The PowWow

Curtis found it a little after six in the morning, which meant he'd been running searches for nine straight hours without once asking either of us to spell him, and I only knew he'd found something because the typing stopped.

Typing stopping, with Curtis, is an event. I sat up.

"I need you to look at this before I tell you what I think it is," he said, "because I want to know if you see it too, or if I've just been awake too long and started finding shapes in noise."

He turned the monitor toward us. A list. Names, dates, locations, a column I didn't immediately understand labeled with a case number format I recognized because I'd filed enough of our own paperwork over the years to know the county's system when I saw it.

"Grave disturbances," Curtis said. "Reported and unreported. I built the search wide — cemetery vandalism complaints, funeral home discrepancy reports, two different medical examiner databases, and a very specific kind of noise complaint that keeps showing up in police logs from people who live near cemeteries and called in something they couldn't explain and were told, politely, that there was nothing to investigate." He didn't look up from the screen. "I cross-referenced every name against our own case files. Every case. Going back to the beginning."

"And," Jacob said.

"And every single disturbed grave on this list belongs to somebody we've researched." Curtis said it flatly, the way he'd said everything else since he walked through the door the night before, but I heard what was underneath the flatness this time, because I'd had a night to learn the shape of it. "Not somebody adjacent to a case. Not a witness, not a bystander, not a victim in the sense of somebody who had something done to them without their participation. Every name on this list is somebody who was, at some point, on our radar from the case you were working."

I looked at the list. Some of the names I recognized immediately, with the specific unpleasant jolt of a face resurfacing that I hadn't thought about in years. Others took a second longer, memory working backward through the accumulated weight of nine years and I didn't know how many cases before I placed them.

"They have one thing in common," Jacob said, and it wasn't a question, because he'd already seen it too, reading the list over my shoulder with the particular stillness he gets when a pattern locks into place and he doesn't yet like where it's pointing. "Every name on this list is someone Suriel moved. Not someone he simply crossed paths with. Someone he successfully pulled away from God, usually before we entered the picture."

"Lim," I said, because he was the obvious one, the confirmed one, sitting right there near the top of the list with a case number I could have recited from memory.

"Lim," Curtis agreed. "And below him, going back. People who said yes to the wrong thing, in one case or another, and never said no to it again before they died." He scrolled, slow, letting us read. "I don't know all of these stories. Some of them I do. Some of them are older than my involvement with any of this. But the ones I recognize, I recognize because we were the ones who eventually heard about or researched them and their choice to keep the thing that was killing them rather than let it go."

The room was quiet for a moment. Not the working quiet of the last several hours, but a different kind — the quiet of three people looking at a list and understanding, all at once, what it actually was.

"He's not raising strangers," I said. "He's raising those that chose to be away from the Lord. Everyone Suriel ever successfully corrupted across every single case we've ever worked, and lost track of once they died, because we assumed dead meant finished. He kept a ledger the whole time. And now he's collecting on it."

"Which means the pool is not infinite," Jacob said, and there was something almost like relief in how carefully he said it, the relief of a man finding the first actual boundary in a problem that had felt boundless since Naomi asked her question at that window. "It is large. It may be larger than we want to know. But it is not everyone who has ever died. It is a specific list, built from a specific willingness, accumulated across a specific span of years doing a specific kind of work. That is not comfort. But it is a shape. A shape is more than we had yesterday."

"I'll keep building it," Curtis said. "Every name, every case file, cross-referenced against burial location, so if any more of them start moving we'll know before the department does instead of after." He rubbed his eyes, the first visible sign all night that he was human and tired and running on nothing but resolve. "I want a complete list. Not almost complete. I want to know exactly how many instruments this thing has available to it, because 'we don't know' is not a sentence I am willing to keep saying out loud to either of you."

Jacob nodded slowly, then was quiet for a while — long enough that I recognized it as the specific quiet that meant he was praying, not thinking, a distinction I'd learned to read in him over enough years that I no longer needed him to tell me which one it was.

"I have been asking the Lord since Naomi gave us her perspective," he said, eventually, "what we are actually permitted to do, if one of these comes at us again. Whether there is any version of mercy still owed to a body that used to be a man." He looked at me, and there was something settled in his face that hadn't been there in days — not peace, exactly, but its close relation, the specific steadiness of a man who has stopped carrying a question he's finally been given clearance to put down. "I do not believe there is anyone left to spare. Naomi's answer was as close to certain as this family gets to certain, and I have prayed on it, and I have not been given a different one back. If it is a weapon, and nothing more, then the only mercy left in the equation is stopping it as completely as we can, as quickly as we can, before it reaches whoever it was sent for."

"Stopping it," I said. "You mean killing something that's already dead."

"I mean destroying whatever is keeping it upright and moving, since 'killing' does not seem like the correct verb for a thing with no pulse to lose." Jacob's jaw was doing the thing it does. "We restrained the one at Mara's door. Restraint did not stop it. It waited us out and left on its own terms. I do not intend to be in that position again without a better option available."

"So what actually works," Curtis said, already pulling up a blank document, because apparently even existential horror got filed as a research question in his hands. "Practically. Physically. What stops a body that doesn't need blood flow, doesn't feel pain, and doesn't tire."

We didn't have a good answer, which was its own kind of unsettling, sitting in a well-lit office at six in the morning trying to reason our way through a problem that belonged, by every rule I understood about the world before nine days ago, in a category of fiction rather than tactics.

"Fire," I said, first, because it was the obvious one, the one every story reaches for. "Thorough enough, if we can actually get it burning and keep it burning. Slow. Loud. Hard to do quietly, and harder still to do safely in a residential hallway at four in the morning without setting the building on fire around whoever we're trying to protect."

"Explosives are worse," Jacob said. "Effective, theoretically. Also illegal, difficult to obtain on short notice, and just as likely to bring a structure down on the person we are trying to save as on the thing we are trying to stop."

"Which leaves brute force," Curtis said, typing as he talked. "Which we already tried. It didn't work — it held, but it didn't stop, and 'held' isn't the same category as 'stopped.'"

"Perhaps not enough of it," Jacob said. "I did not use everything I have on that thing. I was restraining, not ending. There is a difference in what a body can absorb depending on which of those two things you actually intend." He said this without relish, which I noted and was grateful for — there was no part of my brother enjoying the idea of what he was describing, only a man doing arithmetic he wished he didn't have to do. "Enough force, applied correctly, to the correct structure — the spine, the skull — may do what a punch to the chest did not. I do not know. I have never had reason to test that theory against something that does not bleed when I am right."

"We should not be testing theories blind," I said. "Next time, if there is a next time, I want options lined up in advance instead of improvising in a hallway. Something that buys us the two seconds it takes Jacob to actually finish whatever he starts, instead of the two minutes it took last time."

"I'll look into it," Curtis said, already typing that too, a new document opening beside the list of names, a plain and practical file with a title I found almost unbearably calm given what was going into it: Containment and Neutralization — Working Notes.

Jacob looked at the list of names one more time before Curtis minimized it, and I watched something move across his face that wasn't quite grief and wasn't quite anger, but sat close enough to both that I didn't try to name it more precisely than that.

"These were people," he said, quietly. "Whatever they chose, and whatever it cost them, and whatever we may yet have to do to whatever's left wearing them — they were people, made in the image of God same as anyone else. I do not want us to become people who forget that on the way to becoming people who are willing to do what apparently now has to be done."

Nobody argued with him. I don't think any of us wanted to.