be talking?” Finn chided, perspiring a little in his struggle to keep the priest at bay.
I hurried to the guy he’d hit, about to try and help him to his feet, when I stopped in my tracks. Slithering out like a snake from behind the altar came a grey mist. Before I knew it, it seeped into the man and his eyes rolled back in his head. I turned to Rita and found her backing up close to me as the mist advanced on her.
“It can’t get into us, remember?” I said, grabbing her arm. “Did you bring the vinegar and the salt with you?”
She swallowed and nodded.
“Good. We’ve got to make the mixture now. Run and get some holy water from the shop. Quickly.” Again, she nodded and hurried through the mist. It parted for her like the Red Sea, as though repelled by her very presence, which was a relief.
The man’s eyes came back into focus, only now they were completely black. It wasn’t just a little bit of the mist that had gotten into him, it was the whole thing. The sight made my blood run cold. One side of his mouth tilted upward in a sickening, sadistic grin.
He stretched his hands out on the floor and began crawling towards me, super-fast. I stumbled backward, the backs of my legs hitting off the edge of a pew. I looked to Finn and saw he wasn’t just struggling to keep a hold of the priest. He was also trying to avoid several clouds of mist that were swirling around him like predators, waiting for their chance to claim his body, too.
Normally, I liked the fact that Finn was human, but right then I really wished he had something supernatural about him. It was one thing when a peace-loving priest went crazy, but it was another entirely when a man like Finn, who knew exactly how to kill, lost his marbles.
I pulled the razor from my pocket, flipped it open, and swiped into the air as a warning for the crawling man to stay away from me. He stopped in his tracks and hissed, cracking his neck to the side. God, that was creepy. I felt like I was suddenly living in a horror movie.
I kept swiping at him, but it only held him back for so long. The chaos entity inside him clearly didn’t care if I cut the body it possessed because the man came at me. I screamed and hopped up onto a pew, leaping from one to the next until I reached Finn. I swung my arms out at the clouds that were gaining on him, and I repelled them in the same way Rita did.
All of a sudden, the book came into my head again, the one that told me about the spell for Rebecca’s blood. Like before, my mind flicked through the pages before stopping on a single line.
To expel the chaos from human flesh, a witch or warlock must place both hands to the centre of the chest until all remnants have evacuated.
Without thinking I dropped to my knees before the priest and pushed both of my hands to his chest. Almost instantaneously, his mouth opened and the mist fled his body in a stream of black and grey. His head sagged to the side, and I checked for a pulse. Thankfully, he was still alive, just unconscious. I imagined the possession took a lot out of him.
Just as I was about to relax, the man from before pounced on me out of nowhere. I yelped and threw my hands out, pushing them to his chest the same way I did with the priest. His body went limp as the mist evacuated, but unlike the priest, this guy wasn’t merely unconscious. He was dead. I remembered how he’d cracked his neck to the side when he’d been coming for me. The mist killed him. I backed away, shocked by his lifeless form.
“Shit, how did you do that?” Finn asked breathlessly.
I shook my head, unable to explain the book that seemed to exist only inside my mind. “It just came to me.”
I saw some mist try to slither its way toward Finn again, so I jumped in front of him and swiped at it. “Get away from him!” I shouted, and it slunk off into a dark corner of the building.
When I looked back at Finn, he was grinning. “What?” I asked.