The demon was three floors up and moving east.
Haatim tracked it through the building's thermal signature — not literally, of course, but the Gift had evolved past simple instinct into something closer to sonar. The spiritual imprint of the possessed registered as a cold spot in his awareness, a void where human warmth should have been, and this one was dragging something. Someone. The civilian they'd come for.
He pressed the radio once. "Third floor, east corridor. Moving fast."
Dominick's response was a single click — acknowledgment without wasted breath. Haatim had learned to appreciate that about Dominick. Two months of guerrilla warfare had stripped their communication to its essential elements. Words were luxuries they couldn't afford when a possessed human could hear whispered prayers through two walls of concrete.
From his position on the roof of the adjacent parking structure, Haatim watched the building's windows through binoculars that hadn't cost enough to justify how much he relied on them. The office complex was six stories of abandoned corporate optimism — glass and steel gone dark after the company that leased it had collapsed during what the news called the "ongoing mental health crisis." Nobody called it what it was. Nobody wanted to.
A light flickered on the third floor. Then off. Then on again — rhythmic, deliberate. Petrillo's signal. The kid had gotten creative with building maintenance systems, which was either impressive adaptability or a fundamental misunderstanding of what stealth meant. Both, probably.
"Breach in thirty seconds," Dominick said. Quiet, controlled. A man counting exits and calculating angles the way other people counted change.
Haatim pushed his glasses up his nose and scanned again. His Gift swept the surrounding blocks in widening circles, reading the spiritual landscape with the same methodical precision he brought to his notebook entries. Four low-tier demons within a two-block radius — baseline for this part of the city. The possessed population had saturated certain neighborhoods so thoroughly that demonic presence had become ambient noise. Like traffic. Like birdsong. Like the sulfur smell that clung to certain street corners and never quite faded.
No mid-tier signatures. No greater demon resonance. The building's occupant was alone.
He pressed the radio twice. All clear.
The breach was efficient. Haatim tracked it through sound — or rather, through the absence of sound. Dominick moved like silence had a professional obligation to follow him around. Petrillo was louder, but the loudness had direction now, purpose. Two months ago the kid would have kicked the door in and announced himself like a birthday party. Now he kicked the door in quietly, which was an improvement Haatim had documented in his notebook with restrained satisfaction.
Abigail was positioned on the fire escape, three stories up. Overwatch. She didn't need the vantage point — her power could level the building from the street. But that was precisely the problem. Every time she used what the corruption had given her, it took something back. So she watched. Waited. The nuclear option held in reserve behind golden eyes that never quite stopped glowing.
Haatim's radio crackled.
"Package secured." Dominick's voice was flat, informational. "One hostile, neutralized. Civilian has minor injuries. Moving to extraction."
"Emma?" Haatim said.
"Streets are clean," Emma responded from the van two blocks north. "No communications chatter. No response to the entry. We're invisible."
They were never invisible. That was the illusion of successful operations — the belief that efficiency equaled safety. Haatim knew better. Every strike left traces. Every demon destroyed sent ripples through the network Belphegor had spent months constructing. The question was never whether Belphegor noticed. It was whether Belphegor cared.
Lately, Belphegor didn't seem to care about anything.
That was the part that kept Haatim awake.
***
The safe house — the fourth in three weeks — was a converted dental office above a shuttered laundromat. The previous tenant had left behind anatomical charts of human teeth that Petrillo had decorated with devil horns. Haatim found it exactly as funny as it deserved, which was slightly more than he would admit to anyone.
He spread his notebook across the reception desk and updated the operation log with the same meticulous care he'd once reserved for academic research. Date. Time. Location. Number of hostiles. Classification. Outcome. Civilian status. Resources expended. The entries had developed a repetitive quality that bordered on liturgical.
Twenty-seven operations in the past six weeks. Twenty-three successful. Two partial. Two aborted. No team casualties. Four civilian injuries, none critical. An efficiency rate that would have impressed any military strategist and meant absolutely nothing against the scope of what they faced.
He wrote the numbers anyway. The discipline of documentation was its own form of prayer — or what he called strategic habit to avoid confronting the implications of the word "prayer" and the complicated relationship it had with a Gift he still refused to name.
Arthur appeared in the doorway. He moved stiffly — the damage from Hell hadn't healed so much as calcified into a permanent state of rigid motion that made him look like a man held together by determination and scar tissue. His eyes missed nothing. They swept the room, catalogued every person, every exit, every object that could be used as a weapon or a barricade, and settled on Haatim with the particular intensity of a man who evaluated everything through the lens of tactical significance.
"Report," Arthur said. Not a request. Arthur didn't make requests. He issued statements that happened to require responses.
"Clean operation. One low-tier demon, destroyed. Civilian extracted. No trail." Haatim tapped his pen against the notebook's spine. "That's three clean ops in four days. The pattern is holding."
"What pattern?"
"The pattern of no pattern. Belphegor isn't responding to our strikes. Two months ago, every operation triggered a counter-move within forty-eight hours. Now we're hitting his network and getting nothing back. No retaliation. No repositioning. No communication spikes." Haatim paused, adjusting his glasses. "Silence."
Arthur stood very still. The kind of stillness that in another man might have been contemplation but in Arthur was closer to a predator scenting the wind. "How long?"
"Three weeks since the last direct engagement. Four weeks since any confirmed sighting of Belphegor himself."
"He's not gone."
"Obviously he's not gone." Haatim couldn't quite suppress the dryness. "Greater demons don't take sabbaticals. He's doing something."
"Regrouping," Arthur said. The word landed like a stone in still water. "I've seen this before. The smart ones go quiet when they're adapting. They study what hurt them, close the gaps, and come back with something you haven't planned for."
Haatim wrote the word ADAPTING in the margin of his notebook and underlined it twice. His hand was steady. His handwriting was steady. Everything about the process of documentation was steady because the alternative — considering what a regrouping Belphegor might look like — was a thought he preferred to keep on the other side of the pen.
"We keep operating," Haatim said. "Hit the network, degrade his infrastructure, force him to spend resources on rebuilding instead of planning."
"Guerrilla doctrine." Arthur's tone was neither approving nor disapproving. Just observational, like a man reading a weather forecast for a storm he intended to walk through regardless. "It works until the enemy decides to bring the hammer."
"Then we move faster than the hammer." Haatim closed the notebook. "We've been doing this for six weeks, Arthur. We're good at it."
"Being good at fighting isn't the same as winning the war."
Haatim had no response to that. Arthur, who never wasted a tactical advantage, said nothing more and left the room.
***
The team ate dinner in shifts because sitting together in one room was a luxury they'd trained themselves to avoid. Petrillo and Dominick took first watch. Emma ate at her monitoring station — a laptop connected to three burner phones and a police scanner, the entire apparatus balanced on a folding chair that creaked in a way Petrillo had described as "architecturally concerning." Abigail sat by the window, picking at food she didn't seem to taste, her golden eyes catching the streetlight and reflecting it back in a way that was beautiful and wrong.
Haatim ate standing up. He'd started doing that somewhere around the third safe house, a habit born from the practical observation that a man standing could reach the door faster than a man sitting. He wasn't sure if the habit was tactical or anxious. The distinction had blurred.
He was reviewing the demon activity map — a hand-drawn overlay on a city grid that looked like the work of a conspiracy theorist with excellent penmanship — when Frieda arrived.
Frieda Gotlieb entered rooms the way other people entered negotiations: with precise timing and no wasted motion. She'd rebuilt her contact network from the wreckage of the Council's collapse with the same institutional efficiency she brought to everything. Whatever was left of the old intelligence infrastructure — retired hunters, sympathetic clergy, the occasional government analyst who'd seen enough to stop calling it mass hysteria — Frieda had found them, vetted them, and woven them into something resembling a web.
She carried a folder. An actual paper folder, because Frieda trusted electronics the way Arthur trusted demons: provisionally, at arm's length, and with one hand on a weapon.
"We need to talk," she said.
Haatim set his plate down. "You could at least let me finish chewing."
"You weren't chewing. You were staring at your map and pretending to eat."
She wasn't wrong. Haatim pushed his glasses up, wiped his hands on the paper towel that served as a napkin, and gestured to the reception desk. "What have you got?"
Frieda opened the folder with the crisp economy of a woman who had delivered intelligence briefs to people who could authorize military strikes. Three photographs. Three different cities. Three different timestamps spanning the past four weeks.
"My network flagged these independently," she said. "Three separate contacts, three locations, no coordination between the sources. All three report the same thing." She spread the photographs across the desk. "A young woman, early twenties, South Asian features. Moving through crowds. No obvious purpose. No obvious destination."
Haatim looked at the photographs. They were poor quality — grainy security feeds, a phone camera, what might have been a traffic camera still. The woman in each was blurred, partial, caught in the peripheral vision of cameras that hadn't been looking for her.
He knew the face anyway.
His pen stopped.
"Continue," he said. The word came out with more control than he felt, which was itself a kind of failure — the analytical voice papering over the crack that had opened somewhere behind his sternum. A hairline fracture. Nothing structural. Just the kind of damage that spread slowly if you didn't address it.
Frieda watched him with the careful assessment of a woman who read people the way Emma read data. "The Prague contact says she approached a street vendor and spoke in a language he didn't recognize. Touched his arm. He describes a feeling of intense cold followed by disorientation. The Chicago contact reports a similar encounter — a woman matching this description walked into a shelter, touched three people, and left. All three reported nightmares for a week afterward." She paused. "The Buenos Aires sighting is older. Just a visual confirmation. No contact."
Haatim picked up the Prague photograph. Held it at an angle where the overhead fluorescent caught the grain and for one moment — one cruel, specific moment — the blur resolved into something like a face. High cheekbones. Dark hair pulled back. The particular way she stood, weight on her left foot, chin slightly raised, that he'd grown up watching across the breakfast table while she argued with their father about the television remote.
Nida.
Or the thing wearing her.
He set the photograph down with care. The pen went back to the notebook. His hand did not shake because he would not allow it to shake, and the distinction between could not and would not was one he had stopped examining weeks ago.
"Three cities in four weeks," he said. "She's mobile. Or the demon wearing her is mobile. Whichever pronoun applies."
"There's more." Frieda's voice had the particular quality of someone delivering the worst part of a briefing — the slight deceleration of a woman choosing each word with surgical intent. "The Buenos Aires contact included a secondary report from a local priest. Not one of ours — civilian clergy. He performed a wellness check on a parishioner who'd encountered the woman, and the parishioner described something unusual." She looked at Haatim directly. "She said the woman was crying. Walking through the market, touching people, and crying. Then the tears stopped and her face changed. The parishioner used the word 'emptied.' She said the woman's face emptied."
The pen tapped twice against the notebook's spine. Then stopped.
Crying. The real Nida, surfacing. Fighting through whatever held her down long enough to shed tears before the demon dragged her back under. She was still in there. Somewhere behind the possession, behind whatever their father's deal had done to her, Nida Malhotra was still present enough to weep.
Haatim closed the notebook. The motion was deliberate, precise — the kind of controlled physical action that meant the emotional equivalent was anything but controlled.
"Where was the most recent sighting?" he asked.
"Prague. Eleven days ago."
"And the trajectory? Prague, Chicago, Buenos Aires — that's not a pattern. That's random movement. Unless it isn't."
"My analysis is incomplete," Frieda said. "I don't have enough data points for trajectory modeling. Three sightings in four weeks across three continents suggests either deliberate misdirection or a demon with no fixed agenda."
Or a demon whose host kept breaking through and forcing changes of direction. A sister who wasn't entirely gone, surfacing in moments of weakness and pushing the thing that wore her somewhere — anywhere — that wasn't where it wanted to go.
Haatim looked at the photographs again. Three blurred images. Three continents. Three ghosts of a face he'd known before the world broke open and swallowed everything that mattered.
"I want every piece of intelligence you can pull on these sightings," he said. "Contact patterns, environmental analysis, spiritual residue if your people can detect it. I want to know where she's been, where she's going, and what the demon is doing between appearances."
"Haatim." Frieda's voice was careful. The first name was a warning — she used rank and surname by default, and the deviation meant she was about to say something he didn't want to hear. "This could be Belphegor's silence explained. Three weeks of quiet while he sets the board. Nida showing up now, in three different locations, with just enough evidence to be found — that's not an intelligence failure. It's an intelligence delivery."
"I'm aware of the implications."
"Are you aware that acting on this is exactly what Belphegor would want?"
Haatim picked up his pen. Turned it once between his fingers. Set it down.
"I am aware," he said, "that my sister is possessed by a demon, that she has been suffering for years, that she surfaced long enough to cry in a Buenos Aires market, and that the fact Belphegor may be using her as bait does not change the fact that she is still in there." He met Frieda's gaze. "I am also aware that this is not an analytical assessment. Document your objection. I will take it under advisement."
Frieda held his eyes for a long moment. Whatever she saw there made her close the folder without further argument.
"I'll have the full intelligence package by morning," she said. She left the way she arrived — precisely, with no wasted motion, and with the particular silence of a woman who understood that some decisions were made in the space between reason and love, and that no amount of institutional efficiency could close that gap.
Haatim sat alone at the reception desk. The notebook was closed. The pen was still. The photographs lay where Frieda had spread them, three windows into three cities where his sister had been seen and lost.
He reached for the pen. Opened the notebook to a new page. The analytical framework that governed his entire existence demanded he write something strategic — threat assessment, probability analysis, the careful language of a commander evaluating operational risk.
He wrote one word instead.
Nida.
Then he stared at it until the letters blurred and the fluorescent light hummed and the safe house settled into its nighttime creaks around him, and the war that had become routine cracked open to show something underneath that was neither routine nor safe — just a brother, alone with a name, doing the precise arithmetic of hope against the terrible suspicion that the numbers didn't work.
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