Page 3 of An Inheritance of Monsters

We did this before every show. It was a commemoration of every single place we’d filmed and investigated, and provided the cover photo for every YouVid episode we uploaded.

This time, Crispy and Sierra were clear, the stone idol visible in the background.

My hair, dyed sky blue and peach, was visible…but beneath it, my face was nothing but a smear. Black marks streaked across my face, as though wiping me from existence.

Sierra frowned and snapped another photo.

This time, we were all there. No dark marks. No smearing.

And none of us were smiling. We were all frowning intensely at the camera.

“Weird.” She flicked back through to the one with the smeared face. “Probably just a glitch.”

“Don’t worry,chicas, I brought the holy water,” Crispy teased. He thumped my shoulder, his rosary gleaming on his chest.

I returned the gesture with a light elbow to his ribs, and turned back towards the idol.

Thestatue. I needed to stop calling it an idol in my mind, because the more power I assigned to it there, the more power it would hold over me in the real world.

Neither Sierra nor Crispy would believe me if I veered off-course from my ‘investigative host’ persona and started spouting that sort of nonsense…but deep inside, I felt it was true.

There was something about that towering stone.

Like I could climb up, and slip inside that cavernous mouth…and find something in there.

“We’ll come back and get our cover photo when it’s lighter out,” Sierra said. “We’re going to be late for the first meeting.”

That brought me back to reality.

We were only here on this island because the owner of Duskwood Manor—and by extension, the island itself—had invited five teams of paranormal investigators to live here for a month.

It was an offer that had never been made before, and would never be repeated. Investigators with far more money than us had tried to pay their way in for decades, but the owner had always coldly rebuffed them.

So, when I’d received a thick parchment envelope addressed toJuno Weaverin copperplate cursive, at first I’d thought it was some sort of prank.

Reading the letter inside had made my jaw drop.

But a few carefully-worded questions on our usual investigators forum had netted me some answers: we weren’t the only ones who’d gotten the invitation to visit what was supposedly the most haunted mansion in the world.

I’d responded immediately, and the return letter had arrived with three ferry tickets.

It was real. We were going to Duskwood Manor at the most crucial time in our careers: when the Sci-Fi Network had requested an unaired episode for consideration.

The location was perfect. It would be completely new material that not even their massive cable network had managed to air on a previous paranormal show.

All we had to do was be on this island and at the manor’s doors by 9 a.m., April 30th, and we’d be given housing for a month and free reign to film.

But that was exactly fifteen minutes from now, and we still needed to lug our bags and equipment over several steep hills to reach Duskwood Manor.

I slung my backpack on, heaped my duffel bag on top, supporting the weight on my shoulders, and took one of Crispy’s metal equipment cases.

“Go, go, go!” he shouted, thundering across the dock, loaded with equipment like an oversized aluminum tortoise. “¡Vamos!”

The wood swayed and warped under my feet, and we were panting within moments, but we charged past the idol and up the first hill.

Away from the bay where fishermen drowned and the Lady of Dark Waters stalked the waves.

Away from the ferry, where safety lay.

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