Chapter 5
Five
Cisco
The iron gate is cold beneath my hand as I push it open, senses alert and primed.
Only days after my sister drowned, I recognized evil for the first time in something other than myself.
I still remember it with crystal clarity, as if it’s engraved in my head.
It was a sweltering day in Naples, so I ducked into a gelato store.
I felt something was wrong the instant the door clicked shut.
A chill crawled up my spine like a thousand black ants.
The shopkeeper’s eyes glinted oily. His smile stretched too wide.
I knew, before he even reached for his scoop, that Hell had already licked the place clean.
I turned around and walked straight out.
That’s what it feels like now.
This garden is empty despite the boxes of herbs, patches of greens, gnarled tomato stakes, and fruit trees standing heavy in the dark. The chicken coop is silent. The cold, damp air smells of mint and compost.
I aim my torch into every shadowed corner, using the beam to purge the mystery.
Light sweeps over an explosion of iridescent color—marigolds, foxglove, night-blooming jasmine—but there’s no rustle of feet through the rows, no startled field mouse, no demonic entity waiting to be seen.
Just the random buzz of insects on a northern summer evening, the distant calls of frogs, and Zeke’s stilted breath a few paces back.
The peace still feels wrong, like the kind of tranquility after a massacre, not before. I glance up at the sky. Rain is forecast this week, but the storm is holding off.
“Leila just sent a message,” Zeke says, arriving. “Jinx caught some weird fish with flies infesting its body. Wanna see?”
He holds out his phone, displaying a fish carcass. Nothing about it appears untoward, except perhaps the jagged teeth marks and ripping open the darkened flesh.
“That’s it?” I raise my brows.
“Apparently, all these flies burst out of it. Gross, right?”
When we’d noticed Jinx causing mischief and the girls laughing, I thought I’d imagined the flash of evil. The incident happened hours ago. It could be nothing, but if it is…
“Why did they take so long to warn us?” I ask.
“That’s what I’m asking now.” He hits send. Two seconds later, his phone vibrates with the reply. After reading it, he gives me a grim, wry look. “Mercy told them to hold the information until we’re back.”
Grinding my teeth, I continue farther into the garden. My clumsy boots scuffle mulch, disturbing sleeping insects. A burst of iridescent wings swarms in my face until I swat them away. Pests. Summer is the worst for them, even here in the cooler north, where it feels more like an Italian winter.
As I continue along the dirt paths between vegetable patches, my senses tingle. Invisible black ants crawl up my spine but then fade away, teasing me.
Something is here.
I breathe in the sweet, cloying undercurrent of rot beneath the perfume of basil and thyme.
On closer inspection of the patch beside me, plants thrive with glossy leaves, but others are limp, mottled with brown spots, curling as if trying to shrink from the world.
I use my boot to nudge a weighted leaf, waking more flies.
Only this time, they don’t swarm into my face.
They buzz and turn in circles on their bed until each one faces me. Staring.
Goosebumps erupt over my flesh.
Flies are bad in summer, yes, but this seems a little … excessive.
I turn, locate Zeke not far behind me, and give a curt nod toward the rot and flies I’m illuminating with my torch. Immediately, he straightens. His hand moves to his pistol, ready to draw.
We have not had time to replicate Helwinga’s spells discovered in Romania.
We still need to test out their limitations against our enemy.
Leila’s relic may be the only gun capable of annihilating demons, but Wesley is the only one knowledgeable enough even to know where to begin replicating the bullets.
Thea is helping, but her expertise is stretched thin.
For now, we have only the standard spells, blessed weapons, and bullets carved with Enochian spells of protection.
I have my exorcist travel kit jammed into pockets: a prayer book, stole, holy water, cross, and salt.
They will buy us time, but won’t save us.
If Leila hadn’t alerted Zeke to the fish incident, we might not be taking this threat so seriously.
“You sense something?” he asks.
I close my eyes, slow my breathing, and open myself to the prickling awareness that’s haunted me for decades.
The sensation of crawling ants coming and going over my body is only the precursor to the main event.
I feel them pulse outward, crawling over dirt and foliage until they connect with a cold vein running beneath the earth, a hollow that was once alive, that feels familiar … a storm of nothing.
Something has been here.
Something hungry.
I move quickly along the rows, careful not to break the fragile stalks with my boots, tracing the origin of the unease now with my vision.
The fading sense is strongest by the far wall, where moonlight pools on a patch of dead grass beside the compost and chicken coop.
A circle of dirt is freshly disturbed, as if an animal had dug its way out rather than in.
I kneel and press two fingers to the ground.
The soil is colder than the stone wall behind it. Like ice.
The distinct click of a pistol cocking announces Zeke’s arrival, and just like that, as if the evil is not happy for the intrusion of someone not of our kind, flies emerge from the dirt.
One, two, ten crawl over my tattooed fingers.
They multiply fast, but I flick the dead weights off and slowly stand.
Within seconds, the shallow hole is filled with writhing, circling, buzzing flies.
They crawl into position and aim their thousand eyes at us and then grow still. Silent.
Watching us as we watch them.
“Fuck me,” Zeke breathes. “That’s not normal.”
“No. It is not.”
“Can’t shoot ‘em.” A pause. “That won’t work, right?”
“No.”
There is an exorcising spell to create a stream of fire from holy water, using a cross wrapped in something flammable, like cloth.
“Do you still carry your lighter?” I ask.
He nods, fumbles in his pocket, and pulls out his metal lighter, tangled with the rosary beads I gifted him a few weeks ago. My heart tugs at the sight, at knowing he still values my counsel despite his earlier words.
He quickly detangles the objects as I wrap my purple stole around my cross.
Purple. The same color the Church assigns to both reconciliation and exorcism.
I can’t decide whether it’s the Vatican’s dark sense of humor or its oldest confession—that the two rites are not so different after all.
I inwardly groan at the thought of losing another, but I don’t have time to cut strips of fabric from my clothes.
Probably should have thought about that before setting off tonight.
Once secured, I douse it with holy water. Only when I have the lighter ready and the wrapped cross aimed at the nest, do I begin speaking the spell’s Latin words.
“In nomine domini—”
“Light that fucker up,” Zeke mutters.
“—exi ab eo, spiritus immunde.”
I continue through the spell’s words and then strike the lighter’s flint. Fire ignites, heat flares, and a rush of something works through my veins. The nest goes up in flames.
I used to try to name that feeling. Tried to judge whether it was good or evil, but now I simply stare as the nest burns and the flies quietly submit to their fate.
All I can think is that I’m thankful the same thing didn’t happen to me when I was ordained.
For if it did, then I would have known God had forsaken me.
“Is it Famine?” Zeke asks quietly.
“I don’t think so.” I pause, recalling the odd sense of familiarity with the evil. Like calling to like. “It’s demonic, but I think a little different.”
“How so?”
My lips flatten. My team knows a little about my family curse, but not the full extent of it. They know I sense evil, but not why, or what happens if I lose control of my hunger.
“It feels unlike a usual demonic entity,” I reply. “Incomplete.”
That’s the truth, because I don’t understand yet what this evil sensing ability is, only that it feels halfway between home and Hell.
Famine is not here, but it has left its mark. Whatever crawled from this garden could still be somewhere on the grounds. As the last of the flies sizzle to a crisp, the sense of black, crawling ants fades from my skin and disappears altogether.
“Let’s finish the sweep,” I suggest. “Stay close.”
Zeke trains his sharp gaze on the areas I do not look.
He may be a needle in my side, may be a little too optimistic about the romance of this prophecy, but when it’s time to face evil, there is no one else I would rather have at my back.
The same goes for the rest of my team, Wesley and Dominic.
We are more than soldiers fighting together in the same holy war.
They are the only famiglia I care about … and the only ones who care about me.
We move along the perimeter, checking the greenhouse, the water barrels, and inside the compost heaps.
They crawl with beetles but not flies. At first glance, every inch of the garden screams health, but beneath the surface, it’s dying.
The leaves are brittle, the roots spongy.
The air is now thick with the stench of impending decay.
The Garden of Eden, rotting from the inside out.
The sense of buzzing surrounds me, growing loud and then quiet as if oscillating between near and far.
For a moment, I’m reminded of hot Italian summers at the beach, scalding sand, sunburnt skin, and my little sister complaining about melted ice cream.
Then it’s all darkness and ants, crawling inside my veins.
I catch Zeke watching me, a frown creasing his forehead.
“You okay?” he mutters.
How can I explain to him what it means to feel the world decay before my eyes, to know that every living thing is a ticking clock and yet still hunger for its demise?
That I felt this same storm once, ignored it, and someone close to me drowned.
Worse, for a long time afterward, I did not repent.
I consumed. I gorged myself on every ravenous, violent desire until I was swimming in blood.
I thieved, I fucked, and I murdered. Oh, how I murdered.
Back home, they called me Il Giudice—the Judge—because I took life as though I was God Himself.
But I know the truth. I was not an instrument of Heaven, using my dark gift to righteously smite those who deserved it, no matter what the Vatican tells me.
I was simply trying to fill the void inside my soul.
It was never enough. The emptiness grew, yawned wider, until by the time I landed in prison, it was a good thing. I would have eaten the world.
So when Zeke teases me about cake and “all you can eat buffets,” he does not understand who he truly tempts.
Not me, Father Francisco Angelotti, the priest and shepherd he has come to know.
Not Cisco, his friend, his brother in arms. He is speaking directly to the hunger, to the devil that my holy vows and collar keep locked away.
And he is playing with forces he does not understand.
No one does. Not even me.
“We’re done here,” I clip. “We must warn the others.”
We head back toward the abbey, and the air behind us feels different, as if the garden itself exhales. Zeke grows restless beside me, and I give him leave so he can go to his woman, take her in his arms, and know she is safe.
He claps me on the shoulder. No innuendo this time, just a wordless look that tells me everything I need to know. Then he jogs down the path.
I stare after him and try not to let that aching void travel too high beneath my ribs.
In his eagerness, Zeke is already halfway to the abbey, which gives me time to do the thing I’ve avoided. As I walk, I ease my phone from my pocket and prepare to update my superiors, but then I hesitate.
Considering the recent dead fish fiasco, I should probably message my team about what we found in the garden first. Zeke will likely rush straight to Leila and warn Wesley and Dominic of nothing. I can’t really blame him.
I think about what waits for me—an empty cot and a cold monastic cell.
Before I can stop myself, I decide to message the Vatican.
It takes me three attempts to unlock my cell phone, and I very nearly throw it in frustration.
After spending a decade in prison, then living modestly as a priest, the technology I must navigate now is impossible to understand.
Eventually, I fumble through typing and send:
Garden compromised. Infestation confirmed. Postpone visit.
And then, after a moment’s hesitation, I add:
Will monitor. Further updates soon.
I lock the phone, listening to the gathering wind rattle in the branches, and stick my hands in my pockets.
Maybe I should have reported accurately and called for backup. Maybe I am being reckless, selfish even. Maybe it was not me who wrote that message, but the hunger I keep chained.
All I know for sure is that, at the dinner last week, I did not care a single iota about the bland food.
I only cared to know the answer to Tawny’s question about whether there are enough “Saints” for “Sinners” at the abbey to satisfy the Magdalene Prophecy.
I looked at Mercy, she looked at me, and something inside me contracted, cold and sharp, until I couldn’t breathe.
When that icy grip recoiled, the thought of men descending to seize what I must never touch gnawed at me like teeth.
I shutter my eyes, and for a moment, the scent of bruised fruit on the wind is replaced by the memory of red hair and soft skin. The sound of her husky voice in the confessional was both vulnerable and, somehow, still mocking.
But so goddamn alive.