Book of Shadows (38 page)

“Is that right?” Selena raised an eyebrow. “How interesting.”

“Is he real?” Garrett asked, in spite of himself.

Selena half smiled. “What is real?” Before Garrett could bristle, she relented and explained, “He is a fetch. A servitor. A fetch is a thought form created for a particular task. He was made of my intention, and your expectation. There are unformed energies in the other dimensions which are eager to interact with the world of humans, and those energies can take on a supplicant’s intention.” Her face shadowed. “Demons are much the same: dark energies that gain power with human intention.” She shook her head. “But the fetch—merely a playful energy. I must say I wasn’t expecting such a Shakespearean bent to you, Detective—it’s quite charming.”

She glanced toward the woods where the boy had disappeared, then back to Garrett, with an appraising look. “Odd, though. I didn’t summon him just then. Which means
you
must have.”

Before Garrett could begin to wrap his mind around that, Tanith spoke behind her. “We should start.” There was agitation in her voice.

“Yes,” Selena said, still looking at Garrett. “Let’s begin.”

They cast the circle together, Tanith on one side of the moonlit pool, Selena on the other. Garrett sat on a boulder by the side of the water, watching as the trees around them rippled in the soft wind, and beneath the moon they called on the four quarters, the Elements, the Watchtowers. Garrett had thought the ritual powerful when Tanith did it alone, but watching the two women together was a whole other dimension; the entire primeval life force of the forest seemed to be with them: wind, fire, water, earth.

Then Selena took a lit candle and walked around the pool three times, while Tanith stood still at the edge, her arms at her side, turned away from the water, face tipped to the moonlight, her body outlined against the fire. And when Selena completed the third circle, she stepped to Tanith and turned her toward the pool, then placed the candle in her hand. Tanith moved obediently, like a sleepwalker. Selena raised her hands to the moon.

“Hecate, Goddess, Mother Night, give thy daughter perfect sight. This water a window through which she can see . . . as I say, so mote it be.”

Tanith dropped to her knees beside the water with the candle clasped in her hands and stared into the dark shadow of her reflection.

Garrett suddenly recalled Tanith staring through the Plexiglas of the jail, at Jason’s silhouette, the two mirroring each other.

Beside the pool, Tanith reached one hand toward the water, toward her own pale reflection. And in his mind Garrett heard her words to Jason in the jail:
“I need you to help me now. I need you to be there tonight. You must bring her there, Jason.”

The older woman stood as if bracing herself against the wind, and spoke. “Erin Carmody, are you there? Erin, hear my voice and come to me. Come to the light I hold. We are here for you.”

The candle in Tanith’s hand flickered, reflected in the water . . . and Tanith reached down toward the pool, the hand of her reflection reaching up toward her . . . And as her fingertips touched her reflection, she closed her fingers, holding tightly . . .

Garrett watched, unnerved. Her arm stretched forward, as if someone were pulling her hand. She bent over at the waist, until she was folded over herself on the bank of the pool, her outstretched hand submerged in the water.

Tanith suddenly dropped the candle, jerked her hand out of the water, and sat bolt upright, as if she had been struck by lightning.

“Help me!”
she screamed, in a voice too light and high to be her own. Garrett recoiled with the shock of it.
“Help me!”

“Erin Carmody, hear me,” Selena commanded in a voice that brooked no argument. “We are here for you. We are here to help you.”

Tanith scrambled on the bank, her fingers digging into the earth at her sides; she was panting like a dog, her chest heaving, her eyes dilated with terror. “Help me help me help me help me—”

“We will come for you. We will come. You must tell us where you are. Erin. Do you hear me?”

“Dark. So dark, so dark. Can’t move. Scared. Scared.” Tanith writhed and scrabbled on the ground as if she were bound and fighting to escape. “Where are my hands? Where are my hands? Oh God oh God oh God . . .”

The young voice was shrill with panic. Garrett moved involuntarily toward the pool, toward Tanith, and Selena threw out a startlingly strong arm to block him. Garrett halted in his tracks, but just barely.

“Erin, open your eyes,” Selena commanded, her voice resonating in the night. “Open them and look. You must tell us what you see, so we can come for you. Tell us.”

On the ground, Tanith was hyperventilating, her breath coming in short, panicky gasps.

Selena’s voice cut through the firelit darkness. “Erin.
Erin
. Calm yourself. Focus on what you see. Tell me what you see.”

“Dark dark dark dark . . .”

“Focus in the dark. You can see. Tell me what you see. Tell me what you smell.”

“Blood,” came the voice. “Smells like blood. And dust, and fire. It smells like—garden.”

“Like garden,” Selena said sharply. “Like garden how?”

“Like moss,” the young voice said. “Like soil . . . potting . . . clay . . .”

“That’s good, Erin. That’s very good.” Selena darted a glance toward Garrett. “Now look. What do you see?”

“Big, dark, space. Glass. Glass everywhere. Big gray glass. Broken. Barn? Dirt, on the floor. Dirt floor. And a triangle in white,” the young voice said. In his own mind, Garrett saw the triangle in the dirt floor of that dank cellar, the altars with the heads . . .

Tanith’s breath shuddered in a gasp, and Garrett snapped back to the present. “Dead,” Tanith whispered. “Everything’s dead.”

“What is dead, Erin?” Selena asked from the circle.

“All the flowers . . . all the flowers are dead.”

Garrett felt a chill.
Choronzon. The sign of the demon.

Tanith whimpered deep in her throat, like an animal. “Bad. It’s bad.”

“Erin, tell me. Are you alone?”

Tanith shook her head rapidly and violently. “Three of us . . . so dark, so cold . . . And one warm one.”

Selena straightened. “A warm one . . . you mean, alive?”

Garrett felt a sick adrenaline charge. “A live one? What?”

Selena’s voice never rose. “Erin, there’s someone there with you?”

“Warm . . . warm . . . warm . . . He wants more.”

Garrett’s mind was spiraling, his thoughts out of control.
He’s already taken one? But it’s not time, they said we had more time . . .
Tanith suddenly writhed on the ground and screamed. “Coming! He’s coming . . .”

Selena planted herself in front of Tanith, a pillar of strength, speaking over her frantic screams. “Erin, we will come for you—”

The older woman suddenly gasped . . . and pulled back, as if resisting something. She held up her hands to the moon and recited quickly, “Back to your body, child of my heart. End this journey, return from the dark.”

Tanith’s body jerked on the ground and she sat straight up with a huge intake of air.

“Yes, child, yes.” Selena knelt on the wet leaves and took Tanith’s face in her hands. “You’re safe. You’re here.”

The wind rustled through the treetops, and Tanith collapsed in the older woman’s arms. Garrett stood in the whispering clearing, looking down at the two women embracing by the pool in the shimmering moonlight.

Tanith was out like a light—there was no rousing her. Though Selena insisted she was fine, just exhausted, Garrett knelt to check her pulse and eyes. She was breathing slowly, but steadily.

He had to carry her out of the forest, holding her to his chest again, Selena climbing carefully before them, leading him a shorter way back to the Explorer through the towering shadows and whispering leaves and redolent smells of cedar and pine.

“What if I hadn’t been here?” he demanded of the witch.

“But you are,” she said placidly, never faltering in her steady ascent.

Back at the Explorer, he lay Tanith in the backseat, with her head on Selena’s lap. “Your car . . .” he started.

“It’s taken care of.” Selena stroked Tanith’s hair.

Don’t tell me the Dragon Man is driving now,
he thought, but all he wanted to do was get out of the forest, back to the city, to the light, and find out what all this meant.

Back at Selena’s they settled Tanith on the sofa of a room he hadn’t seen before, a sitting room, and Selena beckoned him forward into the connecting room, a small library, and pulled the door not-quite-shut behind them.

Garrett paced amid the glass-cabineted bookcases. He was having trouble processing any of what he had seen in the forest clearing; it seemed too much like a dream. His mind was bending in ways he didn’t like at all. “How is this happening?” he demanded of Selena. “What happened?”

Selena lowered herself to a love seat. Her face looked drawn. “I suppose the easiest way to explain it is that Tanith removed herself from her own body so that Erin’s spirit could come into it and use it to talk to us. It’s channeling. Tanith has a facility for it. She allowed herself to be possessed by spirits at an early age and that makes her able to channel now . . . thankfully more judiciously, these days.”

“Channeling Erin’s spirit,” Garrett said flatly, shaking his head.

“Yes. Erin is trapped between this world and the next. This man you seek has bound her soul to what he has kept of her body so that he can use the power of her spirit for his own purposes.”

Garrett didn’t believe a word of it.
But the heads . . . he kept the heads.

He asked the first thing that came to mind. “She sounded afraid. Why is she so afraid of him if she’s dead?”

Selena shook her head. “She knows not what she is. Part of her believes she’s alive. She is in a dark and miserable place, with no peace, no light, no love, only a living presence of hatred and terror.”

“Purgatory,” Garrett said involuntarily, and then wondered where the hell the thought had come from. He had not been to mass in ages.

Selena smiled at him fleetingly. “Indeed.” Then her face grew grave again. “That’s why it’s essential that she be freed—she and the rest.”

Garrett felt everything in him rebelling against what she was saying. “I only care about what’s real,” he said roughly. “She—Tanith—said some things. Descriptions. An empty space. A barn with glass everywhere.”

“Do you know it?” Selena said, suddenly keen.

Garrett paused, his mind racing. There was something familiar about it, something he felt he should be able to place, maddeningly elusive. He shook his head, frustrated. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Despite her obvious exhaustion, Selena rose to her feet. “You need to know this, about Samhain—”

“It’s Halloween,” Garrett said, not wanting to use the witch words. “She already told me. Tomorrow.”
Or was it already after midnight?
he wondered with a chill.

“It’s more than a holy day, though,” Selena said. “You must understand this. It’s the most powerful night of the year, the night that the door opens between this world and the next. That is when—that monster—thinks he can let the demon through. He will do his magic on Samhain’s eve, and he will kill to do it.” She stopped her nervous pacing and faced Garrett directly. “But it is also the night when all souls who have passed during the year move from this world to the next. The door opens and spirits can depart—or come through. That means it is the night when the souls of those children he holds captive can most easily be freed to go on to the next world.”

Garrett felt every logical thought in him rebelling against what she was saying. “I can’t do anything for the dead,” he exploded. “If I’m supposed to believe all this, he’s about to kill three other people. I need details. I need something
real
.” Selena had stopped still, and was regarding him quietly. He fought to compose himself, looked toward the door behind which Tanith lay asleep. “Will she remember any of—that?”

Selena gave him a veiled look. “She may, or not.”

“Wake her, then.”

Selena stiffened. “She’s exhausted. You don’t understand the ordeal—”

Garrett rode over her. “I understand that if you’re telling the truth, if any of this is real, then three more kids are going to die tomorrow. So wake her or I will.”

Selena gave him a look that would melt steel, but she rose and crossed to the door. She stopped in front of it and pushed it open.

Garrett strode past her into the room—and stopped in his tracks.

The room was empty. Tanith was gone.

Samhain is a festival at the time of the closing dark. For pagans it was the beginning of the new year, the time that is neither past nor future, during which the doors are open between worlds. It is believed that all the souls of those who have died during the year must wait until Samhain to pass through to the other side.

It was also traditionally a time of ritual propitiation: sacrifice, animal and human, and of the choosing of a sacrificial victim by lot.