A few days later, Liam and I had watched a plethora of YouTube videos about ghosts, and there was something that had become glaringly obviously wrong - I hadn’t seen a ghost in a single video. It wasn’t all that unusual for me to go an entire video without seeing anything - since people were just making up theories based on the reactiveness of faulty equipment, it was almost comically easy for a YouTuber to film an entire video and not get a single ghost on camera. Every once in a while, though, they were bound to catch something, at least in the background. After all, if you keep going to haunted places, you’re bound to see a ghost.

  “Okay,” Liam said, closing another video after I told him that there were no ghosts in there, either. I was getting pretty frustrated by that point, and I assumed that Liam could tell, based on the way he kept running his thumb across my knuckles as a small point of contact to calm me down. Or maybe he was trying to calm himself down. Either way, I was definitely using it to my advantage, trying to fight the growing pit in my stomach that pointed to the most logical conclusion - for whatever reason, I wasn’t able to see the ghosts anymore. “Okay,” he said again, his brain clearly trying to run through possible reasons just like mine was. “Maybe I’m just bad at choosing which YouTubers to watch. After all, we know Silas Hughes is a cool dude his videos are fun to watch, but we all know his methods are less than standard.”

  I nodded - after all, he’d left a half-eaten granola bar for the ghosts, and his coming back to find that it hadn’t been touched was a major part of the plot of this video. But it wasn’t as though we had just been watching him, and it wasn’t as though I’d never seen anything in his videos, either. “I think something’s wrong,” I said quietly, not really wanting to vocalize it.

  Liam squeezed my hand. “I know.” He let go of my hand and lightly reached up to turn my face toward his. His eyes had a hint of worry to them, but it was overshadowed by the seriousness in them. “But even if something is wrong, we’ll figure out a way to fix it, okay? Even if I have to fight that demon myself, we’ll get your ability back.”

  I tilted my head to rest my forehead against his. “I don’t want you to fight the demon. I don’t want to lose you because of something like that.” I sighed, then gestured for the laptop. “There’s one way to officially check.” He wordlessly handed over the laptop, and I pulled up their video from the Peters building. “If I can’t see Grady, then we’ll know, and we’ll have to figure out where to go from here.”

  ***

  I couldn’t see Grady in the video. It had been long enough since I’d seen the video that I didn’t know when Grady was supposed to show up, but by the time we were 40 minutes into the video, I knew he had to have been in it somewhere. I paused the video with a mild curse. “Nothing.”

  Liam nodded solemnly, then started unfurling himself from me. “I’ll get Luke and Caitlin. I don’t know if they’ll have any suggestions, but if anyone has any idea where to go from here, it’ll be one of those two.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  I nodded, but he had already turned to leave the room. I hit play on the video, letting the noise fill up the room in the hopes that it would be a distraction while Liam was gone, but it was no use - my mind had already begun its quick spiral downward. I curled myself into a tight ball, pulling the blanket with me, although it could have been on fire for as much as I registered the temperature of it.

  I couldn’t see ghosts anymore. That definitely put a large crimp in all of my plans. Talking to ghosts had consumed my world since I was old enough to remember - some of my closest friends growing up had been the deceased. Sure, I’d gone days without talking to a ghost before, just depending on whether or not I went to any sort of a haunted location, but it wasn’t even that unusual for me to stop at a gas station and see ghosts. They’d become completely engrained in almost every facet of my life.

  And that doesn’t even take into account my job. Not the videos - I was pretty sure that Luke and Liam (and even Caitlin, although it if was hurting the bottom line, I think it would physically pain her) would be willing to keep me on to help with some portions of the videos, regardless of whether I saw ghosts or not. After all, they’d never had someone who had actually seen ghosts before, and that’d never stopped them. But my job back home, helping with unsolved cases. Sure, they probably could figure it out without calling me every time, but what of the cases where finding a body was the only thing that kept a murderer from going free? I’d had other mundane jobs in my life, but my ability to see ghosts had actually helped people time and again, and I was just supposed to step away from that?

  I was so zoned in on my thoughts that I didn’t even realize the others had walked into the room until Liam lightly touched me on the shoulder. I jumped in surprise and turned toward him, not liking the look of abject sympathy that I saw there. But Luke’s face, at least, was full of determination, which gave me some hope that we might actually be able to fix it. Caitlin just looked like she was doing complex math in her head, but in fairness, she usually was.

  “So,” Caitlin said as I looked between the three of them, “if you can’t see ghosts anymore, one might think that would be bad for the videos, but it might actually help you garner sympathy with the audience. After all, they haven’t seen any proof of you seeing ghosts in the last several videos, so if we drop ‘hey, she lost the ability to see ghosts a while ago and is just now realizing it,’ that might give them enough information to turn it around. When you’re done doing…whatever that is,” she said, gesturing toward me, “we’ll have to get you on video explaining the situation.” Liam cleared his throat looking pointedly at her. “But we’ve got a couple more videos already ready to be posted,” she added quickly, “so it’s not like a huge loss if you want to like mourn or whatever for a while first.”

  “And doing a video about that will give us enough time to get you back to full health so that we can have Circe come back and get rid of that demon once and for all,” Luke added, too cheerful for the occasion. “Hopefully that makes it so you’re able to see ghosts again. And if not, then we’ll come up with something. But we’ll make sure you get your ability back, Andi, don’t worry.”

  I sighed. “Are we even sure the demon is the cause of this?”

  “Nope,” answered Liam, sounding like he was trying to be as cheerful as Luke, but there was still the vibe of worry behind it. “But if it’s not the demon, it’s really weird timing, isn’t it?” I nodded.

  “Besides,” Luke added, “even if it’s not the demon, it’s nearly killed you a couple of times, so frankly, I think getting it out should be our top priority. I went out to a couple of churches today, and I think I’ve got enough holy water to last all of us for a week or two, so if we’re going to undemonify, we might as well do it soon.”

  I was silent for a moment, and then nodded. He was right - if nothing else, we had to get this demon out of me before it actually succeeded in killing me. “Perfect!” Caitlin responded first. “You get yourself cleaned up and I’ll set up some camera equipment in the dining room, and then we’ll start the process of getting you back on the right track.”