Book of Shadows

CHAPTER Forty-five

Tanith was out like a light—there was no rousing her. Though Selena insisted she was fine, just exhausted, Garrett knelt to check her pulse and eyes. She was breathing slowly, but steadily.
He had to carry her out of the forest, holding her to his chest again, Selena climbing carefully before them, leading him a shorter way back to the Explorer through the towering shadows and whispering leaves and redolent smells of cedar and pine.
“What if I hadn’t been here?” he demanded of the witch.
“But you are,” she said placidly, never faltering in her steady ascent.
Back at the Explorer, he lay Tanith in the backseat, with her head on Selena’s lap. “Your car . . .” he started.
“It’s taken care of.” Selena stroked Tanith’s hair.
Don’t tell me the Dragon Man is driving now, he thought, but all he wanted to do was get out of the forest, back to the city, to the light, and find out what all this meant.
Back at Selena’s they settled Tanith on the sofa of a room he hadn’t seen before, a sitting room, and Selena beckoned him forward into the connecting room, a small library, and pulled the door not-quite-shut behind them.
Garrett paced amid the glass-cabineted bookcases. He was having trouble processing any of what he had seen in the forest clearing; it seemed too much like a dream. His mind was bending in ways he didn’t like at all. “How is this happening?” he demanded of Selena. “What happened?”
Selena lowered herself to a love seat. Her face looked drawn. “I suppose the easiest way to explain it is that Tanith removed herself from her own body so that Erin’s spirit could come into it and use it to talk to us. It’s channeling. Tanith has a facility for it. She allowed herself to be possessed by spirits at an early age and that makes her able to channel now . . . thankfully more judiciously, these days.”
“Channeling Erin’s spirit,” Garrett said flatly, shaking his head.
“Yes. Erin is trapped between this world and the next. This man you seek has bound her soul to what he has kept of her body so that he can use the power of her spirit for his own purposes.”
Garrett didn’t believe a word of it. But the heads . . . he kept the heads.
He asked the first thing that came to mind. “She sounded afraid. Why is she so afraid of him if she’s dead?”
Selena shook her head. “She knows not what she is. Part of her believes she’s alive. She is in a dark and miserable place, with no peace, no light, no love, only a living presence of hatred and terror.”
“Purgatory,” Garrett said involuntarily, and then wondered where the hell the thought had come from. He had not been to mass in ages.
Selena smiled at him fleetingly. “Indeed.” Then her face grew grave again. “That’s why it’s essential that she be freed—she and the rest.”
Garrett felt everything in him rebelling against what she was saying. “I only care about what’s real,” he said roughly. “She—Tanith—said some things. Descriptions. An empty space. A barn with glass everywhere.”
“Do you know it?” Selena said, suddenly keen.
Garrett paused, his mind racing. There was something familiar about it, something he felt he should be able to place, maddeningly elusive. He shook his head, frustrated. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
Despite her obvious exhaustion, Selena rose to her feet. “You need to know this, about Samhain—”
“It’s Halloween,” Garrett said, not wanting to use the witch words. “She already told me. Tomorrow.” Or was it already after midnight? he wondered with a chill.
“It’s more than a holy day, though,” Selena said. “You must understand this. It’s the most powerful night of the year, the night that the door opens between this world and the next. That is when—that monster—thinks he can let the demon through. He will do his magic on Samhain’s eve, and he will kill to do it.” She stopped her nervous pacing and faced Garrett directly. “But it is also the night when all souls who have passed during the year move from this world to the next. The door opens and spirits can depart—or come through. That means it is the night when the souls of those children he holds captive can most easily be freed to go on to the next world.”
Garrett felt every logical thought in him rebelling against what she was saying. “I can’t do anything for the dead,” he exploded. “If I’m supposed to believe all this, he’s about to kill three other people. I need details. I need something real.” Selena had stopped still, and was regarding him quietly. He fought to compose himself, looked toward the door behind which Tanith lay asleep. “Will she remember any of—that?”
Selena gave him a veiled look. “She may, or not.”
“Wake her, then.”
Selena stiffened. “She’s exhausted. You don’t understand the ordeal—”
Garrett rode over her. “I understand that if you’re telling the truth, if any of this is real, then three more kids are going to die tomorrow. So wake her or I will.”
Selena gave him a look that would melt steel, but she rose and crossed to the door. She stopped in front of it and pushed it open.
Garrett strode past her into the room—and stopped in his tracks.
The room was empty. Tanith was gone.