Days and days of reading and interviewing had turned up little. It seemed no one had much idea whether the keeper of the Otherworld could eradicate a malignant spirit of uncertain origin.

Malik’s approach had been twofold. On the one hand, he wanted to find the source of the rougarou’s curse. He had traced the creature back to stories of the loup-garou in France, but had then hit a wall. Some stories told of a nobleman who had been cursed, but Malik could not identify the reason for the curse, beyond its roots in faithlessness. Had the man been bewitched? Had an existing spirit simply chosen to manifest as a wolflike humanoid in that man? No documentation he had unearthed had confirmed the spirit’s origin.

On the other hand, was the spirit’s origin important? It was clearly a spi...

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