Elias discovered the switch deep inside Bradley O'Donahue's sock drawer, his arm stuck in the dresser up to the shoulder. Curious, he pushed it. He heard a clunk from across the bedroom, peered across the shadows and moonlight: a panel had sunken into the wall.

He was doing what he always did in targets' houses while he waited for the targets to show: poking around, looking for spare cash or coke. If he didn't find any of these, he usually found something worth pawning, or a cute trinket to stack on top of his bookshelf. Today, had he found a wall safe? An armory? A sex dungeon?

He extracted his arm from the dresser and crossed the room. Pushed the panel further in and discovered it slid upward, revealing a low narrow doorway. A cot. A water pitcher and a small toilet. A long chain dangling from a ring in the ceiling. In the darkness, a little brown girl, ten years old or so, sitting up on the cot and staring at him.

Sex dungeon.

Elias's heart raced and he struggled to slow it: he wasn't alone. Never was, these days. It's nothing, nothing, he thought at the dark in the back of his thoughts, and from that darkness, he heard...nothing. Good.

There was a special place in Elias's heart for pedophiles: they ruined what should have been guaranteed virgin sacrifices. This kid staring at him was worth about as much on the altar as his damn target—probably less, accounting for body weight. And he could never really know his sacrifice was a bust until Asmodeus showed up, laughed in his face, punched him across the room, and stole twenty years off his lifespan to teach him a lesson in quality control. Elias hated pedophiles.

He could still have fun with this kid though.

He closed the panel behind him halfway, jamming a pen into the gap to keep it from latching. The room was full-black now. The girl was silent—well-trained. Elias shushed her anyway, felt for the ring in the ceiling, followed the chain down to the cuff on her wrist. He picked her up under the shoulders. She was bony. Not much fight to her. She whimpered as he pressed her against the wall and wrapped one hand around her throat. Placed the other over her heart.

He wanted to feel this. Ever since the spirit had invaded his body, he hadn't done this successfully once—he wanted to feel her lungs heaving and her heart racing and her limbs thrashing until everything slowed, slowed, stopped. Maybe, since she was so small, he could control the situation, it wouldn't spin into a fight, and he could do it without spilling a drop of her blood...it was worth a try. He was desperate for a death, not for money, not self-defense, not because his buddy Yegor was breathing down his neck, but just for him alone to enjoy. He squeezed. The child scratched at him, so he leaned against the wall, pinning her arms—

Something bit him on the ankle. He kicked out by reflex, still throttling the girl with one hand, and he heard a clang, a rattle of chains. There was another kid in here. He'd kicked them, knocked them into something hard. He reached up with his free hand, feeling along the ceiling for a second chain, heard a sniffling and a sob from over by the toilet.

His eyes felt dry. He blinked hard, and his eyelids dragged over them.

Nothing, it's nothing! he insisted to the darkness, but the dark was stirring. His bones ached, his mouth went dry, and the darkness snarled, drowning out his mind, Innocent blood.

Fuck, Elias managed as his last coherent thought, before his flesh caught fire and boiled away alive, and he fell down, down, down into a deep silent hole inside himself.

The spirit's fire lit the space, revealing two sobbing, chained children. He yanked his bony hand away from the throat of one child, and she took a hoarse sobbing breath and scuttled to the corner away from him, as far as her chain allowed. The other one, crouched by the toilet, pressed one hand to a bleeding wound on her head and screamed at him. In her eyes, her sins blazed back at him like his own reflection, and he saw the worst things she had ever done: killed a young chicken by accident and hidden it under a slab of concrete. Kicked her mother during a tantrum. Falsely accused a classmate of striking her. A child's sins. Someone had put a child in this hell of chains, and—and—

For a moment it was his own brother staring back at him, screaming, as he himself lay bleeding on the floor of his family's earthen house and the stinking men in white metal armor raised their shining spears. The longer he was dead, the harder it was to remember what his brother had looked like. Now he saw him everywhere, and the fever of vengeance that fueled him since that last terrible day, burned hot for these children as well.

He followed the chains to the children's wrists, hating the way they screamed and fought to get away from him. He wanted to tell them they were safe now, that he would never harm them, never ever, but they were not safe, life was not safe, and he was not his host. His host had been halfway to killing them. And with his host stuffed down so deep inside their mind right now, he had no words in their language. He broke their chains with his burning fists and let them out of the little room. Herded them, strolling slow and furious, through the house and out the door, into the night. He was less fit for the human world with every century; he did not know what safety for these children would look like, except that they should run far away from him and this terrible house.

He turned his back on the door and stood in the foyer, fists clenched, silent, until he was confident the children were hidden from his host. Then he focused his thoughts and attempted contact. What is this?

The host pushed at him, irritable. Paid gig. Money, always money motivated him. That, and drugs.

The spirit ground his host's teeth, snorted flame. So it's murder. Who did you murder?

No one yet. The host's tone grew sly. But the guy who kept those kids chained up, he's the one I'm actually here for. Why don't you let me back out? I'll punish him for you. He sees your flaming skull, he'll go running in the opposite direction, and then I'll be broke. I'll have to take more jobs. More nannying for you.

You were about to kill a child. The spirit snarled wordlessly, spun on his heel and gazed at his host's fleshless skull in the dark glass panels of the front door. What kind of monster are you?

A bored one. Put the fire out, or you won't get to put the stare on O'Donahue. You know you want to.

The spirit did want to put the stare on O'Donahue, but not as much as he wanted to put the stare on his host. He shifted through the shadows, right up to the door, and stared into his host's eyesockets as he had done so many times before to no effect. He hated this host. He hated that his bloodline had somehow produced him. He returned to O'Donahue's bedroom and locked himself into the little cupboard where the children had lived in torment, and stood, his flames lighting the darkness, listening. The scent of innocent blood filled the tiny room, not just the fresh blood from where his host had bashed the girl's head against the toilet, but layers and layers, in the mattress and on the floor, and not just these two children. Years of terror and suffering. If the men in the plate armor had spared his brother's life, perhaps they would have inflicted this on him instead. The spirit trembled as he crouched beneath the low ceiling. His flames crisped his host's bones as he waited. Waiting was against his nature, but he did it anyway. For the girls.

Like his host, he would do whatever it took to seize his prey.

He heard the snappy rumble of an expensive car, the rattle of a garage door rolling open.

He heard a door opening, just inside the room, and before he knew what was happening he'd charged through the wall—not the sliding panel, through the wall itself, flinging concrete panels and bits of lumber at the startled rapist who'd entered the room in socks and slacks. The rapist gazed back at him in confusion, his mouth dropping open stupidly, and the spirit called on his host to join him. This is vengeance. You understand? Vengeance?

I'm not an idiot, Bones, his host snarled back, and the spirit let him up to join him, no longer afraid of being stuffed down and made party to Elias's atrocities. They tackled Bradley O'Donahue, straddled his chest, and rained hot, sledge-hammer punches on his chest and face. In that moment, host and spirit were one, welded together with their hatred, and O'Donahue was the man in the plate armor who had killed the spirit's family, he was Elias's old jefe who'd kicked him out of La Eme, he was the expatriate Nazi the spirit had hunted in Argentina, he was every person who had ever wronged them or wronged an innocent. They poured out their fury on his mortal body. One of them—the spirit couldn't tell who had thought of it first—reached back, burned one hand through O'Donahue's wool slacks, and ripped off his genitals. He wasn't even screaming, could barely move, hardly breathe. They'd come at him too fast for him to start to understand that he was being attacked. His eyes were bulging. The host raised two fingers. Not his eyes, leave his eyes! The spirit fought for control. I need his eyes. I need him to suffer. Don't you dare gouge out his eyes!

The host stabbed down, and the spirit managed to divert the thrust lower, into his mouth. They ripped his tongue out. Don't fucking tell me what to do.

The spirit realized he was rapidly losing control of his host body and therefore running out of time. He seized the rapist by the jaw and the back of his head, gritted his teeth against what he was about to see, and met his miserable stare.

In his five hundred years wandering the earth as a conduit of vengeance, the spirit had seen the sins of thousands of human souls. Perhaps if he still had a human mind, he would have become numb to the horror, hating all the human race for the endless selfish banalities they inflicted upon one-another, but he did not have a human mind. He experienced all sin fresh, in all its variety, and he never lost faith in human beings and their capacity for goodness and innocence, so the horrors they committed instead shocked him over and over again. All that changed was the heat of his rage, greater year by year. Bradley O'Donahue baffled and appalled him. He saw all the rapes and meanness and murder and torture O'Donahue had committed in his forty-two years on earth, and he made himself a mirror, inverted it all, shoved it deep into the man's soft wet mortal brain.

It had been so easy for this man to hurt a child: a minute, ten minutes. It was even easier for a spirit of vengeance to fill him with all the pain and shame and terror and hatred and loneliness that would poison that child for the rest of their life, every child he'd hurt, and those less innocent besides. Just as water flowed downhill, so vengeance sought out a perpetrator. This was the spirit's purpose that bound him to this earth. Hurting people.

He barely managed to finish when his host won the fight to control the body. Snuffed him out into the dark and quiet.

Elias swayed forward and caught himself on one hand. Patrick O'Donahue moaned continually, the vibrations from his chest traveling up his thighs where he sat on him. His face was a mess of blood, swelling rapidly, eyes bulging and staring as his head tossed back and forth. Elias squeezed his legs together and felt something grinding between his thighs: he was sitting right on his target's broken ribs. He laughed harsly. Beyond saving his life, and those moments when he got to come up and share the power the spirit brought, sometimes the spirit gave him gifts like this. Warmth and blood and a dying heart pounding away beneath his body. He patted O'Donahue's face, hard, right over the collapsed cheekbone.

O'Donahue just turned his head aside, eyes unseeing. He didn't even seem to feel Elias's hand on his face or his thigh crushing his chest, locked away in a hell inside his head the spirit had constructed for him. “Come on,” Elias ground out. He picked O'Donahue up by the shoulders and shook him. His head lolled and he whimpered. “Look at me.”

Nothing. Elias stared down at the spirit's victim in disgust. Some gift.

He reached for his gun, changed his mind, got his knife. He stroked O'Donahue's face with it, opening deep red-and-yellow grooves of blood and fat. He stroked down his neck, avoiding the important bits. Cut open his shirt, turned on the light to appreciate the dark red bruises starting to bloom under his pale skin. O’Donahue just lay there, occasionally moaning at something Elias hadn’t done, the unending horror-show inside his head. Elias couldn’t touch him in any way that mattered.

“Fuck it,” Elias said at last, and stabbed O'Donahue through the heart. Slid the knife sideways between the ribs a few inches, opened up a gap, and shoved his fingers deep, deep until he could feel, down in the wet dark, the tireless red muscle throbbing away, clench-clench-clench until at last it stopped. O'Donahue's bladder and bowels let go, and the body tensed up and arched underneath him. Good. Good, good, good. This is all you're going to get for the foreseeable, remember this. Elias clung to the moment. Leaned down and rested his forehead against the corpse's. Mine.

When the corpse's shivers died down, Elias shoved himself to his feet and went to O'Donahue's master bathroom to tidy up. There was blood all over his hands and shirtsleeves, of course, and his face. He took off his shirt and sport coat, rinsed and wrung out his sleeves—black, of course—mopped up his face, and pissed on O'Donahue's stack of magazines next to the toilet. Dressed again, wet down his hair and combed it in the mirror.

He met his eyes and felt a stab of hatred that had to be from the spirit. Back already. It was getting harder to keep it shoved down.

He scowled back at his reflection. Fuck off, you had your fun.

It's not about fun.

Hey, for me, this is just a job. What's your excuse? His hair looked fantastic. He riffled through O'Donahue's toiletry drawers and noticed a bottle of Gucci cologne, stuck it in his pocket. Then, finally! A dime-bag of white powder. He sprinkled a tiny pile onto the web between his thumb and index finger and inhaled it in a practiced motion, stuck the rest of the baggie alongside the cologne bottle. The taste of O’Donahue’s coke...Elias wrinkled his nose. The man wasn’t a connoisseur by any means. Probably ten percent pure, if that.

“Buenas noches, pinche rapta-niños,” Elias sneered as he left the bathroom, staring down at the wreck of human meat on the floor. If he’d been thinking, he could have cut his heart out intact. O’Donahue would have held still for it. Demons liked a heart thrown their way now and again. Like women and chocolate. Oh, well. There would be others. His boss Yegor was edging toward a full-scale turf war with the Irish lately, and that suited Elias fine.

The spirit grabbed his chest with a hot shock and Elias grunted. Did you kill him?

“Use my fucking eyes.” Elias staggered against the wall. “I need. The money.”

You spend all your money on cocaine. That grows on trees. Trees! You useless animal, he was suffering and you stopped it. The spirit burned hotter, just hurting him, not yet taking him over. Elias tasted blood and charcoal on his breath. You stopped his suffering. You released him from his penance, for your own selfish wants! He’s not in pain! He’s not suffering! The spirit’s inner voice rose to a howl. Bring him back! Bring him back! He needs to pay for what he did!

Elias’s body combusted for the second time that night, and the spirit screamed into O’Donahue’s dark bedroom. Fire rose from its host’s body and hands, consuming the walls as he punched and tore at the house until he and the mansion were one creature of flame, and the corpse and the terrible room were utterly consumed.

The spirit paced through the smoking cinders of the burned house, kicking half-consumed timber out of its way as sirens shrilled in the distant night. He felt his host sulking deep in the silent black inside himself: the innocent were safe from him, but only temporarily. The spirit wasn’t strong enough to control him. Tonight, with the girls, had been too close. He had had many hosts, some of whom he’d loved, some of whom he’d hated. None had been like Elias Reyes.

Killing was not in his nature as a spirit of vengeance, but once he had been a human being. He knew that if the man in the plate armor had not stabbed him first, he would have killed to protect his brother. His memory of his human life was fading, but that just meant he saw his brother in every innocent face. It was his human nature that forced him closer and closer to an easy, dreadful resolution.

He had saved his host from death, but his host was a devious, unrepentant killer of innocents, and the spirit could not prevent him from killing again.

He would find a way to kill his own host.