The rectory was silent except for the faint crackle of the single beeswax candle on Father Damien’s desk.
Midnight had come and gone. The parish church next door stood dark, its doors locked, its stained-glass saints blind to what was about to happen in the small stone room behind the sacristy.
Father Damien, thirty-two, lean, dark-haired, always impeccably groomed, sat in his black cassock with the top three buttons undone. His Roman collar lay discarded on the desk like a shed skin. In front of him: an old leather-bound book he had found sealed in the crypt during last year’s restoration, its pages brittle, its Latin script jagged and profane.
He had told himself this was research. Academic curiosity. A priest studying demonology to better combat it.
That lie had died weeks ago.
The
