Alexandra Sokoloff - Book of Shadows

Garrett didn’t know what he could reasonably expect to find there. But he could not forget the words of whoever or whatever had been speaking to him that night in Tanith’s candlelit circle, the words that had been tormenting him since that unnerving night:

“ There is a watcher in the park.”

Is.

He reached the bench—Amber’s bench—and half fell onto it, slumping back as if the walk had been an effort. Although he couldn’t see them he was weirdly aware of the burned footprints right behind him; he didn’t like having his back to them.

The demon blasts the flowers of the field…

He stared up through the moonlight at the stained angel, as Amber must have done a hundred times before.

In his mind he saw again the circle in the candlelight, Tanith’s bottomless eyes as she croaked at him in that inhuman voice: “There is a watcher in the park…”

Then he felt the same prickling on the back of his neck, and every sense suddenly sprang to alert. There was someone behind him.

Garrett stayed slumped in position, barely breathing. And then in one move he stood and twisted around to look behind him.

A huge dark shadow moved beside the gnarled tree. Garrett’s pulse skyrocketed as he spotted the shadowy figure. Undeniably real. He reached for his holster and drew his weapon and shouted, “Police, don’t move!”

The shadow took off running—big, bulky, silent. It bolted toward the perimeter of the park, darting through the parched bushes. Garrett took off running after it. It was a stretch that he had any cause for pursuit—loitering, maybe, trespassing—but he’d think about that later.

For the size and bulk of the fleeing man, he was amazingly fast and light on his feet. Garrett was panting by the time he’d dodged through the dry and browning hedges and reached the sidewalk. The hulking shadow had disappeared; there was no movement Garrett could see. He spun around, scanning the dark…

…and across the street he spotted a black shape squeezing itself through a gap in the green plastic fencing blocking off the front of the construction site, surrounding the skeleton of the building. Now his suspect was trespassing, and that was cause enough. Garrett pulled himself upright and darted across the street in pursuit. As he ran he grabbed for the cell phone in his pants pocket and hit speed-dial for Emergency Dispatch. He barked into the phone, “Detective Garrett in foot pursuit southbound Tremont and Washington.” He sucked in air, stopped on the sidewalk, and searched for an address on the curb of the site. “Suspect trespassing at 93 Tremont, wanted for questioning in homicide. Suspect African-American male, six-four, heavyset, dark parka and pants.”

He heard the response, “Copy, Detective Garrett,” and shoved the phone back in his pocket as he stopped on the sidewalk in front of the green fencing, quickly calculating. He knew units were already on their way, but the watcher could be through the skeleton of the building and out the other side in just minutes.

It was his least favorite type of situation because there was no way of seeing what was beyond the fence; the watcher could be right on the other side of the gap, with any kind of weapon at all.

Garrett gasped in a centering breath and stepped up to the gap in the sagging fence. He grabbed the edge of the plastic and stuck both his weapon and his face halfway through the gap.

His heart was pounding out of control as he blinked rapidly to adjust to the darkness.

He was looking in on the skeletal structure of the building: a raw concrete floor, metal piers, scattered sawhorses, vast empty spaces. There was no sign of the hulking dark shape.

Garrett slipped through the gap in the green fencing, noting that it had been pulled off the pole; someone was using this gap as a thoroughfare. He moved across the concrete floor into the cavernous building.

There was a stark, luminous quality to the space; the ambient light from outside streetlamps caught the pale of the cement flooring and made it glow like marble. Metal slugs were scattered on the floor like silver coins, and the whole floor was coated with white, powdery cement dust. And as Garrett looked at the slugs, he spotted a trail of footprints in the cement dust: huge, blurry footsteps that reminded him queasily of the burned footprints in the wild-flowers. He tightened his grip on his Glock and moved forward, following the prints.

He stared into the darkness… and saw a large chunk of darkness shift. He had a sudden mental flash of reptilian jaws, scaly skin, basilisk eyes: images from the paintings Tanith had shown him. Nightmare images.

He banished the thought and yelled again, “Police! Don’t move!”

The dark hulk scuttled into the shadows again and disappeared.

And before his eyes, Garrett saw the wall in front of him ripple like water. He froze, his mind for a moment unable to comprehend what he was seeing. Then he realized the rippling wall was opaque plastic sheeting, draped from ceiling to floor and blowing slightly in the wind. He clenched his jaw and moved forward, pulled the plastic back to enter.

Garrett smelled him first: a rank stink of sweat, urine, garbage, every combination of filth. He had just a glimpse of a metal shopping cart parked at the wall, filled with white plastic carrier bags, double-bagged and tied around pouches of—stuff. And then he saw his suspect: a huge dark mass barreling straight at him, and raving at the top of his lungs: “Current status in static! Chaos! Chaos in the current! Disperse diverse diversion. Beee-eep. Bee-eep. WHOOO!”

Garrett responded entirely by instinct; as the dark mass hurtled toward him, he stepped aside and stuck out his foot to trip him—and as his attacker stumbled Garrett lunged at him with his full body weight and tackled him. The man fell and Garrett fell with him, landing flat on top of him. It was like crashing into a garbage heap; his fall was cushioned by the man’s bulk, but the stink was overpowering. The big man jerked and bucked. Garrett kneed his attacker in the back, wrestled for the man’s beefy arms, and managed to slap a cuff on his substantial wrist, then jerked the other arm behind him to cuff the other wrist. The huge man beneath him was howling now, an animal sound, mixed with sobbing. His bare brown feet, blackened with filth, kicked the pavement in helpless rage.

Garrett scrambled to his feet, tried to breathe through his mouth to minimize the assault on his olfactory glands, and planted his shoe firmly on the back of the man’s neck. Somewhere on the streets outside, Garrett could hear the wail of sirens. Beneath him, the dirty man continued his raving.

“Don’t hurt! Danger! Dragons in the current. Don’t look! Don’t hurt! Nooo!”

The patrolmen who assisted Garrett in leading his collar to the squad car were no more happy with this particular job than Garrett was; he noticed one of the young uniforms fighting not to gag at the smell emanating from the huge man. The other uniform, stronger-stomached, muttered, “Get the gas mask,” under his breath. The collar, an African-American male who looked to be in his early thirties, was six feet four if he was an inch and nearly three hundred pounds, almost certainly schizophrenic at the very least and way off the meds—if he’d ever been on them. Garrett recognized the “word salad” aspect of his speech (and even without that the shoelessness and overall state of filth would have been a pretty good indicator). They had themselves a classic “dirty man,” one of the homeless chronic mentally ill who lived out of grocery carts and garbage bags, and more often than not wore their entire meager wardrobe at once, at all times, winter, spring, or summer. The parka and frayed cuffs and blackened feet were pathetically characteristic.