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Ketron Island.

“As soon as the demonic threat was identified, countries all around the world founded their exorcist forces. The first one being, unsurprisingly, the Vatican. The Catholic Church trained their first class of exorcists in a century. Italy soon followed. But the United States of America created the first military branch dedicated to fighting demons in history, paving the way for other countries.

The State Exorcist’ training varies from one country to the other. France only handpicks soldiers from their special forces. Japan built a school and traded with the Vatican to hire priests to teach their students. China has set a mandatory two-year training for the higher ranks in their military. Here, in the U.S, we have the training facility on Ketron Island that awaits volunteers.”

-Extract from the State Exorcist’s Manual , edition of 2047.

NEW YORK, 2041 / WASHINGTON STATE, 2042

The State Exorcists came to my father’s penthouse in New York a week after the incident at the summer camp. As soon as they showed him their shiny badges, he couldn’t refuse them entry.

The two women were… impressive, to say the least. Dressed all in black, like you would expect FBI agents to be dressed. Except they also wore looser pants and combat boots. Clothes that allowed movement in a fight. One was a tall blonde with short hair and an eye patch—Agent Murphy. The other, Agent McDougal, was a curvy brunette with—of all things—a missing arm. They were terribly disconcerting.

“ Stay calm ,” my demon advised.

He could feel my racing heart. I expected them to have come to exorcise me. I was terrified, but willing to let it happen. Could I finally be free of the demon inhabiting my body? Would I even survive the exorcism?

They asked to sit on the rooftop terrace for privacy. My father brought refreshments, but they didn’t touch them. He remained with us, but the rest of his new family had to stay inside, beyond the closed glass doors.

It was early evening and night had just fallen over New York. The city shone with a million lights below us. The air was warm and thick with pollution.

“Jonah. We’re here to ask you a few questions about the night of the incident at summer camp,” said the blonde woman.

It was all too reminiscent of the week after my mother and brothers had died, when two agents came to ask me questions about the House Shaw Massacre.

“He already answered multiple questions to the police,” my father said.

She leveled her good eye at him and said quietly, “Please, Mr. Shaw. We’re here to talk to your son. You can stay as his legal guardian, but if you slow our progress, we have the right to ask you to leave.”

My father, the trader and businessman, kept his mouth shut.

“Jonah, walk us through the events of that night,” said the second agent.

So, I did. I repeated exactly what I’d said to the police a few days before. Yes, I’d known the older kids from camp were obsessed with demons, and when they’d failed to come back to the dorm, I’d gotten worried. I’d walked to the shore and heard the screams. Then, in a panic, I’d swum and found them being attacked by the possessed. I’d gotten out of the lake to help them.

“It was very brave of you,” the brunette said.

I shrugged. The police had said the same. But I couldn’t be called brave when I had the strength of a demon backing me up.

“Did the smell tip you off?” Agent Murphy suddenly asked.

My eyes widened before I could keep them in check. “What?”

“Sulfur. The smell of Hell. Did it give it away? Did it smell like the night when your mother tried to sacrifice you to call a demon? It’s impossible to forget.”

My father gasped.

So, they knew about that. Of course, they did.

I nodded slowly. There was no point in lying; they had seen my face. “I smelled it in the wind… and I knew.”

Agent Murphy smiled faintly. “You have a good instinct. What made you drown the possessed?”

I shook my head, unsure. I couldn’t tell them my demon had told me to kill the host.

“I don’t know… He was trying to kill me, and I dragged him into the water. I knew that if I let go, he would kill us. Eventually, he stopped moving.”

“And yet, you did CPR and brought him back to life,” says Agent McDougal.

“When I realized he was dead, I freaked out. I didn’t want to go to jail for murder.”

It was accurate enough.

“What you did, Jonah,” said Murphy, “is a successful exorcism. Clumsy and very lucky, but an exorcism nonetheless. You killed the host, and the demon was banished back to Hell. Then you brought the boy back to life. You rescued him minutes after he was possessed. We have trained exorcists who aren’t as efficient as you by far on their first try, Jonah.”

I stared, at a loss for words. They weren’t here to exorcise me, but to offer me a job.

“You’re a survivor,” continued the second agent. “You lived through a satanic ritual when you were seven. And now, you’ve shown resilience and skill. It’s precisely what we’re looking for in a State Exorcist. Most of our recruits are like you. They went through Hell, and they want payback. We have a military facility and training grounds—”

“Certainly not,” my father interrupted, against his better judgment.

The other agent pointed a threatening finger at him with her remaining arm.

“We have a facility and training grounds,” Murphy continued, as if he hadn’t talked. “We train adults, but also young people like you, to become agents. The country needs brave souls to fight the rising threat from Hell. We’ll pay you handsomely for your service, and you’ll rise to one of the highest ranks in the military and police combined. We exorcists enjoy a life of power and purpose. The required age to enroll is sixteen. It’ll be in a few months for you, and you can join. Or you can finish school and join us when you’re eighteen. Think about it and call us when the time is right.” She put a black card on the table and slid it toward me. “We like to have a legal guardian’s agreement, if possible,” she said, eyeing my father, “but it’s not a hard wall to overcome if you’re willing.”

My father’s lips thinned. He was angry but knew to keep his mouth shut this time. And in the weeks to come, he would be easily swayed. He was happy to be rid of me for good, even if it meant letting his son risk his life fighting demons daily.

I took the card and nodded in a daze.

My demon laughed in my head. “ They are inviting a wolf into the herd .”

The two agents bid us farewell and left.

I spent the night searching for everything that I could about State Exorcists online. What they did. How they fought demons. By morning, I was convinced they could teach me how to get rid of my demon.

“ I know what you are doing, little human ,” my demon said as I picked up the black card and my phone. “ It will not work. I am not as easy as a hellhound to expel .”

I frowned and typed the number. He didn’t try to stop me.

My birthday arrived fast, and I didn’t go back to school at the end of winter’s break. I had no friends, which meant no difficult goodbyes. Before Christmas, I’d warned school management and the teachers that I wouldn’t come back and that they could give my dorm room to someone else. They requested signed permission from my father. I gave them the admission paperwork for the State Exorcists’ training instead. They regarded me with shock and confusion.

My father dropped me off at the airport on January 2nd, 2042, with my bag and a bland goodbye. I took a plane to Seattle. From there, I would go to the Joint Base Lewis McChord, near the Puget Sound inland estuary, where the State Exorcists had their school and training grounds.

I watched the clouds and the sky from my window during the entire flight. I was too anxious to do anything else. Was I really going to live amid exorcists? One look at me, and they’d immediately know I was possessed. I could get killed. But then again, death was coming for me, one way or another, and I was out of options.

My demon was quiet during the entire journey.

I walked out of the terminal with my bag over my shoulder. I expected to have to find a taxi, except there was a man holding a sign above his head with my name on it. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with cropped ginger hair and a square jaw.

“Hello,” I said timidly as I reached him.

He looked down, smiled, and then did a double take.

“Jonah Shaw?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Bloody hell, I knew you were young, but are you sure you’re even sixteen?”

I flushed. “Today is my sixteenth birthday.”

“Oh, happy birthday?” he said with an awkward laugh. “They sent me to pick you up and bring you back to base. I’m Robb. Nice to meet you.” We shook hands, and my fingers looked small in his calloused bear’s paw. “Come now. We have a two-hour drive ahead of us. We can talk in the car.”

We walked to the giant parking lot to find the black SUV that would take us back to the Joint Base. Usually, new recruits in the military wouldn’t get special treatment like this and would have to find their way alone, but the State Exorcists were different. So few of us volunteered during the first years. A lot was still unknown about demons back then, and the mortality rate was higher than ever. ‘The suicide squads’ , the other soldiers called us.

“So, did you really drown a hellhound?” Robb asked after turning on the engine.

I had kept my coat on; the car was freezing.

“A what?” I said, not faking my confusion.

How could he know about it?

“The demon you sent back to Hell. They tested the kid you exorcised. He barely started to mutate, but the genes don’t lie. It was a class-four demon. A hellhound. They didn’t tell you when they came to recruit you?”

I shook my head. They definitely forgot to mention they could do DNA tests to identify demons. I was doomed.

“How—how do you know about that?” I asked to hide my shock.

He chuckled. “Our world is a small one, Johnny.”

“It’s Jonah…”

“News and rumors travel fast. And they brief us when we get newcomers. Last week, two siblings arrived. Liam and Ella. A family friend came to their holiday house on the West Coast with his demon. He killed their entire family in the span of an hour. They’ve been Hell-bent on revenge ever since. Don’t ask about it, though. They’re still a little touchy-feely.” He laughed.

What a strange thing to talk about casually. But I would come to learn that demons and their horrors were the State Exorcists’ daily lives. They didn’t consider deaths and blood a sensitive topic.

“And they say you’re the only survivor of one of the first viral cases,” he continues, driving out of the parking lot. “The House Shaw Massacre. That true?”

I took a shaky breath. For years, my father avoided the subject, and he forbade me from talking about it. The last time someone mentioned it to me was my therapist, almost eight years ago.

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Cool. We studied your case during theory class, you know? Wild. The police didn’t know what to make of it.” He laughed again. “I’m pretty sure there was a demon on the run for a while in your neighborhood; they just didn’t know it.”

How right he was.

The rest of the two-hour ride unfolded in the same manner. Robb talked, and I listened, out of my depth. I learned a lot about what was to come.

The State Exorcists’ barracks and training grounds weren’t in the Joint Base itself, with the other soldiers. We were on an island, separated from the rest. For safety reasons, apparently.

“How we train isn’t exactly orthodox and safe,” Robb joked.

He didn’t notice my growing anxiety. Walls and barbed wires surrounded Ketron Island, and there were nets in the water to slow any attempt at an escape.

“Are we prisoners?” I asked.

Maybe I could still make a run for it before we reached the base.

“Nah. It’s for the demons we use in training,” Robb said. “You don’t want one escaping and attacking innocent people outside. We can’t leave on a whim, but we have boats to go out through the gate. Every week we go on land to train with the other special forces. To keep us sharp.”

I nodded, dazed. What did I get myself into?

When we arrived, Robb parked the car near the docks. There was a large boat waiting for us. On the other shore, I could see Ketron Island. He hadn’t been lying; walls surrounded the entire island, and we needed to use a passage in the water guided by blinking buoys to avoid the massive nets. Two watchtowers stood on each side of the gate. I could see guards pacing them, weapons over their shoulders.

“ You humans never cease to amaze ,” my demon said. “ You always find ingenious ways to fight back .”

It was the first words he uttered since I left my father’s house.

“We are,” I whispered. “And soon, I’ll get rid of you.”

He laughed. “I would love to see it, little human .”

He didn’t seem worried, even though we were walking into the den of the very people who could fight him.

The tall gate closed with finality behind us, and I tried not to panic. The boat reached the docks of Ketron Island, and a group of people waited to empty the cargo of food and supplies. Robb led me to another car.

The island was small, and we reached the primary facility in less than five minutes by a winding road through the forest. The air was chilly and damp, and the trees looked inexplicably ominous, as if the exorcists themselves were stalking me from the shadows.

The building was like any other military facility I had ever seen on screen: ugly but practical. Robb led me through the halls, pointing and giving simple explanations like, “Here’s the mess. And here are the men’s showers. This side is for the women. No trespassing, or they’ll cut your dick off and feed it to a demon.”

I tried to remember everything, but it was difficult to focus with the empowering smell of sulfur in the air. Were they doing rituals often enough for the smell to cling to the walls?

We met no one on our way to the dorms.

“They’re all training,” Robb said as soon as I raised the question. “They’ll come back in the evening. I would have been, too, but they asked me to come and pick you up at the airport. I think they were worried you might get lost, considering your age and everything. Here’s your bed,” he said, gesturing at the top bunk bed in a room with four others. I was to be the eighth occupant of the dorm. “Rest now, kid. Tomorrow, your training starts, and you’ll need all the strength you can get. But don’t forget to join us for dinner in the mess at nine. So you can meet the others. Alright?”

I nodded eagerly, and Robb left.

I sat on my bed and contemplated my life choices for the next four hours. Night fell beyond the small window. When noises finally echoed in the building, signaling the exorcists’ return from training, I jumped down from the bed. It was past nine already. I took a shaky breath and walked out. I couldn’t hide forever.

The mess was overflowing with recruits. Robb had warned me we were very few. Ninety-six, to be exact. Much less than the number of kids at the boarding school. But at that instant, it felt like too many as I walked in. Blessedly, most of them ignored me as I found my way to the counter where the cooks waited to serve dinner. I grabbed a tray and cutlery and smiled self-consciously at the kitchen workers. They eyed me strangely as they filled my plate with chicken and pasta, especially after I requested another plate. As always, I was ravenous.

When, at last, I turned to find a table to sit, the mess had turned quiet. All the recruits were looking up from their food, watching me with looks varying from surprise to hilarity.

I hesitated, my legs locked up from the anxiety. Agent Murphy and McDougal had assured me they trained young people like me to become exorcists. But it had been a twist of the truth. Very few recruits in the mess looked to be in their early twenties, and none to be teenagers like me.

I was about to make a run for it and eat my dinner in the dorm room when my savior stood up and waved.

“Jon! Come sit with me,” Robb said.

This time, I didn’t feel like correcting him. I was just happy to know someone.

I made my way to his table, but right as I sat down, I heard a man say behind my back, “He’s the new guy? You’ve got to be kidding me. He’s a twig.”

There was a wave of whispers following his statement. I heard words like kid , children , and death wish .

“ This is going to be delightful ,” my demon said, and my dread only grew.