“Everything was going so normal.” Anna said. “He seemed like he calmed down a bit when we got to the church. But then they went into the confessional.....” Anna trailed off and started to sob again.

Cass had read the reports, as an occultist, how could you not have. Sixty-five years of age, forty of those years as a devout priest. By all accounts one of the good ones at that. The story goes that they go into the confessional, everything seems alright, until out of nowhere the priest starts bashing his face into the door. It took three people to pull him out of the bloodied confessional booth before he killed himself. And Vik? Well, he just sat on the other side laughing like a maniac.

But that didn’t explain what had caused him to do it. Did Viktor do something to the man? say something? He couldn’t find anything on it other than the short few news articles. He suspected Anna didn’t know much more, and if she did he didn’t feel right prying in her state. That part would just have to remain for now.

“Alright, what about when you first started to hit it big?”

“Vik... He’d been strange for sure. I thought it was just the stress we got big so fast. It was like we recorded that one first song and it all just Boom.” Anna made a gun shooting motion with her hand, aiming her imaginary cannon off into one of Cass’s many bookshelves.

“We just shot off like a rocket. It all happened so fast I didn’t even have time to think.”

“Anything about that first recording?” Cass asked.

“Yeah actually, the producer for it was different. We’d used our friend Jerry for everything up until then but Vik said he found someone better, someone, who’d shoot us to the top with one song. I didn’t believe it at first but He did.”

“Let me guess, gave you everything down to the lyrics and chord progressions?” Cass leaned against one of the bookshelves and crossed his arms.

“How did you?”

“Probably always wore black, never took his sunglasses off?”

“How --?”

“And a strange tattoo right? One that just so happened to appear on Viktor shortly after?”

Anna began to cry again sobbing out words in between the heaving tears.

“How did you know?”

“They’re very good at hiding, some of them are too good. But you can spot a lower level demon for their... obvious fashion choices.” Cass leaned up and began to pour over the bookshelves scanning for something.

“Did Viktor ever have a strange book?” Cass asked perusing the shelf. ” Weird symbols, old leather-bound, creepy old ink drawings, that sorta things.”

Anna’s cries slowed and she wiped her nose with a sniffle. 

“Yeah--Yeah back before we made it big. He was really into this paranormal stuff. I always thought it was goofy.. But ... I .... Loved ...Hi---” she sputtered back into tears as Cass continued searching through the leather-bound tomes lining his shelf.

“Can you remember the name of any of them specifically? Any that stuck out. Maybe made you feel like that producer made you feel when you were left alone with it?”

“Yeah.” Anna said the quiet reservation in her voice told Cass everything he needed to know about what had happened. Now he just needed to find a way to fix it. If one existed.

“There was this one. It was this little black book, I--- I thought it was a journal for a long time. But....” Anna stopped and stared into her coffee.

“But?” Cass stopped his search and turned expectantly looking over to Anna still sitting in front of his desk.

“I looked inside of it one day. It had all these weird symbols, and--- and the drawings were just so-- I swear to you Mr. Cassidy those pictures were moving.” She began to cry again placing the coffee onto the desk and crying into her jacket sleeve.

“Did you see a title? Even a chapter heading?”

“Compendium Daemonia.” Anna stated as she tried to regain her composure. “He had some specific pages bookmarked, but I haven’t seen that book since the first recording.”

“Makes sense.” Cass said as he went back to the shelves with a renewed vigor. With a newfound speed, he searched through the shelves arranging and rearranging books until he finally came across it. A little black book with a little red tassel sticking out of its spine. 

Cass swung around with the book in hand bringing it into Anna’s view. The immediate shock and dread on her face were enough of a confirmation for Cass. He carefully placed the book onto the center of his desk and went to sit back down in his high backed office chair. He leaned back with a small whine of the chair adding a creepy effect that Cass was never sure he actually wanted to add to any situation. 

“You said he had a page marked, could you find it?"

She sat for a second and looked down into her lap contemplative. Cass could tell that this wasn’t a question of can, but will. In truth he understood, to someone like himself looking in a demonic compendium was nothing. Like a seasoned horror veteran going into the latest teen psycho killer movie. But he could tell she was different, gentler, kinder, purer than anything had any right being while in the same room as Mr. Thomas S. Cassidy. He looked over her shoulder to the hunched figure. Certainly to pure a soul for you buddy. 

Anna reached up with trembling fingers and lightly slid the book over to her side of the desk. She straightened up in her chair and wiped her nose, tossing the tissue and quickly grabbing another. She opened the cover to the black tome carefully wearing the look of fear that something might bite her. She rifled through the pages trying not to stare too long at any given symbol or etching.

She finally found the page after a moment of one-eyed hunting, glancing only momentarily to the pages to see what she could see, and to avoid seeing what she could as well. She slid the tome back over to Cassidy who regarded the page with an inquisitive look.

Anna stared at him as he poured over the tome’s dark and yellowed pages. He looked up to her, then over to Viktor, and then back to the page to pour over the two-page section once more.

“Alright.” He said suddenly standing from the room's center desk and walking over to the other desk piled with books and his laptop. He lazily moved a couple of stacks of books onto the floor with a couple of loud thuds. He unrolled a map of the state of Georgia on the newly cleared portion of table and put a small milky white crystal on each corner. He wiped off the map with his hand releasing a cloud of thick dingy-smelling dust.

Anna coughed and stared on in wonder at what Cass was doing. She’d seen Viktor do some strange rituals and perform “magic”, but it had never worked and had always been for a laugh she thought. Even when he’d told her that he was gonna make em famous even if he had to use his magic powers, she had counted it as a joke. Never actually believing in this kind of stuff, that is until Viktor began acting strange.

But, as she sat there staring at Cass rummaging through a drawer cursing himself like an old man for losing something, she thought Maybe magic could be real. If it is, I sure want this man to be able to do some.

Cass cursed and rummaged in a desk drawer until he found what he was looking for. A similar, but smaller, milky white crystal attached to a small chain almost like a necklace but broken. Cass messily tossed the opened black tome onto the map, and he began to swing the milky white stone in a circle like a pendulum. He muttered something to himself under his breath and seemed to make strange rhythmic symbols with his free hand.

The stone spun and spun and spun as Anna seemed mesmerized by the movement. In fact, she stared right at The Compendium Daemonia without care. She sat and watched the slow-moving spin, Cass massaging the small chain between his fingers as he rotated it above the map. 

The spinning continued for another moment until suddenly as if breaking the very laws of physics itself, the stone stopped and snapped down onto the map. The stone sat touching a point on the map as if magnetized, its formerly loose chain taught in Cass’s hand.

“Alright, wait here I’m gonna grab my car and we’re gonna take a field trip.”

Cass exited the room as Anna sat uncomfortably in the office. Were all his books like this? She sat in the dimly lit room and surveyed the bookshelf. She was looking closer than she had before and as she strained to read the titles on the book’s spine, a cold chill ran up her spine.

She quickly got up and exited the room out to the front of the strip mall lighting a cigarette.