Prelude: Piazza di San Pietro
(Page 4 of 20)
Piazza di San Pietro; Vatican City State
Saturday, February 19
11:48 PM
Saturday, February 19
11:48 PM
The pain was almost too much to bear—a harsh current flowing across his skin as ichor burned his veins. Demetrius stepped lightly past the colonnaded outer edge of the plaza, agony with each footfall. He was not meant to be here, and the torment could only be controlled by shifting his focus: Insufflatio. Exsufflatio. Insufflatio. Exsufflatio . . .
That was why he came: he was a man with an unclean spirit and he wanted to exhale the demon. In two days, the Jubilee of the Roman Curia would begin and he could petition God to accept his work and shorten the suffering of his soul in Purgatory. He’d tried so many other things. An indulgence may give him means of discharging the temporal punishment of sin and allow this pathos to end, at least, with the Last Judgment.
Suddenly, he heard a woman strike the ground near one of the light posts that surrounded the granite obelisk at the center of the plaza. As he turned to look, an irrational sense of dread overtook him, as if his subconscious mind caught something which his consciousness didn’t yet recognize. The woman whispered incoherently, and Demetrius felt an overwhelming want to stop her words.
He circled behind the woman and her companion. Recognizing something about them which filled him still further with icy fear, until he recalled the hunter left behind in America. He was being targeted, hunted by these two.
“What did the angel speak of?” The younger one smiled as she asked.
Angel?
He focused the pain that surrounded him into anger.
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