Dane's a Decrypter down on his luck -- after accidentally dispatching the wrong creature, he's sent to a small town where the cryptids he hunts are sparse. Crypt Coffee becomes his business front, but instead of a thrilling new mission on the side, he's stuck sending ghosts back to where they came from. Dane can annoy customers, at least, and tries to scare off Professor Sean Sanderson when he starts poking around too much.<br><br>But Sean isn’t about to stay away. Not when he hears about the murder of a former student, and definitely not if young, exciting Dane has information about it. But the more he allows himself to get dragged into this supernatural world of monsters and ghosts, the more the danger escalates. And if Sean and Dane aren’t careful, tracking down a murderer who can use magic might just get them killed.

Bad Seed

“Good. You met Ned, he’s my kind-of assistant. Gives me heads-up on what’s going on in the graveyard.”


“Just fucking be quiet, professor.” Dane took a step away from the bottle, thinking he probably shouldn’t have so much he’d be noticeably affected when he went back to Crypt Coffee. “That thing you ran into? Whatever’s leftover from Eliza Bartley, very deceased. That’s why you get cremated. Remember that.”


Sean nodded, but he didn’t interrupt.


“Sometimes the bastards come back, obviously. This one had already passed on and came back—that makesthem more dangerous. Don’t ask me how it works, I just handle the disposal. You got your various ways of doing it, your spelled blades and your plain old spells, charged crystal shit, etcetera. I like to use silver—clean work, you can put it on just about anything. It disrupts something with the magic or their power or whatever.”


Chapter 9