Twilight: Bay City Paranormal Investigations, Book 3

bring?”
“EMF and video, and the notepad. Frankly, I don’t think there’s much point in more than that. It’s too cold out here to notice if there’s much of a temperature drop, and there’s only three of us anyway. You can carry the still camera in case we need it, but I mainly want you to feel out the area again psychically.”
“Okay.” Glancing up, Sam saw Sandra and Jerome heading toward them carrying platters stacked high with pancakes. His stomach rumbled. “Oh, man, that smells great.”
Dean grinned at him. “Yeah, I guess y’all probably worked up an appetite last night, huh?”
Bo shot him a warning look, but didn’t have time to say anything before the two Lodge employees arrived at their table. “Good morning,” he greeted them, ignoring Dean’s snicker. “Those pancakes look wonderful.”
“Yeah, Sandra’s the queen of pancakes,” Jerome declared, setting a platter laden with pancakes and bacon and a pitcher of warm syrup in the middle of the table. “Y’all enjoy.”
Talk subsided as the group dug in. The first mouthful of hot, buttery pancakes dripping with syrup hit Sam’s tongue, and he moaned loud enough to garner a few strange looks from the other tables. He blushed while Dean laughed so hard he nearly choked on his bacon.
They didn’t see Lex or Carl. Sandra told them the Lodge owners were busy doing damage control after having canceled all the remaining reservations for the next two nights. After breakfast, Sam and Bo waited on the path while Dean went to fetch the video camera from the staff quarters.
After a brief discussion, they decided to go ahead and investigate the area of the sightings before the threatening snowstorm broke. They could upload last night’s video to the laptop later, along with any video from this morning. The heavy gray sky told them they had a limited amount of time to look around before the snow began.
The three of them stopped at Sam and Bo’s cabin to gather the rest of the equipment, then set off down the path. Bo switched on the EMF detector, saying he wanted to take readings of other areas for comparison’s sake. The reading was roughly the same as it had been in the woods. They passed several familiar faces going the other way as last night’s Lodge guests hurried to descend the mountain before the trails became too treacherous. The older couple from the previous night called goodbyes to them as they passed.
The trail was empty and silent when they reached their destination. They turned off the path and tramped toward the big boulder. Frost-coated pine needles and twigs crackled underfoot, the sound unnaturally loud in the breathless quiet.
When they reached the rock, Bo studied the EMF detector. “Three point four,” he announced. “Just a hair higher than last night. I think we can safely say that’s about baseline for this whole area. We’ll need to get readings around the rest of the Lodge to be sure, but so far baseline EMF’s been a bit high everywhere.”
Just like at Oleander House. Suppressing a shudder of fear, Sam wrote down Bo’s reading. He reached out with his psychic senses, easily finding and latching onto the fine thread of strange energy lingering around the boulder. “Still picking up the exact same thing as I did before. No stronger, no different.”
Dean pursed his lips. “Y’all, this whole thing gets weirder by the second.”
Winding the end of his braid around two fingers of his free hand, Bo gazed into the dense forest with a thoughtful expression. “I wonder…”
Sam glanced at him. “What?”
“Nothing. Just…” Bo shook his head, his brow furrowing. “I don’t want to say anything yet. Let’s just see what we find today.”
Curiosity burned in Sam’s gut, but he knew better than to press the issue. If Bo didn’t want to explain himself yet, nothing short of torture would make him do it. Maybe not even that.
“You want to hike out into the woods, where that thing went last night?” Dean asked, thumbing the video camera on for a quick pan of the area.
“Yes. We need to do that before—” Bo broke off, eyes widening. “There it is. Video and stills, right now.”
Shoving the notebook and pen into his jeans pocket, Sam whipped around, turning the camera on and raising it as he moved. A few feet behind the boulder, something black and shadowy emerged from thin air, paused a second, and scuttled off into the trees. Forcing back the urge to drop everything and run like hell, Sam snapped