Sleeper cultist

And then Clint’s reddened, work-roughened, clammy-cold hand shot into the confessional and seized my throat. It caught me off guard, and the sudden pain as his fingers tightened and he shut off my air supply was indescribable. He lifted me and, without hesitating for a second, began to slam me left and right, against the walls of the confessional, each impact horribly heavy, with no more passion than a man beating the dust from a rug.
My head hit hardwood several times, stunning me. My knees went all loose and watery, and suddenly the Rave and the Boom Box were gone. The next thing I knew, I was being dragged by the neck toward the altar. Clint walked up onto it and threw me down on my back on the holy table. I blinked my eyes, trying to get them to focus, and realized that the cult was gathered all around me, a circle of tentacle-mouthed faces and dead eyes.
Carlos and the kids were gone.
Good.
“It isn’t a mortal,” Clint said, somehow speaking through the tentacles, albeit in a creepy, inhuman tone. “See? It’s different. It doesn’t belong here.”
“Yes,” the captain said.
“Kill it. It cost us our sacrifice.”
“No,” the captain said. “You are new to the mortal world. This creature’s blood is more powerful than generations of the Miksani and their spawn.” The tentacles thrashed more and more excitedly. “We can drain her and drain her. Blood more powerful than any we have spilled to pave the way for the Sleeper. Our Lord shall arise!” The captain’s eyes met mine and there was nothing behind them, no soul, nothing even remotely human. “And he shall hunger. Perhaps …”
“Perhaps you should think about this,” I said. I think my sibilants had gone slushy. “Walk right now. Leave this island and don’t come back. It’s the only chance you have to survive.”
“What is survival next to the ascendance of our Lord?” the captain asked. “Bow to Him. Give yourself of your own will.”
“You don’t know who I am, do you, squid-for-brains?” I asked.
“Bow, child. For when He comes, His rage will be a perfect, hideous storm. He will drag you down to his prison and entomb you there. Forever silent. Forever in darkness. Forever in terrible cold.”
“I am Lady Molly of Winter,” I said in a silken voice.
The thrashing tentacles went abruptly still for a second. Then the captain started to shout something.
Before he could, I unleashed power from the heart of Winter into the cathedral, unrestrained, undirected, unshaped, and untamable. It rushed through me, flowed through me, both frozen agony and a pleasure more intense than any orgasm.
Ice exploded out from me in swords and spears, in scythes and daggers and pikes. In an instant, crystalline blades and points, a forest of them, slammed into being, expanding with blinding speed. Ice filled the cathedral, and whatever was in its way, living or otherwise, was pierced and slashed and shredded and then crushed against the sanctuary’s stone walls with the force of a locomotive.
It was over in less than a second. Then there was only silence, broken here and there by the crackle and groan of perfectly clear ice. I could clearly see the cult through it. Broken, torn to pieces, crushed, their blood a brilliant scarlet as it melted whatever ice it touched—only to freeze into ruby crystals a moment later.
It took the captain, impaled against the cathedral ceiling, almost a minute to die.
And while he did, I lay on the holy table, laughing uncontrollably.


Brief Cases, Cold Case, Page 314-316