The backroom chosen for the rite had the low, oppressive quality of a space built for storage rather than habitation — thin curtains, a ceiling close enough to brush a tall man's hair, decades of cold stone and old wood only partially softened by a couple of electric lamps someone had dragged in at some point in the last century and never bothered to properly integrate. Candles lined the walls in careful rows, their flames flickering out of unison with each other in a way that had nothing, Abigail told herself, to do with any draft she could actually feel.
At the center of the room, a single wooden chair waited. Old. Sturdy. Recently fitted with leather restraints that Sister Margaret and Sister Lydia were now securing with the quick, silent efficiency of women who had done this before and had long since stopped needing to discuss the choreography of it out loud.
Aldric and the groundskeeper half-carried, half-dragged a young man through the doorway — Daniel, twenties, limp, sweating, barely conscious, his head lolling forward as they strapped him into the chair. Tight. His chin stayed against his chest, unmoving.
Abigail stood back, a deliberate distance from the chair, arms loose at her sides. Not afraid. Watching, the way she'd watched Eleanor, the way she'd watched Linda Marsh's photographs spread across a conference table what felt now like an entire lifetime ago.
Ferrara stepped forward, his burned hand wrapped now in white gauze, no explanation offered for it and none asked. "Let's begin." He raised his crucifix, voice settling into the old, practiced Latin cadence. "Exorcizo te, omnis spiritus immunde—"
Daniel's head snapped upright. A guttural scream tore out of him.
"Make it stop," he gasped, in his own voice, unmistakably his own, raw with a terror that needed no translation. "Please!"
Ferrara pressed forward. The candles along the wall flickered — one guttered out, then another, the room's light thinning by uneven degrees.
Daniel convulsed. Then stopped, mid-scream, the sound cut off so completely the silence that followed felt like something slamming shut rather than simply arriving.
Slowly, his head turned. Not toward Ferrara, whose Latin still hung half-finished in the air.
Toward Abigail.
"You're the one."
The voice was not Daniel's. It carried the same faint double-register Eleanor's had, the same sense of something speaking from just behind its own words rather than through them.
"Don't engage it," Ferrara said, tense.
Abigail didn't flinch. She stepped closer instead. Just slightly — a small, deliberate motion that she would later be unable to fully account for, except that some part of her, the part that had clicked ACCEPT alone in her apartment weeks ago, had wanted to close that distance before her conscious mind had finished weighing whether it should.
"What are you?" she asked, ignoring him entirely.
Daniel's eyes darkened — not blinking, not glazing, but deepening, the way a hallway deepens when a light at the far end of it goes out, something looking at her now from far behind where his eyes should have ended. A faint smile began to form at the corner of his mouth.
The hum started. The same frequency she'd heard in the fog outside Eleanor Whitby's house, the same low vibrational presence — except this time it came from inside the room, from Daniel's own chest, resonating up through a throat that no longer seemed entirely his to use.
"You can hear it too," the entity said, soft, almost pleased.
"In the name of Jesus Christ—" Ferrara's voice, forced now, strained against something that wasn't fighting him so much as ignoring him entirely.
Daniel didn't react to the name at all. His smile widened, unnatural, stretching a fraction further than a human mouth should have comfortably allowed. The room's temperature dropped hard enough that Abigail's next breath came out visible, a thin gray plume between them.
Daniel laughed — a raw, human sound at first, and then, mid-laugh, it glitched, split, a second voice slipping in underneath the first, then a third, layered and misaligned, several registers speaking at once through a single mouth that had clearly never been built to hold that many voices at the same time.
"That name doesn't matter anymore," the layered voices said.
"It should to you," Abigail said.
The voices recalibrated — focused, briefly, back into something closer to one register.
"It never did."
"But structure requires identity." She said it the way she'd have said it in a conference room, clinical, testing a hypothesis in real time, no longer entirely aware of how far she'd already stepped past the line Ferrara had drawn for her.
A pause. Something almost like genuine interest crossed whatever was using Daniel's face.
"Interesting."
Ferrara pushed forward, louder, forcing every ounce of authority he had into his voice. "I command you — leave this body!"
Nothing. The entity didn't so much as glance in his direction. His jaw tightened — she saw him recognize something in that dismissal, the same specific, total indifference he'd felt from whatever had watched him kneeling alone in the nave two nights ago.
"Why would we leave?" the entity said. A beat, almost amused. "We have only just arrived."
One of the leather restraints snapped — not from struggle, not from any visible strain against it, but from pressure applied evenly, deliberately, from somewhere that didn't need muscle to exert force.
The entity turned fully toward Abigail.
"Watch closely."
Daniel's face twitched — small, rapid micro-movements, something testing configurations the way a hand tests a glove it hasn't worn before. Abigail watched his pupils dilate, split for a fraction of a second into something that briefly resembled two separate points of focus, then snap back, flooding entirely black.
She should have stepped back. She understood that, distantly, the way she'd understood a dozen things this past month that she'd gone ahead and done anyway. Instead she leaned in, something lit behind her own eyes that had nothing to do with fear.
"Replication," she whispered.
"Yes."
Every candle in the room went out at once. Total blackout, absolute, the kind of dark that had weight to it, that pressed against the eyes rather than simply failing to reach them.
"We don't need one," the entity's voice said, from everywhere at once, surrounding her now rather than confined to the chair where Daniel sat. "We need many."
A faint inhale — right behind her. Close enough that she felt it stir the small hairs at the back of her neck.
Light returned, violent and sudden, every candle reigniting in the same instant.
Daniel collapsed against his restraints.
A sharp, wet sound. Abigail's eyes went to his face — one eye, a vessel burst behind the white, a thin trail of blood already tracking down toward his jaw.
She was at his side before she'd consciously decided to move, two fingers against his throat. A pulse. Weak, ragged, but there.
"He's alive."
Ferrara lowered his crucifix slowly, uncertain. "It's gone." A beat, and even he didn't seem to believe it fully. "I think."
Abigail stood. Looked at Daniel's slack, unconscious face, the blood already drying at his jaw, and felt something she would not, if asked, have been willing to name out loud — not relief, and not quite the fear that would have been the reasonable response to what she'd just watched happen to a young man's body in front of her.
Something closer to exhilaration. A held breath she hadn't fully released yet. The particular, dangerous thrill of a hypothesis that had just been confirmed in the worst possible way, and some small, quiet part of her that was already, disgracefully, looking forward to testing the next one.
"Something tells me it only moved," she said.
She did not examine, in that moment, how much of herself had wanted to see it happen again.