Book of Shadows

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  There was a spread of Tarot cards on the table, the pale cards with their faintly glowing symbols and names below: The High Priestess, The Lovers, The Devil, Death. The medieval images gave Garrett a sense of foreboding.

  But it was the back room that drew him. He found the key in the standing cabinet where he’d seen Tanith take it from.

  He used the key to unlock and open the door and was assailed by more darkness, and the faint phosphorescence of the pentagram within the circle inscribed on the floor. In this space there was no danger of light leaking through to the outside. He closed the door quietly behind him, muffling the sound of the rain, and felt along the wall for a light switch. His hand felt only the thick cloth that covered the walls; there were no protuberances that would indicate a switch. But he remembered there were candles everywhere. He reached into a pocket and switched on his Maglite, the small but powerful flashlight he carried on his key chain, and used the circle of light to guide him to the altar in the center of the pentagram. He lit several candles and then stood while his eyes adjusted to the warm and flickering flames.

  He glanced around the room and then back down at the altar—and was startled to see a wide, thick hand-bound book. Jason’s grimoire? His mind raced. How did she . . .

  But when he picked it up he realized it was not the same book, just disturbingly similar.

  He hesitated . . . then stifled his conscience and opened it.

  The pages were the same kind of handmade paper that Jason Moncrief’s grimoire had been fashioned of, and the writing was in code, not the twiglike runes, but something more scrolled and feminine, vaguely Celtic.

  He paged through the book. The writing was incomprehensible, but there were rough drawings, of him, of Landauer. He turned pages with numb and building disbelief . . . and then stopped, staring down at a page with a sketch: the circle with the three triangles. The sigil of Choronzon.

  He felt a rush of nausea, of fear . . . and then the sudden certainty that he was not alone. He whipped around—

  Tanith stood behind him in the dark.

  He had not heard the door open; it was closed behind her, as if she had passed through it. The thought unnerved him even more than having been caught.

  Then the force of her fury hit him, although she said nothing and did not move; it was like hearing screaming in his head. Thunder boomed in the sky outside, shaking the windows of the house.

  She strode forward, jostling him hard as she passed him, and slammed the cover of the book closed.

  “What is that?” he demanded, without much force.

  She turned on him in a rage. “Do you know it could have killed you, to open that without permission? Do you know I could have booby-trapped the house, put a spell on the door against intruders, bound the book with toxins . . . so if you so much as touched a page you would die a slow death, untraceable . . .” Her voice was low and lethal and he had no doubt she was serious.

  “Did you?”

  Her eyes blazed fire. “It’s what you deserve.”

  That he couldn’t argue, but his face burned nonetheless.

  “You still have no idea what you’re dealing with.” There was contempt as well as fury in her voice. “You don’t understand and you don’t want to understand.”

  She turned from him, but he stepped in front of her, blocked her from the door. “What is that thing?” he demanded again, pointing at the book lying on the altar.

  “That is none of your business,” she hissed, a venomous sound.

  “It is when you have a book just like Jason Moncrief’s—”

  “You are a fool. It’s my Book of Shadows. Every witch keeps one.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “You’ll find out—”

  He grabbed her wrist, twisted her toward him. “Spells,” she spat at him, trying to jerk her hand away. “You have no idea what you’ve done—”

  He grabbed her other wrist and held her, struggling, against him. He spoke beside her cheek. “I found Amber. Her body was sunk into the Fort Point Channel, on a chain. He has her head.”

  Tanith stiffened in his arms. In the candlelit silence, their hearts pounded against each other.

  “Jason didn’t kill her, then,” she gasped, in what sounded like triumph.

  Garrett tensed. “Why do you say that?”

  “You know it—” She tried to pull away from him and he held her firm.

  “That won’t free him. No one will believe it. There’s no establishing time of death. The decomposition is too advanced.”

  She stared at him in shock and fury. Then she pushed him away with a strength that startled him. She circled the floor in the flickering candlelight, breathing hard, not looking at him.

  He watched her, saw her trembling. “What is this kid to you? Why do you care?”

  She didn’t answer, but suddenly veered to the cabinet against the wall and pulled the door open, to take out a decanter of wine and two goblets.

  She set them on the altar and looked at him. “Are we going to talk, now, Garrett? Then why don’t we get comfortable?” She poured both glasses full and extended one to him. He stared at her, not taking it.

  “Oh, please, you’ve already had a few, haven’t you?”

  “Why do you care?” he asked again.

  She lifted the glass and drank it down. She wiped the red from her lips with the back of her hand, a gesture that sent flames racing through Garrett’s body. She filled the glass again, then picked up both glasses and walked to him deliberately, extending one. He took the glass without drinking.

  “Why are you helping him?”

  “Because he didn’t do it.” She drank again, her eyes challenging him, and he lifted his own glass to his lips and drank, too. The wine was spicy and complex, a welcome rush of heat.

  He lowered the glass and looked down at her. “Why did you lie?”

  “Why are you lying?” she answered back, and drank again, then stepped forward to him, extending the bottle. To his surprise, the glass in his hand was already empty. She reached to fill it. “You know it’s true. You know he didn’t do it.”

  “You have no idea what I think—”

  “I do. Because I read your mind,” she flung at him.

  “Stop it.” He clasped his hand around her arm. “No games.”

  She leaned forward against him and put her lips to his hair. “No games like breaking and entering, Detective?” He could feel her breath in his ear and his cock leapt to life, hardened to stone. “What game would you prefer?” she whispered. And then he was pulling her against him and his mouth was on hers. Her lips were sweet under the bite of wine, and soft, and luscious . . . She opened her mouth under his and sighed and fire shot through him as their bodies ground against each other. She put her hands under his sweater and found bare skin; her fingers moved on his abdomen, rippling the muscles of his stomach as she touched him, moving lower . . . stroking him . . . his mind was a dark rush of lust. She pulled back from him, gasping, and he seized her again and she jerked against his hold, deliberately off-balancing him so they staggered to the floor. He was on her, then, and her legs were wrapping around him and his tongue was in her mouth and she was pulling off his sweater, ripping at his shirt; he could hear buttons popping and rolling on the floor and then he forgot everything when he felt her hands on his stomach again, pulling open his pants and sliding her fingers inside and down, stroking the hard aching length of him.

  He ripped open the buttons on her tight vest and sunk his mouth into her breasts, licking and sucking as she tipped her head back on the floor and shuddered, and he took her mouth again, devouring her. They struggled on the floor, half fighting, half kissing, in the center of the glowing circle, shedding clothes, finding skin.

  He was huge, throbbing, as he slid into the hot core of her, and he moaned with the pleasure as she closed tightly around him. They rocked together, writhing naked in the pentagram, bodies locked in fury and ecstasy, waves of heat and cold breaking over them as th
ey slammed into each other until he was shouting . . . searing heat and blinding white light flooding through him . . .

  Below him her eyes flew open, dark as night, the pupils huge, and she was murmuring words he didn’t understand . . .

  And then he saw her not below him, but floating above him, in the air, although he was still lying on top of her—and she reached down her hand and seized him and he felt himself pulling out of his body . . .

  He was in the air with her . . . floating above their still and naked bodies.

  Before he could comprehend what was happening there was a crack of thunder and a great wind, as if the storm had penetrated the walls, but not blowing at them, rather sucking them in . . .

  And they were gone.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  There were no walls, no house . . . and the rain and clouds had disappeared, leaving only the rush of wind. They were flying: fast, exhilarating speed, with black night and the starkly glowing full moon on their left side and crimson sunrise on the right. The shock of seeing full day and night at once was electrifying. Garrett felt weightless, nothing solid but the clutch of her fingers around his hand.

  The sunrise brightened to white, and then the white was clouds in the wind, layers and layers of all thicknesses, cumulus, nimbus, cirrus . . . light and fluffy in the air, then freezing to snow on an ice field, melting to whitecaps on blue waves, then boiling to steam that blew away to reveal pure blinding white salt on a desert plain, with the moon gleaming white in a pale sky above.

  The changes made him dizzy, the sensation of flight, a feeling even beyond sex; the top of his head was coming off . . .

  The moon sank behind the racing clouds . . .

  And they raced after it, plunging into white . . .

  . . . Then falling, falling, into dark.

  It should have killed them to hit, but suddenly they were on the ground, although he could not feel his feet touching it. It’s a dream, it must be, he thought incoherently. It was dark, though the moon spilled pale light over the hill on which they stood. Alien, yet familiar to Garrett; he’d been here before, in his body.

  He wanted to ask her where they were, but he could not form words in his fleshless existence. As if knowing, she turned toward him in his mind and whispered, without speaking: Watch. Listen.

  He looked over the bare, earth-covered hills around them, and the familiarity was gnawing, but without the aid of smell and touch, the sensation of air on skin, everything seemed two-dimensional, an alien world.

  Tripping. I’m tripping, his mind managed. The wine. Something in the wine . . . drugged . . .

  He looked up toward the moon . . . and it was the stark black silhouette of the office chair, pitched on the top of a hill that finally oriented him. They were at the landfill where Erin Carmody’s body had been dumped.

  Shhh, Tanith said in his head, and he turned his attention toward the sound.

  A car was stopped on the moonlit ribbon of road, the rutted dirt road where Garrett had seen the burned footprints. A stooped figure turned away from the open lid of the car trunk and Garrett saw it carried a dark wrapped shape slung over its shoulder—the size of a human body, wide on top and tapering at the bottom, wrapped in a black plastic tarp.

  The dark figure hauled its terrible cargo toward the lip of the hill, where he stopped at the cliff’s edge and transferred the object wrapped in the tarp from his shoulder to his arms. He stood for a moment, then pulled the tarp back and flung its contents over the side of the hill. The figure stood, staring down over the side of the hill as he rolled the tarp into a ball.

  Look, Tanith spoke in Garrett’s head, and without knowing how he knew to do it, he turned toward the car.

  The license plate was visible in the moonlight: TOR 936

  And he knew the make of the car: a dark Camaro, navy blue or black. The car seemed drawn in crystal clarity, hyper-real.

  Garrett glanced back toward the figure on the cliff’s edge. It suddenly stiffened . . . turned slowly . . . its face all in shadow, hooded by its coat. It was still, staring toward Garrett and Tanith with an intensity Garrett could feel even from the distance.

  Then it dropped its bundle and shot forward into the air, a black and ragged and virulent shadow, hurtling straight at them, with a shriek of sheer black madness—

  Chapter Thirty-four

  He woke abruptly to his head pounding more violently than any hangover he could ever remember experiencing, and there had been a few. He was on the bare black floor of a dark room, naked and alone in the center of a pentagram within a painted circle, and for a long and paralyzing moment he had no idea who he was.

  Then the dream came flooding back to him.

  Flying through the clouds, through ice, through steam, through desert . . . the sensation of flying . . .

  His stomach roiled with the memory of motion, and suddenly another image flashed into his mind.

  The landfill . . . the dark shadow . . . the blue Camaro and the license plate . . .

  Garrett sat up in the dark velvet-lined room, cringing at the throbbing pain in his head. The air was heavy with the smell of apple musk and sex.

  A wave of nausea suddenly doubled him over and he dry-retched, over and over again, his stomach spasming. He sank back on his heels, swallowed, and breathed shallowly, fighting the nausea.

  Jesus, what did she give me?

  Finally the sickness passed enough for him to straighten. He looked around and saw a wineglass on the floor; red liquid had spilled out in a puddle. He crawled over to it and looked at the glass. There was a thickness to the dregs of sticky liquid left in the bottom.

  He reached shakily for his clothes and dressed, wincing at every move, every muscle in his body aching. Then he took out one of the glassine evidence bags he always carried in his coat and stooped to scoop the wineglass into it.

  He moved out through the doorway into the dark reading room. The cards were gone from the table, and the room was empty, as was the front of the shop; no sign of Tanith.

  Moving gingerly, he walked for the door as quietly as he could . . . but as he was reaching for the knob, he stopped. He turned and looked toward the shelves of herbs and powders behind the counter. Then he crossed to stand in front of the shelves. The jars were labeled and alphabetized, and it took him no time at all to spot the jar he was looking for:

  Belladonna.

  The homicide room was mercifully quiet for a Saturday. Garrett headed straight for the crime lab and handed the wineglass and the glassine bag of belladonna over to Warren Tufts. “The wine in the glass. I need to know what’s in it.”

  Tufts looked him over with a raised eyebrow, and Garrett knew the criminalist was taking in his pallor and bloodshot eyes, his death-warmed-over appearance. Garrett didn’t try to explain. He had no doubt Tufts had seen worse.

  He went back to the detectives’ bureau, ignoring a curious Morelli and Palmer, and slumped in his seat behind his desk, too exhausted to muster even the energy to go to his car and drive home. His thighs ached and he had a sudden memory of Tanith riding him, both of them naked and straining, her black hair spilled over her breasts, her mouth ripe and sweet against his . . . and he felt himself weak with desire again.

  He tilted his head back against the chair, and must have dozed, because he was in the dark and watching a shadow figure creep from a Camaro—when suddenly a female voice spoke from above him and he jolted awake.

  “You look like hell.”

  He blinked up to focus groggily on Carolyn, who stood in front of his desk, pristine and unsmiling.

  She held a file folder in her hand, which she tossed down on the desk in front of him. “Try doing your own homework next time.”

  Without a word of explanation about what she meant, she pivoted on one lethally fashionable heel and was striding out of the room.

  Garrett didn’t even have the words left to call her back. He reached for the file and opened it.

  The name in black type hit him from
the top of the page. Teresa Smithfield, a.k.a. Tanith Cabarrus.

  He was looking down at a rap sheet.

  It took him two mugs of coffee to go over it all, not because of the length of the file but because of how hard his tired mind was trying to fight it.

  A September 1999 arrest for five counts of fraud and grand larceny, for which “Smithfield” received three years and was remanded to MCI Framingham, the state women’s prison, where she served nine months before being released on probation.

  A June 2000 arrest for disorderly conduct, after which she was institutionalized at McLean State Hospital for four months, then discharged to the care of a Selena Fox.

  The file was thick with photocopied official documents. One of them was an intake report from McLean Hospital.

  INTAKE REPORT

  IDENTIFYING DATA: The patient is a 23-year-old white female with no known address, arrested by the police on 24 June and brought into the emergency room, subsequently admitted into the locked psychiatric unit as a Section 12: risk to herself and others. She gave her name as Teresa Smithfield. She carried no ID or identifying papers.

  HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS: Arresting officers received a 911 call from Salem resident Althea Carstairs reporting “a young woman going crazy in the park.” Police arriving at Salem Willows Park found Ms. Smithfield in a disheveled condition, covered in blood and brandishing a large knife, which she threatened the officers with, screaming at them to stay away. Officers held their weapons on her and instructed her to drop the knife, at which point she began slashing at her arms and chest, screaming that she had to “cut them out.” Officers subdued and disarmed Smithfield using Tasers. Officers conducted a visual examination and concluded the blood on Smithfield was most likely her own, as she had numerous fresh cuts and stab wounds in various parts of her body.