Possess

line of biblical demon slayers. That’s a little too Buffy for me, okay?”
    “Then how do you explain what has been happening to you?”
    Hormones. Depression. Maybe she was crazy? Any of those options made more sense than Father Santos’s story.
    “You can’t explain it, can you?”
    Bridget threw up her hands. “But it doesn’t even make sense! This is like a fairy tale, a bedtime story.” She pointed at the Skellig Manuscript. “Things like this don’t happen.”
    Father Santos pursed his lips and flipped to another page in the manuscript. “Oh, really? Then how do you explain this?”
    Bridget followed his white-clad finger to the next page of the manuscript. It was a map, supposedly of Europe, Asia, and Africa, as best she could tell, though the topography was all wrong. Several of the land masses were labeled with titles Bridget didn’t recognize, with arrows coming from the area around the Holy Land and sweeping north, south, and east.
    “This is an eighth-century map of the known world, showing emigration patterns out of the Holy Land. The Emim did not care to be held in check by their cousins. Though they could not physically touch or harm the Watchers, they could use their influence over men against them. The Emim raised human armies that slaughtered hundreds of Watchers. The surviving Watchers fled, scattering themselves throughout the barely habitable regions of the world, forgetting much of who and what they were in the process. Nordic Europe, the barren deserts of Africa, the northern plains of China.”
    “China?” Bridget gaped.
    “Yes,” Father Santos said, flipping to the last of the manuscript pages. “The line of Watchers, listed here by their clan names. How’s your Latin?”
    Bridget cringed.
    “Then I’ll translate.” Father Santos didn’t even look at the page; he apparently had the manuscript memorized. “A tribe of Watchers moved to the east, to the kingdom known as Han, to the protection of the ruler of the Han, Emperor Gaozu, also known as Liu Bang.”
    Liu? “But that would mean my dad . . .” Her voice faltered.
    Memories flooded her mind: her dad asking if she ever heard monsters in her room at night, reminding her if she ever had anything she needed to talk about, something she didn’t understand, that she could always come to him. And her bracelet. That damned charm bracelet, which was, apparently, an amulet of exorcists going back a couple hundred years. Had he known what she was? Had he known because he had the same power?
    “He would have told me,” she said at last.
    “Not necessarily. You only discovered your talents in the face of a demonic infestation, which is rare, to say the least. It’s difficult to estimate how many Watchers never have an experience like that. Also, we aren’t entirely sure whether the powers exist in each generation or only manifest randomly throughout a family line.”
    Bridget gripped the arm of the chair. Her hands trembled.
    “He was k-killed last year,” Father Santos said gently. “Wasn’t he?”
    “Killed” was an insult. “Murdered.”
    “Er, yes. By the man who broke into the sanctuary here at St. Michael’s?”
    Milton Undermeyer. Bridget nodded.
    “Your father h-h-had seen Mr. Undermeyer on several occasions, and was in the process of diagnosing his mental capacities, correct?”
    Father Santos knew way too much about the Undermeyer case for someone who had just shown up from the Vatican. It made her nervous.
    “What’s your point?” she said.
    Father Santos stared at her with his small, dark eyes. “Schizophrenia is a common misdiagnosis for demonic possession. If your father was a, well . . . was like yourself, don’t you think it rather odd that his death should coincide with such a case?”
    “But—”
    “Have you ever wondered why Milton Undermeyer, the school janitor, would have had to break into the church? He had a key to every door at St. Michael’s.”
    “He was crazy.”
    “Or maybe he was possessed. And he knew something, something he never told anyone else. Something that made him break into the church that night.”
    Penemuel’s words flooded her mind. “The messenger was sent. His warning was not delivered. You must find the messenger.” A message from her dad. A message from a Watcher.
    Bridget closed her eyes. Could she really deny it? Could she really keep pretending that this wasn’t happening?
    “They called me a traitor,” she said.
    “Who did?”
    “The demons