The homeless man was dying, and he wouldn't shut up about the angels.
"They're screaming, Father," he gasped, his breath rattling in his chest like dice in a cup. "Can't you hear them? All those beautiful voices, screaming and screaming—"
"I'm not a father anymore," I said, kneeling beside him in the alley behind St. Adalbert's. The cobblestones were slick with February sleet, and the smell of rotting garbage mixed with the copper tang of blood. "Just Marcus. And I need you to save your breath."
But he clutched at my jacket with fingers that had no strength left in them, pulling me close enough that I could smell the cheap wine on his breath and something else underneath—sulfur and burnt cinnamon, the stink of the supernatural. His eyes were wide and fever-bright, pupils blown so large they'd swallowed the iris whole.
"You're a priest," he insisted. "I can see it on you. The mark. You've walked between worlds, haven't you? You've seen behind the Veil."
I had. Six years ago, when I'd failed the exorcism at St. Bernardine's Cathedral and killed seventeen people in the process. When I'd died for three minutes and come back wrong, able to see things that were supposed to stay hidden. When the Vatican had stripped me of my collar and told me never to darken a church door again—though technically, I was still a priest. You couldn't unring that bell, no matter how much both parties might want to.
"Yeah," I said quietly. My fingers found his pulse. Thready and fast, barely there. "I've seen some things."
"Then you understand." He smiled—teeth too perfect, too white, nothing like the rotting stumps you'd expect from a man sleeping rough in Chicago's South Side. "They're afraid, Father. The angels are afraid. Something's coming, something that makes even them scream."
His hand shot out and grabbed the rosary hanging from my belt—the one I'd been carrying since I was sixteen, my grandmother's rosary, blessed by three different bishops and carried through enough firefights with the supernatural that it hummed with accumulated grace. The moment his skin touched the blessed beads, they burst into flame.
Not metaphorical flame. Actual, honest-to-God fire.
I jerked back, but not fast enough. The burning rosary seared across my palm, and I bit back a scream as the smell of my own burning flesh joined the alley's perfume. The man held onto the beads even as his palm blistered and blackened, his smile never wavering.
"You see?" he whispered. "Even your holy things know. Even they burn with the knowledge of what's coming."
Then he died.
Just like that. One moment he was staring at me with those fever-bright eyes, the next they'd gone flat and empty as windows in an abandoned building. His hand fell away from the rosary—no longer burning, just a string of charred beads and melted silver—and his final breath escaped in a long, rattling sigh.
I sat back on my heels, cradling my burned hand. My heart hammered against my ribs. I'd been doing this for six years—investigating the weird, the wrong, the things that didn't fit into nice neat boxes labeled "natural causes." I'd seen demons wearing meat suits, angels with too many wings, vampires who filed their taxes and werewolves who coached Little League. I thought I'd seen it all.
But a blessed rosary had never burned me before.
Not even when I'd stopped being one of the good guys.
I forced myself to focus. The man was dead. That meant I needed to call it in, let the proper authorities take over. Except—
A pattern on his chest, visible through his torn shirt.
I pulled the fabric aside, careful not to touch his skin directly. You never knew what you might catch from a corpse that reeked of the supernatural. The winter moonlight was thin and cold, but it was enough to see by.
Carved into his chest were symbols.
Not random cuts or the careful precision of a ritual scarring. These had been carved into his flesh with something that burned as it cut, leaving edges cauterized and blackened. I recognized the alphabet—Enochian, the language of angels, written in characters that hurt to look at too long because they weren't meant for human eyes.
I pulled out my phone and took pictures, making sure to get the detail. Then I started translating, tracing each symbol with my eyes, careful not to touch.
It took me fifteen minutes to work through it. Enochian wasn't a language you learned in seminary—it was something you picked up when you spent too much time asking questions the Church didn't want answered. When you broke into Vatican archives that were supposed to stay locked. When you traded favors with demons who remembered Eden.
The symbols spelled out a single word.
INNOCENT.
I sat back on my heels again, my burned hand throbbing in time with my pulse. A homeless man dies in an alley, clutching a rosary that burned both him and a supposedly consecrated priest, carved with angelic script declaring him innocent.
Nothing about that added up.
I pulled out my phone and dialed a number I'd been calling too often lately.
She answered on the second ring. "Chen."
"It's Marcus. I've got a body."
Detective Sarah Chen sighed, and I could picture her in her office at the 18th District, probably surrounded by case files and cold coffee, her black hair pulled back in that severe bun she wore when she was dealing with budget meetings or jurisdiction disputes. "Marcus, unless there's something weird about this body—"
"He was carved up with Enochian script spelling 'innocent,' died clutching a blessed rosary that burst into flames, and spent his last breath telling me the angels are screaming."
Silence on the other end of the line. Then: "Where are you?"
"Alley behind St. Adalbert's. South side, between 17th and 18th."
"Don't touch anything. Don't let anyone else touch anything. And for God's sake, don't leave before I get there."
She hung up.
I stood up, my knees popping—I was thirty-eight but felt sixty most days—and moved to the mouth of the alley. Traffic hummed past on Ashland Avenue, people heading home from their normal jobs to their normal lives, completely unaware that something was wrong with the world tonight. That angels were screaming, according to a dead man with perfect teeth.
I pulled out my flask—bourbon, cheap but effective—and took a long swallow. The burn in my throat didn't quite match the burn in my palm, but it helped. Everything helped these days, as long as it came from a bottle.
My phone buzzed. A text from Lily, my sixteen-year-old niece. The only family I had left, the only person who gave a damn whether I lived or died.
*Uncle Marcus when are you coming to visit? I had that dream again.*
My thumb hovered over the keyboard. The dream she kept having, the one where she stood in a cathedral full of blood and screaming, where something with too many wings told her she was special, chosen, damned. The dream I kept telling her was just a dream, even though I knew better.
*Soon, kiddo. Promise.*
I hit send and hated myself a little more than usual. Just another lie added to the pile. I hadn't visited St. Catherine's Boarding School in three months, too busy taking cases that paid my rent and her tuition, too damaged to let her see what I was becoming.
Too afraid she'd see the truth in my eyes: that the dream wasn't a dream at all.
Headlights cut across the alley mouth, and Chen's unmarked sedan pulled up. She climbed out, already wearing latex gloves and a expression that said she was regretting taking my call. Behind her, a Crime Scene Unit van pulled up, and I recognized Martinez and Wong, two of the techs who'd learned to stop asking questions when Chen brought them to the weird ones.
"Marcus." Chen walked up, all business. Pretty, but the kind that came with hard edges and shadows under the eyes. Three years since she'd lost her partner to a vampire nest. We had that in common. "Show me."
I led her back to the body. Martinez and Wong followed, already taking photos with their cameras, the flash strobing against the alley walls like lightning.
Chen knelt beside the dead man, studying him with the careful attention she brought to every case. She lifted his shirt, examined the carved symbols, checked his hands and face.
"No ID," she said. "No wallet, no phone. But look at his clothes."
I looked. Beneath the grime and the tears, his coat was quality—wool and cashmere, the kind of thing that cost more than I made in a month. His shoes were expensive too, Italian leather, barely scuffed.
"He wasn't homeless," I said.
"No." Chen stood up, her jaw tight. "Martinez, get facial recognition running. And check missing persons for the last forty-eight hours, white male, mid-fifties, approximately two hundred pounds."
"On it, Detective."
Chen turned to me. "The rosary?"
I held up my burned palm. The rosary dangled from my other hand, the beads still hot to the touch where they hadn't melted entirely.
"It burned you." Not surprise in her voice—she'd stopped being surprised three years ago. Something else entirely. "I thought blessed objects didn't affect you anymore."
"They don't," I said. "Usually."
"But this one did."
"Yeah."
She looked at the body, then back at me. "What's it mean?"
"I don't know." I slipped the ruined rosary into my pocket. Evidence, technically, but Chen wouldn't call me on it. "But I'll find out."
---
Chen drove me to Holy Redeemer—the condemned church on the South Side where I'd been squatting for the past six years, operating out of the basement like some kind of supernatural private investigator. The archdiocese kept meaning to demolish it, but paperwork had a funny way of getting lost when you knew which demons to bribe and which angels to annoy.
"I'll call you when we get an ID," she said as I climbed out of her sedan. "And Marcus? Be careful. Something about this one feels wrong."
"They all feel wrong," I said.
"No. This is different." She looked at me. In the glow of the dashboard lights, worry etched lines around her eyes. "The rosary burning you. That's new. That's—"
"I know," I said quietly. "I know."
She drove off, leaving me standing in the empty parking lot. Holy Redeemer loomed above me, all Gothic architecture and broken windows, a monument to the neighborhood's better days. I'd chosen it because it was still consecrated ground—even defrocked, even damned, I could feel the weight of accumulated prayer in the stones. It made certain things harder to reach me here.
Most nights, anyway.
I descended the stairs to the basement, key already in my hand. The door was warded against intrusion—salt lines, sigils in dead languages, a mezuzah I'd stolen from a Kabbalist who owed me a favor. Overkill, maybe, but I'd made enemies.
The basement had become my home by degrees. At first it was just a place to store books the Vatican didn't want me reading, files on cases the Church had buried. Then it was a place to sleep when I didn't want to go back to my apartment and stare at the walls. Now it was everything—bedroom, office, library, arsenal.
I flicked on the lights. Fluorescent tubes buzzed and flickered before catching, illuminating the controlled chaos I lived in. Books stacked everywhere, some so old they'd crumble if I opened them wrong. Jars filled with herbs and oils and things that were neither. Weapons on the walls—blessed blades, bullets carved with exorcism prayers, a shotgun loaded with rock salt and iron filings.
And bottles. So many bottles.
I went to the desk and pulled out my research materials. If someone was carving Enochian into people, I needed to know why. The language of angels wasn't something you learned on the street. It required training, access to texts that most people didn't know existed.
It required the kind of training the Church gave to exorcists.
I opened my laptop and started pulling up files I'd collected over the years. Case notes from Chicago PD that Chen had fed me. Vatican archives I'd downloaded before they kicked me out. Personal journals from other exorcists, some living, most dead.
I searched for Enochian, for carved symbols, for ritual scarification. Found dozens of cases, none quite matching. Pulled up photos of crime scenes that had never made the news, murders the Church had classified as "internal matters."
Nothing.
I took another pull from my flask—I'd refilled it before starting research, a habit born of experience—and tried a different angle. What if it wasn't about the Enochian itself? What if it was about the message?
INNOCENT.
Why carve that into someone? What was the point? Unless—
Unless you were trying to prove something. To declare something. To make a claim that needed to be written in the language of Heaven itself.
My phone rang. Chen.
"Talk to me," I said.
"We got an ID. His name was Robert Cardelli, fifty-three, real estate developer from Evanston. Reported missing by his wife thirty-six hours ago. She said he went out for a walk and never came back."
"Any priors?"
"Clean as a whistle. Model citizen. Donated to charity, coached soccer, went to church every Sunday."
"Which church?"
Papers rustled. "St. Ignatius in Rogers Park. Why?"
I was already grabbing my coat. "Was he going to confession?"
More rustling. "According to his wife, he'd been going to confession every day for the past week. She thought he was having an affair and feeling guilty about it."
"But there was no affair."
"No. I already checked. He was exactly what he appeared to be—a good man with a good life."
"Then why the hell was someone carving 'innocent' into his chest in angel-speak?"
"That's what I was hoping you could tell me," Chen said. "Marcus, I just got a call from the ME. There are three more bodies."
I stopped halfway to the door. "What?"
"Three more bodies in the last week, all found in different parts of the city. All with the same markings. All reported missing after going to confession."
Ice spread through my chest. "Someone's targeting people who go to confession."
"Looks that way."
"Send me the files," I said. "Everything you have."
"Already on the way. Marcus—" She paused. "Whatever this is, it's not random. Someone's running a pattern. Someone with training and knowledge and access to things they shouldn't have access to."
"Yeah." I stared at the ruined rosary on my desk, the beads still faintly warm. "I'm starting to figure that out."
I hung up. Stood in the center of my basement, surrounded by weapons and books and bottles.
Four people dead. All after confession. All carved with Enochian declaring them innocent.
Someone was playing games with absolution and damnation, life and death, the very nature of sin and redemption.
Someone was using the sacred as a weapon.
And I had no idea who, or why, or how to stop them.
I picked up the rosary again. Heat still trapped in the beads, radiating against my palm. A blessed object had burned me—something that had never happened before, not even after St. Bernardine's. Not even after I'd stopped being sure I was on the right side.
"What are you trying to tell me, Grandma?" I whispered to the ruined beads.
But the only answer was the silence of the basement and the distant sound of traffic on the street above.
The angels were screaming, the dying man had said.
I was starting to think he might be right.
