“Speaking of which,” Sloane said, pulling out her phone and looking at it. “It has been way more than five minutes, and there are zero bears here, so I’m kind of disappointed.”
“Only because you haven’t opened your mind to the supernatural.”
“Also, it’s seven fifteen,” she said, and Max swore, then checked his own phone out of habit.
“Shit,” he said out loud. “We gotta eat and look for ghosts.”
Chapter Six
“I meant to do this over drinks and dinner,” Max was saying. He had the iPad and a couple of printouts on the table in his hotel room. Both of them were leaning over it. Sloane was doing her best to eat a burrito without getting any on what looked like a tide chart. “But then, somehow, I ended up playing fuck, marry, kill about dead people instead.”
“That must have been awful for you,” Sloane said, carefully dotting more hot sauce onto her next bite of burrito. She had a method. “Sorry that happened.”
Max looked up at her. “Could have been worse.”
Sloane licked hot sauce off her thumb. Max looked back down at the table and cleared his throat.
“I’m going to do the attic first,” he said. “Best to be up there making noise before quiet hours start so fewer people hear me stomping around and talking to myself about demonic symbols.”
“They’ll just think we’re ghosts,” Sloane pointed out. “That’s win-win, right?”
“I.”
“You what?”
“They’ll think I’m a ghost,” Max said, patiently. “I’m not making you come back into the attic where you had a panic attack, Sloane.”
“It’s fine. I’m here to help, so I’ll help,” she said, putting hot sauce on her next bite of burrito and not looking Max in the eye. “That’s the point, right?”
“Sloane,” Max said again, then waited for her to look at him. “Come on.”
She wanted to disagree some more. She wanted to go back into that stupid attic and look at stupid laundry symbols around a stupid, incorrect pentagram. She wanted to prove that she was, shit, some kind of supercool, fearless badass or something.
Instead, Sloane sighed, made a face, and reminded herself that part of being an adult was knowing one’s limitations and accepting them gracefully.
“Okay, okay,” she said, and only rolled her eyes a little, which was pretty good, she thought. “Get good pictures of the weird symbols, though. And the weird writing on the wall. It looked sort of familiar, but I can’t tell if it just looks like something I’ve seen before or whether it is something I’ve seen before. Do you have any Ziploc bags?”
“I can find something Ziplocky.”
“Try to get a sample of the stuff that glows under black light. And use gloves. It’s probably not something gross, but you never know.”
Now Max was grinning, and Sloane pressed her lips together so she didn’t smile back. To distract herself, she put more hot sauce on her burrito. “And if you explore the rest of the attic, take the black light and see if there’s anything else,” she finished.
“Any more expert ghost-hunting tips?”
Mouth full of burrito, Sloane flipped him off.
“Should I also take my night-vision camera? Maybe the thermometer in case I hit any cold spots?”
She rolled her eyes.
“What about a flashlight? I just can’t decide.”
“You’re the one who dragged me down here because I lost a bet,” she said. “Do you want my suggestions or not?”
“I’ll black light every corner of the attic, just for you,” he promised. “Want to meet me at the poison garden when I’m done there?”
Despite reading several brochures, Sloane didn’t really understand why the romance hotel had a garden full of poisonous plants. Was it some sort of Romeo and Juliet thing? A veiled threat to anyone who did their lover wrong? Some sort of secret confession from Belle herself?
