Raven's War - Chapter 3: The Fire Axe

Petrillo couldn't sleep, so he hit the bag.

The heavy bag hung from a chain in the corner of the warehouse that Dominick had designated as the "after-hours gym," which was a generous name for a concrete floor, a bag, a pull-up bar welded to a support beam, and a set of weights that looked like they'd been rescued from a scrapyard. The bag swung and shuddered under his fists. Left-right-left. Hooks, crosses, uppercuts. No gloves. The skin over his knuckles had split weeks ago and healed and split again until the calluses were thick enough that he barely felt it anymore.

The rosary bounced against his chest with each swing. His grandmother's rosary. Wooden beads, dark with decades of prayer oils, the crucifix worn smooth by her thumb. He'd taken it from her nightstand the morning after she died. Not stolen — inherited. She would have wanted him to have it. She would have wanted a lot of things.

He drove a right cross into the bag hard enough to send it swinging wide on the chain. The impact jolted up his arm and into his shoulder. Good. Pain was honest. Pain didn't lie to you or crawl inside your head or make your grandmother's neighbor pick up a kitchen knife and—

He hit the bag again. And again. And again. The chain groaned overhead. Sweat ran down his temples and soaked the collar of his shirt. His breath came in sharp, percussive bursts that fogged in the cold air. The warehouse was barely heated this time of night — the industrial units cycled down at midnight to save on the electric bill that Frieda's contacts were already struggling to cover.

"You keep that up, you'll break your hands before morning."

Petrillo caught the bag on the backswing and turned. Dominick stood in the doorway, arms folded, silhouetted against the dim glow of the corridor lights. He wore sweatpants and a T-shirt, his feet bare on the concrete. He looked like he'd been awake for a while.

"Can't sleep," Petrillo said.

"I noticed. The bag's been screaming for the past twenty minutes."

"Cazzo. Sorry. Did I wake you?"

"I was already up." Dominick walked into the gym and leaned against the support beam. He didn't tell Petrillo to stop. He didn't tell him to go to bed. He just stood there, watching, the way he watched everything — with a patience that seemed inexhaustible and eyes that missed nothing.

Petrillo wiped the sweat from his face with the hem of his shirt. His hands were shaking. Not from the cold, not from exhaustion. From the thing that lived behind his sternum, the memory that came when the lights went off and the world got quiet and his brain stopped running long enough to remember.

Nonna Rosa. The kitchen. The fire axe.

"You want to talk about it?" Dominick asked.

"No."

"Okay."

Petrillo punched the bag three more times, lighter now, without purpose. Then he stopped, his forehead pressed against the rough canvas, breathing hard.

"My grandmother prayed the rosary every night," he said. The words came out before he decided to say them. "Every night. Decades. She had this spot on her couch, this indent in the cushion from sitting there for forty years, and she'd pray and I could hear her through the wall when I stayed over. Which was a lot, because my mom worked nights and my dad was—" He flicked his hand. The Italian gesture for gone, absent, not worth discussing. "Nonna raised me. More or less."

Dominick said nothing. He didn't shift his weight or check his phone or do any of the things people did when they were waiting for you to finish so they could respond. He listened the way he fought: completely.

"She lived in Bensonhurst. Same house for fifty years. Same neighbors. The guy next door, Mr. Ferraro, he'd been there almost as long. Old Italian guy. Used to bring her tomatoes from his garden. She'd make sauce. They'd argue about whose sauce was better." Petrillo's throat was tight. "He was a good guy. Everyone said so."

The bag swayed gently between them.

"It started slow. Mr. Ferraro stopped tending the garden. He stopped going to church. His wife left — one day she was there, the next she was gone. Nobody on the block said anything because you don't, you know? You mind your own business. That's the code. Even when his lights were on at three in the morning. Even when the smell started."

Petrillo closed his eyes. The memory unspooled behind his lids like film through a projector — grainy, overexposed, impossible to stop.

"Nonna called me on a Tuesday. Said Mr. Ferraro was talking to himself through the wall. Said his voice sounded wrong. I told her he was probably just going senile, take him some soup, Nonna, you know how she was. She made soup for everyone. Soup fixed everything."

His fingers found the rosary and gripped it. The wooden beads pressed into his palm.

"I should have gone that night. I was supposed to. I had a date with this girl from the gym, Valentina, and I thought — I thought it could wait. One night. Nonna was tough. She'd survived worse than a weird neighbor."

Dominick's voice was quiet. "Marco."

"I got there the next morning. The front door was open. Nonna's front door. She never left it open. Never. She had three locks on it because the neighborhood wasn't what it used to be and she was an old woman who lived alone and she was careful. She was always careful."

He pulled away from the bag and sat down on the concrete floor, his back against the wall. His legs stretched out in front of him. His hands hung between his knees. They were still shaking.

"The kitchen was wrong. That's the first thing I noticed. Not what was in it — what wasn't. The light was wrong. Nonna kept this light over the stove, this yellow light, warm, it was always on because she said a kitchen should always be ready. The light was off. Everything was dark except what was coming through the window."

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

"Mr. Ferraro was standing in the kitchen. He was facing the wall. Just standing there, facing the wall, not moving. And Nonna—"

His voice broke. He swallowed hard, twice, and kept going. His grandmother's prayers echoed in his mind, faint and steady, the way they always did — Ave Maria, piena di grazia, il Signore e con te—

"She was on the floor. There was blood. A lot of it. He'd used a knife from the block on her counter. Her own knife. She was alive. She looked at me and she was alive and she said—" He stopped. Started again. "She said, 'Marco, that isn't him. Run.'"

The warehouse was very quiet. The heavy bag had stopped swinging.

"I didn't run."

"No," Dominick said. "You didn't."

"There was a fire axe on the wall in the hallway. The building was old — built in the fifties, before they changed the codes. Real axe, mounted behind glass. Break in case of emergency. I'd walked past it ten thousand times. Never thought about it."

He held up his left forearm. In the dim light, the scar was visible — a ragged line from wrist to elbow, puckered and white.

"He came at me when I grabbed the axe. He was fast. Faster than an old man should be. His eyes were—" Petrillo's jaw worked. "Wrong. Black. Not human. And his mouth was open and there were two voices coming out, two, layered over each other, and one of them was Mr. Ferraro and one of them was something else and the something else was laughing."

He touched the scar on his forearm.

"The knife got me here. I didn't feel it. Not then. I felt the axe in my hands. I felt how heavy it was. And I felt — Dio santo, I felt so angry. So angry that this thing had come into my grandmother's house and used her neighbor's body like a puppet and hurt the only person in the world who—"

He hit the concrete with his fist. The sound echoed in the empty warehouse.

"I swung the axe. I wasn't aiming. I wasn't thinking. I just swung it and it connected and the thing inside him — it screamed. Not a human scream. Something else. And black smoke came pouring out of his mouth and his eyes and the cut on his chest where the axe went in, and it stank like sulfur, and then it was gone and Mr. Ferraro was on the floor and he was just an old man again. Bleeding and broken and crying."

Petrillo wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. The gesture was rough, impatient — angry at himself for the tears.

"Nonna died at the hospital. Two hours later. She was praying when she went. The nurses said she was praying." His voice was barely audible. "Mr. Ferraro survived. He doesn't remember anything. He tends his tomatoes. He doesn't know why I can't look at him."

The silence stretched between them. The warehouse hummed with the industrial heaters, the distant traffic, the settling of old steel. Dominick crossed the gym floor and sat down next to Petrillo. Not close enough to crowd him. Close enough to be there.

"That's why you're here," Dominick said. Not a question.

"Cazzo, yes. That's why I'm here." Petrillo laughed — too loud, too sharp, the big laugh he used to cover the holes in himself. "Because some demon wearing my grandmother's neighbor carved her up in her own kitchen and I killed it with a fire axe and nobody — nobody in the whole world could tell me what happened. Not the cops, not the doctors, not the priest at Saint Anthony's. They all said Mr. Ferraro had a psychotic break. They said it was a tragedy. They said these things happen."

His voice hardened. "These things don't just happen."

"No," Dominick agreed. "They don't."

"So I started looking. Online, mostly. Conspiracy forums, occult websites, garbage mixed with truth — people who'd seen things and been told they were crazy and refused to believe it. It took three months to find someone who knew something real. A woman in Newark who'd lost her son to something she couldn't name. She knew a priest who'd been defrocked for performing unauthorized exorcisms. The priest knew a name. That led me to another person, and another, a chain of damaged people who'd seen the cracks in the world, and eventually to a woman named Frieda who asked me very specific questions and gave me an address in Philadelphia."

"And here you are."

"And here I am. Punching a bag at two in the morning because I can't close my eyes without seeing my grandmother on the kitchen floor."

Dominick was quiet for a long time. Then he said: "When I was at Raven's Peak, I saw things that rewired my brain. Things I can't unsee. A man I'd trained with for years, possessed, trying to kill me with his own hands while the demon inside him used his voice to call me by my first name." He paused. "The first year after, I couldn't touch Marvin without flinching. My husband. The man I love more than anything in this world. And I couldn't let him touch me because my body had decided that hands meant violence."

Petrillo looked at him.

"It got better," Dominick said. "Not gone. Better. Marvin was patient. He's the most patient man alive. And I went to someone who helped me talk about it. And I trained, because training gave me something to do with the fear. Something productive."

"Is that what this is? Productive fear?"

"That's exactly what this is." Dominick met his eyes. "You have talent, Petrillo. Raw talent. I saw it the first day you walked in here. The way you move, the way you read a room, the instinct — you can't teach that. But talent without discipline is just a fire axe. It'll save your life once. Maybe twice. After that, it'll get you killed."

"Haatim says the same thing. With more words."

The corner of Dominick's mouth twitched — not quite amusement, but the faintest crack in the professional facade. "Haatim uses words the way I use weapons. Precisely and in large quantities." The smile faded. "He's right, though. The drill work, the fundamentals, the patience — that's what turns a survivor into a fighter. You survived your grandmother's kitchen. I want you to survive everything that comes after."

Petrillo looked down at his hands. Raw knuckles, the scar on his forearm, the rosary pressed into his palm. His grandmother's prayers echoed in the back of his mind, faint and eternal. Benedetta tu fra le donne, e benedetto il frutto del tuo seno...

"I'm not good at patience," he said.

"I know."

"I want to hit things until they stop moving."

"I know that too."

"But I'll do the drills." He looked up. "Not because I think they're right. Because you asked."

Dominick shook his head. "Don't do them for me. Don't do them for Haatim. Do them for the next person you have to save. Do them so that when someone's grandmother is on the floor, you're fast enough and skilled enough and disciplined enough to save her."

The words hit Petrillo in the chest like a fist. He blinked hard. His throat was too tight to speak, so he nodded.

They sat together in the quiet warehouse. The heavy bag swayed gently on its chain, pendulum-slow. Somewhere in the building, a pipe clanked. The heater hummed. Outside, Philadelphia slept, and the things that crawled through the cracked Ninth Gate moved through the dark, patient and hungry.

Petrillo touched the rosary. Nonna's rosary. He closed his eyes and for the first time in months, instead of seeing the kitchen floor, he saw her face. Not broken, not bleeding — alive. Sitting on the couch with the indent, the beads moving through her fingers, her voice low and steady. Praying for him, probably. She'd always prayed for him.

"Dominick."

"Yeah."

"Teach me everything."

Dominick stood and offered his hand. Petrillo took it and pulled himself up. His knuckles stung. His forearm ached where the scar tissue pulled. His eyes were red and his hands were still shaking.

But he was here. In a warehouse in Philadelphia, standing next to a man who'd fought demons and survived, surrounded by people who'd seen the darkness and chosen to fight it. His grandmother would have approved. She would have prayed for him and fed everyone soup and told him to stand up straight and kissed both his cheeks and whispered, "Mio ragazzo forte." My strong boy. The way she always had, every time he left her house, every single time.

He cracked his knuckles and squared his shoulders.

"From the top?" he asked.

Dominick nodded. "From the top."

Dominick showed him the stance first — proper this time, not the scrappy brawler's crouch Petrillo defaulted to. Weight centered. Guard up. Blade angle forty-five degrees, the way the old Council manuals prescribed. Petrillo's body resisted it. Every instinct said lean forward, close the distance, swing hard. Dominick corrected him without judgment, the same way he'd correct a misaligned scope or a poorly staked tent. Mechanical. Patient. Professional.

They trained until dawn.