👉 Previous Choice: You covertly dispatched Deputy Wright and discovered the forged documents.
Silas stepped closer, his shadow falling over the damning document in my hand. His voice, usually so steady, now held an unnerving edge.
“That old parchment,” he began, his eyes locking onto mine, “Gabriel wrote that himself. In a state of divine ecstasy, a holy delirium.” He shook his head slowly. “He was preparing his soul for ascent.”
“This is dated before his death,” I countered, my voice tight. “He was alive when Bartholomew Gidley notarized this. It assigns everything to your ministry.”
“His prophetic vision guided him,” Silas insisted, his tone unwavering. He reached for the document, but I pulled it back. “He knew his time was near. He wanted to bless the Covenant.”
His face remained calm, almost sorrowful. “And this call you received, Evelyn? It’s your grief, child. Your mind is breaking. You refuse to accept God’s will for Gabriel, for yourself.”
He tried to take my hand, his touch cold. “You need rest. To purge these delusions. This distress call is nothing more than your mind’s desperate attempt to avoid the truth.”
Just then, my comms headset crackled to life. Deputy Caleb Wright’s voice, strained and breathless, burst through the speaker.
“Dispatch, this is Wright. I’m at 414 Cedar Ridge Lane. The house is empty.”
A wave of dread washed over me. “Empty?”
“Empty,” Caleb confirmed, his voice barely above a whisper. “But… the interior doors. They’re all carved.”
“Carved with what?” I demanded, my grip tightening on the forged document. Silas’s eyes narrowed, his gaze like a physical weight.
“Sigils,” Caleb choked out. “Strange, geometric symbols. All over the doorframes, the windowsills. Ritual markings, Evelyn. I’ve seen them in old Covenant texts.”
My blood ran cold. Ritual sigils. This wasn’t a hallucination. This was real.
“And the phone line, Evelyn,” Caleb continued, his terror palpable. “The landline. It’s not connected to the network. It’s plugged directly into a dead wall socket.”
He paused, then added, “It was never connected to anything. It couldn’t have made an outgoing call.”
The phone line plugged into a dead socket. No incoming or outgoing calls possible. Then who had called me? And how? The silence in the dispatch center felt suffocating. Silas’s calm facade faltered for a fraction of a second, a muscle twitching in his jaw.
He knew.
➡️ Read CHAPTER 7 to continue the story.
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