Page 1 of Cursed
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SETH
“I have waited long enough.Avenge me!” The furious ghost sent a frigid wind through the small parlor, sweeping papers from the desk and swaying the curtains. The candle in the middle of the séance table guttered but didn’t go out.
“That’s why we’re here.” Seth Tanner had never considered himself a ghost whisperer, but recent situations dealing with angry spirits made him wish for those skills. “We want to stop the man who killed you.”
“He took everything from me!”
The spirit of Rod Jennings looked like a tough stevedore in his middle years with a fringe of gray hair around his trucker cap and a muscular body gone soft in the middle.
Seth looked at Alicia Peters, the medium, and saw the strain in her face. Evan Malone, the third person at the séance table, squeezed Seth’s hand as a warning to wrap up the conversation. The ghost made himself heard because Alicia lent him enough energy to speak aloud. Seth knew that meant their time was short because she couldn’t sustain that for long.
“Who killed you?” Seth needed to hear his suspicion confirmed by the killer’s victim.
“Sterling Vernon,” the ghost spat, loathing clear in his expression. “I worked on the docks, and I saw what was inside one of his refrigerated shipping crates. There were body parts—not normal butchered cuts of meat. Except, they didn’t look like they came from people or farm animals. I swear they were monster meat.”
“And he killed you because of what you saw?”
“I didn’t know he was behind me. He said something witchy, my heart stopped, and I fell down, dead,” Rod replied. “I had a life. A family. That bastard took everything. I want revenge.”
Seth could sympathize. He had lost his parents and younger brother to one of Vernon’s fellow witches.
Rod’s body had been returned from Savannah to be buried in Charleston, making it possible for Alicia to contact his ghost. That was one of many reasons Seth and Evan had stopped in Charleston on their way to deal with the Savannah witch-disciple.
“Is there anything else you can tell us about Vernon that would help us stop him?” Seth asked.
“He got regular shipments of cold crates like that, so if they all had monster meat, he must be doing something with it,” the ghost replied
“Do the crates still arrive on schedule?”
“Yeah. Nothing changed—except that I’m dead.”
“Alicia can help you pass over if you want to go,” Seth offered the irate spirit.
“Not until I’ve seen that son of a bitch get what’s coming to him,” Rod’s ghost snarled. “You need help nailing his ass to the wall? I’m your man.”
“Rest now,” Alicia said, and murmured an incantation to release the ghost, who winked out of sight.
She slumped and let go of their hands when the spirit departed. Seth moved to help Alicia lie on the divan while Evanfetched the sports drink and candy bar they had set out to help replenish her energy after the working.
Seth stood a few inches over six feet tall with dark blond hair, chocolate-brown eyes, and an athletic build. Evan, his partner, was just as tall, but he had chestnut hair and hazel eyes.
“We’ve had witch-disciples selling pharmaceuticals for supernatural creatures and warlocks trafficking shifters and psychics, but monster meat is a new one,” Seth said as he and Evan found chairs nearby.
“What do you think it’s for?” Evan asked. “Rituals? Spell components? Aphrodisiacs?”
“I don’t think I want to know, but we need to find out anyhow,” Seth replied. “Sterling Vernon’s one of the stranger disciples, and that’s saying something.” He paused and was quiet for a moment before Evan spoke.
“What’s on your mind?”
“Just thinking about Jesse,” Seth admitted. “Like always.”
A few years ago, Seth and his younger brother, Jesse, had camped out near a haunted bridge on a lark. They intended to spend the night doing silly videos for social media, drinking beer, and hanging out. A mysterious force attacked them, leaving Seth unconscious and killing Jesse. Then his parents died in a suspicious wreck, and the house burned, leaving Seth with a pickup truck, his parents’ fifth-wheeler, and the black Hayabusa motorcycle he had bought when he got out of the Army.
No one believed Seth that the causes were supernatural, but obsessive research led to the unlikely truth: Jesse had been a sacrifice for a dark witch in a ritual cycle going back over one hundred years.
“I’m still amazed that for a whole century, no one else noticed the pattern with the deaths,” Evan said.
