Raphael had never dealt with an opponent in this particular state before.

One moment of inattention and the thrall was on him, both arms locked around his shoulders, the fangs driving into the artery before he could create distance, the pull of feeding immediate and greedy.

He didn’t panic. He seized the thrall’s arm with his free hand, bent at the knees and waist, used his own body as the axis, and threw him forward.

The thrall lost his balance and his mouth came off the wound, but the hunger had overtaken everything else, the black membrane split open and the jaw worked furiously, desperate to get back to the blood.

Raphael clicked his tongue.

"Stop making that sound. Do you know you have bad breath?"

He drove a fist into the open mouth. A fang snapped. He seized the next one and wrenched it sideways until it came out at the root, and threw it across the room.

"You like to bite? Good. Try this."

With the two most dangerous teeth removed, Raphael took a handful of silver hunter’s rounds from the revolver’s cylinder, held them in his palm, and drove his black-gloved fist straight into the thrall’s mouth.

The remaining teeth tore into the glove but couldn’t break through. He pushed deeper, past the throat, making sure there was no way to expel anything.

Then he closed his fist and crushed the rounds, silver fragments and powder mixing with the charge, and released.

"AAAUGH—!"

The pure silver found the stomach lining. For a Demon-type entity, contact with silver from the inside was its own category of suffering, the walls burned through in multiple points, the stomach acid traveling freely through the openings and carrying silver fragments with it into the surrounding organs.

It was like someone had lit a fire inside him and the fire was spreading outward. The heart registered it within moments. The pain that followed didn’t have a normal name.

The thrall convulsed on the floor, clawing at his own abdomen with both hands, raking deep lines through the flesh, instinctively trying to reach inside and tear the silver out.

He rolled left and right across the ground, the sounds coming from him animal and continuous, his consciousness narrowing to a single repeating input.

Raphael watched, judged the timing, and with some distaste at the saliva on his glove, picked up Death Crow and moved to finish it.

Then Alp recognized the opportunity.

The thrall’s grip on the contract loosened as his awareness blurred.

Alp slipped back into the dominant position and drove the body downward in the same motion, shadow-form, sinking through the floor, and then he was moving again, faster than anything the thrall had managed.

Different shadows, different angles, the path of it Snake-like movement toward the door with the agility of something that knew how to use its own nature.

"Once I’m outside I pull the alarm. This whole floor becomes a problem for him. I don’t care what happens to the rest of it."

"You’re not leaving."

Raphael recognized the plan immediately and moved to intercept.

But another strike wouldn’t do it, additional Death Sentence layers would accumulate, yes, but they wouldn’t determine the fight, and there was a real risk of killing the thrall outright, which would leave Alp free to move without any weight dragging at him.

No silver rounds either, wrong target type. Moonlight Blade wasn’t available, the reserves were empty.

What he needed was for the thrall to wake up and keep being a problem for Alp’s Shadow.

He knew Alp. In the original fight, the moment the D-Brotherhood’s group lost the advantage, this one had run. He needed someone to hold Alp in place, and there was only one candidate, the thrall currently being carried.

And there happened to be exactly one skill available for waking him.

Wraith’s Shriek.

Raphael put Death Crow away, shifted into wraith-form, and opened his mouth.

The sound that came out had no human equivalent. It was pitched past what human ears could receive, and it targeted the incorporeal, regardless of whether a shadow had ears, the scream reached into the spirit of what it was and hit.

Alp lurched, the direction tilting slightly off course. But his goal was still clear. Still the door. Still escape.

Inside him, though, the thrall broke through the haze.

The shriek had hit like a hammer and the hammer had knocked him back into himself. His consciousness snapped into focus. And what he saw in front of him wasn’t a door.

It was a river.

The river had no light. The water was black and looked still, felt still in a way that was absolute and total, not calm, but dead. Darkness on every side.

The cold of it touched his bones without any physical source. It waited there in front of him the way an ending waits, patient and permanent, collecting everything that ever approached it.

"No. I won’t be taken to the river. I just became something better than what I was, I just—!"

The fear of death and the raw fury of being cheated out of a future that had only just started, both hit simultaneously, and the thrall slammed the full weight of his contract authority against Alp and fought for the controls.

The flat shadow stopped moving.

Alp pushing outward, thrall pulling back, neither winning, neither losing, the whole thing locked in the narrow gap between the floor and the doorframe.

"You absolute waste of a vessel, look with your eyes, that is a door! One door. Wood and hinges."

Alp’s Shadow had never been struck by Death Sentence. The river wasn’t visible to him. But the door out of this room was right there, and the idiot he was wearing was actively trying to crawl backward away from it.

"It’s a hallucination. There is no river. If you don’t move through that door, the real thing coming up behind you will actually kill you!"

But the thrall had been through too much in too short a time. Two near-deaths. The silver still burning through his insides.

The deathrattle sounds of things dying. Whatever remained of his rational mind was gone, and what Alp’s warning landed in was fertile ground for the next wave of it, fear of being abandoned, fear of the voice threatening him, fear expanding to fill all available space.

Caw. Caw.

The sound came from behind him. He turned.

On the armrest of the corner sofa, a crow entirely black sat looking at him. Red eyes. Still.

It saw through the black membrane entirely, reflected his face back at him, a face marked for death, and the crow that had come to watch the moment arrive.

"AHHH—!"

The thrall lost all remaining command of himself and drove backward. Alp had no choice but to come with him, the shadow-form beginning to peel away from the floor in the same slow, grinding way it had submerged.

Raphael felt the window.

He dropped into the floor in wraith-form, making himself invisible to Alp’s spatial awareness, held for a beat, then surfaced directly in front of the thrall and reasserted.

Through the thrall’s Death Sentence haze, in a vision reduced to fog and fear and the image of an ending, a black-cloaked figure stood in front of him, raising a scythe.

"NO—!"

Death Crow descended.

The head separated from the neck and landed.

The noise stopped.