Book of Shadows

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  The creature in the triangle threw its spiked head back and roared, a sound that ripped through Garrett’s whole being, in its wrongness, its essential negation. It strode on clawed feet toward the man in the robe but when it reached the phosphorescent line of the triangle, blue sparks flew from its hide and it roared in pain and rage. Garrett stood staring and stupefied, but then shouted at himself, It’s the drugs. You’re drugged.

  The demon roared, a hideous snarl that sounded impossibly like infinite voices, layered on top of each other. “Otref coh sutcam eaem eugueailiamaf omod siem euqsirebil ihim suoitiporp snelov seis itu, rocerp seceprp sanob obdnevombo otref coh et!”

  The killer stood above the first cocooned body with the sword and his voice was calculated, cunning, a question: “Date et debitur vobis?”

  The demon snarled back in that impossible, layered voice: “Otref coh et!”

  The killer raised the sword above the first webbed body, hilt clutched in both hands, about to plunge the blade.

  At another point of the triangle, one of the bound kids came to life, thrashing in her trusses, and began to scream, a piercing, nerve-ripping sound. The thing in the triangle opened its jaws in a yawning growl of pleasure . . .

  Garrett seized that distraction and ran headlong for the altar, pounding in the dust. He lunged past candles, sending them flying, but as his fingers reached for the dagger, McKenna spun and was upon him, brandishing the sword, bringing it down with a snarl of rage. Garrett let McKenna begin the swing and then viciously kicked out at his knee and connected. McKenna roared in pain and the sword crashed down into the altar instead.

  Candles fell against the wall, black wax sizzling and splashing. The dry wood went up like tinder, flames licking up the walls, an orange glow. Behind them in the triangle, the demon shrieked, a hundred savage layered cries.

  Garrett lurched for the splintered altar and grabbed the dagger, and while McKenna struggled to pull the sword from the wooden altar, Garrett whipped around and thrust the blade into McKenna’s throat.

  McKenna dropped to his knees, gagging hoarsely, eyes wide and staring as he clutched at his neck. Blood seeped from between his fingers. Behind them, the unearthly thing in the triangle paced and snarled, but did not move beyond the gleaming white lines . . . McKenna collapsed onto the packed dirt, convulsing . . .

  Then Garrett felt screaming inside his own mind as the eyes of the first head on the altar opened and looked at him, then the next, then the next, until all three were staring with filmy, black gazes. The dead mouths opened and mouthed words, without vocal cords, voiceless. But Garrett heard them anyway: Help. Help. Help.

  And as the thing in the triangle turned toward Garrett, with jagged teeth bared and red eyes glowing, McKenna rose to his knees, blood pouring from around the dagger stuck in his throat. But Garrett had heard the death rattle, the gag of breath; he could smell the stink of his evacuated bladder and bowels.

  He’s dead, Garrett’s mind shouted . . . but McKenna kept coming, a shuffling stagger, lifting the sword.

  Then there was a breath of wind, so soft it might have been a dream.

  And behind McKenna, Garrett saw Tanith in the black mirror, standing pale and shimmering, with her arms raised. Three insubstantial wisps surrounded her, swirling and circling, as if drawn to her light. She stood and chanted, and Garrett saw the world open, a black universe of night, that shuddered and separated into dark and light. The three wisps swirled up and toward the light. Inside the triangle, the demon shrieked in rage. It crouched, coiling into itself, and pounced at the glass, toward Tanith. It hit hard and bounced back off it as if it had tried to charge a closed door.

  Tanith drew her hands together, drawing the light into her grasp. And then she turned and hurled the ball of light at the mirror.

  The light hit and the black plate of glass shattered. But instead of exploding outward, it imploded, inward. And the thing in the triangle was pulled into the explosion as into a vacuum, howling its rage in the cyclone of wind . . . a wind that pulled at Garrett, staggering him, pulled at the dust on the floor, pulled at the flames licking up the walls of the greenhouse, pulled at the very structure of the greenhouse until the beams and joists groaned . . .

  And then was gone. The triangle was empty. In front of Garrett, McKenna’s body dropped to the ground like a stone.

  The walls around Garrett were pure flame now. One of the teenagers bound at the triangle was screaming endlessly.

  Garrett lunged toward McKenna’s body and pulled the dagger from the corpse’s throat. He bent and slashed the ropes binding the screaming teenager. “I’m Boston police. Can you run?” he shouted in her face. She nodded, wide-eyed and shaking. “Then go.” He pulled her to her feet, turned her toward the door. “Get out.”

  She staggered a few steps forward, then bolted. Garrett seized the next bound body and began to drag it toward the door.

  He pulled both bound bodies into the main greenhouse, one at a time. Smoke drifted blackly in the rows of shriveled plants, but Garrett’s vision was clearing; the effects of the drug were wearing off, perhaps diluted by adrenaline. Garrett stooped and lifted the first bound body, registered that it was a boy, before he threw it over his shoulder and ran for the nearest door.

  By the time he made it back in for the last teenager, the barn was an inferno behind them, flames reflected in a thousand panes of glass, blazing through the whipping wind and pouring rain. Garrett lifted the girl’s body and clutched her to him as he stumbled forward, through the rows of shriveled plants, through the door . . . into the night, into the wet, into the wind.

  Chapter Forty-nine

  The Internal Affairs hearing was a formality; the media loves nothing so much as a hero and had elevated Garrett to such iconic status that no one in Boston or the free world would have dared suggest that he had broken every rule in the proverbial book.

  Garrett sat before the suited panel and recited the barest facts with no inflection. “McKenna charged me with the sword that he intended to use to behead the hostage, and we fought. The fire began when lit candles on the altar were knocked over in our scuffle. I grabbed a dagger from the altar and stabbed him in the throat, and then dragged the hostages out.”

  Malloy was livid; Garrett could feel the force of his fury from across the room, but there was nothing he could do; Garrett was restored to duty with extraordinary honors. He could have run for Congress that month if he’d wanted to. Any such thought was the farthest thing from his mind.

  Outside, the media swarmed on the steps, and Garrett allowed himself to be jostled and photographed as the press shouted questions. A CNN reporter shoved a mike in his face.

  “Is it true that you were suspended from duty for pursuing this line of investigation?”

  “The department was aware of this line of investigation,” Garrett answered evenly.

  “Then why were you alone at the scene, Detective Garrett?” another reporter called.

  “My partner was incapacitated in a previous attack by McKenna. I arrived first on the scene and determined there was no time to wait for backup.”

  The shouts of the reporters started again until one voice rose above the fray. “Is it true you alerted three separate departments to the situation and backup never arrived?”

  The shifting hoard of newspeople went silent, straining to hear Garrett’s response. He stared at the reporter levelly. “It’s my understanding that all departments arrived in due time after my call.”

  The crowd murmured and the same reporter raised his voice again. “You have no criticism of the way the department handled this investigation?”

  Garrett looked into the camera with no expression. “I can only say I regret my own part in the arrest and detention of Jason Moncrief. We made the best determination we could based on the evidence we had at the time. I am glad the real perpetrator . . .” He hesitated for the first time, and on the monitors it seemed that he was looking far away. He finally finished: “Has been stopped.�
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  As he turned away from the reporters, he saw Carolyn standing in the crowd of police officials, watching, as lovely and polished as ever. They looked at each other without speaking, and then Garrett moved on, jostling through the shouting crowd.

  The small private room of the hospital was so crammed with flower arrangements and potted plants it could have been a florist’s shop—or a greenhouse. Garrett winced unconsciously at the sight when he stepped through the door into the room, but all these blooms were fresh and colorful and alive, the plants a lush green.

  Landauer lay propped up with pillows, a mountain in the bed. He had regained consciousness the night of Garrett’s battle with McKenna. Garrett had checked the precise time with the nurses and in his estimation Landauer awoke at the same moment that McKenna died.

  A woman sat beside his bed. She and Landauer turned to the door to look at the same moment. Garrett stared back at them from the doorway: his partner, and Tanith Cabarrus.

  “What the hell took you so long?” Landauer scowled at him.

  “I stopped to get you flowers but the whole city seems to be out,” Garrett deadpanned, casting a look around the room.

  “Too busy playing American Idol to check up on me, is more like,” his partner accused.

  “That and I.A.,” Garrett agreed.

  “Fuck ’em,” Landauer answered. “What do they know?” And the men looked at each other.

  Tanith rose from her chair beside the bed. “I’ll leave you two to catch up.”

  “Thanks for stoppin’ by,” Landauer said, then visibly struggled with himself, and met her eyes. “My wife said to say thanks, about the smoking thing.”

  Tanith looked back at him. “If you go back to it, you’ll be dead within a year. You get that, don’t you?”

  Landauer’s grin twisted. “Funny, she said exactly the same thing.”

  Tanith smiled faintly. “All women are witches.”

  “I always thought,” Landauer agreed. He hesitated. “So . . . if I don’t, you know, start again, how long have I got?”

  Tanith stepped toward the bed and looked at him squarely . . . Garrett could see Landauer holding his breath . . .

  Then she shook her head. “I can’t see that far into the future,” she said lightly.

  Landauer grinned like a little kid. Then he faked a yawn and looked at Garrett. “Awright, both of you out of here. I need my beauty sleep.”

  Tanith walked silently beside Garrett in the hospital hall, past a glass wall of windows overlooking the garden, while Garrett recited the facts as he knew them in a carefully neutral voice.

  “McKenna had a sheet under the name Andrew Forsythe. Cruelty to animals, sealed juvie record, drug convictions, psychiatric detention, questioned in the disappearance of a teenager in Maryland. No association with any organized satanic or pagan groups or cults, just a lot of Crowley and demonic stuff on his computer and in the motel room he’d been renting for a week. He fits the psychological profile perfectly. A lone satanic practitioner who uses the trappings of satanism to satisfy his own violent fantasies.”

  “That must feel good, to have things wrapped up so cleanly,” she said, and there was no mockery in her voice.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’d like to close the book on this one,” Garrett said, and didn’t look at her.

  She nodded, and bit her lip. Her voice was cool, with just a hint of a tremor. “I can understand that.”

  He stopped on the bridge, and now he did look at her. She was so darkly beautiful he had to look away again. “I couldn’t do my job if there weren’t some—underlying sense to it.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I want to thank you for your help, though,” he said. “I know—” He paused, and struggled with himself. “Sorry—I—I’m still recovering from the drugs. I was dosed pretty hard.”

  Something flickered on her face. She nodded slowly, not speaking.

  “What I know is, those kids would be dead if not for you.” And finally he turned to her. “And I probably would be, too.”

  “No. You wouldn’t have been there at all.” She looked into his eyes, and her voice was gentle. “You took a big risk. You went farther than—anyone else would have. You went out on a limb and you saved four lives.”

  He shook his head. “Not four. Land would never have been in danger to begin with if I hadn’t—”

  “I meant Jason Moncrief,” she said, without smiling. “Thank you for that.”

  She started to turn away. He caught her hand, but flinched back at the contact, as if it burned him. “I just can’t . . .” He looked at her fully for the first time. “I don’t want to live that way.”

  She smiled, with effort. “I know.”

  “I live in this world,” he said.

  “I know.”

  Her hand was still in his . . . neither of them moved. He could feel the blood pulsing in her wrist . . . and a sense of power beyond imagining . . . a sense of dark . . . and light . . .

  And life.

  Acknowledgments

  My fabulous and much-loved agents, Scott Miller and Frank Wuliger, and Sarah Self for their fine representation and help.

  My spectacular editor, Marc Resnick, who makes me glad every day that I decided to try this novel thing, and the lovely and talented Sarah Lumnah, for her help and support.

  Again, Marc and Sarah, and Sally Richardson, Matthew Shear, Katy Herschberger, Talia Ross, Matt Baldacci, and the entire St. Martin’s Press team.

  Michael Gorn of the Boston PD Crime Lab, for his extraordinary willingness to share his knowledge and expertise. The mistakes I have made and liberties I have taken are solely mine.

  The awesome Beth Tindall, webmistress; and Michael Miller, Sheila English, and Adam Auerbach for their art.

  Sarah Langan, Sarah Pinborough, and Rhodi Hawk, dark soul sisters under the skin.

  Kimball Greenough, for his extraordinary contributions to this story and my understanding of the forces.

  Rhodi Hawk, Laura Benedict, Sarah Shaber, Brenda Witchger, Elaine Sokoloff, Franz Metcalf, and Jess Winfield for their early reads and phenomenal notes.

  The whole gang at Murderati.com, for teaching me the business every day.

  Heather Graham, F. Paul Wilson, Harley Jane Kozak, the Pozz’s, and the Slush Pile Players—the best reward for finishing writing.

  The Coven, because a girl just needs her witches.

  The authors, officers, and staffs of Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers, Mystery Writers of America, Horror Writers of America, and Romance Writers of America, for creating these incredible communities.