Possess

priest. The priest wielding the sword.
Unsure if sword is physical or not. J researching. Suggested I contact Monsignor Renault at St. Michael’s. Turns out the OSM was right in sending me to this parish after all.
    Bridget’s hand shook. It was true, it was all true, staring at her from the notebook pages in her dad’s very own handwriting. He had been a Watcher, an ancient relative of a bunch of horny angels banished from Heaven. And she was too.
    But she was no closer to discovering who killed her dad. The message Undermeyer had delivered to him was the same one they’d given her. Points for consistency at least, but there was nothing here that would prove who actually killed him.
    The last entry, January 28. A week later her dad was dead.
    She read through the notes again, looking for a hint she may have missed. The spooked entities looked promising, but she had no way of knowing why. Another dead end? It couldn’t be.
    Bridget’s hand rested on the envelope, and she noticed there was something else inside, something hard and circular.
    She dumped the contents out onto her sheets. A CD. The missing audio? She slid the disk into her laptop and pulled on her headphones.
    “All right, Mr. Undermeyer,” Dr. Liu said. “I have stopped the recording.”
    “Not safe. Not safe. We are not safe here.” Bridget heard several thumps, accompanied by frantic grunts from Milton Undermeyer. He must have been restrained and was attempting to get out of his chair.
    “You’re perfectly safe here, Mr. Undermeyer. And whoever else may be in there with you.”
    Undermeyer sucked in a breath. “He knows. The Watcher knows. Of course he knows.”
    “Yes, I do.” Bridget could hear her dad’s frustration bubbling below the surface. “I know who you are and I know why you’re here.”
    “Liar!” Undermeyer taunted. “Liar, liar, liar.”
    “I know you have a message for me.”
    “Yesssss,” Undermeyer hissed. “But they know it too. They know it too.”
    “Who is they ?” Dr. Liu asked. “The Emim?”
    More thumping.
    “Do not say it!” Undermeyer’s voice was twisted, distorted like it was coming through a bad loudspeaker. “Do not say it. Not safe. We are not safe here. Not safe. We are not safe here.”
    “I have dominion over the Emim,” Dr. Liu said. “I will protect you.”
    “Not safe. Not safe here,” Undermeyer muttered to himself over and over again.
    Bridget heard her dad sigh, that sigh of exasperation she knew only too well. She couldn’t help but smile: It was nice to know that she wasn’t the only one who could make her dad sigh like that. Of course Dr. Liu was dealing with a demonically possessed madman, so maybe the comparison wasn’t so great.
    “I can’t help you, Mr. Undermeyer, unless you help me. Tell me why you were in the Church of St. Michael. Tell what this message is you—”
    A knock at the door.
    “Come in,” Dr. Liu said.
    “Sorry to disturb you, Dr. Liu.” Bridget knew that voice.
    “No problem, Hugh. Is there something I can do for you?”
    A shriek maxed out the treble on the record, and Bridget scrambled to turn down the volume. “Not safe!” Undermeyer screamed. “Not safe! Not safe! Not safe!”
    The recording went silent.
    It made perfect sense that her dad had hidden the duplicate files and the secret recordings, both of which exposed his abilities as a Watcher. Bridget almost laughed at the thought of Sergeant Quinn going over those materials. Would he have thought her dad was crazy? Probably. It’s what Bridget would have thought herself if she didn’t, unfortunately, know better.
    “Contacting J from OSM for further instructions.” Who the hell was that? A company? A religious organization? Whoever “J from OSM” was, her dad obviously had contact with him long before Undermeyer arrived on his doorstep. The OSM must be involved somehow with the Watchers.
    Bridget hopped out of bed and shuffled down the hall to get a soda. She was wide awake now, antsy and anxious to find answers to new questions.
    She pulled a can of Diet 7Up out of the fridge and popped it open. J from OSM. That was the key to the mystery. She had to figure out who or what it was. But how? She needed a database devoted to this kind of stuff . . .
    She stopped midsip. Father Santos. Father Santos had a personal library in his office “borrowed” straight from the Vatican. That was as good as it got, right? The freaking Vatican library? Father Santos would let her look for