Twenty Years of Service, Thomas

Father Boone Castellanos had performed exactly two exorcisms in his thirty years of priesthood, and both had ended without incident, which was precisely why nothing in his experience prepared him for the moment eleven-year-old Mia Fenwick’s voice dropped three octaves and addressed him by a name he’d never told anyone, not even his own bishop.

“You buried it well, Thomas,” the voice emerging from the child’s small frame rasped, using the name Boone had legally abandoned when he entered seminary twenty years earlier. “But we remember what you did before you found God. We remember exactly.”

“Whatever you are, you don’t get to use that name,” Boone said, keeping his voice steady through years of pastoral discipline despite the ice spreading through his chest. “I’m here for Mia, not to relitigate whatever you think you know about my past.”

Mia’s parents, Priya and Costa Fenwick, stood at the room’s edge, their faces carrying the particular exhaustion of two months watching their daughter deteriorate through symptoms that no medical specialist could adequately explain — inexplicable strength, knowledge of private family details she couldn’t have accessed, and a voice that emerged periodically from her small body carrying a malevolence entirely foreign to the sweet, ordinary child they’d raised.

“Father, please,” Priya said, her composure fraying visibly. “Whatever it’s saying to you, please just help her. We don’t care about anything else right now except getting our daughter back.”

Boone nodded, forcing his attention away from the accusations he’d spent twenty years trying to bury and back toward the ritual itself, beginning the Rite of Exorcism with a steadiness he didn’t entirely feel. The entity’s response came immediately, Mia’s small body arching with a violence that shouldn’t have been physically possible, her voice rising to something considerably beyond human range.

“You think your prayers matter more than what you actually did, Thomas? You think God forgives so easily, just because you traded one name for another?”

“I think,” Boone said, continuing the ritual despite the entity’s escalating attempts at psychological destabilization, “that whatever I did before doesn’t change what I’m doing right now, which is helping this child regardless of what you’re trying to use against me.”

The ritual continued for nearly two hours, the entity shifting tactics repeatedly, alternating between vicious personal attacks and physical manifestations that tested every ounce of Boone’s composure, until, in a moment of genuine desperation, it revealed something that made his blood run cold.

“There are others,” it said, Mia’s voice carrying a note of genuine, malicious triumph. “We’ve been watching you for years, Thomas, waiting for exactly the right vulnerable child, exactly the right moment to remind you what you actually are beneath the collar.”

“That doesn’t change anything about what happens here tonight,” Boone said, though his voice carried a tremor he couldn’t fully suppress. “Whatever you think you know about me, you don’t get to keep this child because of it.”

The final phase of the ritual brought a physical manifestation more violent than anything preceding it, the room’s temperature plummeting, objects flying from shelves with considerable force, until, with a final, guttural scream that seemed to shake the house’s very foundation, the entity finally, completely withdrew, leaving Mia collapsed and unconscious but, according to every subsequent medical examination, entirely, blessedly herself again.

“Is it over?” Costa asked, his voice barely audible, watching his daughter’s chest rise and fall with ordinary, peaceful breath for the first time in months.

“I believe so,” Boone said, his own exhaustion finally breaking through his professional composure. “But I need to be honest with you both about something the entity said, something I need you to understand before you decide whether you still want my continued involvement in Mia’s care.”

He told them, haltingly, about the life he’d lived before seminary, the violence he’d once been capable of before finding, desperately, a different path, and watched Priya and Costa absorb the confession with a complicated mixture of surprise and, ultimately, gratitude that outweighed whatever discomfort his past history provoked.

“You saved our daughter, Father,” Priya said finally. “Whatever you were before doesn’t change what you did for her tonight. I don’t think that’s something we’re prepared to hold against you.”

Boone carried the entity’s threat with him in the weeks that followed, the promise of “others” it had made settling into a persistent, low-grade dread he couldn’t fully shake, and he found himself, for the first time in years, revisiting the details of his abandoned past with a wary vigilance he’d hoped his years of service had finally allowed him to leave behind entirely.

“Do you think it was telling the truth?” his bishop asked, once Boone had finally, reluctantly, reported the full details of the encounter through proper diocesan channels. “About others watching, waiting?”

“I don’t know,” Boone admitted. “But I intend to be ready regardless, because whatever peace I thought I’d found, I don’t think it’s finished testing exactly how strong that peace actually is.”

Boone eventually confided the full encounter to a trusted fellow priest, unable to carry the weight of the entity’s threat entirely alone, and the two of them began, quietly, cataloguing similar cases reported across the diocese, building a careful record neither of them fully expected, nor particularly wanted, to eventually need.

Priya and Costa Fenwick eventually became quiet advocates within their own church community, encouraging other families to seek help immediately rather than enduring months of unexplained symptoms alone, understanding, better than most parishioners ever would, exactly how much earlier intervention might have spared their daughter considerable suffering.

Boone’s bishop eventually assigned him a formal mentor specifically for cases involving suspected demonic activity, a considerably more experienced priest who had, it turned out, encountered similar targeted attacks referencing a subject’s past, and their subsequent collaboration became the foundation of a considerably more thorough diocesan protocol than had previously existed.

The diocese’s updated protocol, developed largely from Boone’s detailed case notes, eventually became a reference document shared cautiously among several regional dioceses, and Boone, reviewing the final version years later, felt a quiet pride that his own difficult, painful history had ultimately helped protect other vulnerable children more effectively.