Crone's Moon: A Rowan Gant Investigation (15 page)

“Well, she had the two episodes, and just
before she came out of the second one, she started telling us that
Brittany Larson is dead.”

“Us? You mean you and Storm?”

“No, me, Cally, and RJ.”

“So what about Storm? Was he there or
not?”

“He was already passed out,” I replied.
“That’s pretty much why I’m calling you.”

“Why is Ben passed out, Rowan?” Her words
were more of a demand than a simple question.

It was obvious that him missing the briefing
was a sore spot for her, and what she had said was dead on—
Benjamin Storm didn’t shirk his responsibilities. Unfortunately,
this new little tidbit of information just added another layer to
my worry over his situation.

I wanted desperately to cover for my friend,
and so I tried to think of a feasible way around answering her
without telling an outright lie. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of
a single thing to say other than the cold truth, and before I knew
it, that was exactly what came tumbling out of my mouth. “He’s
drunk, Constance.”

There was a spate of silence on the line, and
then her voice issued again, this time with a hard edge. “Wake him
up and get some coffee into him, Rowan. I’ll be there in half an
hour.”

Knowing the way she drove, I suspected it
would be more like fifteen minutes.

“Okay, but listen, Constance,” I appealed.
“Go easy on him. He’s got just about as good a reason for this as
anyone can have.”

“Yeah, well he’d better, Rowan because I had
to throw some Federal weight around to get him back on the MCS for
this investigation.”

“Yeah, I think he knows that,” I replied. “Or
he suspects it at least.”

“Well, if he makes me look like a fool then
he’s going to have someone besides Lieutenant Albright after his
ass,” she snarled. “And I can be a hell of a lot nastier bitch than
she can.”

That was it. I’d had enough arguing. I
already felt like I was perched atop an inordinately narrow balance
beam eighteen hours out of every twenty-four. Between Felicity’s
binding spell, Ben’s marital problems, and now Constance being on
the warpath, I felt like what little normalcy I had left in the
world was crumbling away beneath my feet, and I wasn’t ready to
fall quite yet.

My own voice adopted an angry edge, and I
replied candidly, “Listen, Constance, I understand where you’re
coming from, but I seem to remember a certain city homicide
detective going to the mat for you when you assaulted a suspect
during an interrogation.”

There was no way for me to retract the
statement, but I’m not sure that I would have wanted to if I could.
I had been a witness to her loss of control as well as having been
her confidant when she needed someone to talk to about it. I hated
to slap her in the face with an incident from the past, but Ben had
gone so far as to lie for her, and that was no small gesture from a
man who valued honesty as much as him.

Sometimes, I suppose we all need to be
reminded of the debts we owe and to whom we owed them.

I could hear her breathing at the other end,
but not a single word was spoken for the span of a half-minute.

“Listen, Constance,” I finally said. “I’m
sorry about that. I didn’t mean to…”

“No, Rowan, you’re right,” she replied, her
voice a mix of emotions. “See if you can get him sobered up. I’ll
get out of here in a few minutes and head over.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I replied. “Thanks,
Constance.”

I hung up the phone as I stood and then
started out the door on my way to the kitchen to enlist some aid in
getting Ben up and about. Whatever curiosity I’d harbored regarding
how the process of the un-binding was going was immediately
eliminated the moment the rasping pain raked across the back of my
neck.

The wall before me became a psychedelic
whirlpool spinning at an ever-increasing velocity. My body tensed
then jerked as my knees gave way. The burning agony drew itself
across my neck once again, halting, then biting anew as it dug
deeper into my upper spine.

I was trying to call out for help when the
floor suddenly filled my field of vision, only to be replaced
almost immediately by indigo darkness.

I
was floating.

Or maybe I wasn’t really floating. I had no
visible point of reference in the darkness, so I couldn’t really
say for sure. All I knew for certain was that it felt like I was
floating, and I was happily willing to accept that as fact.

I blinked for no other reason than to make
sure my eyes were actually open. Again, it felt like they were
open, so I took the sensation at face value.

There was little else I could do, and the
truth was, I didn’t really care.

I was comfortable.

In fact, I don’t think I’d ever been this
comfortable in all my life.

Since I couldn’t see anything, I decided I
would just listen.

Actually I wasn’t any more interested in
listening than I was in seeing, but I did it anyway. Why? I had no
idea other than the fact that there was this little nag in the back
of my head.

It told me it needed to know something. I
don’t know what information the nag was after, but it wanted
something, and it wanted it now. I tried to ignore it, because
after all, I didn’t see any point. It wanted to know something, not
me.

The nag was on a mission. It told me I
needed the information too.

I tried to reason with it. Given that I
couldn’t see, and for all intents and purposes, I couldn’t feel, I
didn’t really know that I could hear either. So, why bother
trying?

The nag wouldn’t listen. It wanted me to try
hearing in the worst way, and it wasn’t going to give up until I
did.

I told it no.

It nagged harder and became an
annoyance.

I told it to go away.

It wouldn’t. Instead, it just kept growing
beyond annoyance and became a pain.

A real pain.

Physical.

Tangible.

Now I was no longer comfortable.

I gave up and listened. I doubted that it
would do any good, but I did it anyway. I was willing to do just
about anything to make the nag go away.

Had I cared, I would have been chagrined
when I started to pick up the faint sounds around me, fading slowly
in from nowhere to eventually fill my ears with ambient noise. But,
I didn’t care about such things. I just wanted the nag to go away,
so I kept listening.

Cicadas warbled out their song, the buzz
rising and falling, fading away, then starting anew.

Okay, I could live with that. Why the nag
wanted me to listen to cicadas I couldn’t fathom, but if it made
the nag leave me alone, I was happy.

But, the nag didn’t want to hear the
insects. It wanted to hear something else, so I listened
harder.

Metal scraping against earth sounded softly
in the darkness. How I knew it was metal against earth I couldn’t
begin to say. I just knew it as simply as I knew two plus two
equaled four. It was a fact.

The ambience grew as I listened intently.
The cicadas, the metal, the earth, the wind… The crunch of dry
leaves began sneaking through, adding themselves to the mix and
setting up a rhythm.

Scrape, crunch, thud, warble.

Scrape, crunch, thud, warble.

Underscoring the odd rhythm was an off-key
hum, and the nag became very interested in it. I focused on the hum
and noticed that it ran in an audible parallel to a severely
muffled background of driving bass.

I despised the nag. It was making me take
notice of my surroundings, and now I was starting to be curious. I
didn’t want to be curious. I wanted to be comfortable like before.
But, that was slipping further away with each scrape, crunch, thud,
and warble.

Now I was noticing that labored breaths
interrupted the hum at random intervals, falling in and out of
cadence with the crunch and scrape that seemed to be setting the
beat.

On the heels of a metallic clunk, a tinny
stream of noise masquerading as music suddenly vomited into the
blackness. Severe notes, squealing outward from what might have
been a guitar, intermixed with the heavy bump of a frenzied
drumbeat. In reality, it wasn’t very loud at all, but given the
disparity of it against the otherwise quiet darkness, it may as
well have been a thunderclap.

The nag started down a new path.

It wanted to know about this driving thrum
that insisted on being called music. I was just about to appease
the annoying little monster when a hot stab of pain shot through my
chest.

I felt myself jerked upward, without warning
or apology.

Stark, blue-white brilliance exploded in my
eyes, hot and fierce like an arc of lightning.

The afterimage of a swirling tunnel and a
wooded grove began fading from my retinas.

Blackness.

Crashing luminance, intense and stark.

Nude flesh. Pale, flaccid, and marred.

Blackness.

Again, the impressed image began to
fade.

The violent strobe burst, casting a woman’s
body in harsh light.

Woman. Corpse. Blood.

Blackness.

Scrape, crunch, thud, warble.

Light, coming faster and faster.

Blood. Shoulders. Blood.

Blackness. Light. Corpse. Blackness. Light.
Blood. Blackness. Light. Shoulders. Blackness. Light. Head.
Blackness. Light. Shoulders. Blackness. Light. Face. Blackness.
Light. Brittany. Blackness. Light. Blood. Blackness. Light.
Brittany. Blackness. Light.

Headless.

Pain.

Pain.

“…
Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.” I heard
Cally’s steady but frightened voice calling out.

With each number she recited, focused
pressure drove into the center of my chest, released, and then
instantly repeated. I felt something tightly pinching my nose and
something pressed against my mouth. Hot air rushed down my throat,
and I was suddenly overcome by a need to cough. I tried, or at
least I thought I did, but nothing happened.

I spasmed suddenly and felt my body jerk as I
sputtered and gagged. With a heavy wheeze, I drew in a deep
breath.

Whatever it was that was trying to smother me
let go of my nose and moved quickly away.

I tried to cough again and this time I
succeeded.

Then the cough came hard. I felt my shoulders
lift from the floor as I sputtered and hacked.

The next breath was easier.

“He’s breathing.” This time it was Felicity,
relief in her tenor.

Soft fingers pressed against my neck, and I
heard Cally announce, “He’s got a strong pulse.”

The clamor of hurried footsteps met my ears,
reverberating through the hardwood floor before halting with a
heavy thump.

“An ambulance is on the way.” RJ’s frantic
tone now entered the mix of voices.

“Rowan?” A handed patted my cheek lightly as
Felicity called my name. “Rowan?”

The back of my neck was on fire, and it felt
as though it was creased with an open, festering wound. My head was
already starting to throb, and I involuntarily let out a low
moan.

There was a frightening image dancing around
inside my skull, insisting that I share it. My stomach soured at
the very thought of trying to describe the horrific tableau. I
wanted nothing more than to chase the vision from my mind and slam
the door behind it, but a tickle in the back of my skull said
no.

The vision was beginning to fade, and I tried
desperately to let it. The tickle objected. It was important even
if I didn’t want to think so. I had to tell someone before it was
lost forever.

“Rowan?” Felicity called again.

“No head,” I heard myself whisper.

“What?” she asked.

I felt the warmth of her face near mine as
she bent closer.

“No head,” I repeated as my short brush with
consciousness rushed toward its end. “Brittany. No head.”

* * * * *

“His vitals are fine. He’s coherent; he knows
his name, day of the week, the year, who the President is…” the
paramedic was telling my wife, letting her voice trail off as the
list grew. “I’m sorry, but there’s not much we can do if he refuses
to go with us.”

Her partner was already loading equipment
back into the life support vehicle, which was still lighting up our
front yard with its wildly flickering light bar. I hadn’t checked,
but I was sure that neighbors were standing on porches and peering
out from behind their drapes at the commotion surrounding the
‘Witch house’. This wasn’t the first time we’d provided a light
show, and unfortunately, it probably wasn’t going to be the
last.

As was procedure, a police officer from the
local municipality had responded along with the paramedics. He had
stepped out onto the front porch himself, and I could see him
through the glass of the storm door as he was speaking into his
radio.

In sharp contrast to the activity in the
immediate vicinity, Ben was still sprawled on the sofa, unconscious
and oblivious to everything.

Luckily enough, the afghan Cally had laid
over him earlier was still in place, hiding his sidearm and badge,
so we didn’t have to explain to one cop why another cop was passed
out in our living room. Although, there had been some question as
to why he was sleeping through the ruckus. We had simply explained
it away as us not letting a friend drive drunk, and fortunately,
that had been satisfactory.

“But, his heart stopped,” Felicity insisted,
still trying to convince the paramedic to cart me off to the
hospital.

The young woman shrugged and shook her head
apologetically. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I’ve got no proof of that. His
EKG looks perfectly normal.”

“Felicity…” I started.

“Your heart DID stop, Rowan,” Cally pitched
her offering into the fray, cutting me off.