For some reason, he regretted now that he hadn’t eaten the damn thing.

“What did you do?” Eddie asked. “What was the ritual?”

“The psychic told me…” Vin ricocheted back in time.

After having collapsed in front of the school at a fucking pep rally, he’d had it—and had gone to the newspaper looking for psychics because he figured if they saw into the future like he did, then maybe they’d know how the hell to stop seeing things before they happened.

Saturday morning he’d gotten on his bike and ridden all the way down to the riverfront, to a bunch of ratty little storefronts with cheap neon signs that said things like “Tarot Here!”, “Astrology Readings!”, and “100% Accurate! $15!” He’d walked into the first door that had a palm with a circle on it, but there had been a line. So he’d gone to the next one and found it locked. The third one was the charm.

Inside, the dark place had smelled like something he couldn’t recognize. Dark. Spicy.

Later he learned it was no-holds-barred, grown-up sex.

The woman had come out from a beaded curtain and she’d been dressed in black, with black hair and black eyeliner—but instead of a caftan and a wig and wrinkled lids, she’d been in a catsuit and looked like something out of Playboy.

He’d wanted her. And she’d known it.

As the echo of meeting her rippled through him, he shook himself back to the present. “I told her what I wanted and she seemed to understand immediately. She gave me a black candle and told me to go home and melt it on the stove. When it was liquid, I was supposed to pulled out the wick and put it aside, then—” He glanced at Marie-Terese and wished like hell he had another story to tell. “Then I was supposed to cut some of my hair and put it in, along with some blood and…ah…something else….”

Vin was so not the kind of guy who minced words or stuttered. But admitting to a peanut gallery and a woman he wanted in his life that whacking off had been part of the deal was not the kind of admission he was in a big hurry to make.

“Yeah, okay,” Eddie said, saving his ass. “Then what.”

“So I was supposed to cool the wax, re-form it with the wick, and go upstairs. Get naked. Draw a circle with salt. Ah…” He frowned. Weird, the first part was so clear; precisely what he’d done next was not. “It’s fuzzy from then on…I think I cut myself again and dripped the blood into the center of the circle. I lay down, lit the candle. Said some words—I can’t remember what they were exactly. Something like…I don’t know, calling things to lift burdens or some shit.”