The Soul Thief by Leah Cutter

flicked the drops of blood gathered on the blade into the pot of water on her electric stove.
    Steam instantly boiled up and flowed over the edges, like a witch’s cauldron.
    Franklin couldn’t help but shiver.
    The steam didn’t contain images, not that Franklin could see.
    But he could recognize its power.
    This steam reminded him of the regular ghosts who sought him out—something that was between one place and the next. Maybe between the here and now and the past.
    Fascinated, Franklin sat up to stare harder at the pot. Beulah was still chanting, swaying and moving her hips more gracefully than he would have thought possible. She danced in time with a music he didn’t quite hear, but he knew it came from the steam and her cauldron.
    There was something there. In that mist. He could tell.
    He just couldn’t see it. Not like she could.
    Beulah started to moan.
    The sound sent more shivers down Franklin’s back. Julie silently handed him his shirt, and Franklin gratefully slipped it back on.
    Then Julie sat beside him on the table and they waited with dread while Beulah finished her reading.
    Franklin wasn’t about to turn back now, but he wasn’t looking forward to whatever it was that Beulah had to say.

Six
    “YOU KNOW WHAT you get when you cross a spider with a snake and a bat?” Beulah asked.
    Franklin shook his head. It sounded like the start of a joke that he didn’t know, the kind Darryl would tell.
    Franklin and Julie sat out in the backyard of Beulah’s shack, perched on the remains of stumps carefully placed around a great bonfire pit. The sun peeked over the surrounding trees. Birds sang wildly just beyond the edge of the trees, while the cicadas cycled up and down. The woods smelled of mulch and green things, freshly growing.
    Next to the house was a well-kept coop for the chickens, with a pen for the birds to scratch in. They’d gone back to quietly clucking to themselves once they’d realized no feed was coming.
    It reminded Franklin of Lexine’s cabin, though she had more garden in her backyard. She also took care of her place more. However, this was Beulah’s…focus spot, for want of a better term. Franklin would bet that she spent a lot of time with the bonfire going, feeding the flames and reading the smoke.
    “That blade weren’t merely forged. It were conjured, constructed to take lives—souls—and suck them free of a body,” Beulah said. She paced in front of Franklin and Julie, from one side of the bonfire pit to the other.
    Franklin shivered in the bright daylight. “So the knife’s evil,” he said.
    “No, it ain’t,” Beulah said. “Weren’t no demons or otherworldly creatures involved. All natural.”
    “But you said it takes souls,” Franklin protested.
    “Taking a soul don’t make it evil,” Beulah interrupted. “Y’all have raised chickens, right?”
    Franklin nodded. He hadn’t, actually, raised chickens. Though he liked eggs well enough, it was just him, and the stupid birds weren’t worth the bother.
    But he had slaughtered Sweet Bess, the hog he’d raised. She’d been much more like a dog than a pig. A big, nasty, mean dog, but still. So he understood what Beulah was getting at.
    “It’s what you do with the soul afterward that makes it good or bad,” Beulah explained. “It were originally created for sacrifices. A way of honoring their gods.”
    “Their gods?” Franklin asked. It didn’t surprise him too much that it was a foreign knife.
    “There’s more out there than just your white-bearded old man,” Beulah warned.
    Julie squeezed Franklin’s hand in warning when he would have spoken up.
    Instead, he nodded, keeping his words to himself. “So it weren’t created to do evil,” he clarified. “But it weren’t created to do good, either.”
    Beulah shrugged. “It could do good,” she said. “In the right hand.”
    Franklin pressed his lips together and didn’t say anything, though he didn’t see how taking souls could ever be a