The man was dying in the alley behind St. Adalbert's, 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." Marcus knelt beside him on cobblestones slick with February sleet. The cold soaked through his jeans at the knees, and the smell of rotting garbage mixed with the copper tang of blood. "Just Marcus. And I need you to save your breath."
But the man clutched at his jacket with fingers that had no strength left in them, pulling him close enough that the cheap wine on the dying man's breath hit Marcus full in the face—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."
He had. Six years ago, when he'd failed the exorcism at St. Bernardine's Cathedral and killed seventeen people in the process. When he'd died for three minutes and come back wrong.
The Veil separated the mundane world from everything else. Most people saw reality as a single layer—solid, predictable, ending where their senses ended. But reality had depth. Strata. The Veil was the membrane between layers, and after Marcus died and came back, he could see through it like staring through dirty glass.
Everything carried a second image now. People trailed shadows of their sins, dark smudges that clung to their shoulders like parasites. Holy objects glowed with accumulated prayer, bright enough to hurt if they were old enough. And demons—demons looked like oil slicks in the shape of men, beautiful on the surface but with something writhing underneath, something with too many angles and not enough mercy.
The Vatican had stripped him of his collar when they realized what he'd become. Told him never to darken a church door again—though technically, he was still a priest. You couldn't unring that bell, no matter how much both parties might want to.
"Yeah," Marcus said quietly. His fingers found the man's pulse. Thready and fast, barely there. "I've seen some things."
"Then you understand." The man smiled—teeth too perfect, too white, nothing like the rotting stumps you'd expect from someone 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 Marcus's belt—his grandmother's rosary, the one he'd carried since he was sixteen, blessed by three different bishops and carried through enough firefights with the supernatural that it hummed with accumulated grace. The moment skin touched blessed beads, they burst into flame.
Not metaphorical flame. Actual, honest-to-God fire.
Marcus jerked back, but not fast enough. The burning rosary seared across his palm, and he bit down on a scream as the smell of his own burning flesh joined the alley's perfume. The man held on 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 those fever-bright eyes stared up at Marcus, the next they'd gone flat and empty as windows in an abandoned building. The hand fell away from the rosary—no longer burning, just a string of charred beads and melted silver—and a final breath escaped in a long, rattling sigh.
Across the alley, near the mouth where the streetlight pooled orange on wet pavement, a woman stood watching. Marcus registered her in fragments—heavy coat too large for her frame, a shopping cart loaded with plastic bags, dark eyes that caught the light and held it. A homeless woman, unremarkable, the kind of figure you passed a hundred times a day on Chicago's South Side without seeing. She stood perfectly still, her gaze fixed on the dead man's face as if studying something only she could read there.
Marcus blinked, and she was gone. Shopping cart and all, vanished into the February dark as if she'd never been there. Later, he would try to remember her face and find nothing—just the impression of eyes that had seen too much and a stillness that didn't belong to someone living on the street. But right now he had other problems.
He sat back on his heels, cradling his burned hand. His heart hammered against his ribs. Six years of this—investigating the weird, the wrong, the things that didn't fit into nice neat boxes labeled "natural causes." Demons wearing meat suits, angels with too many wings, vampires who filed their taxes and werewolves who coached Little League. He'd thought he'd seen it all.
But a blessed rosary had never burned him before.
Not even when he'd stopped being one of the good guys.
Blessed objects only reacted that way under specific circumstances—when two sources of genuine grace collided, or when accumulated prayer met something it recognized as fundamentally holy. The man had touched his rosary and it hadn't just rejected him. It had ignited like flash paper meeting a match. Which meant something celestial had been burning in his blood, something pure enough to trigger a reaction in an object blessed by three bishops.
Something angelic.
Marcus forced himself to focus. The man was dead. That meant calling it in, letting the proper authorities take over. Except—
A pattern on his chest, visible through torn fabric.
He pulled the shirt aside, careful not to touch 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 enough to see by.
Carved into his chest were symbols.
Not random cuts or the careful precision of ritual scarring. These had been carved into flesh with something that burned as it cut, leaving edges cauterized and blackened. The alphabet was Enochian—the language of angels, written in characters that hurt to look at too long because they weren't meant for human eyes.
Marcus pulled out his phone and took pictures, making sure to get the detail. Then he started translating, tracing each symbol with his eyes, careful not to touch.
Fifteen minutes to work through it. Enochian wasn't something 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.
Marcus sat back again, his burned hand throbbing in time with his pulse. A 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.
He pulled out his phone and dialed a number he'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 he 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.
Marcus stood, knees popping—thirty-eight but feeling 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 had gone wrong with the world tonight. That angels were screaming, according to a dead man with perfect teeth.
The spot where the homeless woman had stood was empty. No shopping cart tracks in the slush, no footprints. Just the wet gleam of pavement under the streetlight.
He pulled out his flask—bourbon, cheap but effective—and took a long swallow. The burn in his throat didn't quite match the burn in his palm, but it helped. Everything helped these days, as long as it came from a bottle.
His phone buzzed. A text from Lily, his sixteen-year-old niece. The only family he had left, the only person who gave a damn whether he lived or died.
*Uncle Marcus when are you coming to visit? I had that dream again. The one with the cathedral. But this time I touched the blood on the floor and I SAW things. Faces. People dying. Is that normal?*
His burned hand pulsed. The same hand that had touched his grandmother's rosary moments before it burst into flames. The Kane bloodline carried gifts—his mother had them, her mother before her. Visions. Knowing things you shouldn't know. Touching objects and seeing their histories.
Lily was manifesting. The psychometry was waking up.
His thumb hovered over the keyboard. She needed him to explain what was happening to her, to train her, to keep her safe from the things that hunted people with gifts like theirs. She needed an uncle who wasn't drowning in bourbon and guilt.
*Soon, kiddo. The dreams are just stress. I'll visit next weekend and we'll talk. Promise.*
He hit send and the lie tasted like ash. Three months since he'd visited St. Catherine's Boarding School—too busy taking cases that paid his rent and her tuition, too damaged to let her see what he was becoming.
Too afraid she'd touch his hand and see St. Bernardine's burning behind his eyes. Too afraid she'd know exactly how many people he'd failed.
***
Headlights cut across the alley mouth, and Chen's unmarked sedan pulled up. She climbed out already wearing latex gloves and an expression that said she was regretting taking his call. Behind her, a Crime Scene Unit van arrived, and Marcus 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—the other Marcus, Marcus Rodriguez—to a vampire nest in Pilsen. She'd put three rounds into the thing's chest before discovering bullets didn't work, then watched it tear him apart while she lay bleeding on the warehouse floor. The department gave her a medal. She gave herself nightmares and a standing appointment with every weird case that crossed her desk.
They had that in common. Losses that defined them. Guilt that drove them.
"Show me."
He led her back to the body. Martinez and Wong followed, cameras already strobing against the alley walls like lightning.
Chen knelt beside the dead man, studying him with the careful attention she brought to every case. 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."
Marcus looked. Beneath the grime and the tears, the coat was quality—wool and cashmere, the kind of thing that cost more than he made in a month. The shoes were expensive too, Italian leather, barely scuffed.
"He wasn't homeless."
"No." Chen stood, 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 Marcus. "The rosary?"
He held up his burned palm. The rosary dangled from his other hand, 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. Concern, maybe, though she'd have denied it. "I thought blessed objects didn't affect you anymore."
"They don't. Usually."
"But this one did."
"Yeah."
She looked at the body, then back at him. "What's it mean?"
"I don't know." He slipped the ruined rosary into his pocket. Evidence, technically, but Chen wouldn't call him on it. "But I'll find out."
***
Chen drove him to Holy Redeemer—the condemned church on the South Side where he'd been squatting for 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 he climbed out of the sedan. "And Marcus? Be careful. Something about this one feels wrong."
"They all feel wrong."
"No. This is different." In the glow of the dashboard lights, worry etched lines around her eyes. "The rosary burning you. That's new. That's—"
"I know." His voice was quiet. "I know."
She drove off, leaving him standing in the empty parking lot. Holy Redeemer loomed above him, all Gothic architecture and broken windows, a monument to the neighborhood's better days. He'd chosen it because it was still consecrated ground—even defrocked, even damned, he could feel the weight of accumulated prayer in the stones. It made certain things harder to reach him.
Most nights, anyway.
He descended the stairs to the basement, key already in hand. The door was warded against intrusion—salt lines, sigils in dead languages, a mezuzah he'd stolen from a Kabbalist who owed him a favor. Overkill, maybe, but he'd made enemies.
The basement had become his home by degrees. First just a place to store books the Vatican didn't want him reading, files on cases the Church had buried. Then a place to sleep when the apartment walls closed in. Now it was everything—bedroom, office, library, arsenal.
Fluorescent tubes buzzed and flickered before catching, illuminating the controlled chaos he lived in. Books stacked everywhere, some so old they'd crumble if he 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.
He went to the desk and pulled out his research materials. If someone was carving Enochian into people, he 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.
He opened his laptop and started pulling up files he'd collected over the years. Case notes from Chicago PD that Chen had fed him. Vatican archives he'd downloaded before they kicked him out. Personal journals from other exorcists, some living, most dead.
He 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.
Another pull from the flask—he'd refilled it before starting research, a habit born of experience—and 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 you were trying to prove something. To declare something. To make a claim that needed to be written in the language of Heaven itself.
His phone rang. Chen.
"Talk to me."
"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?"
Marcus was already grabbing his 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."
His burned hand throbbed. The rosary wound pulsed with each heartbeat, a reminder that something fundamental had shifted tonight. "What?"
"Three more bodies over the past three months, all found in different parts of the city. We only just connected them—different precincts, different detectives, nobody saw the pattern until I started looking. All with the same markings. All reported missing after going to confession."
Ice spread through his chest. "Someone's targeting people who go to confession."
"Looks that way."
"Send me the files. 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." He stared at the ruined rosary on his desk, the beads still faintly warm. "I'm starting to figure that out."
He hung up. Stood in the center of his 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 he had no idea who, or why, or how to stop them.
Marcus picked up the rosary again. Heat still trapped in the beads, radiating against his palm. A blessed object had burned him—something that had never happened before, not even after St. Bernardine's. Not even after he'd stopped being sure he was on the right side.
The beads gave no answers. They never did.
Outside, February wind rattled the basement windows and pushed cold through every crack in the old church's bones. Somewhere above, the traffic on Ashland carried people home to warm beds and simple lives, people who'd never have to wonder whether the burning in their hands meant something holy or something damned.
The angels were screaming, the dying man had said.
Marcus poured three fingers of bourbon, drank it standing, and got back to work.
He was starting to think the dead man might have been right.
Join the Discussion