A Gap in the Veil: A Contemporary Witchy Fiction Novella: A Gay Urban Fantasy set in a Graveyard with Ghosts

by Sam Schenk

  Greg released Donny and let out a short laugh. “Well, it’s good that your mum still has friends in your gran’s circle.”

  Donny smiled too. It wasn’t quite back to the confidence he’d come to expect from the bassist, but Greg could see that it was a start. It was more genuine. Hopeful. Optimistic.

  “She knew all about it. Just like Mom, waiting for me to ask,” Donny said.

  “Did she know you were getting the tattoo?” Greg asked.

  “No, not until I’d already done it. She flew into a rage, but I thought she was angry about the tattoo, not that she thought I’d get myself mixed up in Voodoo. We were in a fight for weeks over it.”

  “Seems like she had your number, waiting to say ‘I told you so’.” Greg grinned.

  “Sounds like you know the type.” Donny rolled his eyes.

  They both laughed for a minute, and before Greg knew it, Donny had found his way into his arms again. They fell to the ground, Donny on top, caressing and kissing each other. Dark clouds of energy swished out from Donny’s arm and around his bare chest. It explored its way outward, playing through Greg’s body as they pressed together.

  “Are you sure you’re not scared?” Donny whispered, reaching for the button of his jeans.

  “Terrified,” Greg gasped. “But I can’t let you go.”

  Naked, they lay on the floor of Donny’s room, a little apart. Greg was stuck in his thoughts. It was some of the best sex he’d ever had, wanting nothing and nobody else. The added mystery and danger of the charged veil energy was invigorating. He hadn’t thought or planned, hadn’t done anything but followed what his body wanted to do. He didn’t think he’d ever had that pleasure before.

  Donny sat up first. He reached to his discarded pants to fish out the tip of a printed plane ticket. “So, only a few more days with you.” He sighed, letting them fall back to the floor again.

  “Have those been in your pocket the whole time?” Greg looked at him incredulously. “You’ve revealed your weakness. I could just rip them up, and you’d be stuck here until you earned enough money to leave.”

  Donny’s gaze softened, His fingers slid up Greg’s chest. “I’d just slip through your fingers. It’s all digital these days, the ticket is a fallback. It’s there to keep me sane. I’m afraid your cunning plan wouldn’t work.”

  “Well, I’ll have to find some other way to make you stay.” Greg grinned, hiking Donny’s leg over his hip.

  “What am I going to do when you go back home?” Greg asked Donny as they redressed.

  “You have those ghosts to keep you company,” Donny said lightly.

  Greg must have changed his expression because Donny slipped his hands around Greg’s chest from behind. His hands felt so good. They burned against the knot that the memory of Lipman’s departure left in his stomach. And Robert was gone too — his two main contacts in the graveyard.

  “I’m sorry,” Donny said, simply.

  “No, it’s a good thing. I believe they’re in a better place.”

  “Would you really want me to stay?” asked Donny softly.

  “You can’t anyway.”

  “You never know what the future holds. If you were interested, we could keep in touch. You could come and visit me. I’m sure I could use a friend with powers…”

  Greg laughed. “So you’re just going to embrace this, eh?”

  “Have no choice, I guess. It’s part of me now.”

  Greg turned to embrace him. “I want to see you again before you leave,” he whispered.

  “Good.” Donny kissed his neck. He retrieved a computer from the kitchen bar. “We got cheap tickets here. Maybe they go the other way.”

  Greg joined him, kissing his neck as Donny tapped at the keys.

  “It’s not…a horrible price if you come in a month or so? Just long enough to miss me.”

  Greg checked the screen. He was right, not completely prohibitive. “What if I went with you now?” he asked, sliding the departure dates backwards.

  Donny clicked through a few more pages. The price was high, but Greg had enough. He took the computer away from Donny, pressed “buy”, and entered his PayPal password.

  When Greg showed the computer to his friend, Donny’s eyes widened. “You…I can’t believe you just did that.”

  “I have some leave booked up. Let’s do it.” Greg grinned, set the computer down and embraced Donny again.

  Donny was smiling when they held eyes again. “Nobody has ever done something like this for me before.”

  “Let’s just say, I’m looking forward to the adventure. I’ve never been somewhere with old magic before. We’ll learn together,” Greg said softly. He caressed Donny’s side. “For now, let’s just enjoy ourselves. Fuck the consequences.”

  “Fuck them,” Donny agreed, and they kissed each other with a need that had them both out of their clothes again in seconds.

  A note from Sam Schenk

  Hello! I hope you enjoyed A Gap in the Veil. It was my first time attempting to write a book set in my amazing home city. I hope you enjoyed a bit of a whirlwind tour through the eyes of a friendly witch! Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction!

  If you liked A Gap in the Veil, please consider reviewing it on Amazon or Goodreads. Every review helps!

  Want more witchy fiction? Keep reading for an excerpt from [title of book], and a list of all the Witchy Fiction books written by my friends and I here in New Zealand. If you’d like to find out more about us and our books, check out our website at www.witchyfiction.com or join our Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/WitchyFiction.

  About the Author

  Canadian born, Texas raised, and New Zealand matured, Sam Schenk is a business analyst by day, a writer, mom, and gamer by night. Based in Wellington, she loves diving, exploring new places, and learning about different cultures. The love of speculation keeps her coming back to writing, whether that's in fantasy, sci-fi, or off-modern-day. A Gap in the Veil is her first publication, and she’s thrilled to be able to work with such an intrepid group of artists. To follow the Sam’s exploits, feel free to join her twitter circle @SamSchenk2!

  Excerpt from Raven’s Haven for Women of Magic by Anna Kirtlan

  Cassandra Frost was working at her desk job, busy not being a witch. The

  Wellington City Council’s ‘Don’t get hit by a bus’ campaign was exactly the kind

  of non-magical work she loved. No hexes, fortune telling, or brewing foul-

  smelling things in cauldrons – just basic press releases and campaign work.

  For this one, the council was throwing a pile of money at telling pedestrians to

  look both ways before crossing the road. Cassandra wouldn’t have believed it if

  she hadn’t been working on the project herself. The scary thing was: it was a

  campaign that was actually needed. There had been a spate of pedestrians

  stepping in front of buses and coming off second-best. When Pedestrian vs Bus

  became a weekly occurrence, it was decided something had to be done. ‘Look

  right’ signs had been painted on the pavement at accident hotspots, and

  Cassandra was in the process of helping put together a poster campaign for

  billboards and the sides of buses.

  It was just a part-time, entry-level comms job, but she loved it. Her fascination

  with people and how they relate to each other had brought her here, but it was

  the company of non-magical folk she loved most.

  The elevator bell dinged as Adrian from the design company entered with the

  latest proofs. Cassandra knew it was him before he came into eyeshot because

  of his unusual aura. Pink, blue, and purple shades bounced off each other,

  sometimes shunted aside by more vibrant reds and oranges. Generally, people –

  and witches – had auras that settled on one colour, changing hues on occasion,

  depending on their mood. Adria
n’s never settled on one colour for longer than a

  few seconds, and it utterly fascinated her. She had to be careful not to stare and

  make things awkward.

  “Cassie!” he said, smiling as she walked out to meet him. “It’s like you always

  know I’m coming.”

  “Hi, Adrian,” Cassandra said, biting her tongue. “Are those the proofs for the

  buses?”

  “Yep!” he said, brandishing a cardboard tube.

  “Well, let’s have a look at them then.”

  Cassandra led Adrian to one of the council’s many meeting rooms and watched

  as he spread a sheaf of A3 papers across the table. She eyed the Ghostbusters T-

  shirt he was wearing. An open red- and purple-checked shirt was slung over the

  top, its sleeves rolled halfway up his freckled arms. Adrian had an impressive

  collection of paranormal themed T-shirts, and she was always interested to see

  what he’d wear next. Last week it was an X-Files tee, before that it was Bela

  Lugosi’s Dracula. She wondered how many he had and where he kept them. Did

  he have a designated creepy T-shirt cupboard?

  She stilled her wandering mind and focussed on the poster in front of her. It

  looked amazing, apart from one detail. “Adrian, that’s a rooster.”

  “I was kind of hoping you wouldn’t notice that” he said, sheepishly running a

  hand through his curly brown hair.

  “The joke is ‘why did the CHICKEN cross the road?’ I’m not going back to the

  comms team with a rooster!” Cassandra said, exasperated.

  “I know, I know. But chickens are so bland! Look at this guy’s beautiful red comb,

  look at his plumage! It just makes the design pop!”

  Cassandra found herself trying not to smile at the designer’s enthusiasm – and

  the ridiculousness of the conversation they were having. She knew their

  communications head – Sandra Stick-up-her-butt, Adrian called her – would have

  less of a sense of humour about this. “I don’t care how pretty his comb is Adrian;

  it has to be a chicken.”

  “Oh fine!” he sighed dramatically, whipping the first poster away to reveal a bog-

  standard chook with a double-ended arrow underneath and the legend ‘Look

  Both Ways’. Cassandra let out a sigh of relief. She had to admit the chicken was

  less striking than the rooster, but she also had visions of people not seeing the

  ‘Look Both Ways’ because they were too busy trying to work out why a rooster

  was crossing the road.

  “Maybe if we made the chicken bigger?” she said, in a bid to humour him. “Otherwise, it looks brilliant!”

  Adrian pushed his trendy, black-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose and

  muttered to himself.

  “Bigger chicken. Sure. The customer’s always right...”

  “I’ll keep the chicken to show the team,” Cassandra said as Adrian rolled his

  beloved rooster up and bundled it into the cardboard tube. She could tell by the

  way the colours in his aura were happily bouncing off each other that he wasn’t

  actually that pissed off.

  “I can’t believe we need to make these anyway. Don’t people get taught how to

  cross the road in primary school?” Adrian muttered as Cassandra walked him

  back out to reception.

  “You and me both,” she agreed. “Its headphones and cell phones that are doing

  it, I reckon. The poor drivers don’t have a chance to stop when some numpty

  steps out in front of them.”

  As they approached the lift, the door to another meeting room swung open.

  Adrian stopped in his tracks and hissed. Shocked, Cassandra spun around to see

  what had drawn the designer’s ire. The noise that came out of him was that of a

  cornered feral cat, and it was clearly involuntary as he clamped his hand over his

  mouth in dismay as soon as he made it. Out swaggered Mareth Giles. Tall,

  moustachioed and pompous, Mareth was one of the city’s more well-known, if

  not necessarily well-liked, counsellors.

  A vocal anti-feline crusader, Mareth was constantly trying to have the creatures

  restricted or, if he had his way, outright banned. Since the majority of witches

  had a cherished feline familiar, his views didn’t resonate particularly well in that

  community either.

  “Oh God, I’m so sorry!” Adrian blurted, once Mareth had left the building. “I hope

  he didn’t hear that!”

  “It’s fine!” Cassandra said, grinning reassuringly. “He would have been too

  wrapped up in himself to even notice. Besides, there are very few people in this

  building who actually like the guy.”

  “Right, ah, well, I should probably go,” Adrian stuttered, clutching his rooster

  poster and heading for the lift.

  Just as he reached the lobby, the lights started flickering violently.

  CRAACK!

  The entire building shuddered, and in a split second, Cassandra could see what was

  going to happen. The glass cabinet displaying historical maps of Wellington,

  trophies, and artefacts, was bolted to the wall to withstand the capital’s famed

  earthquakes. Its contents were not. She watched in horror as a bust of the

  ‘Father of Wellington’, John Plimmer, was hurled forward, smashing through the

  cabinet and crashing to the ground. A jagged sliver of glass few through the air

  and straight at Adrian’s face.

  Cassandra didn’t even think about it. “By the sand that formed you, STOP!” she

  roared at the glass. It wasn’t even a proper spell. It was a scream at the universe

  and some words from the top of her head. Whatever it was, it worked. The shard

  heading straight for Adrian’s eyeball froze mid-air, centimetres from his face,

  while the rest of the glass from the cabinet crashed harmlessly to the ground.

  She raced over and plucked the chunk of glass from the air before anyone else

  saw. Adrian gaped in shock, his mouth opening and closing like a goldfish.

  One by one, council staff crept out from under their office desks and doorways.

  “Haven’t had a doozy like that for a while!” Craig from payroll said, tapping on

  the side of the bright yellow hard hat he was wearing. A few of the other staff

  wore them as well – they all had them stashed under their desks, along with

  other emergency supplies.

  “He alright?” Craig gestured towards Adrian and the broken glass on the floor.

  “He’s okay, just in shock,” Cassandra replied, slinging an arm over the designer’s

  shoulder. “We’re going to go sit down in one of the meeting rooms in case there

  are any aftershocks.”

  “Good idea,” Craig said, “I’ll take care of the mess.”

  “Be careful!” Cassandra warned, guiding Adrian down the hallway.

  Opening the door to the nearest meeting room and steering the designer

  towards a chair, Cassandra finally had the chance to catch her breath.

  “I’ll grab us a glass of water,” she said, once Adrian was seated, and shot out to the tea room before he had the chance to respond.

  Both hands grasping the sink, Cassandra started shaking, finally giving in to her

  own shock. She had cast a spell in front of someone from outside of the magical

  world. What was she going to do now?

  Want to read more? Click here to get Raven’s Haven for Women of Magic now!

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  Now, ten years later, she’s being dragged back.

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