Anders didn’t need to look it up. He’d been raised Catholic, even if he’d abandoned it. The verse came to him unbidden: “I came to cast fire upon the earth; and how I wish it were already kindled!”
Sister Agnes Marie, seventy-three years old, from a convent in the Badlands of South Dakota. Her subject line read: “The Fury is back. Please help.” The Divine Fury
Sister Agnes came up beside him. “Will he be back?” Anders didn’t need to look it up
Anders kept his hand where it was. “Neither do I,” he said. “But maybe that’s the point.” In the morning, the man in the charcoal suit was gone. The scorch mark on the chapel floor remained. But on the wall beneath Luke 12:49, in letters that looked like they’d been written by a trembling hand, was a new verse: Her subject line read: “The Fury is back
Anders never forgot. Twenty years later, Anders was a professional skeptic. He ran a YouTube channel called Myth-Breaker with two million subscribers. He debunked faith healers, exorcists, weeping statues, haunted dollhouses. He was good at it. Calm, methodical, with a voice like warm concrete. People trusted him because he never raised his voice and he never believed.
He booked a flight to Rapid City. The convent was called Our Lady of the Sorrows. It was a cluster of gray stone buildings huddled against the wind, surrounded by prairie that went on forever. Sister Agnes met him at the gate. She was tiny, bird-boned, with eyes that had seen too much.