The search results loaded, page after page of them, and none of it helped. There were self-help blogs, motivational speakers promising to turn his life around in seven easy steps, and religious sites that blamed demons for everything from debt to bad knees.
10 Signs You're Under Spiritual Attack. How to Break Generational Curses. Prayer Warriors: Fight Back Against Dark Forces.
Makun scrolled with his jaw clenched. His damp clothes clung to him, cold and uncomfortable, and the apartment was dark except for the glow of the screen. He opened one article and got as far as "If you're experiencing constant misfortune, negative spiritual forces may be" before he closed it. The next one wanted his prayer request and a donation. Scam.
He tried other words. Constant bad luck spiritual cause brought him more of the same, articles written by people who had never been truly desperate and believed a few prayers and some positive thinking could fix a life that had been broken from the start. Breaking curses and hexes brought him a shop full of crystals, candles and sage bundles that cost more than he had in his account.
Am I cursed brought him forums.
Those were harder to close. People there told stories that sounded like his own: jobs falling apart, relationships imploding, accidents that made no sense. The replies were always the same. See a therapist. You're just depressed. Stop blaming external forces for your problems.
His thumb hovered over the screen. Maybe they were right. Maybe he was only looking for an enemy to fight so he wouldn't have to admit that he was the problem. But the dream wouldn't leave him alone, the chains and the glass and the shapes that fed, three times this week, and that wasn't normal either.
He kept searching. Spiritual attacks real. Why does everything go wrong for me. Someone cursing me.
At some point he stopped searching and opened his contacts instead.
He scrolled the whole list slowly, looking for one name he could call at this hour, to borrow money or just to say out loud what had happened to him today. There were old coworkers who had stopped answering after he was let go, numbers he no longer remembered saving, his landlord, a pizza place. His thumb stopped on Amara's name and stayed there for a long time. He didn't press it. She had already told him what she thought, and she had been kind enough to say it to his face.
He went back to the browser.
The clock read 11:34 PM. He had been at it for hours, his eyes burned and his head throbbed, but he couldn't stop, because what if there was something? What if Amara had been right?
The next page loaded, and at the top of it sat an ad.
It was almost too plain to be real. There were no flashy graphics, no testimonials and no smiling people holding crystals, only two lines of text.
SPIRITUAL DIAGNOSTICS. $50.
If your life feels like someone else is pulling the strings, maybe they are.
Makun's thumb moved before he had decided anything.
The website was as bare as the ad: a contact form, an address in the Lower City, and the photo of a young woman in her mid-twenties. She was dark-skinned, with her hair pulled back tight and sharp eyes that seemed to look through the camera instead of into it. Tattoos ran down her forearms in intricate patterns his eyes couldn't quite follow; whenever he tried to trace one, it seemed to slide somewhere else. She wasn't smiling, and she wasn't trying to sell him anything. She just looked serious.
Below the photo was a name, Zuri, with no surname, no credentials and no promises of miracles.
Someone else pulling the strings. That was exactly what his life felt like, as if he were a puppet and someone kept yanking the threads just to watch him stumble.
There were only three reviews, short and vague. "She saw things I didn't tell her. Worth every dollar." "Not what I expected. But she was right." "Don't go unless you're ready to hear the truth." There were no star ratings and no gushing, and somehow that made them easier to believe.
The address was a thirty-minute bus ride from his building. Then he looked at the price again. He had about eighty dollars in his account, and fifty of it was two weeks of rice and eggs, or bus fare to job interviews he didn't have yet. Handing it to a stranger who would probably tell him to burn sage felt like the worst decision he could make.
This is stupid.
He knew it was. This was desperation talking, the same desperation that fed every psychic and fortune teller and con artist who lived off broken people. But then he thought about Marcus and the forklift, about the shelf that had collapsed last week, about every job and every relationship that had slipped through his fingers like water. He thought about the chains, and the feeding.
What if it's real?
He opened the booking form and filled it in: his name, his old Gmail address, the number he'd had for three years, tomorrow, first available. Then his finger hovered over the button. Fifty dollars he didn't have, for answers he probably wouldn't get, from a woman who might be just another fraud.
But he had nothing else left to try. He pressed submit.
Appointment confirmed. Payment required upon arrival. 47 Osapa Street, Lower City. Tomorrow, 9:00 AM.
A confirmation email arrived a second later with the same details and a map link. He looked at Zuri's photo one more time. Her eyes looked as if they could see through walls and skin and all the lies people told themselves, and he wasn't sure whether he hoped that was true or feared it.
He locked the phone and set it on the table beside the eviction notice. Tomorrow he would go, pay the fifty and sit across from her, and find out whether she was real or just one more person squeezing money out of the desperate. If she was a fraud, he would lose fifty dollars. He had lost more than that today.
He peeled off his damp jeans, threw them over the chair with his shirt and lay down, staring at the water stains on the ceiling. He knew the dream would be waiting. The chains would close, the glass would come down, and the shapes would gather and begin their slow count.
But for the first time in a long while, there was something on the other side of the night: an address, and a time.
Nine o'clock.