Molly’s story is here…
Reaching Out is a
San Jenaro story with a different kind of focus. While Lana Moreno is a smart-mouthed, two-fisted monster hunter with a terrible sex life, her cousin Molly’s life is quieter. Except for all the screaming of the dead. Molly can feel past the barrier between this world and the next. Ghosts, spirits, and other harder to define things. People pay her to answer questions no one really wants answered. And when her spirit friends start going missing, Molly is literally the only one in San Jenaro willing and able to do anything.
If you’d like to know more about
why I wrote Reaching Out, take a look here!
You can get your ebook here on Itch.
Or here on Payhip.
Or here on Amazon.
Or the dead tree version.
Here’s a sample* for your reading pleasure!
*Because this is a early draft, stuff subject to change!
A tall white candle flickered suddenly in front of me inside it’s glass hurricane jar. The light from the candle bounced off of the smooth stone of a simple headstone. I never read headstones if I can avoid it, so I didn’t consider the name or the dates etched there. Rather, I glanced up at the solemn oaks that lined the car path through St. Marcella‘s Consecrated Earth and Place of Rest cemetery. The leaves were still. The sky was twilight. The daylight birds were napping after dinner, I suspected, and quiet. The night time insects hadn’t roused themselves to live their little bug lives and so there were no echos of their chirrups and twittering. Twilight is an in-between time as far as animal noises go. It’s a liminal time for a lot of reasons.
But the candle flame was flickering, jumping around like an angry child trying for my attention. It had my attention. The air grew cooler, without progression from what it was to noticeably chilly. It was chilly all at once. A presence was with me. I expected one, but that didn’t make it any less jarring.
I sat in my black lace dress, it’s skirt spread out across graveyard grass. I wore a black mantilla over my hair and face with a lit white candle in a cemetery. That‘s the expected uniform for this kind of good work, and I wasn‘t yet one for pushing against expectation while working. Twilight of a Friday afternoon turning to Friday night. I sat beside an empty grave though not an open one. They buried an empty casket when they never found a body. I had lit a candle and reached out to find a ghost. It was a sad story, they are all sad stories. I reached out, across the veil of our world into the next to find a boy who‘s mother missed him very much.
I had hoped I would reach out and get nothing. There are a lot of good reasons I might reach out and get nothing, and some of them are good news for a grieving mother. There is only one reason for me to feel a presence when I reach out, and it wasn’t much in the way of good news for that same mother.
“My name is Molly.” I told the empty air.
“Like the drug?” a voice came back. It was echo, a distant sound happening more in my head than in my ears. When I looked up from the flickering candle flame, I was all at once aware that someone was sitting on the headstone looking down at me.