Love & Exorcisms | 18+ | COMPLETE |

- Chapter 25 -

Damian

Go to the exorcism ground as you would go to war: with your armor, and your weapons, and all of the fierceness within you. Paint your face with the ashes of cleansing fire. Choose your words and your prayers with care.

The battle is not merely for their body, my child. It is their soul for which you fight.

Damian had once thought there would come a day when the journey to an exorcism would not make his hands shake. It would not send anxiety coursing through him, nor make his heart pound against the inside of his chest like the battle drums his grandmother told him used to beat at every spiritual ceremony. But that day had yet to come. After 27 years, 7 of them alone, he still bore the approach to an exorcism as a man facing the gallows.

Father Alexander Iscariot bore it as an addict, with the enthusiasm of one about to get his fix after weeks deprived. He drove the automobile out of the city at terrifying speed, so that the engine roared and they jostled and bumped along the old dirt roads that led ever nearer to the unruly riverside forests and the chapel that lay within.

"For they are demonic spirits, performing signs, who go abroad to the kings of the whole world, to assemble them for battle on the great day of God the Almighty," Alexander said, his eyes wide and fingers tightly gripping the auto's wheel. Damian had been struggling to ignore his mutterings for the entirety of the journey thus far, but every verse wheedled just a little deeper under his skin.

But Alex was not finished.

"And the great dragon was thrown down!" he cried, raising his voice. "The serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him!" He smacked the wheel for emphasis, and Damian had to resist the urge to throw him out of the car.

He knew the verses were Alexander's armor, the Bible his weapon, his passionate devotion to God feeding the fire that was his fearsomeness. His grandmother had warned him: there were exorcists of every creed, of every country, of every culture. He was to hold them with respect, as comrades, as brothers and sisters in battle. It was his grandmother - with her intuitive sight - who had first written him when he arrived in the States and told him to seek a man named Iscariot.

The Catholic Church's rabid dog.

Alex had never met Belthazha, Damian's grandmother. He had not needed to. The old woman had seen him in dreams and made the declaration that Damian was meant to meet him, for their paths intertwined. Damian had dearly wished then - and often now - that she had dreamt of some other exorcist to partner him with. Someone more...stable. Less...noisy.

Alexander was still going. "For with authority and power he commands the unclean spirits, and out they come!"

"Alexander," Damian spoke softly, but quickly. "If you could recite more quietly, we may yet reach the chapel without me having bashed your head against the wheel."

Alexander looked over at him as if noticing him for the first time. "There's power in these verses, lad!" he exclaimed. "They get the blood runnin' through ye'!"

He did quiet himself though, and Damian could hear his verses only in rapidly muttered whispers. It gave Damian the silence he needed to retreat into his mental space, the place he collected his own armor for battle. In the words of his grandmother, his mother, and all those of wisdom who had come before them, he found his strength.

Alexander was devoutly, passionately Catholic. It was an aspect of him that Damian often found particularly difficult to reconcile, but he resigned himself out of respect for the man's process. It was not only trinkets that he wore to show his devotion, although the three golden rosaries around his neck were hardly subtle. The first time Damian had seen the man undress, he was stunned to find that a tattooist had devoted countless hours to a stunning piece that wrapped around Alexander's entire back and torso. He had made of himself a walking Sistine Chapel, an artistic masterpiece of the Virgin Mary, angels, demons, and hellfire.