True to what Ben had said, two Overmoor squad cars descended upon us at almost the same instant I switched off the cell phone. At my urging, we moved the three vehicles farther down the shoulder in order to remain out of the line of sight of anyone in the park. Seventeen lethargically oozing minutes later, Ben and Detective Deckert arrived, followed hotly by a dark sedan bearing U.S. government plates.
Special Agent Constance Mandalay looked far more intimidating than attractive in the muted glare of the distant streetlamp. The strict angular shadows that sliced through the sodium vapor glow painted her slight figure in an almost violently imposing likeness as she fixed her angry gaze on me.
“Did I not make myself clear, Mister Gant?” she javelined the query tersely. “You are no longer a part of this investigation. Period. Now, since Detective Storm seems intent on following you blindly about, you’ve not only bought yourself a world of trouble, you’ve managed to jeopardize his career as well.”
My head was still being relentlessly hammered from the inside, and fire danced up and down my spine, making me painfully aware of Roger’s presence in the moonlit park. The seemingly endless misery coupled with our race against time had begun deeply affecting my overall disposition. I was walking nothing other than the paper-thin edge between steady calm and explosive anger. The instant Agent Mandalay inserted herself into the grotesque equation, I lost all semblance of balance.
“Go fuck yourself,” I told her drily.
“EXCUSE ME?” she demanded incredulously, visibly taken aback by my uncharacteristic and graphic instruction.
The low chatter among the uniformed officers came to an abrupt halt, and everyone present turned their eyes upon the close-quartered standoff that had materialized between us.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” I apologized for my rudeness but still maintained my umbraged tone, “but you’ve had it in for me from the very beginning, and I have no idea why. To be honest, I don’t care that you don’t like me. Whether you want to believe it or not, Roger Henderson is in this park.” I stole a quick glance at my watch and then displayed it to her. “And in less than twenty-five minutes, the sonofabitch is going to stick his hand into a little girl’s chest and rip her heart out. Now, if arresting me makes you happy, then be my guest. Just do that little girl a favor and wait until after we’ve stopped this asshole from killing her.”
Agent Mandalay stared back at me with a slackened expression. A retort half formed, her lips parted suddenly then almost immediately closed without revealing the substance of the comment. The only sound to escape her was a reluctantly acquiescent sigh. “Okay. Fine. We’ll search the park, but rest assured, Mister Gant, I am not through with you.”
“Fine.” Still unflinching, I held her contemptuous stare. “All I want to do is save the little girl.”
She all but ignored my comment and turned her attention to the uniformed officers who had been observing our sharp exchange. “It looks like we’re in the middle of a residential area. How big is this park anyway?”
“We are, ma’am, and it’s pretty small,” a sergeant replied. “Just a few acres. It used to be the grounds of a seminary.”
“Doesn’t sound like a very secluded place for a ritual murder.” She directed her sarcasm toward me.
“Actually, it is fairly obscured. The idea was to leave it as natural as possible,” he offered. “With the exception of the trail, it’s pretty heavily wooded on the opposite side of the lake.”
He began stumbling over his words near the end of the sentence. I could tell by his expression that if looks could kill, she had just stared him into an early grave.
“All right, Mister Gant.” She turned back to face me once again. “Any suggestions as to WHERE in the park we’ll find him?”
The details of my vision had become clearer and more precise with each painful recurrence. They were now so sharply in focus as to seem almost unreal.
“About thirty yards up the hill on the other side of the lake.” I described in words what my mind was replaying in overblown, pixilated color. “There’s a small clearing. It’s surrounded on all sides by trees and bushes. There’s an indirect entrance from the back.”
She looked back to the uniformed officers and raised a questioning eyebrow.
“Yeah, he’s right,” one of the patrolmen spoke up. “There’s a clearing there. We’ve caught a few teenagers hiding out in there, partying in the middle of the night.”
“Deckert,” she dictated as she unbuttoned her jacket and slipped her sidearm from its holster. “You’re with me. You four,” she directed herself to the uniformed officers. “Spread out and flank the clearing. Storm, you stay here with Mister Gant and his wife, and keep an eye on the entrance.”
“But…” I started to protest.
“Save it!” she shot back. “You’re staying here.”
Ben grabbed my arm and shook his head as I started forward. I could feel Felicity’s hand resting on my other shoulder, leaching her own mixture of fear, anger, and desperation into me.
“Look, Mandalay,” Ben lashed out. “If you want my badge then come and get it. But until it’s in your hot little hand, get off your power pony and give it a rest. I’m goin’ in and Rowan’s comin’ with me.”
“Suit yourself,” she remarked flatly. “But be aware that you’re kissing what’s left of your career goodbye and getting your friend charged with interfering in a federal investigation in the process.”
“O’Brien. That’s spelled capital O apostrophe capital B, r-i-e-n,” Felicity broke her self-imposed muteness.
“Excuse me?” Agent Mandalay demanded.
“I just wanted to make sure you spelled my name right when you filed the charges,” my wife told her flatly. “I’m going in too.”
Special Agent Mandalay simply turned and stalked off into the night, waving for the others to follow. Ben, Felicity, and I brought up the rear, quickly and quietly covering the forty odd yards along the shoulder to the park entrance. As a group, we advanced across the small paved parking area to the trailhead and proceeded up the short path to the starting marker. There, low to the ground, a white metal rectangle was bolted securely to an earthbound wooden post. PLEASE DO NOT FEED GEESE was embossed on its surface in bold black letters.
The group fanned out, following the trail in opposite directions, skirting around the lake on both sides. Everyone moved as quietly as possible, and I was fighting to contain several pained groans that threatened to seek release as the white-hot intensity of Roger’s presence burned up my spinal cord and into my brain.
A bright stripe of cold moonlight traced a ribbon of white across the rippling surface of the dark water. The night was silent save for the occasional light breeze through the upper reaches of the trees. Even the crickets were refusing to sing their songs. We continued to creep along the path, moving as hastily as discretion would allow.
Ahead of me were Agent Mandalay and Detective Deckert; to my left, Felicity; and behind, Ben. The other officers were no longer visible, having slipped around to the other end of the lake and into the thickening woods. I cast a quick glance to my right and captured an instant flash of movement near the rocky shoreline. There immediately followed a loud plop as something hit the water.
Like sharply honed combat veterans, Mandalay and Deckert dropped to one knee, pistols directed at the fading sound. Ben did the same, dragging Felicity and I downward with him. Taking aim, he instantly snapped on a small but powerful flashlight, sighting it alongside his weapon. A muted glow diffused eerily through the water from the tightly focused beam.
The forced hush was thick around us, and I swallowed hard to evict my heart from my throat. The five of us stared almost unblinking into the murky water seeking out any and all movement. More than a few of our precious seconds expired before we pinpointed the source of the sound. Centered in the ribbon of moonlight, a rounded stub protruded upward from the water, followed by an ovalish dark hump, roughly the size of a dinner plate. Slowly, the large turtle began to paddle away.
After releasing soft relieved sighs, we regained our upright stances and proceeded deeper into the park. As we rounded the easternmost end of the shallow lake and made our way around to the backside, Ben quietly solicited Felicity’s and my attention and motioned for us to stop.
“I want you two ta’ wait right here,” he whispered.
“But Ben,” I objected, “what about…”
He didn’t let me finish. “Right here!” he insisted, whispering through clenched teeth.
I had no choice but to stand silently watching as he moved past us along the path with Agent Mandalay and Detective Deckert. In mere moments, the three of them shrank to small blue-black silhouettes on the dimly washed landscape then disappeared as they seemed to melt and join with the shadows.
The antimony-veined disk of the moon jeered down at me when I allowed my gaze to drift upward. Though imperceptible to the naked eye, I knew only a thin thread-like arc of darkness remained along its edge. Looking back down, I pressed the side of my watch, and a dim blue-green glow illuminated its face. In less than twelve minutes, even that dark wisp of a thread would be gone.
We stood alone in the uneven shadows, mutely straining to glean whatever details we could from the silent landscape. I kept watch on the opposite end of the lake, expecting to catch a glimpse of the uniformed officers through some of the thinner sections of the trees. They had a slightly farther distance to travel, as the trailhead had started closer to our end. However, our momentary diversion, courtesy of the lake inhabitant, should have evened out the time.
Should have, but for some reason the four patrolmen still hadn’t appeared, and a gnawing worry was starting to brew deep in my stomach.
“Something’s wrong,” I whispered to Felicity.
“You feel it too?” she half asked. “I’m freezing.”
Felicity always sensed ethereal presences as coldness, no matter what the temperature truly was. The less pleasant the energy she sensed, the colder she got. She was shivering as she leaned against me.
“The other cops. They should have come around the end of the lake by now, but I don’t see them.”
“What do you think happened?” she questioned through chattering teeth. “Where are they?”
“I don’t know, but I’m willing to bet that…”
I wasn’t afforded the opportunity to complete the sentence. A sixteen-pound sledgehammer, swung at full force, impacted squarely with the back of my head, shattering my skull and spilling its contents onto the path. At least I can only imagine that to be the closest example to the unbearable pain that suddenly stole away my breath, my sight, and even my very thoughts.
I doubled forward involuntarily.
Voluntarily.
With extreme prejudice.
I was willing to do almost anything to make it stop. The ripping spasm escaped down my spine and out through every nerve ending I possessed. My knees buckled, and I pitched to the ground. I don’t know if I was screaming; I might have tried, but my hearing had fled with my other senses. Pure indigo darkness tugged at my soul, insisting that I enter into marriage with it.
“ Why, Rowan, why?” Ariel Tanner stood before me shrouded in white lace, wisps of her strawberry-blonde hair floating gently on the breeze.
“ I don’t know, Ariel. I don’t understand,” I groaned.
“ Yes, you do,” her melodious voice sang. “You have always known. Tell me again, what does Rowan mean?”
I choked the answer out from behind blinding pain, “Strength…Security…Protector.”
Ariel smiled knowingly. I began to feel energy flowing from her and into my body, chasing away the ravaging spasms. It was then I realized that the question had not been hers, but my own all along, “Why me? Why was it I who had been chosen to pursue this killer?”
The answer was as simple as my name.
I returned to reality curled into a ball on the mossy ground, breathing in the loamy odor of the soil. Roger’s telltale fire still licked viciously up and down my back, but gone was the unbearable agony that had recently occupied the space where my head should have been. Clarity and focus had crept up from behind and ousted it from power.
“Rowan! Rowan, what’s wrong?!” Felicity was insistently shaking me as she whispered.
I emulated her hushed tone as I climbed to my feet. “How long? How long was I out?”
“A few minutes. You just fell to the ground and curled up into a fetal position. What happened?”
“I’ll tell you about it later. Did the other cops ever come out of the woods?”
“Not that I saw,” she shook her head. “I was a little preoccupied with you, so I wasn’t really watching.”
The night grew suddenly still and impossibly, even more silent. I looked up into the inky sky at the moon bursting into fullness then down to my wide-eyed wife. Less than forty yards away, up the hill and to the right, the fragile pane of silence was shattered into innumerable glistening shards by a woman’s terrified scream.
My heart double-skipped then settled into a steadily increasing rhythm as the adrenalin injected itself into my system. I had no idea what I was going to do. I only knew that before the piercing, horrified sound even began to fade, my legs were pistoning, pushing me up the hill toward its point of origin. Stealth was no longer an issue, and my feet were thudding loudly against the carpet of thick vegetation. I thrust my hands outward, warding off low hanging branches, which sought to assault my face with stinging, leafy slaps as I weaved through the increasingly thick woods.
Somewhat lighter, but no less frantic, footfalls echoed behind my own. I knew them to belong to Felicity as she followed me on my insane headlong rush into whatever peril awaited.
A second shattering scream pierced the air, easily overcoming the manic kettledrum my heart was creating in my ears. Thickly foliaged bushes and young trees had continued to grow more numerous as I pushed farther away from the marked path, and they now presented themselves as an almost unbroken barrier before me. Yellow flickers of light I knew to be burning candles teased me through small bare spots in the oncoming brush. A third scream followed weakly on the heels of the second, telling me I had no time to search for the clearing’s entrance.
Still clueless as to what I was going to do, I tucked my face behind the protection of my arms and plunged forward into the thicket. Burrs and needle-like spines tore and stabbed at my flesh while ground-hugging vines attached themselves ropelike around my ankles. My progress slowed as the sinewy ground cover seemed to pull against me in an attempt to drag me downward. Deep sobbing reached my ears, and I pumped my legs harder, tearing free and bursting scratched and bleeding through to the other side.
When I pulled my wildly lacerated arms from my face, the scene before me was much as I had witnessed in my vision. The young girl was laying on her back near the center of the small clearing, clad in silky white lace. Her glassy eyes stared upward through the dark green canopy of the trees, unblinking. Candles burned, red, yellow, blue, green, and white about the perimeter, black near her head. I had only a split second in which to take in the details of the display as my attention was immediately diverted by yet another fearful scream ice-picking my eardrums.
Special Agent Constance Mandalay stood transfixed on the opposite side of the clearing, her unfired sidearm tossed carelessly to the ground out of reach. Her eyes were wide in absolute terror, and her mouth trembled as thin tears wetted her cheeks. In the dimness of the shadows, I could see a sparkling halo of energy surrounding her. My eyes instinctively followed the crackling ethereal tether that whipped snakelike through the air, ending unsurprisingly at Roger Henderson’s black-cloaked form.
Once again, Agent Mandalay’s lips parted, emitting a high-pitched, unearthly sound. I wondered at why more attention hadn’t been attracted to the small clearing by her night-breaking shrieks. At the same time, I could only fear what might have happened to Ben, Deckert, and the others.
The spidery lightning bolt remained connected between the two of them, pulsing outward from Roger in a quickening pace and snapping violently against her spasmodically jerking body. Visible sparks leapt from each point of contact, hissing through the air and quickly extinguishing before reaching the ground.
She had begun to slap and claw at herself as if something were trying to rend the flesh from her bones. I don’t know what horror she was seeing; it was something meant solely for her. I only knew that whatever innermost personal fear she had kept locked away in the depths of her subconscious was now loose and ravaging her in ways unthinkable. Roger had been the one to release the obscenity, and by continuing to feed its illusory presence, he was going to kill her.
I was airborne for less than a second. I barely remembered the decision to launch myself at Agent Mandalay’s tormentor-it had been that close to automatic. So intent was his focus on her, he hadn’t even noticed my presence until we collided. My shoulder met hard with his midsection as I flung my full weight into his stationary form. A guttural huff exploded from his surprised mouth as the impact drove the breath from his lungs, sending the two of us on a collision course with the spiny thicket surrounding the clearing.
The primary objective of my less than thoroughly thought out plan was to sever the supernormal connection between Roger and Agent Mandalay, effectively ending the deadly glamour. My secondary ambition was to subdue him until he could be turned over to someone more qualified to make a proper arrest. Fortunately, the first part went exactly as I hoped. It was the second idea that immediately presented itself as a problem.
His initial shock rapidly fading to nothing more than a memory, Roger regained his breath and twisted wildly from my grip as we slammed into the thorny hedges. He scrambled upward from the tangled heap, fighting to break free as he regained his feet. From my prone position, I pitched myself forward, stretching my arm until I believed I could feel tendons tearing away from bone-then I reached even farther. Claw like, my hand hooked around his ankle as he fought the scrub for freedom, and with an agonized jerk, I knocked him off balance, casting him once more to the ground.
The two of us dragged ourselves to our feet almost simultaneously, first into a crouch then fully upright, slightly more than an arms length apart. Roger wheeled around to face me and we both froze. His hood had fallen back across his shoulders, and his face was exposed to the night. Hatred smoked in the grey-ashed cinders of his eyes as he locked his glare on me, and the sinewy tendons in his neck bulged angrily as he tensed.
“I warned you, Gant,” he seethed. “You can’t stop me.”
“I already have. Look at the moon,” I choked between somewhat labored breaths. Internally, I was regretting what my desk bound choice of professions had detracted from my physical condition. “Give it up Roger.”
Slowly, he looked up through the shadowy foliage to the swollen globe. Absolute fullness was only a handful of heartbeats away, and he knew it the moment his eyes were filled with the silvery visage. With an almost calm intent, he just as slowly lowered his gaze back to mine. His smoldering grey irises started to crumble away like ash from a burning coal, revealing a savage red-orange glow.
The fire that had earlier danced up my spine now seared like a blowtorch across my body, slathering its malignant excrement upon me. Bracing myself against the supernatural attack, I pressed my own energies outward, deflecting his rage and forming an ethereal barrier between us. The blaze of pain was immediately doused, and my tortured skin quickly cooled.
Roger was unprepared for the backlash of his own energy and almost didn’t catch it in time. The stream of malice-driven power exploded against his own hastily erected defenses in a roiling shower of crimson lightning. He stumbled backward from the shockwave and fought to maintain his balance. To the average spectator, we would have appeared to be doing something on the order of shadow boxing. To a crowd of Witches, one hell of a fireworks presentation was taking place. However, the exhibition was cut short as my opponent realized his chances of defeating me in such an arena were almost non-existent.
I caught only a vanishing glimpse of Agent Mandalay from the corner of my eye as she crawled forward reaching for her gun. My ears were filled thickly with a demonic banshee wail from Roger as he propelled himself low into my stomach and drove me through the ripping thorns of the thick brush. He bear-hugged me as I fought to maintain my balance, backpedaling into the foliage. I hammered my fist downward and felt it glance across his ribs, a sensation that was immediately followed by jellied numbness chased with glass shards of pain as the blow reverberated up my arm.
My stability faltered as we exploded through the wall of scrub and ricocheted off a solid tree trunk. A crush of agony ripped through me as my attacker’s shoulder dug inward, and I heard the sickening sound of my own ribs as they cracked. We lurched to the ground, glancing from a tree stump, and began to roll. I fought to keep my arm hooked around his neck as our momentum increased. Rocks and small trees insinuated themselves into our wild path, exacting what revenge they could as we rolled over them. I reached with my free arm to grab at the tough saplings, trying to halt our progress down the ever-steepening hill, but to no avail. My grasp was too slow and our inertia too great. I ended up with nothing more than damp fistfuls of leaves and a raw, bleeding gash across my palm.
Our chaotic journey down the hillside ended almost as abruptly as it began. In a tangle of flailing limbs, we were catapulted from a low earthen ledge at the bottom of the hill.
With a dull thud, Roger and I impressed ourselves into the muddy shoreline of the small lake. I laid there gasping as the shock of the sudden stop began to subside. My right arm was still curled tightly around my assailant’s neck, locked firm and unyielding. My heart was racing as I stared upward at the night sky, listening to shouting voices in the near distance.
Roger hadn’t moved since we stopped rolling. I had maintained a desperate hold on him for the entire journey down the hill, and his head now seemed oddly cocked to the side. Resting against him in the mud, I listened for any sound from his limp body and not only heard nothing but felt nothing. Wearily, I disentangled myself from his still form and extricated my arm from about his neck. The voices were drawing closer and were joined by the sounds of running footsteps against soft ground. I hauled myself up to my knees, then shakily, to my feet.
Sharp, blinding pain surged up my thighs then down my calves, and my kneecaps felt as though they had been detonated like small explosive charges. My legs buckled, and I pitched backward, slapping the surface of the water with a stinging smack, and then I slipped under. Most of my breath had been forced from my chest with the surprised yelp elicited by the sharp pains in my legs, and the murky water rushed in to fill my nostrils. I knew I was in no more than two feet of water, so I clamped my eyes shut and started to sit up. Unfortunately, I felt a sudden weight on my chest and an angry hand firmly encircling my throat.
I began flailing my arms in front of me, pounding against the weight and trying to force it off my chest. My lungs burned from lack of oxygen, and the violent physical exertion only added fuel to their blaze. The bonfire in my chest crackled desperately up my throat, singeing it like a blowtorch. My body begged me to gasp for air; my mind forcefully told it not to.
I opened my eyes in the murky shallows and blinked rapidly as silt tried to settle in them. My vision, distorted as it was, started to darken and tunnel as my brain screamed helplessly for oxygen. I knew I was on the verge of passing out, and I fought even harder in the face of my greatest fear. Drowning.
My water-filled ears picked up the thick sounds of splashing as I flailed against Roger, his hand ever tightening around my neck. He pushed me hard into the spongy lake bottom, forcing me another inch farther from the cool, fresh air. Through the rippling surface of the silty water, I could see the glowing moon, which had moved past full, and although undetectable to the naked eye, into its waning phase. Its cold blue light glinted sharply from an all too familiar double-edged dagger held poised above me by the madman.
Murderous grey eyes bore down on me through the murky surroundings, smoking with the same fire they had displayed earlier. Ariel’s athame flashed once again as my attacker prepared to plunge it downward. My vision continued to stretch forth in a tunnel-like fashion then slowly began to fade.
Before I could close my eyes, the blade jerked out of its killing arc and followed a harmless trajectory away from me. At the same instant, the dull thrashing of water distantly entered my ears and was joined by a muffled explosion.
A dark rain spattered the surface of the water above my face and mixed lazily into milky spirals-cloudy helixes of vermilion in the dim moonlight. A second blunted thump sounded, followed quickly by a third, then a fourth. Three more showers of the thick crimson rain sprinkled wildly across the water’s surface. The hand around my throat spasmed twice then fell limp. The weight pressing down on my chest shifted heavily and slid sideways.
Cool air rushed forcefully into my lungs, flowing down my throat in a thick gulp as I suddenly broke the surface. I gasped gratefully, sputtering and choking on the lake water I had sucked in, and blinked rapidly to clear the debris from my eyes. I began flailing angrily as I felt a large meaty hand entwine itself with the front of my shirt in a viselike grip then relaxed when I realized I was being pulled out instead of being pushed back in.
Felicity, Deckert, Mandalay, and two of the officers gathered in a loose semicircle around me as I laid gasping on the bank. Ben’s large hand was still tightly gripping my waterlogged shirt, shaking me.
“Rowan?! Rowan?! Are you all right?” his concern-laden voice urgently met my ears.
I looked around the worried faces of the group then back to his. “Little girl?” I croaked.
“She’s fine. The other coppers are with her,” he smiled down at me. “There’s an ambulance on the way.”
Telltale distant warbling was growing louder as emergency vehicles raced to converge on us. I struggled to sit up, only to find they weren’t going to allow it. Ben and Felicity both pressed me back down gently.
“Stay put,” my wife ordered softly. “They’re coming for you too.”
I didn’t protest, I just continued biting off large chunks of the night air and swallowing them hungrily. Again, I focused on Ben’s face.
“Hey, Tonto,” I choked out between breaths, “you shoot the bad guy?”
“Yeah, Kemosabe,” he grinned. “Yeah, I shot the bastard.”
“Next time,” I wheezed, “don’t take so damn long.”