34
THE MAN'S FACE stared up at me, eyes wide, glazed, unseeing. His head was still attached to his spine, but the chest had been split open as though two great hands had dug into his rib cage and pulled. The heart was missing. The lungs had been ripped, probably when the rib cage gave. The stomach had been punctured, giving a sour smell to the smaller room. The liver and intestines lay in a wet heap to one side of the body as if they had all spilled out at the same time. The lower intestine still curled down inside the lower end of the body cavity. By smell alone I was pretty sure that the intestines hadn't been pierced.
I sat back on my heels beside the body. Blood had splattered the lower half of the man's face, drops of it scattering across the rest of his face and into his graying hair. Violent, very violent, and very quick. I stared into his sightless eyes and felt nothing. I was back to being numb and I was not complaining. I think if I'd seen this body first, then I'd have been horrified, but the remains in the dining room had just used me up for the day. This was awful, but there were worse things, and those things were in the next room.
But it wasn't the body that was interesting. It was the room. There was a circle of salt around the body. A book lay within the circle covered so thickly in blood that I couldn't read the pages it was opened to. They'd taken all the pictures and videos they were going to in this room so I used borrowed gloves to raise the book up. It was bound with embossed leather, but there was no title. The middle half of the book had soaked so much blood up that the pages were sticking together. I didn't try and pry them apart. The police and the Feds had technicians for delicate work. I was careful not to close the book and lose the place the man was probably reading from. For all I knew the book had been on the desk that the man shoved against the door, and it had simply fallen to the floor, opening on its own. But to think that meant we had no clue, so we'd all pretend we were sure that the man had deliberately opened the book. In the middle of being chased by a monster that had just butchered his wife, he went for this book, opened it, started to read. Why?
The book was hand-written and I read enough to know that it was a book of shadows. It was the spell book, sort of, of a practicing witch. One that followed an older or more orthodox tradition than the neo-pagan movement Gardian or Alexandrian, maybe. Though again I couldn't be sure. I'd had one semester in college on comparative witchcraft, though now I'm sure they called it comparative wiccan. Of the wiccan practitioners I knew personally, none of them practiced anything this traditional.
I put the book carefully back where'd I'd found it and stood. The bookshelves against the near wall were full of books on psychic research, the preternatural, mythology, folklore, and wicca. I had some of the same books at home, so the books alone weren't proof of much. But the clincher was the altar. It was an antique wooden chest with a silk cloth over the top. There were silver candlesticks with partially burned candles in them. The candles had runes carved into them. Other than the fact that they were runes, I couldn't read them.
There was a round mirror with no frame sitting flat between the candles. There was a small bowl of dried herbs to one side, a larger bowl of water, and a small carved box tight shut.
"Is that what I think it is?" Bradley asked.
"An altar. He was a practitioner. I think that book is his book of shadows, his spell book for lack of a better term."
"What happened here?"
"There's salt in the floor of the dining room."
"That's not unusual," Bradley said.
"No, but a salt circle is. I think he was somewhere further back in the house. He heard his wife screaming or heard the monsters. Something alerted him. He didn't come running with a gun, Bradley. He came running with a handful of salt. Maybe he had something else in his hands or on his person, some charm or amulet. I don't see it, but that doesn't mean it's not here."
"Are you saying he threw salt at this thing?"
"Yes."
"Why, for god's sake?"
"Salt and flame are two of our oldest purifying agents. I use salt to bind a zombie back into its grave. You can throw it on fairies, fetches, a whole host of critters, and it will make them hesitate, maybe not much more."
"So he threw salt and maybe some charm at the creature, then what?"
"I think that's why the monster stopped, and why the tablecloth full of trophies is still sitting by the table."
"Why didn't the monster go back and get the trophies after he killed the man?"
"I don't know. Maybe he finished the spell before he died. Maybe he drove it from the house. I'd like to get a real wiccan in here to look over the scene."
"Wiccan, you mean witch."
"Yes, but most of them prefer the term wiccan."
"Politically correct," Bradley said.
I nodded. "Yeah."
"What could a real wiccan tell us that you can't?"
"She might know what spell he used. If the spell drove the thing from the house, then we might be able to use a version of the same spell to trap or even destroy it. Something this man did drove the creature out of this house before it was ready to go. He forced it to leave behind its goody bag and to leave without gutting his body. It's the first weakness we've seen in this thing."
"Franklin won't like bringing in a witch. Neither will the locals. If I force everyone to bring this wiccan in, and it doesn't work or she talks to the media, then the next time you see me I won't be an FBI Agent."
"Aren't you supposed to try every angle to solve this crime? Isn't that your job?"
"The FBI doesn't use witches, Anita."
I shook my head. "How the hell did you get me in then?"
"Forrester had already brought you in on the case. All I had to do was stand up to Marks."
"And Franklin," I said.
He nodded. "I outrank Franklin."
"Then why is he so snotty?"
"It seems to be a natural talent of his."
"I don't want to get you fired, Bradley." I went to the overturned desk and started opening the drawers. There was a gun cabinet in the living room. Most people who had a cabinet full of them kept one for personal protection.
"What are you looking for?" he asked.
I opened the larger bottom drawer, and there it was. "Come here, Bradley."
He came to peer into the drawer. The gun was a 9 mm Smith and Wesson. It lay on the side of the drawer where it had fallen when the desk tipped over. Bradley stared down at the gun. "Maybe it's not loaded. Maybe he had the ammo locked in the living room."
"Can I touch it?"
He nodded.
I lifted it, and just by the weight I was pretty sure it was loaded, but it wasn't a gun I was familiar with, so I popped the clip and showed it to Bradley.
"Full," he said, voice soft.