“Grand job, I’d like to have a word with him. My friends here want to purchase some holy water.” He pauses and nods to me and Rita. “They’ve a very sick aunt who’s requesting to be bathed in it. They’ll probably want to buy up your whole stock. Would that be okay?”
What a weird explanation. I guess being bathed in holy water wouldn’t sound so strange to a nun. Perhaps she’s used to carrying out extreme requests for the sick and dying.
“Oh yes, of course. I’ll just finish up with these people here and I’ll be right with you.”
“Lovely.” Finn gives her a warm smile and the nun turns back to her line of customers.
He walks towards me and Rita, dusting his hands together. “That’s that taken care of. We’ll have our chaos killing juice put together in no time.”
He rests his arm along my shoulders, all casual. His thumb begins rubbing absently back and forth across the material of my coat.
Rita starts looking through a selection of rosary beads. “These could make for a fun accessory. Tegan, do you know if crucifixes work on vamps like they do in the movies?”
“They don’t,” Finn replies gruffly. “God forbid we have it that easy.”
“Well they’d still look cool. I can wear them ironically or something.”
“Where does the irony come in?” Finn asks.
“I’m the offspring of evil wearing a representation of godliness and prayer, get it?”
Finn’s just about to say something to her when a loud scream filters through from the main area of the church. We all look at each other questioningly. Sister Frances pales sitting behind her glass window; she’s clearly been keeping abreast of the news and fears the increasing violence has found its way to St. Peter’s. You’d think a church would be immune from such things, but what we’re dealing with isn’t selective like that. It infests what it can, wherever it can.
Finn’s arm drops from my shoulders and I can’t help thinking how I miss his warmth. We hurry out to see where the scream came from. At first it looks like the place is empty, but then when my eyes reach the alter my heart drops. A priest is pummelling his fists into a man who’d been praying in the pews when we’d entered. The whole thing just looks so wrong. Finn rushes toward him and pulls him away from the man by wrapping his strong arms around the priest’s middle.
The priest struggles and fights against Finn’s hold, but he has him in too firm of a lock now, with his arms twisted behind his back.
“Let go of me you bastard. Let me fucking go,” he spits.
“Now, now Father, is that any way for a man of the cloth to be talking?” says Finn, perspiring a little in his struggle to keep the priest at bay.
I hurry to the guy he’d been hitting, about to try and help him to his feet when I stop in my tracks. Slithering like a snake out from behind the alter comes a black mist. Before I know it it’s seeped all the way into the man and his eyes roll back in his head. I turn to Rita to find her backing up close to me, because there are several mists advancing on her as though trying to cow her.
“They can’t get into us, remember,” I say, grabbing her thin arm. “Did you bring the vinegar and the salt with you?”
She swallows and nods.
“Good, we’ve got to make the mixture now. Run and get some holy water from the shop, quickly.” Again she nods and hurries through the mist.
It parts for her like the red sea, as though repelled by her very presence. I feel a small moment of triumph.
I turn to the man to see that his eyes have come back into focus, only now they’re completely black. It wasn’t just a little of the mist that got into him, it was the whole thing, and the sight of him makes my blood run cold. One side of his mouth slashes upward in a sickening, sadistic grin.
He stretches his hands out on the floor and begins crawling towards me, super fast. I stumble backward, hitting the backs of my legs off the side of a pew. I look to Finn to see that now he’s not only struggling to keep a hold of the priest, but there are also a bunch of mists swirling around him like predators, waiting for their chance to claim his body, too.
Normally I like the fact that Finn is human, but right now I really wish he had something supernatural about him. It’s one thing when a normally peace loving priest goes crazy, but it’s a whole other kettle of fish when a man like Finn who knows exactly how to kill loses his marbles.
I pull the razor from my pocket, flip it out and swipe into the air as a warning for the crawling man to stay away from me. He stops in his tracks and hisses, cracking his neck to the side. Oh my Christ. This is like some topsy turvy version of The Exorcist. When the mist leaves his body I don’t think he’s going to be walking away from the experience.
I keep swiping at him, but this time it doesn’t work. I think that the chaos entity inside him suddenly realised that it doesn’t care if I cut the body it’s currently possessing. It leaps at me. I scream instinctively and hop up onto a pew, before leaping from one to the next until I reach Finn. I swing my arms out at the mist that’s gaining on him, and I repel it in the same way Rita did.
All of a sudden the book comes into my head again, the one that told me about the spell for Rebecca’s blood. Like before, my mind flicks through the pages before stopping on the line it’s looking for. It reads: “To expel the chaos from human flesh, one of a magical disposition must place both hands to the centre of the chest until all remnants have evacuated.”
Without thinking I drop to my knees before the priest and push both of my hands to his chest. Almost instantaneously his mouth opens and the mist flees his body in a stream of black and grey. His head sags to the side. He’s breathing but he doesn’t regain consciousness. He’s old though, so I’m sure the possession took a lot out of him.
Just as I’m about to relax, the man from before pounces on me out of nowhere. I yelp and throw my hands out, pushing them to his chest the same way I did with the priest. His body goes limp as the mist evacuates, but unlike the priest, this guy isn’t unconscious. He’s dead. I scurry away from him, horrified by his lifeless form.
“Shit, how did you do that?” Finn swears.