Malediction: An Old World Story by Melissa F. Olson Page B

know, I have a few connections in game design. Why don’t I buy you ladies a round of drinks, and we can head out to the patio and discuss it?”
    He stepped toward them, and was it just her imagination or had his whole demeanor gotten more aggressive? Almost … violent. Sam took an instinctive step backward, feeling strangely creeped-out by this guy, who hadn’t actually done anything improper. Still, she decided to let Ruanna handle this pitch on her own. She opened her mouth to excuse herself, but before she could speak Ruanna looped her arm through Sam’s and stepped forward.
    “We’d love to,” Ruanna said firmly. Samantha Wheaton found herself being propelled toward the bar.
    Later, during a few fleeting moments of groggy consciousness, Sam would remember this moment and curse herself for not trusting her instincts about this man. Of course, he wasn’t a man, not really.  
    He was the thing that killed her.

1. Lex

    Ask Jesse Cruz how I died.
    I had to hand it to my sister—in life she had always known how to make an entrance, and after her death, she could sure as hell clear a room. I meant that literally: the moment after she said those words, the room we were sitting in abruptly vanished, and I woke up covered in a film of cooling sweat.
    I sat up in bed, breathing hard, displacing several annoyed-looking rescue pets that had crowded into the bed with me. Raja, the biggest cat, yawned at me and stretched, kneading his claws into the blanket still tossed over my legs. The claws punched straight through the fabric and into my skin, making me yelp. Revenge accomplished, he stalked off the bed and out of the bedroom.
    I scrubbed my hand over my face, trying to slow down my breathing. It’s important to note here that the conversation with Sam, my dead twin sister, was not a dream. Lots of people dream about their deceased loved ones—hell, I dreamed about the soldiers who’d died under my watch on a regular basis. But I’d recently discovered that I was a boundary witch, one who could control magics that crossed the line between the living and the dead. Shortly thereafter, I found out that I could do a lot more than dream about Sam. I could call her actual soul to mine, have a conversation with her in a safe place that my mind created for that purpose, and then send her back to wherever she was the rest of the time.
    It was a neat trick, but I was still learning how it worked and how to control it. One thing I’d discovered very quickly, however, was that there were strict limits to what Sam was allowed to tell me. She couldn’t say anything about her current … situation, or whatever you want to call the afterlife. I was fairly certain that she hadn’t done anything to land herself in some iteration of Hell, but I wasn’t sure if she was in Heaven, Limbo, a spiritual holding dimension, or, hey, waiting in a long line for reincarnation. But if she tried to tell me anything that was off-limits, she would be abruptly blinked away from me, which is exactly what happened after her cryptic message about Jesse Cruz.
    I did, at least, know who he was: Cruz was the former LAPD detective who had investigated my sister’s murder. I’d visited him after Sam’s disappearance ten months earlier. He was the one who’d explained why they didn’t expect to find my sister’s body.  
    When I spoke to him that day, I’d also run into an associate of his, a young woman who suggested I was more than human. I’d shrugged it off at the time, but months later, after I found out about my connections to magic and the Old World, I started to wonder if Cruz was tied up in it too. I had actually tried to contact the detective again, only to find out that he no longer worked for the LAPD.
    My life had gotten really chaotic after that—a group of vampires had been intent on kidnapping Sam’s daughter Charlie—and I’d never followed up. Now Sam herself was pointing me back toward Cruz. Why?
    I swung my legs over the