When Your Light Goes Dark

Chapter Two : Training Day

Halfway across the globe, Brother Micah Scott was having a terrible day. He'd spent all morning in a group training session, his lunch had burned, and now he was stuck in a car in a desert without the proper supplies.

"I think I mentioned," he said to the man in the passenger seat, "that we needed oil."

"Yes, you did," the man said. His name was Brother Wyatt Young, and his day wasn't going much better. "Thing is, you didn't specify what kind of oil--"

A buffeting wind rocked the car from above. The grit of the dry road on either side kicked up against the doors.

"--and since we were going on a car trip--"

An unholy screech, made by five different mouths, right outside.

"--I assumed you meant motor oil."

"It was a car trip to a haunting," Micah seethed, "and we're out of holy oil."

"Well," Wyatt yelped, as the car began to shake, "what do you want me to do about it?"

Micah braced himself between the window and the console.

"Aren't you the one with poltergeist training?" he asked loudly.

"No!" Wyatt had to yell. The screeching was loud enough to crack the glass of the car windows. "That's Caleb!"

His ears were beginning to bleed, soaking into the foam earpiece of his headset. He screwed his eyes shut against it all.

"Caleb's dead," he whispered, because he couldn't hear himself. He didn't want to.

It all stopped.

"What?" Micah asked sharply, driven back down into his seat pretty hard by the reappearance of gravity. "What? Caleb's dead?"

"Hey..." Wyatt frowned. "How did you even hear me?"

"Obviously mine's gonna have less goin' through," Micah said, tapping one ear of his own headset. He stared at the other priest. "What do you mean, Caleb is dead?"

Wyatt sighed. He slumped back against the passenger seat, glancing out at the gaping windows of the building across the way. "It was the mission last week, to Cairo," he said softly, toying with the seatbelt. "They tried an older tomb. Caleb wasn't ready."

"I'm... sorry," Micah said, taken aback. "I know you two were close."

Sighing again, Wyatt gave up fighting the forbidden memories. He let himself linger on the upward lilt of Caleb's lips that morning, right before they'd kissed goodbye. The past three years had been rocky, but good, and despite the weight of all that secret-keeping Wyatt had considered himself truly happy.

"Yeah," was all he said.

Micah watched his student closely. "Do you want to call it a day?"

Swallowing, Wyatt met Micah's eyes again with a determined glare. "I've got this. You just need to tell me what it is I'm not doing."

"Well," Micah mused, working his jaw around, feeling stubble as he rubbed it. He just shaved two hours ago. "First thing about poltergeists is, don't let them pin you down like this. You're in a tin can, nothing useful around for miles. You're dead."

Wyatt pursed his lips.

"You've got to get the drop on them," Micah insisted. "Otherwise, they'll drop you."

"So you use the tattoos?"

"Use anything you've got. Usually before they deploy anybody, they know whereabouts and what. We choose what to use based on what they tell us is out there."