The Seance

Jasper Creed is the most famous psychic medium in America. Twelve bestselling books. A Netflix special. Sold-out venues where grieving parents pay hundreds of dollars to hear him channel their dead children.

Jennifer Stone grew up in foster care reading every one of those books. She believed Jasper was like her. That the whispers she'd heard since childhood, the shadows that moved wrong, the feeling of being watched by something vast and patient, meant she wasn't alone. That someone else could feel it too.

She won a contest for the final seat at "An Evening Beyond the Veil," a live-broadcast seance at the Colby Memorial Temple in Cassadaga, Florida. Ten celebrities at fifty thousand dollars a seat. And Jennifer, the charity case, given one question and told to be seen and not heard.

It takes her less than a minute to realize Jasper Creed is a fraud. Earpiece in the left ear. Assistant feeding information from backstage. Cold reading techniques she could spot from the cheap seats.

Jennifer is not a fraud.

She draws a symbol on her notepad that she learned from a book no library has ever catalogued. She presses the pen into her palm until it breaks the skin. She speaks a word that is not in any language the living have ever learned.

What comes through the table is old and amused and very real. And it has questions for every celebrity in the room. Questions about the NDAs. The buried bodies. The minors. The fraud. The suicide they caused.

Jasper Creed asked the dead to speak. He should have been more careful about who was listening.