Harm None: A Rowan Gant Investigation (44 page)

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.