Heretics book 3 - The Apocryphile Press

352 :: JOHN R. MABRY
ty he did not know she possessed, he watched her connect
the candle stand with the back of Dane’s head. It made an
audible crack. Dane’s head lurched forward, his eyes wide,
his mouth open. He pitched forward, and caught himself on
his hands and knees.
“That’s for my brother,” Kat said.
Richard was about to object that her brother did what he
did without Dane, but it was pointless—she was already in
motion. She whirled the candle stand around her head and
brought it down again upon Dane’s spine with an impact
that Richard felt. “And that’s for the dogs!” she spat, her
black hair flying at all angles. She spun around again,
twirling the candle stand above her head, and planting it
with force once more on his spine. “And that’s for Mikael!”
She held the candle stand to his back and twisted it.
Dane was still conscious, but obviously in a world of pain.
He writhed on the floor, uttering mangled cries of mixed
pain and rage.
Richard saw the mighty Duke Articiphus approaching,
and moved back. Kat, eyes wide, did the same. The demon
bent over the scion and touched his bunched and straining
brow with a skeletal finger.
“So tell me, priest,” his infernal majesty addressed
Richard, “who here is under your protection?”
Richard froze. He looked around the room, then at Kat,
candle stand poised like a baseball bat ready to swing; at
Dane, writhing and cringing at the demon’s feet; at Larch,
uncurled now, but paralyzed in fear; at Dylan cutting at the
rope binding the feet of little Jamie; at Terry, madly flipping
through a liturgy book; and the cowering Charybdis.
Richard knew that anyone he did not claim would be fair
game for whatever the demon desired. He fixed the demon
with a steady eye. “They all are.”
The demon turned the scarred half of his face toward