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Knowing I’ve got Brooks right where I want him, I prop my foot up on the back of my twin’s seat, wiggle my toes in his ear, and whisper, “I want to suck your blood.”
Brooks’s dark eyes twinkle as his face breaks into a wide, rare smile, something I see through the rearview mirror.
Got you, bro.
I’m ten dollars richer.
“Get off me.” Orion shoves my foot away with a scoff of distaste, then his black-painted nails immediately return to his knee, where he taps out an unfamiliar beat. “And sucking blood is for vampires, not ghosts. Didn’t you pay any attention during Monster Hunting School?”
“Monster Hunting School” is what we call our childhood growing up as the offspring of Mark and Rebecca Bellua, two of the most notorious monster hunters in America. When our parents weren’t off hunting vampires or bashing boggarts, they drilled us on every aspect of arcane magic and monster lore. Mom taught us how to swing a sword and drive a stake, and Dad taught us how to use magical symbols and runes to cast simple spells to bind monsters and protect ourselves.
Not that their knowledge and experience could save them when the time came. We still don’t really know what happened to them—they left for a routine fairy-slaying job when we were fourteen, and they never came back.
Brooks, who’s five years older than us, took over as our guardian until we were sixteen, and then he skipped town too. He had this misguided idea that he had to carry on the family business so we could go off to college and have normal lives.
But the monsters had other ideas.
And now the Belluas are back together again, the three of us hunting monsters on the road for an organization called the Vault.
“So what’s this job?” I ask, wiggling my toes in Orion’s face yet again. I removed my socks and shoes almost as soon as I entered the car hours earlier. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from our extensive travels across the United States, it’s that you need to find comfort in whatever way possible. And that includes forgoing shoes whenever you get the chance. And pants—but I don’t think my brothers would be fans of me sitting in the car in only my boxers. “I wasn’t listening in the diner.”
“Of course you weren’t,” Brooks snaps.
“It appears to be a standard haunting.” Orion has his tablet in his lap, and he’s scrolling through news stories and paranormal investigation forums, hunting for intel. “Two weeks ago, two newlyweds were found murdered in the honeymoon suite of the Bridgemont Hotel. Their bodies were sliced up, limbs severed, organs relocated to places they absolutely should not be. Pretty gruesome stuff. The number six was scrawled on the wall above the bed in their blood. The staff came running when they heard the screams, and when they entered, the room was completely empty apart from the bodies. There was no sign of anyone else having been there at all.”
“Jealous ex-lover escaped out the window?” I arch an eyebrow.
“Nope.” Orion shakes his head, his dark hair—slightly longer than mine—brushing his cheeks. “The windows were all locked from the inside. And they’re not the first couple to die in the room, either. A little less than two months ago, an older couple, the Gilmores, were celebrating their silver wedding anniversary. They were found by the maid the next morning, drowned in the bathtub. The number six was written in the steam on the bathroom mirror.
“And six weeks before that, a couple from Arkansas were staying in the room. According to the crime scene photographs,the bodies had their bones broken and limbs contorted so that they formed—”
“Let me guess,” Brooks pipes up. “A number six.”
“So how do we know this is an actual haunting?” I stretch my legs across the seat, hoping like hell that Dictator Brooks will let us have a pit stop soon. My long, football player's legs weren’t made for being cramped up in this hellhole of a car. “This could be a serial killer with a mathematics fetish and a talent for picking locks—”
“The police have found no evidence. Not a single hair or fingerprint. Nothing on the security cameras in the hallway or on the property. Other couples have stayed in the room with nothing bad happening to them. But back in the sixties, a young couple booked the honeymoon suite for their wedding night. The wife poisoned her rich husband, took all his money, and ran off with the best man.
“The story on the hotel’s website is that the jilted groom still haunts the hotel, determined that no couple will have the happiness that he was denied. Up until recently, he’s been sticking to small stuff—cold spots, objects moving, strange things written on the mirror. Several guests have reported sightings of a man in an old-fashioned suit able to step through walls. But nothing grisly, until now.”
Orion flashes his tablet towards me, where a grainy photograph of a handsome man and a pretty woman stand side by side. The groom looks positively bewitched by the woman, but she seems either annoyed or uncomfortable—way more uncomfortable than a bride should look on her wedding day.
“Odd,” I say. What Orion’s describing isn’t normal behavior for ghosts. Usually, a ghost floats around, saying “woooo” and frightening women in nightgowns into falling downstairs, but they have to be hella pissed off to be able to affect the physical world. “I wonder what’s made it angry?”
“Exactly. It’s odd. Obviously, this ghost doesn’t like something that’s going on at the hotel. Their social media reveals that years ago, the hotel came under new management. The place has been slowly rotting for years, but this new guy brought in a ton of money and started doing up the place and inviting celebrities and influencers to stay there. Now, the hotel is popular and busier than ever. They’re doing a lot of renovation work to upgrade the rooms into luxury suites, so I suspect the ghost is trying to stop them from digging something up.” Orion flicks to a new tab and once again twists it for me to see.
This page shows a 3D rendering of a new addition to the hotel—modern and sleek, with a state-of-the-art swimming pool and even an arcade.
“So this isn’t unusual at all. It’s your garden variety haunting, and we’ll deal with it the way we always do…” Brooks bends over to punch the skip button on his Monster Hunting playlist.
The Creedence Clearwater Revival song “Bad Moon Rising” is replaced by a chipper Blue Oyster Cult riff. Orion’s face relaxes. He can’t listen to that CCR song anymore, not after—
No.
I shake off the memory. I don’t want to think about that night. There’s nothing we can do to change anything, and dwelling on it makes me…
It makes me feel useless. Like I failed my twin. Because I did. If I stuck with the training my parents laid out for me, instead of giving it all up when they died and Brooks left us, then I would have acted more quickly, and we could have saved—
No. Stop thinking about it.
