The notebook was running out of pages.
Haatim pressed his pen against the margin of a cramped entry — demons, three lesser, one mid-tier, engagement duration eleven minutes, casualties zero — and realized he'd reached the last quarter of the leather-bound journal. The binding had cracked along the spine two weeks ago. He'd repaired it with electrical tape from the safe house kitchen, the kind of fix that would have made his university professors wince. Academic rigor, applied to the cataloguing of hell.
He pushed his glasses up his nose and wrote the time: 0347.
Three engagements in eighteen hours. The math lived in his notebook now, spread across pages in his cramped handwriting — frequency distributions, threat escalations, recovery intervals. The numbers told a story that didn't need interpretation. They were accelerating.
The safe house was a two-bedroom apartment above a shuttered pawnshop in a part of Mobile that smelled like brackish water and old grease. They'd been here thirty-one hours. Their longest stay anywhere in the past week. Emma had chosen it because the building sat at the intersection of three evacuation routes, and Haatim had approved it because he was too exhausted to argue with her analysis. She was right. She was almost always right, which should have been comforting but instead made him feel redundant in a way that scraped at something raw inside his chest.
He tapped his pen against the notebook. The gesture was unconscious — pen against paper, the rhythm of a mind that couldn't stop working even when the body begged for sleep.
In the next room, Abigail was sleeping. Or trying to. The golden glow leaked under the door like light through a crack in a furnace, faint but persistent, visible even through closed eyelids. Haatim could feel her through his Gift — not her thoughts, never that, but the hum of the corruption like a high-voltage wire buried in the wall. It hadn't dimmed since the assault. If anything, it had grown louder. A beacon, Emma called it. The word was clinical, accurate, and entirely insufficient for what it meant.
It meant that every demon within range could feel her.
It meant they were coming.
***
The first engagement had been easy. That was the word Petrillo used when they debriefed, cracking his knuckles and bouncing on the balls of his feet with the restless energy that never quite left him, and Haatim hadn't corrected him because correcting a young man who'd just driven a blessed blade through a demon's sternum seemed unkind. Easy. Three lesser demons, drawn to the beacon like moths to a porch light, stumbling through the alley behind the pawnshop with the disjointed gait of vessels that hadn't fully adjusted to their occupants. One of them had been wearing the body of a middle-aged man in a mechanic's coveralls. The nametag read GERALD. Petrillo had glanced at it afterward and looked away quickly.
Petrillo and Dominick had handled them in under four minutes. No injuries. Minimal noise. Efficient.
Haatim had watched from the second-floor window, his Gift stretched thin across the neighborhood like a net, feeling for anything else moving in the dark. The spiritual landscape of Mobile at three in the morning was a patchwork of small horrors — distant pinpricks of demonic presence scattered across the city like embers in ash. Most were low-tier possessions, the kind that manifested as behavioral changes, sudden violence, personalities curdling over weeks. The epidemic that the world refused to name. He catalogued what he could feel, wrote coordinates in the margin of his notebook, and knew that none of it mattered because they couldn't fight an epidemic. They could barely fight the symptoms.
He'd found nothing close. The relief had lasted forty minutes.
The second engagement was harder.
They'd moved to a fallback position two blocks north — standard protocol, never stay where you've been found — and Haatim's Gift had snagged on something wrong. Not the skittering interference of lesser demons but something heavier. A presence that pressed against his spiritual awareness like a hand against glass. Mid-tier. Named, maybe. Intelligent enough to wait.
It came with four lesser demons as escort, or perhaps the lesser ones simply followed, drawn to its gravity the way they were drawn to Abigail's. The sulfur smell arrived before them — not the sharp chemical stink of a struck match but something deeper, older, the smell of things burning underground that should never have been exposed to air. Haatim coordinated from a rooftop, his notebook closed for once, both hands pressed flat against the concrete ledge as he channeled his Gift into a detection web. Arthur took the east approach, moving through the shadows with the silent precision of a man who had been doing this since before Haatim was born. Dominick and Petrillo bracketed from the south.
The mid-tier demon wore the body of a woman in her forties, someone who might have been a bank teller or a teacher before the thing crawled inside her. The face was wrong in the way mid-tier faces were always wrong — the expressions slightly delayed, as if the demon were operating the muscles from a manual it hadn't quite memorized. It fought with the calculated precision of something that understood tactics. The lesser demons served as distraction while the mid-tier circled, probing for the weakest link.
It found Petrillo.
The kid was good — better than he'd been six months ago, better than Haatim would have believed possible for someone who'd started as a fire axe kid from nowhere — but he overextended on a lunge and the mid-tier exploited the gap. Haatim saw it happening from the rooftop, the demon pivoting with inhuman speed, clawed hands reaching for Petrillo's exposed flank.
Dominick was there before the strike landed.
He intercepted with the efficiency of a man who'd spent his entire adult life putting himself between danger and the people behind him. His combat knife — blessed steel, the blade nicked and dark with residue that never fully cleaned off — caught the demon's arm at the wrist. The mid-tier screamed. The sound cracked windows in the building across the street and sent pigeons exploding from the rooftop in a grey wave. Haatim felt it through his Gift like a needle through cloth.
In the chaos that followed — Petrillo recovering his stance, Arthur driving blessed silver through the mid-tier's chest with surgical calm, the lesser demons dissolving into sulfurous ash that scattered in the predawn wind — Haatim saw Dominick wrap his forearm. A cut, maybe four inches, running from elbow to mid-forearm. Not deep. Not dangerous. Blood soaked into the sleeve of his jacket in a dark stain that spread slowly, almost casually, as if the wound couldn't be bothered to bleed with urgency.
Dominick didn't mention it. He finished the engagement, cleaned his blade on the dead woman's coat — a gesture that looked callous and was actually practical — and checked Petrillo's positioning with the quiet patience of a man correcting homework. "You lunged. Don't lunge. Close the distance, then strike. The difference between a lunge and an advance is whether your balance stays over your feet."
Petrillo nodded. His hands were shaking. The rosary around his neck caught the streetlight — a glint of silver that seemed wrong in the aftermath of violence, too holy for the stink and the ash. Dominick pretended not to notice the shaking, which was the kindest thing he could have done.
***
The third engagement came at 0300.
Haatim was at the kitchen table of the new safe house — another anonymous apartment, this one above a laundromat that still smelled faintly of detergent and bleach — writing in his notebook when his Gift convulsed. Not a gradual detection, not the slow-building pressure of approaching demons. A spike. Sharp, immediate, close. His pen skittered across the page, leaving a jagged line through his calculations. His nose started bleeding before he consciously registered the threat.
"Contact," he said, and his voice sounded alien to him, too calm for the adrenaline flooding his system. "Six. Maybe seven. Two hundred meters, closing fast."
The team moved with the practiced choreography of people who'd been doing this too long. Arthur was out the door first — always first, always toward the threat, his face settling into the blank tactical mask that Haatim had learned to read as love — with Frieda two steps behind coordinating exit routes on a burner phone. Petrillo grabbed his blessed weapons from the duffel by the door, the rosary swinging as he moved. Emma began breaking down the intelligence station — laptops, maps, the hand-drawn charts of demon frequency that papered the wall like a conspiracy theorist's bedroom.
Dominick caught Haatim's eye as he passed. A glance at the blood running from Haatim's nose, tracing the line of his lip and dripping onto his shirt collar. A fractional nod. How bad? Not bad. Just bleeding. The entire exchange took less than a second. Dominick moved on, combat knife in his right hand, the bandage on his forearm already dark with something that might have been blood or might have been sweat. His wedding ring caught the kitchen light. Haatim noticed it and then made himself stop noticing it.
Seven lesser demons. Clustered in the street below like dogs that had caught a scent. Their vessels moved wrong — limbs at angles that suggested the occupants didn't fully understand human joint mechanics. One of them, a young man in a delivery uniform, was walking on hands and feet like something that had forgotten which end was up. Another was a teenage girl still wearing earbuds, the white cord bouncing as she advanced with her head cocked at an angle that no living neck would allow.
Dominick and Petrillo engaged first. The blessed blades caught the streetlight — brief arcs of silver in the dark. Arthur flanked from the east, using the alley between the laundromat and a vacant lot. Haatim held the rooftop, channeling his Gift into a suppression field that wouldn't kill the demons but would slow them, make their vessels sluggish, buy seconds that translated into angles and openings.
It worked. It always worked, until it didn't.
The seventh demon was smarter than the rest. It hung back in the shadow of a dumpster, waited for the engagement to pull Dominick forward, then sprinted for the building's entrance. Going for Abigail. Going for the beacon. It moved with a speed the lesser ones shouldn't have possessed — whatever inhabited this vessel was closer to mid-tier, something drawn down from a greater distance by the strength of the signal.
Haatim didn't think. His Gift surged — a blast of spiritual energy that hit the demon like a wall. The vessel staggered, stumbled, went to its knees on the sidewalk. Haatim's vision whited out for a heartbeat. His Gift wasn't meant for this. The analytical mind, the researcher's tool, the thing that detected and categorized and understood — he was using it as a weapon. Channeling raw force was like using a scalpel as a hammer. It worked, but the cost was disproportionate and the damage to the instrument was real.
Arthur killed the demon before it recovered. Clean. Silver through the base of the skull. The body went limp and the sulfur stench washed over them like a wave, mixing with the bleach smell from the laundromat until the air tasted like poison and clean laundry.
***
In the aftermath, Haatim sat on the rooftop and pressed his sleeve against his nose. The bleeding had intensified. His Gift ached — not pain exactly, but a bone-deep fatigue that made his teeth hurt and his vision swim at the edges. He could still feel the spiritual landscape of the city through the ache, and what he felt was not comforting. More presences. Distant but moving. Drawn by the beacon.
Dominick found him there. The cut on his forearm had reopened during the fight. Fresh blood soaked through the bandage, dark in the predawn light. He sat beside Haatim without speaking and began re-wrapping the wound with the methodical care of a man who'd done it a thousand times. Gauze from the kit on his belt. Medical tape. The movements were precise, efficient, a small ritual of maintenance that kept the body functional because the body was a tool and tools required upkeep.
"The pacing is unsustainable," Haatim said. He heard himself using the academic word and almost laughed. Unsustainable. As if this were a research problem. As if the solution were a matter of optimization rather than the slow, grinding certainty that they were being consumed.
"I know," Dominick said. His voice was steady. It was always steady. That was the thing about Dominick — the groundedness that made him the center of whatever room he occupied. Not loudness, not authority. Just the unshakable calm of a man who had looked at the worst the world could produce and decided to be useful anyway.
"Three engagements in eighteen hours. The frequency is increasing. The beacon—" He stopped. Pushed his glasses up. Started again, more carefully. "Abigail's corruption is drawing them. Not selectively. Everything within range. And the range appears to be expanding."
Dominick finished wrapping his arm. Flexed his hand once, testing the bandage's hold. The blood was already seeping through the fresh gauze — a slow, patient stain.
"How long can we sustain this rate?"
Haatim opened his notebook to a page of calculations he'd been running between engagements. Frequency curves sketched in blue ink. Fatigue projections in black. Sleep debt accumulating in red along the margins, the numbers growing like a debt that compounded hourly. "Two weeks. Maybe. If nobody gets seriously injured. If we can maintain safe house rotation. If the engagements don't intensify further." He paused. His pen tapped against the page — three taps, the rhythm of uncertainty. "Those are optimistic assumptions."
Dominick absorbed this with the stillness of a man who understood what two weeks meant. Not a timeline for victory. A timeline for collapse.
"And Belphegor hasn't even attacked yet," Dominick said. Not a question.
"No. This isn't him attacking. This is the consequence of what he already did." Haatim's voice was quiet, precise, the academic cadence that surfaced when he was thinking through something too large for emotion. "He pushed Abigail past a threshold during the assault. The beacon is the result. The corruption acts as a signal — a frequency that resonates with lesser demonic entities within range. They're not being sent. They're being drawn." He paused. "He doesn't need to attack. He just needs to wait."
The sky was lightening in the east. Mobile's skyline emerged from the dark in silhouette — water towers, church steeples, the skeleton of a construction crane on a project that would never be finished because the workers kept having rage episodes they couldn't explain. The world was wrong and didn't know it. The thousands of demons released through the cracked Gate moved through society like a virus, and the symptoms — violence, madness, a pervasive dread that settled behind people's eyes like something crouching — were rationalized as politics, as mental health, as the economy, as anything other than what they were.
Dominick looked at the lightening sky. "Marvin would be getting up for work right now," he said. The words came out quiet, almost absent, the way a man mentions the weather. Then he stood, rolled his shoulder to test the bandage, and went back inside. The door closed behind him with a soft click.
Haatim sat with the sentence for a moment. Marvin. The husband Dominick never talked about. The man in Baltimore who didn't know what his partner really did, who went to work and came home and lived in a world where the shadows didn't have teeth. Dominick carried that world in his pocket like a photograph — the normal world, the real world, the one that justified everything the rest of them endured.
Haatim closed his notebook and opened it to the second section. The secret section. The one he hadn't shown anyone.
The pages here were different. Not tactical logs but theoretical work. Cross-references between demonological texts and comparative religion. Notes on the corruption's biochemistry — if that was even the right word for something that existed at the intersection of flesh and spirit. Diagrams of the ritual mechanics he'd studied at the Philadelphia training facility, annotated with questions that had no answers. Fragments of an idea he couldn't yet articulate but couldn't abandon.
The cure.
He didn't know what he was looking for. The word itself felt premature, unscientific, the kind of thing that faith healers and television preachers promised with bright eyes and open palms. But the corruption was a thing — a measurable, observable phenomenon with properties and progression rates and identifiable stages. And things that existed could be understood. Things that could be understood could, theoretically, be addressed.
His Gift stirred as he thought about it. The spiritual energy that channeled through him — whose spiritual energy? He'd never answered that question and the avoidance was its own kind of faith. The Gift could sense the corruption, could even push against it. Not cure it. Not even come close. But the interaction existed, which meant the corruption wasn't invulnerable. It had an interface. It responded to inputs.
He wrote a single line at the bottom of the page: *If the corruption was transferred, it has properties. Properties can be studied. Study requires data. Data requires time.*
Time. The one thing the math said they didn't have.
He closed the notebook. Pressed it against his chest. The leather was warm from his body heat, the electrical tape rough under his fingers, the pages inside holding two different kinds of desperation — the tactical desperation of a war they were losing, and the quiet, stubborn desperation of a man who refused to believe that losing was the only option.
Below, in the apartment, he could hear Abigail murmuring in her sleep. Not words. Sounds. Syllables in a register that made his Gift flinch and recoil, like touching a hot surface with bare hands. A language that wasn't language, spoken by a mouth that didn't know it was speaking. He'd told her about it once. She'd gone very still and then asked him, in a voice stripped of everything but precision, exactly what the sounds were like. He'd described them as best he could. She'd nodded and hadn't asked again.
He rubbed the bridge of his nose. The blood had dried in a crust along his upper lip, copper-tasting and intimate. He was exhausted and terrified and the only person in the room doing the math, which meant the math was his responsibility, which meant the answer — if there was one — would have to come from him.
Two weeks. Maybe.
He uncapped his pen and turned to a fresh page.
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