Book of Shadows

CHAPTER Thirty-two

A bar was his first impulse. His second impulse came before the third shot of Jameson’s, before he was moved to start screaming along with the Drop Kick Murphys on the jukebox, although the raucous soundtrack continued in his head once he’d poured himself into his car.
And once again he was on the road to Salem.
It was dumping rain by then, raining so hard it was difficult for him to drive, and at one point he pulled off the road, staring out past his frantically beating wipers at the downpour, wondering if it was simply madness to continue.
He closed his eyes and had a vision of Tanith’s hands on the Dragon Man—so gentle—and so in command.
He opened his eyes and pulled back onto the road.
The shop was dark, as was the second story of the house. He stood dripping and freezing on the porch and rang the bell several times, while rain blew around him in gusts. There was no stirring from within.
He used the excuse of the whiskey to justify to himself what he did next.
He had a passable talent for breaking and entering, and not just as part of his police training. There was a time in his life, as with many teenage boys of a certain neighborhood and from a certain socioeconomic stratum, when he could just as easily have fallen on the wrong side of the law-and-order equation.
He picked the lock in under a minute and was inside the door.
In the dark the shop had a medieval apothecary look, with its thick glass jars of herbs and powders and the cases of crystals and wands. Outside, the rain thundered down, and a crack of lightning illuminated the room for a moment in ghastly grayish light.
Garrett’s heart was beating fast, and he felt a rush that he knew was familiar to criminals; the powerful effect of dominance, of conquest. He understood what he was doing was not merely immoral but also stupid in the extreme, but he continued anyway, walking noiselessly past bookcases with their mysterious volumes, on to the starry velvet curtain in the back. He stepped through into the reading room, with its lingering redolence of incense and concentrated darkness.
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 they 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.