“Sorry to interrupt your meeting, but we have a very special guest from the Curia,” Ewan said with the appropriate affable tone of the perfect host. “Senior inquisitor Eleni Stavros, please meet Sister Vivian, and the parents of the young man in need of assistance, Arisa and Riku Seki.”
We exchanged the usual annoying pleasantries before I jumped right into the thick of the matter.
“I’ve been sent to help investigate some of the strange occurrences with possessions in the area of late,” I said in a non-committal fashion.
I didn’t know how much they had revealed to the parents. Obviously, I hoped the idiot wouldn’t have divulged how many of his clerics had vanished, but I also didn’t believe in publicly shaming or undermining others. Whatever internal problems we had, we would fix in private.
“I understand you came here to seek help for your son?” I asked.
“Yes,” Arisa replied, squeezing her hands together with a mix of nervousness and despair. “The exorcism should have ended early this morning, but we haven’t heard back.”
“You both seem extremely young to be parents to a twenty-five-year-old man,” I said in a neutral tone devoid of outright accusation.
They both nodded. “We adopted him,” Riku replied. “At the time, my wife was twenty-four, I was twenty-eight, and Elliot was ten.”
“We always wanted children, but I found out that I was sterile. So, fifteen years ago, when the opportunity presented itself for us to adopt a little boy, we didn’t hesitate.”
“I see,” I replied in the same conversational tone while trying to assess what was bothering me about them. “When did he first start showing symptoms of possession?”
“About a month ago,” Riku said, slowly shaking his head as if he still couldn’t believe what had happened. “Elliot used to be such a sweet and polite boy. We were so proud of the young man he had turned into. And then he suddenly snapped. After that, he started locking himself up in his room where he took to drawing very scary and violent images. One week later, the corpses of mutilated animals began popping up all around the property. We couldn’t speak to him without him becoming verbally abusive and using the foulest language.”
“Did he strike either of you?” I asked.
They both shook their heads.
“Never,” Arisa replied vehemently. “He would break stuff, make threats, and yell at us. At the height of his rage-filled outbursts, his facial features and even his voice seemed to change. It was terrifying. But it was the day he crawled up the walls that we knew what was happening. And that’s when we reached out to the Sanctum.”
I stared at them for a moment before glancing in turn at Vivian and Ewan. Finding them both staring at the couple with commiseration had me rolling my eyes with aggravation. Crawling up walls was nothing but theatrics in folk tales. During real possessions, demons had no time for that type of nonsense.
“Fancy tale,” I replied, unimpressed. “Now how about you stop lying and wasting my time?”
“Eleni!” Ewan exclaimed, the shock on his face reflected on the other three people in the room.
“Don’t Eleni me. They’re lying,” I said harshly before turning my attention back to the couple. “A cleric is missing, and as I understand it, so is your son. Whatever he may have done, we’re not here to prosecute him. Our goal is to banish the demon and save both your son’s life and the exorcist who was attempting to help him. So speak up and spare me the old wives’ tales.”
Riku looked at me with outrage and slipped a protective arm around his wife, apparently ready to call me out over my stern words. I crossed my arms over my chest and stared back at him with a dare. Whatever he saw on my face made him hesitate. Arisa patted the back of his hand around her waist before taking on a defeated expression.
“My Elliot is a good boy. He just lost his way. The reason he still wasn’t adopted at his age is because he was born with a club foot. He got bullied a lot for it, but that never seemed to truly bother him until about eight months ago. Elliot was madly in love with the kind of pretty girl every young man dreams about, but who always ends up marrying the wealthiest heir in town. When my son confessed his feelings for her, she rejected him with unnecessary cruelty. That completely changed him.”
“Where is the girl?” I asked, tension seeping into my voice.
“She’s fine,” Riku interjected quickly. “Elliot has not gone after her or even tried to contact her in any way. You see, from the moment he met her, he started paying for powerful glamour spells from the enchanters in Charmer’s District. He is a very handsome young man except for that one defect. They had started seeing each other, and things were moving along nicely when the glamour spell faltered.”
“Ah! So she realized he had been deceiving her about his true appearance,” I said with sudden understanding.
It didn’t excuse rejecting him in a cruel fashion, but it certainly explained what might have prompted an excessive response.
“Instead, he began saying that no woman would ever like him with that foot. So he started looking for a permanent fix that didn’t involve glamour,” Riku continued. “No traditional cure or medicine worked. He even considered surgery, but the doctors said they wouldn’t be able to attach anything that would even remotely look natural. That’s when he turned to the dark arts for a solution. We don’t know what kind of things he dabbled in. But last month, something took over him.”
“You should have been honest from the start,” I said sternly.
“But he’s a good kid!” Arisa exclaimed with tears in her voice.
“That’s not the point,” I said firmly, although in a gentler voice. “Sorrow and despair drive people to do stupid things. Lying just compounds it. We cannot help your son unless we have all the facts. Like I said, we’re not here to prosecute him for his poor choices, but to free Elliot from the abomination that’s controlling him, on top of rescuing our own Sister.”
“I’m sorry,” Arisa said with a devastated expression. “I wasn’t thinking beyond trying to protect my boy.”
I nodded. “Where was the exorcism taking place?”
