My body ached when I climbed out of bed later that morning. My feet felt like I’d been hiking in crappy shoes, and even walking across the room to the kitchenette made my leg muscles scream in protest. As I tucked Camila’s box into the cupboard above my sink, I wondered if I should call Elizabeth and make an appointment for a massage.
My phone was in my hand before I remembered she was gone.
I slowly sank down onto a stool at my counter. I hadn’t expected to feel this way until the funeral, but here it was. For the first time since receiving the news, her death felt real. I had to acknowledge it. The final period at the end of her story had been hammered onto the book of her life—or at least the part of the story I had been privileged to read. Her next chapter would be written on the vellum that separates the living world from the next plane of existence, and not even a psychic like me would be able to see it all.
A sob bubbled up my throat as the finality of her loss sank in. I would never be able to talk to her again. I would never get to listen to her opinions about the way an intuitive should use their gifts for the benefit of the world. I wouldn’t even get to tell her about New Mexico and see her gray eyes flash with indignation when I let her know her cousin Fred didn’t really believe in her psychic abilities.
“Crap,” I muttered.
Fred. He didn’t know why we left early. Graham had left our room key in the late checkout box outside his office when we hightailed it back to Donn’s Hill. I meant to call Fred after we got back, but my run-in with Sheriff Harris had driven it right out of my exhausted mind.
He and Elizabeth had been close. They were family. He needed to know she had passed away. How did that normally work? My father had no extended family for me to contact when he died. His friends at the university helped me spread the word about his services. Was someone here making the difficult phone calls to the people who had known and loved Elizabeth?
Just in case, I called the Yurt in Luck office and got no answer, so I left a message asking Fred to call me as soon as possible. Death didn’t seem like an appropriate topic for a voicemail.
When my phone rang later that morning, I expected it to be Fred calling me back. Instead, Yuri’s accented voice greeted me warmly.
“Good news,” he said. “We have two new crew members.”
“Really? That was quick.”
“We got lucky. Our new cameraman just moved here from Los Angeles and can’t wait to get started.”
“Oh, cool,” I said half-heartedly. I found it hard to get excited about working with anyone who wasn’t Mark or Kit. “How about a producer?”
“I wanted to talk to you about that. You are doing a great job with the sound equipment on our little minisodes. Would you like a promotion? To take over the rest of Kit’s duties?”
I winced, glad he couldn’t see the look of distaste on my face. I had watched Kit edit several episodes, and the software she used was terrifyingly complicated. Plus, the process of clipping, cutting, rearranging, and generally wrestling the footage into a TV-ready format looked more tedious than I could handle. “I don’t think anyone would want to see an episode I edited.”
“I should have said, her duties except for that. We can outsource the editing to the same team we used for our commercials and the recent minisodes. You would handle the scheduling, making arrangements, keeping us on track. That sort of thing.” When I didn’t answer right away, he added, “It would come with a significant increase in your pay.”
Striker reached up and hooked one of her claws into my phone’s protective case. She yanked it downward toward her mouth like she was going to bite it, and I swatted her paw away.
“Mac? Are you still there?” Yuri asked.
“Sorry. Striker’s trying to take over. She wants to know if she’ll get a raise too.”
I expected him to chuckle, but his voice was serious as he said, “I can offer her an extra bag of fishy treats per month.”
Just like that, I lost the game of phone chicken and burst into laughter. Yuri joined in, which made me laugh harder and longer than the joke deserved. But it felt good. I wanted to keep laughing forever. I had been too long inside my head, and for the first time since Kit left, I found myself feeling genuinely excited to get to work.
“Deal,” I told Yuri. “So do you need to hire my replacement now?”
“Already done. Stephen Hastain recommended a friend of his. Do you know Kevin Lund?”
“I don’t think so.”
“He impressed me quite a bit during our interview. He has a passion for what we’re doing.”
“Sounds good to me. When can we get started? Or is finding our next gig my job now?”
I could hear the smile in his voice as he said, “You can take over starting with the next one. The Ace of Cups has asked us to investigate some unusual activity. We’ll start shooting Sunday evening.”
“I thought their whole bit about psychic bartenders was just a shtick to get around The Enclave’s rules?”
“It is, though we won’t mention that on the show. But some of their staff live on the second floor of that building in the tenant apartments. They claim to have seen a ghost up there. I think it will be a fitting bridge between our tourism series and the next season of Soul Searchers.”
After we hung up, I mentally amended my resumé. My career had doglegged sharply to the left when I decided to start over in this town. A string of administrative support jobs had suddenly ended, replaced by production assistant—a job I hadn’t previously known existed. Now I was going to be a producer on a television show.
I had to look up what I had agreed to become.
According to the internet, it sounded like producers were sort of like the managers I had worked for at previous jobs. They hired crew members, managed schedules, and oversaw the budget. I frowned. I had never really thought about the Soul Searchers budget before. Did Yuri actually expect me to manage the money? I raked our conversation over in my mind. He’d only mentioned the schedule, so I decided to focus on that piece until we could talk about it more.
I knew most of our prior investigations were booked in one of two ways: either someone reached out to us through our ScreamTV website and asked us to come look into suspected paranormal activity, or Kit and Yuri contacted people who owned notoriously haunted locations—like the Grimshaw Library or the Franklin cabin—and made arrangements to film an episode there. If I was going to be scheduling upcoming investigations, I decided I had better start making a list of possibilities to pitch to Yuri.
Down into the rabbit hole of online research I went. My entire day disappeared, sucked into an endless sea of personal blogs, message boards, and social media threads about paranormal activity in and around Driscoll County. If everything I read was true, almost every public building had at least one ghost associated with it. I started a list of the most promising places and kept digging.
It was satisfying to actually find something in my research for once. Funny how casting a wide net let me catch more leads than trying to hunt for an Anson Monroe-shaped needle in the haystack of the entire American population.
My hands froze on the keyboard. When Graham and I had been looking for Anson’s contact information, we’d only been searching for him by name. We had chosen the most specific possible thread to follow. Of course it hadn’t yielded many results.
Tentatively, I typed in a few other search phrases, things I knew Anson specialized in. Between my mother’s letters and the conversations I’d had with Horace, I had way more to go on than just a name.
Astral projection. Spiritual nexuses. Crossing over.
Even in the endless sea of the internet, the resources I found were comparatively thin. It wasn’t as easy to find instructions for astral projection as it was to find a recipe for super chewy chocolate chip cookies. But hunched over my laptop with a bowl of potato chips at my side, I spent hours sifting through what little I could find.
Compared to scouting potential filming locations for the Soul Searchers, this was a slog. A strangely combative argument on a now-dead forum about whether astral projection or transcendental meditation were to blame for the hauntings in Amityville nearly made me give up and snap my laptop shut. But near the bottom, just before the conversation petered out, I read a comment that made me lean forward toward the screen.
If you really want to astral project, you have to disconnect from your body, the poster wrote. You’ll need one of these flying ointments.
I had no idea what a “flying ointment” was, but the idea that the answer to the question my mother had spent so long asking could be found on the internet both saddened and intrigued me. When she died, we didn’t even have a computer in our house. She wouldn’t have been able to resist clicking the link at the bottom of the comment, and neither could I.
It took me to a blog post that was over ten years old. With as much authority as a free website can muster, the author claimed to have unearthed the only genuine flying ointment recipe in the world. It listed a dozen herbs—some I recognized, like ginger and chamomile, and others I didn’t, like hemlock and thorn apple. According to the site, witches as far back as the middle ages would rub the salve on their skin to “facilitate the separation of their spirits from their bodies, which allowed them to fly above the earth and pass freely through walls.”
I frowned. Anson definitely ignored walls when he appeared to me as Horace in places like Elizabeth Monk’s day spa. But the idea of someone’s spirit detaching from their body to literally float around like a cartoon ghost? Even living in Donn’s Hill, where the impossible happened every day, something about that just didn’t sit right with me.
It didn’t sound like astral travel.
It sounded like death.
The first comment at the bottom of the page backed up my suspicions. They emphasized their warning in all-caps: DO NOT USE THIS! These ingredients are dangerous! If you’re lucky, you’ll hallucinate your brains out. If you’re not, you will seriously die.
Another reply agreed. Belladonna? Wolfsbane? You’re kidding, right? That’s literally poison.
The first commenter added, Yup. And you don’t even need an ointment to astral project. You just need to be in a place of power.
“A place of power” sounded like the spiritual nexuses my mother had spent years exploring—places like Donn’s Hill, where the wall separating the living and the dead was thinner than normal. But she hadn’t stayed in Donn’s Hill. She had gone looking for somewhere even more powerful. Had she known about these ointments? Had she tried them?
My stomach turned.
A third poster chimed in, claiming, You can’t just find somewhere powerful enough to cross over. You have to make one.
To that, the original author of the blog replied, You’re all missing the point of the salve. If astral projection was easy, everyone would be doing it. Your mind has to separate from your body completely to pull it off. If you have to be on the edge of death to get there, so be it.
I sat back from my computer, momentarily stunned by the ideas I had just consumed. Where were these people getting their information? Experience? Had the person who wrote the blog actually used the recipe to successfully astral project?
It didn’t feel likely. It seemed too close to something Kit’s girlfriend, Amari, had told me about how to tell if a psychic is real or fake.
“The real ones,” she had said, “don’t advertise.”
If someone had knowledge this powerful, I couldn’t picture them just posting it online. I couldn’t imagine them sharing it at all. How would you even know who you could trust with it? What if you taught someone and they used it for evil?
The question brought a deep frown to my lips. Had Anson Monroe discovered the secret to astral projection on his own, or had he learned it from someone else? I knew my mother had considered him a mentor. She had been convinced he was going to help her do it, so he must have told her he could. Had he ever intended to teach her? Or had it all just been a trick, part of some sadistic plan that ended with her dying alone in the desert?
I didn’t want to imagine it, but the images filled my mind nevertheless. I saw her curled around a jewelry box just like Camila Aster, cold beyond shivering and no longer aware of her surroundings. I wondered if, as the link between her spirit and her body weakened, she was able to astral project at all. Did she realize her dream before she died? How long did it take for her soul to detach completely, leaving her body on the ground for the New Mexico State Police to find?
“No!” I shouted, shoving my laptop away from me. It flew off the countertop and clattered to the floor.
Tears streamed down my face as I fled my apartment. I needed to find Graham, needed to feel his arms around me and hear his voice in my ear. But no matter how fast I ran down the stairs, the vision in my mind followed.
No matter how far I went, I could never escape the past.