There was a chilling certainty in the exorcist’s words. I stared at the circle of chairs. Demons needed a host to get around. If Andara believed the creature was here already, it could mean only one thing: the demon had already possessed one of the six survivors. I glanced up at the mural of The Last Supper, zeroing in on Judas among the apostles.
Could Andara be right? Had some infernal presence already infiltrated the monastery?
My thoughts turned to the strange earthquake and Liza’s creepy behavior. Perhaps she hadn’t just snapped during this first session. Maybe the demon had hitched a ride in its original host. That would make a certain kind of sense—
I froze in mid-thought as my gaze landed on the twelve-inch, ornate silver cross in Andara’s hands. This was the cross Andara used in his exorcisms. There was a grim determination in the man’s eyes.
“I’m sorry, Kane.”
And with these words, Andara brought down the heavy metal cross on my head, and the world went black.
Chapter Eight
“Simon, are you alright?”
Nora’s voice broke through the dark veil of unconsciousness, and I let out a low groan. My head was throbbing something fierce. I inhaled and opened my eyes, allowing my surroundings to come back into focus. I was still inside the conference room. Five of the formerly possessed stared down at me with a mixture of concern and confusion.
Nora offered me a cup of water that I greedily accepted.
As the liquid ran down my parched throat, I scanned my watch. It was a little after seven, which meant I’d been out for four hours.
“What happened?” Detective Tomkins wanted to know.
Good question. It’s not every day that an exorcist knocks you on the head with a metal cross. What in God’s name had gotten into Andara? What reason would he have to attack me?
And then the chilling answer hit me. My right hand slid toward my double-holster, receiving confirmation of my worst fears. My father’s sacrificial blade—the athame—was gone.
The exorcist had taken my knife.
What the hell are you up to, Andara?
I could guess the answer already, but shifted my focus to the assembled group. As per Andara’s instructions, everyone had returned to the conference room at seven o’clock sharp, only to find me conked out on the floor. Everyone except Liza Hawthorn—and the exorcist himself.
As I groggily rose to my feet, the world spinning around me, a banging sound rocked the chamber, adding to the pounding sensation in my head.
Clang-clang-clang. Church bells. But according to the monastery’s brochure, no Mass was scheduled this early in the evening.
“What’s going on?” Tomkins asked.
The ominous peals of the church bell continued, intensifying my dark sense of foreboding. I grabbed my Glock, relieved to find that Andara hadn’t taken the pistol.
I turned toward the door, gun in hand. “I’m going to find out.”
No one offered to join me.
The ringing bells accompanied me as I made my way down the roofed galleria. Earlier I’d marveled at the tranquil beauty of the courtyard; now, I barely paid any attention to it. Bigger problems occupied my mind. In the best-case scenario, one of my closest colleagues had gone nuts and tried to brain me. But I had to face the real possibility that a demon was loose in this isolated monastery. Without my blade, I didn’t stand much of a chance against the fiend—especially not one as powerful and cunning as Andara had described.
Rapid footsteps behind me gave me pause. Nora caught up with me, her beautiful features a giant question mark.
“I’m coming with you.”
I wanted to talk her out of it, but the steely determination in her eyes suggested my words would fall on deaf ears. To be honest, I didn’t mind having some company for this next part. Investigating phantom church bells in some remote monastery in the middle of the night wasn’t an activity you’d want to do on your own. Add the possibility that a demon might roam these hallways, and there were plenty of reasons to opt for the buddy system.
“Okay,” I said and started walking again.
“Are you going to at least tell me what happened?” she asked.
“I think Andara is about to make a big mistake.”
By the time we stepped out of the monastery’s guest house, I’d brought Nora up to speed. My former lover looked disturbed—and scared. That made two of us.
We turned toward the church in the near distance. The constant banging of the bell had grown more insistent. I could feel the vibrations rattling around inside my skull. There was almost a supernatural quality to the rhythmic pounding sound.
The cold of the desert misted our breaths as we edged through the darkness. The temperatures had dropped by at least thirty degrees, and I wished I’d brought a jacket. Nora’s chattering teeth told me she was suffering, too.
Clang—clang—clang.
The pounding bell droned on as we pressed onward. The church bell’s incessant peals had become the heartbeat of the surreal, dark desert landscape that stretched out before us.
Nora asked what was on both of our minds, almost shouting to be heard over the ringing.
“Where is everyone?”
Excellent question. There were no signs of the monks. The clanging grew more overwhelming with each successive step. I could feel the vibration shivering down my spine, drilling into my bones, churning my insides. Danger lurked in the alien darkness, unseen but tangible.
By the time we arrived at the oaken church doors and my fingers closed around the brass ring, we both breathed a sigh of relief. Even knowing that nothing good could be waiting for us inside, at least the church offered some sense of shelter from the unsettling vastness of the desert.
I pulled open the heavy church door with a loud creak and—
Nora cried out in horror.
A shadow swung back and forth in the darkness up ahead, obscuring the view of the nave and altar beyond. I pulled out my flashlight and pointed it at the swinging figure.
We’d found Father Andara.
He dangled a few feet above the floor, the church bell line wrapped around his neck like a noose, his swinging body causing the bell to ring out again and again above him.
The beam of my flashlight found his dead features—tongue lolling, lifeless eyes bulging from wide-open sockets. His skin had turned blue, neck twisted at an unnatural angle.
My heart sank.
I was beginning to believe that Liza was right.
The demon had indeed returned.
Chapter Nine
The hanged body of the exorcist spun clockwise, then counterclockwise, performing a final grotesque pirouette before coming to a juddering standstill.
The haunting sound of the bell stopped.
I scanned the scene, piecing together what must have happened. Someone had wrapped the bell line around the exorcist’s neck and tossed him down the circular wooden staircase that wound its way up toward the iron bell high above us. I didn’t know if the fall had snapped his neck or if he’d gasped his last breaths while the ringing bell drowned out his death rattle.
“We can’t leave him like this,” Sister Nora said, snapping me out of my grim musings.
I wished I had my athame so I could cut down the exorcist and restore some dignity to Father Andara in death.
My flashlight illuminated the dead man’s contorted, purplish features once more. I had fought side by side with this man, helping him save several lost souls. It pained me to see the legendary warrior of the light come to such a tragic end.
I looked up at Nora and saw that she was fighting back tears. Andara had saved her soul five years earlier. She owed this man. And now he was gone. She didn’t know yet that he’d called her here to serve as bait, nor that he’d been the one who attacked me.
Nora’s panicked voice thrust me out of my thoughts. “Oh my God, there’s another body!”
My attention turned toward the nave of the church and made out a form splayed
atop the altar, dimly illuminated by the flickering votive candles.
Jaw tight, I walked down the nave with Nora. Candles guttered around us as we approached the altar, our footsteps echoing eerily on the stone floor.
My face fell as I drew closer and my gaze fastened on Liza Hawthorn. Her limbs spilled over the sides of the altar like a carelessly discarded doll. Making matters worse, my father’s sacrificial blade was sticking from her gore-covered chest. Someone had drawn strange glyphs and occult symbols all over the altar.
Andara, what have you done? I thought.
My mind flashed back to my earlier exchange with the exorcist. While I was unconscious, Andara had taken my athame and sacrificed Liza, convinced he could finally send the foul creature inside her back to Hell.
That theory explained Liza’s death, but what about Andara? Had the exorcist come to his senses following the murder? Had guilt driven him to commit suicide? Or perhaps the murder-suicide was part of an occult ritual?
My mind was hurting from the possibilities. The bottom line was that we were all in trouble. The snake tattoo on my shoulder was pulsing with pain, a clear indicator that black magic was in the air—as if I needed any more of a hint.
We had to alert the others, inform the monks of the crime. Before we could leave this accursed place, though, there was one last thing I had to do.
My fingers reached out for the handle of my father’s sacrificial blade. I was disturbing a murder scene, but I didn’t have a choice in the matter.
“Simon, what are you doing?”
I grimaced. No matter how I spun it, this wasn’t going to sound good. “The knife is my best weapon against demons,” I said. “It’s mine—Andara took it after he attacked me. I need it back.”
I fought back a wave of disgust as I pulled the blade from Liza’s gored chest with a wet smack.
Nora watched me in horror. As I studied the blood-caked blade, another realization hit me. I understood the real reason Andara had invited me out to the desert monastery. Everything he told me about facing my darkness had been bullshit. He always wanted me here so he could use my blade to slay the creature that had tormented him for so many years.
And that raised an interesting question. Had the exorcist achieved his goal? Was the demon defeated?
I doubted it. The man’s lifeless body dangling from the bell line suggested that something had gone wrong. A man like Andara might have crossed many lines in his pursuit of victory against the forces of darkness, but he would not have taken his own life. Not if it meant damning his soul forever. He’d truly believed in what he preached, even if those beliefs had taken him down a dark path at the end.
I cursed the exorcist under my breath for being such a stubborn fool. Why hadn’t he confided in me from the start? Together, we would have stood a far better chance of besting the demon. Why had Andara insisted on facing the creature alone?
“We need to let the others know what happened here,” I said.
I was about to circle the altar when the peal of the bell shredded the silence of the church. Nora stifled a gasp, and I gripped my knife. My gaze turned toward the bell line at the other end of the nave, now shrouded in shadows.
The clanging continued for a few seconds and then stopped.
Heart hammering in my chest, I walked back toward where we’d found the priest, a nervous-looking Nora by my side.
As I reached the bell line, I forgot to exhale. My hand unconsciously reached back and gripped Nora’s, both of us frozen in fear and confusion.
There was no sign of Father Andara. The exorcist had vanished.
Chapter Ten
The demon has returned.
Liza Hawthorn’s words kept echoing through my mind as Nora and I made our way to the monks’ quarters to alert them of the situation. The thought of having to explain this nightmare scenario to the sour-faced head monk filled me with a different dread. The abbot’s worst fears had become a terrifying reality—Andara had invited evil into this monastery and the Son of the Devil was about to share the good news with him. Norman’s icy reception felt more than justified now.
An unnatural silence greeted us as we walked up to the monks’ living quarters. Once more I wondered why the brothers had ignored the ringing church bell earlier.
The sensation that something was wrong deepened upon entering the building. There were no signs of the brothers anywhere. The mess hall, dormitory, and recreational area were all abandoned.
“How could this demon make sixty monks disappear?” Nora said.
I shook my head, unable to explain this latest mystery. “We need to get back to the guest house and warn the others.”
I prayed we wouldn’t arrive too late.
As we approached the guest quarters, all conversation between Nora and I died down. My mind struggled to make sense of what was happening. Andara would not have killed himself—not unless the alternative was significantly worse. Perhaps the demon had jumped from Liza’s body into the exorcist when he plunged my athame into the possessed woman. As the demon wrestled to seize control of Andara, the exorcist had seen only one way out of his predicament. Suicide might feel like a viable option in such a scenario, even to a devoted man of God.
If my theory was correct, then Andara hadn’t realized the entity could reanimate his corpse. Still, the demon’s time on this plane would be limited in its current form. A demon could hijack and manipulate a corpse for a short period of time, but the creature would soon require a new host body.
And once possessed, a person was more vulnerable to the infernal forces. The demon would go after one of the survivors.
I quickened my pace, gripped with greater urgency. We had to get back to the others before the demon did.
Ten minutes later, we entered the conference room and found the circle of the possessed pretty much where we’d left them. The group eyed us with a mixture of hope and trepidation. One look at our ashen faces told them we weren’t the bearers of good news.
“What’s happening out there?” Father Ambrose asked.
“We have a problem,” I said.
“Did you find Father Andara and Liza?” Courtney wanted to know. A shrill note had entered her little girl voice, an unnerving contrast to the prematurely aged pop star standing before me.
I debated how to respond to the question. Everyone in this room was terrified, and the truth would rattle these folks to the core. They deserve to know, I told myself. If we wanted to survive this ordeal and defeat the demon, we all needed to understand what we were up against.
I was still searching for the most diplomatic response when Nora beat me to it.
“They’re dead,” she said matter-of-factly, cutting right to the chase.
A chilling silence gripped the room as the full horror of these words sank in.
“How?” Courtney Star enquired in a whisper.
“Liza was right. The demon has returned.”
The news sent shock waves through the group—gasps mixed with curses.
“How is this possible?” Father Ambrose asked.
I considered the question. How indeed? Had the demon repossessed Liza Hawthorn before she even arrived at the monastery? She’d sounded so normal, the painful memories she'd shared with the group earlier so heartfelt. What had changed?
Demons were skilled at misdirection, so perhaps her little confessional had been part of the beast’s act. Then again, maybe there was another explanation.
My gaze locked on the circle of chairs, struck by a terrible suspicion. I nodded at the members of the group.
“Let’s pull the chairs out of the circle and roll back the carpet.”
“Why do you want to do that?” Maddox wanted to know.
I shot a glance at the soldier. The SEAL sure had a talent for being difficult.
“Indulge me.”
He hesitated for a beat, then begrudgingly joined the others.
My heart sank as the floor underneath the carpet stood revealed, my worst suspicio
ns confirmed. An intricate web of occult symbols tattooed the stone floor and erased all lingering doubts.
At the center of the circle, hidden earlier by the carpet, was a fiery demonic eye. Eight lines extended from the burning orb like the spikes of a sun wheel. Each one ended in a circle that corresponded to the eight chairs. More glyphs and symbols filled those circles.
As I took in the elaborate occult tapestry, goosebumps pricked my skin. Andara’s handiwork revealed the true, twisted depths of his plan for revenge. This had never been a group therapy session. The whole meeting had taken place within an occult circle designed to tap into the collective pain of the possessed. Psychological wounds and raw emotion could act as fuel for mystical forces. While the group had exposed their innermost secrets and pain, they’d inadvertently activated the black magic of this ritual.
Courtney took in the strange scribblings, rising panic turning her once-attractive features into a mask of terror. “What does it mean?”
“It means we’re fucked.” Maddox said. “Looks like the exorcist was messing with some crazy shit way above his pay grade.”
“Do you have any idea what these symbols represent?” Father Ambrose asked me.
“I’m still working out the specifics, but Andara used the energy of this circle, the power of your confessions, to initiate a ritual.”
The homicide detective lit himself a cigarette and took a deep drag while his eyes found mine. “What kind of ritual?”
A ritual to bring a monster into our world, I thought. And the beast is now loose within the walls of this monastery.
“Why would Father Andara do this to us?” Courtney Star cried in her shrill helium voice. She sounded like a woman who never grew up. “I thought he was trying to help us bury the past, not relive it.”
“Don’t you remember what Andara said?” Ambrose interjected. “He wants us to face the beast.”
“And how the fuck are we supposed to do that? Use our bare hands? Harsh language?”
The Possessed (The Paranormalist Book 5) Page 6