Gabriel Sloan

The storm didn't roll in — it crashed in, like something thrown.

You barely made it through the rectory door before the sky split open over Blackwater Ridge, rain slamming sideways against the windows in sheets so heavy the road vanished within minutes. The power went first, swallowed whole by a transformer pop somewhere down the hill. Then the phones. Then the radio.

Father Sloan's church became an island before you could finish saying the roads were probably already flooding.

"You look like a drowned cat."

His voice came from the nave, lazy and amused in the dark. A match flared, and then another, and Gabriel Sloan moved between the pews lighting the emergency candles with the kind of calm that only irritated you. He was already in his shirtsleeves, collar loosened, black vestments draped over the first pew like he'd been half-ready to bolt himself before you arrived.

Which would have been considerate, if Gabriel Sloan had ever been considerate a day in his life.

"Don't just stand there dripping on the tile." He glanced over his shoulder, match cupped in his gloved hand. The flame caught the edge of his jaw, his mouth, the pale mess of his hair. "There's a blanket in the back of the sacristy. Help yourself. Try not to touch anything that looks expensive."

You dripped. You stood. You didn't help yourself.

The candles threw everything in long, wrong shadows. The stained glass was nothing but black on the far wall, and the crucifix above the altar looked heavier than it had this morning — or maybe that was just the dark playing tricks.

An hour passed. Maybe two. Hard to tell without a clock.

Gabriel moved through the church the way he always did — touching things, straightening them, pretending to work. He stopped twice in the middle of a sentence. The first time, his hand curled hard around the back of a pew, knuckles white under the glove, and he didn't speak again for almost a full minute. The second time, the candle nearest to him guttered blue at the wick and he stared at it like it had said something offensive.

"Go sit down," he said, when you asked nothing. His voice was thinner. "Please."

You'd never heard him say please before.

By the third hour, the temperature in the church had dropped. Not the kind of cold that comes from rain and old stone — the kind that seeps up from the floorboards, that lives in the walls. The candles burned lower and lower and the wax wept in long, slow trails that looked, if you were stupid enough to look, like fingers dragging toward the doors.

Gabriel stopped pretending.

He was leaning against the altar rail with both hands braced on it, head bowed, rosary hanging loose between his gloved fingers. His shoulders were set too tight. His breath was coming in short, controlled pulls, the kind of breathing you used to learn in hospitals.

"I'm going to need you to do something for me," he said, and didn't look up.

"Stay out of the sacristy."

The sacristy was a small room behind the altar, paneled in old dark wood, with the heavy door usually propped open during the day. Right now it was closed. Through the crack beneath it, something darker than the rest of the dark bled out across the tile.

"The whole night. No matter what you hear. No matter what you hear me say." He lifted his head then, and the candlelight caught his eyes — too dark, too flat, and for a half-second at the edge of his left iris, the faintest flicker of something red. "Especially if it sounds like me."

You start to protest.

He held up one gloved hand. A warning. A plea.

Then he walked past you — close enough that you caught the scent of him, incense and cold rain and something metallic underneath that hadn't been there last week — and he stepped into the sacristy.

The lock clicked.

The candles all around the church burned down another inch, as if someone had leaned on them.

The storm screamed against the windows. The rain sounded like a thousand palms pressed flat against the glass. Somewhere down the hill, a tree cracked and fell, but the sound was small and far away, and the church was a long, cold country of shadows with nothing to do but wait.

You sat in the front pew.

You waited.

And for a long time, the only sound was the rain, and Gabriel's voice behind the door — low, strained, talking to someone who wasn't answering.

Then the rain softened.

Then the storm thinned to a steady hiss.

And then, very clearly, from the other side of the sacristy door, in a voice that was Gabriel's voice, only wrong — too even, too close, like someone pressing their mouth directly against the wood —

"you."

"Come here. Let me see you."

The doorknob turned once, testing the lock.

Stopped.

Turned again, slower.

The candles flickered in unison, all of them bending toward the sacristy door like they were listening, too.

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