Donn's Legacy, page 14
He seemed unsure until we heard Yuri’s voice outside the office door. Graham stood to kiss the top of my forehead. “I’ll just be over at Stephen’s. If anything weird happens—and I mean anything—call me.”
“I will.”
As Graham left, Yuri pulled a flat cart into Alexi’s office. Stacks of equipment cases were tethered together to keep them from falling off as he eased the cart over the raised threshold. Striker’s tail poofed, and she scurried under the desk to escape the contraption, but I whistled in approval.
“Pretty cool, right?” Yuri asked as he unclipped the bungee cords.
“I love it,” I said. “I thought I’d have to help schlep those up the sidewalk two at a time.”
“Our new production assistant had the idea. It’s his cart.” Yuri glanced back into the bar. “Where did he go? He was just—ah, Kevin, this is Mac, our medium.”
The newbie stepped into the room shyly, and I wondered how he had gotten past the door. He didn’t look nearly old enough to be in a bar. He had the skinny frame of a high school student, and his pasty chin and cheeks were devoid of even a hint of hair.
There was something familiar about him, though. As I squinted at him, he coughed and tucked a long strand of straight black hair behind his ear.
My eyes went wide. I did know him. It was just a little strange to see him wearing jeans and a hoodie. The last time I saw him, he’d been wearing a floor-length robe while getting strangled by a fake psychic. “Fang?”
Heat filled his otherwise chalky cheeks. “You can call me Kevin, if you want.”
I stared at him for a second before turning my frown on Yuri. “You know he’s a fraud, right? He scams tourists by pretending he can read palms.”
“Yes, Kevin was open about his—shall we say—checkered past.” Yuri clapped the younger man on the back. “It is behind him.”
“I closed up the shop,” Fang said hurriedly. “Gave up my lease. I’m sleeping on Stephen’s couch. I don’t want to lie anymore. I want to help people.”
I didn’t like it. Something about the situation irked me, and I couldn’t let it go. Forgetting for a moment that Yuri had already interviewed and hired Fang, I launched into a line of questions.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-one,” he said.
“That’s pretty young,” I argued. “Do you even have any experience?”
Yuri dipped his chin and eyed me over his glasses. “Mac, come with me to check on something while Kevin unpacks the equipment. Kevin, make sure everything on the checklist is accounted for.”
We stepped out of the office, and Yuri closed the door behind us. I looked around expectantly, not sure what he needed my help with.
He didn’t move except to fold his arms across his chest. When he spoke, his voice was low and stern. “Mac, what’s going on?
“With what?”
“Why are you interrogating Kevin?”
I glanced at the closed door and lowered my voice. Fang was close to Stephen, and I didn’t want my criticisms to get back to Graham’s closest friend. “It just feels like a bad fit. I mean, the kid’s a con artist.”
“Was,” Yuri corrected.
“So he claims. What if our viewers find out what he used to do? It’s already an uphill battle with the skeptics out there. Every week, somebody calls me fake in our video comments. They call me a liar. How are we supposed to defend ourselves against those kinds of attacks if somebody on our crew really is a fraud?”
“I won’t pretend to be thrilled about the choices he made in the past. But listen to your words, Mac. Don’t you believe in second chances?” When I didn’t answer, he pressed on. “Gabrielle will be free someday. She will need to find a home, a job. How do you hope people respond to her when they learn about the terrible choices she made?”
I opened my mouth to object. Their situations weren’t at all similar.
Yeah, my inner voice chided. The stuff she did was way, way worse. And you still take her calls. You still let her put you on the prison’s visitor list.
Damn it. I sighed deeply and scratched at my hairline with both hands, sending my hair flying. “Fine. I’ll give him a chance. But I still think he’s too young.”
The corner of Yuri’s mouth twitched upward. “He’s older than Kit was when she and I started this.”
Having soundly defeated all my arguments, Yuri pushed the office door open and gestured for me to go back inside. I found Fang crouched on the floor, dragging a bungee cord back and forth in front of the narrow space between the desk and the carpet. One of Striker’s black paws shot out, and she hooked her claws into the braided material.
Fang giggled. “I see why you named her Striker.”
“Actually, I didn’t. She already had that moniker when I adopted her.” I studied him as he tugged lightly on the cord. “What happened to your accent?”
“Accent?” He glanced up at me, then flushed again. “Oh. You mean my”—his voice deepened and took on a pompous quality I associated with old presidential speeches—“soothing psychic voice?”
In spite of myself, I smiled. “Yep. That’s the one.”
He shrugged. “I don’t need it anymore.”
“What about ‘Fang?’ Where did that come from?”
“It started as a gamer tag. When I opened my shop, I thought it sounded more mysterious than Kevin.”
“Which name do you prefer?”
He was silent for a few moments as he bounced the end of the cord up and down in front of the desk. He kept his eyes fixed on the floor as he said, “I don’t know. I want to leave all that behind, all the lying and scamming. So I sort of feel like I should be Kevin again. But the weird thing is, even though it wasn’t my real name, calling myself Fang never felt like lying. It just felt… like me.” He looked up at me. “Is that dumb?”
I smiled, relieved by his answer. “I don’t think so. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure about it at first. But now I’m having trouble calling you anything else.”
As I spoke, Striker yanked the cord back under the desk and sank her teeth into it. One of her wild yellow eyes shone from the shadows, and her purr was audible even across the room. Our production assistant crouched down to wiggle his finger in front of her face, and she proved that she had some fangs of her own.
“Striker!” I rushed forward and nudged her face away from his hand. “Did she bite you?”
Joy lit up his face. He held up his finger for my inspection. “She’s just playing. See? She didn’t break the skin. She just wanted me to know she could have, like flag football.”
“Brrrllll,” Striker agreed.
Fang rocked back on his heels and hopped to his feet. “Sorry. I got distracted. I’ll finish unpacking.”
“It’s okay. Hopefully Yuri told you in the interview, but entertaining Striker is actually the production assistant’s most important job.”
“Oh, he told me,” Fang said seriously. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bag of cat treats.
Striker immediately materialized in front of the desk. She pawed at Fang’s pant leg and yowled vociferously. When he reached down with a treat in his hand, she snapped it right from between his fingers.
“Hey, I need those,” he teased, then gave her a second treat.
Yuri elbowed me. He didn’t say it, but I felt his silent “I told you so” in my ribs. And honestly, I didn’t mind. It had been the fake things about Fang—the bogus accent, the flowery manner, the phony palmistry—that irked me. I hadn’t been able to stand the fifty-year-old Vincent Price wannabe in the twenty-one-year old’s body, but his real personality and bubbling enthusiasm were quickly growing on me.
I helped him unpack the gear and explained what a few of the less-obvious items on the packing list were. Kit’s shorthand had taken me a while to get used to; she preferred nicknames like shinies for the light reflectors and sneks for the extension cords. It was the kind of thing she had only gotten away with doing because she worked with her father, and a fit of laughter nearly overwhelmed me as I imagined her trying to use a similarly ridiculous naming system with Amari’s crew.
I had just finished explaining how the EMF meters worked when there was a tap on the door. A stranger poked his head in, and his face split into a smile when he saw us.
“Oh, good. I’m in the right place.” He stepped into the room and shook Yuri’s hand. Dark circles sagged beneath his eyes. “Sorry I’m late. I totally underestimated how long it would take to walk across town.”
“No problem,” Yuri said. “We were just about to start setting up. Mac, Kevin, this is Noah Westhouse.”
Noah stared at me for a long, awkward moment. I returned the favor with a raised eyebrow, studying his features. Like Fang, something about him was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place his face. He looked older than me, maybe forty or so. He had a large frame with broad shoulders, and his short sandy brown hair swooped up and away from his forehead in a messy pompadour.
Maybe it was just how completely exhausted he looked. Those same dark circles had been greeting me in the mirror every morning for a week straight.
He blinked and grabbed my hand to shake it. “Sorry, I just can’t believe it’s really you. Mackenzie Clair, psychic extraordinaire, in the flesh.”
Heat rushed into my cheeks. I still wasn’t used to people knowing who I was before I introduced myself.
Before I could respond, he moved on to Fang, who gazed at him with a sort of starstruck awe, forgetting to pull his hand away when Noah stopped shaking it.
“Is it true you used to work on First Date Worst Date?” Fang asked.
Noah laughed and raised his right hand. “Guilty.”
“What is that?” I asked.
Fang turned to me, excitement lighting up his eyes. “It was this awesome show where they paired up couples at random and told them they were sending them on this amazing first date. But then everything would go wrong, like the limo would get a flat tire and the driver would pretend not to know how to fix it or all the food at the restaurant would come out with bugs in it.”
I cringed. “That sounds awful.”
“No, it was great!” Fang said. “Some of the people were like, ‘Screw this, I’m out.’ But every episode there would be at least one couple who, like, made the best of it, and you just knew they were gonna make it.”
“Okay, guys.” Yuri clapped his hands together. He was addressing all of us, but I felt sure his next question was just for me. “Are you ready to begin?”
Excited as I was about finally getting to do a proper paranormal investigation again, I hesitated before answering. Our once-perfect crew was now rounded out by a former charlatan and someone with more experience dealing with angry couples than angry spirits.
Hopefully the audience would never know the difference, but the truth was the old Soul Searchers was dead. We were a zombie crew now, a ghost of our former selves.
Even if I was ready, were we as a whole?
It didn’t matter. Ready or not, our first job with the new Soul Searchers was about to begin.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Noah jabbered away constantly as he positioned the tripods, or maybe it just seemed that way compared to the quiet way I was used to things happening. Our old cameraman, Mark, would bustle around wordlessly, only occasionally asking Yuri to confirm that the framing or the angle was what Yuri envisioned. Noah, on the other hand, had opinions about everything: the lighting, the way the chairs were staged, whether or not Striker should be on someone’s lap. Yuri considered each suggestion thoughtfully, seeming to enjoy the endless discussions.
I hated it.
Noah struck me as the kind of person who automatically assumed he was the smartest in the room. He probably wondered how on Earth we had managed to film a single episode without his expertise.
I imagined an alternate timeline where Kit and Mark had never left. Right now, Kit would be figuring out how to get a little more life out of a secondhand piece of equipment, and Mark would be quietly scowling at his camera. After filming, we could grab a beer together or take a dozen donuts back to Primrose House to sustain us through a movie marathon.
Is that what they were doing right now in Paris? Bonding with their new crew over a box of croissants and Kit’s new favorite horror flick?
“Hey, Mac, how do you work these mics again?” Fang asked, snapping me back into the moment.
I coached him through attaching the lavalier mic to Yuri’s lapel and again to Alexi’s when she finished locking up the bar and joined us in the office.
“What, no makeup?” she joked, patting a copper cheek as she settled into her high-backed desk chair.
Soon, the cameras were rolling, and Yuri was asking Alexi about the history of the bar and the building it occupied. I found it strangely difficult to focus on their conversation. My mind was with Kit and Mark. What were they investigating in France? Did they have better equipment? How big was their crew? Did they miss the chaos of a smaller operation, always having to do more with less?
Did they miss me?
“… She was the first bartender to bring it up, and she ended up quitting just a few weeks after we opened,” Alexi was saying. “Honestly, I’m having trouble getting staff to stick around because of this.”
“What about the other employees?” Yuri asked. “The ones who aren’t also residents?”
“They like to spread the stories. They’ll tell the new hires about a ‘lady in white’ in the basement by the napkin refills, but I don’t think they really believe in anything they’re saying.” Alexi glanced at the ceiling. “If there’s anything supernatural going on here, it’s upstairs, not in the basement.”
Yuri looked directly into the camera. “Let’s go find out.”
We stopped rolling and prepared to go mobile. Noah transferred the camera to a shoulder rig, and I put on one of the lavalier microphones. From here on out, I would be on camera. Even after six months with the Soul Searchers, I still wasn’t super comfortable with it. My voice seemed to shift upward in pitch as soon as the little red light came on, and I had to fight to sound postpubescent.
“Hey,” I whispered to Yuri as we climbed the back stairs to the apartments. “I sort of spaced out back there. What have people seen up here?”
He threw me a surprised glance. “Are you feeling all right? It’s not like you to be inattentive.”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just tired, I guess.”
His mouth opened, and I thought he was about to fill me in on the disturbances Alexi’s staff had reported, but he abruptly pursed his lips. A mischievous smile crept onto his face.
“This is perfect,” he said. “I can do a voice-over later to explain that you don’t know the background of the reported haunting. Then if you sense something, our viewers will know that it wasn’t an idea Alexi planted in your head.”
Before I decided whether I agreed with his idea or not, we reached the second floor. A strange feeling settled over me as my feet crossed the creaking floorboards on the landing.
If someone told me we just went back in time, I would have believed them.
From the looks of it, Penelope’s team had taken the exact opposite approach up here from what they did downstairs. Instead of gutting the space and starting over, they had opted to repair and restore as much of the original construction as possible. A narrow hallway stretched out before us. Twelve identical doors lined the walls, six on each side. If I stood in the middle of the hall, I could easily grab the knobs of two opposing doors. I imagined doing that while the occupants of the old miners’ apartments pounded to be let out.
Striker immediately began running her nose along the tall baseboards, pausing at the first apartment to thrust her paw into the crack beneath the door.
“Is anybody home?” I asked.
Alexi shook her head. “I chased all the tenants out for the night. It’s just us.”
“Noah, go ahead and shoot some B-roll while we get the GoPros up,” Yuri instructed. “MOS, okay?”
“MOS?” Fang asked Noah.
“Uh—”
“We’ll be filming without sound,” I interrupted, pleased to not be the new kid for once. “Yuri probably wants to do some voice-over stuff on top of the footage.”
We divvied up the tiny, mountable GoPro cameras, and I showed Fang the places he should put them in the hallway. Yuri pointed me to a door and gestured to the case containing our measuring instruments.
“I want a camera in every corner of that room,” Yuri said. “That’s where most of the activity has been centered.”
“Got it.”
The apartment on the other side of the door looked as old and carefully restored as the hallway, with eggshell paint and twelve-inch baseboards. It reminded me of my college dorm room, if my dorm had been built in the early 1900s. The space was long and narrow, but a tall window at the far end helped it feel cozy rather than claustrophobic. Through a narrow doorway, I spied a cramped bathroom. And it had two things my apartment didn’t: a stove and a full-size refrigerator.
Striker hopped up into the sink and sniffed the faucet handles with quivering whiskers. I turned one on, just a trickle, so she could drink from the stream. Noah brought his camera closer, and a deep growl rumbled out of her chest.
“She thinks you’re going to turn off the water,” I explained.
“I just want to get some footage of her. Beautiful cat.” He backed away and slowly panned around the room. “This place isn’t too shabby.”
The red light glowed on his camera. I stiffened, then had to remind myself to relax. This is your job, Mac. Be cool.
He tracked me as I set up the thermometer, EMF meter, and audio recorder on the kitchen counter.
“Nervous?” he asked.
“No,” I lied.
He chuckled. “I don’t want to freak you out, but viewers can totally tell you’re not comfortable in front of the camera. It’s okay, though. Adds to your charm.”
