Perfect Trust: A Rowan Gant Investigation by M. R. Sellars Page A

the
season, work. I had hoped that the next time we saw one another, it
would be at a gathering of family and friends where we could share
a drink and forget about the everyday rigors of the world.
    Of course, this was my bizarre life, and something like that wasn’t
about to happen.
    I guess I should have known I wouldn’t be
blessed with such normalcy considering the circumstances, not to
mention the fact that just over one year ago my very existence had
veered off course to follow this far more tremulous path. On a
sweltering August night, an ability that would soon become my
life’s bane had exited thirty plus years of shadow to come fully
into the light.
    It was on that night that a perverted serial
murderer had taken the life of one of my friends—a student I’d
instructed in the ways of The Craft. Her final passage across the
bridge into Summerland had cost me dearly.
    I would never again be the same. In
fact, I often wondered if what that really meant was that I would
never again be sane .
    It was during the investigation of her
death—as well as the subsequent victims—when I discovered that a
cigar is not necessarily always a cigar. I had learned that for me
at least, a nightmare is quite possibly a harbinger of reality;
that an intimate supernatural connection with the “other side” was
my talent as a Witch—and at the same time, my torment.
    Just as unfortunate was the fact that the
random visions and nightmares didn’t always make much sense—like
right now. And they were very often accompanied by a headache that
would make a migraine seem like a welcome relief. Sometimes a
sensation would even manifest as an unexplained pain localized in
some other part of my body—once again, just like now.
    The only saving grace was that this
didn’t happen all the time.
There were actually long stretches where I was able to experience
“life as usual.” But, torment did happen frequently enough to keep
me off balance and always wondering. I just never knew when or
where to expect it.
    Judging from the current circumstances,
this was obviously one of the when’s , and wherever I was at the moment was,
well, one of the where’s .
    And once again, as I’d known for some time
that I would end up, I was smack in the middle of something I’d
rather have no part of. Especially given the fact that I was parked
in the chilly back seat of a Saint Louis City police cruiser,
wearing a pair of handcuffs and staring out the window at my best
friend’s incredulous face.
    As I said before, how I’d come to be here I
wasn’t entirely certain. The last thing I remembered for a fact was
climbing into bed next to my wife, Felicity. From there, to the
best of my recollection, I had gone to sleep.
    The next thing I even begin to remember after
that is chasing after the glowing yellow rectangle. Upon adding up
the imagery with the circumstances and carrying the remainder, I
had concluded that the luminous shape was none other than the
doorway to the apartment in the near distance. It didn’t help that
said doorway was quite obviously the entrance to an active crime
scene.
    “Rowan? Jeezus…” Ben’s voice came to me,
initially muted by the tempered glass of the windows, only to have
the rest of the sentence leap in volume as he jerked open the car
door. “What the fuck?!”
    From what I could tell, the woman’s thoughts
that had commandeered my synapses were pretty much gone, for now at
least. At the moment, I was feeling relatively lucid, though there
was still a definite fog hanging over me that kept threatening to
obscure rational thought altogether. I hoped it would hold off long
enough for me to figure out what was going on.
    “Hey,” I answered sheepishly.
    “Jeezus H. Christ, white man,” he continued.
“What’s goin’ on? What’re ya’ doin’ here?”
    “Honestly?”
    “Hell yes, honestly , Rowan!” he barked. “This is a fuckin’
crime scene, not a shopping mall.”
    “I don’t know.” There