Jerzy sat down at the kitchen table and rested his face on his hands, his elbows on the table supporting the weight of his head. He knew he was among friends now, and he let the facade drop. He looked as awful as he felt.

Leigh was getting things out of the ‘fridge for breakfast. She’d mixed up some waffle batter the night before, and had fresh fruit washed and ready to slice or eat whole. The cinnamon rolls had been resting in the refrigerator, too, and she set the second cookie sheet of them on the counter while the first batch finished baking. The comforting scent of cinnamon began to fill the clubhouse.

“Yo, guys,” Tony said, grabbing an apple from the bowl, “I gotta head ta New York. My friend at da Vatican said I oughta talk ta dis guy in da New York Diocese, da priest in charge ‘a records. All he said wuz ‘sum t’ings can’t be discussed over da phone.’ I got ‘em gassin’ up da plane at City, an’ I’ll be back soon as I can.”

“Fly right,” Justin told him.

“Have a safe flight,” Leigh said, handing him a bag with cookies, fruit and juice for the trip.

David checked his email. Still nothing from Angie, so he went to take a shower. Justin poured himself a mug of coffee, and was already back at the large table in the front room, sifting through the print-outs from last night, looking for connections.

Master Naka had taken his tea into the front room, and made himself comfortable on his zafu to enjoy it. Karen put a few things on a plate for Uncle Jerzy, then filled a plate for herself. Jerzy’s plate sat untouched beside one elbow.

Justin glanced up, giving his eyes a rest from reading, and he froze. On the big screen LCD TV, which wasn’t on, blood dripped down from what looked like wounds opening in the screen itself. The blood oozed up and rolled down the screen, and at first Justin though the deviations in its path was from dust on the surface of the screen. But the blood trails began to form letters....

R...E...P....

Justin stood and flipped on the surveillance cameras in the room, then moved to block Uncle Jerzy’s view of the TV.

E...N...T....

Master Naka sensed Justin’s tension and opened his eyes to see what caused the sudden change in mood. He spotted the blood on the screen and rose from his cushion, setting his mug on the floor.

S...I...N....

From the kitchen, Karen could see Justin’s back tense and straighten, as he planted his feet for a fight. She came up beside him and saw the words forming, then moved so that Leigh, who’d come out behind her could see it, too.

N...E...R....

In the silence that filled the room, the sound of David singing in the shower floated down the stairs. He had a nice tenor voice, and was singing a traditional Ojibwa rain dance song.

Master Naka cautiously approached the TV and began looking and feeling around the edges, and pressing his head against the wall to look behind it. It was mounted on the wall with a standard flat-screen mounting kit. He was looking for a reservoir from which the blood could be released onto the screen’s surface, or any indication that the television had been modified to create this illusion.

Karen quickly went to her bag and got the sampling kit. She pulled on latex gloves, and pulled out cotton swabs, wooden craft sticks and an assortment of small vials and bottles.

Leigh went to the liquor cabinet and got a bottle of whiskey. If Fr. Jerzy saw this, he was going to need a drink.

Jerzy looked up and saw Leigh there with the bottle. “I...I can’t take it anymore,” he groaned. “I can’t resist it anymore.” A sob escaped his throat, and he pushed back the chair to stand. Justin heard his distress, too.

“I will never let your soul be damned,” Justin whispered in Jerzy’s ear, slipping up behind him and wrapping his arm around Jerzy’s neck. He squeezed as gently as he could, and after a few seconds, Jerzy’s body went limp as he lost consciousness.

Master Naka could not find anything to indicate that the TV had been tampered with, at least not without taking it down from the wall. He would have to do that now, since what he was seeing was just not possible. It was not anything he’d ever encountered before, and this reinforced his belief that one or more people in this group were extremely skilled special effects artists.

“Dr. Riley,” Master Naka said as Karen approached the TV, “we have spoken before of your abilities to protect us.” The strange thing was that Dr. Riley seemed to be genuinely intrigued by and concerned about this occurrence. Was it possible that she was unaware of the hoax?

“Yes, I....” Karen spoke distractedly as she reached out with one of the craft sticks to scrape up a sample of the blood.

“Can you affect this...” Master Naka asked. But as Karen’s stick touched the surface of the TV screen, the blood faded, before he could even finish asking his question...and before Karen could get a sample of the blood.

Justin carefully lifted Uncle Jerzy’s unconscious body from the kitchen chair and carried him to one of the couches in the front room. He was just making his uncle as comfortable as he could when David came back from his shower.

“What’s up with the TV?” David asked, seeing Master Naka and Karen studying it intently.

“Oh, sure. We have a major manifestation, and you take a shower,” Justin complained. “It was bleeding...in letters.”

David joined Karen and Master Naka in front of the TV. “Oh! I see it now!”

“No you don’t! It’s gone!” Justin told him. “Don’t try to humor the large white man.”

“Sorry, Moose,” David apologized, coughing over a laugh.

“Ya know, I’m actually getting used to that,” Justin said, mostly to himself. He’d just gotten Uncle Jerzy stretched out and put an afghan over him, when he realized that his uncle might be more comfortable in a bed. Justin picked him up again, and headed for the guest room. Leigh met him near the doorway, to help him maneuver his load through it.

“I understand that is not a standard feature,” Master Naka commented. Karen couldn’t tell if he was joking around or not. He sounded quite serious, and had his face right up to the screen, studying it from various angles.

David picked up the remote and turned the TV on. “Oh, look! I found the Horror Channel on the first try!” He began pressing the button to surf through the channels. “No bleeding screen...no bleeding screen...no bleeding screen.... Sorry, I can’t find the channel you were watching.”

“The TV wasn’t even on!” Justin shouted at him as he came out of the guest room. Leigh stayed behind to keep an eye on Fr. Jerzy.

David turned the TV off. “So...what’s for breakfast?” he asked, heading for the kitchen. He found every breakfast food he could think of spread out on the counters and table, and he began filling a plate.

Master Naka could find no chemical residue on the screen that could account for what he’d seen. In fact, when Karen swabbed a spot where blood had definitely been, she found nothing either.

“Doubt you’re gonna find anything, Doc,” Justin told him. “It’s bolted to the wall.”

“But I must examine.”

“It’s just a standard wall-mount,” Justin said.

“Where are your tools?” Master Naka asked. Justin pointed to a door which opened into the workshop. He, Tony and Angie had amassed in that room at least one of just about every tool ever made, since they never knew just what they might need when. Master Naka came out with several tools and, setting most of them on the floor, he began loosening the TV’s mounting bolts. “I have seen the ‘Blair Witch Project,’” he told Justin, by way of explaining his insistence.

“Oh, hey...that reminds me...” Justin said. He went to the guest room and poked his head in the open doorway. Karen had noticed that Leigh was sitting in there to keep an eye on Uncle Jerzy, so she’d taken her own and Leigh’s laptops in so they could work on the research. “If it’s OK, with you guys, I’m gonna turn on the camera on Uncle Jerzy. Just in case, ya know?” The two nodded their agreement.

Master Naka got the TV down and inspected the back of it, to make sure that the power cord supplied nothing but electricity. Then he inspected the wall where it had hung. There was nothing there but brick wall, and the metal brackets that supported the weight of the TV.

Satisfied, though not entirely pleased, he lifted the TV to put it back on the wall. He got it up to about waist height and attempted to change his grip to lift it further. But the top began to tip dangerously away from him. He took a step forward, to get it balanced again, and it tipped back. The side of Naka’s face against the screen was the only thing that prevented it from toppling right over him and onto the floor.

“Mmm.... Thangs, Leigh!” David said around the food in his mouth. He’d carried his plate into the front room, and was watching Justin rescue Master Naka from the ‘scary TV.’ Master Naka actually looked pretty strong himself. But the TV looked a little too bulky for one person to maneuver it onto its mounts.

Suddenly, Master Naka felt the TV’s weight partially lifted from his hands. “Move to your right,” Justin instructed him from the other side of the TV. Master Naka carefully slid his hands along the bottom of the TV. He got one hand on the right side of it while the other supported it from the bottom, and Justin did the same on the left side. The two were able to get the TV back on its brackets; then Justin left Master Naka to finish tightening down the bolts.

In the guest room, Leigh and Karen were finally getting some results from the pattern-recognition algorithms they were running David’s research data through. The key factor that the programs seemed to be latching onto was that the people who died all seemed to be devout religious people, specifically, who violated the tenets of their religions then committed suicide or died in some other unclean manner to escape the consequences.

The team had been on the same track last night, as they’d all pored over the hard copies David had printed. The threads they’d teased out had helped them set the parameters for the algorithms; and in return, the programs confirmed their suspicions by sifting through the data faster than they could have themselves.

From the hundred-plus hits David’s search had returned, the programs had distilled out a dozen cases which matched in almost every important detail. The women began flipping through the flagged files. The first one was about a Buddhist monk in France, who’d killed a traveler to steal his money....

David had finished eating, and was a little bored. His contacts didn’t have anything for him to work on today, since they needed time to go over his case notes from yesterday. He put his dishes in the sink and came back out to the front room. There was a large open space in one corner. David began doing Tai Chi in the center of the space.

Justin caught the movement from the corner of his eye as he studied the papers hung on the two white-boards. Wow! He wasn’t gay...but still, he could see how someone might appreciate David’s body. The man was well-built, and, more than that, he seemed perfectly comfortable in his skin and confident in his abilities. “Ya know, there’s more space for that in the gym,” Justin told him. David said nothing, concentrating on his slow, measured movements.

Master Naka put the tools away, and saw David working out when he came out of the workshop. He went over and motioned to the space beside David. David nodded, and Master Naka bowed then stepped into the space. He immediately joined in, seamlessly matching David’s movements as if he’d been there the whole time.

Justin watched them. Master Naka’s movements were more reminiscent, to Justin’s experienced eye, of Karate training. Justin himself had been studying Krav Maga, the martial art developed and practiced by the Israeli Army. About the only martial art more violent than Krav Maga’s no-holds-barred style was the Russian 'Sambo,' and that was only because the Russians had thrown in guns, too. Justin shook his head and went back to the white-boards.

Leigh came out of the guest room to stretch her legs and let Justin know what the computers had sorted out, and she saw the other two men shifting, leaning, sweeping, their movements soft but controlled. She gave Justin the new information, then stuck her head in the guest room. “Karen, do you mind if I...?”

Karen looked out to where Leigh’s gaze had gone, and she saw David and Master Naka. “Of course not. Enjoy!” She looked back at the laptop, scrolling down through one file then opening the next. Leigh stood before the men and pointed to a space on the other side of David. Both men nodded, and Leigh joined them, matching her movements to theirs.

Justin gathered up all the cases that the computer programs had rejected as not fitting the ‘mold’ of their case. He looked through them, just to make sure, and realized that the computers had definitely saved them a lot of time. He set the stack of paper aside and began sorting through the twelve cases that were left. One of those was Berowski’s. As he finished reading each case, he hung it on the empty white-boards, to look for new patterns.

Over the course of the afternoon, the 3 Envoys and their 2 new associates split their time between studying the case; relaxing, whether that was by working out or napping; and keeping an eye on Fr. Jerzy.

In the back of his mind, Master Naka still puzzled over how the TV had come to have blood oozing out and spelling the words REPENT SINNER. He’d proven to his own satisfaction that it was not rigged by the SAVE members in any way that he could discern. But it left him having experienced an event that had no rational cause or explanation.

David had noticed that, while these people might be crazy, they approached their research in a professional, skilled manner that he had to respect...and they had mostly really good food.

The computers had winnowed the data down to a dozen cases occurring over about 40 years, cases where the similarities emerged after all the extraneous information was peeled away. Those cases had been narrowed down to two basic types. In all twelve cases, the person was known to be devout, and had committed some particularly heinous sin against the commandments or precepts of his...or her...religion.

But for four of the sinners, one of them being Berowski, the act hadn’t been a one-time occurrence. Each of those four were found, when the team had teased out more details, to have committed the sins repeatedly until they were finally caught, and then evaded punishment by committing suicide.

For the majority, the sin was a one-time occurrence, coming out of the blue and without warning; and all committed suicide soon afterward, before they could sin again.

As the team stood and stared at the cases Justin had arranged on the white boards, other patterns became apparent. The occurrences seemed to be clustered into 4 discrete religious groups, with one of the Type 1 offenders (which the team began to refer to as Patient Zeros) in each ‘cluster,’ and one or more of the Type 2 offenders in each cluster.

Besides the Buddhist monk who killed the traveler, there were 3 other Buddhist offenders over the course of 11 years. There were 3 other Hindu offenders after the Hindu Patient Zero. There were 2 Muslim offenders after the Muslim Patient Zero. And Berowski seemed to be the Catholic Patient Zero, with Fr. Jerzy the next Catholic to fit the pattern.

The team charted the time-lines of the 4 clusters, looking for possible connections between them, but found nothing that might indicate a pattern. The briefest period between incidents within a cluster was one and a half years. But some clusters had much larger gaps between incidents, with the 30-year gap between Fr. Berowski and Fr. Jerzy the longest.

There was also no clear pattern in the order of the incidents, either. Clusters overlapped other clusters in an apparently random way. Not even all the Patient Zero incidents happened in any particular sequence. The only thing that they could say for sure about the timing of incidents was that each Patient Zero incident was definitely the first within the cluster's population to occur.

Karen and Leigh carefully checked each incident date for special significance, whether it might be astronomical, historical, cultural.... They could find nothing that allowed them to predict on what day or date the next incident would occur.

None of the team could find any concrete way that the ‘curse,’ whatever it was, could have moved from one cluster to another through direct contact. Each incident within a cluster happened in the same geographic locale as the others in that cluster. The Buddhist cluster was confined to the San Francisco area, as far as the team could tell; the Hindu cluster to England, the Muslim cluster to France, and the Catholic cluster of two to the Detroit area.

Some, but not all, of the incidents were violent. But all broke major tenets of the person’s faith. For instance, Muslim Patient Zero was found to be drinking, whoring, eating pork. When he was found out, he fled, and hid from his pursuers in a pigpen, where he was trampled to death. Since the death was unclean, he would never have been permitted to go to his reward, even were he absolved of the other sins, in the same way that a Catholic who commits suicide will not be admitted to Heaven no matter how holy his life had been to that point.

They did notice, though, that, while the Patient Zeros tended to have an ongoing history of committing grave sins, the ‘followers’ tended to commit ‘splashier’ sins, things that put them on Page 1 of the local papers. The Envoys weren’t sure what to make of that yet, so they agreed to revisit the idea when they’d discovered all the other patterns they could find.

The team noticed that there was only one female sinner, a Hindu of the Brahma caste. But they realized that it was probably only because most of the world’s religions still have a patriarchal power structure, not because the ‘curse’ had any sort of ‘preference’ for men rather than women.

By about 6pm, the researchers were mentally exhausted from their investigations. Justin and David were sitting in front of a TV (not the big screen LCD, since Justin, at least, was still kind of creeped out by it), watching reruns on TVLand. Leigh had persuaded Karen to help fix something for dinner. And Master Naka was sitting in the guest room with Fr. Jerzy.

Justin could hear his uncle wake with a groan, complaining of a massive headache. He couldn’t keep knocking Uncle Jerzy out with choke holds, so he called to see if Aiden had any suggestions. Luckily, Aiden happened to be sitting in the break room eating his microwaved dinner. Justin explained, as succinctly as possible, the situation. “So, do you think we could chemically sedate him?” he asked Aiden.

“It’s not generally a good idea,” Aiden told him. “But I can grab my kit and come take a look at him, while things seem to be relatively quiet here.”

“Thanks. I really appreciate it.” As Justin hung up the phone, he could hear his uncle and Master Naka talking, Jerzy’s voice slightly louder than necessary.

“Can I help you in some way?” Master Naka asked.

“If you really want to help me,” Jerzy said gruffly, “knock me out.” Justin pushed himself up from the couch wearily, and turned to see Uncle Jerzy trying to barge past Master Naka, who was firmly planted in the open doorway.

“I must go!” Jerzy shouted at Naka, swinging wildly, like a man unused to doing physical violence. He missed, and Master Naka merely stood there, blocking his way.

Karen and Leigh heard the commotion and came out of the kitchen. David turned to watch over the back of the couch, ready to get up if.... Well, he wasn’t really sure what he could do to help, but he was ready to move if someone asked him to do something.

Leigh moved in beside Master Naka and put a hand on Fr. Jerzy’s arm to try to restrain him. He was wild-eyed, and sweating profusely. Justin stood a few paces behind Master Naka, hoping that his uncle would give up and lay down quietly, but ready to catch him if he managed to push his way through.

“I got him if he comes through,” Justin whispered to Master Naka. So Naka stepped to one side, giving Jerzy enough room to get by if he insisted on it.

Fr. Jerzy twisted and pulled at the same time, yanking his arm from Leigh’s grasp. Justin planted his feet wide, ready to clothesline his uncle as he ran by. Then Karen raised a Sphere.

It took a second for Justin and Leigh to realize what had happened. Instead of running headlong into Justin, Jerzy stopped dead in his tracks. A look of relief flooded his face, and his body sagged as if he were ready to collapse.

Karen wasn’t sure it would work. But she didn’t want to risk attracting the attention of Whatever was causing Uncle Jerzy’s affliction by doing a Shield, and this was the only other thing she could think of. She also wasn’t sure if the Sphere would have a lasting effect, or only pushed the Shadow off him as long as it stayed up. Only one way to find out, though. She caught Leigh’s eye and raised a finger, silently telling Leigh to hold off raising another Sphere for at least a moment.

Leigh nodded, and Karen let her Sphere go down. Instantly, Fr. Jerzy’s face changed again, the wild-eyed beast within him regaining It’s control. He lunged toward a possible opening, a way past the people who wanted to stop him.

And Leigh raised her Sphere. Again, relief flooded Jerzy’s face, and he stopped two steps from where he’d been.

“Now might be a good time to get a hold on him,” Karen suggested. Justin stepped around behind his uncle, his pain and sadness evident in his body language, though he kept his ‘warrior’ mask firmly on his face.

Jerzy looked around, from one Envoy to another, a silent ‘thank you’ beaming from his tired, teary eyes. Then Leigh’s Sphere went down. Jerzy immediately began to struggle in Justin’s arms, fighting the choke hold that would give him the temporary relief of unconsciousness.

Karen threw up another Sphere, planning to hold it up as long as necessary to get Uncle Jerzy under control and restrained.

It took Justin only a few seconds, though, to knock out his uncle again. “Guess he’ll have to go in the ‘other guest room’ now,” he said sadly. Leigh helped Justin pick up Jerzy, folding his arms across his chest so they wouldn’t flop around on the way down the stairs.

Karen let her Shield drop, and went ahead of Justin opening doors and turning on lights down to the holding cells in the basement. The cells were as well-secured as they could make them, using Aiden’s time as an ‘almost-werewolf’ for guidance, with recessed lighting and cameras, heavy duty locks, solid metal walls, and sound-proofing. They also managed to acquire every type of humane restraint system they could find, especially for normal human beings who weren’t in any danger of ripping through steel walls.

Leigh followed Justin downstairs, and helped him arrange Fr. Jerzy as comfortably as possible, under the circumstances, on the gurney. They strapped him down with the lamb’s wool-lined restraints, and pushed the gurney into the cell. Before leaving him, Justin transferred a little of his own energy to his uncle, hoping that the boost would help him fight off whatever was trying to control him. They locked the cell door, turned on the cameras to record anything that might happen down there, and waited for Aiden to get there.