Sister Margaret carried her small tray of candles into the nave humming a hymn under her breath, bright and domestic, the ordinary soundtrack of a woman closing out an ordinary night's work.
"Father Aldric? I thought I heard—"
She stopped dead. The hymn died in her throat before she'd finished the thought.
The confessional. Aldric's head lolled forward against the grille, his face pale, eyes open but fixed on nothing at all. Dark streaks ran from his ears, from the corners of his eyes, tracing paths down a face that had, only an hour ago, worn its familiar warm patience for one more member of his flock. The rosary beads lay scattered across the stone floor where they'd fallen from his open hand.
"Father?" Her voice cracked on the single word.
She crossed to him. Knelt. Touched his shoulder, her hand trembling badly enough that she had to try twice before her fingers actually made contact.
"Father Aldric?" Urgent now. "Father, wake up."
No response. She shook him — gently at first, then harder, her hymn dissolving fully into something raw and wordless.
"Father!" The scream tore out of her, animal and total, shattering the church's stillness and echoing off stone that had absorbed four hundred years of prayer and had never once, Margaret would think much later, been asked to absorb a sound quite like this. "Father!"
She collapsed beside him, both hands pressed to his face, sobbing in a way that made no attempt to compose itself.
The scream pulled people from the nearby lanes — a door slamming somewhere in the dark, footsteps hurrying closer.
"Someone call—" Margaret was on her feet again, hysterical, barely coherent. "Someone call the doctor!"
Ferrara and Abigail arrived at a run, Sister Lydia following a few steps behind, unhurried, her pace never once matching the urgency of everyone around her.
"What happened?" Abigail was breathless, already taking in the scene before anyone answered her — Aldric, the blood, the scattered beads.
"It was here," she said, quietly, to no one, to everyone.
The church doors opened. Villagers rushed in, faces drawn, one already fumbling for a phone, another pressing a hand over his own mouth as if to hold back whatever sound wanted to escape it.
"He was confessing," Margaret managed, through tears that showed no sign of stopping. "He was confessing and then— and then—"
Ferrara stood over the scene, rosary in hand, taking in the blood, the silence, the particular horror of a man who had built his entire life around protecting people from exactly this kind of ending and had, tonight, been unable to protect the one man who'd taught him how.
"He's been attacked by this demonic presence," he said, quiet, to Abigail, the clinical phrasing a thin shield against what he clearly wanted to say instead.
Abigail's eyes moved to the confessional grille. "It learned the cadence." Her voice had gone flat, stripped of everything except the horror of the pattern completing itself in front of her. "It used the confession."
More villagers gathered at the doorway, whispering, their faces carrying a new and rawer fear than anything Abigail had catalogued from them so far. She looked toward the back of the nave, toward the spot where Thomas Hale had stood only minutes before.
Empty. The doors beyond it stood open onto a dark, empty path that offered nothing further to see.
A distant hum threaded faintly through the church — the ghost of the sound that had killed him, already fading, already retreating back into whatever patient silence it preferred to wait in.
They moved him, eventually, to his own small sleeping quarters — a narrow bed, a wooden dresser, a single crucifix mounted above the headboard that had watched over this room for longer than Aldric himself had occupied it. A washbasin sat on a low stand beside the bed, filled with fresh water Sister Margaret had carried in herself, refusing anyone else's help. A beeswax candle burned low, its light soft and trembling across a room that had gone, in the space of a single night, from ordinary to sacred in an entirely different way than it had been before.
Aldric's body lay covered to the chest with a plain white sheet, his face peaceful now, the violence of his death softened by stillness in a way that offered Margaret, she would think later, the only mercy this night had extended to anyone.
She stood beside him, sleeves rolled, hands steady despite everything. She dipped a cloth into the basin, wrung it out, and began, slowly, reverently, to wipe the dried blood from his face.
"You served longer than any of us," she said, softly, barely more than a whisper. "You deserved a gentler end."
She rinsed the cloth. Continued — his face, his hands — her movements carrying the practiced rhythm of someone who had performed this exact ritual before, for other members of this parish, across other difficult nights. She had never once done it for someone she loved this much.
She paused. Brushed a strand of hair back from his brow, the gesture unconsciously maternal, the same gesture she might have offered a sleeping child.
"I told you not to go into the confessional alone." Her voice trembled, but her hands kept working, steady even as her voice wasn't. "You never listened."
She lifted the hand that had clutched his rosary as he died, cleaning the dried blood carefully from beneath each fingernail, and laid it back across his chest, folding his fingers gently around the beads once more.
"You were stubborn." A small, broken almost-laugh escaped her, gone as quickly as it arrived. "And kind. And too brave for your own good."
She dipped the cloth a final time, wrung it out, and wiped the last traces of blood from his jawline.
The candle flickered.
She stopped. Looked at it, some old instinct in her going wary, bracing for whatever this village had taught her, over the last several weeks, to brace for whenever a flame moved without cause.
The flame steadied.
She exhaled — relief, small and complete, the first uncomplicated breath she'd managed since she'd walked into that nave carrying a tray of candles and a hymn she'd never finish.
She laid a clean cloth over his folded hands.
"Rest now." Her voice had gone quiet, certain, the voice of a woman handing off a burden she had carried as far as she was able. "We'll carry the rest."
She leaned forward, pressed her forehead gently to his for a long moment — a final blessing, offered the only way she had left to offer one — and then straightened, wiped her own eyes with the back of her wrist, and blew out the candle.
The room settled into darkness, and into a silence that belonged, finally, only to grief, with nothing else left in it to fear.