The Priest’s Other Life

Father Dominic was the kind of priest who made people believe again. Not just in God, but in kindness, in redemption, in something more than their tired little lives. His sermons were poetic and raw, his hands calloused from helping rebuild homes after storms, and his voice calm in times of crisis. He wore the collar with sincerity, not superiority. To his parishioners at St. Augustine’s, he was a saint in waiting.

But every Thursday, after evening vespers, Father Dominic disappeared.

It wasn’t that anyone thought much of it. Every man, even a holy one, deserves time for rest. The church secretary assumed he went to visit his ailing sister out in the country. The deacon believed he went to a monastery retreat for weekly silence and prayer. Only the old janitor, Mr. Kelley, once hinted otherwise. “A man’s silence speaks,” he had muttered cryptically, scrubbing at the chapel floors. “And Father Dominic’s speaks volumes.”

Dominic would drive his old Chevy Impala out of town, switch off the GPS, and park beside an abandoned railway tunnel three miles past the county line. There, under the cover of night, he walked down into the dark. Past graffiti and broken glass. Past whispers of what used to be.

Then he changed.

Gone were the robes and collar. He stashed them in a metal case behind a loose panel in the tunnel wall. He dressed instead in a faded leather jacket, jeans, and boots worn from years of wear. He strapped on a belt with tools: small knives, vials of holy water, chalk, iron nails, and a rosary that was not purely ornamental.

Because Father Dominic had another calling.

By night, he was a hunter of demons.

Not metaphorical demons — not the kind he exorcised through prayer and counseling in the daylight. These were real, clawed, malevolent things. Creatures that fed on despair and festered in places abandoned by hope. Most people never saw them, not with waking eyes. But they felt their presence — in unshakable dread, in sudden madness, in things they dared not name.

Father Dominic had seen his first demon as a teenager. It had taken his brother. No one believed him then. Not the doctors. Not his parents. Not even the local priest. But the thing with the yellow eyes had been real. And it had smiled when it left.

That night, Dominic swore two vows — one to God, and one to the darkness.

To serve both heaven and earth. To protect the living from what they did not understand.

He trained himself in silence. Learned Latin rites beyond the seminary books. Found the hidden texts — the ones buried in Vatican vaults, guarded by men who knew the world was stranger than it pretended to be.

Now, once a week, he sought out infestations: hospitals with too many suicides, orphanages with cold spots and weeping walls, motels where guests went mad. He didn’t always win. Scars ran up his ribs and down his left arm, sacred symbols inked over old wounds.

This Thursday, the demon wore the face of a child.

It stood in a crumbling apartment building downtown, where the pipes groaned like ghosts and the residents never made eye contact. The boy — or what wore him — had been seen drawing symbols in blood, eyes black as coal, whispering things no ten-year-old should know. A social worker called the church, thinking it a case of trauma.

Father Dominic knew better.

He entered the apartment quietly. It smelled of mildew and something fouler — burnt hair and sulfur. The boy sat in the center of a chalk-drawn circle, eyes wide, teeth too sharp for a human mouth.

"You’re not welcome here," Dominic said, stepping into the room, rosary in hand.

The thing in the child’s body grinned. "You’re too late, priest. He’s mine now."

Dominic didn’t answer. He placed salt at each corner of the room, speaking low, ancient words. The air thickened. The temperature dropped.

The demon hissed, lunged.

The exorcism wasn’t clean. They never were. But when it was over, the boy lay sleeping, a tear drying on his cheek. Dominic carried him to the hallway, where the bewildered social worker waited. He gave no explanation — only a soft word of comfort and a promise the boy would be fine.

Then he walked away, bruised and bloodied, into the night.

At Sunday mass, Father Dominic delivered a sermon on love’s persistence. On the fight for the soul, even when it seems lost. No one noticed the bandage under his sleeve, or the way his voice trembled on certain words.

But a little girl in the second pew stared at him hard, as if she could see something others could not. When he smiled at her, she didn’t smile back.

Later, as he stood alone in the rectory garden, she approached.

“You fight monsters,” she said plainly.

Dominic looked down at her. “Sometimes.”

“Will you teach me?”

He paused. A hundred answers bloomed behind his eyes. But in the end, he only said, “When you’re older.”

She nodded solemnly. “Promise?”

He bent down to her level, voice low. “Promise.”

Because the war never ended.

And saints had many lives.