"Nowhere left to go," Barlow murmured sadly. His dark eyes bubbled with infernal mirth. "Sad to see a man's faith fail. Ah, well..."
The cross trembled in Callahan's hand and suddenly the last of it's light vanished. It was only a piece of plaster that his mother had bought in a Dublin souvenir shop, probably at a scalper's price. The power it had sent ramming up his arm, enough power to smash down walls and shatter stone, was gone. The muscles remembered the thrumming but could not duplicate it.
Barlow reached from the darkness and plucked the cross from his fingers. Callahan cried out miserably, the cry that had vibrated in the soul-but never the throat-of that long-ago child who had been left alone each night with Mr. Flip peering out of the closet at him between the shutters of sleep. And the next sound would haunt him for the rest of his life: two dry snaps as Barlow broke the arms of the cross, and a meaningless thump as he threw it on the floor.
"God damn you" he cried out.
"It's too late for such melodrama," Barlow said from the darkness. His voice was almost sorrowful. " There is no need of it. You have forgotten the doctine of your own church, is it not so? The cross...the bread and wine...the confessional...only symbols. Without faith the cross is only wood, the bread baked wheat, the wine sour grapes. If you had cast the cross away, you should have beaten me another night. In a way, I hoped it might be so.It has been long since I have met an opponent of any real worth. The boy makes ten of you, false priest.
Suddenly, out of the darkness, hands of amazing strength gripped Callahan's shoulders.
"You would welcome the oblivion of my death now, I think. There is no memory for the Undead; only the hunger and the need to serve the Master. I could make use of you. I could send you among your friends. Yet is there need of that? Without you to lead them, I think they are little. And the boy will tell them. One moves against them at this time. There is, perhaps, a more fitting punishment for you, false priest."
He remembered Matt saying
Some things are worse than death.
He tried to struggle away, but the hands held him in a viselike grip. Then one hand left him. There was the sound of cloth moving across bare skin, and then a scaping sound.
The hands moved to his neck.
"Come, false priest. Learn of a true religion. Take my communion."
Understanding washed over Callahan in a ghostly flood.
"No! Don't...don't-"
But the hands were implacable. His head was drawn forward, forward, forward.
"Now, priest," Barlow whispered.
And Callahan's mouth was pressed against the reeking flesh of the vampire's cold throat, where an old vein pulsed. He held his breath for what seemed like aeons, twisting his head wildly and to no avail, smearing the blood acvross his cheeks and forehead and chin like war paint.
Yet at last, he drank.