I was live-streaming my fortune-telling, and I connected with a kind-looking centenarian. He asked me how much longer he had to live. I bluntly told him, “You won’t live past tonight.” He didn’t get angry. Instead, he kindly forgave my lack of skill. He even went so far as to live-stream past midnight to prove me wrong, as requested by viewers. However, at the exact moment of 0:00, the live stream cut off. When the live stream came back online, the screen showed the old man’s body, bleeding from all seven orifices… “For the last time, I didn’t kill him. I just saw that his time was up.” I leaned back in the squeaky chair of the interrogation room, trying my best to sound patient. It was the third time I’d repeated the same, simple truth. The detective across from me, a man whose face was a roadmap of sleepless nights and bad coffee, was not buying it. His eyes narrowed. He slammed a beefy hand on the metal table, making me jump. “Seraphina,” he growled, “do you hear yourself? Nobody just looks at a man’s face and sees a damn expiration date. Especially not when that man is Silas Croft, a perfectly healthy centenarian who, by some ‘coincidence,’ drops dead in the most gruesome way imaginable on the very night you say he will.” I offered him my most innocent expression. “Most people can’t. That doesn’t mean I can’t.” My life hasn’t exactly been normal. I was left as a baby on the porch of a cabin deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The woman who lived there, my Nana, was what folks in those parts call a “granny woman”—a seer, a healer, a keeper of the old ways. She saw the date on the scrap of paper tucked into my swaddling clothes and said the spirits had marked me for the path. She raised me. We had each other, and that was enough. Then, right after I got my scholarship to college, she vanished. Left a note on the kitchen table saying the mountains were calling her deeper and I shouldn’t look for her. Just like that, my world fell apart. She could have at least left me some cash. How was a broke college freshman supposed to survive? So, I did what any desperate student with a very particular, and mostly illegal, set of skills would do. I ruled out the ghost-busting and curse-lifting Nana had taught me—too much paperwork. But of the five arts, I was always best at reading people. And I’d heard the quickest way for a student to make money was livestreaming. The plan was simple: online psychic readings. One a day to cover my ramen and rent. It was a beautiful plan. Until my very first client. The man, Silas Croft, was a monster wearing a saint’s skin. A life-stealer. He should have died thirty years ago, but there he was, a celebrated hundred-year-old, hale and hearty. The karmic rot clinging to him was blacker than a serial killer’s soul. He’d been stealing years from others to pad out his own. So, the detective was right. It wasn’t a coincidence. If he hadn’t streamed with me, he might have had a little longer. But he did. And I believe in doing a good deed daily. All I did was give the tormented spirits of his victims, the ones forced to linger around him, unable to find peace, a little nudge. A window of opportunity. So, technically, I wasn’t lying. I didn’t kill him. Eventually, they had to let me go. My alibi was rock-solid. My roommate, my RA, and the dorm’s security cameras all confirmed I hadn’t left my room all night. But the second I stepped out of the police station’s front doors, I was swarmed by a group of well-dressed senior citizens in black. “There’s the witch that murdered our father!” one of them shrieked. “Get her!” 2 I sidestepped a surprisingly agile lunge from a man who had to be at least seventy. My evasive maneuver only seemed to make them angrier. A woman with a pearl necklace and venom in her eyes pointed a trembling finger at me. “You killed our father, and you have the nerve to run?” The logic was… questionable. As she spoke, she signaled to the others to surround me. A little further away, a younger man held up his phone, clearly livestreaming my impending beatdown for the whole world to see. They seemed to have forgotten they were standing on the steps of a police station. Before they could even touch my jacket, several officers burst out the doors to restore order. Seeing the police protecting me, one of the women collapsed dramatically onto the pavement and began to wail. “She murdered our father, and now the police are protecting her! Oh, Lord, open up the heavens and strike down these wicked people!” I stood comfortably behind a wall of blue uniforms, watching her performance with genuine admiration. It was top-tier. And while I’m not the Lord, I could certainly grant her wish. I discreetly flicked a small, carved piece of wood from my sleeve in her direction—a little something Nana taught me for encouraging bad weather. A deafening crack of thunder echoed overhead, and a single, brilliant bolt of lightning shot down from a perfectly clear blue sky, striking the ground in the middle of the frantic seniors. They screamed and scattered as the bolt danced between them, a chaotic light show of divine retribution. The strangest part was, it seemed to be targeting them specifically. When an officer tried to pull one of the men away, the lightning simply arced around him, continuing to chase the wailing family members. When it was over, everyone expected to see charred bodies. Instead, the group was rolling on the ground, shrieking in terror, their expensive funeral attire disheveled but completely unharmed. The police just stared, utterly bewildered. That’s when I cleared my throat and spoke in a calm, clear voice. “Officer,” I said. “I’d like to report them. For the murder of multiple children.” 3 Less than ten minutes after being released, I was back inside. At least this time I was in an interview room, not a holding cell. From the hallway, I could faintly hear the Croft siblings proclaiming their innocence. “We’ve already dispatched a unit to the location you described,” said Detective Harding, the same man from before. His face was granite, his eyes sharp enough to cut glass. “This is no longer just a potential homicide. You are making a very serious accusation. You’ll be held legally responsible for what you say.” “I understand,” I said, nodding meekly. I patted my stomach. “Excuse me, officer, but does the department have a lunch budget?” My stomach punctuated the question with a loud, mournful gurgle. For a second, Harding’s professional mask almost cracked. An eyelid twitched. I could practically read the thought bubble over his head: Are you kidding me? Five minutes later, a styrofoam container with Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, and green beans was placed in front of me. I could have cried. Ever since Nana left me with nothing but a hundred twenty-eight dollars and sixty cents to my name, I’d been living on a diet of instant noodles and saltine crackers for weeks. The city police department was quickly becoming my favorite institution. Nothing in this world is more blissful than a full stomach. And of course, someone had to interrupt my moment of joy. Another officer walked in, holding out his phone on speaker. “Harding,” a voice crackled from the other end. “We’ve dug five feet down in every spot she described. There’s nothing here. No sign of disturbance, no bodies.” Harding’s gaze snapped to me, cold and hard. “Seraphina Moon. You have anything to add?” I quickly swallowed my last bite of mashed potatoes. “I couldn’t have been wrong. Are you sure you dug in the right place?” His brow furrowed, clearly warring with himself. “Describe exactly what you saw. Every detail.” “Okay,” I began. “The woman in the red dress, we’ll start with her. The whites of her eyes are visible all the way around the iris. That’s a sign of profound cruelty. Her aura is a rotting, blackish-green, and there are deep, vertical lines of shadow in her karmic field that scream—” “Enough!” he roared, slamming his pen down. “Are you making a mockery of this investigation?” I blinked at him, genuinely confused by his anger. “No, sir. You asked me how I knew, so I’m telling you. Is it the terminology? Are you having trouble following?” I could sympathize. When I used to help people at the cabin, they’d often get confused if I didn’t speak in plain English. Maybe Detective Harding was just embarrassed to admit he was lost. Before I could simplify it further—like just telling him how many ghosts were clinging to each of them—he cut me off. “Ms. Moon, this is a police station, not a sideshow. Stop playing games. Just tell me what you witnessed. The time, the place, the actions of the suspects.” He took a few deep breaths, visibly trying to regain his composure. He picked up his pen. And then I said the one thing that was guaranteed to make him explode. “I didn’t witness them do anything.” I had only seen the ghosts. The dozens of child-spirits huddled behind me right now, cowering from the righteous energy radiating off Detective Harding. If Nana hadn’t warned me that showing a normal person a ghost could literally scare them to death, I would have opened his third eye right then and there. But with this many spirits in the room, it would be a death sentence. Besides, the ghosts couldn’t tell me anything. Their ethereal forms were pierced with old, iron nails, sealing their senses. They were deaf, blind, and mute. Rusted chains were bound to their ankles, tethering them to an ancient oak tree on the Croft estate. It was a particularly nasty kind of folk magic, designed to trap their souls, preventing them from finding peace or telling their stories in the afterlife. The only way to free them was to find their physical remains, pull the nails, and break the chains. This was a problem. Harding didn’t believe me. His phone rang again. It was the team at the dig site, asking if they should pack it in. I could hear frustrated voices in the background. Harding glared at me, then spoke into the phone. “Yeah, sorry to waste your time, guys. Pack it up. We’ve got a false report here. I’ll deal with… Seraphina, what are you doing?” Hearing him call it off, I lunged, snatching the phone from his hand. I held it up to my mouth and shouted, “Keep digging! Turn on your video camera, I’ll show you where to go!” 4 Harding’s patience had finally evaporated. “Seraphina, this is not a game. Give me back my phone.” On the other end of the line, the officers were silent, waiting for his command. Acting on pure instinct, I ripped my shirt open a little and shoved the phone down into my bra. The move seemed to stun Harding into silence more than anything else I’d done all day. He finally found his voice, speaking through gritted teeth. “Seraphina. For the last time. Give. Me. The phone.” I lifted my chin, meeting his furious gaze without flinching. “There are sixteen murdered children buried out there. Are you really going to let them lie in the cold ground forever, without ever getting justice?” He said nothing. He just stared, his eyes boring into me, searching for the lie. The silence was broken by a hesitant voice from the phone, now muffled against my chest. “Uh, Detective? Maybe… maybe we should listen to the girl. Just one more time.”
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