Midnight To Mourning: The Mourning Series, #1.5

By C A Rin

Naomi prefers the midnight shift.
It gives her time to think. To declutter her thoughts. Quieten the incessant voices around her.
But not tonight.
Tonight, the voices will not be silenced.

 

Hailing from a matriarchal lineage of Vodun priestesses, reluctant clairvoyant Naomi holds reverence for her ancestral traditions and beliefs. Still, practicality compels her to approach life in a level-headed and pragmatic way. Practicality must take precedence over tradition, and generational beliefs are incompatible with her day-to-day world as a single working mother who runs a cleaning company. Despite this, Naomi's clairvoyance has a way of seeping into her everyday life. She sees things others cannot – glimpses of the future, flashes of insight. It is only in the solitude of night that she feels truly at peace when the voices and the auras of the living do not confront her.

When working her usual midnight shift at the university, Naomi is challenged by a series of ominous anomalies, a malevolence carried on the wings of divination that culminates in an encounter with a ghostly figure she dares to recognize.

 

Fifteen minutes later a man is dead.

Within weeks others will follow.

 

As the facade of night splinters, Naomi must come to terms with a rapidly encroaching reality that everything she saw and felt, the ancestral gifts she has avoided throughout her life, are the only truths separating her from death itself. What she experienced haunts her — could she have changed the course of events, or are our lives already fated?

• Language: English
• Publisher: the BEAR the DOGS Publishing
• Release date: Sep 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9780645387223

C A Rin

C A Rin is a writer of thrillers: psychological, crime, and the supernatural. She lives on the Gold Coast of Australia, where many of her stories take place and where local knowledge fuels inspiration in characters and settings.

Book preview

1

When the night was over, and for a long time after the incident, Naomi was still unsure whether what she had seen had been a figment of her imagination, whether she’d had some sort of premonition, or if, in fact, she had come face to face with something far more sinister. What she did know was that what had happened had been on her watch, and for that, she was irrevocably saddened.

She had spoken at length to police: multiple conversations about what she had witnessed, what she had heard, timelines, and so forth, and she had sincerely wanted to help. Naomi hardly considered herself a people person, a neighborhood watch kind of gal, but she had told the detectives everything she knew and nothing that was not the truth. It was just unfortunate that there were some things she really couldn’t speak about—some things she would rather not think about at all, and for that, she was sincerely adamant.

***

Naomi pulled her little yellow RAV into her usual parking spot. At this time of the morning, only a couple of cars dotted the university lots, so, technically, everywhere was her parking spot. Once, she’d dared the Vice Chancellor’s, but he’d arrived early and not been amused. From then on, she stuck to the one under the streetlight and directly across from the pathway that led to the central quadrant.

A minute past midnight, Naomi liked this hour – nothing and no one to muddle her thoughts. The harsh mantel of the day was lifted, and when she looked upwards, she could gaze into infinity, see beyond into the cusps of other worlds—places where, perhaps, the spirit people dwelt. She was okay sharing her time with them. They made minimal demands of her, unlike the chaotic mandates required from her household occupants.

She had left a note on the kitchen table for Jess, her daughter. Home again after the breakup of a hasty and irresponsible marriage to Michael. Like any good mother, Naomi had tried to warn her off him in a way that didn’t seem like she was warning her off the useless piece of work that he was. But daughters did what they did best, not listen to their mothers when they needed to, and, lo and behold, three years on, here she was home again. She and little Samantha. Sweet kid, two years old, and a bundle of two-year-old disruption.

Naomi had packed her a lunch box before she’d left, ironed her a dress for Kindy. She had also ironed Jess an outfit for work because she knew she’d leave everything until the last panicked moment. She had made pancakes. Breakfast, lunch, and possibly dinner for her eighteen-year-old son, Jasper, just in case he decided to get out of bed and actually