The Long Night
Chapter Two: The Vicar Amelia
Every crooked statue and darkened building cast long shadows over the streets, and that alone would have made them eerie. But the people were what made this town its own miniature hell. If they could actually be called people.
There was the same kind of mad person they'd first encountered and subdued, not always travelling alone, but each time just as violent and insensate. They grunted like animals and only rarely could any actual word be made out. Most carried torches, casting the streets they moved through in flickering light. These were the ones who were clean of the plague but mad in that other way that Gilbert had described. Who looked about themselves and saw monsters in every other face they passed.
But they were not the only ones out in the night.
This was nothing like the fight in the ministry. Harry's heart was so far up into his throat he thought it might leap into his mouth at any moment. His pulse hammered in his jugular like it was trying to beat bruises into his flesh.
"What the hell are these – things?" he gasped breathlessly as he threw a shield up to avoid being clawed to death by a man with an oversized, snarling wolf's head. The yellowed fangs were bared in a rictus grin that never faltered, no matter how he snapped his jaws at Harry's shield. The shield charm held, though the man-beast splattered it with discolored saliva as he roared in frenzied rage. "Shit – Depulso!"
The man-beast went careening down the long staircase they'd made it to the top of, screeching in a way no real wolf could or would have, and Harry took a trembling step back and tried to catch his breath. His shield was faltering, growing more transparent as Harry's arm shook with exhaustion.
"The infected, I think," Sirius grunted, his voice a grim whisper. His wand swept across the street and shards of ice followed its path in the air, stopping the people below from following them. "Gilbert could have mentioned that they'd be like this. I thought 'beastly' was meant metaphorically."
Harry could only agree as he stared wide-eyed down the stairs where the beast-man was turning away from them, apparently losing interest as soon as they were out of sight. Professor Lupin had never been this deformed in his werewolf form. These people-creatures… they looked ill. Some with dripping snouts, some with blinded eyes and all attacking with a sort of immediate, mindless fury that Harry had never seen in any creature or human before. Like they didn't know what they were doing - like sharks scenting blood in the water and lashing out.
'How far have we made it these past four hours?' Harry thought, rubbing the sweat from his temples with the edge of his sleeve. 'Can't be more than half a kilometer at most.' The streets and alleys were so labyrinthine and badly lit that it was difficult to keep track of how far their frantic fighting and running had taken them. A broom would have made everything so much easier.
'Though who knows? The air could be full of deformed bird-people or something, just waiting to swoop down from the rooftops…' Harry thought and stumbled back another step over cracked cobblestone. He cast Tergeo on himself, but the deep stains in his clothes didn't completely disappear. Though at least it removed the sweat that had been dripping into his eyes. To his left was another one of those abandoned coffins that seemed to be everywhere in the city.
"It shouldn't be too far now - " Sirius said, casting a cleaning charm of his own over himself. He was visibly less tired, but that wasn't saying much when Harry felt like he was one more frenzied mob from collapsing.
They escaped through a dark alley, riding down a ladder to a roof with slippery, cracked tiles. There were sounds of fighting coming from below, but up here there was nothing jumping out to attack them. 'No deformed bird-people.' Harry caught his breath and pressed a hand to his chest, trying to force his heart to slow down. "You get the feeling that our spells don't do as much damage as they should?"
Sirius plunked down on the roof with a heavy sigh and waved his wand over his bad knee. "Not on the crazy humans, but definitely on those turned into beasts. And the less humanoid monsters."
"I sent a cutting curse at one of those crow… things… and it should have cut it in two." Harry hunkered down at Sirius side, waving another cleaning spell over himself. Now that the rush of adrenaline was fading, he realized he was bleeding in several places. Funny, he hadn't felt it at all during any of their fights. His Episkey was getting better, at least, so that was something.
"Gilbert could have mentioned all the monsters running about," Sirius mumbled, though he looked less annoyed and more disturbed. The massive crows Harry mentioned lay in wait, always grouped together in a murder, and the moment you got a bit too close they attacked all at once.
Harry looked down over the edge of the roof and there was another one of those starved, rabid dogs that were running all over the damn town. He would have pitied them, but they were more terrifying than pitiable. They snarled sounded too deep for their thin bodies and they attacked with a viciousness their atrophied muscles shouldn't have allowed.
Further away, one of those troll-like creatures lumbered slowly behind a building with small traceried windows and disappeared from sight. Harry looked away, squinting up at the rooftops around them. All were dirty with mud and blood and who knew what else. The wind whooshed between two slim towers, carrying with it a high-pitched howl that made the dog down below bark and snarl and slaver like mad. 'Everybody's mad here, except me and Sirius. It's a damn parade of the mad and the bad and the broken.'
"I wonder what's really in these bottles everybody's keeping in their pockets," Sirius mused, having tended to his own wounds. It was a facetious question, so Harry didn't bother answering. Sirius held up the glass bottle and the red liquid within sloshed against the sides. It should probably have turned viscous by now, but perhaps whatever dark taint that was in everything in this place kept it from coagulating. Just as it kept the sun from either setting or rising, suspending it in the sky like a disk of red nailed to a wall.
"How much further?" Harry asked. He'd have asked to look at the map, but there wasn't enough light in this particular nook of the roof and casting a bluebell spell was an unnecessary risk to take.
"Through there, if I read it correctly," Sirius said, pocketing the bottle and pointing at an enormous segmented stairway ahead and to their right. It had the same ornamental stone handrails that all the stairs in this town seemed to have and was topped by more of those leering gargoyles. At the very bottom of the stairs was a limping figure with a wide-brimmed hat, stalking back and forth with a staff in one hand and a lantern in the other.
"There's one of those dead-looking giants," Harry murmured, cursing eloquently in his mind as he watched the creature move slowly down the stairs. They were huge skeletal things that loomed over every other creature around, with corpse-like skin and roughly-hewn capes draped over their shoulders. The bells they had tied around their necks made it easy to tell when they were near, at least, but avoiding them was another matter. Like all the other monstrous things, they were so aggressive that if you breathed in their direction they came charging at you.
Sirius huffed out a breath between clenched teeth. "Alright. We don't have much choice, but that doesn't mean we need to get close." He turned and waved his wand in Harry's direction and the third invigorating charm Sirius had spelled him with today put a little life back into his limbs. The rush was a familiar friend, but it was starting to make him feel sort of feverish.
'I don't really want to know how often that spell can safely be used,' Harry thought as Sirius performed the same charm on himself. What he said instead was, "We need to get a little closer, though. My aim is pretty good, but those thick handrails are in the way…"
Sirius nodded and put his hand on Harry's shoulder, squeezing reassuringly before he Apparated them to a low wall much closer to the stairs. Sirius wheezed alarmingly as they landed and Harry had to grab his arm to keep him from toppling over. He'd been Apparating them around a lot today and though Sirius hadn't said anything, Harry had a feeling that Apparating in Yharnam wasn't at all like Apparating back home. The cloying dusty air, the orange-red light from this never-ending dusk and that feeling that never got any weaker – that there was something amiss with the fabric of this world, this town, this wherever they were.
"I'll go for the giant, you take the man -" Sirius said but before Harry could voice agreement or dissent, a streak of yellow light stole his attention. It was pure instinct to throw up another Protego, his lips forming the words without conscious input from his brain. And fortunate that, because hidden behind the guardrail further up the stairs was another man. And this one had some kind of rifle in his hand.
More bullets pinged against his shield. They couldn't attack through the shield, but damn it, the giant was slowly turning around and taking notice of them. Sirius whispered in his ear to let the shield go for a second, and there wasn't much choice, because the giant was ambling their way with his bell clinking against his bony chest-
Harry let the shield go and heard the sharp whistle of a bullet passing by his ear. Then Sirius' hex punched the rifleman over the rail and into the wall on the other side of the stairway. Harry grit his teeth, gaze turning to the giant, and he turned the wand in an angled pattern high above his head. "Diffindo!"
Pale green light cut a gouge into the giant's head and made one of its empty eye sockets weep fluid. The sight made Harry's gorge rise, but he'd seen a hundred such sights in the past few hours, and so it didn't slow him down. It wasn't really a person, this creature. Not really. It was a dead hulking mass, probably infected with the plague and mindless. He definitely wasn't making up excuses for himself.
"Diffindo!" he bit out again, and another cut appeared in the giant's chest. The ribs stood out so starkly that instead of cutting through flesh, the cut bisected bone. All the bone on the left side of the giant's ribcage.
Sirius dodged staff-strikes and the pale light that emerged from the limping man's lantern, putting him down with a whip of fire. Perhaps "man" was too generous a word, for when he stumbled back, his face had the same kind of pale corpse-like features as the giant. His mouth opened and it was just a black hole without teeth or tongue, and Harry couldn't find it in himself to care that Sirius had just killed a person. He just wanted to go home. These creatures didn't even bleed when you cut them, for Merlin's sake.
With a third Diffindo, the giant finally crashed into the ground and remained there. Its giant axe tumbled from its hand and stuck into a withered tree nearby. Harry's eyes flicked back and forth up the stairs, guard still up. It looked empty now, but it probably wasn't. They'd yet to be that lucky.
They cautiously made their way up the stairs, and of course there was another pale corpse-man with a fiery scythe waiting for them further up. They took him down together; another severing charm coupled with bludgeoning hex from Sirius left the man in a heap on the steps.
In the place of gargoyles, atop the handrails there were now eerie black statues of hooded figures holding lit lamps. The light they cast was so cloudy and yellow that it didn't offer much visibility, but it was better than traversing the stairs in the dark.
And of course there were two more corpselike men waiting at the top of the stairs right in front of the doors, dressed in black robes and carrying long, wooden implements they wielded like spears. More severing charms followed and when they were also in heaps on the floor, Harry put his head in his hands and tried to catch his breath again. Sweat was trickling down his temples and cheeks and briefly he just wanted to lie down and rest, just for a little while. It was a senseless thought, of course. Maybe the repeated invigoration spells were starting to turn his brains to mush.
"You okay?" Sirius asked, his eyes seeming even more sunken-in than usual. Like they were trying to disappear into his head. He was paler than usual too, so Harry nodded as briskly as he could and tried not to let the knot twisting his insides show on his face. If they ever made it back home he was going to have nightmares for the rest of his life, but the squelching sounds of flesh being torn open and the brittle cracking of breaking bones wouldn't feature in them nearly as much as the sheer overbearing atmosphere of this place.
"Yeah, 'course. This is the Grand Cathedral, right? So we're one step closer to home!" Harry tried for a smile and was rewarded with half a grin from his godfather. 'If this Vicar is willing to answer, and if they actually do have some idea what might take us back, and if they're not as mad as everybody else here…'
The Cathedral's thick double doors were lit by two flickering torches in the hands of two other creepy statues with skinny arms and holey faces. At least the light from their torches actually lit up the area around them, casting the intricate reliefs in the door in light.
Sirius flicked his wand and the doors opened with a rattling sound. Somewhere above, bells tolled for them as they made their way in. There was a small, empty antechamber leading to yet another set of chairs. Candelabras were set out on low stone shelves along the walls but their light didn't reach the high, rib-vaulted ceiling. More holey-faced statues lined the stairs, tilting long spears over their heads as they walked slowly up the steps.
"You hear that?" Harry whispered as they ascended to the top. The hall they entered was buttressed by fat stone pillars on either side. The tiled stone floor was cracked and the whole place would have seemed abandoned if not for the enormous altar at the far end of the hall. There was a towering statue of a headless woman pouring water from a jar. Behind her, Harry spotted tree branches growing, perhaps from her back. And below her were other statues, hooded humanoids with thin arms raised in worship toward the female form above. Two dozen candles lit up the display and the light caught in the polished gold accents.
There was a woman's voice, murmuring something about thirsting for blood. Her voice was low and humming, like she was reciting to herself rather than speaking to somebody else. It took Harry a minute to spot her, because she was bent so low and small over the ground in front of the altar that she wasn't easily visible in the shadow.
"…She's speaking English, so that's something. I guess." Belying his flippant words, Sirius tilted his wand forward in the direction of the woman.
"She's dressed in white," Harry mumbled, though her clothing seemed to consist of dirty rags. He took a few more steps forward and called out to her. There was no answer, though her mumbled reciting turned into incomprehensible muttering. 'Mad, of course,' and he wasn't even surprised at that, though their one hope was unraveling in front of their eyes.
"Vicar?" Sirius called out, louder.
"…Let us pray, let us wish… to partake in communion -" She descended back into unintelligible muttering and Harry was about to call out to her again, because what else could he do, when that simmering feeling of wrongness in the pit of his stomach suddenly became overpowering. Like feeling a tsunami coming without actually seeing it. The woman bent lower to the ground and murmured, "Our thirst for blood satiates us, soothes our fear…"
"Sirius – I think we should go -" Harry said, as she began making horrible choked sounds that slowly became hoarse shrieks. "I think we should – run -" He could barely get out a word more, because there was bile on the back of his tongue and a swooping sensation in his chest - a kind crunching in his head. It felt like something was trying to squirm its way in, like something terrible was about to come down on his head and hammer him into the ground – or, or devour him – unmake him –
The woman's shrieks became an inhuman roar on her next inhale. There was the sound of bone splintering, of flesh shredding itself. A geyser of dark blood sprayed the altar and the statue above, splattering over the candles and the polished gold, as the woman began transforming into – something. Something much, much worse than the creatures they'd faced outside.
She grew larger and larger and as her feet became bird's talons, Harry took a few uncertain steps back. His face felt clammy, tongue stuck drily to the roof of his mouth. "Sirius, we've got to – we have to go now -" he got out, voice wavering and he wasn't too proud to admit his own terror. Sirius looked like he'd stopped breathing, staring vacantly at the creature the Vicar was becoming. Harry took him by the sleeve and dragged him backwards without ever taking his eyes of the monster ahead, as its roars seemed to shake the very foundations of the Cathedral. This was a different kind of beast. Whatever it was, it was much worse.
Harry threw a glance behind him and the muscles in his back jumped when he caught sight of the smoky barrier that blocked what should have been their way down the stairs. He tried a Diffindo, he tried Bombarda, he even tried Alohomora in pure desperation. The smoke let the spells pass without even swirling around them. But it wouldn't even let him pass a hand through.
"I don't think that'll work," Sirius gritted out, and his voice was unusually slow and heavy. "It feels very strong and… dark. The old kind of dark, the kind even my parents were wary of…"
So they had to fight. The monster turned around, a dog's snout wavering in the air under blindfolded eyes. From its head grew a set of dark antler behind small furry ears and it towered almost all the way up to the ceiling. As big as the basilisk, if not bigger. What had been white, tattered clothing had turned into some kind of wispy material that moved like tendrils of hair in the air, though the arms were wrapped in strips of what looked like bandages.
It – she? - struck the ground with a clawed hand bigger than a giant's and that sent a shockwave through the floor from the impact. She roared again and catapulted herself forwards in their direction, like she could see them despite her blindfold. Or perhaps she'd caught their scent.
"Ascendio!" Harry breathed as Sirius Apparated aside, and with a snap of his wand he was high up in the air. The beast roared again, swiping right with her enormous clawed hand and missing Sirius by an inch.
"Baubillious!" he shouted, still up in the air, and a streak of yellow lightning shot out of his wand and ripped into her head between her massive antlers. She shrieked again, but at least she had now lost track of Sirius, who dove behind a pillar.
Harry dropped down on the beast's back and the collision knocked the breath from his lungs. Where his palms touched her, there was something like a burning sensation. Except the burning was made of wrongness, of otherness and distracting enough that she managed to buck him from her back. Harry landed hard on the stone floor, sucking in a deep breath and hacking up bloody spittle. 'There goes a rib, I think,' he had time to think before the beastly Vicar turned on him again and he had to dodge to the side. For such a large creature, she was surprisingly quick.
Sirius flicked his wand and out came a purple light that tore a gouge into the beast's left arm. Blood leapt from her flesh, though Harry couldn't see the wound for all the raggedy bandages wrapped around her arm. Her hands came together as if in prayer, raised to her face, and then beat down so hard on the ground that it rattled with the force of it. Harry's teeth clicked together and he stumbled back a step.
"Bombarda!" It should have blown her skull apart, or at least her face, but what it did instead was punch her backwards. She staggered for a moment and Harry saw blood pool behind her blindfold. Before he could take a breath, she lashed out with a clawed hand and swiped it over the floor. Close call. Sparks cascaded over him as he dodged and caught in his shirt, like the floor was made of flint.
"Harry, move!" yelled Sirius from somewhere behind her and then great chains wrapped themselves about the beast's neck. Harry threw himself across the floor, skidding behind a pillar. There was blood in his throat and it pushed itself up over his tongue when he tried to swallow. 'No time for that now,' he thought, hand pushed against the broken rib.
The floor rumbled again as the Vicar tried to break the chains. She threw herself back and forth with such force that one of the pillars on the other side collapsed when she slammed into it. The thundering booming of stone colliding with stone hid the sound of Harry's next spell. "Confringo!" he bit out. A roaring flame erupted from his wand and bit into the beast's side. There was a terrible crunching sound as her shoulder collapsed in on itself, but she shrieked with more rage than pain.
Harry took off towards his godfather. Sirius lips were moving silently, and a jet of what looked like black water shot out the tip of his wand. It burned up the beast's back like acid, melting the hair-like filaments over her back and the flesh underneath.
"Physical attacks don't do any damage," Sirius called. The Vicar turned around and screamed in his direction. Maybe she understood human speech still. Sirius' voice wavered and Harry saw how his knee bent at an awkward angle. They had to finish this soon, but how? Their attacks weren't doing the amount of damage they should be doing. Harry pushed his own exhaustion back and snapped three Blasting Curses in quick succession at the beast's left arm. Her flesh blistered and crumpled like he'd poured boiling water on it, red and weeping liquid. Then her elbow collapsed under her, tipping her great body to the right. Her head hit the floor and she snarled in pain or anger. Harry's arms were trembling and all that really kept him going now was a fear-fueled adrenaline the likes of which he'd never experienced before. His heart pounded against his sternum from the inside.
Finally the beast righted herself, but instead of lashing out at Sirius again, she sat back on her haunches. She folded her hands together and Harry was prepared for her to beat them to the floor. Instead she was enveloped in a warm, smoky light. It glittered faintly as it rose towards the ceiling, lighting up the hall where she sat. 'That's magic,' Harry thought, eyes widening. 'No way it's anything else.'
And then he noticed that the red, skin was knitting itself back together. Her elbow righted itself. Harry sucked in a breath and wiped the sweat from his eyes. He cast Deprimo silently, though his wand-arm trembled so badly he thought he might miss her. She howled as it punched into her gut, her ribs cracking and her stomach going unnaturally concave for a brief moment.
When Harry glanced at Sirius, he was waving his wand over his leg. Bandages erupted from the tip and snaked their way around his knee. "Episkey," murmured Harry tiredly, and hoped it would be enough.
And then a clawed hand slapped him across the hall. He slammed into the wall on the other side like a ragdoll. His vision went black and then he was suddenly on the floor, coughing so hard his lungs felt like they were cramping. Blood dribbled from his mouth as he tried to catch his breath and there was a hollow ringing in his ears.
"Sirius?" Harry mumbled, his jaw aching. Sirius was on the beast's head, hanging on to her antlers, and – his left leg was gone below the knee. The stump spurted blood down the side of the beast's face. Where he and Harry had stood before, the lower half of his leg lay bleeding on the floor.
The sight forced the last dregs of energy Harry had into his legs. He stumbled up and before he had even decided on a spell, a fiery rope sprouted from his wand. He lashed it like a whip and it wrapped around the Vicar's arm like a snake. Harry saw the flame burn her, saw how it ate into her arm, but his focus was entirely on his godfather.
He threw himself forwards and by how difficult it was to breathe, Harry suspected a few more of his ribs were now broken. 'If he dies – after all this – after making it this far -' Harry realized he was crying. At least he thought he was. Maybe it was just sweat. He pointed his wand at the beast and it sang with power. Fire tore out of it, and Harry didn't even know what spell he wanted to cast, he just knew what he wanted to happen – he only knew the fear trying to choke him into freezing in place –
The flames ate at her legs, burned the bandages away and revealed first skin and then warped, ugly flesh the color of grilled salmon. "Sirius? Sirius!" Harry shouted as Sirius fell, limp and palce, to the ground. Harry lashed out with his wand again and the beast's head snapped back like she'd been punched. The fire should have gone out by now, but instead it was continuing to eat its way down up her body. She was screaming and snarling loudly enough to make the windows tremble.
'Accio Sirius!' Harry thought and Sirius came flying, blood trailing after him in a banner of red. 'He's unconscious – what do I do? What the fuck am I supposed to do?' Harry thought as he tried to put enough pressure on the bleeding stump to make it stop gushing blood. It wet his hands to his elbow and made the floor a gleaming, slippery mess. 'Episkey! Episkey! EPISKEY!' he thought and jabbed his wand at the open flesh where the leg had been ripped off. It made the bleeding slow, but did nothing to heal the wound.
Harry heaved a breath that had stuck in his throat and slashed his wand in the air. The beast shrieked when more flames came tearing through the air and enveloped her head. It wasn't proper, functional magic. It was all anger and fear and a sense of hopelessness he didn't want to admit to himself.
'He's not – He won't make it,' Harry realized and that realization squeezed his chest like an iron vice. Now he was probably definitely crying, which was stupid and useless when he had a monster to kill and an unconscious godfather to take care of. 'A dying godfather, you mean,' said a voice in his head. It sounded like Snape, cruel and taunting.
He wished Hermione was here. And Ron. Or better yet, Dumbledore. But they weren't, and he'd be damned if there was nothing he could do. 'I won't sit and watch him die -' Harry thought, though the thought didn't miraculously make him remember any other healing spells. He stilled, an idea unfurling in the midst of desperation.
Because… hadn't Sirius kept one of those bottles of blood? One of those blood concoctions that were supposed to cure anything and everything? A few days ago, Harry would never have contemplated it. Force-feeding his godfather some sort of dark blood potion wasn't the Gryffindor thing to do. 'But it is the only thing I can do,' Harry thought to himself. Maybe he was making excuses for himself. Sirius might prefer dying over being saved by 'blood ministration', as Gilbert had called it. But if so, he could rage at Harry later.
The realization that Sirius was dying and what he had to do to save him had only taken a few seconds. The thoughts zipped past so quickly that he should probably have stopped to reconsider it before making the choice. He should have considered carefully the blood's addictive qualities, and what Gilbert had said about how it caused the plague. But he wasn't planning on doing this more than once. And just once couldn't cause much harm, could it? Could it?
Harry dug into his godfather's trouser pocket and his hand clenched around the small glass bottle therein. The smell of the liquid inside was so pungent that Harry nearly choked. He put the mouth of the bottle to Sirius lips anyway, not allowing himself to hesitate, and tipped the liquid into his godfather's slack mouth. The floor was starting to rumble again and Harry's shoulders tensed.
They had to move.
Sirius was much lighter than Harry had expected, though he'd known his godfather was underweight. 'How much does one leg weigh, anyway?' Harry thought irrelevantly, and wondered if the effects of long-term adrenaline highs included the urge to giggle inappropriately.
"Harry?" Sirius murmured, but Harry had to turn around and meet the oncoming claw. He threw up a shield that she sharpened her claws against, rumbling and snapping with her fangs. He dropped it and spelled more fire at her. He tried to make short work of her, but the strength of desperation had faded with his godfather's awakening, and his exhaustion was making his limbs move as though they were shackled to anvils. He whipped fire and threw blasting curses and she was weakening, but he might not last until she was weak enough to kill.
A curse whizzed past from behind him and hit her snout. Harry glanced back to see Sirius slumped against the pillar, wand-arm up. His godfather smiled half-heartedly and gestured at the healed stump. Fresh skin had grown over the bloodied mess. 'Thank Merlin,' Harry thought. This was it. The last strength either of them had to offer.
The wrongness the beast had brought with her was nearly gone, the air almost cleared of its scentless stench, and her bony chest was heaving low against the ground. Her enormous body was splattered with so much blood that the bandages were more red than white.
She roared when she finally went down. Harry slammed her back against the altar with another blasting curse and she wobbled in place before tipping forward to land heavily on her hands. She lifted her head for a moment, and it seemed to Harry like she was looking straight at him through her blindfold. Then she toppled over, her snout meeting the floor with a heavy thump. Her body fell a second later, careening into the ground with a sound loud enough to pass for an explosion.
And then her whole beast's body, the size of a basilisk, disappeared in a shower of blood. There one second and gone the next. Only a scattered pool of red remained, soaking into the stone floor and filling the air with a rusty odor.
Harry stared at the blood for a moment, wobbling in place. Did that mean she was dead? None of the creatures outside disappeared when you killed them. But the oppressive wrongness was gone and that had to be a sign of her demise or departure. He turned back to his godfather, relieved and shaky. In a heartbeat, the adrenaline washed out of his body and he promptly collapsed on the floor.
His last thought before unconsciousness claimed him was that they'd killed a goddamn demon.
A/N: I don't even enjoy writing this kind of drawn-out action scene, so what am I doing dedicating half a chapter to it? Ah, well. It had to be there for the changing of the moon.