Heretics book 3 - The Apocryphile Press

220 :: JOHN R. MABRY
more bone-thin than usual. Richard placed two fingers on
his neck. Yes, there was a pulse, however faint. Richard
slapped lightly at his face, but Mikael did not budge.
“We found him!” he called to Terry. “And he’s alive!”
“Thanks be to God!” Terry called back from the doorway.
Richard took one of Mikael’s arms and threw it over his
own shoulder. He motioned for Dylan to do the same. Dylan
did. The lighter went out momentarily, and Richard felt a
flash of panic in the pitch blackness, but as soon as they had
lifted Mikael between them, the flame sprung to life once
more.
As soon as they were through the door, Terry took the
lighter and led the way. Mikael’s feet dragged behind them,
and Richard worried that they were hurting his arms in their
haste, but he put it out of his mind. He didn’t care if they dislocated
both of Mikael’s shoulders, so long as they got him
out. They could fucking pop his arms back into their sockets
later.
Richard wasn’t really concentrating on where they were
going, and he collided with Terry when the shorter man
stopped in his tracks. “Oh, shit,” he heard Terry whisper.
Richard looked up and added his own expletives. Coming
down the narrow stone steps was a flaming figure, so bright
that Richard had to squint against it until his eyes adjusted.
When they did, however, he wished again for the relative
coziness of the dark. Descending from the final step onto the
hard packed earth was Alice Stout, transfigured by an
orange luminosity emanating from her eyes and from balls of
light affixed to two of her four hands.
In the other two hands, in constant motion up and down,
were curved blades that flashed and reflected the light like
razor-sharp mirrors.
Beneath her page-boy haircut, beneath the orange balls of
fire that were her eyes, a tongue hung twisting obscenely