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—
Book of Shadows
Alexandra Sokoloff's books
- Last Chance Book Club
- The Book of Madness and Cures
- The Cherry Cola Book Club
- The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fic
- SIX MONTHS_(A Seven Series Novel Book 2)
- Book of Lost Threads
- The Book of Fires
- The Book of Murder
- The Book of Spies
- The Book of Three
- Ascendants of Ancients Sovereign
- Because of You
- Betrayal of the Dove
- Blood of the Assassin
- Bonnie of Evidence
- Child of the Mountains
- City of Darkness
- City of Light
- City of Spades
- Confessions of a Call Center Gal
- Conservation of Shadows
- Daughter of Smoke & Bone
- Days of Blood & Starlight
- Edge of the Wilderness
- Empire of Gold
- Equal of the Sun A Novel
- Evidence of Life
- Eye of the Storm
- Forces of Nature
- Garden of Secrets Past
- Garden of Stones
- Ghost of a Chance
- Heart of Glass
- Lady of the English
- Of Moths and Butterflies
- Out of the Black Land
- Pieces of Truth
- Price of a Bounty
- River of Dust A Novel
- Serpent of Moses
- Shades of Passion
- Sleight of Hand
- Son of Destruction
- Stages of Grace
- State of Emergency
- Stealer of Flesh
- Tapestry of Fortunes A Novel
- Temple of the Gods
- Tomb of the Lost
- Wall of Days
- Act of Treason
- Act of Will
- Acts of Faith
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Acts of Nature
- The Blessings of the Animals_A Novel
- The blind side of the heart
- The Body Of Jonah Boyd
- Butcher Bird_ A Novel of the Dominion
- Buzz Off
- By Reason of Insanity
- Breakfast of Champions
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- The Broom of the System
- A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Non-Fiction
- The Secret Life of Violet Grant
- Riyria Revelations 02 - Rise Of Empire
- Theft Of Swords: The Riyria Revelations
- Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
- Better Off Friends
- The Geography of You and Me
- Shadows Gray