Only when Helen had gone, and Jack had gone, and all were in the house, did Ciel steal back to the building which was Massacre's. He walked inside like movement from the corner of another's eyes. In the halls there was still screaming. In the roots there was still screaming, and the stones shook with it. The white walls shook with it. The mopped floors with their sharp scent of false citrus shook with it, with the stain of rot. He walked through in his heeled black shoes, laced tightly, and his black fine child's clothes, passing under the glances of the government men, as he walked unerringly through the labyrinth. There, where the cold shelves gleamed, was the body, and the monster, defeated, lying on the ground. It whimpered as though in pain, gnashed its teeth in defiance, and the eyes, which were the color of petaled bruises, watched him. He had all time now, and all power. He emptied the body onto the floor. He poured the flammable detergents upon it. He moved, and the walls licked with flames, and crackled, and the air was eaten, hungrily, as a dog eats. Moving at his heels. Pacing back and back again, within its confines, and reaching higher. The foundations shook and bent, and the smoke began to rise, and the emergency stairs, with their heavy doors, did not open. With the sun beating down upon it, the building crumbled from within.
And a voice within the flames began to speak; something that sounded, at first, as quiet as though it were only part of the flames. "Snuff out the unclean," it said. "Snuff out the unneccessary."
The fire crackled, and ashes below it drifted like snow. "Snuff out the unwanted."
The words started quietly, but they grew with the flames, grew until they were a scream. They shrieked their way around the single point of darkness that Ciel was; they tore at his hair and the ribbon at his throat. They overturned the corruption of the corridors, burning the bodies down with a furnace's heat, and leaped higher; they rained blows upon the office where Philip had died, and made bones of animals and humans alike, and burned the bones. All throughout the building, souls glowed faintly free of their confines, and the sound of turning reels of film—to those that could hear it—joined the piercing screams. The file cabinets burst, and sagged, and the papers turned to dust. The needles melted, and the wires melted and started small fires which were swallowed up in the inferno; the lights flickered off with the power and the whole thing was cast into artificial, windowless night: and at last, it was cleansed; the impurities burnt out.
Ciel pulled himself from the ruins, the gap between the other buildings extending into the earth entire; a vortex in the shape of a boy. A trailing darkness held him aloft. Its body scoured to ash, the minotaur was silent and at peace: the air, in summer sun, held only birdsong.
And when he stumbled away through the street between the cries of watchers, fearful and amazed, he found it was his own voice that was hoarse.
.
.
.
the story will continue in "whatever we lose" where Ciel and Sebastian will finally get a bit of a break — link in profile :)