The End Of Desire: A Rowan Gant Investigation Read Online Free Page A

for better than 150 years but
just happens to be up to her old tricks again because the wrong
person decided to play with the wrong kind of magick for all the
wrong reasons. It wasn’t as if I was with the FBI, or even a cop.
But, I did have a vested interest because that “wrong kind of
magick” had been deeply affecting my life and, more importantly, my
wife’s for almost a month now. It was time for it to stop, and I
was willing to do whatever it would take to make that happen.
    “Yeah, Ben, I know…” I muttered in reply.
“But when is the last time you recall anything being normal in my
life?”
    He answered without missing a beat, “Nineteen
seventy-two.”
    “I’m pretty sure you didn’t even know me in
nineteen seventy-two.”
    “You’re right. Anyway, I was just guessin’.
Actually, I’m bettin’ you’ve prob’ly never had a normal day in your
life, period.”
    “It feels that way,” I sighed. “But, there
was a time…”
    “Yeah, Row, I know there was…” he agreed, his
voice trailing off as it lost some of its edge.
    My friend was agreeing because he had been
around when things were sane. While 1972 was pushing the limit, we
truly had been friends for more years than I could remember. So he
was well aware it wasn’t until I started hearing the voices of the
dead that things began to get weird. And, while it seemed like a
lifetime, especially to me, that affliction had only come upon me
somewhere around a half dozen years ago.
    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.
    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