Alexandra Sokoloff - Book of Shadows

There were more documents, and Garrett had no doubt as to their authenticity; there was no more meticulous researcher than Carolyn. And he, of course, had never bothered to check. He felt sick, betrayed—and more than that, like a complete and utter fool.

The phone buzzed on his desk, and he reached for it. “Garrett,” he said, his voice hollow.

“Got that analysis for you, chief,” Warren Tufts said on the other end. Garrett sat up straighter, but he knew what Tufts was going to say next. “You were right on the money. The wine in that glass was laced. Atropine.”

Landauer met him in the smoky dark of the Hibernian, with its polished and endless bar and Irish soundtrack, and there were no “I told you so’s,” no recriminations, only the warm and hulking presence of a partner and friend. Of course, Garrett was fairly certain Land had told Carolyn about Tanith to begin with, but that was for his own good, obviously saving him from himself.

“She was running a phony fortune-telling business, swindled people out of their money. Then a complete mental collapse, institutionalization, delusions, schizophrenia… she’s as loony as Moncrief.” Garrett swallowed the rest of his Jameson’s, chased it with a Harp, and nodded to the bartender for more. “I’ve been a total ass.” He was aware he was slurring.

“You’re always a total ass, Rhett,” Landauer said, and Garrett knew he was forgiven. Garrett was not about to be so kind to himself. He spoke harshly.

“She dosed me with belladonna last night.”

Landauer looked at him over his beer. “No shit? How was it?”

Garrett gave him a thin smile “I feel like I was hit by a T. But last night… it was wild. Hallucinations…” He trailed off as memories of sex, of flight, raced through him… then the image of the Camaro, the dark shadow of the man, the shadow’s sudden flight. “It felt wicked real.”

The bartender brought their next round and Garrett swallowed his whole. The lights blurred to a comfortable haze around him. “Here’s the thing,” he said slowly, so there would be minimal slurring. “Belladonna. She’s working so hard to get this kid Jason out, you know what I’m saying? Do you think she’s in on it? He got the drug from her; they’re using these girls for some rituals…” He suddenly remembered. “There was a girl—same age as Erin—in her shop. Fuck knows what all she’s in to.” He slammed his hand on the bar.

Landauer looked him over. His face was red from the whiskey, but his eyes were still focused and sharp. “Yeah, she played you good, bro. And maybe her head’s not screwed on so tight. But murder? There’s a difference between kinky and hinky.”

Garrett felt himself swaying on the bar stool. “Dunno…” he muttered. Suddenly Landauer’s hand was under his arm, and he realized that his partner had just barely stopped him from falling off the seat.

“I’m driving you home, Rhett. You sleep this one off and we’ll talk in the morning.”

Whiskey on top of belladonna did not turn out to be the happiest of combinations. Sometime during a brutal night Garrett woke from an instantly forgotten nightmare to find himself drenched in sweat, his head and throat burning up. He threw off his sheets and lay back with his head throbbing, feeling as if the bed were rocking.

Flying…

He licked sweat from his lips, wondering if he had it in him to make it to the bathroom for water.

And then he heard movement in the living room.

Adrenaline shot through him and he sat up, straining to hear.

Silence… nothing but the sense of presence…

…and then the slow scrape of wood against wood…

A window?

Garrett reached to his bed stand, eased open the drawer, and withdrew his Glock.

He stood noiselessly… and had to brace himself against the wave of dizziness. He felt weightless, incorporeal. Every muscle in his body was tensed as he moved naked to the bedroom door and put his head against the door frame to look out into the hall.

Pitch-black and no sound.

Garrett barely breathed.

There was no stirring from the living room—only that certainty of presence.

Garrett slipped through the doorway and eased into the hall, one slow barefoot step in front of the other on the hardwood floor. His heart was racing, his mouth dry as dust.

At the end of the hallway he pressed his back against the wall and listened. Nothing.

Slowly, slowly, he peered around the corner… and his eyes widened.

The living room was dark and empty—but all the windows were wide open. The curtains billowed, breathing at the frames. Garrett spun to the front door. It, too, was open into the night.

There was a sound behind him and Garrett twisted around again, his weapon aimed in front of him—

Tanith stood on the other side of the room, naked, perfect body gleaming in the moonlight, her dark hair spilled around her shoulders—

She held a large book open in her hands, offering it to him…

And behind her in the window, yellow eyes gleamed in the darkness—then leapt forward… a dark, thick hulk, hurtling toward him… and the leathery shape of wings…

Garrett jerked upright.

He was in bed, in the dark, in a cold sweat.

Alone.

Garrett had never before, in any way, experienced any doubts about reality. The very idea that reality could be in question had never occurred to him. He found himself now in a profound state of unsettlement, something he didn’t like at all.

He circled his living room in the subdued light of dawn, checking the windows and door again. They were all locked, as they had been since he’d awakened.

You were drugged. Get over it, he ordered himself as he poured and drank cup after cup of coffee, alternating with whole bottles of water at a time, hoping to flush the residuals of the psychotropic from his system.

And possibly it was more than the drugs. The woman is an expert hypnotist. If she could do what she did with the Dragon Man, she could induce hallucinations. Or memories, even.

So his mind said. His body, though… his body felt as sore as if…

As if he had flown.

It felt real. It all feels real.

When the night’s dream stubbornly refused to fade from his mind, he sat down at his computer and Googled “atropine” and “belladonna.”

After a half hour of clicking through articles, he sat back in his chair, limp with relief. Every personal and medical account he’d read of experiences with belladonna reported the same symptoms: hallucinations of flying so real that at the time the subject was convinced that he or she had actually flown. He had also found an article documenting the use of belladonna in a ritual known as sex magick, in which orgasm was the trigger for hallucinatoric flight.

“Nothing but drugs,” Garrett muttered, his voice sounding hollow.

And yet, the Camaro. There was something about it that gnawed at him. It had seemed, in a hallucination of hyper-clarity, particularly real, and significant.

Look, Tanith’s voice whispered in his mind, and he felt the sound in his whole body.

He swiveled in his chair, rotating away from the desk. The chair came to a slow stop, facing the dining-room table.

And the murder book.

Tanith standing naked in the moonlight, holding the open book out toward him…

Garrett stood and crossed to the book. He opened the stiff blue cover, flipped through pages—and stopped on a witness report from the landfill, the list of makes and models of cars that the landfill’s office manager had made.

Garrett scanned the list, and his index finger stopped on a line.