What with me being a Witch, I suppose that most would think I should be used to such things as communicating with the departed. After all, that’s exactly the sort of thing Witches were “supposed to do,” right along with riding brooms and sprinkling bat wings into bubbling cauldrons. To be honest, I sometimes thought that the Hollywood myth about WitchCraft would be a much easier way to live than I did at present. Riding a broom would definitely save me the aggravation of traffic.

Of course, while the “double, double, toil and trouble” aspect is a disproportionate fiction, Witches do tend to be more open to accepting the unexplained without going to great lengths to debunk it. Magick is certainly a part of our lives, and we know that it is very real. But, by the same token, we also know that real magick isn’t what you see in the movies and on television.

So, while I wasn’t particularly surprised by the fact that I could hear the dead, or even that they sometimes chose radical measures such as stigmata with which to communicate their distress to me, it definitely didn’t make me see it as the norm. No, I knew for a fact that I was the odd man out. Very few people, Witches or not, get stuck dealing with this sort of thing. I just happened to be one of the unlucky ones and, because of me, so was my wife.

And there, in the proverbial nutshell, was the root of the whole problem I faced at this moment in time. My wife. Even as I stood here, she was back in Saint Louis, warming a bed in the psych ward of a hospital-which I suppose was better than the jail cell she had occupied only a few days before, after being accused of at least two brutal murders. Those charges had been dropped, but the nightmare was far from over.