Heretics book 3 - The Apocryphile Press

40 :: JOHN R. MABRY
She almost cried out with relief to discover he was warm.
She put her ear to his mouth. He was breathing. She felt his
neck, he had a pulse. He was utterly unconscious, though,
lying in a pool of water which she realized a moment later
was saliva.
Tears streamed from her eyes, and she choked back scared,
relieved sobs. She fumbled at her cell phone and called 911.
She struggled to be calm enough to give the operator the
proper information, and then hung up to wait with her
brother until the ambulance arrived.
As she held his head in her lap, the rest of the scene came
into focus. They were sitting in the middle of a circle, intersected
by a larger star, stained—or perhaps burned—into the
hardwood floor. The oriental rug that normally covered the
floor was rolled up against one wall. Candles had burned
down—and out—all over the room. One, a large, thick candle,
was still burning, as if it had hung around to bear damning
testimony to what had occurred there.
Just outside the circle a triangle was likewise burned into
the floor, and on a table within it, a small triangle of white
paper. Kat picked it up, and noted the strange symbol written
upon it in a blackish-red substance. With horror she recognized
that it was probably written in blood. Perhaps
Randy’s.
Kat was a Wiccan—a witch, a worshipper of the
Goddess—so she was not unfamiliar with the accoutrements
of the occult. The magick she practiced was white magick,
nature magick, concerned with the perpetuation of natural
rhythms, and the mystical attunement of oneself with the
cosmos. She was magickally literate enough to know the difference
between the kind of religion she practiced and the
black magick of Goetic Magicians. And there was no doubt
what sort of magick her brother had been doing. She stuffed
the paper into the pocket of her jeans, and knelt beside him,