The Sword of Michael - eARC by Marcus Wynne

mediums of phone, e-mail, Facebook and Twitter, that attempts to organize and consolidate contact information and referrals. Most of us have our own private network, a shamanic list of friends and practitioners we call on when we need work done on ourselves, back up, or questions answered.
    I called one of my favorites.
    Sabrina Murphy is a badass biker chick. She’s drop dead gorgeous: killer violet eyes, a body bursting out of ragged jeans and wife-beater tops like a teenage boy’s midnight fantasy, pale skin covered with tattoos and more than a few scars from bar room brawls. She’s Cherokee and one of the most powerful shamanic healers, with a particular gift for divination journeys into the Other Realms. I called her my Shamanic CIA. Nothing was hidden from her for long. She’d come to the attention of the government’s military psychics, like most of us do. What they called remote viewing we called Middle World journeying. When they came round offering her big bucks, she told them to fuck off and went back to her work. They tried to teach her a lesson with their technologically enhanced remote influencing; she kicked their asses in the Other Realms and, rumor had it, left several of them injured when their machines backfired on them.
    My kind of woman, all the way around.
    Her voice, still sleepy at this time of day, was colored with a whiskey and cigarette rasp. “What did you get, dude?”
    “It’s mixed, sister.”
    “Cabal?”
    “Could be. There’s that whole Atlantean connection.”
    “Piss off some sorcerers lately?”
    “Daily.”
    She laughed a deep and throaty and hot-as-hell laugh. If it wasn’t for Jolene—who loved this Wild Woman—I might take my life in my hands and dally with her.
    Truth is, I probably wouldn’t survive it.
    “You got that right, Marius,” she said. “You got that whole ‘fuck you and the world’ thing going on. I thought you were kinder and gentler now that you’ve reached the age of wisdom.”
    “I’m not getting any wiser, darling.”
    “Born dumb, huh? That’s all right, baby. I love you anyway.”
    “Thank the Creator for that.”
    “I think him every day,” she said.
    A long thoughtful draw on her cigarette, audible through the phone.
    “So,” she said. I’ll look at this today. Get back to you. I’ll tell you my first hit right now…old curse, Marius. Past life, not ancestral, but someone…or some thing…from before. I get Cabal, too. You got to watch out for the psychotronics and those convenient accidents they’re fond of.”
    “No lie, GI.”
    “Yeah. Watch yourself. I’ll get back to you later…cell phone?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You should get you a prepay, baby. Cabal likes to…”
    “I know.”
    “’Kay, baby. Watch yourself.”
    She hung up.
    I powered down my cell phone and took the battery out. Cabal. That really complicates things. The Cabal is where top secret technology, hard-core sorcery, and the amoral direction of nonhuman entities and willing humans intersect. It’s cloaked in government secrecy, funded with black budget dollars and put to the service of the hidden bureaucrats who ruled from behind the puppets they slipped into place every election.
    Not a pretty picture.
    The Dark Forces manifest here in Middle World in all sorts of ways—the thoughtless cruelty of one human towards another, the efficient predation of a serial killer, the ruthless exploitation of Mother Earth—to hold humans in thrall through the machinery of governance, all to quash the greatest gift of the Creator: Free Will.
    Freedom.
    Made me want to go watch a Mel Gibson movie.
    * * *
    I had no clients today. That happens. My practice isn’t one that lent itself to a lot of return customers. Depossession is like surgery. You go in and get the work done, help them through their recovery, and move onto the next. That’s why I keep a list of practitioners to refer clients out to; I’m problem oriented and once I’ve done the work I’m supposed to