Alexandra Sokoloff - Book of Shadows

He grabbed her other wrist and held her, struggling, against him. He spoke beside her cheek. “I found Amber. Her body was sunk into the Fort Point Channel, on a chain. He has her head.”

Tanith stiffened in his arms. In the candlelit silence, their hearts pounded against each other.

“Jason didn’t kill her, then,” she gasped, in what sounded like triumph.

Garrett tensed. “Why do you say that?”

“You know it—” She tried to pull away from him and he held her firm.

“That won’t free him. No one will believe it. There’s no establishing time of death. The decomposition is too advanced.”

She stared at him in shock and fury. Then she pushed him away with a strength that startled him. She circled the floor in the flickering candlelight, breathing hard, not looking at him.

He watched her, saw her trembling. “What is this kid to you? Why do you care?”

She didn’t answer, but suddenly veered to the cabinet against the wall and pulled the door open, to take out a decanter of wine and two goblets.

She set them on the altar and looked at him. “Are we going to talk, now, Garrett? Then why don’t we get comfortable?” She poured both glasses full and extended one to him. He stared at her, not taking it.

“Oh, please, you’ve already had a few, haven’t you?”

“Why do you care?” he asked again.

She lifted the glass and drank it down. She wiped the red from her lips with the back of her hand, a gesture that sent flames racing through Garrett’s body. She filled the glass again, then picked up both glasses and walked to him deliberately, extending one. He took the glass without drinking.

“Why are you helping him?”

“Because he didn’t do it.” She drank again, her eyes challenging him, and he lifted his own glass to his lips and drank, too. The wine was spicy and complex, a welcome rush of heat.

He lowered the glass and looked down at her. “Why did you lie?”

“Why are you lying?” she answered back, and drank again, then stepped forward to him, extending the bottle. To his surprise, the glass in his hand was already empty. She reached to fill it. “You know it’s true. You know he didn’t do it.”

“You have no idea what I think—”

“I do. Because I read your mind,” she flung at him.

“Stop it.” He clasped his hand around her arm. “No games.”

She leaned forward against him and put her lips to his hair. “No games like breaking and entering, Detective ?” He could feel her breath in his ear and his cock leapt to life, hardened to stone. “What game would you prefer?” she whispered. And then he was pulling her against him and his mouth was on hers. Her lips were sweet under the bite of wine, and soft, and luscious… She opened her mouth under his and sighed and fire shot through him as their bodies ground against each other. She put her hands under his sweater and found bare skin; her fingers moved on his abdomen, rippling the muscles of his stomach as she touched him, moving lower… stroking him… his mind was a dark rush of lust. She pulled back from him, gasping, and he seized her again and she jerked against his hold, deliberately off-balancing him so they staggered to the floor. He was on her, then, and her legs were wrapping around him and his tongue was in her mouth and she was pulling off his sweater, ripping at his shirt; he could hear buttons popping and rolling on the floor and then he forgot everything when he felt her hands on his stomach again, pulling open his pants and sliding her fingers inside and down, stroking the hard aching length of him.

He ripped open the buttons on her tight vest and sunk his mouth into her breasts, licking and sucking as she tipped her head back on the floor and shuddered, and he took her mouth again, devouring her. They struggled on the floor, half fighting, half kissing, in the center of the glowing circle, shedding clothes, finding skin.

He was huge, throbbing, as he slid into the hot core of her, and he moaned with the pleasure as she closed tightly around him. They rocked together, writhing naked in the pentagram, bodies locked in fury and ecstasy, waves of heat and cold breaking over them as they slammed into each other until he was shouting… searing heat and blinding white light flooding through him…

Below him her eyes flew open, dark as night, the pupils huge, and she was murmuring words he didn’t understand…

And then he saw her not below him, but floating above him, in the air, although he was still lying on top of her—and she reached down her hand and seized him and he felt himself pulling out of his body…

He was in the air with her… floating above their still and naked bodies.

Before he could comprehend what was happening there was a crack of thunder and a great wind, as if the storm had penetrated the walls, but not blowing at them, rather sucking them in…

And they were gone.

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.