Messages (voice or text) for Marcus Keane.

Things have been a bit odd at home lately.

It isn't due to anyone else in the house, Sabrina and Dan are both as wonderful as always, and Salem and Trass have an odd, yet respectable relationship. In fact, their home is as harmonious as Marcus has ever imagined one being and he knows he's extremely lucky to have this as his life.

But things have still been odd.

It had begun after the trip he had taken with Sam, Lisbeth, and Viktor to the strange island. Although they hadn't found anything particularly alarming on the trip, there had been some evidence of demonic activity, enough that Marcus has been careful to keep an eye on things since. Until very recently, things had been quiet and he had been hopeful that, whatever it was they'd found, perhaps it had been frightened away.

It's silly. He should have known better.

Sitting outside now, the air in the garden is still crisp, but spring is coming and the snow is nearly melted, and Marcus can see from his chair that the woods look different. He's drinking his morning tea, the mug cupped loosely between his hands, and he has every intention of getting up to investigate further, but he just wants to finish his tea before he does. Best to enjoy it rather than have it potentially interrupted.

And when the back door opens, Marcus doesn't turn. Without looking, simply knowing, he says, "Do the woods over there look strange to you, love? Like... there's something in the trees. Some shape forms from the bare branches and twigs?"

The first day, Marcus gets to work -- a place where he has an office now, one he shares, but still strange enough -- and finds Robin isn't there. This isn't exactly unusual, as she obviously has things to attend to outside of the Home, but by mid-morning, when she still hasn't arrived, Marcus goes looking for someone who might know where she is. He tries Flora first, but can't find her, then Janie, with whom he's developed a rather wonderful friendship, only to discover she isn't in the kitchen where she would normally be.

The few staff members he can find are busy and flustered, trying to pick up the slack where the missing bodies have most been noticed, and Marcus pitches in with a gnawing worry in his stomach.

He's exhausted by the end of the day, they all are, but he calls Dan and tells him what's happened, that some of the staff are missing. He stays the night after he's spoken with Dan to let him know his plan, though he doesn't sleep much. The children need him, especially when he's woken up around two in the morning by screaming babies, and he runs into their room only to realize Amelia is nowhere to be found.

The morning of the twenty-third, he makes some calls. Dan, Sabrina, Kat, Neil. He needs help, both with running the Home, and with trying to figure out what the hell is going on. He had asked Margaret, one of the nurses, to start making calls and she'd nodded and grabbed the staff listing, sitting down at the front desk to call everyone who was missing. By the time Marcus returned, she was gone, the phone beeping angrily where it lay on the floor. He returned it to its cradle, then called the police department, only to be told by a frazzled sounding man they were dealing with all kinds of disappearances now and if he could just handle things, the department would really appreciate it.

Before Marcus could answer, the man on the other end of the line disconnected their call, and two toddlers began to scream from down the hall. In a moment, Marcus becomes painfully aware just how much assistance he really needs.

The staff of the Home, from what he can tell, are gone. All of them. For the moment, he's the only one in the building over the age of eighteen, and for all he loves these kids, he knows he can't do this alone. All he can do for the moment is hope some reinforcements arrive soon.

Once things are settled, tentatively, and he gets some help here, Marcus sneaks outside for a cigarette, standing on the front steps, smoking hurriedly, knowing he doesn't have all that much time before some other crisis arises and he's needed back inside.

There's something strange making a home in the woods behind the house Matthias built.

At first, Marcus only notices little things. Vegetables gone from the garden that could have very well been blamed on the deer if not for the fact that the prints are far too large to be made by a deer. Sometimes at night he wakes, thinking he's heard a sound, a mournful sort of baying he can't place, but when he listens for it, he hears nothing at all. He always falls asleep once more, assuming he's imagined it. There are broken branches near the property, high up in the trees, higher than a deer or even a bear would reach if it were scratching itself against the trunk.

None of it feels particularly threatening. It's just strange.

On a few of his days off from the Home, Marcus does some reading into any history of Darrow and strange sightings he can find. There are a few reports of something described as being a winged, bipedal horse, which sounds terribly like the Jersey Devil. Marcus knows the Jersey Devil to be nothing but legend, but in Darrow anything is possible.

A few of the sightings call it the Winrow, which to Marcus sounds like a variation of windrow and he can't imagine whoever coined the name of the creature realized what they were doing. A windrow is hardly frightening. But then, maybe the Winrow isn't all that frightening either.

With another two days off before he needs to return to his regular schedule at the Home, Marcus calls up Kat and asks if she'd like to go on a little hunt in the woods behind his house. He's more curious than anything. He wants to know what's been stealing Dan's vegetables.

When all was said and done, picking a ring had turned out to be a lot easier than Marcus had anticipated. For a time, he had considered asking for Neil's help, but it hadn't felt right, involving him in something like a proposal when he was in the process of leaving his own marriage. He'd thought about asking Kat, too, or Sam, and had been halfway through a text message to the both of them when he'd passed by a small jewelry store, the lighting inside dim and atmospheric.

The Latin inscriptions had drawn him first and then the beauty and the quality of the pieces. He'd found the one after looking at only a few, glancing at the inscription -- Ab Hinc -- for the barest of moments before he'd told the owner it was the one he wanted. From Here On.

It feels exactly right.

Marcus doesn't think he knows how to be properly romantic, but Dan deserves it, so he tries. It's a Sunday, so he knows the beach will be less busy that evening than on a Friday or Saturday, and so he sends Dan a text to meet him. He has nothing with him but a blanket, the ring, and some sparkling, non-alcoholic cider to celebrate, and he keeps the ring in his pocket, but hides the rest down the beach in a private nook. The place they had gone together that evening last summer, the first evening they had kissed.

He's waiting for Dan now on the boardwalk, leaning against the edge, his forearms draped over the railing. He's nervous and he isn't. He's excited and scared. He still doesn't know if he deserves this happiness, but Dan does, and so long as he focuses on Dan, he feels like he's doing exactly the right thing.

Since the day Dan had brought up the topic weeks ago, Marcus has been turning it over in his mind, trying to determine what he really feels about the idea of marriage. It isn't that he takes issue with men marrying each other -- or women -- and he thinks the fact that he'd officiated Neil's wedding with great honour can attest to that. It isn't even that he believes God is opposed to it, that he would be doing something contrary to his maker's guidelines, because he has to believe if God truly cared about any of it, He'd have made it known long ago.

It's awful to admit, but he thinks it might be the priests who had raised him. Marcus hates the idea of giving those men any such credit for having shaped the way he thinks about himself, but he has to imagine it must be possible. He had spent so much of his childhood and young adulthood with them, listening to them, internalizing their messages without even truly realizing it. He's never been a man who cared much for rules, not those set forth by the Church, not those put upon him by others.

But here he is. Uncertain and left feeling rather foolish because of it.

He had asked Neil to meet him for a drink, knowing if there's anyone who will tell him what an idiot he's being, it's Neil. And that's exactly what he needs right now more than anything else. He needs to be reminded that he isn't part of that world any longer and their rules don't apply to him.

Sitting in a booth at the pub, Marcus is already nursing a dark ale when Neil comes in and he raises his hand in greeting to let him know where he's seated.

Marcus remembers a time when having nothing to do would have driven him mad with restlessness. He remembers days spent furiously sketching on canvas with charcoal, his hands black with it, feeling as if the drawings were the only way for him to get out the dark things that circled his soul. Waiting for another assignment had always been difficult for him and he'd had a hard time staying in one place.

At some point, all that had changed.

The day stretches out ahead of him and Dan with absolutely nothing planned. Sabrina has left for school, neither of them have any work to do, and Trass disappeared out the back door when Marcus rolled out of bed around six in the morning to let him leave. They're alone in the house now, having slept later than usual, and Marcus stretches as he comes out of the shower, his hair still wet, longer than it's been in some time, and dressed in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt.

"How do you feel about waffles?" he asks Dan as he passes the bed and pauses at the door to look back. "Once you're out of the shower, I'll have coffee ready for you. And waffles?"

Not that long ago, this life would have been impossible. He would have said he'd never be able to stand it. Now, he knows, how foolish and wrong he was. He's never been more content.

It's been some time and Marcus has yet to seek out Kaz.

He knows it's cowardly, but that hasn't been enough to get him moving, because he's also managed to convince himself that he's done well in other areas, so a single failure isn't so bad. After the exorcism, he'd wanted to isolate himself from everyone, keep himself locked away with his drawings, and punish himself until he felt it was sufficient. And it would have never been sufficient.

But he hadn't done that. He had gone to Neil's for Christmas and he had spent time with Dan and Sabrina, he'd gone out for lunch with Kat, and even met a new friend or two. He's seeing a therapist, too, someone who believes him when he says he's an exorcist and he thinks it's making a difference.

Something had to fall by the wayside.

It's true he hadn't actively decided he wouldn't go to see Kaz, that he wouldn't find some way to apologize, but it had felt like the most difficult apology to make and so he'd put it off. And he'd kept putting it off until it had felt like he'd waited too long, so he'd put it off more to the point where he knows how terrible it must look.

Kaz is the one who'd never seen a demonic possession before, however, and no matter what Marcus had said to him, he knows it can't have prepared him for the things the demon had said. The things it had known, dredged up from Kaz's mind to use against him. And how does one even begin to apologize for that? The others had, in their own ways, known was they were in for. Kaz could never have prepared himself.

But finally he goes to the Crow Club. If nothing else, he thinks as he slips inside, a public place gives Kaz the opportunity to throw him out if he wants.

Marcus is exhausted.

He'd known, of course, he'd seen it dozens upon dozens of times in the people he's helped. He'd held them and wiped their tears and tended to their wounds and told them they just had to fight for a little while longer, so he had known, but he had never really appreciated the bone wrenching exhaustion that comes with fighting back from this side.

Every part of his body aches, but he can only feel it from a distance. Everything comes to him as if from a distance, as if he's not really part of his body at all, but something kept just slightly apart. Kept out of the way.

There are times when it feels physical, as if he's pushing back against some barrier, times when he's able to hook his fingers into something and claw to the surface, but those moments are getting more and more difficult to grasp. He feels if he could only wrap his hands around the demon's throat, he would be able to choke it out of him, but every time he tries, a horrible buzzing laugh rips from his mouth and he finds his actual hands yanking against his restraints, trying to reach his own throat.

Matthias comes to him in those moments, soothing him, pressing a cool hand to his burning forehead and Marcus wrenches away from the touch. He had been such a fool to fall for it in the first place, but he'd just felt so lost, so confused, all those memories pressing in on him, time folding over on itself in ways that should have been impossible. In the moment, it had made sense for Matthias to be there. If he was in Darrow and he had also killed Andy, then he could be here without Matthias and Matthias could still be there all at once, only he understands now none of that is true.

He didn't kill Andy. Not the man he is now. And when Matthias comes to him, eyes and voice and smile so familiar, he knows it's wrong. He's so damn ashamed of having fallen for it in the first place.

"You're not you," he hisses at Matthias in a rare moment when he can speak in his own voice. The others don't see Matthias, he knows they don't, but he can't let this stand. This thing wearing Matthias's skin. "You're not you, you don't belong here."

He knows the thing's name. If only he could get back to them properly, if only he could find a moment of awareness, he would be able to tell Sam, but he can't seem to get there. Every time he speaks the name it dissipates on the air and another lash is ripped across his back, leaving his skin bloody and raw.

Even the pain is distant, though. All Marcus knows is how tired he is. How much he just wants to close his eyes and sleep.

"Sleep, älskling," the thing wearing Matthias's face says gently. "Sleep now."

Marcus works up what little strength he has and spits in its face.