Page 47 of Vengefully Matched

I’ve been dead for almost two years, haunting an old barn, and I am having the darndest time finding whatever it is I’m tethered to. I don’t even recognize this barn, but every time I go to sleep, I wake up there, no matter how far I travel. I’ve tried several alleged spiritualists, and countless churches that claim to commune with the spiritual world—one particularly bat-shit-crazy one believes live people can marry spirits; they’re a breath away from drinking Kool-Aid, that one—but no one can SEE me or hear me. I finally figured out how to manifest physical motion enough to steal a cell phone off a hiker, and then a charger off another one, and then it was easy to haunt the house enough to generate electricity and get online. Where ON EARTH (or any other reasonably close plane of existence) can I find a medium who could actually help me? I can’t work with a summoner, because I don’t know what object I’m attached to. And anytime I find someone who can see me, it’s, like, a kid, or a dog, and people assume it’s crazy too. HELP.

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“See?” Lex said. “Connie would be perfect.”

The door swung open, and a pale-faced young woman walked out, looking shaken.

“She’s leaning way too hard into her shtick in there,” the woman whispered. “It’s like some sort of over-the-top haunted house that manages to be so cheesy that it’s scary.”

“Ah, dearest, a real psychic will do that to you.” Lex smiled disarmingly, and the woman quaked a little, hurrying to her parked car.

“Real? No. No. None of that was real. It’s not real.”

She peeled out of the parking lot before the door swung open again.

“Welcome,” said Connie, who was dressed in a long, embroidered shawl and a fringed hat that hung low into her eyes. Her hair was freshly blue-black, an impressively shiny color that made her appear ageless and wise. “Madam Cleopatra will see you now.”

“Oh,” said Agatha.

“She really is leaning into it,” Priscilla added. “Again.”

They filed in, and it was a tight squeeze with the three of them, Priscilla and Agatha pressed against the curtain to avoid disturbing anything in the room, Lex sprawled out on the large bench sofa seat as though he hadn’t a care in the world that he was taking up almost all of the room, forcing Priscilla to be intimately acquainted with the feel of Agatha pressed against her side.

Connie held a finger to her lips.

“For this to be as realistic as possible, to see what the problem is, I need the two of you to pretend you are not here. It is just Madam Cleopatra and this dashingly handsome stranger.”

Lex smiled, a crooked thing, and took her hand, raising it and pressing it to his lips above the crystal ball that was already set up.

“Enchanté, Madam Cleopatra. I’m Olexandre, but you may call me Lex. I’m delighted to be here.”

“Olexandre,” she cooed, ignoring his advice. “Hold out your hand.”

He complied, shooting Priscilla a smile until Madam Cleopatra caught him doing that and made a disappointed clucking sound with her tongue.

“None of that.”

She hummed, running a finger up and down his palm, tracing something.

“You have been in love many times, Olexandre.”

“Yes,” he said lazily. “Well, I’m over three thousand years old, so I should think it would be dreadfully boring were that not the case.”

Her eyebrows furrowed, irises widening eerily in a way that Priscilla had never actually seen on any creature. That would certainly alarm a mundane.

She shook her head.

“No,” she mused. “There was one heartache—oh. A human one. Before you became what you are now.”

Lex bristled. Priscilla sat up. She hadn’t realized Lex had been human once. Interesting.

“That’s easy enough to deduce, innit? Given how most people end up in diabolical arrangements?”

“Hmm,” said Connie, and she seemed to slip deeper into a trance. Her pupils widened, the darkness bleeding first into the iris and then in the already smaller sclera, turning entirely black, and then clouding over, gray and misty.

“YOU HAVE FALLEN IN LOVE TOO MANY TIMES TO COUNT, AND YET YOUR GREATEST UNDOING LIES AHEAD OF YOU.”

Recoiling, Lex clutched his hand as though he had been burned.