Chapter 6: The Sun Strategy
Erin’s kitchen was a different world. The air was thick with the warmth of cumin and chili powder, a stark, comforting contrast to the cold, incense-heavy atmosphere of the rectory. Sunlight, real and uncomplicated, flooded the worn wooden table where Riley sat, his hands wrapped around a mug of coffee he hadn’t tasted.
Across from him, Erin moved with a quiet efficiency that had always calmed him. She stirred a pot on the stove, her other hand absently resting on the swell of her hip. A wooden rocking horse stood sentinel in the corner, next to a basket of brightly colored blocks.
The heart of the room, though, was a small figure in pink pajamas with ducks on them. Maisie, two and a half, was conducting a silent, intense war on the linoleum floor. Her weapon of choice was a handful of Barbies, their plastic limbs locked in eternal, smiling conflict.
“So he just… told you everything,” Erin said, not turning from the stove. Her voice was level, a carefully controlled neutral.
“Everything,” Riley confirmed, the word tasting bitter. “The angel. The blood. What he… what it did to him. What he’s been giving to the congregation. All of it.”
A yellow-haired Barbie in a sequined gown kamikazied into Riley’s shin. He looked down. Maisie grinned up at him, a gap-toothed smile of pure mischief, and crashed the doll into his knee again. “Boom,” she whispered, seriously.
He managed a faint smile for her. “Boom.”
Erin turned, leaning against the counter. Her face was pale, but her eyes were clear and sharp. “And you believe him.”
“I saw his reflection. Or the lack of one. In the window, last night. After.” Riley swallowed. “He doesn’t cast one. It’s not a story, Erin. It’s a… a condition. A plague.”
“A monster,” Erin stated quietly.
Riley flinched. “Yeah.”
She studied him for a long moment, taking in the hollows under his eyes, the way his hands trembled just slightly around the mug. The love and the terror warring in him were as plain as the daylight on the table. She let out a slow breath, the practical part of her brain engaging. “Okay. What do you need?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “He’s scared. He thinks he’s damned them all. He wanted me to run.”
“But you’re not running.”
“No.” The word was simple. Final.
Another Barbie, this one with astronaut gear, slammed into his forearm. “Crash-landing,” Maisie narrated, making a sizzling sound.
Erin’s lips twitched. Then her expression hardened again. “We need Hassan.”
It took an hour. An hour of Riley sitting in Erin’s living room, watching Maisie build a lopsided tower, while Erin spoke in low, urgent tones on the phone in the kitchen. He caught fragments: “…no, Sheriff, just listen…”, “…Riley Flynn is many things, but he’s not a liar…”, “…remember Bev Keane’s ‘miracles’? Doesn’t this explain it?…”
Finally, the door opened. Sheriff Hassan stood there, his uniform crisp, his face a mask of profound reluctance. He didn’t step inside. “This had better not be a waste of my time, Erin. I’ve got actual island nonsense to deal with.”
“This is the island nonsense,” Riley said, standing. “All of it.”
Hassan’s eyes swept over him, taking in his ragged state. “Flynn. I heard you were back. Figured you’d be keeping your head down.”
“I was,” Riley said. “Then the world ended.”
They laid it out at the kitchen table, over Erin’s chili. Maisie sat in Riley’s lap, content now to gently brush a Barbie’s hair against his stubbled jaw. Riley talked about the angel’s blood, the aversion to crosses and sunlight, the terrifying communion. He spoke of Paul not as a monster, but as a patient zero, a man who’d made a catastrophic mistake trying to cheat death.
Hassan listened, eating slowly. His skepticism was a physical presence in the room. “A vampire priest,” he said finally, putting his spoon down. “You hear how that sounds, right? This isn’t a comic book, Flynn.”
“I know what I saw,” Riley said, his voice low. “I know what he is.”
“It’s not just him,” Erin interjected. “It’s the whole congregation. They’re all… infected. Stronger. Happier. No pain. But only at night. Have you seen how lively the town has been after sunset? How dead it is during the day?”
Hassan was silent. He had seen it. The bizarre, fervent energy of the nightly services, the way people like Bev Keane glowed with a health that seemed unnatural. He rubbed his temples. “Even if I believed you—which is a gigantic if—what’s the play? We can’t arrest a supernatural condition.”
The phone on the wall rang, sharp and jarring. Erin answered. “Hello? …Sarah. Yes, he’s here. We’re all here.” She listened, her eyes widening slightly. “You’re sure? …We’ll be right over.”
She hung up. “That was Sarah Gunning. She says we need to come to the clinic. Now. She ran some tests on a sample Riley gave her.”
“What sample?” Hassan asked, standing.
Riley met his gaze. “A vial of the communion wine. The blood.”
Sarah’s makeshift lab in the back of the island’s small clinic was a place of sterile order, a bastion of science against the creeping unreality outside. She didn’t greet them, just pointed to a microscope hooked up to a small digital screen.
“Take a look,” she said, her voice tight with a clinical awe.
Riley peered in. The screen showed blood cells, but they writhed with a strange, black particulate, like moving silt in a red river. “What is that?”
“Contamination is the polite term,” Sarah said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s symbiotic, or parasitic. It’s rewriting the host’s cellular structure at an incredible rate. The regenerative properties are off the charts.” She paused, then picked up the sealed vial. “But watch this.”
She walked to a small, high window where a narrow beam of afternoon sun cut across the room. Carefully, using long tweezers, she extracted a single drop of the dark liquid onto a glass slide. She placed the slide in the beam of light.
The reaction was immediate and violent. The drop didn’t just dry up. It sizzled, emitting a faint, acrid wisp of smoke, and within two seconds, it was gone, leaving only a faint, charred smudge on the glass. The peculiar black particulate was completely eradicated.
A charged silence filled the room, broken only by the hum of a refrigerator.
“Sunlight kills it,” Sarah said, stating the obvious with scientific finality. “Ultraviolet radiation utterly denatures the foreign agent. It’s lethally photosensitive.”
Hassan stared at the black smudge. All his resistance, his worldly pragmatism, crumbled in the face of the tiny, burning evidence. “Okay,” he breathed. “Okay. So it’s real.”
Riley’s mind, which had been churning in circles of fear and guilt, suddenly snapped into a fierce, clear focus. He looked from the dead drop to the beam of sun, then to Sarah. “The aversion to crosses… it’s not the symbol. It’s the refraction. The angle.”
Sarah’s eyes lit up, following his train of thought. “Mirrors,” she said.
“Mirrors,” Riley repeated, turning to Hassan and Erin. “We don’t wait for daytime. We bring the sunlight to them. We build a trap.”
Erin, who had been holding a sleeping Maisie against her shoulder, nodded slowly, her mind already calculating, planning. “The community center,” she said. “Big, empty after dark. Lots of windows we can black out. One wall we don’t.”
Hassan understood. He was a man of action, and now he had a target, a method. A bizarre, insane method, but a method. “We’d need to get them all in there. A special service. A late-night prayer meeting for the ‘flock.’” He looked at Riley. “He’d have to call it. They’d only come for him.”
Riley felt a cold wave of dread, but beneath it, a steady resolve. Paul’s terrified face from the morning flashed in his mind. I’ve damned them all. This was the undoing. This was the fix. “He will,” Riley said. “He’ll do it.”
Erin shifted Maisie’s weight. “I know where we can get every mirror, every piece of polished tin, every old windshield reflector on this island. I’ll start making calls.”
Sarah was already sketching angles on a notepad. “The alignment would be precise. We’d have one shot. Dawn.”
Hassan pulled out his radio, his authority settling back over him like a cloak. “I’ll coordinate the logistics. Quietly. We’ll need to secure the perimeter, keep any innocents away.”
They stood there, the four of them—the ex-con, the mother, the doctor, the sheriff—bound together in a conspiracy that defied all reason. The plan was taking shape, fragile and audacious, a sliver of hope forged from a drop of burning blood and a child’ toy.
Riley looked at the charred slide again. Then he looked at Erin, at Maisie’s peaceful face. For the first time since Paul’s confession, the heavy, helpless fear began to mutate into something else: a desperate, galvanizing purpose.
The monster priest and the killer had a plan. And the island, sleeping in its cursed bliss, had no idea what was coming with the dawn.