Adam could scarcely breathe, dared not move, darting his glance furtively between Soulis and Raeburn. Raeburn's chest heaved. Wavering, he transferred his glare to Adam, the blade in his hand still mere inches from his victim's throat. Adam could almost hear him thinking, weighing his own lust for murder against the more subtle prospect of letting Adam become possessed by Soulis, a prisoner in his own body. After a moment Raeburn exhaled heavily and lowered the blade.
"Very well," he agreed. "You may have this one - but only after you have kept your part of the bargain by empowering the dagger."
Soulis nodded agreeably. "As you wish. The blood of an unwilling victim is still required. I will appoint one myself. It shall be… him!'' He stabbed a finger at the black priest. The man gasped and recoiled, only to be seized by two acolytes, the chalice wrenched from his grasp. As Angela came to take charge of it, Barclay and Mallory joined in to help strip the priest of his unholy vestments. Smiling a secret smile, Soulis retreated to the far end of the altar to observe. Raeburn, with a calculating glance at the struggling priest, cut the cord binding Adam's right wrist and summoned Mallory to help him shift Adam far to the left side of the altar to make room.
"Well, out of the frying pan, Sinclair…" Mallory remarked, ducking to tighten the remaining cord binding Adam's left wrist. "Do you want me to get something for the other one?" he asked Raeburn as he straightened, jutting his chin toward the now naked priest.
"No, we'll make this quick," Raeburn replied. "Our guest doesn't seem to like drugs. Barclay, get him over here!"
The black priest moaned and twisted in his captors' hands as the lynx medallion was transferred from Adam's neck to his, bucking and pleading as they lifted him onto the altar beside Adam and held him down rather than bothering to tie him. He continued to struggle weakly as Raeburn forced him to take a draught from the chalice he himself had desecrated, Mallory holding his head and another man leaning across Adam to pin his left arm. He subsided whimpering as the chalice was handed off to Angela, tears trickling from the outer corners of his eyes as Raeburn raised the dagger and began the offertory again.
With all attention now focused on Raeburn, and one of his minions still leaning across Adam's body to help hold the now sobbing black priest - blocking Adam's view but also partially shielding him from observation - Adam dared to gather himself for one last, desperate, silent cry for help, refusing to squander whatever time he might have left - for when the priest died, Soulis would turn his attention to his preferred offering.
Shrinking from the obscene power being focused right at his side, but with his thinking somewhat cleared by the adrenalin-surge of the past minutes, Adam dragged himself sluggishly downward into trance, doing his best to visualize one of the psychic flares he had once described to Harry Nimmo, sending it aloft with a prayer.
As the image spiralled haltingly up and outward, his exertion was rewarded with a faint but familiar flicker on the distant edge of psychic awareness. His head was pounding with the strain, but fuelled by hope, his psychic cry for help surged upward again with renewed brightness. This time his straining senses touched a familiar hint of presence.
Noel! Peregrine!
Pulse pounding, he concentrated on forcing a psychic shout through the blanketing miasma of evil enveloping the chapel. A rushing whisper began to pulse through his entire body. It took him a few seconds to realize that the sound was coming not from inside his head, but from somewhere outside - the rhythmic whuff of helicopter blades descending out of the night.
Chapter Thirty-Six
A dazzling searchlight-beam from the chopper scythed down the chapel's length, a second raking the burial ground to the south. Raeburn ducked to a half-crouch with a short-bitten oath, warding his eyes as the first beam swept back. His henchmen likewise cowered from the light's revelation, but they did not abandon their hold on the black priest as automatic-weapons fire peppered the night and the chopper lifted slightly to the north, suddenly trailing abseiling ropes. Though Adam immediately lost sight of it, new hope surged in his breast as he heard the heavier chatter of return fire. But he knew he still could die before his rescuers reached him. And even if Raeburn did not kill him, Soulis had already marked him for his own.
In that instant, however, Soulis was no longer fixed on his chosen prize. Apparently oblivious to the implications of late twentieth-century technology, he darted closer to Raeburn and extended taut hands over the black priest's heaving chest.
"Strike here!" he cried. "Strike now! You must release the power by which I may destroy this demon!"
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.