Death of an Adept

His voice cracked like a whip. Startled into obedience, Raeburn hauled himself upright, arm cocked back with the dagger in his hand, and plunged the blade downward into the black priest's heart.

The body of the sacrifice arched violently on the altar, his piercing scream momentarily masking even the gunfire. Beside him, Adam flinched from the backlash of power suddenly being channelled through the dagger, sluggishly dragging his unbound arm upward to shield his eyes. Raeburn's men likewise cringed, releasing their holds on the victim; but as the priest's body spasmed in mortal agony, Raeburn himself held firm, bearing down on the dagger white-knuckled, eyes blazing and lips drawn back in a rictus of anticipation.

A brooding rumble shook the ground as the dagger drank the last spark of life-energy from the sacrifice. In that instant, the blade became a conduit for an inrush of power so potent that its kiss all but took Raeburn's breath away. The taste of empowerment was ravishing. Still clinging to the dagger, Rae-burn threw back his head in a moan of mingled pain and delight as his body was gripped by a trembling ecstasy.

The engine-roar of the helicopter had receded to a whistling, whuffing sound as it settled on the burying ground to the north of the chapel, its searchlights now stabbing horizontally across the snow, splashing against the plywood hoardings, arching over the chapel like a roof. Adam could not see it, for the hoardings blocked his view in that direction even as they blocked the view of his would-be rescuers; but as he tried to lift his head, still cringing from the body of the now dead priest, he wondered whether he had the strength to roll off the edge of the altar - though to do so would move him closer to Soulis, still inhabiting lolo McFarlane's body; and to stay, left him within reach of Raeburn, who might yet choose to kill Adam as he had the priest, both to exact his revenge and to try augmenting his power even more.

But variables were shifting too fast for Adam to keep up, in his dazed condition. As automatic-weapons fire again shattered the night, off to the south, Soulis drew back a pace from the altar, a malicious smile contorting his lips as his hands sketched a sequence of ritual gestures too swift and intricate for Adam's eyes to follow, the while muttering a harsh incantation.

In the next instant, the body Soulis wore was overtaken by a violent convulsion. lolo's mouth gaped, his hands groping forth blindly to catch on the edge of the altar as blue smoke poured from his lips in a vomitous stream. As the vacated body crumpled, Soulis' essence reared up in a ghostly column of flame-eyed shadow, infernal fire pulsing at its heart.

A hoarse shriek from Angela warned Raeburn's other accomplices of danger from within as well as without, for the shadow that now was Soulis surged up from the foot of the altar to blanket the still-twitching body of the black priest like a lightless shroud. Adam managed to shift his left leg off the side of the altar, cringing as far from Soulis as he could, but he had not the strength to roll all the way off. As the dead man's lips began to move in the whispered syllables of a further incantation, Adam tried again to throw himself clear. Rae-burn, only now recovering from his unholy rapture, sagged dazedly against the head of the altar, with the dagger clasped to his breast, apparently oblivious to Adam, Soulis, or even another exchange of automatic-weapons fire outside the confines of the chapel - though he flinched as a thunderous boom rocked the ground underfoot.

Even as the echoes were still reverberating, a squat, wild-eyed creature suddenly materialized behind the altar, as if out of nowhere, wearing the form of a gnarly, bandy-legged old man with bare, sinewy arms and a gaping mouth full of carious yellow fangs. Clothed in a loincloth and mantle of ragged skins, his grizzled head was crowned with a filthy red cap - by which token Adam could have no doubt that Soulis had summoned his dreadful familiar, the cannibal-spirit known in Scottish folklore as Robin Redcap.

With a hideous gloating laugh, Redcap made a bound for Raeburn's nearest acolyte, oblivious to the several shots the man managed to get off, and ripped out his throat with a single snap of powerful jaws. Pausing only to fling the body aside, Redcap wheeled around and charged next at Raeburn, blood glistening on his hairy cheeks and down his chest.

The impact of the charge broke Raeburn's grip on the dagger. Juggling the knife in a vain attempt to retain it, he bowled backward under a heavy blow that sent him reeling to the ground on the altar's other side, even as Redcap seized the dagger's bloodied hilt in taloned fingers and held it triumphantly aloft, chuckling throatily to himself. Simultaneously, the shadow that was Soulis surged upward to wrap shadow-hands over those of Redcap.