Poor Simon Berkley.
Hated by witches and totally misunderstood by the supernatural community, he's no psychic, nor anything anyone can explain. When a mysterious dark force starts knocking off witches one by one, Simon is immediately thrust into an...
Dedication: For Erica. My personal Alice. Forever.
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Chapter 1: Ghost
I flipped the cards through my hands, feeling each smooth rectangle with the tips of my fingers. The woman was, by all means, beautiful: brown skin, hazelnut eyes and a figure that made the Coke bottle doubt itself. She sat across from me in the dimly lit room, eyes surveying it with suspicion.
This was my type of girl.
"So," I said, my eyes not escaping her for a second. "Why are we here?"
She took a moment, as if to think. Then, staring at the cards I shuffled, she said, "I don't know Mister... err..."
"Simon—Simon Berkley."
She nodded and said, "I'm—"
"Winona Simmons" I said.
Her brown skin paled around the top of her cheeks and then, as if searching for the right words, she let herself say, "Well...how...?
I pointed to the room, the table with a crystal ball placed ceremoniously in the middle of the wooden table, and smiled. These were things weren't placed here by some higher power or even out of need — my gift, or whatever it was that gave me the visions was not powered by a crystal ball or tiny rubies around a necklace. But these things were sure eye candy for believers in such hoopla. To tell you the truth, I don't know the origin of my gift. It started at such a young age; I barely remembered how it all began — no wait. No, never mind.
She nodded and said, "Right. You're psychic." I could feel her insecurity like a thick mass around her body, almost choking me.
"Something like that," I said and grinned.
I stopped shuffling and pressed the card deck against the middle of the table and tapped it twice against its surface. She must have thought this was a ritual, but it was more my little case of OCD.
I waited for her to speak.
Winona looked down at her palms on the table and said, "My husband was murdered."
There was silence.
"You want me to contact him?" I asked.
Winona's eyes looked intensely at my own and she nodded. I usually rejected the walk-ins, most of the time they turned out to be undercover pricks just trying to bust me. But I felt her sincerity. I looked up from the table and saw him there, his dull eyes with just a glimmer of recognition, maybe a longing of some sort that still lingered there within his transparent shell; maybe it was love that drove the dead back to us. Part of me wanted to let her know everything was going to be well, that her husband would not be contacted — for he was already in the room. The gray man floated, eyes swaddled in a dark void. For a while he just stared at her in the morose way the dead — especially those who died in gruesome ways —stared at those on this plane. He had that flashing thing, too. The thing when the dead flash to and from this plane and the next, never quite staying on either. Creepy, even for me. I closed my eyes and let his story come to me like a cool current until I froze.
