Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist
Cleveland, Ohio
3:20 a.m., Dec. 24
Father Franks shrugged off Dana’s hands, and she stepped back, wary and vigilant. Her career had taught her when to shut up and watch, and this was one of those times. She’d also known, vaguely, that the priest served the diocese as an exorcist, but she’d never seen him haul out a crucifix and accost someone. He and her father had been best friends, and he’d never mentioned the priest doing anything like that. Of course, he’d never talked about the priest at all, so maybe they’d been out fighting demons together all those nights her father had left her alone in the apartment, watching reruns of the WWE, while her mother was out with her tennis friends.
Dana took in Franks’s disheveled clothes, his wild hair, and haggard eyes. He’d clearly thought Finn was a demon or at least some seriously effed-up angel, and given Finn’s bizarre responses to her questions, she couldn’t fault the priest for that one either. She’d encountered two separate people who’d thought they were possessed since she’d started working in security, and both had been seriously scary souls.
Finn didn’t give any indication that he was about to start foaming at the mouth, and he didn’t have a tail, but she clearly needed to be more careful around him. Her mind went instantly to her leg and how he’d seemed to almost magically heal it…then to their unreasonable speed in evading attackers who had looked like demons. Creatures who’d bled black goop instead of blood.
Yeah. She was going to need to be a lot more careful.
But Father Franks now stood hunched in on himself, a criminal forced to the point of confession. Dana’s nerves hummed with the pressure in the room, but she couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. She could barely draw breath.
Finn held out the slender gold crucifix, and Father Franks took the cross, his eyes cast down, his shoulders slumping as he cradled the sacred object. Dana shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket, grateful for the reassuring feel of her cell phone. So if Finn wasn’t a demon or a straight-up angel…what the hell was he? And who was this Bartholomew character who was distressing Father Franks so much?
A headache thrummed behind Dana’s eyes, tiring her further, but she pulled her phone free, swiping it on. Someone had aimed a gun at them from a limo. Someone who hadn’t been one of the slobbering creatures in the streets. Barely looking at the device, she keyed in the name Bartholomew and sent the text to Max. First-name-only searches were a nightmare in a city the size of Cleveland, but it was Christmas, after all. And she’d been a very good girl this year.
She replaced the phone as Franks turned and placed the cross on the altar, resting his palm flat on the cool marble for a moment before lifting his gaze heavenward, staring up at the enormous wooden screen behind the altar. The saints glared back down at him, unrelenting. Then he spoke, his powerful voice calm, almost eerily flat.
“I hadn’t been a priest for very long when I received the call from Rome. It happened to many young men who showed an aptitude for learning, they said, for languages and history. New priests who fit a certain profile. I had become a servant of the Lord with such zeal, determined to make a difference, convinced that I could succeed where so many others had failed.” He shook his head at the memory. “I was told my service in Rome would bring me great spiritual reward. I would study ancient languages, assist the Vatican in matters of clerical importance for a few years, then return to run a parish of my own in some large city, wherever the need was greatest.”
Franks’s voice strengthened as he spoke. “When I arrived in Rome, it was much as they said for the first year. I studied constantly, translating texts, learning and relearning Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic. I memorized arcane rites, ancient arts of spiritual healing, incantations to return evil to its hell. All for the supposed purpose of cataloguing these instructions to fill the Vatican library with yet one more research text. It seemed a colossal waste of time for me. I yearned to preach God’s word to the people, to guide a flock of my own. I knew I could turn them from their paths of ruin, help them find the way to the Father.” His lips twisted. “It was my arrogance that had drawn their attention, you see.”
“Who?” Dana asked, but the priest went on. She thought of Franks with the crucifix, his bold confrontation with Finn. His bent but still-powerful frame. The way his hands had held the holy relic. This man had been her father’s best friend, yet she hadn’t known him at all.
Something clicked inside Dana, a door unlatching. She gripped her hands tight, willing her mind to be quiet and listen.
Franks lifted his eyes to the ceiling, as if he was tracing the patterns of stars tucked into the shadowed archways. “And then it came—a new summons, to a new cathedral. Not so very far away from Rome, barely over the border and into France. A special meeting for me, I was told. A special test in Lyon.”
“Lyon?” Finn asked sharply. Franks turned to him, his eyes bright with unspilled emotion.
“There was a man they kept there in the crypt—an insane man known only by the name Bartholomew,” he said. “A man who’d been kept alive for hundreds of years.”
The tension in the room deepened. Finn didn’t move a muscle, but his focus on the priest was all-consuming, as if he could will the words out of the old man. Franks turned away from him, his voice trembling and low.
“He’d come to the gates of the church in rags, the story went, in late May of 1527.”
Dana’s mind seized, stumbled. She’d heard that wrong, she thought, and her brain reordered the numbers, restated them into a date that could be real, could be possible. Not one that was nearly five hundred years ago.
“The man’s body was strong, his voice pure, but his mind had been fractured. His eyes burned pure gold, and he was filled with rage and fire. That first day, it had taken a dozen men to subdue him, and he screamed at them in languages they could not decipher until he passed out from apparent exhaustion. They brought him to the cathedral, and he seemed crushed. Defeated. Until he saw the clock.”
Finn frowned. “The clock?”
“The astronomical clock of Lyon.” Franks sighed. “He made them understand, eventually. That he knew the clock and all its inner workings. He convinced them he’d made one similar to it, and they were overjoyed. The astronomical clock of Lyon had a complexity that had been lost in the many years since its creation. He would tend it, make improvements, and remain within the church walls, even though—” He paused, shooting a glance at Finn. “Even though he could not fully reclaim his mind.”
“He arrived in 1527.” Finn spoke as if to a ghost. “After the sack of Rome.”
“He told me that, yes, but I soon learned that part of the story had not been shared with the current generation of priests at the church. To them, Bartholomew wasn’t a refugee from one of the greatest crimes against the Holy See and its defenders, he was simply…a miracle, a gift from God who’d been possessed of a demon. Their challenge was to release the demon while sparing the angel.” He shook his head. “They’d been trying ever since.”
Finn’s scowl grew ominous as Father Franks continued. “I’d been brought in to drive the demon out of the poor man once and for all. I was locked in the room with him for three days, watched through a slit in the door.” His lips twisted bitterly. “It was my test as an exorcist.”
“And did you pass?”
“Well enough. I did not—could not—drive the demon from him. He laughed when I made the attempt. But he gave me words to share with my superiors, to convince them I had, somehow, reached the spirit behind the devil that caused him such agony. But he told me more, words that I was not to share. What he’d seen in Rome. His name. The mark on his wrist and its purpose. That he was no demon…but also no human. That he was a Fallen angel, beloved of the Lord. He also told me how…” Franks swallowed. “How much power he still possessed.”
“Why you?” Finn asked.
The priest shrugged. “My arrogance must have caught his attention too. But when I said I would return to help him again, he said no.”
“No?” Dana asked, and this time, Franks did look at her, and she took a step back, struck by the misery in his eyes.
“He believed he deserved the pain he was in, that he had failed in his mission and should be punished. That he could never trust himself.” Franks’s mouth trembled, and Finn winced, knowing that sorrow, that belief. “The Church thought him an angel, and at the time, he had decided that an angel was the only thing he could be, or everything else they believed would be held suspect. But he was very different from any angel I would ever expect. He was…deeply damaged.” His gaze swung back to Finn. “I heard nothing more of him, and after the years passed, I let myself forget about Bartholomew. But I have felt his presence strongly these past few weeks. He is here. And now, so are you. Bearing the same mark. But you are not mad.”
“Not yet, anyway.” Finn grimaced.
Finn’s words galvanized Dana, and she forced her hands down to her sides, her mouth to work again. “So what exactly is going on, Finn? Who are you?” she asked in a low voice. “And why do you want to see Lester?”
That shook Franks out of his own troubled thoughts. “Lester?” he asked. “Tell me he hasn’t endangered Dana yet again.”
But Finn was looking at Dana, not the priest. “I’m not what this Bartholomew guy was, or whatever he’s become. Because clearly…something broke inside him.” Broke, and is a serious problem.
“And it hasn’t broken in you. Yet.”
He quirked a smile. “Not that I know of.”
“How about some honest answers here?” Dana snapped, anger finally breaking through her sense of dread. “Let’s recap. Father Franks is an exorcist. Years ago, he was called to exorcise a demon out of a church prisoner named Bartholomew, only he couldn’t. He did, however, see Bartholomew’s cool ink, listened to his story of being an angel on Earth, and got the impression that the dude had lived a really, really long time. Fast forward to tonight. You show up, also tripping Father’s demon Spidey sense, and you’ve got the same ink. You want to tell me you’re also several centuries past your expiration date? And that you’ve got feathers?”
She didn’t know how she was asking these questions in her normal-person voice, but when Finn stared back at her, refusing to answer, another synapse snapped. “Jesus Christ,” she muttered. “What the hell are you?”
“He’s a Fallen,” Franks said simply, his voice low, defeated. “No more or less than that.”
Dana curled her lip, trying not to snarl at the priest to pull it together. “A Fallen angel. Great. And you’ve floated down to Cleveland on Christmas Eve—why, exactly?”
“I need to speak to Lester,” Finn said implacably.
“So you keep saying,” Dana said, watching Franks’s shifting emotions with interest. Franks wasn’t denying Finn’s words anymore. He’d accepted Finn, which was its own circle of crazy, but there was too much she needed to know. Starting with: “Why do you need to see Lester, again? And why tonight?”
“Because he’s expecting me,” Finn said smoothly. He smiled, and every sense in Dana’s body went on high alert. She hated it when he smiled. “He has something to give me. I honestly don’t know anything more about it. If I did, I’d tell you.”
Dana blew out a long breath. Lester had a penchant for collecting the odd and the crazy, and he was, admittedly, a little bit of a nut for religious antiquities. So if Finn was part of some group of people who could convince even straight-up priests that they were, ah, angels or demons or whatever, she could see such a group appealing to her uncle. Secret societies and ancient artifacts and arcane lore were the old man’s catnip.
So okay, but…there was still Father Franks’s reaction to contend with. And her own apparently healed leg.
Which once more raised the question: who was this guy?
Dana’s attention fractured as her phone buzzed, and she turned away from the two men. Max would be texting her. About time.
She flipped to her texts.
Got the name, running the search. Also, L called me. I told him about Dr. Doom. Turns out he’s expecting him—and he’s massively geeked. Wants to send his goon squad to get you both. Good?
Dana sighed, resigned. That solved at least one mystery, then. Lester might be one fruitcake short of a full bakery, but he was both her client and her uncle. And Finn—so far—hadn’t proved dangerous so much as protective. “Good news. He wants to see you,” she said to Finn. “He’ll send a car.”
Finn nodded. “Excellent. The sooner I can finish this, the better. Those men out there aren’t the last of your problems. There will be more, and until I have what I need, they’ll also be looking for Lester. If they can’t find him…they will find you.”
The half-forgotten nightmare assaulted Dana again, distorted faces, misshapen bodies. “What were they?”
“Demons, some of them. Others were Possessed, which is almost as bad—and worse, in some ways,” Finn said. Father Franks shifted beside them, his face closing down, the secrets of the Church locked within it. “But the important part is, they’ll only get stronger. They’ll strike again before midnight tonight. You can count on it.”
“Uh-huh. What do they want from Lester?” she asked. Demons. He said the word like it was God’s own truth, and Franks wasn’t contradicting him. Great.
“The same document I’ve been sent for, I told you,” Finn said, eyeing her as if he was trying to see if his words meant anything. They didn’t. “Once I have it in hand, the attention of these things that were following you will turn away from you and your uncle, and fix on me.”
She narrowed her eyes. “That’s it? They’ll leave us alone after you get this document? How do you know Lester hasn’t made a dozen copies of it?”
Finn’s gaze arrowed through her. “I don’t. But if he gives it to me, whatever it is, he’ll be safe.” She sensed herself being almost physically pushed back by the force of his gaze, surrounded by it. “You’ll both be safe. I swear it.”
The moment felt heavy, ominous, a fire stinging along Dana’s nerves that hadn’t been there before, Finn’s dark eyes blazing with heat and intensity. “All right,” she said, keying another message to Max to unleash her uncle’s hounds. “I’ll take you to Lester. But I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
The smile on Finn’s face flickered dangerously. “I also get that all the time.”
Dana rolled her eyes. The phone buzzed again in her hand, and she glanced down at it. Goons en route. Be there in five.