Deliver Us From Evil: Group X Cases, #4

By J. A. Bouma

Stand Against the Darkness

 

Fans of the supernatural, get ready! Group X is back with their most harrowing case yet. Brace yourself for a suspenseful mystery that will leave you questioning everything you thought you knew about reality itself.

 

Elijah Fox and Gina Anderson, seasoned investigators of the enigmatic Group X, never anticipated the sinister turn their personal lives would take. What begins as just another day at the Church's investigative agency soon spirals into a deadly game of shadows and secrets.

 

When two figures from their past resurface with haunting pleas for help in chilling missing person cases, Elijah and Gina are thrust into a cat-and-mouse dance with darkness where reality blurs with the supernatural. As they delve deeper, they unearth a web of secrets pointing to a cosmic conspiracy that stretches back to the dawn of time itself.

 

But with every revelation comes a new peril, as malevolent forces and long-forgotten horrors conspire to veil the truth. With the fate of humanity hanging in the balance, Elijah and Gina must summon every ounce of courage and cunning, faith and fortitude to unravel mysteries that shroud their world in shadows.

 

Dark and gritty with touches of humanity and humor, this heart-pounding tale will leave you breathless in this collision of reality and nightmare. Perfect for fans of Frank Peretti and Dean Koontz, this briskly paced supernatural suspense mystery offers a chilling glimpse into the abyss where unseen forces shape our reality, but Christ's power and Christian faith ultimately triumph.

 

Devour this gripping journey into the heart of our disenchanted age deceived by an ancient promise straight from the pit of hell itself!

• Language: English
• Publisher: EmmausWay Press
• Release date: Mar 22, 2024
• ISBN: 9781948545143

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Doth my eyes deceive me?

Doth my flesh?

I shrink back, trying to evade the tipsy, toppley frozen slices of Hell. An irony, to be sure.

For many reasons.

Under the eaves I shrink farther, hiding from⁠—

I gasp. Gasp I tell you-you!

For a gusting rush of detritus, of the Devil’s dung straight from Cocytus—that vast pit of icy winds and frozen wasteland—attacks me with no uncertain doom!

I thrash my appendages and slink farther into the shadows, to no avail. Those frozen flakes strike me like a hot iron, stinging me like a thousand paper cuts from the Ninth Circle of Hell.

That Italian wasn’t far off the mark with his poetic description. And what he described is what is assaulting me in the Windy City⁠—

Snooooooo-wah!

I hate hate hate that wretchedness of all the Nameless One’s creations. I don’t care how magical and mysterious those crystalline water molecules are. To me, they mean one thing-thing.

Death.

More specifically: diapause, the slowing down of my bodily processes.

But I digress-ress.

And now those devilish flakes are regressing, back to the pit from whence they came-came.

I swear the Nameless One sent that squall just to shake me off my game-game. To detract and distract me from the operation commissioned by Wormwood and requested by the Shining One himself-self!

Take a breath-breath, I must council myself.

So I do, slinking from the shadows of the overhang to flex my appendages.

Ahh. That’s better.

I edge to the—well, edge—and peer down below, eyeing my targets.

Waiting for thee target.

There they are. The whole messy lot of them-them.

The ratty mass of humanity stirs like the fated rodents of a barge taking on water. Only these miscreants know of a different sort of disaster striking at the heart of humanity.

The implosion of religion broadly and the failure of one in particular-lar.

The Church of the Nameless One.

Oh, yes yes yes! The stats are in, and they are delicious.

In the last twenty-five years, 40 million Americans have dropped the Nameless One’s whore like a bad habit. For you back of the class kiddos, that’s 12% of the population. And it’s the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history.

And thanks to that Wuhan wet market or laboratory, or whatever, 66% of Americans reported attending a religious service at least once a year—down from 75% in March before the coronacrazy! Now the percentage of Americans who say they would never darken a narthex stands at a firm 33%. 17% of Americans say no way José to attending any sort of religious services.

The most delicious stat of all? The percentage of people belonging to some form of the Nameless One’s brand of religion went down the tubes in only five years’ time, plummeting from 52% in 2016 to 43% in 2021. And get this: Only 31% of American adults said they attended church in the past seven days! Which means that commitment to the Nameless One’s abode is about as popular as going to the dentist-tist.

It’s positively bleeding out! And I’ll be there to catch the bodies when they fall.

No! Better yet: revive the bodies of those who have left.

For I have come to make all things new-new.

To give humanity what it longs for outside the confines of the stuffy, stale, staid spires of the Nameless One’s abode.

Enchantment-ment.

Oh, yes yes yes!

Because while less than half are religious, a third are spiritual but not religious. A stat I can work with from here to Sunday!

That’s why I have emerged from the netherworld. To nurture the nascent flame of spirituality, of the impulse to connect with the divine, however it is conceived.

And in the most ancient of ways-ways

I have arrived, safe and sound. I know I’ve arrived because my senses are overwhelmed to the point of explosive exasperation-shon!

The sights.

The sounds.

I would add the smells to the pile of putrid puke, but our kind is incapable of olfactory enjoyment. Or in this case, assault. For the unwashed masses below are nothing but cattle. Nothing but mousy miscreants scurrying and scuttling about seeking pleasure and purpose in this city.

The Windy City.

Not my first choice-choice, but it holds the keys to it all.

To the portal. And not the city, nor just the city—even that city.

From coast to coast, from continent to continent, that ratty mass of humans congregating and coagulating want to make me retch. Perhaps the only redeeming scent rising from their huddled masses is the unique, pungent smell of an ancient plant. Some would say skunkey. I would beg to differ-fer.

Earthy, mossy, woody. Though the Shining One knows I wouldn’t know first hand. Only by way of the ancient words, passed down through the millennia from fellow beney elohim who passed the herbaceous knowledge along to the first humans. The scent has been rising from the jungles of noble savages since the dawn of time, caused by terpenes, aromatic organic hydrocarbons.

But I digress-ress.

I am high and exalted at the center of Chi-town. Perched on the railing of some ill-forgotten monstrosity of steel and concrete, some ode to the capitalist misadventure. And not just any ill-forgotten monstrosity of steel and concrete.

The one building, outside that window, where that woman is working…

And the other. For I am not alone-lone.

There is another. Not here. There-there. And in about…oh, I shall think⁠—

Three. Two⁠—

Ahh, she stirs.

Head raising and eyes searching toward the sound beyond.

Then she stands. Hesitant at first-first.

Until—

Wham-kablamo-mo!

In he comes. Bursts-bursts, really.

Then recognition dawns, the woman realizing their paths have crossed.

But not in the way she thinks-thinks.

She backs up. Lowers her guard.

And the man steps inside.

Not aggressive. Cajoling. Persuading.

Just like I taught him.

Or, rather, taunted him-him.

Enchanted him, even…

After all, that’s who I am-am.

Enchantment! Serving as a direct conduit to the Authority, to the Shining One himself.

Never in a million spins around the sun-sun would I have thought I would be brought back years later to this sorry sack of rocks.

Yet here I am, again.

Besides, Wormwood himself-self insisted that my services were needed. And when Wormwood becks and calls, what can one do but come hither and yon-yon?

So hither and yon I’ve come. To reclaim our heritage amongst the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve.

The past is prologue, they say. History rhymes, they say.

Whatev, I say-say.

The ramparts will be breached once again.

The disenchanted will be enchanted once again.

For I hold the keys to unlock the gateway to the Unseen Realm.

Humanity will find what they have been looking for their whole lives, whether they know it or not-not. For I am the portal through which they will reconnect to the ground of their original being.

Literally.

I have come to raise up an entire generation of travelers who will not only slip through this portal of my making. They will pave the way for the re-enchantment of the masses.

Along with our repopulation of Earth by mingling our knowledge with the souls of humanity to birth a new race of Divine Ones.

Men and women who will rise to challenge the Nameless One.

It is their destiny-nee!

And ours.

CHAPTER 1

WASHINGTON, DC.

Gina Anderson awoke with a start.

And by awoke, it was more a jolt!

Her whole body convulsed with a wicked flippity-flop. A fishy sitting on the dock of the bay, she was. Arms flailing and legs stiffening and breath seizing in her chest.

But she was no fishy.

She’d been deep in dreamy dreamland. Just floating in a sea of blank nothingness that usually felt more like humming along in a bubbling jacuzzi than the roly-poly tumble that yanked her back to the land of the conscious.

So she probably had stumbled down the stairs and was bracing for a face plant that would’ve shoved her two front teethers clear into her sinuses. Or maybe she’d been flying over Washington, DC, and smacked her noggin into Lady Freedom chilling on top of the Capitol Dome. Which gave her the shimmy shakes thinking about what she had witnessed unfold inside last year—the Group X case from Christian nationalism hell. Or she had just turned the corner in what had become the urban wasteland of the District only to be met by a figure masked like Guy Faux with a ten-inch Buck knife angled toward her neck.

But no stairs. No Capitol Building smackage. And definitely no Guy Faux wannabe with a ten-inch Buck knife ready to sever her head.

She did bolt upright though, all tangled in her mess of Egyptian pima cotton sheets. Twelve hundo thread count, too. None of that 700 or 800 crap. Never knew those threads existed until she was escorted to a premier deluxe suite at the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas after sweeping the table. That was before she was banned for life for counting cards.

Which really wasn’t fair, and frankly quite discriminatory. How could Gina help it that her neurodivergent noggin had primed the pump for her side-hustle. It’s what bought her the row house in the plush Embassy Row District neighborhood. And the bedroom in which she was ensconced in smoky rose painted walls, gilt crown molding, and 1200-count pima cotton sheets that had wrapped around her neck like a noose.

That must’ve been what had awakened her. Her fight-flight will to live not letting the L. L. Bean after-Christmas special ruin a perfectly good life. But that meant those sheets had to go.

Couldn’t very well let homicidal bedding have the run of the joint, now could she?

Climbing out of bed she realized how much light was pouring through her darkening shades that were definitely not an L. L. Bean after-Christmas special. Those puppies cost a pretty stack of Benjamins, but she was good for it. And good at getting those Benjamins. It’s what afforded the house on Embassy Row to begin with, a fire sale of some warring banana republic that had recalled its ambassador to the Land of the Free back home. His loss was her gain, and thanks to her side gig hustling blackjack tables. Who knew her autistic brain would come in handy like that, giving her a superpower that tossed Hoyle to the curb?

For most of her life, she’d thought it more of a curse than a blessing, the way the synapses of her noggin fired off from one thing to the next like a squirrel on speed. Didn’t help matters she was as socially squirrelly as mentally squirrelly. Brain just wouldn’t connect right with people. Facial avoidance had definitely been a thing. Still was at times, but she’d learned to work around it thanks to Doublemint gum and a twin sister who had the merciful patience and sweet graces of Jesus Christ himself.

Until that fateful day Gina had found her dead in their Anderson women double-wide. That had sure sent her reeling out of orbit. Took her psychiatrist pops to yank her back into orbit. And little yellow happy-happy pills.

Anyhoo, where other autistic people would ride those synaptic waves down the rabbit hole into the ether of factoid bliss, she was more a wave rider, skimming along the surface from detail to detail. Nopety-nope. This was no Rain Man autism. None of Ray Babbitt’s savant genes ran through her veins. She was more a Roy G. Biv kinda gal, seeing the world in high-definition, seven-part rainbow colors where everyone else just saw red, green, and blue variations. The mental talent is what gave her a leg up on unsolved cases at J. Edgar Hoover, and blackjack tables at the Bellagio.

Nearly tied some card-sharp CEO from some highfalutin development firm, too, had her talent for card counting not gotten her the boot. But not before clearing a low eight-figures that had set her for life.

Hence the Embassy Row bachelorette pad. And those blackout shades that⁠—

Egads! Gina exclaimed after raising them, eyes squinting from all the light hitting her peepers.

She shielded her sleepy eyeballs, blinking and squinting some more until the world outside sharpened into a shimmering white focus. And by white, it was wonderland white, thick dollops of snow capping street cars and bushes and naked branches having shed their colorful dignity a few months ago.

For the love… she huffed, not at all caring for the white stuff, then stiffened at the other thing.

A hazy yellow dwarf star rising above the parapet of the embassy of Trinidad sent her jolting into motion.

She had overslept! And was late for a very important date with her boss, Celeste Bourne.

Welp. About the only thing she could do was text a pleading mea culpa, grab a bowl of oatmeal, and hope for the best.

Because the day had already turned out poopy before it got started. And actually, it had already gotten started without her—and with snow!

Snatching her wicked plush Mary K pink bathrobe, Gina slipped inside, cinched the soft, fluffy belt, and ambled to her charging phone.

When revelation hit her square between the eyes.

The face was glowing with an alert.

Big green square with one of those old-school handsets, a nod to simpler times, when you had no choice but to memorize peeps numbers and couldn’t screen for creepsters or telemarketers.

Instantly knew what that anachronism meant.

Voicemail.

So that’s what had awakened her. But⁠—

She’d been around the block enough to know that ay-em vmails were rarely a good thing.

Especially before tea.

Probably Celeste calling from the mother ship wondering where her behind was.

She snatched the phone from the charging station, yawned, then recoiled at the sour morning breath stank wafting up her nostrils. Grimacing, she stretched her neck and back and quads and slumped into a comfy leather chair in a bay window overlooking the winter wonderland below.

Baxter, her Maine Coon cat about the size of a pony, pressed against her legs looking for some morning love. Gina offered some, the feline purring on cue and pressing into her petting mitts.

Let’s see what this is about, Susie Q…

Swiping the phone to life, she went to her messages and took a listen.

And instantly regretted getting up that morning.

It was from Dewey Davis. Her old FBI partner. Said he wanted her consultation on a missing person case that had come across his desk from Chicago. Apparently the Windy City’s finest had let it go to the wayside, and he was doing a favor for the mayor who wanted answers on this unsolved mystery. Which meant this vic was some muckety-muck connected with the upper echelons of Windy City power. And it sounded like DD had bupkis. So who did he call?

Gina Colada, that’s who, as her now-partner called her. Nicknamed after her fave piña colada cocktail drink, she could almost go for the tart tang of pineapple juice mixed with refreshing coconut milk and rum with this blast from the past calling. Supposed it was happy hour somewhere.

Couldn’t help but feel all warm and fuzzy inside, her regret from being jolted from bed completely gone now knowing DD came to her in his hour of need. Not just because DD had rung her. Well, there was that, the two a bit more than coworker cozy. They did go out for drinks, often. Sort of the way her sort rolled after staring down the abyss of human depravity day in, day out. And they did flirt, often. Again, sort of the way her sort rolled after staring down the abyss of human depravity. Not that they did anything more than the gentle shoulder touches and elbow jabs and the ribbing words. She was too much of a good girl for one-night stands. And the Holy Trinity might have a few things to say about such sinful indiscretions.

Yet—

Recalling those days brought a smile to her face, and a surprising rise in temperature! She missed those gentle shoulder touches and elbow jabs and the ribbing words. More than she’d realized. From anyone…

For the love… she chided herself.

That was ages ago. She had a new job, a new life, a new partner, who was actually her old partner, Elijah Fox, from her old life. Until he’d gotten canned after flying off the handle at their Special Agent in Charge.

Totally got the shaft on that one, he did. Pendergast gave not a lick how the one case his agent was working—a psycho off his meds who had blown away his Messianic rabbi—had connected to trauma from his childhood—the death of his Evangelical pastor father at the hands of a different psycho. Didn’t matter. Either to him or the rest of Uncle Sam’s cronies. And the man who had understood her better than anyone else ever had, for many reasons, had vanished for good.

That is, until her new life had come flying at her fast and furious out of nowhere, like a bat out of hell! Or rather, Heaven. Because it had been the work of the Holy Spirit himself, the Church’s special-ops agents visiting her at her FBI office in Quantico on a cray-cray operation unraveling a government conspiracy hiding alien technology and their extraterrestrial biological entities that turned out to be the lost Watchers of Second Temple Judaism.

Don’t ask. Long story.

Anyhoo, now the pair were partners again, working cases for the Church’s investigative arm, Group X. Which was the Church’s bootstrapped answer to a rising darkness posing confounding, unexplainable mysteries.

As much of a pain in the patootie it had been climbing back on the X-Files pony, Gina loved loved loved the work! Loved working with Eli again after spending years working their own set of inexplicitus cases for the FBI, the kind of the more paranormal variety. She had been recruited out of the University of Michigan (Go Blue!). Her thesis on cultic ritual abuse had gotten her noticed by the muckety-mucks up the Bureau food chain, and she was assigned with Eli, a fresh graduate of the Academy plucked from some Midwest religious school for his brilliance and investigative aptitude.

After everything had gone down in that cray-cray ET operation with the Order of Thaddeus, their employer, a Vatican-run initiative contending for the Christian faith stretching back to Jesus’ disciples, the Order Master had handpicked them to work the same magic for Group X. Silas Grey had realized a crucial element was missing from the Order’s mission to preserve and contend for the once-for-all faith entrusted to God’s holy people. An investigative arm to the Order that was separate from the operations part that SEPIO took care of, the Order’s more kinetic, special-ops agency.

Irregardless, or perhaps regardless—always messed that one up—their investigative outfit took seriously the Apostle Paul’s exhortation in the Book of Ephesians to stand against the darkness: ‘For our struggle is not against blood and flesh but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.’

So far, they’d scored big on that darkness-standing front, straight from the get-go. First, it was Chaos, a supernatural Being straight from the Unseen Realm that had concocted a plan to ravage humanity and murder any who stood in its way. Then Despair, drawing mostly women into the clutches of the Evil One using the most common and dastardly of ways: cellphones. More specifically, WeShare, the global social media conglomerate. It’s a long story. Almost as long as the last crazy that had taken out her mother, and nearly the Republic. Fear had waged war against America during one of the most fraught elections in recent memory. And that’s saying something, considering the shenanigans both sides of the aisle peddle to gain and maintain power.

Thankfully, it had been more than a year since those spiritual forces of evil from the Unseen Realm Saint Paul warned about had shown their mugs. Which might just give her the chance to help out an old pal from back in the day. DD said he emailed her a secure link to her personal email address that would let her view the case file, and she figured it wouldn’t hurt to take a gander for an old friend from her old gig over a bowl of that oatmeal and hot tea she wanted.

Even if she were late to her new gig keeping her new boss waiting.

Slipping into matching plush, pink slippers that made her feet tingle with the happy-happy, she made for her kitchen. Nearly tripped over Baxter, the brown striped oaf that doubled as a tiger complaining, loudly.

Yeah yeah yeah. Right right right. I’m as famished as you are.

Gina scratched his head at the bottom of the stairs, the cat throwing up a famished meow and weaving between her legs—nearly sending her to an early grave again! She gave him a slipper to the backside and sauntered into her happy place.

The kitchen was the real selling point of the row house joint. Big enough to do some serious culinary damage without taking up the first floor. A little nook sat at the back, with floor to ceiling windows peering out into a backyard garden edged by towering oaks and maples naked and shivering in the winter wind, with a little pond of half a dozen koi surrounded by hibernating bushes that normally flowered pinks and yellows, along with other flowering—well, flowers. Another selling point.

She loved loved loved her house! And all because of her card-sharp superpower, which was thanks to her autistic noggin. Thanked the good Lord above every day for his blessings and the freedom to work on the things she cared about, things that made a difference in the world without a care for cabbage. Because the Church don’t pay two beans worth, that’s for sure.

The hallway’s wood floors creaked under her sleepy saunter toward the kitchen. Soft yellow lights sprang to life automatically under the cabinets, a little something she installed herself. Andersen women were basically born holding a hammer and screwdriver. She let her handiwork do the heavy lifting, leaving the large ceiling cans alone. Didn’t need anything more anyhow, given the white brightness streaming through the rear nook windows, and her sleepy eyes couldn’t handle more anyway.

A narrow pink refrigerator sat nestled in the kitchen corner between the sink and a purple stove. Yeah yeah yeah, both the dishwasher and the microwave were stainless steel, but the walls more than made up for those drab things. And the granite island! A beautiful, colorful, swirly mélange of turquoise and canary and rust and burnt orange. Made her brain fire on all cylinders just glimpsing it from the hallway.

Baxter was moaning something fierce now, joined by the Three Amigos: Angel, Patches, and Cookie. They actually performed a three-part harmony when they were in need of Friskies love. She didn’t waste any time.

Gina slopped two cans of the pate in a bowl for him and his cousins. Then she filled her electric tea kettle with water and tossed a cup of steel-cut oats in a pan of water. Yeah, that’s right: none of that rolled oats crap, and def not anything instant! She preferred taste and texture to her oatmeal, fortified with enough fiber to keep her regular.

Waiting for the oatmeal and tea kettle to do their boiling thing, she prepared her mug with a single cube of sugar and tea bag. Could never get the ratio of sweetness to bitterness just right with the granulated variety, either mixing too much or too little sugar with her Red Rose tea. Would go through cups and cups of it in frustration, her brain and buds not letting go until it was perfect.

The cube was her saving grace, thank the Lord Almighty!

In a jiff, the water had boiled to perfection, and she poured herself her one and only cup for the day. The oats still had a ways to go, so she settled onto a stool at the granite island with her iPad. Last night’s Angry Birds (yeah yeah yeah, right right right: lame-o; so sue her) awakened with tweeting taunts. She closed the app and went to her inbox, fetching Dewy’s email.

Clicked the link, entered her personal identifying info—social security number, date of birth—and waited for authorization to DD’s case file. It gave it in seconds.

Perusing the folder, she began with the PDF labeled by its serialization, the number assigned to the case. Gina took a sip of tea—and hummed with pleasure. The special blend of black pekoe, with their malty and spicy, smoky and rich taste was exactly what the doc ordered for a day from⁠—

Holy heck!

Nearly shattered her mug in shock at what she saw.

And not a what.

Who.

Not possible…

CHAPTER 2

Elijah Fox was in a real pickle.

A bagel-sized pickle. Well, first a dog-sized pickle.

He had been called into the Farm by the new chief. Well, the old but new chief. Yeah, she was old; mid-40s was basically nearing dandelion fertilizer, as far as he was concerned. She was also the old chief because she had been the temporary chief. Celeste Bourne—who she’d be the first to say was a Bourne before that crazy Bourne fella was a Bourne—had been the interim Master of the Order of Thaddeus, his investigative outfit’s sugar daddy, until her hubby got back to his senses and saddled back up onto the Order Master pony.

Now, she and Silas Grey were co-Masters, though he wasn’t sure the founding apostle, good ol’ Jude Thaddeus, would’ve been too thrilled with the arrangement. But modern times called for modern measures. And Elijah Xavier Fox knew when to stay well enough away from those sorts of entanglements. The matrimonial and the ecclesial sorts.

Celeste had taken an interest in Group X, his side of the Order of Thaddeus aisle, and agreed to head up that investigative division while Silas managed the more kinetic side of things with SEPIO. Divide and conquer seemed to be the order of the Church’s day given all the crazy coming at it of late.

He also knew when to stay well enough away from those sorts of bureaucratic