Alexandra Sokoloff - Book of Shadows

He glanced to his right and his heart lurched. On a crude altar, three leathery heads were lined up, with lit black candles sizzling wax around and between them. They were pasty and unreal, they looked fake, but didn’t feel fake, and Garrett knew they were not. Two were barely recognizable as female; one had Erin Carmody’s long blond hair; the other the waifish dark hair of Amber Bright. The other was vaguely male, from the angularity of the features.

Garrett felt a surge of fury, and tried to breathe in quietly to control himself. Lose it now and you lose everything.

He stood as still as a statue and continued to take visual inventory. Across the triangle from the altar with the three heads was another altar, lit by a candle the holder of which made Garrett’s stomach turn again: another shriveled, waxen hand. A large book lay open on the center of the altar, with the rough pages Garrett recognized now as handmade, hand-bound: grimoire pages. The drugs made the pages appear to glow with a sickly pallor, the glow undulating upward like the heat from a candle flame.

Garrett’s eyes widened as he took in the other items on the altar: a chalice—and a dagger, a shining eight-inch blade. So far his best chance at a weapon. But the altar was a good twenty feet from him, and the cross-legged man with the sword was only five feet from it. Garrett would never make it.

He held the thought of the dagger in his head and shifted his eyes to the phosphorescent triangle in the center of the floor, and of all the things he had seen so far, this sent his stomach plummeting. At each point of the triangle, a human body lay, each wrapped in coils and coils of rope, looking sickly like huge insects caught in spiderwebbing. All three were so still Garrett felt a stab of fear that he had arrived too late.

But then he saw one shift slightly and moan…

A small swirl of dust started at one of the points of the triangle. At first Garrett thought it was a breeze, but then a second began, and then a third, three dust devils rising at the points of the triangle.

McKenna’s chanting grew louder, with a note of triumph. “Choronzon, acerbus et ingens! Cede pectares alere flamman tuam. Ab Choronzon principium. Do et dus—”

And the altar with the grimoire began to shake. A candle flipped over and thudded to the dirt floor. And then the entire altar slid four feet through the dirt, with a powdery scraping sound.

Garrett looked toward the dark mirror and froze. There was an insubstantial shape taking form, the outlines blurry but disturbing, behind the flickering reflections of the candles. First just a pale shape with dark crevasses of eyes… eyes that were living black holes. Then the paleness began taking form.

I’m not seeing this. It’s the drugs, Garrett told himself, but his legs felt like water and he was unable to look away.

The face in the black glass was ivory, discolored as aged teeth; a skin leached of life; like a corpse, like a mummy. A feral, triangular head with a long narrow jaw, bony ridges above the eyes, and something like a ridge on the top, something spiny and inhuman… but it was no animal; there was a savage intelligence in the black eyes, in the snarled set of the jaw. The mouth was maybe the most frightening… it seemed either snaggle-toothed, or as if the mouth had been stitched together in crude, wide, triangular stitches and then ripped open in a gaping death’s-head grimace.

It was huge, the face, at least three feet across, and the contours of the body were rapidly filling the entire five-by-five glass, the shape becoming clear. It was powerful, like a lynx, but bigger, horribly bigger, and it was crouched on haunches with talons extended—and as Garrett watched in paralyzed disbelief, it sprung, like a tidal wave of black water.

The shape was in the triangle now, a savage thing with red and demonic eyes.

Hairy, yet naked. Human, yet monstrous. Insubstantial, but vibrating with power. Yellowed fangs and lolling tongue.

Garrett felt a drowsy, paralytic terror, felt his mind shudder with denial.

McKenna leapt to his feet and spun, holding the sword up in his two hands, and began to chant deliriously. “Choronzon, acerbus et ingens! Cede pectares alere flamman tuam. Do et dus. Date et dabitur vobis! Abyssus Abyssum invocat!”

The creature in the triangle threw its spiked head back and roared, a sound that ripped through Garrett’s whole being, in its wrongness, its essential negation. It strode on clawed feet toward the man in the robe but when it reached the phosphorescent line of the triangle, blue sparks flew from its hide and it roared in pain and rage. Garrett stood staring and stupefied, but then shouted at himself, It’s the drugs. You’re drugged.

The demon roared, a hideous snarl that sounded impossibly like infinite voices, layered on top of each other. “Otref coh sutcam eaem eugueailiamaf omod siem euqsirebil ihim suoitiporp snelov seis itu, rocerp seceprp sanob obdnevombo otref coh et!”

The killer stood above the first cocooned body with the sword and his voice was calculated, cunning, a question: “Date et debitur vobis?”

The demon snarled back in that impossible, layered voice: “Otref coh et!”

The killer raised the sword above the first webbed body, hilt clutched in both hands, about to plunge the blade.

At another point of the triangle, one of the bound kids came to life, thrashing in her trusses, and began to scream, a piercing, nerve-ripping sound. The thing in the triangle opened its jaws in a yawning growl of pleasure…

Garrett seized that distraction and ran headlong for the altar, pounding in the dust. He lunged past candles, sending them flying, but as his fingers reached for the dagger, McKenna spun and was upon him, brandishing the sword, bringing it down with a snarl of rage. Garrett let McKenna begin the swing and then viciously kicked out at his knee and connected. McKenna roared in pain and the sword crashed down into the altar instead.

Candles fell against the wall, black wax sizzling and splashing. The dry wood went up like tinder, flames licking up the walls, an orange glow. Behind them in the triangle, the demon shrieked, a hundred savage layered cries.

Garrett lurched for the splintered altar and grabbed the dagger, and while McKenna struggled to pull the sword from the wooden altar, Garrett whipped around and thrust the blade into McKenna’s throat.

McKenna dropped to his knees, gagging hoarsely, eyes wide and staring as he clutched at his neck. Blood seeped from between his fingers. Behind them, the unearthly thing in the triangle paced and snarled, but did not move beyond the gleaming white lines… McKenna collapsed onto the packed dirt, convulsing…

Then Garrett felt screaming inside his own mind as the eyes of the first head on the altar opened and looked at him, then the next, then the next, until all three were staring with filmy, black gazes. The dead mouths opened and mouthed words, without vocal cords, voiceless. But Garrett heard them anyway: Help. Help. Help.

And as the thing in the triangle turned toward Garrett, with jagged teeth bared and red eyes glowing, McKenna rose to his knees, blood pouring from around the dagger stuck in his throat. But Garrett had heard the death rattle, the gag of breath; he could smell the stink of his evacuated bladder and bowels.

He’s dead, Garrett’s mind shouted… but McKenna kept coming, a shuffling stagger, lifting the sword.

Then there was a breath of wind, so soft it might have been a dream.

And behind McKenna, Garrett saw Tanith in the black mirror, standing pale and shimmering, with her arms raised. Three insubstantial wisps surrounded her, swirling and circling, as if drawn to her light. She stood and chanted, and Garrett saw the world open, a black universe of night, that shuddered and separated into dark and light. The three wisps swirled up and toward the light. Inside the triangle, the demon shrieked in rage. It crouched, coiling into itself, and pounced at the glass, toward Tanith. It hit hard and bounced back off it as if it had tried to charge a closed door.