Crone's Moon: A Rowan Gant Investigation (29 page)

The final bulleted point in the report was
also one of particular note. There were various torn ligaments and
ruptures within striated muscle tissues. These, coupled with
several blistered marks on her skin that were consistent with
electrical burns, told a gruesome tale in and of themselves.

There had been deeper dimension to her
senseless torture— an added layer that had racked her both mentally
and physically. And, it provided an explanation for the ethereal
electrical storm my wife and I had endured and barely survived.

In the end, the listed cause of death was
asphyxia. The notes explaining the possible cause outlined that
various indicators pointed to the fact that it may have been due to
prolonged high-voltage current passing through the thoracic wall—
the result being violent spasms of the intercostal muscles and
diaphragm.

In short, she had been electrocuted into
suffocation but not before enduring many hours of unimaginable
agony.

The report had been a horrific chore for me
to read. Even as jaded as I had become these past few years, simply
reading what had been done to this woman made me physically ill.
The darkness one had to possess in their very soul to do such a
thing to another living being was unfathomable to me. Equally
distressing was the fact that I realized whoever had done this had
done it not out of anger or spite, but because he enjoyed it. It
brought him pleasure in the most intimate sense, and that very
concept sent bile rising in my throat.

I had to set the folder aside on more than
one occasion that day we spent at Police Headquarters. I simply had
to place some distance between it and me for a while before I could
gather the stomach to continue with the next page. Even avoiding
the autopsy and crime scene photos after the first glance through
didn’t give me any relief. The words on the page were enough by
themselves to spark violent images in my head that I was certain
would drive me insane.

One of the things that pained me as well was
the fact that I couldn’t convince Felicity not to read it. She
wasn’t content to hear my carefully edited version of the
postmortem. She had to see it for herself, and when she did, she
alternated between sorrowful tears and raging fits of anger with
each clinically descriptive paragraph she digested. Before it was
over, we were both inhabitants of an emotional wasteland:
disgusted, overwhelmed and spent, prone to moodiness and
withdrawing rapidly from the world. Had it not been for a number of
sessions with Helen Storm, my wife and I would surely have
imploded. I already had a healthy respect for Ben and anyone else
with a badge for that matter. What I saw in this report just made
me admire them that much more. How they could face this sort of
thing and not simply crack, I would never understand.

On top of it all, there was a secondary
driving force that kept us going. We both knew that Brittany Larson
was but one of the victims. There were at least two others who had
been put through the same horrors we now beheld in black and white.
And, the truth was that no one knew if it stopped there. The police
had a list of names that shared some very simple traits: women who
were young, pretty, and more to the point, missing. Fortunately, by
the blessings of The Ancients, that list was very short. Still, it
existed and that was a horror in itself.

As if utter failure on a mundane level
weren’t bad enough, it just got worse. True to what I had told
Lieutenant Albright that first day in the interview room, it simply
didn’t work the way she wanted. The winds of the ethereal plane
could be as fickle as the doldrums and at times, even more
unforgiving.

And, this go around, that is exactly what
they were. Not only had it not worked the way she wanted, it had
not worked at all. Magick, it seemed, had forsaken us.

Of course, this only served to fuel the
lieutenant’s crusade against me, and it wasn’t long before she
managed to sway the mayor back to her way of thinking. After less
than two weeks, we were unceremoniously banned from any involvement
with the investigation. Felicity and I were out, Ben was quickly
reassigned back to the city homicide division, and some thirty-odd
days later special agent Mandalay had no choice but to move on to
more pressing FBI business.

To our chagrin, any and all ethereal contact
between the spirit of Brittany Larson and Felicity had abruptly
ended the moment my wife had located her decapitated corpse. Not
that we hadn’t tried our best to reestablish the connection, but in
some ways I was relieved that we hadn’t. After what we had been
through, I was particularly gun-shy about Felicity setting foot
into that realm ever again. I knew there was no way I could stop
her, but each day that she didn’t cross the veil was a day I didn’t
have to worry about her on that level.

Having been the one in the hot seat to begin
with, I opened myself to the darkness, literally calling out to and
inviting in the voices I so often wanted to quell in the worst way.
Much to my surprise, those who inhabited the other side of the dark
curtain were even eschewing contact with me for a change. If they
were talking, it wasn’t to me.

As far as I could tell, all was quiet in both
worlds, and I began to ponder the idea that it might actually be
over. I wondered if my bane had truly disappeared and that the past
few years had been nothing more than a bad dream. And, as much as I
hated not being able to help find the killer of those three women,
having my own voice be the only one to inhabit my skull was a
welcome and restful change.

At the same time, as much as I had begun to
consider the unwanted psychic events as a now distant memory, I
knew I could never be so lucky. I had stared directly into the face
of evil on a hot summer night a few scant years ago and at that
moment, knew that it was my destiny to do so again and again.

Because of that, I wasn’t terribly surprised
when I awoke one gentle autumn afternoon, completely disoriented,
lying in a crumpled heap in the backyard; with a metallic taste in
my mouth, my tongue feeling like freshly ground hamburger, and my
wife’s concerned face staring down into mine.

“Y
ou’re okay?” Felicity
asked as she pushed a glass of salt water into my hand and picked
yet another crumbling leaf from my hair.

Her words ran past me, stretching into a
drawn-out, half-speed playback. I considered the question then
nodded for lack of anything else to do.

“Then I’m calling Ben,” she told me in her
full-fledged ‘don’t you dare argue with me’ voice.

It took a few seconds for the meaning of her
words to register. My nerves were so jangled that I seemed to be
lagging at least a half step behind everything going on around me.
I suddenly noticed that she was no longer in front of me and that
somehow my mouth was now full of salt water. I looked to the side
and saw that she was across the room. She already had the phone in
her hand and was stabbing at the buttons with her dainty thumb. I
gave what I thought was a quick swish, twisted my head to spit the
mouthful of salt water into the kitchen sink, dribbled a good
portion of it down my shirt, and then turned back to her and
nodded.

“Othay,” I said, pushing the
half-intelligible word past my swelling tongue. “Buth thhith maith
be nutthin. Juss enethy baglath”

My response was completely moot. She was
already asking whoever had answered the line if she could speak to
Detective Benjamin Storm. I kept quiet and took another swig of the
warm brine then began to swish it around again as I watched my wife
impatiently shuffling in place with the phone up to her ear. My
brain was having trouble processing the image, and what I got was
more along the lines of a fuzzy pair of Felicity’s dancing in the
air before me. I blinked hard and shook my head, trying to get a
grip on reality.

“Fek!” she spat after a moment, then pulled
the phone away and thumbed the off-hook switch. “Voice mail.”

I spit again, managing to hit only the sink
and not my shirt, then asked, “Ovit or tell?”

“What?”

I had made a serious mess of my tongue this
time around. Worse than the times before and that didn’t bode well.
What I had just tried to tell her was that this might be nothing at
all. That it might be nothing more than an energy backlash a few
months in the making. An ethereal echo created by all of our
attempts to reconnect with Brittany Larson. It wasn’t out of the
question. Felicity and I had put every ounce we could spare into
the attempts, and then some, so backlash was a very real
possibility. Put simply, there were times that casting undirected
energies upon ethereal waters was much like gambling. In some
cases, however, it could be a not quite practiced, side-armed fling
of a boomerang; and, if you turned your back on it you ran the risk
of getting cold-cocked.

But, that wasn’t what was happening now. Even
though I had said it aloud, I didn’t believe it at all. And, it was
obvious that my wife didn’t either. I knew I was just trying to
convince myself that this couldn’t be starting again— so much for
trying to be reassuring.

I was now fighting a headache that had
positioned itself at the base of my skull, and I knew right away
that it wasn’t going to be responding to aspirin, willow bark tea,
or any other remedy I could cook up. But at least I was starting to
be able to see straight even if it was taking a lot of
concentration.

I struggled with my aching tongue and tried
again. “Ovfith or t-thell?”

“Office,” she replied, finally grasping my
words.

“Thry hith tell.”

“That’s what I’m doing, Row,” she returned,
waving the phone at me. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Ah thnno,” I mumbled.

“Aye, sorry then. Wrong number,” I heard her
say, then she spat, “Dammit, I can’t remember his cell number.”

“Thith, tthedro…” I started. “Tho. Ith fife,
thefthn…” After the second try, I realized I was in no condition to
extract the number from my scrambled grey matter. Fortunately, I
was still possessed of enough lucidity to notice the caller ID box
on the wall. I shook my head and pointed to it. “Thayre. Theck thh
calther Idee.”

She was getting better at understanding my
new language, and she immediately began scrolling through the
numbers until she hit what she was searching for. With a quick
flourish, she tapped in the seven digits and tucked the handset
back beneath her mane of spiraling auburn curls.

She began her impatient shuffle once again,
and I watched her as I fumbled with the cap on a bottle of aspirin.
I knew it wouldn’t help my head, but maybe it would do some good
for my tortured tongue.

“Aye, Benjamin,” she said suddenly. “It’s
Felicity. No, this is important. Row just had another seizure… Yes,
just like before… Not ten minutes ago… Yes…”

I watched on as she paused, obviously
listening to him. Her face grew hard and her lips curled into a
frown. After a moment she spoke again. “When?… No… We haven’t even
had the TV on for two days now… Aye… Yes… He seems to be okay at
the moment, I think… Rattled… No… No, not yet… Yes… Okay… Should I
call her?… Yes… Okay then, we’ll be here.”

She hung up the phone without even telling
him goodbye. When she turned back to me, there was an even thicker
layer of concern overlaying her features.

“Whathh?” I asked, not sure I wanted to
know.

“He’s on his way,” she said. “He wants me to
call Constance.”

“Ah kinna gotthh thaa,” I replied.
“Whath-elth?”

She shook her head and looked away for a
moment before locking eyes with me once again. “He says the Major
Case Squad is already working a scene. They found another body,
Row. Just like before. Shallow grave, near the Missouri River, no
head.”

I looked back at her and closed my eyes as I
slowly shook my head. A wave of nausea welled up in my stomach,
bringing its thin burn up to my mid-chest.

Even though I had known in my heart that this
wasn’t backlash, and even though I had known that this was going to
happen again, I had still hoped I was mistaken. Right now, I would
have given just about anything to be wrong.

If all this weren’t enough, I was also
directing anger inward at myself. I didn’t know if it was because I
had tried too hard or not hard enough. Or, if perhaps it were all
because I had begun to take comfort in the fact that the dead had
stopped speaking to me, and due to that, had ignored a sign I
normally would have picked up. Whatever the reason, I knew it must
be my fault that I had only now heard the voice from beyond the
veil. Only now, finally choosing to listen, after she was already
dead and there was no way to save her.

I beat back the desire to vomit and opened my
eyes. Felicity was still staring at me, her face stricken with the
same pained mask I’d seen her wear four months ago.

“Dammit,” I spat.

It was the first clear thing I’d said in the
past fifteen minutes.

* * * * *

“Whoa, back up, Kemosabe,” Ben told me,
waving his hand to indicate that I should calm down. “You’re makin’
assumptions, so lemme just tell ya’ what’s goin’ on.”

“I already know what’s going on,” I
returned.

Fortunately, the combination of salt water,
aspirin, and ice had taken the swelling in my tongue down enough to
allow me to communicate normally by the time he had arrived. The
lingual organ still had a tendency to get in the way of my teeth
from time to time, but at least I was intelligible for the
moment.

My friend had barely made it through the
front door when I started in on him, all but babbling about what
had transpired. The anger I had internalized had grown beyond my
limits and was now venting back into the world as I outwardly
berated myself for obviously missing something. Of course, what I
was missing right now was the fact that he needed me to be quiet
and let him talk.