Alexandra Sokoloff - Book of Shadows

It was an eerie, dead place, with withered vines and blackened plants and flowers—not just dry and dead; they’d been burned.

Choronzon…

No, an effect. It’s an effect.

But the effect meant that McKenna had been there.

Garrett’s grip tightened on his Glock. Instinctively he understood that for his purposes the killer would need more darkness than this wing of the greenhouse afforded. Garrett started down a long plant-lined aisle toward the wooden inner building, his whole body tense with listening and looking.

The greenhouse was quiet; Garrett’s own breathing sounded magnified to him, labored. Then he heard rustling to the right of him. He spun, leveling the Glock.

On the table beside him, a row of green plants was withering in front of his eyes, shriveling and curling and blackening.

Garrett’s pulse spiked with shock and disbelief. There was a whispering all around him, like the sound of voices overlapping.

This can’t be happening…

And then he realized.

The dust cloud when he’d dropped from the window. There was some powder on the floor beside the windows. A hallucinogen.

He had a sudden flash of Landauer, frothing and raving and shrieking.

The demon causes mental chaos.

He forced himself away from the thought, forced himself to focus, take inventory through the wild pounding of his blood in his veins.

How bad am I?

There was a faint glow around the shapes of plants around him. The door in front of him seemed ever so slightly to be breathing.

Garrett had once done psilocybin mushrooms as a college student—it had been a reckless night, and recklessly he’d said yes to the drug that another student had offered him at a party.

The effects he was experiencing were like that trippy night: slightly off from reality. Physically he felt queasy, but not incapacitated. He took several strides toward the door, partly to see if he could… and found his legs were functioning adequately, although there was a heaviness to his limbs that was worrisome. The situation was not ideal.

He moved forward and leaned to listen at the door without touching it… and thought he heard a human whimpering.

He stepped back and lifted a leg and kicked open the inner door.

He darted through it, leading with his weapon and shouting, “Police!” Simultaneously a powder exploded from the top of the door, a pale cloud of granules, drifting down.

Garrett ducked away, covering his face with his sleeve, trying not to breathe.

He had just time to see a triangle inscribed on the floor in powder, gleaming whitely, and candles flickering at the three points—

Then something heavy came down on his head and everything went black.

He woke to a breath of air, like touch, gentle, urgent, and a voice whispering in his head.

Garrett. Wake up. You have to come around.

He forced his eyes open—it was an effort; they were crusty and gummy. His head was throbbing. He tried to sit up, but found he could not move. He flexed wrists, and then ankles, and realized he was bound. He could smell her, though, the scent of apple musk.

He blinked, staring through the dark—and suddenly Tanith knelt on the dirt floor beside him. Her skin glowed as if it were lit from within, and he started… then realized he was tripping; he could feel the drug roller-coastering in his veins, the lurching feeling of nausea. He swallowed and tried to focus. She seemed insubstantial, not merely glowing, but nearly transparent—but that was the drug, wasn’t it, he was still hallucinating?

Untie me, he said, but heard no words.

She shook her head. I’m not here.

Garrett blinked, and tried to process. She was speaking, but not speaking; the voice was inside his head.

There are three kids in there; he has them trussed like you are now. Can you stand?

He opened his mouth to speak. No, she said sharply. Don’t answer aloud, just tell me.

Drugged… he managed. It seemed a great effort to form the word in his mind.

I know. And your gun is gone.

Garrett’s stomach dropped, and his pulse rate shot up, which brought on another wave of nausea, and a rush of colors, but she was speaking, and he tried to focus. He could feel the Taser was gone from his pocket, too.

There is a nail, in the wall behind you. Can you sit up?

Garrett fought the nausea, and jerked himself upright. In that sitting position he swayed, and fell back against the wall, wincing at the hollow thud he made, not because of the pain, but because of the sound.

He used his fingers to feel along the wall behind him and found it, a bent nail, rusty, protruding.

Hurry, she said, and faded away.

He felt the edges of the nail, getting a sense of it, and then began to saw the rope against it.

The barnlike inner room had no windows, no glass at all; it was a light-controlled space. Outside, the night had darkened, the moon was hidden behind the storm clouds, and the clouds finally dumped their rain, a thundering, splashing roar on the panes of glass. Water cascaded down from numerous broken panes. Now the room was as dark as a cellar, with just faint outlines of illumination along cracks in the wood. The floor was dirt, and a large triangle was inscribed on the floor in some powdery substance, lime or concrete, faintly glowing. A huge triangle, at least fifteen feet at the base, and black candles lit and flickering in a circle around it.

A man sat on the dirt floor at the highest point of the triangle, but outside the faintly glowing lines, and he faced away from it. He was cross-legged, surrounded by more fat black candles, and he sat in front of a large upright piece of black glass, at least five feet by five feet. He stared into it with fixed and dilated eyes and chanted, an ominous and repetitive muttering.

At the edge of the room, beside the door, Garrett stood perfectly still, not breathing, his eyes locked on the man. Thanks to the muffled roar of the rain outside, he had gotten through the broken inner door without drawing attention to himself, though now that he was in he realized that if the dark plate of glass had been a real mirror, he would be visible to the man at the head of the triangle right now, and probably dead.

But the reflection in the glass was so dark—just a faint glimmering of the candles and the insubstantial outline of the man… that Garrett realized it couldn’t be a mirror, but something else. And that meant perhaps the killer might not be able to see him. Certainly he was deep into whatever bizarre meditation he was engaged in.

The sick-sweet smell of incense wafted from the altar and various other points around the triangle; the smoke drifted in the candlelight, swirling in eddies with the drafts. Outside, the wind was a dull roaring that shook the building.

The man at the point of the triangle— McKenna —was dressed in a black robe and his crossed feet were bare. He had unkempt, bushy hair, a beard covering most of his face.

Garrett’s quick assessment was that he was medium-sized but powerfully built. A lethal-looking double-edged sword lay across his knees. And he has your weapon, Garrett reminded himself grimly. Within reach somewhere .

The bearded man stared into the black glass and muttered to himself, a barely audible chanting that sounded vaguely Latin, though Garrett could recognize no words from the old-style masses his mother had dragged him to.

Garrett’s eyes quickly scanned the huge, dark room.

There were familiar dark smears on the wall, the sigils of Choronzon: 333 and the three triangles. Above him, veils of cobwebs hung from the rafters and Garrett saw gleaming red eyes watching him from the silk strands. Hallucination, he reminded himself.