The kid came out of the shadows behind the grain silo swinging a machete.
Petrillo caught the blade on his forearm guard and felt the impact all the way to his teeth. The kid was maybe nineteen, thin as a fence post, with the kind of wild-eyed conviction that turned skinny arms into something dangerous. He swung again, a looping overhead strike that would have opened Petrillo's skull if it connected. Petrillo deflected the second strike with the reinforced edge of his left bracer, stepped inside the arc before the kid could reset, and wrapped him up in a bear hug that pinned both arms to his sides.
The kid bit him.
Not a glancing bite, not a panicked snap. The kid sank his teeth into Petrillo's left forearm, through the heavy canvas sleeve of his jacket, through the compression shirt underneath, and into the meat of the muscle with the deliberate, grinding pressure of someone who meant it. Petrillo felt the teeth break skin. Felt the hot wetness of his own blood pooling under the fabric. The kid's jaw clamped and held, eyes staring up at Petrillo from two inches away with a fury that had nothing to do with combat training and everything to do with belief.
"Cazzo!" Petrillo slammed the kid face-first into the packed earth. Not gentle. Not controlled. The takedown drove the kid's nose into the dirt with a crunch of cartilage that Petrillo felt through his arms. Blood sprayed across the ground, bright red against brown soil, and the kid's jaw finally released. He thrashed. Petrillo pinned him with a knee between the shoulder blades, wrenched his arms back, zip-tied his wrists with the practiced efficiency that Dominick had drilled into him on a mountainside three years and a lifetime ago.
He hauled the kid up and sat him against the silo wall. The kid's nose was shattered. A flap of skin hung below his right nostril, and blood ran in a steady stream down his chin and onto his shirt, soaking the collar dark. Petrillo had done that. Not a demon. Not a supernatural entity with sulfur in its veins and darkness where its soul should be. Just a twenty-two-year-old Italian man slamming a teenager into the dirt hard enough to break something that wouldn't heal straight.
The bite on his forearm throbbed with every heartbeat. He pulled back his sleeve. The impression of the kid's teeth was visible in the muscle, a semicircle of puncture wounds already swelling purple. Blood welled from the deepest marks and ran down his wrist to his fingers.
He wiped the blood on his pants and said nothing.
***
Forty minutes earlier, the assault had been clean.
Haatim's voice had come through the radio with the operational cadence Petrillo was still getting used to: the precise, slightly formal tone of a man who treated warfare like an academic paper with live ammunition. "East team moves on my mark."
Arthur had been beside him in the tall grass at the eastern fence line, breathing in the controlled rhythm of a man conserving energy the way a miser conserves coins. Arthur was always conserving energy now. Something in his left hip didn't work right since Hell. Something in his right knee ground when he pivoted. And something in his right shoulder made a sound like wet paper tearing when he raised his arm above his head. He didn't talk about any of it. He compensated with the tactical precision of a man who had decades of experience in using his mind to make up for what his body could no longer deliver.
"Stay behind me on the approach," Petrillo had said. He'd been saying it for weeks and Arthur had been ignoring it for weeks and they both knew how this worked.
"Stay on my left flank and cover the angle from the house," Arthur replied. Which was not agreement. Which was Arthur redirecting the conversation to tactics because tactics were the language he spoke fluently and personal concern was a dialect he'd never learned.
The mark came. They moved.
Petrillo vaulted the fence and hit the ground running. The dewy grass soaked through his boots immediately. The air smelled like morning and underneath it, faintly, sulfur. The wrongness of the site registered in his body before his mind caught up: a heaviness in his limbs, a pressure behind his eyes, the feeling of walking into a room where something had died recently and the scent hadn't quite been cleaned.
The first contact was the eastern patrol: two men with handguns and the rigid posture of people who'd had enough combat training to be dangerous and not enough to be calm about it. Their movements were sharp, adrenaline-driven, the kind of jerky efficiency that Dominick had taught Petrillo to read as partially trained, committed, scared.
Petrillo closed the distance while Arthur drew their attention, appearing at the fence line with the unhurried authority of a man who'd been walking into hostile situations since before these sentries were born. Arthur moved slowly, deliberately visible, his posture radiating the kind of lethal competence that made trained fighters hesitate. The patrol hesitated. That was enough.
The first cultist turned toward Arthur, presenting his flank. Petrillo hit him from the side, a lateral tackle that drove the man off his feet and into the tall grass with a grunt that emptied his lungs. Control the weapon hand. Strip the gun. Joint lock on the right arm, pressure until resistance stops. Zip-tie. Dominick's voice in his head, steady and warm, patient as a man teaching a child to tie shoes: Control the weapon first, Marco. Everything else is cleanup.
The second cultist fired once. The shot cracked over Arthur's head, close enough that Petrillo saw Arthur's hair move. Arthur didn't flinch. Didn't duck. He moved left, low, with the economy of motion that defined him, and the cultist tracked the movement, which meant the cultist wasn't watching his six. Petrillo came in from behind. He stripped the gun, hooked the man's ankle, and put him on the ground with an arm bar that Dominick had taught him in a Philadelphia gym that smelled like sweat and floor wax and the boxing gloves that hung from the ceiling like leather fruit.
Two down. Fast. Non-lethal. Haatim's word. These were humans, not demons. The possessed would be identified and dealt with separately by Niccolo's prayers and Haatim's Gift. The unpossessed were prisoners.
Non-lethal was harder than lethal. Dominick had told him that once, matter-of-fact, over terrible coffee in a motel that charged by the hour: "Killing is efficient. Capturing is work. But we don't get to take the efficient option with human beings, Marco. That's what separates us from the things we fight."
***
The barn was where things changed.
The interior was dim, lit by candles that burned with blue flames and cast shadows that moved independently of the light source. The ritual circle dominated the floor. Two cultists were inside: one kneeling, inscribing symbols in the earth with a tool that Petrillo recognized with a lurch of his stomach as a bone stylus, sharpened to a point and dark with use. The other stood near the east wall with a weapon Petrillo didn't immediately recognize, a short staff of dark wood with metal fittings that pulsed with a faint, ugly glow.
Dark-blessed. Inverted prayers made into weapons. Haatim had briefed them on the theoretical possibility. Theory and the thing in front of you were different animals. The staff's glow made Petrillo's skin crawl. It looked like light that was somehow wrong, photons traveling in the wrong direction, illuminating the darkness instead of dispelling it.
Arthur entered behind Petrillo and read the room in the time it took Petrillo to blink. "The one with the staff. He's the priority threat. The kneeling one is focused on the inscription. Move to the staff-bearer first, fast, before he can activate it fully."
Petrillo moved. The staff-bearer saw him coming and raised the weapon. The dark blessing activated.
Something that felt like cold static washed over Petrillo's skin. It started at his sternum and radiated outward, making his lungs feel heavy and his vision darken at the edges. The pressure was intimate and invasive, like cold fingers pressing against the inside of his ribs. His steps slowed. His muscles resisted movement as though the air had thickened to the consistency of water. Dark blessing. The inverted prayer manifesting as physical suppression. The sensation was nothing like a demon's presence, which burned with sulfur and wrongness. This was human-made darkness, crafted and channeled, and it felt deliberate in a way that made it worse.
He pushed through it. The rosary against his chest was warm. Not supernaturally warm, just body heat, but he felt it like a counterweight. Two steps. Three. The cold deepened, and his fingers tingled so badly he wasn't sure he could grip. Then he was inside the staff's effective range and his hands were on the weapon, stripping it from the cultist's grip with the wrist rotation Dominick had made him practice four hundred times until the movement was as automatic as breathing.
The cold evaporated the moment the staff left the cultist's hands. Like a switch. One second drowning, the next standing in the barn breathing hay-scented air.
The takedown was messy. The cultist fought back with desperate strength that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with the total commitment of a person defending something sacred. He clawed at Petrillo's face. Petrillo caught a fingernail across his cheek, felt the bright sting and the warmth of blood, took an elbow to the ribs that would bruise deep, and finished the restraint with a hip throw that put the cultist on the ground hard enough to knock the wind out of him. Zip-tied. Done.
The kneeling cultist, the woman with the bone stylus, didn't resist. She looked up from her inscription work with eyes that were blank with terror. Not terror of Petrillo. Terror of what the disruption would mean. The blue-flamed candles were guttering around her. The symbols she'd been inscribing were already fading, the dark energy that animated them draining away as Niccolo's prayers dismantled the ward structure outside.
She was crying. Tears cutting tracks through the dust on her face. She held her hands out for the zip-ties like a child offering wrists for handcuffs, compliant and shattered.
"Please," she whispered. "You don't know what you're stopping."
Petrillo tied her wrists. He didn't answer. He didn't have an answer that wouldn't sound hollow in a barn full of shattered ritual stones and a woman crying over the end of her world.
***
The kid behind the silo was one of three who'd been positioned around the outbuildings. The second was a woman in her thirties who'd tried to flank the barn during the breach and been intercepted by one of Frieda's allied Hunters. The third had run into the tree line. Emma tracked him through the overwatch scope and reported his direction to the perimeter team.
But the kid. The kid was the one who stayed.
He sat against the silo wall with blood running from his destroyed nose and Petrillo's blood on his teeth. His eyes were wild and certain. Not the flickering pupils of possession, not the stuttering darkness of demonic markers. This was a human being who had bitten another human being out of conviction.
"You can't stop it." The kid's voice was nasal and thick from the broken nose, but steady. Clear. The clarity of absolute belief. "The Ninth Gate ends the suffering. Everything. All the demons, all the pain. It ends when He comes through."
Petrillo crouched in front of him. The bite throbbed. He could feel the warmth of his own blood seeping through his sleeve, running along his forearm in a line that tickled and itched. The kid was looking at him with an expression that Petrillo had seen on Niccolo's face during prayer: total certainty. The unshakeable belief that the world operated according to rules that justified everything, even pain, even violence, even a nineteen-year-old with a machete and bloody teeth.
"He comes through and purifies," the kid continued. Blood dripped from his chin and made a pattern on his shirt that looked accidental and inevitable. "Mal'akheth is older than all of it. Older than the demons. Older than the corruption. When He manifests fully, every lesser entity burns away. The Gate closes because its purpose is fulfilled. The suffering ends."
Petrillo said nothing. He thought of Dominick, years ago, after a particularly bad encounter with a possessed man in a Philadelphia suburb who'd been an accountant before the demon found him. They'd sat in the truck afterward, Dominick's hands bloody, the accountant's body in the back seat waiting for disposal. "They're already gone, Marco," Dominick had said, gentle and firm and sad. "The host is consumed. What you're fighting is wearing their face, not being their face. The mercy is in the killing, because the killing ends something that was no longer human."
But these cultists weren't possessed. They had no demons inside them, no darkness wearing their faces. They'd chosen this with their own minds, their own faith, their own desperate logic. They fought for an entity that would consume the world because they believed the consumption was salvation. And the problem, the weight that settled on Petrillo's chest like a stone, was that the logic wasn't insane. The world was drowning in demons. People were suffering. The crisis was real and getting worse. The cult just had a different answer.
A catastrophically wrong answer. But an answer that came from looking at the same problem and reaching a different conclusion.
He wiped the bite on his forearm against his pants. The blood soaked through and left a dark smear on the fabric.
"Sit tight," he said. His voice came out rougher than he intended.
The kid looked at him with eyes that held no malice. Conviction without cruelty. Faith without mercy. Petrillo had faced demons who were easier to understand than this thin kid with a broken nose and someone else's blood on his teeth.
***
Arthur was sitting on a bale of hay outside the barn, his left arm hanging loose at his side. Something had popped in his shoulder during the breach. Petrillo had heard it: a wet, grinding sound that belonged in a body decades older than Arthur's years. Except Hell had aged Arthur in ways that didn't show on the surface. The stiffness. The grinding joints. The way his right shoulder sat lower than his left after any exertion, like something inside had slipped its track and was sitting in the wrong groove.
"Let me look at that," Petrillo said.
"It's fine."
"It made a noise, Arthur. Like something tearing."
Arthur looked at him. The look said don't press this with the volume of a shout and the control of a man who had never once in his life raised his voice at someone he respected. Petrillo pressed it anyway, because Dominick had taught him that stubbornness was a survival skill and because watching Arthur pretend his body wasn't failing was something Petrillo couldn't do with a straight face.
"It dislocated once during the last site survey," Arthur said quietly. He moved the arm experimentally, rotating the shoulder with a clenched jaw. "It reduces on its own. Give it ten minutes."
"Dio santo, Arthur. You need to see someone about that."
"I need to see someone about several things. Ten minutes."
Petrillo sat on the bale beside him. The morning was brightening around them. The farmstead looked almost peaceful: the barn doors open, the ruined ritual circle visible inside where the shattered focal stones lay in piles of dark crystal. The stone markers were cracked along the perimeter. If you didn't look at the zip-tied prisoners or the dark stains on the ground where blood had soaked into the dirt, it could have been a farm on any Tuesday morning in any year.
"The cultists fought hard," Petrillo said. He held up his forearm, showing the bite through the torn sleeve. The semicircle of tooth marks was swelling, the punctures dark and angry. "One of them bit me. A kid. Maybe nineteen."
Arthur looked at the wound. His expression didn't change, but something in his eyes shifted: a micro-calculation, damage assessment filed away in the tactical ledger he carried behind his face alongside every other cost he'd catalogued over thirty years of warfare.
"Human teeth?"
"Human teeth. Human kid. He thinks Mal'akheth is going to save the world."
Arthur was quiet for a long time. A bird called from the tree line, high and clear, ignorant of the violence that had happened beneath it. The morning smelled like dew and the fading trace of sulfur and the copper scent of blood that hadn't quite dried.
"During the original ritual," Arthur said, "the Ninth Circle cultists were fanatics. Not mercenaries, not coerced. True believers who thought the summoning would bring about a new age." His voice was stripped to essentials, the way it always was when he talked about the past. Flat. Controlled. The voice of a man who kept his memories behind glass and only showed them when the lesson required it. "I killed eleven of them getting to Abigail. None of them hesitated. None of them ran. The last one stepped in front of the altar with his arms spread and told me I was stopping salvation."
He looked at his right hand. The fingers were curling and uncurling slowly as the shoulder worked itself back into alignment with sounds that Petrillo heard and tried not to hear.
"It was easier then," Arthur continued. "They had a seven-year-old girl on an altar. The moral clarity was absolute. She was screaming. They were chanting. The math was simple." He paused. "These people." He nodded toward the prisoners. "They're fighting a real problem with a catastrophic solution. They're watching the world drown in demons and they've decided the only life raft is the flood itself. That's harder."
Petrillo touched the rosary around his neck. The beads were warm from his skin, smoothed by decades of use. His grandmother's beads. Her voice echoed in the back of his mind, the way it did when the world stopped making clean sense: prayers she'd taught him in her kitchen in Napoli, the kitchen that smelled like basil and olive oil and the particular warmth of a woman who believed that God was present in every simple act of care. Simple prayers. Direct prayers. Asking for strength and the wisdom to know when strength wasn't enough.
"Dominick said they were already gone," Petrillo said. "The possessed ones. But these aren't possessed."
"No."
"So what do we do with that?"
Arthur's shoulder made a final grinding click. He raised his arm experimentally, testing the range of motion. His jaw was tight. The cost was visible and he paid it without comment, the way he paid everything.
"We do the job," Arthur said. "We disrupt the sites. We protect the world from the ritual. And we remember that the people we're fighting believe they're protecting the world too." He stood up. The movement was stiff, deliberate, each joint negotiated individually like a man climbing stairs in a body that wasn't fully his. "That doesn't make them right. It makes them human. And fighting humans is heavier than fighting demons."
Heavier. Petrillo felt the weight of the word settle on him. Demons dissolved when they died, burning away in sulfur and ash and a sound like tearing fabric. You could tell yourself they were things, not people. Monsters wearing faces. The girl in the barn with the bone stylus had been crying. The kid against the silo had blood on his teeth from biting a man who was trying not to kill him. They were human. They bled red. They believed.
Heavier.
Petrillo stood and followed Arthur toward the vehicles. The bite on his forearm throbbed with his heartbeat, steady and warm and human. Eight more sites. Every one of them defended by people who thought they were right. People who would fight. People who would bleed red and believe to the last breath that the flood was the life raft and the drowning was the cure.
He touched the rosary again. His grandmother's voice, quiet and certain in the way that only love could be certain, murmured something about mercy in the back of his mind.
He said nothing. He followed Arthur. He carried the weight.
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