Book of Shadows

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  After a long time they closed the book and sat down in the chairs with the lion-paw hand rests. Selena looked drained, her skin fragile as paper.

  “Well?” Garrett demanded, looking at Tanith.

  “He was doing rituals to summon the demon Choronzon.”

  Garrett tensed. “So it was Moncrief. He killed them.”

  Tanith said, “No,” immediately, and Selena said simultaneously, “I don’t think so.”

  Garrett looked from one to the other, focused on Tanith. “You said that was what the killer is doing.”

  Her voice was tightly controlled. “What Jason was doing was on a very elementary level. It is dangerous, and dangerously stupid, but there is no indication he was considering anything involving sacrifice.”

  Garrett bristled. “I saw the spell for the ‘Hand of Glory.’ And Erin’s left hand was missing.”

  Selena frowned, looked to Tanith. Tanith shook her head impatiently. “The Hand of Glory is a spell that shows up commonly online. These kids who get involved in ritual magic for thrills . . . they collect spells like that.”

  “Oh, really, now?” Garrett lashed out. “That’s convenient. Do you have some proof? Because a spell using a corpse’s left hand and a dead girl missing her left hand is a pretty great match to me.”

  Selena clucked her tongue. “But if this young man kept such an incriminating spell in his grimoire, so openly, why would he not have kept spells of the actual sacrifice, of rituals using sacrifice?” she asked reasonably. She waved a hand over the book. “There’s nothing like that here. Nothing indicating any intention to perform human sacrifice.”

  Garrett remembered that he had gone all through the book, that one long night, and studied all the sketches, and it was true that there was nothing drawn that resembled human sacrifice, and no spell titles that contained the word “sacrifice.” The Hand of Glory had been the most ominous of the drawings by far.

  Selena nodded, as if he had agreed with her. “You see, a grimoire, like a Book of Shadows, is as illuminating as a diary, really. The magician makes very detailed notes of his or her preparation for a major ritual—the cleansing, the fasting, the gathering of instruments, the position of the moon and tide. Come, Detective, and look.” She lifted a graceful hand, beckoning him to her side, and Garrett rose, crossed to her. She pulled the book toward her and looked up at him. “We know the sacrifices were performed on Sabbats, do we not? Erin Carmody’s murder was on the night of Mabon, the fall equinox, September twenty-one. The killing of that other poor girl was on August first, Lammas, or Lughnasadh. But look.”

  She opened the book and turned pages to the month of June. “The entries for June are spells of money, success, fame.” She turned pages and stopped on the sketch of the hand with the candle. “Here, you have the Hand of Glory spell. A loathsome thing. But it is only after that, in August, that Choronzon’s name and sigils begin to appear. A dangerous path, make no mistake.” She turned more pages. “But then in September . . . ah, this is telling, I think. The spells are for attraction. Love.” She turned more pages, to where the book went blank. “And after September nine . . . nothing.”

  She looked up from the book, into Garrett’s face. “There is no indication here that he was preparing for major rituals. Moreover, there is no mention of Choronzon in September at all.”

  Garrett stared at her, trying to process what she was telling him.

  “This boy has not been circumspect in his magical practice. He wrote down what he was doing. According to these entries, the obsession with Choronzon was waning, not increasing.”

  And maybe he just knew enough not to write about it, Garrett thought, and Selena smiled. “You think he was dissembling. Perhaps. But my experience is that a nineteen-year-old boy is not a paragon of control, including in matters of deception.” Her eyes twinkled at him, and Garrett was uncomfortably reminded of his biggest doubt he’d had about the case from the beginning: that a nineteen-year-old could be capable of the kind of precision and control that he felt in this killer.

  “Ah, you do understand,” Selena said.

  “So what else do you see in this—diary?” Garrett said roughly, resisting the pull to trust her.

  Her twinkle disappeared. “A very troubled boy indeed.”

  “Stupid,” Tanith muttered. “Stupid. Reckless. Arrogant.”

  Selena sighed. “Yes. All of that. And more.” She glanced obliquely at Tanith. “Children—people—who feel powerless will seek power wherever they can find it. Even a power that tricks and traps and enslaves. And this particular darkness is very aware of the weakness of vulnerable people.”

  “I don’t think I understand,” Garrett said, even though on some level, he did.

  “This is how he got caught up in all this. This is why he’s in such peril,” Tanith said impatiently. “You open a door like that with thoughtless experimenting and anything can come through. He invited the demon in, and it used him for its own purposes.”

  The words shot a chill through Garrett. He suddenly remembered his encounter with Jason: that stretched-tight face and guttural voice, the layers of babbling voices on the tape of the interview . . . “You’re saying Moncrief is possessed?” He stared from one woman to the other.

  “Not possessed . . . but infected, perhaps.” Selena’s eyes were clouded. “Evil is a contagion.”

  “It used him,” Tanith said. “Found Erin through him. Even framed him.”

  “The demon framed him,” Garrett repeated incredulously.

  “Through its human instrument,” Tanith answered. “So he would not be interrupted before the time came. Jason is being used as a pawn. A distraction.”

  Garrett felt prickles of doubt, like sandpaper scraping on his skin. All this time we’ve had Jason Moncrief locked up, McKenna’s been out there, completely under the radar . . .

  He walked in a circle on the Persian rug, and laughed. “If you believe Moncrief is infected with a demon, what would make you think he didn’t kill these girls? Or at least was part of it with”—he almost said McKenna—“someone else’s help?”

  “The same thing that makes you think it,” Selena said calmly. “The truth that you see. The fact that he didn’t.”

  Garrett stopped his frenzied circling and looked at her.

  Behind him, Tanith exploded, with raw nerves. “Talk to him. The point is, talk to Jason. He’s communed with the demon. That’s your most direct link.”

  “Exactly,” Selena affirmed. “That’s your most direct link. Go.” She looked from Garrett to Tanith. “Both of you. Go now.”

  Garrett stared at the older woman. “Take her into Suffolk County? There’s a warrant out for her arrest.”

  “Then if you’re caught, you were simply bringing her in, weren’t you?” Serena said placidly.

  “Why don’t I just arrest her now and save a step?”

  Serena quirked an eyebrow at him. “Are suspended officers allowed to make arrests?” she inquired, the picture of innocence.

  “I know for damn sure we’re not allowed to sneak them in to see inmates in correctional facilities,” he shot back.

  “She can go in as a member of Jason’s legal team,” Selena said.

  Garrett turned to look at her in disbelief. “No one would buy that.”

  Selena shrugged again, that irresistible lift of her shoulders. “Try it.”

  Garrett shook his head. “This is crazy—”

  “Tanith is your best chance of getting in to see Jason Moncrief,” Selena said.

  Garrett looked to Tanith now, who sat watchful as a cat in the window seat. “You mean he’ll confirm this attorney story because you know him already.”

  Selena sat wearily back against the medieval chair. “Detective Garrett, you do not seem the sort to resist a golden opportunity. Why are you resisting this one?”

  He stared across the long oak table toward Tanith, who said nothing. “Because I don’t like gift horses. Because I don’t trust her.”

 
Tanith’s face blazed with fury, but Selena spoke calmly. “But you are not a stupid man.” She found Garrett’s eyes and held them with her clear blue ones. “You know what is at stake, and you will take this chance, because it must be done. And we have no more time to debate.”

  Tanith was like a statue in his passenger seat as Garrett drove the circular driveway out toward the street.

  The calls had been made and astoundingly Jason had given consent to the visit. But just as the Explorer reached the front gates, Garrett saw something that changed everything.

  A large dark man in overalls and a straw gardening hat stood beside the garden wall, with shears, trimming the roses that rambled over the stonework.

  Garrett’s eyes widened in recognition.

  It was the Dragon Man.

  Chapter Forty-three

  Garrett struggled not to show his shock. He drove past the gardener, out the gates and onto the street, his mind going a million miles a minute.

  Is this all an act? All of it? They’re all in it, working together?

  Waves of paranoia broke over him.

  He drove ahead in silence, waiting until he had turned the corner onto another quiet street, before he hit the child lock so that Tanith couldn’t get out, and jerked the Explorer to a halt by the curb. He reached out across the console and grabbed her. She instantly turned into a wild animal, her body writhing as she fought him. He took both her wrists and pinned her against the seat.

  “I saw him. The Dragon Man. He works for you.”

  “He works for Selena,” she blazed. “Of course he does. What were we going to do, put him back on the street?” She jerked her arms away from him, rubbed her wrists. “He needs a stable environment. He’s healing. He even talks a little now, real sentences.” She stopped, looked at Garrett, read his face. “What—you think this was all a setup? He’s in on everything with us? We’re a coven? A cult?”

  Hearing her say it, he felt the same sense of absurdity he’d experienced when Malloy voiced a similar theory. “It makes more sense than anything else you’ve been trying to make me believe.”

  She laughed. “Oh, now we’re forcing you. You have a mind, Garrett; you have instincts, you have experience, you have a consciousness. Why don’t you use them? What do you believe?”

  “I don’t believe, I know. You lied about not knowing Jason Moncrief. That’s why he consented to the interview.”

  “I don’t know him,” she retorted. “He did come into the shop.”

  Garrett stared at her. She shrugged, agitated.

  “He didn’t buy the books. He bought a wand. Cherrywood, with a quartz crystal at the top. And a censer. Not the Crowley books—I wouldn’t have sold those to him. Those he must have taken.”

  Garrett was deeply skeptical. “Why would you hide that?”

  She shook her head wearily. “What was I supposed to say, that I know he isn’t the killer because I did meet him? Because I would have known if he were buying any of those things with the intention to kill? Would you have believed me for the slightest second?”

  Not a chance, Garrett thought. And I don’t believe you now.

  He fixed her with his gaze. “I saw your file.”

  “I gathered,” she said shortly. She stared straight ahead through the windshield, struggling with herself. “You heard Selena. People who feel powerless will seek power wherever they can. I have a—talent. I read people. I dream things. I see enough that people will pay for what I can tell them, and there was a time I was desperate enough to take them for all they had.”

  She finally looked at him, and for a moment he was unable to look away. “I’m not proud of it,” she said, and her voice was bitter. “It was the first control I’d had in my life and it was addictive. In a way, I was looking for revenge.” She didn’t say revenge for what.

  “I played around with darker and darker things. I . . .” She stopped, swallowed. “It did make me crazy for a while. I was going down a completely destructive path. And then Selena found me. She taught me how to use what power I have to help, when I can. I owe her everything.” The look on her face was stark.

  Garrett was unnerved to find himself wanting to believe her, on the verge of believing her. And then he remembered.

  He took her hand back, this time turning it over and pushing her sleeve up to reveal the old scars: parallel vertical lines on her wrist, the shiny traces of random knife marks and gouges.

  She stiffened, but didn’t pull her hand away. Her face was pale and her eyes distant. “Yes, I was trying to cut the demons out of me.”

  “There were demons inside you,” he said flatly.

  “Yes,” she answered defiantly. “I summoned them. They came. They wait in darkness, watching . . . hoping for an invitation. And time after time, we invite them in. It doesn’t take much, to fall out of the light.”

  She is crazy, Garrett thought. But that’s not what he felt. Hadn’t he seen exactly that, on the streets, over and over again? An invitation to the dark, and a swift fall out of the light?

  She bit her lip, looked out the passenger window. “So I know what path Jason has taken. And I know he hasn’t gone as far down it as you think he has. He can still be saved.” She hesitated. “You can call it schizophrenia if you want, or drug-related psychosis.” Then she turned to him and looked him full in the eyes. “But what if I looked crazy because seeing demons makes you look crazy?”

  Garrett had no way to answer this. But finally he sat back in his seat, turned the key in the engine, and drove.

  As they walked through the triple-thick glass doors into Suffolk County jail, Garrett felt Tanith stiffen beside him, the same kind of tensing he was used to seeing in ex-cons who had to cross the threshold. He was none too easy himself with the idea of escorting a wanted fugitive into a maximum security facility. Then he saw her take a breath and her face smoothed out to perfect neutrality.

  They stopped at the security check-in at the outer control desk, where Garrett sweated bullets as he presented his badge. The desk officer nodded briefly to Garrett and checked off their names on the approved visitor list without questioning them.

  In the visitor processing area, under the gaze of surveillance cameras, one of the corrections officers instructed them to remove their belts, shoes, jackets, cell phones, and keys and place them on the table. Wordlessly, without looking at each other, but with excruciating awareness of each other’s presence, Tanith and Garrett stripped themselves of the objects, emptied their pockets, and stood waiting while the officer examined their property.

  Garrett felt there was something odd in the dynamic of the room, but at first couldn’t identify it. Then all at once he realized the C.O.s at the security checkpoint were paying Tanith no attention whatsoever, even as she pulled off her coat, bent to take off her shoes. True, she had changed her clothes at Selena’s house and had dressed more plainly than usual for the visit, in a boxy navy suit that was too large for her without calling undue attention to itself, and her dark profusion of hair was pulled back in a severe knot. But she would have had to have a bag over her head—a body bag—to conceal that she was a spectacularly beautiful woman.

  And yet these male officers, who were not as a whole known for their feminist sensitivity, were acting as if she was not even in the room.

  Garrett suddenly recalled a similar lack of attention by male patrons of the bar when he’d met Tanith at the inn, several weeks ago. How the hell does she do that? What kind of trick is it? he found himself wondering, and then pushed down the thought. No time for doubts. They had gotten this far.

  They stepped through the metal detector, Tanith, then Garrett, and then the C.O. pushed their shoes and coats and equipment through to them to put back on.

  The C.O. took them through a steel door and they walked past the officer’s station, a cage in which more unsmiling C.O.s sat before panels of controls, and then down a long hallway with the hollow sound of opening locks echoing against the walls, as a series of barred gates ope
ned before them and slammed shut behind them. At the end of the gauntlet their guide opened a metal door into the visitation room, divided by a scratched and dirty Plexiglas wall, with counters on both sides and phones at each seat.

  Garrett and Tanith seated themselves at the counter in front of the wall to wait, in plastic chairs with annoyingly rounded bottoms. Now that they had stopped moving, Garrett felt his pulse elevated, sure that at any moment they were going to be busted and detained. Tanith sat completely still, a pillar of calm; he could not even detect her breathing.

  Unable to contain himself, Garrett put his hand on Tanith’s arm, leaned in close to her.

  “How do you do it?” he mouthed, against her ear.

  She stiffened slightly, said nothing.

  “You know what I mean.” His voice was low, urgent. “They don’t see you.”

  She was silent, and his fingers tightened on her arm. She didn’t look at him as she spoke; her eyes were fixed straight ahead. “Don’t you know how to blend in? Can’t you make people not notice you? Isn’t it your job?” She paused, and then said flatly, “Isn’t it survival?”

  Garrett had worked his share of undercover, and she didn’t have to explain further. “Not like that,” he answered, finally. “I can’t do it like that.”

  She turned her head and looked at him. “But you could.”

  They both twisted forward as a door on the other side of the wall opened and a guard led Jason into the room. He wore the standard toxic orange jumpsuit and his face was pale and hollow, the pallor of confinement, his features seeming sunk into his face. He was passive in the guard’s grasp.

  But his eyes, as he slumped down in the chair, were active and watching, and Garrett caught a glimmer of recognition as he took Tanith in. She reached for the telephone receiver on their side and Jason reached for his own.

  The guard stepped away and assumed an “at ease” stance beside the door.

  “Hi there, Counselor,” Jason said from behind the wall, in a crawling, insinuating voice. “Long time no see.”

  Tanith just looked at him through the barrier for a minute. “If you ever want to get out of here, Jason, you’re going to want to drop that act,” she said, her voice low and level. “We are your absolute last hope.”