He glanced down at the camera to make sure it wasn’t recording Sloane’s thighs. YouTube didn’t deserve them.
“I think I’m supposed to believe this is dried blood,” Sloane said, and pushed herself to standing. She then brushed her hands off on her shorts, which had returned to their regular length.
Before Max could say Don’t disturb anything, she’d hopped over the lines of the circle to stand just inside the innermost ring, then crouched down again.
“What’s the verdict?” Max asked, walking along the outside. He was pretty sure that if he tried to get in the middle, he’d fall over and ruin the whole thing, and then in the process somehow re-light one of the candles and burn the hotel down. Therefore, he stayed put.
“I don’t think it’s blood,” she said, and went to touch it.
“Oh god, don’t?—”
Sloane rubbed a fingertip on the dark spot, then examined both, frowning again.
“It doesn’t flake the right way to be blood,” she said, and she sounded way too certain. “Dried blood does flake. But this is crunchier than blood flakes, kind of. Blood flakes are all crumbly. This is like…croissant flakes.”
“Wow,” Max said in his camera voice. “This is the first time I’ve ever heard of devil worshippers summoning a croissant. They must have been hungry.”
“I’d summon a croissant,” Sloane said offhandedly. She was leaning forward again, careful not to smudge the chalk, one hand braced on the floor and the other pointing her flashlight, focusing so hard that her lips parted slightly. Max knew he should be saying something—this was not good YouTube viewing—but her shorts were riding up again, over the slight curve of the backs of her thighs. This time, her tank top had bunched up to reveal a slice of her lower back, ghostly pale in the ambient glow of the flashlight.
It was a centimeter wide, if that. Max checked the viewfinder to make sure the camera couldn’t see her thighs or her back—he was pretty sure she wouldn’t like that and he was incredibly sure he didn’t want to read what the fucking perverts in the comments would say—and allowed himself one more long glance.
He was still glancing when Sloane said, “I think there’s something else on the floor here.”
“Hmm,” Max said. “Brimstone? Sulphur?”
Sloane shot the camera a look of annoyed-but-amused patience, still on her hands and knees in the circle. Max was going to have to turn comments off on this one.
“If you look at it at the right angle, there’s something kind of shiny in the floorboards,” she said. “Maybe it’s demon slime. Are demons slimy?”
“Some of them, probably? I’m not a demon expert.” Demons were a whole thing, in Max’s limited experience. The few times he’d met people serious about hunting down demons they had been…intense. He preferred to stay away from that side of things. “I’ve got something we can try, though.”
Holding the camera in one hand, Max rifled through his messenger bag until he found another flashlight, this one shorter and fatter than the one Sloane wielded.
“You brought a black light to a hotel?” Sloane asked, now sitting back on her heels. “Brave.”
“I have a strict policy of never turning it on in my room.”
She snorted.
“Though I’m very sure the Hotel Bellwether cleans all its guest accommodations thoroughly and sanitarily between visitors,” he corrected. “A truly luxurious experience, here on the Southern California coast.”
“It’s got three pools, unlimited sunbathing, and possibly a demon,” Sloane added, and then Max clicked on the black light.
Immediately, half the room lit up with pale purple. Sloane gasped.
“Oh, shit,” Max said, slowly scanning the walls. “Wow.”
“Someone’s been busy.” Sloane’s eyes were wide. “This must have taken a while. Do you recognize any of this?”
“Not off the top of my head,” Max said, playing the black light over unfinished walls, bare wood slats with no plaster over them. The lower five feet of each wall was covered in…writing? It looked like writing, but nothing Max had ever seen before. It glowed pale violet blue under the black light.
It was creepy enough to make the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.
“You think this was done by the same person?” Sloane asked, standing. The summoning circle on the floor was glowing, too. New swirls and dots shone between the chalk symbols, though there was nothing there that was as strange as the walls. “That looks like handwriting.”
It did. The symbols on the floor looked painstakingly crafted, like whoever had done it hadn’t been familiar with what they were drawing. The ones covering the walls, by contrast, felt different. Messy and casual, like they were notes dashed off without much thought in language Max had never seen before. They were spiky but graceful, each symbol close to the next but not touching, the lines tapering off to points.
“Do you recognize it?” he asked, just in case.
