at Eileen’s throat. 

Come along, Nell. 

The sky above was very dim; she couldn’t see the moon.

Come along now.

The barrels came up to Laure’s shoulders and were filled to the brim. With Adele’s help and a great deal of noise he might be able to move one; two was out of the question. 

He knelt. 

“Listen to me.”

The match had gone out, but he could hear their breathing, feel the warmth from their bodies; it was almost as good as sight. 

“Adele, give Laure the matches.” She silently obeyed. “Laure, you’ll need to help us see our way out, and then you have to have one ready to light. You need to throw it into the oil and then run quick as you can; don’t let it catch your skirts. Adele, you’re going to help me move this one.” He took her hand, guided it to the barrel best positioned to roll smoothly out the door. “Feel your way to the doorway, now. Get a sense of it. That’s it. We’ll get it onto its side and then we’ll roll it. You’ve got both hands so you need to work out the stopper. Can you feel it? Good. There’ll be no time to talk once the beasts hear us.” He paused a moment; they asked no questions.

“All right. On three we’ll heave it over and Laure’ll light the match. One—two—three.”

Adele shoved with all her might; the match flared; the barrel toppled to the floor with a thud and a clatter that echoed over and over again around the narrow space. He kicked it with the flat of his foot to get it at the right angle and then he and Adele began to shove. Though heavy, it rolled easily with three hands on it, out the door and into the tunnel.

The beasts were shrieking far down in the darkness, and he could hear them breaking into a run. 

“Get the stopper out—”

Adele was already prying at it. She yanked it free, and they began to roll and drag and shove the barrel down the tunnel as the oil slopped out. Laure’s match died.

“Wait,” he said, and they kept shoving it through the dark with the clamor and wail of the approaching horde growing ever closer. Finally he said, “Right it—” and together they shoved the half-empty barrel back to standing. He reached for Adele and dragged her and her oil-soaked shoes out of harm’s way as he called out to Laure, and the match flared to life, and arced through the air, and as it caught and spread it illuminated the mass of beasts large and small, charging down the tunnel and skittering along the walls, fur and fangs and glistening tentacled limbs—and then the fire roared to life. It devoured the remaining darkness, and the beasts that had trod too far; their screams came first, and then the smell of burnt flesh and hair. 

They staggered back, away from the blistering heat. 

Yes, and here we are again; I know. He’d never really left, just awakened briefly now and again, before the nightmare pulled him under once more. The light seared his eye.

A hand tugged on his elbow. “Let’s go,” said Adele. “It won’t last. And I don’t think it got all of them.”

Djura swallowed and turned away from the flames. “You’re right,” he said. The charred scent rushed in to fill his mouth. “It won’t get all of them.” He kicked at the barrel; it was nearly half-full, still. 

“Drag it farther. Use what’s left.” 

Now that they had ample light to see by, Laure helped, too, to tug the barrel a good distance down and begin pouring out what remained of the oil. Though the tunnel still felt like an oven, the flames were beginning to wane, still high but no longer an impenetrable wall. It was possible now to hear the furious cries of the stymied beasts over the crackling of the flames. 

They coated the tunnel floor more evenly this time. When the barrel was empty, Djura kicked it aside. He held his hand out to Laure for the matches, and then began to awkwardly work the blunderbuss out of its holster. 

“Right,” he said. “This is yours now. I don’t know how many bullets are left so don’t be reckless.” And he held it out to Adele. She stared at him, her face painted a shifting swirl of orange and red and black in the waning flames. 

“What? No, I—”

“Go on now. You’re a crack shot, you should have it. Watch out for your sister.”

“It’s too heavy!”

“You’re strong enough.” He proffered it again, and she reached slowly for it, timid as if it were an infant, and then her eyes raised again to his face. The cool impassivity from before had splintered and cracked; her dark eyes were enormous. 

It was unbearable. 

“Laure, give me the matches.” He looked to the other girl, and she obeyed automatically, looking between him and her sister with a furrowed brow. 

The beasts were much more audible now, and cool shadows were stealing back in through the cracks in the ancient stone.

“The two of you are fast but they’re faster. I’m giving you a longer lead, that’s all.” He straightened and rolled his shoulders. He was so strangely light, without his weapons. It was like taking off a suit of armor. “The tunnel’s a straight shot. No turnings. Just go until you find the way out. Put the mountain to your back and follow the roads until you find a town.” There must be more. Should they stay hidden? What would they eat and drink? All this was supposed to be Eileen’s job.

He swallowed. “That’s all. Be smart. Look out for each other. You’ll be fine.” 

Adele started forward, untangling one hand from her cradle-grip on the blunderbuss, reaching out. “Uncle Djura—”

“Go on!” He waved at them impatiently, his voice as firm as he could make it. “Run as hard and as long as you can. Go, now!”

He turned his back on them and walked back through the oil-trail, back to where the flames came only to his waist now. Across them, dozens of eyes reflected green in the fire’s light. Behind, he could just hear the sound of the girls breaking into a run before one of the beasts shrieked, drowning out all other sound. 

“Soon enough,” he said. “Don’t you worry.”

No pack this frenzied would drop the hunt with its prey so tantalizingly close. They hadn’t on the night of Old Yharnam, and they wouldn’t now. A wall of flame would keep them at bay but would not deter them; they had enough presence of mind to be patient. 

They wouldn’t stop until they were satisfied, but perhaps they would be content with one out of three.

If not, at least the girls would have a few more minutes’ lead. 

“Just a little longer,” he told them. “Look, it’s barely to my knees.” The fire was patchy now; soon someone on the other side would be brave enough to attempt a crossing, and the rest would follow. He wondered if he’d known any of them before they turned. He’d known a great many people in this city. 

He began to back away, towards the oil slick behind. He crammed the matchbook into his limp hand and pinned it to his chest, scrabbling with the other to work it open and ready a match to strike. 

The girls must have gotten a good distance already. The tunnel’s damp was pressing close. When he was a child, this place had seemed so welcoming and kind. Now it waited as impatiently as the beasts, seething with dank breath. 

“Soon enough,” he promised. “I know. I understand.” He had never forgiven himself either. 

One of the beasts screamed and lunged forward.

Djura lit the match and threw it behind him. 

When he was a child, he’d wanted to be a pirate.

When he was older he’d thought he might someday see the ocean, at least.

“Come on then!”

The beasts will feast tonight. 

He closed his eye. The flames licked at him from behind, and the beasts pressed in ahead; and there was relief in this, at least, a homecoming in a sense, of sinking at last into this dream of his own devising.

They didn’t stop running until they hit the wall. They had slowed; Adele’s breath was labored, her feet throbbing. Laure kept pace just ahead of her. But they didn’t stop. It was black as mourning-silk farther down the tunnel, black as their dresses had been a mere dozen hours before; the darkness wrapped around her eyes like a blindfold. But Uncle Djura was right. The tunnel was straight, and though she tripped once or twice on uneven stones she did not fall or collide with anything. She pressed Uncle Djura’s gun tight to her chest; she wasn’t carrying it right, but she wanted it close. 

Little by little the blindfold loosened. Though the darkness was absolute, somehow it began to speak to her, and she could feel when she drifted closer to the wall by the coldness rippling off of it, or could tell that the floor sloped up or down by the clatter of the pebbles her feet disturbed. Laure was even surer than she was, which was why she went ahead. It was Laure who reached the wall first, and reached behind to slow Adele and make sure she didn’t run into it. It wasn’t a barrier that people had built. These were boulders and stones heaped atop each other crazily, not carefully-laid bricks: the tunnel had collapsed here. 

Laure got on hands and knees and crawled along the floor. 

“There’s a hole here. Feel it.” 

Adele knelt, and even before her hand traced the outline of the hole, she could feel the air it exhaled, stirring her hair and her skirts. She wrapped her arms around the gun again. 

“It’s big enough for both of us, if we go single file,” said Laure. 

Adele swallowed. She didn’t want to crawl into that darkness. But what she wanted mattered very little. She hugged Uncle Djura’s gun closer; the sharp hard shape of it dug into her chest. 

“All right.”

“I’ll go first,” said Laure. “I’m smaller.”

“All right.” She reached out to brush Laure’s hand, and Laure pressed their fingertips together. Then she crawled into the gap, and Adele followed. 

The hole was not just a hole but a little tunnel of its own; the cave-in had been extensive. Laure crawled ahead, and Adele stumped along behind, three-legged; she held the gun to her chest with one hand and used the other to crawl, then switched when her wrist and shoulder began to ache. 

The crawl-path pressed closer, rough stones digging into her side. The rock was slick. Adele was so intent on maneuvering through the tight space that she didn’t notice the exact moment when light began to leak through; she just realized all of a sudden that she was in deep gray twilight instead of night, and she could dimly make out Laure’s form ahead.

Only a moment later Laure stopped, then lowered herself down so that she was on her belly. The passage had narrowed so far that she could not crawl. 

“Be careful, please, Laure.”

“It’s just a little way.” Laure began to slither forward. “It opens up out here—” And then she was through, the bottoms of her boots disappearing. 

“Pass me the gun, Addie.”

Adele slid it through the opening, and Laure pulled it through. Adele pressed herself down to the copper-scented earth, and hunched her shoulders as tightly together as she could, and squeezed, and squeezed.

Blinding whiteness.                                                                                

She wriggled a hand out, and Laure grabbed it and tugged hard. Her dress caught on the rock above but only for a moment before she slid free and staggered out, eyes screwed up against the devastating light; behind came a sudden rumble and groan as the rock she’d been stuck on tumbled down, and a few smaller stones with it, judging from the sound.

Adele knelt with her eyes closed. There were soft old leaves under her knees and her hands, shockingly cold with dew. A rich earthy scent wafted to her nose, and a chill breeze raised goose-pimples all down her arms. Somewhere up above, a bird chirruped. 

When the stars stopped bursting behind her eyes, she slowly fluttered them open, blinking back pained tears. 

There were trees all around. Not spindly little plantings like in the plazas but big trees, old trees, their ancient trunks gnarled, their roots thicker than her arm. It was only bright here in comparison to the tunnel’s perfect blackness: the trees’ fledgling spring canopies kept their roots draped in shadow. But between the trunks ahead, brighter because it was exposed to the sky, she could make out a worn old road, wide and dew-dampened. The sky itself was a deep, dark blue above her head, lightening to gray and then white as it reached closer to the treetops. Adele rose slowly to her feet, and looked behind. The tunnel’s entrance didn’t look like an entrance at all, but just a heap of boulders: that rock she’d knocked loose had plugged the last opening. She reached out to touch the cool stone. 

Laure drew closer to her side. “Here, Addie.” She held out the gun. Adele took it and looked at it in the pale light, all its scratches and smooth-worn spots, its heavy mechanical realness. 

They walked together to the road. It was wide enough for a carriage and perhaps a horse beside it; the stones were old but well-laid, and it curved downwards on either side so that any water ran towards the edges. It stretched on ahead with forest on either side, unknown but amiable. 

Adele looked backwards. Behind her, the road began to climb, and then to wend back and forth like a hairpin up the ever-steeper slope of the mountain behind. She traced the path with her eyes, up, up; it vanished into the steep cliffs. Up towards the very top, there was a formation that might have been a great encircling wall, or it might have been a sheer spot in the mountain’s stone; and farther above, were those peaks, or spires? She couldn’t say. 

She turned back to her sister. 

In the soft suffusing light, the blood and filth on Laure’s face stood out starkly. Adele could feel it coating her own. Hefting the gun into the crook of one elbow, she touched one of Laure’s lank, grimy curls. 

Laure nodded, then patted a place in her skirts: the knife was still there. 

Adele reached for Laure’s hand, and Laure allowed her to take it, and even squeezed it briefly. She would drop it soon enough. It was uncomfortable to walk like this, and they were too big to hold hands like babies anyways. But for the first steps, she held on tightly, putting the mountain to her back and setting off down the road.

Chapter Text

The Gascoigne sisters lived with their grandmother in a comfortable apartment in the heart of a lowland city. The family hailed originally from Iskierka; some sickness had carried off both father and mother and left the young orphans in their grandmother’s care, and the three had come to the city shortly after. To escape the memories, one imagined, and to give the girls a better start in life: it was widely agreed that those little hamlets at the feet of the mountains were practically half-savage, still awash in peasant superstition. 

The grandmother had never sent the girls away to finish their education, a fact generally looked on with indulgence. The elderly widow had no other family left to her. The sisters were accomplished enough, and pretty enough, and so had their share of friends and acquaintances, even the occasional suitor. Though the family rarely entertained, they moved in respectable circles.

Despite their rustic origins, the sisters had grown gracefully since the day they first arrived on the city’s tree-lined avenues, blinking up curiously at the smooth, stately buildings laid out on a neat grid. Laure Gascoigne was the livelier of the two, merry and clever; she belonged to an archery club for young ladies, and to see her smooth mastery of the bow was to reflect romantically on the misty, primitive past, easily imagining her as a red-painted figure gracing an ancient urn. Delicate fingers plucked at the bow as if it were a harp, and then arrow after arrow flew true into the bright red heart of the target. After her success Laure would often turn to face the crowd, head tilted back to leave her confident gaze unobscured by her hat, teeth bared in a grin. Her sister would clap politely among the spectators, face impassive. 

Perhaps inevitably, a few young men fell under the younger sister’s spell. But none had kept up the chase for long. The girl’s rough, unfinished edges did tend to show, in the end. Once, when they were picnicking in the public gardens, a young hopeful whose valor exceeded his dexterity had offered to peel an orange for her. He succeeded only in peeling off part of his palm. He swore quietly and then, recollecting himself, looked up from his wounded hand to apologize to the young lady—

Only to find his wrist suddenly enclosed in a grip as strong as any man’s he’d ever known, and the injured hand arrested in its motion. He froze instinctively, like a kitten caught by the scruff of its neck. The gash was not debilitating, but it was deep, and blood was already welling upwards and beginning to drip towards his shirtsleeve. Laure held the hand out, and tilted the palm towards herself as if for inspection, and then slowly but inexorably drew it towards her.

He did look up then, to her face. Her nostrils were flared, her lips parted; there was a flush in her cheeks and a brightness in her dark eyes as she stared at the wound.

She tilted his hand so that the blood ran down his palm and dripped onto her lap. Drop after drop landed on the white muslin and stained it red. 

And then she let go, and told him quite calmly that she would see if she could find a napkin for a bandage, and went to join the other young people, who gasped and lamented that her pretty new dress was quite ruined. She sighed in agreement, and neither she nor the family invited him to any further gatherings, and he declined to pay any calls of his own. 

The elder Miss Gascoigne was more reserved and often more discreet than her sister, and yet there were whispers about her as well. Whereas her sister excelled with the bow, there was a contingent of the household staff that held that Adele had rather different inclinations—which is to say that one of the maids swore up and down that Adele kept a loaded pistol in her bedside table. Another, younger and more excitable, insisted that she kept it under her pillow instead. 

And she collected things. Or, to state it plainly, she stole them. Little things, and only from those who already loved her too well to have any objection. Her grandmother’s prayer cards; her sister’s hair ribbons and hat pins; the cook’s shopping list; buttons ready to be resewn by the laundress. These items, if left unguarded, tended to vanish into the depths of jewelry boxes hidden away in her dresser drawers. There they joined other debris, acquired more honestly though no less oddly: pinecones and pretty stones, broken-off masonry, delicate shards of bird’s egg. To walk with Miss Gascoigne was to accept the small but present risk that she might stop suddenly in her tracks and veer off the path, without a word of warning, to pursue some trinket that had caught her magpie’s eye. Feathers were the greatest danger: Adele apparently found them irresistible. 

The great majority of the time, these items lived tucked away in their boxes. But once or twice a year, a strange compulsion would come over Adele, and Laure would enter her sister’s room to find her collection spread across floor and settee and bedclothes. It was not random. Adele placed each item with precision, according to some system evident only to her. Once everything was on display and organized, she would spend hours carefully picking each item up and turning it over, weighing it in her hands, caressing her grandmother’s handwriting, her sister’s comb, the smooth glossy vanes of each beloved feather. The maids learned to enter her room during these spells at their own peril; Adele, usually so cool and placid, would weep stormy tears if she found a single item disturbed. 

Those little trophies in their jewel-cases were not the only things hidden away in boxes in the family’s home. 

There was a box kept on the uppermost shelf of a closet off the hall, where wrapped in layers of tissue paper were two little mourning-dresses: the same dresses that the grandmother had had to fairly peel off their bodies, on the morning that two filthy children with wide and haunted eyes had knocked on the door of her Iskierka home. By some silent compact the dresses had been preserved, much as the grandmother had been tempted to burn them. And there were nights when Laure would slip down the hall in her nightdress by the light of the moon, and open the closet and bring down the box, and unwrap the paper, and kneeling there on the cold polished floor she would bring the cloth to her nose and inhale. Smoke and blood and ancient dust, sewer-smells and gore: the scents enveloped her like mist, blotted out the apartment with its spindly-legged furniture and silk evening dresses. With the fabric pressed to her face there was only Yharnam. 

It only ever lasted a moment. As time passed she became afraid, anxious in a way she rarely was, that every time she opened that box she allowed more of the precious scent to dissipate; that someday she would hold the dark cloth to her nose and smell only grimy crepe, and then not even that. More and more often, on the bad nights, instead of visiting the closet she would creep to her sister’s room instead, and slip under the covers. Adele always woke; both girls slept lightly. Sometimes Laure would speak: Do you remember and I dreamed that and I thought about. Sometimes she merely reached out to touch Adele’s solid warmth, or pressed their foreheads together, half-burying her tears in the soft pillows. It was not unusual to find her sister’s face wet as well. Whatever came to play on her heartstrings when the moon was high, it seemed to prefer to pluck out a harmony. 

But those were the bad days. On the good days, they sketched and played piano and took long walks in sun-dappled parks; they went to the museums and strolled down galleries of fascinations, the skylights above turning the marble underfoot into golden, molten baths of warmth. In the light of summer days they drove out of the city to the hills and the lakes and ate simple, hearty meals stretched out on the sweet-smelling grass. In the darkness of winter nights they drew close around the fire and read aloud from books of old folk stories, and spoke only half-jokingly of applying to university in the spring. And on the good days, all of it—

(crooked cobblestones and soaring spires; bottles of blood delivered alongside the morning’s milk; the smothering spice of incense clinging to their clothes; the smell of gunpowder and smoke; the tinkling lullaby of an old music box; the pink of muscle and white flash of fang, the rank wetness of an animal nearby—)

(awakening in the pale early light to the sound of their father’s voice and the smell of their mother’s cooking, and padding barefoot down the stairs to be swept up into laps and have kisses pressed to the tops of their heads—)

On the good days, it all felt like nothing but a dream.