Stage one of winning over Brandon: success. I might have been a bit smug as I sat down and fixed my own plate. It was so much more satisfying watching him eat than eating, myself.
As he ate, I filled him in. “I texted the ghost hunting team this morning. They came in late last night, and they’re more or less awake now. They want to meet us this morning, get a tour for where to put cameras, and figure out the hot spots. They apparently use quite a bit of equipment. I warned them about Jon, but they said they put EMP shielding over some of their equipment to keep it from being drained by ghosts.”
Brandon paused with his spoon solidly in the biscuits. “Ghosts drain electronics?”
“Ghosts don’t have a lot of energy in and of themselves,” I explained. “So if they want to manifest or do anything, they drain battery power in order to use it. Which is a great sign you have a ghost nearby but makes it hell on your equipment and hard to record anything.”
“Yeah, I can see that. So they’re partially shielded already.”
“The boss of the group—his name is Dave, by the way—said he’d run us through their setup and get our take on it before they planned things out.”
“Smart of him. Okay, that’s fine.”
“Brandon, just so I know, what’s your background? I mean, I don’t know what you were doing for work before the FBI recruited you.”
“Fair enough question. I was SWAT with the Denver PD.”
I was somewhat surprised by that answer. Unexpected, and yet, it made sense in a way. He was built like a fighter. “That’s kinda a switch, going from SWAT to ghost wrangling.”
“Yeah, you’re not the first to say that. SWAT was fun, don’t get me wrong. Breaking down doors and charging into a place was a nice adrenaline rush. But it…got uncomfortable for me there.” Brandon eyed me, weighing something before he spit it out bluntly. “I figured out I was bisexual about eight months ago. The guys I worked with didn’t take it all that well.”
7
One of the things my siblings have always chided me for is my blunt approach to life. I’d rather lay all my cards on the table with someone, see where they stood, before moving along. I didn’t have a lot of patience with the slow approach on getting to know someone. It often upset the cart, but I figured I’d rather know where someone stood on things before I invested a lot of time trying to make friends. If our moral codes didn’t match, I’d rather know sooner than later.
Mack was gay—Jon had mentioned that little tidbit in passing last night; not that I hadn’t already picked up on it—so I didn’t expect an adverse reaction from him about that. But I wanted to see how he took the information.
It surprised him, certainly. He blinked at me like a deer caught in headlights. “Wow. They seriously gave you grief over that? So much you felt like you needed to leave?”
The tension in my shoulders slowly eased. “Yeah. Well, some of them were okay with it. Others…. Funny how it only takes a handful of people to make an environment turn bad.”
“Yeah, I hear you there. I’m sure they argued you were just going through a phase, that no one your age suddenly has a sexual identity crisis or some such rot.”
“Heard that more than a few times, yeah.” It was part of the reason why I’d had such a hard time wrapping my head around it. Because what if they were right? I’d only had the one guy I was attracted to. But their reaction to anything non-straight was repulsive to me. Even if I wasn’t bisexual, I couldn’t stand that they were so set against it.
“You won’t find that attitude in the FBI,” Mack said confidently. “They didn’t even blink at me, and I’m gay.”
“I figured. I mean, Marc and Javier were good indications on that. And they’re still trying to figure out a way to somehow recruit Jon and Donovan. Anyway, I’m confident I’ll like this new career much better. Besides, I get to play with ghosts every day. How cool is that?”
Mack grinned at me, as I expected he would. “I’m really excited to work with you because of that, you know. Your love of spooky. So many people are weirded out about it. Even people who like to watch ghost shows don’t actually want to be there live and in person for a haunting.”
“I know what you mean.” I went back to eating, as the food was amazing. “Okay, so tell me what I can do as your anchor.”
“Basically, it boils down to two things. Keep track of me. Help me block people when I need it.” Mack paused in eating, gesturing with one of his hands. He did that a lot. If I tied his hands behind his back, would he still be able to talk? “You know mediums sometimes have trouble discerning flesh from spirit and how driving is difficult for us. Well, that’s true of me just walking around, too. Sometimes I get caught up speaking to a ghost, or sometimes I’ll see something not quite right and want to go investigate. I tend to lose situational awareness when I do—it’s a common failing with mediums—and I collide with things. Other people. Doors. Sometimes walls.”
I snorted a laugh, trying to bite it back. “Walls?”
“Ghosts aren’t restricted by doors and walls and things like we are,” he muttered, a flush on his cheeks. “And if you’re walking and talking with them, and they pass right through a wall, you sometimes don’t realize until it’s too late that you’re too close.”
Oh boy. And I thought Jon’s situational awareness was bad. “Wait, then why did you salt the window and door to my brother’s room?”
“Just because spirits can walk through walls doesn’t mean they think to do so. They retain their common sense from when they were alive, for the most part. Sealing the entrance is a sort of no-go zone for them, a sign to stay away. They normally respect that. Beau told me that in his career, he only had to do a full salt circle maybe a half dozen times; the spirit was that hell bent on reaching him.”
“That’s good info. Okay, so I keep an eye on you. What about blocking people?”
“Not everyone can see what I’m doing. With a weak enough ghost, if a person walks through it, the disturbance can dissipate the energy, and the ghost will temporarily scatter. It’s aggravating, since that means I have to wait for it to rematerialize and try again. And not all ghosts are nice. If there’s a dangerous one in an area, I need help clearing the room quickly before people get caught in the crossfire.”
That sobered me. “So…how often have you been hurt?”
“It’s just scratches and welts most of the time.” He passed this off as if it were nothing. “I’ve never been hurt seriously.”
I had the feeling I’d either been lied to or misdirected. There was something he wasn’t telling me. But I couldn’t demand answers from him, not two days into knowing each other. I bit my questions back. For now. “Okay. Just those two things?”
“Basically. You’re my support team. Is this anything like anchoring with a psychic?”
“Yes and no. There’s a lot of similarities from what I’ve seen, but Jon told me point blank he’s not like other psychics. They stuck me with him in the first place because Donovan’s more like a medium’s anchor than anything.”