Hallowed Ground

Chapter Thirty-Six

The Deacon feared his heart would burst. The heat and the pain of the talisman seared his flesh and threatened to erase coherent thought. He dug his teeth into his lip to buy himself a different pain, a distraction to give him strength as he fought to hold on. Colleen held the child out to him, and the ridiculous cowboy, already a dead man with the poison of vipers flowing through his veins and the lead of his own bullets buried in his flesh, reached out to him as well. It was pitiful. Comical.

The intensity of the light washing over and through him felt as though it ought to have burned, but it burst through his skin and made contact with the earth beneath his feet. It bathed him, and it bathed the child, it bathed Colleen, whose face had first gone slack with surprise and now glowed with shock and wonder.

The cowboy’s head dropped, and his grip loosened. The light bathed him as well, but it would be a final experience before death. The Deacon grinned fiercely and whispered the name again - the single word of power he’d changed in a ritual so ancient and powerful it transcended the boundaries between worlds.

"Remliel."

The cowboy lifted his head, despite the blood draining from his wounds and the venom coursing through his veins. Something important shifted, and if he could have, in that instant, the Deacon would have pulled back and away. The talisman burst its bonds. A beam of light pierced the Deacon’s flesh and joined him to the child. It shot through the young flesh with the ancient eyes and found the cowboy as well.

The Deacon gasped, dragged air into tortured lungs, threw his head back…and screamed.