Alexandra Sokoloff - Book of Shadows

June 21

August 1

September 21

“It was the same each time. A man in a ritual triangle, lit by fire, using a dagger to cut into the body of a—young person. And then picking up a sword…” She swallowed, looked away.

Garrett was unnerved. The dagger, the sword… it’s all so specific. He fought for objectivity. “So if you ‘dreamed’ this before, why is this the first time we’re hearing about it?”

“It’s not,” she said. There was ice in her voice. “The first time, I hoped it was just a dream. The second time I knew it wasn’t, and I called here—the police station. I was told no such killings had occurred. This time—when I saw the news—I came in.”

Garrett frowned and made a note on his pad to check tip calls made around the date she had listed.

“I wrote down the dreams each time. I made copies, if that’s of any use.” She reached into her large tooled leather purse and removed three photocopied sheets of paper. He took them, glanced through them. Short phrases, images, impressions: Fire. A shadow moves in the triangle. There were sketches, too: a triangle drawn in red, scribbled flames.

Garrett looked for a time at the triangle, and felt his stomach roil. A triangle. He didn’t like it. Not at all.

She was speaking and he looked up, was struck again by the startling blackness of her eyes.

“You need to know this. The dates are significant. They’re Sabbats—holy days in the pagan calendar. June twenty-first—the summer solstice. August first—Lammas. Friday night, September twenty-second, was Mabon, the autumnal equinox. The next Sabbat is five weeks away, and it’s the most powerful of the year…” She paused and said a word that sounded like “Sowwen.”

Garrett frowned. “Spell that?”

A look that might have been irritation crossed her face. She leaned over the desk and wrote on his pad. He smelled apple musk in her hair and heat shot through his groin. She straightened, turned the pad around to face him. He forced himself to look at the page in front of him. The word was Samhain— the word he’d seen on the banner at Cauldron.

“Halloween, to you,” she said drily. “It’s the festival marking the end of summer and the beginning of winter. The Sabbats are power days, best for working rituals. And Samhain is the most powerful night of the year. So if he’s conjuring, which I think he is, whatever he’s doing will have the most powerful effect on that night. And that’s not good.”

Garrett felt his sleeplessness like an undertow. None of this was sounding real at all. He had a sudden wave of paranoia that the dark woman was just playing with them… and then another wave that there was something huge that he was overlooking, something dangerous.

At the other desk, Landauer suddenly leaned forward, with exaggerated interest and what Garrett recognized as an ominously friendly tone in his voice.

“So… you’re in a coven?”

The dark woman—Tanith—glanced at the larger detective. “No. I don’t like people much. I’m a solitary.”

“A solitary… witch.”

“Yes.”

Landauer leaned back in his chair, and it creaked under his weight. “Show us.”

She turned and looked at him full on, and her eyes were ice. “Show you what?”

The big detective spread his hands jovially. “Show us some magic. Put a spell on me.”

Garrett was about to protest, break it up, but something in the witch’s face kept him quiet. She was so still Garrett found he couldn’t breathe, himself. Then she walked three steps to Landauer’s desk and picked up his left hand. Landauer was startled, but quickly forced a neutral look onto his face. She turned his hand over and stared into his palm. Something unreadable flickered in her expression. She picked up his other hand and examined that one. Garrett was amused to see his partner squirm.

She released both of Landauer’s hands, then reached into the front of her blouse and drew out the long silver chain she wore around her neck.

The chain held a perfect, handmade three-inch silver dagger, with gemstones glittering in its hilt.

Tanith pulled the chain over her head in one smooth gesture. She stared down at Landauer, her eyes locked on his, and used the dagger to slice open her left middle finger. Blood dripped from the slash. She extended the finger to Landauer—a classic, deliberate fuck-you gesture—and said, “Suck it.”

Landauer looked up at her, stupefied. “Wha…” He didn’t move. Garrett felt himself riveted.

“You heard me,” she said with an uneven smile, and in that moment Garrett thought she did not look quite sane. “Are you afraid?”

Landauer recovered his bravado. He took her extended hand with a smirk and lewdly closed his mouth around her finger, used his tongue to lick sloppily at the blood. Garrett felt himself bristling with a jealous possessiveness that he couldn’t have explained to himself. Across the room, Palmer and Morelli were frozen at their desks, openly gaping at the sight.

Tanith stood with her legs braced until Landauer had completed his big show of sucking off her finger, and released her hand. She let her arm drop to her side. “You’re done,” she said flatly.

Garrett didn’t miss the brief, jolted look on his partner’s face. He felt distinctly odd, himself.

Tanith wiped the bloody dagger off on the waistband of her skirt, put the chain back over her head, and dropped the knife back into her shirt, between her breasts. She turned to Garrett. “I take it we’re finished, here.”

“Thanks for coming in,” Garrett fumbled, still not sure what in Christ’s holy name had just happened. “I—we’ll call you if we have questions.”

Her smile twisted. “Of course you will.” She gathered her bag from the chair… then she turned back, and her eyes met his for a brief, veiled moment.

“Do you believe in evil, Detective?”

The question so startled him that he answered honestly. “Yes, I do.”

She touched her finger to the triangle sketch she had given him, and held his gaze. “This is evil.”

She turned and walked out through the work pods, with every detective’s eyes following her.

No sooner had the door closed behind her than Landauer threw back his head and wolf-howled. “She can ride my broomstick anytime.”

Morelli and Palmer chuckled lewdly from behind their desks, and the tension was broken. Garrett fought down irritation, shook his head. “I have two words. Blood test.” Predictably his tone had no effect on the others; they continued to comment obnoxiously. Garrett tuned them out and looked down at his desk. The weird word stared up at him from his legal pad: Samhain .

Five weeks away…

He was tired… too tired to process what had just happened. But without thought he turned to his computer and typed “autumnal equinox” into the Google search box. He didn’t even have to click through a link to see that Friday had been the equinox, just as the—witch—had said.

But he went no farther than that. His phone buzzed, and it was Carolyn. The search warrants were ready.

The partners stopped briefly at the crime-scene lab to order a team with a van to meet them up at Amherst to process Jason’s and Erin’s rooms. In the elevator going down, both detectives slumped against the wall; Landauer closed his eyes. Garrett spoke aloud. “It was the equinox. Friday night.”

Land didn’t open his eyes. “I know, G. It was in the paper on Friday, on the Calendar page. That New Age shit always is. She coulda gotten it from there. She coulda gotten the details about the head and carving from the news, already—fuck knows what’s been reported. We had three dozen dump workers tellin’ their wives all about it last night. Everyone’s out to make a buck.”