“He loves you and is telling you to live your life. To stop blaming yourself,” Troy said softly. “I’m not telling him that.” Troy’s voice shifted from gentle to exasperated amusement.
“He’s a menace,” Sully snorted. “Always cracking jokes.”
“He’s begging for you to go get laid and he promises not to watch,” Troy finally admitted, his cheeks bright red with embarrassment. Troy wasn’t the type to be so crude. “And he says goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Malik,” Sully said. “Thank you.”
“It’s silent now,” Troy said. His shoulders sagged in relief that was punctuated with the beep of our equipment turning back on.
“They’re gone. At least eighty percent of them, anyway” Sully said with a string of shocked laughter. “We really fucking did it.”
“Are you okay?” I asked him. He turned to me, his blue eyes serious as he searched for an answer.
“Yeah,” he said, seeming surprised with himself. “I think that was the closure I needed to move on, in so many ways.” Troy and I moved at the same time, before someone shouted ‘group hug’ and everyone crushed us in between them.
“You two made a pretty damn good team,” Lincoln said.
“But we still have a problem,” Gavin pointed out. “We probably just majorly pissed off the one blocking them all.”
“You know… it feels different here,” Ben said as he stepped away from the huddle and toward the ocean. He was right. The air wasn’t as heavy or charged in energy, it felt almost calming at the moment. Maybe it was the residual effect of the light, but it was a nice end to our investigations here.
“Let’s go,” Ethan said. “We’ve done all we can for this place.”
“Wait, no,” I argued. “We can’t just leave with this thing hanging around! It lifted me into the air, Ethan, it could do the same to an unsuspecting tourist.”
“The trouble is what can we even do?” Adam argued. “That’s the thing about ghost hunting that sucks. If we didn’t have Troy, or Sully, or even Brea… what could we do to help them? We record their answers, the footage, but we aren’t god.”
“We got a lot of shit after Finley for that exact reason,” Lincoln said. “The ghosts wanted help, and we gave the owner some resources. But we aren’t priests that can bless the place, and back then we only had the ability to record what happened, like you said.”
“But we do have resources now,” I pointed out. “Maybe we call in the coven now that we’ve got the crew and those willing to cross over? But at the end of the day we can’t force anyone to leave. But this dark entity? We can ward it away from these people, from this beach, right?”
“Well I don’t think Grandma Rose would like a call at…” Ethan trailed off and looked at his watch. “One in the morning. But we’ll call as soon as we can. They’ll have an idea, hopefully.”
“Okay,” I reluctantly agreed.
The fog seemed to get thicker as we walked away from the beach, clinging to the town and cars like a blanket. I was so tired I didn’t see the letters scrawled on the windshield at first, but a thumping sounded as I walked in front of the hood, forcing me to glance over. The sight of the words sent a cold chill down my spine and I fell backwards, scrambling away from the car like it would blow up at any moment.
“I’m your biggest fan?” Adam read out. “Someone in town knows you?”
“No, no, no,” I babbled as I continued to back away. Only one fan has ever used that wording. Mack. Flashes of the mine, of Mack, of all his messages and the plushies flipped through my mind one after the other. Before I knew what was happening, my head was swimming and I felt like I was about to pass out.
“Brea. Stop. Breathe,” Lincoln’s words were a direct order and somehow his intensity cut through the panic. My hand was forced against his chest and he put his on mine, walking me through each breath until my vision cleared. The panic didn’t subside past letting me breathe on my own. I couldn’t stop looking at the words, picturing Mack himself scrawling them there to taunt me.
“It’s not him, Brea. Mack is dead,” Ethan told me. “This is that ghost fucking with you. We took his army away and now he’s pissed off. Yet he can’t touch us. So messing with our minds is all he has.”
“But we aren’t going to let him win,” Lincoln said firmly. “Mack is gone. This isn’t real.”
“It’s very real,” I argued. “Just because it’s not Mack doesn’t mean those words aren’t there.” My voice was shaking with fear and I could see every single person around us was affected.
“Tonight’s been a fucking roller coaster,” Ben sighed. “Come on, let’s go make some cocoa and cookies. I know you won’t sleep after this. Maybe we can watch a movie before bed or something,”
“Sure,” I said in a quiet, raspy tone. But I couldn’t let it go even as I climbed into the SUV and watched Lincoln use the wipers to make the message disappear. That feeling that I was being watched had my hair standing on end and goosebumps rushing over every inch of my skin.
“I could use some cookies,” Ethan said in a fake bright tone.
No one bothered to call him on it. Instead we drove to the inn in complete silence and asked Gary if we could use the kitchen. Even cookie making was purely robotic, none of us talking or singing as we mixed, scooped, and baked the cookies. By the time we settled into the living room with a round of cookies and cocoa I was no less settled. Every time I closed my eyes or let my mind wander, Mack’s face was there, staring back at me with a creepy grin.
“You know what,” I said, standing so abruptly I almost knocked poor Adam off of the couch in the process. “Fuck this ghost. I hope whatever the witches can give us is powerful and he spends the rest of his days stuck in the middle of the fucking ocean. How dare he use something so traumatic against us? Hell, he kept hundreds of spirits trapped here, refusing to let them move on. He didn’t just become evil, he was evil.”