The rain had stopped, but the ground was still wet, black earth laying low in the gutters. The town smelled of iron and old leaves; everything felt softer and more dangerous at dusk. Gabriel moved like a shadow, hoodie up, breath clouding in quick bursts. He'd told himself he was going to the library to cross-check another name. He'd told himself a lot of things he didn't mean.
He met Ryan beside the rusted bus shelter at the edge of town. Ryan stubbed out a cigarette, fingers white around it. There was no pretense of casual in Ryan's face tonight—only a raw, impatient fear.
"You sure about this?" Ryan asked. The flashlight in Gabriel's hand looked tiny under the sky.
Gabriel nodded. "Lockers, storage, the janitor's room—there was a symbol carved in the floorboards. And scratchings on the gate. Someone put a flyer in my bag this morning. Same mark."
Ryan flinched like the word "mark" had a pulse. "So we walk into a creepy chapel on a hill 'cause some kid pressed paper into your book? Brilliant plan, Gabe."
Gabriel shouldered up the hill. He'd read a dozen excuses in the papers, a dozen bureaucratic statements from the police—"no leads," "under investigation," "no sign of foul play." He didn't trust paper. He trusted the floorboards that had spoken to him with carving and ash. He trusted the way Gemma's handwriting had slid into his life like a blade. He trusted the sound of Ryan's boots crunching behind him.
The chapel was half-ruin and half-memory: a low stone shape swallowed by ivy, the cross toppled, one stained-glass window cracked like a sleeping eye. The door hung open on one hinge, the timbers black with damp.
They pushed inside together. The smell hit them first—wax and mildew and something copper-sweet, like old coins left in a wound. The beam from Gabriel's torch caught the altar, and for a second both of them froze.
Candles. Burned low and black, wax pooled like dried blood. Symbols—familiar—they'd seen variants of these in lockers, slapped across the fence, smudged on classroom walls—were etched into the stone floor in a ragged circle. Someone had drawn them with care and hatred in equal measure.
Ryan swallowed. "Who would—"
Gabriel's light skimmed the altar and caught paper tucked beneath a slab: a photograph, edges curled, the emulsion gone dull with time. He knelt and, with a trembling hand, lifted it free.
The photo was a Polaroid, the kind you found in old boxes—kids in a sun back year, laughing faces half-blurred, a picnic scene that should have been warm. But the center of the image was a group of four children clustered around something small and white: a girl with a fringe, everyone else bent toward her like moths. Gabriel's finger brushed a name written on the back—the handwriting small and cramped: "Gemma."
His breath stopped cold.
"You sure?" Ryan's whisper scraped like gravel.
Gabriel didn't answer. His eyes tracked to the corner of the photo, where, half erased by time and stain, another face leaned in—an adult woman with hair pulled back, her profile striking, jaw small and set. It wasn't a face Gabriel recognized at first. But something about the mouth—the thin lines, the way her eyes slanted—reminded him of Aveline. A chill spread through him that was not entirely because of the cold.
"Wait," Ryan said. He shuffled forward, peering closer. "Give me that."
He lifted the Polaroid as if it might combust. Then he swore under his breath. "That's not right. Nobody should have this."
On the altar, tucked beneath the Candles, Gabriel found more. A child's bracelet—tiny beads, one bead cracked—dusted with ash. A strip of fabric with a school logo half visible. A single letter stitched into the cloth: Z.
Zoë's initial.
Gabriel's stomach turned with the sudden, stupid hope that turned hot as iron. "Zoë?"
"Don't. Don't say it," Ryan hissed. His voice held a scolding edge that sounded like grief in natural light.
They stepped back from the altar and the beam of the torch snagged on something farther in the dark: scratches along the back wall, writing scraped into the mortar, raw and wet from whatever hands had carved them. Gabriel edged closer, squinting.
Latin. The same phrases—the same rhythm they had been reading in the halls but rougher, urgent:
NON VOX SED UMBRAE DOCENT.
SILENTIUM EST MORS.
"Not voice but shadows teach," Gabriel read aloud, translating under his breath. "Silence is death." The words felt heavier when spoken in that chapel, pressed into stone. The letters had been carved by someone who'd believed in permanence.
A sound—too deliberate to be the wind—cut across their small circle of light: the crunch of gravel outside, the muffled hiss of tires over wet road. Footsteps. Not coming from the path they'd taken up. A vehicle slowing, idling.
Gabriel flattened himself against the pew, heart thudding in his ears. Ryan shoved into the alcove beside him, breath quick, shoulders up by his ears.
"Hide," Gabriel mouthed, because he couldn't think of a better plan.
They slid behind the broken organ, pressing into the shadow where the wood smelled of mold and memory. The chapel swallowed their shapes; their breathing became the only small, dangerous sound.
The main door creaked. Someone entered. Not many people had keys to an abandoned chapel—none of the obvious ones did. The torchlight outside slashed across the window, making a moving rectangle of gold across the cracked glass. A silhouette filled the doorway—a person, tall and steady. The beam of a phone washed inside in the hand that held it, flashlight on, as if searching, and then the light settled on the altar, passing over the carved symbols and the Polaroid, and lingering there with an attention that made Gabriel's jaw ache.
He recognized the shoulders before he registered anything else—broad and unbent, the coat long and dark. The figure moved slowly, not like someone looking for vandalism but like someone returning to a familiar room. A voice, low, cut the air—no, a whisper carried on wet stone. It was so calm it made Gabriel's skin prickle.
"It is not yet finished," the voice said. A man? A woman? The silhouette paused, and Gabriel's breath stalled. The voice cut the words in English, precise, with a clipped accent that had none of the town's sleep in it. "They always forget the last line."
A small, sudden sound: the figure reached for something on the belt. Flashlight lifted to reveal—white hair, shock pale in that small beam. The same hair Gabriel had glimpsed in the janitor's room, in his nightmares at the edge of the stairwell. The white hair shone like old bone.
Gabriel's hand found Ryan's, squeezing hard. Ryan's eyes were wide, pupils blown black. Neither made a sound.
The figure moved to the altar as if guided by memory. His—or her—gloved fingers trailed across the symbols, and Gabriel watched the ghostly hand flatten and smooth the etched letters, as if trying to read them again.
Then, without turning, the figure spoke into the dark, not at them but into some reverie, "She remembers too much. Soon the others will know."
A shiver ran down Gabriel's spine. The voice didn't glide like menace; it barely trembled, a simple fact stating itself. Familiar. Final.
Footsteps retreated. The car's engine returned to life—a rumble, like an animal pushing up from sleep. The figure left as quietly as it had come, and the chapel door sighed shut.
Gabriel exhaled in a sound that might have been a sob. Ryan's fingers left a bruise on his own hand where he'd been gripping.
"Who—" Gabriel began, throat raw
Gabriel pushed himself up, knees stiff. He'd wanted answers—something solid to hand his father, something to banish Lucy's panic. Instead he carried a Polaroid with all four of them grinning in sunlight and a bead that belonged to Zoë and the sound of that voice.
They didn't leave at once. Before they slipped out into the night, Gabriel bent over the altar and ran his fingers across the carved words. One groove felt different under his fingertips—a brittle edge that, when brushed, left a smear of something dark.
He touched the smear with the pad of his thumb and brought it to his lips without thinking. Iron. Blood? Old, yes, but not entirely gone.
"Run?" Ryan's whisper was a complaint the world had become too small to hold.
Gabriel hugged the Polaroid tight and stuffed the bracelet into his pocket. The town below rounded the bend on its way to sleep, and the chapel swallowed their retreating lights like hunger.
At the foot of the hill, under the orange spill of a streetlamp, return headlights washed over a face coming out of the car—a woman in a long coat, hair dark, posture exacting. She walked not to the chapel door but toward the road, eyes scanning the path as if checking that the night was still night.
She didn't look up at the hill. She didn't need to. Her hand brushed something at her throat—an injury or a charm—and she spoke into the dark as if reading from a list.
"Tonight," she said, voice even, "we take another piece back. Prepare the others."
A car door slammed. The vehicle nosed forward and vanished into mist. The road settled.
Gabriel and Ryan crouched there until the silence was not silence but a pressure. When they finally moved, their steps were careful and small.
They did not speak of what they had seen while they walked home, but the Polaroid in Gabriel's pocket burned like a new brand. In it, not just Gemma's childhood all four of them grin looked innocent and terrible.
At the Moore house, lights were still on. Inside, Lucy paced and George brooded, but the house felt different to Gabriel now—less as a refuge than as a stage.