I Will Help You Find Your Way 1/2
Tamara’s seen that look before. She used to see it every time she looked in the mirror. She sees it a lot when she comes to places like this. The only way to describe the look is shell shocked. What gets her up and moving this time is the fact that the face looks a lot like hers. There aren’t many like them. Not even a handful, at least as far as she can tell.
She watches the young woman walk to the bar, her eyes moving around the room. Tamara can tell she’s never been here before tonight. She’s a newbie, still hasn’t gotten that edge that comes with time. The newbie slides onto the bar stool, then her shoulders drop as she leans forward on the bar. It’s got to be relief coursing through her veins.
Tamara crosses the room from her seat in a far corner and sits down next to the young hunter. “How long?”
The young hunter with jet black curls and brown eyes, soft due to sadness Tamara supposes, turns to ask, “What?”
“How long have been at this?”
“A couple of months.” The bartender, Ellen, isn’t a hunter but might as well be, sets a beer in front of the newbie, a small smile on her face. She doesn’t wait around for thanks. “You?”
“A few years.”
“What happened to you?”
“My daughter.”
“My dad.”
She’d planned to leave before this newbie walked through the door. This is just a short delay. “Ellen’s got my number. Get it if you want it. Call me if you ever need anything.” Tamara gets up as she says it.
“Thanks. I’m Cassie.” She extends her hand, a grateful smile on her face.
Tamara takes it, feels the fresh calluses and remembers. “Tamara.”
She’s an hour away when her phone rings, unknown caller flashing on the screen. The first thing Cassie says is “I need a partner.”
“Meet me in Cheyenne,” Tamara responds. “I’ll let you know where.”
They meet over breakfast, two blocks away from the Tamara’s motel. Cassie slides into the seat across from Tamara and sighs. Her smile is tired as she says, “Didn’t get much sleep last night. Excited, I guess, to meet up.”
Tamara didn’t sleep much either. It wasn’t excitement that kept her up, more like wariness about what she’d gotten herself into now.
Isaac had been her only partner. They’d learned together. Surprisingly, patience had been in great supply. She thinks now it that had to do with having no other choice. They were in it together, novices trying to grieve, get revenge, save the world, and keep each other from falling apart. Pretty tall orders for anyone but somehow they had managed. Now she’s all alone wandering, no longer a novice but not sure if she’s any better at getting revenge (now for two lost loves) and saving the world. For all she knows she’s fallen apart but keeps moving so she can pretend otherwise.
Tamara smiles back, says, “Tell me your story.”
Cassie lost her father and mother in the space of two weeks, her father run down by a possessed truck and her mother finally succumbing to the illness she’d been battling for some time. She mentions Sam and Dean as having got rid of the spirit that killed her dad and his friends. Tamara’s glad she’s developed enough of a poker face to not react at the mention of Sam and Dean.
“Mama always said her home was with daddy so I think she really died of a broken heart,” Cassie says. Her look says she believes such a thing is possible. Tamara doesn’t think it is because if it was, she’d be dead already. She would’ve dropped dead the minute she saw her baby limp and covered in what seemed like all the blood her little body had carried.
The waitress refills their coffee again looking like she’s grateful for something to do or angling for a good tip on a very slow morning. When she leaves, Tamara shares, “My daughter, Yasmin, was killed by a Black Annis in our home one night.” At the look on Cassie’s face, Tamara explains. “It’s a kind of witch. We didn’t know it at the time. We had no clue about such things. It took a few months to figure out what killed Yasmin and then find even more.”
“Who’s we?”
“My husband and I.”
“Where is your husband?” Cassie asks.
“We were hunting demons…”
“Demons are real?”
“Everything you think exists out there does. So does everything you can’t even imagine. Anyway, we track a demon to a bar. We follow him inside. The whole place was full of demons. I watched as one of them made him drink drain cleaner. Some other hunters,” Tamara pauses, decides against mentioning the Winchesters for now. “Some other hunters in the area got me out of there. I’ve been on my own ever since.” If she were stronger, she’s sure the mug in her hand would’ve broken in her hand as she told Cassie. It’s the first time she’s had to describe what happened in words. Usually what happened just replays itself in her mind when she allows herself to think about it.
Cassie touches Tamara’s hand, the one that’s wrapped around the mug. Tamara pulls away to press the heels of her hands to her eyes for a moment. She’s not going to cry in the middle of some diner in front of someone she just met even if she just did the really hard part.
She pulls her hands away, says, “I’m good. You ready to get out of here?”
Cassie falls asleep soon after they get back to Tamara’s room. Tamara doesn’t. She reads the journal Cassie’s been keeping after Cassie tells her it’ll probably make more sense that way.
~~~~~~
Cassie sold the house she grew up in because it was too big and it hurt too much to keep it. I smell my mother’s perfume as if she just walked in the room. What she couldn’t part with but couldn’t fit into her studio apartment near her job at the newspaper, she put in storage, just 10x10 feet of space.
Tamara expects more details about Sam and Dean in the written account of what happened to Mr. Robinson. Tamara could tell over breakfast Cassie left out a lot of details. Tamara knows there’s history there, other than the supernatural kind between Cassie and one of them.
When the dust had settled - parents in the ground, house sold and in her new place - the feeling of unease that had been in the back of her mind made its way forward. It’s been months since I’ve slept through the night. Flashing headlights blinking behind my eyes. I wake up with them bearing down on me. So she did what any one with a need to know streak does when they’ve faced what she faced, she started reading. Reading, reading and more reading plus some interviews with those in the area that always claimed to know something about the supernatural. Cassie, like everyone else in town, always thought those people were crazy.
Cassie manages to stumble upon a hunter, Mac Tellman, not that he tells Cassie what he really does with his time. Tamara can just tell from how Cassie describes him, what he tells her. He chooses his words carefully, too carefully, like he was only telling me just enough. He was wary, the way he stood, held himself, told me things. He would smile but everything else about him told me something different. I almost missed what he said because at some point he reminded me of the night Dean told me about why he was really in town. For all that she gets from reading and talking to folks, there’s no talk of the demons running around and who let them loose. Mac had to have known, Tamara thinks to herself.
Her first hunt was simple salt and burn of a Confederate Soldier that died during the Battle of Cape Girardeau in 1863. The ghost of William Caldwell Stone is no more but he didn’t go without making sure Cassie had to hide out in her apartment for a few days so as not to have to explain her injuries, a black eye and a limp.
After a while Cassie couldn’t work at the newspaper and continue on this new path so the newspaper asked her to take a leave of absence. They think the loss of my parents is finally hitting me. They’re a little bit right.
She leaves Cape Girardeau just before dawn one spring morning. She doesn’t go far, just three towns over to do a job.
~~~~~~~
By the time Cassie wakes up, it’s too late for lunch and too early for dinner.
“You’ve been reading the whole time I’ve been asleep?” Her hair is flat on one side and there are sleep lines on the left side of her face.
Tamara doesn’t look up from the screen. “If this whole hunting thing doesn’t work out, you should go to Hollywood and sell this. You’d make a bloody fortune.”
~~~~~~
“Take your time. … Breathe. … Let me show you again.”
They’ve been out in the field for about an hour, shooting cans and bottles - well Cassie’s trying to shoot. It’s like a scene out of some movie. They’re a cliché.
Cassie huffs, frustration pouring off of her, as she hands over the shot gun. She puts her hands on her hips and stares at Tamara like this time she’ll get it by osmosis.
“Okay, come here.” Cassie complies, rubbing her hands against her jeans to dry them. She reaches for the shotgun. Tamara presses her front to Cassie’s back, closes her hands around Cassie’s on the weapon. There’s the finest tremor running through Cassie, her heart racing just a bit. Tamara counts those signs as a win; Cassie’s learning to be more relaxed every time they do this.
“Breathe with me.” It’s easier said than done, the way you have to breathe when you’re about to shoot. It seems like it would be easy, intuitive. After their breaths are synced up, Tamara says, “Hold your breath on the fourth count, we’ll squeeze the trigger then.”
They hit the neck of the bottle. Tamara steps away as carefully as possible so as not to disturb Cassie’s positioning. “Okay, just shift the gun over slightly to the left and hit the other one.”
She doesn’t but she smiles wide at Tamara anyway because the bottle shook with the force of the wind as the bullet whizzed so damn close.
Tamara wasn’t the type to take unnecessary chances, especially with a newbie, so she took Cassie out to shoot for practice. After seeing her shoot, Tamara was glad she didn’t wait to find out on a job what a lousy shot Cassie is at the moment. She’s got the research down; she knows how to ask the right questions in the right way to get what she needs to know. Being a journalist, she damn well better. What she’s been able to find out just from talking to people amazes Tamara. She seems to get twice as much information Tamara would’ve gotten and she can do it with less work. The physicality is a whole different matter for Cassie. She’ll get it though because she’s determined like Tamara had been.
Tamara remembers those few weeks that turned into months, when she ached all the time in the same old places and new ones. She remembers trying to hold back the tears over cracked bleeding hands from holding anything and everything too tight. Isaac would tell her she didn’t have to do this and she didn’t have to do that. Basically, she would be the brains and he would be the brawn. She always told him through her tears that she could do it and would do it because their little girl deserved that from her. Every day that he’s gone and she’s still able to fight makes her glad she pushed herself back when they got started.
Everything about Yasmin feature wise had been dark - dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin. Everything else - her smile, her laugh, her spirit - had been bright. Tamara believed she was going to take over the world because everyone would’ve fallen in love with her. It’s the dream of every parent but that didn’t make it any less true for Tamara.
~~~~~~
Tamara knows Cassie’s a crier. It’s in the journal. I don’t know if I can do this. Crying all the damn time. Mama used to say I was tougher than anyone she knew because I hardly ever cried. Now it’s like I get back to the motel and I can’t help myself. Yet she won’t do it in front of Tamara. It’s always behind closed bathroom doors or as she falls asleep like Tamara can’t hear with too thin walls and sometimes barely enough room between the beds for a small child to fit.
Tamara doesn’t know why she feels like she has to hide it. Isaac cried a lot in those early days. He was never ashamed to let her know that he hurt emotionally because it was never the scrapes and massive bruises or broken bones that led to tears. It was always the dead bodies they’d find, somebody’s mother, father, sister, child. He never apologized for it. She loved him all the more for being brave and different than most men she had known and met along the way.
Tamara helps Cassie to the Jeep that’s got a cracked rear bumper and air conditioning system that’s on its last legs. Sometimes there’s just no good way to break a fall you weren’t expecting. When Jacob Atherton was alive he was half Cassie’s size having died as a child at the hands of his own father. He died in the basement of his own house, one too many hits to the head. As a ghost he could throw Cassie and he did. Nothing’s broken as far as Tamara can tell but there’s going to be bruises in a few places and pain for quite a while.
Cassie lies down in the back and closes her eyes, quick breaths even though Tamara tells her to take deeper ones. They’re not even three minutes from the Atherton home when Tamara hears muffled sobs mixing with the sound of the tires crunching gravel as they leave.
Tamara stops, turning the car off before getting out, and climbs into the back seat as carefully as she can manage over Cassie’s prone form. If they were on the main road a mile away, anybody passing by would think they are teenagers looking to be alone. Cassie doesn’t even notice until Tamara’s hovering over her. Cassie looks scared and confused.
Tamara says, angrier than she probably has a right to be, “Listen, one of these days you may be holding my guts in your hands so quit it with this crying in the dark bollocks. You’re not that kind of girl. You want to cry, then cry. This sucks. It hurts like hell. Crying doesn’t make you weak. It means you have some sense. That you’ll still alive.”
Cassie doesn’t say anything. She just closes her eyes for one long moment and lets go. Cassie’s cries remind Tamara of her baby girl with colic. That all out “everything is wrong in my world and why can’t you make it better cry”. Tamara gets out and goes to the other side of the care. She outs Cassie’s head in her lap and watches as the night slowly turns into dawn.
~~~~~~
“Check this out,” Cassie says, turning the laptop towards Tamara.
“Three bodies found like that in Charleston, South Carolina. Three guys, late twenties and relatively successful for their ages in their careers. None were married but two had long term girlfriends. Looks like the last place any of them were seen was at place called Torch Velvet Lounge. So it looks like the similarities end there.” The latest victim is described as having died of suffocation, the third victim to die of it in a short period of time. There is no evidence to show how exactly the suffocated.
“Were they seen leaving with anyone?”
“Yes. Each left with a woman. Never the same woman.”
Tamara looks at Cassie over the top of the laptop. “I have no idea what this could be.”
“I might know what this is.” Tamara raises an eyebrow. “A witch called a Boo Hag. It’s an African-American folktale. These witches steal people’s breath or ride their victims like horses until they die of exhaustion. They wear the skin of their victims.”
“These guys all have skin though.”
“Boo Hags are women. They attack women for their skin and hunt down men.”
“And how do you know this?” Tamara turns the laptop back in Cassie’s direction.
“My grandmother. She used to tell me stories about family from South Carolina and the stories they used to tell each other. She, my grandmother, really believed in stuff like this. I always thought she was a little crazy for it, much too smart to put so much stock in superstition and the supernatural. Turns out she was probably the smartest person in the room whenever she talked about it. ”
“It’s not much to go on. This could be nothing, not our kind of case,” Tamara states, digging back into her lunch.
“Cassie leans back in her seat. “I haven’t been doing this long but it seems to me, sometimes not much is all you have until you get to wherever.”
“Okay. If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
“Well, next stop South Carolina.”
Part 2
She watches the young woman walk to the bar, her eyes moving around the room. Tamara can tell she’s never been here before tonight. She’s a newbie, still hasn’t gotten that edge that comes with time. The newbie slides onto the bar stool, then her shoulders drop as she leans forward on the bar. It’s got to be relief coursing through her veins.
Tamara crosses the room from her seat in a far corner and sits down next to the young hunter. “How long?”
The young hunter with jet black curls and brown eyes, soft due to sadness Tamara supposes, turns to ask, “What?”
“How long have been at this?”
“A couple of months.” The bartender, Ellen, isn’t a hunter but might as well be, sets a beer in front of the newbie, a small smile on her face. She doesn’t wait around for thanks. “You?”
“A few years.”
“What happened to you?”
“My daughter.”
“My dad.”
She’d planned to leave before this newbie walked through the door. This is just a short delay. “Ellen’s got my number. Get it if you want it. Call me if you ever need anything.” Tamara gets up as she says it.
“Thanks. I’m Cassie.” She extends her hand, a grateful smile on her face.
Tamara takes it, feels the fresh calluses and remembers. “Tamara.”
She’s an hour away when her phone rings, unknown caller flashing on the screen. The first thing Cassie says is “I need a partner.”
“Meet me in Cheyenne,” Tamara responds. “I’ll let you know where.”
They meet over breakfast, two blocks away from the Tamara’s motel. Cassie slides into the seat across from Tamara and sighs. Her smile is tired as she says, “Didn’t get much sleep last night. Excited, I guess, to meet up.”
Tamara didn’t sleep much either. It wasn’t excitement that kept her up, more like wariness about what she’d gotten herself into now.
Isaac had been her only partner. They’d learned together. Surprisingly, patience had been in great supply. She thinks now it that had to do with having no other choice. They were in it together, novices trying to grieve, get revenge, save the world, and keep each other from falling apart. Pretty tall orders for anyone but somehow they had managed. Now she’s all alone wandering, no longer a novice but not sure if she’s any better at getting revenge (now for two lost loves) and saving the world. For all she knows she’s fallen apart but keeps moving so she can pretend otherwise.
Tamara smiles back, says, “Tell me your story.”
Cassie lost her father and mother in the space of two weeks, her father run down by a possessed truck and her mother finally succumbing to the illness she’d been battling for some time. She mentions Sam and Dean as having got rid of the spirit that killed her dad and his friends. Tamara’s glad she’s developed enough of a poker face to not react at the mention of Sam and Dean.
“Mama always said her home was with daddy so I think she really died of a broken heart,” Cassie says. Her look says she believes such a thing is possible. Tamara doesn’t think it is because if it was, she’d be dead already. She would’ve dropped dead the minute she saw her baby limp and covered in what seemed like all the blood her little body had carried.
The waitress refills their coffee again looking like she’s grateful for something to do or angling for a good tip on a very slow morning. When she leaves, Tamara shares, “My daughter, Yasmin, was killed by a Black Annis in our home one night.” At the look on Cassie’s face, Tamara explains. “It’s a kind of witch. We didn’t know it at the time. We had no clue about such things. It took a few months to figure out what killed Yasmin and then find even more.”
“Who’s we?”
“My husband and I.”
“Where is your husband?” Cassie asks.
“We were hunting demons…”
“Demons are real?”
“Everything you think exists out there does. So does everything you can’t even imagine. Anyway, we track a demon to a bar. We follow him inside. The whole place was full of demons. I watched as one of them made him drink drain cleaner. Some other hunters,” Tamara pauses, decides against mentioning the Winchesters for now. “Some other hunters in the area got me out of there. I’ve been on my own ever since.” If she were stronger, she’s sure the mug in her hand would’ve broken in her hand as she told Cassie. It’s the first time she’s had to describe what happened in words. Usually what happened just replays itself in her mind when she allows herself to think about it.
Cassie touches Tamara’s hand, the one that’s wrapped around the mug. Tamara pulls away to press the heels of her hands to her eyes for a moment. She’s not going to cry in the middle of some diner in front of someone she just met even if she just did the really hard part.
She pulls her hands away, says, “I’m good. You ready to get out of here?”
Cassie falls asleep soon after they get back to Tamara’s room. Tamara doesn’t. She reads the journal Cassie’s been keeping after Cassie tells her it’ll probably make more sense that way.
~~~~~~
Cassie sold the house she grew up in because it was too big and it hurt too much to keep it. I smell my mother’s perfume as if she just walked in the room. What she couldn’t part with but couldn’t fit into her studio apartment near her job at the newspaper, she put in storage, just 10x10 feet of space.
Tamara expects more details about Sam and Dean in the written account of what happened to Mr. Robinson. Tamara could tell over breakfast Cassie left out a lot of details. Tamara knows there’s history there, other than the supernatural kind between Cassie and one of them.
When the dust had settled - parents in the ground, house sold and in her new place - the feeling of unease that had been in the back of her mind made its way forward. It’s been months since I’ve slept through the night. Flashing headlights blinking behind my eyes. I wake up with them bearing down on me. So she did what any one with a need to know streak does when they’ve faced what she faced, she started reading. Reading, reading and more reading plus some interviews with those in the area that always claimed to know something about the supernatural. Cassie, like everyone else in town, always thought those people were crazy.
Cassie manages to stumble upon a hunter, Mac Tellman, not that he tells Cassie what he really does with his time. Tamara can just tell from how Cassie describes him, what he tells her. He chooses his words carefully, too carefully, like he was only telling me just enough. He was wary, the way he stood, held himself, told me things. He would smile but everything else about him told me something different. I almost missed what he said because at some point he reminded me of the night Dean told me about why he was really in town. For all that she gets from reading and talking to folks, there’s no talk of the demons running around and who let them loose. Mac had to have known, Tamara thinks to herself.
Her first hunt was simple salt and burn of a Confederate Soldier that died during the Battle of Cape Girardeau in 1863. The ghost of William Caldwell Stone is no more but he didn’t go without making sure Cassie had to hide out in her apartment for a few days so as not to have to explain her injuries, a black eye and a limp.
After a while Cassie couldn’t work at the newspaper and continue on this new path so the newspaper asked her to take a leave of absence. They think the loss of my parents is finally hitting me. They’re a little bit right.
She leaves Cape Girardeau just before dawn one spring morning. She doesn’t go far, just three towns over to do a job.
~~~~~~~
By the time Cassie wakes up, it’s too late for lunch and too early for dinner.
“You’ve been reading the whole time I’ve been asleep?” Her hair is flat on one side and there are sleep lines on the left side of her face.
Tamara doesn’t look up from the screen. “If this whole hunting thing doesn’t work out, you should go to Hollywood and sell this. You’d make a bloody fortune.”
~~~~~~
“Take your time. … Breathe. … Let me show you again.”
They’ve been out in the field for about an hour, shooting cans and bottles - well Cassie’s trying to shoot. It’s like a scene out of some movie. They’re a cliché.
Cassie huffs, frustration pouring off of her, as she hands over the shot gun. She puts her hands on her hips and stares at Tamara like this time she’ll get it by osmosis.
“Okay, come here.” Cassie complies, rubbing her hands against her jeans to dry them. She reaches for the shotgun. Tamara presses her front to Cassie’s back, closes her hands around Cassie’s on the weapon. There’s the finest tremor running through Cassie, her heart racing just a bit. Tamara counts those signs as a win; Cassie’s learning to be more relaxed every time they do this.
“Breathe with me.” It’s easier said than done, the way you have to breathe when you’re about to shoot. It seems like it would be easy, intuitive. After their breaths are synced up, Tamara says, “Hold your breath on the fourth count, we’ll squeeze the trigger then.”
They hit the neck of the bottle. Tamara steps away as carefully as possible so as not to disturb Cassie’s positioning. “Okay, just shift the gun over slightly to the left and hit the other one.”
She doesn’t but she smiles wide at Tamara anyway because the bottle shook with the force of the wind as the bullet whizzed so damn close.
Tamara wasn’t the type to take unnecessary chances, especially with a newbie, so she took Cassie out to shoot for practice. After seeing her shoot, Tamara was glad she didn’t wait to find out on a job what a lousy shot Cassie is at the moment. She’s got the research down; she knows how to ask the right questions in the right way to get what she needs to know. Being a journalist, she damn well better. What she’s been able to find out just from talking to people amazes Tamara. She seems to get twice as much information Tamara would’ve gotten and she can do it with less work. The physicality is a whole different matter for Cassie. She’ll get it though because she’s determined like Tamara had been.
Tamara remembers those few weeks that turned into months, when she ached all the time in the same old places and new ones. She remembers trying to hold back the tears over cracked bleeding hands from holding anything and everything too tight. Isaac would tell her she didn’t have to do this and she didn’t have to do that. Basically, she would be the brains and he would be the brawn. She always told him through her tears that she could do it and would do it because their little girl deserved that from her. Every day that he’s gone and she’s still able to fight makes her glad she pushed herself back when they got started.
Everything about Yasmin feature wise had been dark - dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin. Everything else - her smile, her laugh, her spirit - had been bright. Tamara believed she was going to take over the world because everyone would’ve fallen in love with her. It’s the dream of every parent but that didn’t make it any less true for Tamara.
~~~~~~
Tamara knows Cassie’s a crier. It’s in the journal. I don’t know if I can do this. Crying all the damn time. Mama used to say I was tougher than anyone she knew because I hardly ever cried. Now it’s like I get back to the motel and I can’t help myself. Yet she won’t do it in front of Tamara. It’s always behind closed bathroom doors or as she falls asleep like Tamara can’t hear with too thin walls and sometimes barely enough room between the beds for a small child to fit.
Tamara doesn’t know why she feels like she has to hide it. Isaac cried a lot in those early days. He was never ashamed to let her know that he hurt emotionally because it was never the scrapes and massive bruises or broken bones that led to tears. It was always the dead bodies they’d find, somebody’s mother, father, sister, child. He never apologized for it. She loved him all the more for being brave and different than most men she had known and met along the way.
Tamara helps Cassie to the Jeep that’s got a cracked rear bumper and air conditioning system that’s on its last legs. Sometimes there’s just no good way to break a fall you weren’t expecting. When Jacob Atherton was alive he was half Cassie’s size having died as a child at the hands of his own father. He died in the basement of his own house, one too many hits to the head. As a ghost he could throw Cassie and he did. Nothing’s broken as far as Tamara can tell but there’s going to be bruises in a few places and pain for quite a while.
Cassie lies down in the back and closes her eyes, quick breaths even though Tamara tells her to take deeper ones. They’re not even three minutes from the Atherton home when Tamara hears muffled sobs mixing with the sound of the tires crunching gravel as they leave.
Tamara stops, turning the car off before getting out, and climbs into the back seat as carefully as she can manage over Cassie’s prone form. If they were on the main road a mile away, anybody passing by would think they are teenagers looking to be alone. Cassie doesn’t even notice until Tamara’s hovering over her. Cassie looks scared and confused.
Tamara says, angrier than she probably has a right to be, “Listen, one of these days you may be holding my guts in your hands so quit it with this crying in the dark bollocks. You’re not that kind of girl. You want to cry, then cry. This sucks. It hurts like hell. Crying doesn’t make you weak. It means you have some sense. That you’ll still alive.”
Cassie doesn’t say anything. She just closes her eyes for one long moment and lets go. Cassie’s cries remind Tamara of her baby girl with colic. That all out “everything is wrong in my world and why can’t you make it better cry”. Tamara gets out and goes to the other side of the care. She outs Cassie’s head in her lap and watches as the night slowly turns into dawn.
~~~~~~
“Check this out,” Cassie says, turning the laptop towards Tamara.
“Three bodies found like that in Charleston, South Carolina. Three guys, late twenties and relatively successful for their ages in their careers. None were married but two had long term girlfriends. Looks like the last place any of them were seen was at place called Torch Velvet Lounge. So it looks like the similarities end there.” The latest victim is described as having died of suffocation, the third victim to die of it in a short period of time. There is no evidence to show how exactly the suffocated.
“Were they seen leaving with anyone?”
“Yes. Each left with a woman. Never the same woman.”
Tamara looks at Cassie over the top of the laptop. “I have no idea what this could be.”
“I might know what this is.” Tamara raises an eyebrow. “A witch called a Boo Hag. It’s an African-American folktale. These witches steal people’s breath or ride their victims like horses until they die of exhaustion. They wear the skin of their victims.”
“These guys all have skin though.”
“Boo Hags are women. They attack women for their skin and hunt down men.”
“And how do you know this?” Tamara turns the laptop back in Cassie’s direction.
“My grandmother. She used to tell me stories about family from South Carolina and the stories they used to tell each other. She, my grandmother, really believed in stuff like this. I always thought she was a little crazy for it, much too smart to put so much stock in superstition and the supernatural. Turns out she was probably the smartest person in the room whenever she talked about it. ”
“It’s not much to go on. This could be nothing, not our kind of case,” Tamara states, digging back into her lunch.
“Cassie leans back in her seat. “I haven’t been doing this long but it seems to me, sometimes not much is all you have until you get to wherever.”
“Okay. If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
“Well, next stop South Carolina.”
Part 2