In truth, it was only just beginning because it turned out the thing that went bump in the night was a half sister that, up until a few days ago, my wife didn’t even know she had. And that sister was up to her eyeballs in Voodoo and hoodoo. Of course, that wouldn’t be such a big deal, except for the fact that she had apparently taken a perfectly acceptable religion along with its associated magickal practice and perverted both of them into something vile and grotesque. While her take on that was probably 180° opposite mine, I’m betting that her victims would probably agree with me. In fact, judging from the pain in my skull, I knew for certain they did.

But opinions weren’t important right now. What was, however, was the fact that whatever she had unleashed was no longer using her alone as a vehicle to inflict pain and death, it had been trying its damnedest to use my wife as well.

I even had the freshly healing wounds to prove it.

Still, why Felicity had been sucked into this, other than a familial connection we didn’t even know she had, was something of a perverse mystery in its own right. And, solving that mystery was what brought me here, now, to this seedy motel room in the burbs of New Orleans, with nothing more in my possession than what I could quickly stuff into a single overnight bag and my carryon backpack.

“Row? You still there?” Ben’s voice drifted into my ear, breaking me out of the semi-dream state into which I’d managed to sink.

“Yeah, sorry,” I mumbled. “Drifted for a minute there.”

“Twilight Zone?” he asked.

That was his personal catch phrase to describe any time that I would experience an ethereal event, especially one that would push me into a trance or something even worse, such as a seizure. The first few times he had witnessed it happening to me he had been frantic, not that I had reacted much better. These days, however, he just took it in stride-as much as one could with that sort of thing, anyway.