Obsidian Curse Read Online Free PDF Page A

come to me in a dream, via a spirit guide, or through the ethereal form at the most inopportune times. Like in the drive-through of a fast-food joint. Poof! I’d turn my head and a ghost would be sitting in the passenger seat coaxing me to order him a bacon double cheeseburger. And no, they can’t eat, but those residual memories of life in corporeal form tended to linger. Or I’d be shopping for new boots and suddenly an old salesclerk would show up, insisting that brown was not my color. Luckily, no one has ever appeared in the shower, or I’d be sporting dreadlocks by now.
    It wasn’t until I began honing my particular skill set that they started touching me.
    And boy did that freak me out.
    So now, I can’t walk past a cemetery without a ghost grabbing my arm and asking me to send a message. Usually it’s something completely mundane like “Tell my granddaughter that my wedding silver was supposed to go to her except that sneaky cousin of mine made off with it.” Things like that.
    And if they can touch you, that means they can hurt you. A lesson I hold in the forefront of my mind at all times. This was why I took the car to Cinnamon’s place. I had to loop around the long way to my cousin’s house now, because the direct path would send me straight past one of the oldest cemeteries in the state. Those are the worst. Mostly, the ghosts there wanted to argue about politics, unsettled feuds, urban sprawl, and how screwed up today’s young people were. You can only listen to so many “in my day” stories before your ears start to bleed.
    I pulled up to Cinnamon’s two-bedroom ranch over on Ruby Lane and parked the car in the driveway. There was a cement sidewalk that led to my cousin’s door, and I followed that to three carved pumpkins sitting on the porch next to a plastic skeleton who leaned back in a wooden chair as if he’d just been reading the newspaper. Someone had propped up his hand and he was flipping me the bird. The pumpkins had to be Tony’s doing, because Cin was not the type of woman to decorate, let alone acknowledge holidays.
    I suspected that she was the one who arranged the finger.
    I knocked once and heard my cousin yell, “It’s open.” That’s the type of community we lived in. Everyone left their doors unlocked, the keys in the car, and the children unsupervised. That kind of thing made me uneasy because I’d written enough obituaries in Chicago to know that we were never that safe, no matter where we lived.
    Predators roamed every town, in every form.
    However, Cinnamon was heavily armed and could shoot a pen out of someone’s hand from twenty yards away. Her father, my uncle Declan, was the chief of police in Amethyst for many years before he left this plane not so long ago. He was obsessed with making certain his little girl knew her way around a weapon and how to defend herself. I supposed my own mother, his sister, was the same way. Except the self-defense she had instilled in me was in the form of spellcasting, potion making, intuitive clarity, and inner strength.
    The door creaked as I opened it and I was surprised at the sight before me.
    Cinnamon was sitting on her blue couch looking like a bomb about to explode. Her dark hair was clipped high on her head in a mass of knotty waves. She had no makeup on and she was wearing one of Tony’s Bears tee shirts, cut off at the sleeves, with a ketchup stain dribbled down the front. Thor was perched next to her, his rear on the sofa, paws on the ground, and his huge head in my cousin’s lap.
    They both looked uncomfortable. But here’s the thing about Great Danes. When they don’t want to move, it’s nearly impossible to get them to do so, short of renting a forklift.
    I bit my lip, knowing that if I laughed, which is what I really wanted to do, my cousin would disembowel me with a toothpick.
    “Thor, buddy, are you bothering Auntie Cinnamon?”
    Cin shot daggers at me with her eyes. “Do. Not. Call. Me. That.”
    “Oh,