Adjective; disturbing and horrifying because of depiction of death and injury.

Late March

Maka is easing the door closed when Spirit calls from the living room.

She pulls her sleeve down to hide the cut a particularly violent poltergeist had given her at the end of her patrol, checks to make sure her uniform isn't peeking out from her bag, and shoves the scythe behind her back as she enters the living room. "I thought you had gone to bed already."

"Nearly," Spirit replies, putting down the crossword puzzle in his hands. "I like to make sure you're home before I do, though."

"I'm always home before eleven." She tries not to squirm as Spirit looks up at her. Marie had assured her that the scythe was hidden from those without psychic abilities by a cloaking shield, but she still hates having to test the theory out.

"Study sessions cutting it mighty close." Spirit speaks in the purposely casual way he adopts when he is fishing for information. "I always thought you liked studying alone."

"I have harder classes than I did last year." She shrugs. "More minds are better than one."

Spirit accedes her point with a grunt. "If they are the right minds, that is."

It's too easy to follow Spirit's line of thinking, and she bites back her laugh. "Do you think I'm seeing someone instead of going out to study?"

His eyes narrow suspiciously. "Are you confessing?"

"No point in confessing to a crime I didn't commit." The contrast between how her father thinks Maka is spending her time and how she is really spending her nights is absurd to the point of hilarity.

"There is nothing wrong with seeing someone." Spirit is in the coaxing good cop role of this interrogation now, though his words seem to physically pain him. "I do insist on meeting-"

"I told you about Hiro, didn't I?" Maka interrupts. "Why wouldn't I tell you if I was seeing someone else?"

"You did." Spirit's voice is slightly, albeit grudgingly, mollified. "And it ended in a disaster."

"It did," she agrees, although she is sure the disaster she's thinking of and the disaster Spirit is thinking of are in entirely different spheres. "Your point?"

"My point is that people, particularly boys," he says, emphasizing the last word, "Are rarely ready for a serious relationship at this age."

"Duly noted." She rolls her eyes so she can appear properly sullen. "Is there anything else I should be warned about?"

"Triply noted, I hope." Spirit looks as appeased as he's going to be. "Another two people were found in Moricio looking like the other victims in our investigation." His expression sobers. "The whole city is on alert so avoid going into Moricio for a while."

"Right." Maka and Kid often trade off on who patrols Moricio-it's her turn this week. "Any leads so far?"

He shakes his head. "It looks like this some other substance is killing them instead of acid, though we have no idea what it is, just that it's some kind of gunk that eats up the body."

"Sounds pleasant," she says, wrinkling her nose. "I'm heading up."

Spirit picks up his crossword. "Oh, and you also got a call."

Maka's heart rate picks up suddenly and very quickly. "Who?"

"Tsubaki," he says, oblivious to the change in her demeanor. "She tried calling you on your cell phone, but couldn't reach you." He looks up. "You must have been too buried in your study session to notice."

"Vibrate mode is the new silent mode."

He snorts, going back to the crossword. "Ten-letter word for supernatural entity?"

Maka almost laughs as she hovers on the bottom stair. "Apparition."

"You lied to him, technically," Soul says as she falls face forward onto her bed.

"How do you figure?" Maka doesn't move from her spot. Reaping is exhausting on a level she never imagined, and after two months of being on her own, there isn't a part of her that doesn't ache.

"I am dead, but I am a boy."

She lets out a groan. "Shut up."

Soul's voice is filled with an amusement that she hasn't heard in it for a long time. "You could have at least introduced me."

She flings her pillow in the direction of his voice without looking up. "I will end you."

His laugh is right above her head as she feels the pillow drop next to her. "Not to disappoint you, but I'm already dead."

"It is a disappointment." She rolls on her back and finds herself staring up at Soul. In the half-light of the room, his skin is nearly the color it was when he was alive. "Being dead, not being unable to be ended," she clarifies.

"They're the same thing." The minutely lopsided tilt to his smile tells her that it's sincere, and that he's present in a way that is achingly absent when they go out reaping.

"Not really." His translucence is masked, too; he looks solid, and her palms tingle with the desire to find out if it's true, even though she knows otherwise. She knows his touch through her skin, but it's not the same and it's not enough. "There's a difference."

"If you say so." He shifts away too quickly; the disappointment on her tongue is a different kind than the one they're talking about. "Reality stays the same, either way."

She kicks off her shoes in response and worms her way under the blankets. The exhaustion that was pulling down on her eyelids has evaporated, and she stares holes into the ceiling. It's grating that she only gets pieces of closeness, fragments of warmth between miles of cold, but she has no right to complain when she did the same thing to him. Trust is uncomfortable, ill-fitting, and borders on the side of nauseating to contemplate, but Soul jumped with her in Abeyance, stayed when she asked, even if it's not in the way she wishes for, so she owes him that much.

Maka swallows her questions and screws her eyes shut. She owes herself that much.

Tsubaki's face pops up after the first ring in the morning. It's hard to make out much with the slightly grainy quality of the video, but she thinks the shadows under her eyes have improved since they video chatted last week.

"Sorry I didn't pick up yesterday," she says apologetically. "I've been trying to get my sleep schedule back on track."

Maka waves away her words. "It's good that you're taking care of yourself." She pauses, trying to decide how to phrase her next question. "How is everything else?" she asks finally.

The smile on Tsubaki's face tells her it's too easy for Tsubaki to see through to her actual question. "The dreams haven't stopped," she says. "But they don't feel as impossible to deal with."

"I've also been trying to get out more," she adds. "I joined the pottery club."

"And how is that?"

"Messy." Tsubaki holds up grey-stained hands to the camera. "But it's peaceful and lets me focus on something else other than my feelings."

"A hard thing to accomplish."

"And you?" Tsubaki leans forward. "How is the end of spring break treating you?"

"It went much too fast," Maka says, rubbing the back of her neck. Catching up on the sleep she's been missing over the break was nice, though she knows her body is in for a rude awakening on Monday. "I wish your break had been this week, instead of next week."

"We'll catch up after school at Sid's," Tsubaki assures her. "Though Black Star says you've been busy with studying lately."

She groans. "He always goes complaining to you."

"It's his way of showing concern." There's a creak from Tsubaki's side of the screen as she scoots closer. "But we don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."

"There isn't much to talk about, I'm just busy." It's truth by vagueness, although it doesn't make Maka feel any better than if she lied.

"All right." Tsubaki doesn't push. "Did you decide anything about your mom?"

"I didn't answer the first postcard," Maka says after a beat. "But I did answer the second."

"And?"

"I got a return to sender notice," she sighs. "Apparently, she moved."

Tsubaki sits back. "I'm sorry."

"It's fine." Maka shakes her head. "I don't know what I would have done if she replied."

"Something, presumably."

Her smile is weak. "Hopefully."

"Well, I thi-" Tsubaki breaks off, eyeing something behind Maka. "What's that?"

Maka looks behind herself. "You mean my wall?"

"No, the thing leaning on it." Tsubaki squints at the upper corner of the screen. "Is that a scythe?"

She attempts to appear casual as she glances towards the scythe, locking eyes with Soul as she does so, who hovers in complete view of the camera. "Oh, that's just a prop."

Tsubaki frowns as Soul shuffles out of the camera's range. "What for?"

"Theater," she invents.

Tsubaki's tone turns skeptical. "You're in theater?"

"Not exactly," she says, trying to choose the lie that has the least knots with the truth. "An idiot was being condescending and I may have pushed him while the theater teacher was passing by."

"Mr. Dyers was always a fan of free student labor," Tsubaki says, shaking her head. "But I thought you were past the illegal student fighting phase."

Maka shrugs, forcing a smile. "Some habits die hard."

"Want to see something interesting?" Stein peers into Azusa's office, eyes falling on Maka as he speaks. "You're here."

"Yes," says Maka awkwardly. While Stein's horn-rimmed glasses give him an owlish appearance, the way his expression sharpens unexpectedly reminds her of a hawk poised on a death dive. She nods towards the doorway. "There was a problem with a cleansing so Azusa went to take care of it."

"And you?"

"My friend can see my weapon, but not Soul." She wonders if Stein only blinks when people aren't looking. "I wanted to talk to Azusa or Marie about it."

"She's not a reaper," Stein says without pausing.

For someone who claims not to have any psychic abilities, Stein has an uncanny way of reading her mind. "Then why was she able to see the scythe?" she asks.

"Abilities like yours and the other people in the DWMA are not all or nothing." Stein takes out a flask half-filled with a viscous and dark red fluid and drains it in one go. He neither explains the flask nor looks remotely embarrassed by the odd look Maka gives him (as does Soul but Stein can't see him). "It lies on a spectrum, similar to hair and skin color."

His comment distracts Maka. "Our abilities are genetic?" she says. "I thought it had to do with the soul."

"The soul is genetic," Stein answers. "It brings up the nurture versus nature debate, which many of our members feel quite strongly about, so we avoid the topic, but it doesn't stop it from being true," he says with a shrug. "Then there's also evidence that some abilities are only triggered after death, which has its own host of taboo topics. Presumably, any single ability would require the activation of many genes to be fully functional."

"You think that's the case with my friend." Her words sound less like a statement and more like a question. "That her abilities are only partially functional."

"It's a hypothesis," Stein replies, returning the flask to his pocket. "But if your friend can't see ghosts, then she isn't a reaper."

Maka absorbs this information, wishing she'd taken back up the habit of carrying a journal with her, before giving a slow nod. "I guess that answers my question then."

He pulls a new flask, this one tiny and platinum, and holds it out to Maka. "And leaves you free to give your perspective on the liquid you and Kid found on that moose."

Maka eyes the flask with an equal amount of wariness and curiosity before taking it. "Did you find out what it was?"

"Nope." Stein sounds intrigued rather than discouraged. "There are some biological components to it so my best guess would be blood, but it's nothing like animal or human blood."

She moves the flask back and forth slowly; whatever the liquid is, it's warm enough to feel the heat through the metal. "It wouldn't be if it came across from the rift, right?"

"Not necessarily." Stein takes back the flask. "But that's not what I'm most interested at the moment." He doesn't gesture for her to follow so much as walk away without warning, but Maka is quick to scramble after him.

"And if Azusa comes back?" Soul hisses as they trail Stein into the elevator.

"We had to go out on patrol," she answers, stealing a glance at her watch. It's not exactly a lie-after Kid left her on her own, the poltergeist population had remained more or less steady, but the past two weeks seem to have produced outcroppings of poltergeists that she can hardly keep up with.

Stein doesn't ask who she's talking to. "How are you and your partner doing?"

"Increasingly dead."

Maka smiles. "We're managing."

Stein nods. "Soul is his name, correct?"

The elevator begins to move downwards. "Solomon, technically."

Soul scowls. "Was that necessary?"

With a soft ping, the elevator opens and Stein steps out, hooking a foot between the wheels of a rolling chair sitting by the elevator doors and sitting in one fluid move. "There are a few items you shouldn't touch if you value keeping your body as is so I would refrain from touching anything," he says as he rolls away.

The wall closest to Maka make it apparent that this is Stein's lab; the faces of animals and creatures from Abeyance stare at her with empty eyes as they rest in liquid-filled jars of varying sizes. She tears her gaze away to the rest of the room, which is in a state of organized chaos. Glass tubes and other lab equipment resting on rickety tables fizz and sizzle with a violet solution, while files and books lay in piles on the couch in the middle of the room and the overladen desk in the corner.

"Here." Stein has somehow already managed to roll all the way across the room to a metal table crammed next to his desk. "This is where I've been experimenting with the liquid," he says, taking out a glass dropper. "The sample was diluted with the moose's blood, which was fortunate because the glass it was in didn't start to melt until after he gave it to me." He withdraws the platinum flask as he speaks, dipping the dropper into the flask and pulling it out.

Immediately, the liquid eats a hole through the glass. A tiny fleck of the liquid falls from the dropper, caught back in the flask by Stein before it lands on the table. "It wears through the table if I don't catch it," he says, pointing to a dozen nickel-sized craters in the middle of the table, next to a line of glass beakers and metal containers that met a similar fate. He peers into the flask with one eye. "It's one of the most corrosive substances I've ever seen."

"Glad I didn't touch it," mutters Maka to Soul.

"It's sticky too." Stein tips the flask upside down, but none of the black blood comes out. He balances the flask above a Bunsen burner at the end of the table. "And it only stays a liquid around human body temperature."

Maka looks from the flask to the holes in the table. The image of the dying moose flashes across her vision. "What kind of creature has this for blood?"

"I have no idea." Stein sounds slightly elated as he caps the flask. "But I do hope it's the only one of its kind."

April

"What do you think souls taste like?"

Maka's question is an absent-minded, soft half-whisper, though the way the whispers in his head turn into knives is not. He's grateful that he's not possessing the scythe. "That's weird to ask."

"Some of them look like the swirls on an ice cream cone," she says, standing on her tiptoes to point to the tip of the partially decayed soul floating in front of them. "See?"

"Not really." He wishes they would leave the shell of a warehouse they found the poltergeist in. It revolts him to look at the soul, all that remains of a poltergeist after a reaping, though it's the hunger burning a hole through his stomach that disgusts him more.

She drops back on her feet and presses the black button on her map. "I guess I've just got food on my mind for skipping dinner."

"And morbid curiosity."

"To complement your morbid humor," Maka rejoins as she finally walks away from the poltergeist's soul. "Besides, it was just a passing thought."

He wants to claw out that passing thought, rip away the rest of the thoughts the whispers rooted in his mind, and crush them until nothing remains. Then maybe he can pretend that he's not a monster with more success.

The shift from the darkness of the warehouse to the moonlight illuminating the mouth of the alley outside detangles him from his thoughts slightly. They're in Moricio tonight, and have reaped more poltergeists in a few hours than they usually do in a whole night in Orcus Hollow. It's rubbed the little left of Soul's grip on reality raw-the city lights are burning as he trails Maka out onto the sidewalk. "How much more of the city do we have left to patrol?"

"Well, it's an hour to back home so-"

She freezes suddenly, and he narrowly avoids running through her. The hunger nearly unravels him. "What happened?"

Maka's gaze drifts upward, face scrunching like she's straining to catch wind of something. "Do you hear that?"

There is nothing but the blaring and buzzing of the city. "I don-"

Soul is cut off by a shushing noise from Maka. She drifts forward a few steps, and then she turns. "It's gone."

He tries to speak again. "What's gon-"

"There it is again!" She spins back around, eyes tracing the air before she shoots forward. "Come on!"

He scrambles after her. "Where are you going?"

"I don't know!"

Rain from earlier lingers now, turning the city streets as close to deserted as they're going to get on a Friday night; still, Maka seems to have let all caution go as her feet pound against the sidewalk. She saves herself from slipping twice by catching herself on the handle of her scythe, causing a passing couple to stare, and Soul hisses in her ear, "Be careful!"

Maka cuts down a side street, and the sounds and lights of downtown disappear as Soul continues to follow, the light from the moon swallowed up by a traversing cloud. She finally skids to a halt in front of an old church, whose faded opulence shines through in the parts of the exterior that haven't been eaten away by the weather.

"There," she says, breathless. "They're in there."

Soul shoves his thoughts into the far back of his mind as he eyes the church. A crumbling stone sign above the arching double doors names it as Santa Maria Novella, sister church to a famous basilica in Italy. A vague dread threads through him the longer he stares at the church; there is something thoroughly wrong about it that he can't place. " Who is in there?"

"I don't know." She exhales, eyes trailing up the church doors and back down again. "They felt like poltergeists, but there's something not right about them."

He snorts. "Isn't 'not right' the entire existence of a poltergeist?"

Maka doesn't answer, moving forward slowly. She places her hand on the door, and her eyes grow wide. "They're gone."

"What?"

"They're gone," she repeats, leaning close to press her ear against the door. "I felt them behind the door, but they just vanished."

She's reaching for the door handle when it hits Soul what's wrong with the church as he drifts back to get a better view. The warping of the darkness around the edges of the church dredges up memories of last Halloween in too vivid detail.

"There's a demon in there."

Maka jerks back, stumbling back a few steps. "I didn't sense that." Terror passes from her side of their bond to Soul, but she doesn't move from the entrance. She swallows. "We have to be sure."

Soul itches to run and forget the church exists-whatever waits in it isn't something that should be opened, something his mind screams at him over and over, louder than his whispers or hunger. But he can't leave without Maka, and even if he could, he wouldn't. "Maybe there is something else or maybe it's a demon playing tricks," he says finally. "But whatever is in there is bigger than us. We need to get help."

The scythe blade spins slowly in a lazy circle as Maka rolls the handle in her hands, mouth parting. A flurry of expressions, each of them instantaneous and unreadable, crosses her face. "It won't be here when we come back."

She presses the small silver button on her watch and holds out the scythe in a wordless question.

He is on the verge of explaining what a tremendously bad idea it is, that his facade of being enough will not hold up to this, but the words die in his throat when he meets her eyes. Her question isn't if they should go in or not, but whether Soul will follow her or not, and that answer has always been the same since he met Maka in Abeyance.

A rush of cold radiates from his chest out to his fingers as he possesses the scythe; it's something he can't get used to, even after months of reaping with Maka. In the beginning, it was hard to hold onto himself in the vast expanse of darkness that envelopes him when he possesses the scythe, but the sharp edge of emotions coiling inside of him now makes it easy to keep the boundaries of himself and the scythe separate.

He peers out from the blade of the scythe as Maka tries the handle to the church, the door opening soundlessly.

Soul sees the empty pews in disrepair and hymn books scattered across the floor first; a balcony wraps around the sides and the back of the church, curved wooden arches reaching up into the ceiling. The only light in the church comes the moon shining faintly from the stained glass window overhead, sending tiny rainbows that resemble cracked grins on the walls and floor. It is not enough to illuminate the statues lining the main aisle splitting down the center of the church, their faces shrouded in darkness.

The dread sprouting in Soul's chest grows as Maka walks inside, her footsteps bouncing hollowly against the walls of the church. There is a nearly inaudible rustling from the rafters, a movement of shadows that nearly slips past him, and he opens his mouth to warn Maka when she speaks first.

"There."

She doesn't point up towards the rafters, but directly to the shroud of darkness standing in front of the altar.

The wings emanating out of the creature's back almost consume them, wrapped around them so tightly that nearly nothing else is visible, save for the crown of their head. Whatever the wings are made of, they must act like a shield because Soul doesn't register the jolt he felt months ago until they reach the first pew. It resounds in his being, beating in his chest in a mockery of a heartbeat, and it is right as Maka pauses in front of them that he realizes this is going to go very badly.

(Hunger.)

"Who are you?" Maka's voice is too loud. He tries to keep his mind together.

They don't answer, although their wings drop ever so slightly. A soft mumbling comes from within, a frenzy of words that are impossible to make out

Maka raises her voice; her words crack against his head. "Did you come from across the rift?"

(Feed.)

Maka moves close enough that he can see how the wings ripple and swirl, not made of darkness at all. The skin at the base of their wings is almost as transparent as he is, the veins underneath an inky color.

Black blood.

Maka knows she made the wrong choice as soon as she steps inside the church.

The demon's aura nearly overwhelms her as she walks in further, but there is more than something off about the stillness inside of the church, the shadows that dance on the edge of her vision, and the fact that she can't feel Soul, although he is in her hands.

But then she sees the person hunched, surrounded by wings of darkness, and something about them strikes her as pitiful, even knowing they weren't human. She has to approach them, see their face finally, and that is when her mistake became irreversible.

She asks them once who they are; they don't answer, but their mumbling becomes faster. The scythe seemed to grow heavier in her hands too, becoming almost a chore to keep lifted.

She gets closer now and tries again, asking this time, "Did you come across the rift?"

They still don't answer, though their wings undulate at her words; they are more solid than darkness, but bend and coil like molten glass. She moves closer so she might be able to see their face at least, but their face is buried in their hands, which twist and untwist twines of their hair over and over.

Their fingers still suddenly, voice inching higher. "I want to be good, I want to be good, I want to be good."

Pity swells in spite of herself; the scythe drops to Maka's side as she opens her mouth to speak, but she's cut off as their voice rises to a crescendo. "But my blood is black, it runs and runs and runs, seals everything shut and then I see my blood is black."

The words sink in at the same time Soul de-possesses the scythe.

Maka stares up at him in disbelief. "What are you doing?"

His answer is lost as one of the wings shoots out; she dives away and slams into a pew, narrowly avoiding being impaled by the black blood, although that doesn't stop flecks of black blood from spraying onto her skin.

She chokes on her scream, unable to inspect herself, and can only swipe at it as the wings of blood grow high above their owner. The scythe is clumsy in her hands as Maka sprints down one of the side aisles and dives behind one of the pillars at the back of the church. She sucks in deep breaths, heartbeat a roar in her ears as she waits for the wings to find her.

Seconds that feel like eternity pass, and when her heart finally slows, she dares to look down at herself. Black blood is streaked across her clothes, climbing up her hands and arms in a trail of tiny specks. Her stomach convulses at the sight, but while the blood stings and clings to her like a second skin, it doesn't dissolve her skin or eat away at the rest of her body.

"Are you okay?" Maka bites back another scream as Soul appears.

Her hands clench around the scythe. "You left me, and you're asking if I'm okay?"

"I didn't-" There is a restless disquiet in Soul's eyes along with something else, something she doesn't recognize. "I can't-"

Maka's gaze falls to where he stares at the scythe, splattered with black blood, though it hasn't eaten away the metal, sticking to the blade like it does on her skin.

"It's the blood." She recalls how heavy the scythe felt in her hands before the attack. "It's affecting you."

His silence is her answer. "Come on." She doesn't wait for Soul to respond, peeking out from the pillar. The demon's presence is absent, like it fled, but she doesn't trust the feeling, eyes flicking up to the rafters before she looks towards the altar, to the person.

They're talking to themselves again, shoulders hunched as their hands twine together endlessly. Their wings have pulled back to them again, although they rove edgily around the space surrounding the altar, like they have a mind and life of their own.

The doors to the church are less than twenty feet away, but moving away from the pillar means going out into the open, and she doesn't know how the creature will react. She can't reap without Soul; their bond is what allows the scythe to work, and she doubts she'll be able to fight with the scythe alone.

It takes another minute to screw up the courage to step out from behind the pillar. Her heart climbs into her throat as she works to keep her footsteps quiet. While the wings stir towards her halfway to the door, the creature doesn't pry their hand away from their face, still muttering and fidgeting erratically.

She doesn't want to know what will happen if she does see their face.

Relief sweeps over Maka in a rush when her fingers brush against the cold metal of the door handle. She fumbles as she tries to push the door out, heart skipping a beat, until she remembers it opens inwards.

The door doesn't budge.

Memories of a smoke-filled basement and demons with burning eyes threaten to overwhelm her, but she fights down the panic trying to suffocate her, pulling on the door again as quietly as she can.

"Didn't I tell you I sealed all the doors?"

The creature's voice comes from right behind her; Maka lets out a half-scream, bringing the scythe up in an arc as she twists around.

"My blood seals everything." The tip of the scythe blade is wedged in one of the cracks that spirals towards the center of the creature's face, blood oozing out from around the blade and trickling down the creature's face in tiny rivulets.

"Even me." Their face is nothing but thorny cracks curving across where their eyes, nose, and mouth should be. They seem to grow the longer the creature stares at Maka.

Horror silences her yell; she yanks on the scythe, but it is stuck fast.

"My mother made me this way." The creature does nothing as Maka pulls, though she can't say the same thing for its wings.

Maka's composure disintegrates; she plants her foot in the middle of the creature's chest and yanks hard, letting out a grunt as the scythe dislodges itself and she collides into the church doors.

The creature tilts their head to one side. "Did your mother make you that way too?"

Maka then does something reserved for the desperate: she cracks the creature's face with the flat of her blade and shoves them aside as she shoots forward for the main aisle. She's halfway up the aisle when she comes to a halt, nearly tripping over her feet.

The statues lining the aisle have moved.

The statues, which aren't statues at all, stand huddled in front of the altar, heads looking up in unison at Maka. She was right when she said to Soul that they didn't feel like poltergeists, that there hadn't been something off about them.

They're alive.

Black blood entombs them; it seals to their bodies, compressing so tightly that it turns their own skin into a casket. They turn towards Maka as she skids to a stop; their bones stick out from their face, bodies disintegrating before her eyes, and although their expressions are frozen in various states of fear, a low, gravelly death rattle emanates from them.

They move slowly, unlike poltergeists, but it's clear what they're becoming. Beside her, Soul stares at them, transfixed. Maka raises the scythe, but she doesn't move backwards. "Stay away from me."

Her voice wavers, breaks on the last word, and she clasps onto the scythe in the same way she gripped her flashlight years ago. She doesn't dare look behind herself unless she loses her head completely.

Helplessness is a taste more bitter than fear, one she refuses to die with on her tongue. Maka readies the scythe for a swing as the poltergeists close in, even though she knows it's a useless effort.

A deafening boom resounds from the back of the church, knocking the scythe out of her hands and Maka to her knees. Dust stains the air and a ringing reverberates in her ears as she struggles to get to her feet and several large shadows streak by.

More sniffers, much bigger than the ones in the Death Room, weave past Maka as they make for the horde of budding poltergeists. They become a shapeless shadow as they reach the horde, seeping into their bodies like water.

The horde stops, movements slowing before stiffening into a standstill. For several moments, nothing happens, and then the poltergeist closest to Maka moves. Or rather, its hand spasms as the poltergeist begins to crumble into dust, limbs breaking apart with a sickening crunch before becoming dust as well.

A sniffer unwinds from the pile of dust that used to be a human being as the rest of the horde follows suit.

Maka is frozen, unable to keep herself from watching. The face of one of the poltergeists is turned upward as dust peels away its features into swirling clouds. It's the only poltergeist that kept its eyes open, and right before the spreading dust consumes the last of its face, she glimpses a mournful plea in them.

Sniffers pop up the piles of dust, unrecognizable from the dust wafting down from the ceiling. When Maka looks down, she notices her hands and the scythe are covered in dust. Her bond with Soul is nothing but static that sends claws running up and down her mind.

"And that is how you banish a soul."

Slowly, Maka turns around.

Azusa calls her sniffers back as she walks into the church. She's followed by no one, but the voices of Stein and Marie rise from behind her. Her eyes are alight with a simmering fire as she reaches Maka. "What happened?"

Maka opens her mouth to answer, and promptly throws up.