The town was wrong before they crossed the county line.
Haatim felt it through the Gift — a low-frequency spiritual disturbance that registered less as sensation and more as absence. Like driving into a dead zone where the radio dropped to static except the static was inside his skull and the frequency was something older than radio waves. He gripped his pen tighter out of reflex and immediately catalogued the reflex: unconscious stress response, noted, filed, ignored.
"You feel that?" Dominick said from the driver's seat. Not a question, exactly. More like a calibration check between two instruments that had learned to read the same signal differently.
"Low-tier saturation. Multiple presences, none distinct." Haatim opened his notebook to a fresh page and drew a rough grid of the town as they entered. His information was limited — a gas station, a main street, a cluster of residential blocks visible from the two-lane highway. Small-town America in the particular way that small-town America had become during the crisis: shuttered businesses, cars in driveways that hadn't moved in weeks, and a pervasive stillness that suggested either Sunday morning or collective unconscious dread. "The ambient demonic presence here is... dense. Like fog."
"Good fog or bad fog?"
"There's no good fog, Dominick. Fog is water vapor suspended in air. The metaphorical extension to demonic activity doesn't improve the analogy."
Dominick's mouth twitched. Not quite a smile — Dominick didn't waste full smiles on anything short of his husband's voice on the phone — but the acknowledgment of humor that passed between them had become its own form of communication. They'd been traveling together for nine hours. Nine hours was enough to strip conversation down to its essential structures.
The sighting had been in this town. Five days old — ancient by their operational tempo, but Frieda's intelligence package had placed Nida here with three independent corroborations, which was as close to certainty as their degraded intelligence network could achieve. A waitress at a diner. A gas station attendant. A minister at a Baptist church whose congregation had dwindled to seven people and whose description of the young woman who'd walked into his Sunday service was detailed enough to make Haatim's throat tight.
"She sat in the back pew," the minister had told Frieda's contact. "Didn't say a word through the whole service. When I went to greet her afterward, she touched my hand and I — I can't describe it. Cold. Like she pulled something out of me. Then she started crying. Not loud. Just — tears. Like she didn't know she was doing it. And then she stopped. Just stopped. Like someone turned off a faucet. And the face..." The minister had paused. "The face changed."
Haatim had read the transcript four times. He'd highlighted the word "crying" and then crossed out the highlight because highlighting a word in a intelligence report about his sister's demonic possession felt like the kind of thing that blurred the line between analysis and grief in ways he wasn't prepared to examine.
Dominick pulled the car into a gas station lot and killed the engine. They sat for a moment in the kind of silence that comes before entering a space where the rules have changed.
"Ground rules," Dominick said. His voice was professional — the tone of a combat specialist briefing a partner before a mission that was almost certainly going to go sideways. "We observe, we interview, we leave. If we pick up a demon signature above low-tier, we withdraw and call for support. If we see Nida — or the demon — we do not engage. We document and report."
"Agreed."
"Haatim."
"I said agreed."
"You said it with the voice of a man who's planning to agree until the moment he doesn't." Dominick's eyes were steady. Brown, warm, and absolutely immovable. "I've seen that look. I've worn that look. It's the look of someone who already knows what they're going to do and is being polite about the pretense of following protocol."
Haatim adjusted his glasses. The gesture felt transparent in a way it hadn't before — the nervous tic exposed by someone who'd spent enough time reading people to see through every buffer. "I will follow the ground rules. But I need to see what's here. I need to know if she's—" The sentence broke in a place he hadn't expected. Not dramatically. More like a hairline fracture revealing itself under stress. "I need to know."
Dominick watched him for a long moment. Then he checked his sidearm, holstered it beneath his jacket, and opened the car door. "Then let's know."
***
The gas station attendant was the first interview. A man in his fifties with the particular weathered look of someone who'd spent thirty years in fluorescent lighting and had accepted this as a permanent feature of existence. He stood behind a counter arrayed with lottery tickets and energy drinks and watched them approach with the guarded hospitality of a man who'd had too many strangers pass through recently.
Haatim had prepared a cover story — federal investigators tracking a missing person, the kind of bureaucratic fiction that worked because no one questioned the authority of a clipboard and a serious expression. The story crumbled within thirty seconds.
"You're here about the woman," the attendant said. Not a question.
"You've spoken to someone else about her?"
"Three people in the last week." He rubbed his jaw — a self-soothing gesture Haatim catalogued automatically. "I'll tell you what I told them. She came in around nine at night, about six days ago. Young, dark hair, pretty. Looked lost. Not confused-lost — the other kind. The kind where you know exactly where you are and you wish you didn't."
Haatim wrote in his notebook. His pen moved with precision, each word earning its space on the page. "Did she speak?"
"That's the thing." The attendant leaned forward. "She came up to the counter and she — she tried. You could see it. Her mouth opened and she was trying to say something, and the sound that came out..." He shook his head. "Not English. Not any language I recognized. Like she was fighting to get the words right and they kept coming out wrong. She touched my hand — just a brush, reaching for the counter — and it was cold. Cold like putting your hand in a freezer. I pulled back and she — she looked at me." He stopped. Swallowed. "She looked at me like she was drowning. You understand? Like she was going under and she knew it and she was trying to tell me but the water was too deep."
The pen paused on the page.
"And then it stopped," the attendant continued. "Whatever was happening with her face, with the struggling — it stopped. And she straightened up, and the look was gone, and she turned around and walked out. Didn't buy anything. Didn't say anything. Just — walked away." He hesitated. "There was a smell. After she left. Like rotten eggs. Faint. I thought the septic was backing up again."
Sulfur.
Haatim closed the notebook slowly. "Did you notice which direction she went?"
"North. Toward the church."
***
They interviewed the waitress next. She told a similar story — the struggling, the cold touch, the moment of drowning desperation followed by the abrupt cessation — but added a detail that made Haatim stop writing.
"She was in the booth for maybe ten minutes before I went over," the waitress said. She was young, early twenties, with the kind of anxiety that manifested as excessive politeness. "I thought she was on her phone — she had her hands on the table and she was staring at them, like, really concentrating. When I got close, I saw she was shaking. Full-body tremors. And she was whispering. Over and over, the same thing."
"Could you hear what she was saying?"
"Not the words. But the pattern — it was the same phrase, repeated. Like a prayer or a — or a mantra. Just the same sounds, over and over, getting quieter each time." The waitress wrapped her hands around her coffee mug. "Then she looked up at me and it was — God, this sounds crazy. It was like two people were looking at me from the same face. One of them was terrified. The other one was... curious. Like it was studying me."
Two people in the same face. Haatim wrote the phrase in his notebook and then wrote it again because the first version had a tremor in the handwriting he didn't want to preserve.
"She reached out and touched my wrist," the waitress continued. "The cold — Jesus. It went all the way up my arm. And for a second — just a second — the scared one was in front. The one that was shaking. And she said something I understood." She paused. "She said 'help.'"
The pen stopped.
"Then the other face came back. And she smiled at me. The most wrong smile I've ever seen — like something was practicing using a mouth. She stood up and walked out." The waitress's hands tightened on her mug. "I had nightmares for three days. Not about anything specific. Just — cold. And the feeling that something was inside my house, watching me sleep."
Dominick thanked her, and they stepped outside. The sun was high and hot and did nothing to penetrate the wrongness that saturated the town like a fever. Haatim stood on the cracked sidewalk and looked at the street where his sister had walked and felt the analytical framework he'd built his entire adult life around strain against something it wasn't designed to contain.
"She's surfacing," he said. "The real Nida. She's breaking through. The whispering — the mantra — that's her fighting for control. The cold is the demon's influence, but the words, the tears, the drowning look —" He pressed his glasses up with more force than the gesture required. "That's my sister."
Dominick was quiet for a long time. He stood with his hands in his pockets and his weight centered and his eyes moving across the street in the continuous tactical assessment that was as natural to him as breathing. When he spoke, his voice had the particular gentleness of a man who cared enough to be honest.
"It could also be the demon performing distress to bait exactly this response."
"I know."
"The tears. The struggling. The moments of clarity that are just long enough to create hope but never long enough to communicate anything useful. That's a pattern too, Haatim. And not the kind you want it to be."
"I know." Haatim's jaw tightened. The pen in his pocket felt heavy with all the things he couldn't write — the observations that didn't fit into analytical categories, the data points that were actually grief wearing a lab coat. "I know it could be manufactured. I know Belphegor uses people's love as a weapon. I know that following the trail of a possessed sister across the country while a greater demon regroups in silence is the kind of tactical error that gets people killed." He turned to Dominick. "I also know that the waitress described a woman whispering the same phrase over and over like a mantra, and that when Nida was twelve years old she used to whisper Surah Al-Fatiha under her breath when she was scared. Our mother taught her. She'd whisper it during thunderstorms and during exams and during the argument when our father—"
He stopped. The sentence had boundaries he wasn't prepared to cross in a gas station parking lot.
Dominick waited. Patient. The kind of patience that came from years of watching people reach the edges of what they could carry and choosing to stand beside them rather than tell them to put it down.
"We should talk to the minister," Haatim said.
***
The Baptist church was a white clapboard building with a steeple that leaned two degrees to the east, as though decades of wind had worn its convictions down to an angle of polite compromise. The minister was waiting for them — a heavy-set man with kind eyes and the particular exhaustion of a spiritual leader trying to shepherd a flock through a crisis that didn't have a name in any theology he'd studied.
"She came to the Sunday service," he said. They sat in the front pew — Haatim and Dominick side by side, the minister across the aisle. The church smelled of wood polish and candle wax and, faintly, sulfur. "Sat in the back. Didn't sing. Didn't pray. Didn't speak. Just — sat. I've had a lot of people come through those doors in the past few months. People who are scared, people who are angry, people who've done things they can't explain and want God to tell them it's going to be all right." He paused. "She wasn't any of those. She was the first person who walked in here and made me feel like something walked in with her."
"What happened when you approached her after the service?"
"She was still sitting. Everyone else had left — my congregation is small now, and they don't linger. I went to the back pew and I said, 'Welcome, I'm Pastor David, is there anything I can do for you?' She looked up and —" He removed his glasses and cleaned them. The gesture was so familiar that Haatim felt the recognition like a physical blow. "She tried to speak. The same thing your gas station fellow described, I'd wager. The struggling. The wrong sounds. But she kept trying. Longer than the others described. Minutes, maybe. She kept trying and her hands were gripping the pew so hard the wood creaked."
Haatim's pen moved across the page. His handwriting was precise. His breathing was not.
"Then she grabbed my hand. Both hands — small hands, strong grip. Cold. Cold like I'd touched a pipe in January. And the struggling stopped. She looked at me and her eyes were clear. Present. Like someone waking up from a dream." The minister's voice dropped. "She said, 'I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Tell him I'm sorry. Tell my brother I'm sorry.' And she was crying. Real tears. Not the empty kind — the kind that come from somewhere deep."
The pen stopped.
"How long?" Haatim asked. His voice was steady because the alternative was a crack that would split the conversation in half, and he needed the rest of the information more than he needed the luxury of feeling it.
"Thirty seconds. Maybe forty. Then the face changed. The tears stopped. The grip went slack. And whatever was looking at me through her eyes wasn't the woman who'd been crying." The minister's hands were folded in his lap, the way hands folded when they'd given up trying to hold something. "It smiled at me. With her face, but not her smile. And it said — in perfect English, clear as day — 'She does that sometimes. Inconvenient.'"
The notebook was open but the pen wasn't moving. Haatim stared at the page where the transcript ended and the blank space began, and in that blank space was the architecture of everything he'd ever built to protect himself from the world's capacity for cruelty — the frameworks, the analyses, the precise and formal language that kept chaos at a measurable distance — and all of it was insufficient.
Nida. Still in there. Fighting through the possession in churches and diners and gas stations, surfacing long enough to apologize, to cry, to beg strangers to tell her brother she was sorry. Sorry for what? For being possessed? For being the one their father chose to sacrifice? For the tears that came unbidden in the bodies of strangers, for the cold that followed her, for the demon that wore her face and smiled?
"Thank you," Haatim said. The words were precise, formal, and entirely inadequate. He stood, closed the notebook, pocketed the pen. His glasses were slightly askew and he didn't fix them. "Thank you for your time, Pastor."
They walked out of the church into the hot sun. The town was quiet. The wrongness persisted — the low-tier saturation, the spiritual fog, the sense that the air itself had been breathed by something that shouldn't have lungs.
Dominick walked beside him. Silent. Present. The kind of companionship that understood there were moments when speaking was not comfort but intrusion.
They reached the car. Haatim opened the passenger door and stood there, one hand on the roof, looking back at the church where his sister had surfaced long enough to say sorry.
"She's fighting," he said. "Every sighting — the tears, the struggling, the words — that's not the demon. That's Nida. She's fighting it from the inside. She's losing, but she's fighting."
"I know," Dominick said.
"I have to find her."
"I know."
"This might be exactly what Belphegor wants."
Dominick put his hands on the car roof. His eyes were steady — brown, warm, and carrying the weight of a man who had a husband at home and a war everywhere else and had learned to hold both without letting either one break him. "Haatim. I followed you here because you needed to see this. I will follow you to the next sighting and the one after that. But I need you to hear me: the brother is going to get the commander killed."
Haatim looked at him. "Which one should I listen to?"
"That's the question, isn't it." Dominick opened his door. "For what it's worth — I'd follow the brother too. Marvin would never forgive me if I didn't." He climbed in. "Let's go."
Haatim got in the car. He opened the notebook to the page where he'd written Nida's name the night Frieda brought the photographs. Below it, in handwriting that was no longer steady, he wrote:
She's still in there. She's sorry. She's fighting.
The analytical part of him — the part that had kept him alive and useful and sane through months of shadow war — whispered that hope was a weapon Belphegor knew how to use. That every piece of evidence had the fingerprints of a trap. That the rational course of action was to file the intelligence, note the threat, and return to the war that needed a commander instead of a brother.
He heard the whisper. He documented it. He filed it under Acknowledged but Insufficient.
Then he let Dominick drive them north, toward the last known heading of a sister who might still be saved, through a landscape that smelled of sulfur and old prayers and the particular kind of grief that doesn't end — it just learns to travel.
Join the Discussion