“THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!” BELLOWED THE priest, a good four hours into the exorcism. The chapel was three-sided, one side for each part of the Trinity. Besides the priest, there were nine people in the room, nine being regarded by the Department of Peculiar Science as a holy number. Bayliss was inclined to believe the theory. Nelson yawned and checked his watch.

“The power of Christ compels you!”

“Is it the twelfth century?” said Nelson. “Someone get me my phone. I have apps for this kind of crap.”

Bayliss shushed him. “This one is special,” she whispered.

Nelson whispered back, “I’ve seen literally a hundred exorcisms. Trust me. This one isn’t special.”

“It is when it’s our boss.”

“Huh,” said Nelson. “I guess that is a little different.”

“It’s the entire top floor,” said Bayliss. “All of management possessed. How do you not know about it?”

“Because unlike you, I have a life outside of work.”

“Being drunk doesn’t constitute a life.”

“If you’re good at it it does,” said Nelson.

“Does not.”

“Does too.”

“The power of Christ compels you!” said the priest through gritted teeth, looking at the two of them.

“Sorry,” mouthed Bayliss. Nelson, like other members of the group, was holding a ritual crucifix. His was hollow. He popped Jesus’s head off and took a drink. “Now that’s the power of Christ,” he whispered to Bayliss.

The chapel was deep in the bowels of what looked like an ordinary office building on Wilshire in Los Angeles’s financial district. In fact, there was a real import-export business on the thirteenth floor, because it was good cover and because none of the building’s real employees would work on that floor. The import-export company’s employees wouldn’t have worked there either if they’d known the true nature of the building.

The underground chapel where the exorcism was taking place was on old consecrated ground, the former site of a church to Freydis, a little-known Norwegian saint most notable for the fact that the Church in Rome wanted her as far from itself as humanly possible, and there weren’t any churches in Antarctica. The reason Rome wanted to keep her at a distance didn’t have to do with just her visions—although those were disturbing enough. No, it had more to do with how she responded to them. St. Freydis’s father had been a strongman and wrestler in a traveling sideshow, and Freydis was known to strip down to her petticoats and challenge any local demons, smart-ass wizards, and later, mad scientists reanimating corpses to create unstoppable killing machines, and grapple with them. Two out of three falls. Winner take all.

She always came out on top and soon became known as St. Freydis of the Camel Clutch.

“Holy balls, Father, how much longer are we going to have to stand here while you scream like Little Richard?” said Nelson.

“Shhh!” hissed Bayliss.