What Hides Inside: Bay City Paranormal Investigations, Book 2

announced. “What’s up?”
    Straightening up, David bounded over and gave Cecile an enthusiastic kiss. “Hey. Me and Dean found out some really interesting things today, we were just discussing it. What about y’all, you learn anything good from the students you talked to?”
    “We did, yeah.” Sam shrugged out of his jacket, hung it on the rack and went to join the others. “But I think I want to hear whatever y’all found out first.”
    “Wait ’til you hear this.” Dean grabbed Sam’s hand and pulled him into an empty chair. “It’s really amazing. Tell them, David.”
    Sam glanced at Bo, who was perched on the edge of the desk. The man’s gaze shifted from Sam to Dean and back again. His eyes narrowed, and Sam’s stomach rolled. If Bo found out he’d had sex with Dean, he’d never forgive him.
    And whose fault would that be? Sam thought bitterly. If you lose him for good over this, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.
    Cecile’s laugh cut through Sam’s morose thoughts. “Yes, David, tell us.”
“Okay.” Moving back to his chair, David sat and pulled Cecile into his lap. “This time, we figured we’d have a look at the records of the South Bay property before the monks bought it. We thought we’d see if there were any records of disappearances like with the monks and with the students now.”
“And what did you find?” Sam asked.
David rested his chin on Cecile’s shoulder, his eyes sparkling with excitement. “We learned a lot about the history of the property. But what it comes down to is this—people have been vanishing from that property ever since the sixteenth century.”
“And here’s the really interesting part,” Dean added. “The disappearances have happened at regular intervals. Every eighty-three years, for a few months at a time, and then it stops. The last one before the monks was the disappearance of an entire family. It was their house the monks found on the property. No one ever knew what happened to them.”
A sense of looming revelation made Sam’s pulse race. His gaze locked with Cecile’s, and he knew they were thinking the same thing.
Not only did a dimensional gateway lurk in the tunnels under South Bay High, but its opening was no accident. It was just as Sam thought—something was controlling it. Something from the other side.
Chapter Ten
    “What we were just talking about when you got here,” Bo said, tugging on his braid, “was what exactly such a regular pattern of disappearances might mean.”
    Andre gave Sam and Cecile a considering look. “Why do I think you two might have some ideas?”
Sam glanced at Cecile. She huddled closer to David, brown eyes wide and solemn. “We do sort of have a theory, yeah,” Sam acknowledged. “We think that the things from the other side are somehow controlling the gateway.”
Bo looked startled, then his expression turned thoughtful. “Hm. That’s an interesting thought. It fits, too. Nearly identical incidents every eighty-three years, with nothing in between, couldn’t possibly be random. It stands to reason that the gateway is under some sort of control.”
“But it could be that stuff has happened, and we just haven’t found those records yet,” David suggested.
“We didn’t even find any folktales or anything about that site, though,” Dean pointed out. “To me, that says people didn’t experience strange things there in the times between the active periods. Hell, we only found a couple of accounts where anybody claimed to see anything unusual even while people were vanishing left and right.”
“That fits with what we found out today,” Sam said. “The biggest thing we learned from the student interviews was that these rumors of weird creatures living in the tunnels are only a few weeks old.”
“The stories started up right after Patrick Callahan disappeared last month,” Cecile chimed in. “He was the first one. We spoke with his girlfriend, Karen. She was with him when he vanished.”
All eyes in the room homed in on Cecile. “What did she see?” Bo asked.
Cecile clutched David’s hand tightly in hers. “She said they were walking to class across the courtyard, when suddenly everything turned, as she put it, ‘dark and fuzzy’, the ground opened up, and something came out and dragged Patrick back into the earth with it.”
Andre’s face went ashen. “Oh, fuck. That sounds like…”
He didn’t finish the thought, but there was no need. The horrified expressions on