My dad’s dead, my mom’s crazy, one of my sisters is fueled by anger, and my baby sister is damned. My name is Jasper Whitlock Andrews. As I write this I am nineteen years old, today is Trinity’s seventeenth birthday and she’s coming to live with me. While I am not completely comfortable with this idea, I know that it is our only option. Trin and I are basically orphans, all we have is each other and even though my life isn’t something that I want her involved in, I can’t turn my back on my own sister. There are elements in this world, some good and some bad, but all are dangerous depending on which side of the line you live. When I was younger I swore that I would take the mess of my childhood and make something good of it, but growing up in a group home I quickly learned that the criminal lifestyle was the easiest and sometimes the safest way to make a living, especially for a kid who could see the invisible elements that walk among us. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like had I not looked right at the being that day. I’d been looking for a job for a while but no one wanted to pay decent money to a scrawny kid with no parents. I found myself strolling down a busy street near dusk, it wasn’t exactly the best part of town, but it was far from the worst. I figured I could find someone around here that would pay a few bills a week to a kid willing to do a man’s job. While I was walking by a coffee shop I noticed a gray cat lounging in the sun. I thought nothing of it at first, brushing it off as nothing more than a normal cat, but then a man walked out of the shop. As he was taking a step, the cat darted between his feet and tripped the poor guy, at least that’s what I thought at the time. I must have looked stricken as I watched the cat race away into a nearby alley. The guy, after picking himself up ff the ground and kicking at his now empty coffee cup, followed my gaze and narrowed his eyes. ‘Did you see that?’ he asked me. I nodded my head and attempted a weak smile, “Alley cats, more dangerous than your average tabby.” I was trying to be cute; maybe this guy owned his own business and would take pity on me in the form of a job. “A cat you say?” Crap, I knew then that the cat hadn’t been real, well not real in the physical able to be seen by everyone sense of the word. How was I going to get out of this one? I’d been able to see those who walk among us for a while now, I don’t remember exactly when it started, unlike Trinity or my mother, I never witnessed the beings that visited Alexis, but at some point I began to notice these spirit beings sharing our world. Most of the time they kept to themselves, as far as I could see, but on occasion they would play tricks or set people up like the cat had done to this guy. Most of the time I would just act like I hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary and that usually worked just fine, but this time I wasn’t thinking and had opened my mouth just wide enough for my foot to be firmly implanted. “Maybe my eyes were just playing tricks on me, too many alleys today; I haven’t been paying close attention for blocks. Sorry mister.” The man wasn’t going to let me off that easy. He reached out and took a hold of my shoulder. “No, no, if you say you saw a cat trip me then I believe you.” I couldn’t believe him. No adult besides my mom had ever talked about the things others couldn’t see. How did this guy even know about them if he didn’t see the cat? If he believed me, maybe he could explain why I could see them when others couldn’t? I figured it was worth a shot to find out.
As it turned out the man was a mid level operative in some organization. A few of the guys working for him could see the invisible beings but he couldn’t. He liked to surround himself with those who can so that the spirits couldn’t catch him off guard like the cat had today. When he found out that I was looking for a job he offered me an entry position with his organization. He said I would just be an errand boy, carrying messages and packages for him or his boss, maybe even accompanying him on errands, to keep an eye out for the spirits of course. I was hesitant to accept, what would my parents think if they could see me working for criminals? The money he offered was more than I had hoped to make at any legitimate job, but more than that the protection and skills he offered were inviting. I could work my way up in the organization and make plenty of money to take care of Trinity and me always. For a kid with no parents, no home, and no future; the deal was sweet, too sweet to refuse. So I became one of his errand boys and one of his ‘spirit watchers’.
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