The Infernal Adventures of Damian Hunter; Part 2

The locker door rattled shut behind him, sealing away the outside world. The muffled hum of traffic disappeared beneath the buzz of fluorescent lights and the quiet crackle of candle flames. Damian always found the silence inside E-612 strangely comforting. Out there, people lied, forgot, or convinced themselves they had imagined what they had seen. Inside these walls, facts stayed facts.

He stepped inside and closed his eyes. Drawing one long, steadying breath, he let the nightmare, the bourbon, the voicemail, and the drive across town settle into their proper places. There would be time to feel later. For now there was only work.

Nestled among decades of unexplained blazes was the file he knew by heart.

Hunter, Cordelia.

The folder landed on the desk with a familiar thud. Damian didn't bother sitting. Instead, he opened it where he stood, turning the pages with the practiced indifference of a man who had read them thousands of times. The smiling family photographs and birthday snapshots no longer held him. They belonged to another lifetime, one before fire and unanswered questions had consumed everything. What mattered now were the reports.

Every official document told the same story. Incident reports. Fire marshal findings. Insurance investigations. Witness interviews. Psychological evaluations. Different agencies. Different authors. Different letterheads. Yet every page arrived at the same conclusion: accidental house fire, three fatalities, no evidence of foul play. Damian had spent twenty years trying to prove that every one of them was wrong.

As he turned another page, a single sheet of construction paper slipped from the folder and drifted onto the desk. He caught it before it reached the floor.

It was a child's drawing.

Four crooked stick figures stood hand in hand beneath a bright yellow sun. A square house leaned slightly to one side, its chimney puffing happy little clouds into a blue sky. The grass was impossibly green. The flowers impossibly bright. Across the top, written in large purple crayon with all the confidence of a little girl who had only recently learned her letters, were two simple words.

Our Family.

In the lower corner, squeezed beside a smiling stick figure with long brown hair, was a signature.

Cordelia.

For a long moment, the investigator disappeared, and all that remained was an older brother staring at the last picture his little sister had ever drawn.

He carefully slipped it back into the folder, smoothing the worn paper with the palm of his hand before closing it again.

"Not yet," he whispered.

There would be time to remember.

First, there was work to do.

He crossed to the filing cabinet marked FIRES and slid open the drawer. Dozens of folders stood neatly arranged inside, each labeled by city and year. Some were little more than thin jackets containing a single witness statement before the trail went cold. Others bulged with photographs, newspaper clippings, interview transcripts, and years of Damian's own notes scribbled into the margins. He withdrew a stack and carried them back to the desk.

The frightened voicemail replayed itself in his mind.

"He wasn't burning."

Damian uncapped his fountain pen and pulled a yellow legal pad toward him.

Fire.

Victim carried from scene.

Single eyewitness.

Subject unaffected by flames.

He stared at the final line before opening the first folder.

Phoenix. A veteran firefighter had sworn under oath that a man had calmly walked through an apartment building fully engulfed in flames. Smoke inhalation, the department psychiatrist concluded.

Las Cruces. An elderly widow insisted she watched a stranger carry a child out of a burning farmhouse while the fire curled harmlessly around him. Advanced dementia, according to her physician.

Indio. A twelve-year-old girl claimed the same man had disappeared into an inferno and emerged moments later carrying her younger brother. Acute childhood trauma, wrote the consulting psychologist before recommending no further investigation.

Damian leaned back in the old wooden chair and rubbed his eyes. The reports blurred together after a while. Different names. Different cities. Different tragedies. Always the same ending. Without thinking, his hand slipped into his jacket pocket and found the little plastic rectangle waiting for him.

He frowned.

"You're unbelievable," he muttered.

The vape sat in his palm as if it had every right to be there. He stared at it for a moment, weighing all the reasons he should throw it into the nearest dumpster. Then, with the defeated sigh of a man losing an argument he'd had a thousand times before, he took a long pull.

Blue raspberry.

Still awful.

A thin cloud drifted lazily toward the fluorescent lights as Damian studied the files spread across his desk. Phoenix. Las Cruces. Indio. Different witnesses. Different investigators. Different decades. The vapor slowly dissipated, but the pattern refused to.

He wasn't burning.

Damian looked down at the vape in his hand and shook his head.

"I quit smoking for this?" he muttered. "Congratulations, idiot. You traded Marlboros for robot farts."

He stuffed it back into his pocket with more irritation than satisfaction and pulled the Indio file closer. The joke faded as quickly as the vapor. Every witness had described the same impossible man. Every official investigation had reached the same predictable conclusion.

Hallucination.

Trauma.

Smoke inhalation.

His eyes drifted toward Cordelia's folder resting beside the others.

"Well," he said quietly into the silence of E-612, "either every one of you was crazy..."

His gaze settled on his sister's name.

"...or none of you were."

Damian laid the reports side by side. Different cities. Different decades. Different witnesses who had never met one another. Strip away the names, the dates, and the official explanations, and they could almost have been describing the same fire.

He slowly reached toward the bottom drawer of the cabinet. Unlike the others, it required a key. He unlocked it and withdrew a weathered black binder whose corners had long since softened with use.

There was no case number.

No city.

No date.

Only two words embossed across the front.

THE MAN.

This was the file no one else knew existed.

Inside were no official reports. Only patterns. Maps covered in colored pins. Timelines stretching back decades. Sketches compiled from independent eyewitness accounts. Lists of names. Fires that had burned too hot. Bodies that had never been found. Survivors who had spent the rest of their lives trying to convince the world they weren't insane.

Twenty years of obsession fit between those covers.

Damian opened to the most recent map. Red pins dotted California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and beyond, each connected not by string but by dates, weather reports, and the meticulous notes of a man who had refused to accept coincidence as an answer. He reached into a small tin on the corner of the desk and removed another pin.

For several seconds he simply held it over the map.

Then he pressed it into place.

Another fire.

Another witness.

Another disappearance.

He leaned back in his chair and studied the growing constellation of crimson points. It had taken him years to stop looking at individual tragedies and begin seeing the shape they formed together. Whatever was taking people did not wander aimlessly. It hunted. It returned. It followed rules Damian still couldn't decipher.

His eyes drifted to the candlelit photograph of Cordelia.

"I've got something," he said quietly.

The words felt strange.

Hope always did.

Damian closed THE MAN binder and slid it beneath his arm. If Father Alvarez had trusted this witness enough to send him Damian's way, then the priest knew something.

More importantly, Damian wanted to see his face when he asked about it.

He gathered the relevant files, stuffed the vape back into his pocket, and extinguished the candles beside Cordelia's photograph one by one. He paused at the last flame.

"I'll be back."

The final candle went dark.

A few minutes later, the metal door of E-612 rattled shut behind him.

Father Alvarez had a parish to run.

Damian had questions.

St. Michael's was one of the oldest parishes in the region. Built more than a century earlier, its weathered stone walls had witnessed generations come and go while remaining almost defiantly unchanged. The world beyond its gates hurried forward with every passing year, but inside, time seemed content to kneel.

The church was built around a quiet central courtyard, where an ancient live oak spread its branches over a worn flagstone path. At its center stood a towering statue of St. Michael the Archangel, its once-bright stone softened by a century of wind and rain. Time had rounded the edges of the armor and darkened every fold of the great wings with age, but the Archangel's expression remained as fierce as the day the sculptor had carved it.

One sandaled foot rested firmly upon the neck of the dragon. Michael's sword pointed downward, frozen in the moment of victory, while the defeated serpent twisted beneath him in silent agony. Moss had found purchase in the dragon's scales, and tiny cracks traced their way through its coiled body, but the Archangel stood untouched above it all.

Damian paused there, as he always did.

"I guess we all have our demons to face," he murmured, looking up at the great stone warrior. "I know I do." He took one long drag from his vape and headed inside to meet the good priest.

"Do you have an appointment?"

The nameplate on the desk read SUSAN. Damian half wondered if she was also on the parish council.

"Susan, you know me. I'm Damian. I've been in here dozens of times before," he said, already feeling the familiar irritation creeping into his voice.

Every visit was a battle with Susan. Damian had occasionally considered spiking her coffee with holy water just to see if there would be a reaction.

"Father is a very busy man. You can't just barge in here expecting him to—"

The office door opened behind her.

"Damian!"

Father Alvarez poked his head into the reception area, took one look at the situation, and immediately understood.

"Welcome back. Come in, come in." He waved Damian toward the office with surprising urgency, apparently as eager to rescue him from the parish's secretarial Cerberus as Damian was to be rescued.

Damian gave Susan a small, victorious smile as he passed.

She did not return it.

Probably a demon, he thought.

Father Alvarez gestured toward a dark brown leather chair in front of his desk. The office was tiny, cramped with files, theology tomes, and the accumulated debris of parish life. Certificates and photographs of old seminary classmates crowded the walls. Directly behind Father Alvarez’s desk, however, hung the one object Damian could never quite reconcile with the rest of the room.

A motivational poster.

A kitten clung desperately to a wire beneath the words:

HANG IN THERE.

The poster made Damian want to vape.

“So Damian, I can guess what brings you by…” his voice trailed off.  Fr. Alvarez had the uncanny ability to make declarative statements sound interrogative.   Damian had never figured out whether it was pastoral sensitivity or a lifelong refusal to commit to a sentence.