Excerpt: Untitled Appalachian Gothic Erotic Thriller?

So here is what it takes, should you want to try it. Find a rocky prominence, far as you can get from lights and hearth fire, from human laughter and the comfort of a warm bed.
Go up on a stormy evening, and build a cairn of rocks, and in among those rocks you place what you have gathered and brought with you – the necessities of magic. The severed arm of an old doll. A pearl button. A few strands of thread or a piece of cloth with a rusty smear of blood.
Here is the secret: it doesn’t matter what you carry in your bundle. It is the gathering and the binding of them that sets the spell. It is the dark hopes whispered and baptism of tears that matters. Might as well take a handful of earth or a scattering of twigs and chant them up. But there is power in wanting and power in fear and Allie knows to ask for things that will strike ice in the heart of the wanter, what will trouble the dreams of the one for whom she casts the spell. You chant as you lay these things together, you whisper or shout what comes to you, what is called out by the storm and your own fear.
“Don’t matter what you say,” her mother told her, passing down the same wisdom all the women of her line took into their hearts. “Wanting is what matters. Only that.”
And so you take on someone else's wanting to become yours. You want a full womb, you want the arms of another woman’s husband around you, you want all eyes on you, admiring you, coveting all you are. You wrap yourself in that feeling and you open your throat and let that need sing through you and up into the thin air, calling the lightning down.
Once the rocks are laid like a fire, with the kindling of desire, it wants only a spark. It needs the sky itself to reach down and touch the rocks. If you are unlucky enough to catch the moment, like poor Tugga, gape-eyed, the lightning snatches your soul up and swallows it. Poor Tugga because she died and poor Tugga because she died for nothing,
Everybody knows a spell cannot outlive its maker.