Page 21 of An Inheritance of Monsters

Crispy swore under his breath, clicking through. He didn’t find another clear frame until the one time-stamped at 3 a.m.

I was asleep on the bed, my head perched on the very edge of the mattress. If I squinted, I could just make out the glinting pile of rocks next to my hand.

Disappointment and disbelief churned in my gut, a lethal combination when mixed with espresso.

Hours of potential footage—all of it gone.

I counted in my head, ticking off the series of events. If the presence of the monsters shorted our cameras out… then that meant they had already been there before I arrived back in my room.

One of them had been present without me earlier in the day. And as soon as I’d gone to the bathroom, the camera had fuzzed out—that meant one of them had to be in there at that time as well.

The question was, which one?

I wondered if Rask had been there the whole time, but as I stared at the dark band under my bed on the screen, I couldn’t make out anything at all, not so much as a single glowing eye.

But after the adventure through the bathtub, I’d felt a presence… one emanating from the closet…

Had there been athirdmonster in there, spying on me?

I shoved that question aside for the next major problem.

If I couldn’t capture the monsters on camera at all, how the hell was I going toprovethis to anyone?

Seeing ghosts was bad enough. Claims of monsters without evidence would be enough to convince them to leaveSpirit Squad, and me, behind.

Possibly for Carson’s show.

My muscles had bunched up into tight knots as I surveyed the footage, and I nearly jumped a foot out of my seat when a hand gently touched my arm.

“You okay,Jefe?” Crispy looked at me with concern, his mouse hovering over the X on my footage. “You look… like you were expecting something.”

I forced myself to shake my head, taking all that disappointment and anxiety swirling in me, crushing it into a tiny ball, and sinking it into the deepest, darkest trench of my mind. “I mean, I was hoping for a little more. This is literally the most haunted house in the country.”

Crispy relaxed, clicking out of my footage, and pulled up Sierra’s. “It’s okay. We’ve got twenty-nine more days. Maybe whatever’s here is just getting used to us, too.”

Sierra snorted scornfully as he clicked through her feed, but I stared at him thoughtfully.

From what I remembered of those foggy midnight hours, both Rask and Zirin had seemed wary of me. Rask had been ready to bolt the minute I confessed I was frightened.

Maybe Crispy was onto something.

Or I was experiencing a psychotic break and trying to justify the existence of my imaginary friends thanks to a combination of extreme career stress and being stranded on an island with my worst enemies.

I looked down at my hands in my lap. I’d felt the waves of that dark sea. I’d seen the luminescence on my body. I’d heard Rask, and touched his warm flesh.

No way was this in my imagination.

“Nothing from my room,” Sierra announced. “Guys, this is cute and all, but don’t forget—the viewers see whatwewant them to see. So let’s go get some kick-ass footage with all this great architecture around, and we can build an amazing intro just from that.”

I gritted my teeth and stood up as Crispy shrugged at her.

“It would’ve been nice to get some ghost orbs,” he said, but he was already picking up his handheld camera, the overnight footage forgotten. “Something to spice up the pitch.”

She stood at his door, and rolled her eyes. “We’re inDuskwood Manor. Thatisthe pitch.”

Sometimes I wanted to strangle her. Sierra looked great on camera, and she was always game to conduct a flashy séance for an episode, but… she didn’t care about the history or truth of a place.

She just wanted to flash her tarot cards and look pretty. If there were real phenomena here, that would still come second to being famous.

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