The Haunting of the Gemini Read Online Free PDF Page A

away and took a breath. That small action gave me pause. What the hell was I doing? Standing in my own kitchen holding a knife like Norman Bates and shrieking at a ghost? I had to get a grip. I put down the knife and began to walk slowly down the hallway to my bedroom. As I approached, the door cracked just a bit, and my beloved cat Oreo shot out past me. She raced to the living room and started scratching at the glass French doors that led out to the front yard.
    I followed her and tried to scoop her up into my arms. I had to drop down on all fours and crawl after her as she scooted around a folding screen and kept scratching and meowing at the window. I knew she was trying to show me something, and I was damn sure I didn’t want to see what it was. I finally got my arms around her and started to slide backward, away from the French doors. She clawed at me, and I let her go as I stared up and outside. What I saw froze me with fear. A tall man dressed all in black stood on the other side of the door. His face was covered with a rag, which he lifted in order to press his mouth against the glass. His breath frosted the pane before he stepped back slightly and let the rag fall back into place.
    â€œJackie,” I heard him say, as if he were in the room with me, “give me what belongs to me.”
    I crawled away as fast as I could, trying to keep from being pulled into a fight I had nothing to do with.
    * * *
    As this woman kept stalking me, I tried desperately to live a normal life. Well, normal for me. My job as a psychic medium isn’t exactly something you find in the “help-wanted” section of the paper. I use my skills in many ways, not all of them related to death. I help the love struck decide whether their infatuations are truly right for them. I help guide artists and performers toward their next projects. I help families find relatives who have been lost to the streets and the ravages of drugs. I guide people on their deathbeds over to the other side. I help law enforcement with homicide and missing-person cases. And I help those robbed of loved ones by murder or suicide have that last conversation they would otherwise be denied.
    But along with the good always comes the bad. Through my work, I also am acquainted with the devil. I have witnessed and participated in true exorcisms. I have come face-to-face with demons. I have always stood up to them, resisted their leader. I feel that the devil is always looking for a way in with me. Always searching for a crack, some way to slip past my defenses. Maybe my gift is what he wants. A fine soldier I would be in his army. He knows my qualifications.
    I am the combination of two bloodlines rich in the supernatural. My father was a Blackfoot Indian who knew the earth and its rhythms. He was connected to everything natural, and he used those links to stay within the good and the right. He did not walk in the darkness. His view of the worlds—both this one and the next—was expansive, and he taught me to notice what most others did not. Each thing had a purpose, and if I knew that, I could open my mind to its other possibilities. He taught me how to summon our ancestors and ask them for guidance, and he brought me to my special protector, the spirit wolf assigned to me at birth who has guarded me ever since. And he taught me how to treat everyone—no matter what their station in life—with respect.
    My father was a huge man, big and strong. He worked with his hands all his life, molding steel and iron into all sorts of things, pipelines and bridges, and swinging a sledgehammer most men couldn’t even lift. He came down from Canada and met my mother in New Orleans. Where else would she be, my voodoo high-priestess mother? She was of Sicilian descent, but she was Bayou through and through, an expert in the humid byways and old mysticism of the South. She spent her life ridding other people of their demons, but what she vanquished