Free Blood Moon: A Rowan Gant Investigation by M. R. Sellars

shooing one of the cats from it.
    She had a point, even if it wasn’t entirely
on base. This sort of thing still happened to me even when it
wasn’t one of Ben’s cases, but never to this extreme. I suppose
even the tortured spirits of the dead had enough sense to know
whether or not I had access to someone who would actually listen to
what I had to say rather than having me hauled off for psychiatric
evaluation.
    “You stay right there,” she told me after she
finished more or less tucking me in. “I’m going to go make you some
sage tea.”
    “Okay,” I told her.
    There was really little else I could do. Even
if I wanted to bring up the fact that I’d been using salt and try
to argue the point with her I wasn’t feeling up to it. Oddly
enough, however, my lack of fight wasn’t because I was in any major
pain. In fact, I no longer felt a single ache. The pervasive
weakness had actually transformed into a sense of absolute comfort
and the earlier cold that had started to seep into my bones was now
replaced by welcome warmth.
    I allowed my eyelids to droop as the
pleasantness washed over me. I couldn’t remember the last time I
had felt so completely relaxed. I was on the verge of giving myself
over to the darkness of sleep when I felt a quick flutter in my
chest. It was followed by a second, and then a tickle started
somewhere deep inside my brain.
    I tried to ignore it, but it was on a
mission. It persisted in the same way a nagging question would turn
into a mindless obsession that kept you awake at night. As if
giving in to just such a need to go check and make sure a light is
turned off, I allowed the relentless itch to force me to move my
arm. Had I been in any other state of mind I don’t know if I would
have considered the unnatural degree of effort it took to
accomplish that task to be worthwhile. But since the growing nag
was going to continue pecking at me until I satisfied the curiosity
it had awakened, I complied.
    After what seemed an endless stretch of time,
I managed to bring my hand against my neck. However, the action did
little to quell the tickle in my grey matter because I discovered
in that instant my fingers were now completely numb. Unable to feel
anything at all, I gave up and allowed my hand to fall away as I
offered myself to the comfort of the encroaching darkness.
    At that same instant, I could have sworn I
heard Felicity’s near panicked voice screaming my name.
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER 7:
     
    I didn’t recall much of anything between
hearing the echo of my wife’s voice and coming to once again. Of
course, whether or not I had actually lost consciousness in the
first place was a minor point of contention. I thought I had, but
according to Felicity, she didn’t think so; or if I had, it was for
no more than a split second. Since the whole event was all really
just a blank spot in my head, I had to take her word for it.
    The only thing I could say for certain was
that I had suddenly found her concerned face hovering over me while
she pressed her hand hard against my neck—hard enough to hurt, in
fact. Prior to that, about the only thing I could remember was the
sensation of floating in a dark, silent void. Of course, that was
nothing new. Unfathomable darkness and general disorientation were
all just part of the scenery when the dead were demanding my
attention. It seemed to be their way of trying to gain the upper
hand, and much to my chagrin, it usually worked.
    What it came down to in the final analysis
was that Felicity was probably dead on with her estimate about how
much time I had spent unconscious—even if that fraction of a second
had felt much longer to me. But, that was to be expected. Time had
an odd way of becoming an unreliable reference point on the dark
side of the veil, especially when you didn’t belong there.
    It didn’t really matter now anyway. Fifteen
minutes had noticeably ticked away since then, and in the world of
the living, time still retained its