by
When nineteen-year-old runaway Verity Darkwood, homeless and devastated by guilt, takes refuge in a bar to escape the unwanted attention of a stranger, she doesn’t expect to meet Gareth Winter, let alone become business partners with him. They discover that they each possess the ability to interact with the world “beyond the veil” and, with the help of Horace Greeley III, editor of the fantastical online journal The Echo, Verity and Gareth spend the next two years on the road, helping the earthbound spirits who haunt their clients to cross over, or exorcising the demons that plague them. But when they stumble upon a series of unsolved child abductions spanning decades which are eerily similar to the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Verity’s younger sister, they embark on a pursuit that will take them across Canada in their quest to find The Seventh Devil, the dangerous and mysterious figure who may be behind it all.
As Gareth stared, a shape emerged from the shimmer—and then he heard something bouncing on the wooden floor towards his bed. He leaned down and scooped up the object—it was the striped rubber ball. He inhaled sharply, making a quiet, high-pitched whimper.
“Julia?” he whispered, and the shimmer pulsated. He was trembling, caught somewhere between terror and excitement. He didn’t know much about death. The year before, their good-natured retriever Sergeant had become very ill and stopped eating. His father had taken Sergeant to the vet, but when he came home, it was without the dog. When Gareth asked what had happened, his father replied, “The good Lord has taken him into his care” and his mother, eyes too teary to roll, sighed and said, “Sergeant was old and very tired. He’s gone to sleep now, and he doesn’t have to worry about being sick anymore.”
READ MOREWhen Gareth asked, “Will he wake up and come back?”, both his parents, despite their contrasting explanations, were quick to say, “Oh no—he’s gone to a better place.”
Gareth had struggled with the idea that Sergeant could possibly be in a better place than lying under the kitchen table hoping for scraps, or curled up in front of the fire, but after a few days, it seemed his parents were correct because Sergeant never came back. But if his parents were right, why was Julia shimmering from the cot in the corner of his bedroom?
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