Alexandra Sokoloff - Book of Shadows

Malloy interrupted him again. “All you have is speculation. Work the cases, Detectives. No assumptions. And I don’t want to see any premature speculation in the media. This will not turn into a circus, do you understand me?”

“Understood,” Landauer said stiffly.

Garrett escaped the room to the corridor. He felt wrung out by the meeting, but when he heard the clicking of high heels on the floor behind him he knew the ordeal wasn’t over. He turned to see Carolyn striding toward him.

“What are you trying to do?” It was rage in her voice—quiet, controlled, checked—but rage nonetheless.

“I’m trying to make sure we have the right guy locked up. I’m trying to make sure the real killer isn’t still out there. I’m trying to do my job,” Garrett said evenly.

“Don’t you dare suggest that I’m not,” she said, with that tightly reined anger.

“I would never do that,” Garrett said.

She walked a few paces in agitation. “I just don’t understand where this is coming from. We have a perfect case.”

Garrett summoned all the calm he had. “But what if it’s wrong? These are seventeen-, eighteen-year-old girls being killed, Carolyn. All I want is the right guy off the street.”

“No matter what it does to us?” Her emphasis was slightly on the “us.”

He felt a sick twist in his stomach. “I hope I just heard you wrong,” he said softly.

She shook her head in sheer disbelief. “I don’t think I know you at all.”

“Maybe you just never bothered to look,” he said, staring into her face. Her eyes widened… and then narrowed in fury. But Garrett no longer cared. He turned to walk away from her. As he reached for the handle of the EXIT door, he saw Landauer standing at the end of the corridor, watching them.

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—”