Free Name of the Devil by Andrew Mayne

pocket. “I get these up on Lightning Peak. When the ’tricity hits the ground, it leaves these behind.” He hands it to me.
    It’s heavy. He’s ground the rough rock into an edge like a blade. A hand knife made from a bolt of lightning.
    I’m uneasy about the gift. “That’s okay. You don’t have to.”
    His eyes widen. “I do have to. You go running into trouble, some of that trouble is going to come running toward you.” He throws his hands up in the air and won’t take it back.
    He waits for me to get inside my car before turning back to the trail that leads up to his shack. Unafraid of the dark, he vanishes in the night with the determination of someone who knows his own destiny.

9
    â€œ L ET’S TALK ABOUT demons,” says Ailes as I walk into the conference room at Quantico.
    â€œWonderful,” I reply, taking my seat. The chair, like the building, is decades old. Off from the main FBI campus, we’re in our own corner.
    Gerald, my lanky, mop-headed coworker who looks like a teenager who got lost on take-your-kid-to-work day, is sitting at his laptop pecking away at a furious speed. Behind them is a fullscreen video wall. In the center is the Hawkton church.
    â€œOh, so now we’re interested?” I remark.
    â€œI’m always interested. No, it seems Mitchum wants some more information about demons.”
    â€œWhat gives?”
    â€œThis,” replies Ailes. He nods to Gerald. The church erupts into a fireball on the monitor. The roof rips apart and then the entire building explodes. When the smoke settles, the structure is spread across the ground in a thousand splinters, just as I saw from the helicopter.
    â€œWhere’d we get this footage?” I ask, surprised. I didn’t know anyone was filming at the time.
    â€œWe made this. Gerald took all the laser-mapped 3-D data and put it into one of our number crunchers.”
    â€œImpressive.” I feel a bit silly for thinking it was real. I glance at Gerald and nod. He gives me a meek smile.
    â€œYou haven’t seen the half of it.” Ailes picks up a laser pointer and aims its red dot on a small white plank in the bottom left corner of the screen. “See that?”
    Gerald moves his cursor over the board and the image zooms in. The individual grains in the wood become visible. He runs his finger across the track pad and the board flies into the air, reversing the trajectory of the explosion. Seconds later, I’m looking at part of a wall inside of the church, which has magically reassembled. There’s a cork bulletin board a few feet away from the plank. The camera spins around, showing us the entire interior of the church. Not all the details are there—some areas are pixelated chunks—but overall it’s convincing.
    â€œWe have to fudge a few things,” says Ailes. “But it’s useful.”
    â€œI’ll say. It’s like a time machine. So what’s with the new interest in demons? Mitchum take another look at the smudge I found on McKnight?”
    â€œNot quite. Roll forward,” Ailes tells Gerald. The camera flies back to a bird’s-eye view of the hellmouth. He points his laser at a patch of ground in the field across the street. “Zoom.”
    The camera pulls close to another plank. This one is darker, like flooring. On its edges are several deep gouges.
    â€œLook familiar?” asks Ailes.
    â€œNo. Not really.”
    â€œRoll back, Gerald.” As before, the board shoots through the air to fall back into place inside the church. Several other planks nestle down on either side. The gouges continue on to the other boards, and next to each other, the jagged carvings form a name: Azazel .
    The same name in English that I saw written in Hebrew on McKnight’s chest.
    â€œWho wrote this?”
    â€œWe think that perhaps one of the victims carved it with a house key.” Ailes points to the blood