Book of Shadows

Chapter Thirty-three

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.

Look, Tanith spoke in Garrett’s head, and without knowing how he knew to do it, he turned toward the car.

The license plate was visible in the moonlight: TOR 936

And he knew the make of the car: a dark Camaro, navy blue or black. The car seemed drawn in crystal clarity, hyper-real.

Garrett glanced back toward the figure on the cliff’s edge. It suddenly stiffened… turned slowly… its face all in shadow, hooded by its coat. It was still, staring toward Garrett and Tanith with an intensity Garrett could feel even from the distance.

Then it dropped its bundle and shot forward into the air, a black and ragged and virulent shadow, hurtling straight at them, with a shriek of sheer black madness—