Sins of the Father

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 cracked concrete slick with February sleet, the orange glow of a Harold's Chicken sign bleeding through from the street. The cold soaked through his jeans at the knees, and the smell of fryer grease competed 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.

Ever since, the Veil had been thin for him—the membrane between the world people lived in and the one underneath. Through it, sin showed as shadow—dark shapes clinging to shoulders, heavier on some people than others. Holiness registered as warmth, amber or white-gold at the edges of consecrated things. And the inhuman showed as visual noise: shapes his eyes resolved but his mind refused to accept because they couldn't exist. He couldn't unsee what bled through, couldn't stop his eyes from tracing the wrongness layered over everything real.

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 glowed faintly to his eyes—a warm amber light no one else could see, bright enough to leave afterimages. 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.