“A demon?” Caitlin asked. Liam had somehow managed to get her calmed down, and we were now all (except for Luke, who had apparently made a trip to the gym, which Liam joked was a sure sign that he was still possessed by something) sitting in the black and white living room with blankets and cups of coffee that Caitlin had insisted I needed. I hadn’t argued - after the time in the garage, my nerves were so frayed that I didn’t think caffeine would hurt anything. “I know I’ve heard other ghost hunting groups talk about them, but I honestly thought they were a myth.”

“That makes two of us,” I agreed. “And we’re still not sure about that, mind you.”

“Speak for yourself,” Liam said, picking at the bandage on his hand. Apparently, in my desperation to escape from his grasp, I had scratched him hard enough to draw blood in a couple of spots. He barely even flinched when Caitlin was patching him up, though - he just kept his eyes on me, as though he was sure that at any moment, I’d fall back into my panic attack. I wasn’t fully ruling it out, either. “I’ve seen a lot of crazy ghost shit, and I’ve never seen something like that. My vote is demon.”

“Your vote has always been demon,” Caitlin said, swatting at Liam’s hand so he stopped messing with the gauze. “Maybe we’re just overreacting, you know? Maybe we can just take Boo Buddy out to the fire pit and get rid of him once and for all.”

I shook my head. “It might help in the short term, but if there actually is a demon in the bear, you’ll just let it loose in the house again.”

“So what do you suggest, then?” Liam asked.

“Other than containing it and hoping for the best, I’m not sure if there’s anything we can do,” I said with a shrug. “Maybe we could get a featured spot in the Warren’s museum?”

“Or we just shove it into a box in the back of the closet and assume it can’t find its way out,” Caitlin offered.

“It might work,” I conceded. “Just so long as it doesn’t turn into an Annabelle situation where she starts chasing us around the house.”

“Like she’s already been doing,” Liam asked.

Caitlin sighed, then pulled out her phone and typed something into it. “There, I took care of it.”

Liam’s eyebrows raised at her. “You took care of it in fifteen seconds.”

She shrugged. “I asked Circe if she wanted it. I’m assuming the answer is yes, because she’s got quite a collection of haunted objects. Then she can get this ghost doll and we don’t have to worry about it and can get back to filming. Everyone happy?”

I looked at Liam. It wasn’t a brilliant solution, but it was probably the best that we were going to get for the time being.

***

Liam and I retreated back to our room for a couple of hours. He was the one who suggested it, and I thought it was a brilliant idea - I needed a bit to be in a safe place alone to fully calm down. Caitlin, in the meantime, had boxed up the Boo Buddy and ran it down the the post office. After she’d mailed if off, she texted me to let me know that she hadn’t noticed anything weird happening with it. That gave me less comfort than I’m sure she thought it would. After all, I would have thought it was safe in the garage until it suddenly wasn’t.

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Or, at least, that’s what I thought? The longer I lay in the way too plushy bed, thinking about what had happened, I started wondering if I’d even been in danger at all. I mean, yeah, the temperature shifted suddenly, but it was a garage. Had I not seen the weather shift significantly before? And if it gets suddenly cold outside, it would probably get suddenly cold in the garage. And yeah, it got suddenly dark, but Liam had been using his crappy old flashlight. Maybe the easy answer was just that the flashlight died and that I was touchy.

I had almost convinced myself that it was all in my head when I decided to sneak down to the kitchen to try to find something for dinner. It was closing in on 8 PM, which was late for dinner for me, and I’d been pretty hungry already, but I thought it would be better to calm down before I headed downstairs.

I started walking down to the kitchen, but the door a couple down from mine was open a crack, and I peeked through as I was walking by. It was a brightly lit room, following the color scheme of the rest of the house, with the exception of the posters on the wall. The walls were covered with old movie posters. I was so distracted by them, that I almost didn’t see Liam notice me from where he sat.

“Do you like my collection?” he said, and I jumped at the sound. He laughed quietly. “You can come in, you know. I’ve been wanting to check on you, but I wanted to give you a chance to rest first.”

I pushed open the door, flooding the light into the hall, and leaned against the door frame with my arms crossed, much like he had earlier that day. “I think you’re the one who needed a chance to rest more than me, considering you actually got injured.”

“Ahh, this old thing,” he said, gesturing to his bandage. “It’s just a scratch. Plus, if I’m lucky, it’ll scar, and women love a good scar story.”

“Do we?” I joked back. “I don’t know if I’ve ever asked a story about a scar in my life.”

He instantly pulled up his sleeve, revealing a pale slash against his upper arm. “Not even now?” he said with a grin.

I grinned back. “I suppose I must, at this point.”

He dropped his sleeve back down and nodded smugly. “I fell out of a tree when I was a kid and broke my arm.”

“That’s not a very good story.”

“Ahh, but you still asked for it, and that’s the point. So, what are you doing out wandering around?”

“I was going to go down to find some sort of food. I was getting a little hungry up there wallowing.”

Liam instantly jumped up and started toward me. “I’ll go with you, he said, gesturing for me to leave the room. “I could use some food myself, too. Plus, I don’t know what we actually have in the house, so we might have to order something in, and I definitely don’t want to miss that.”

There was indeed no food in the kitchen, so we ended up ordering pizza for everyone in the house. Luke had gotten back from the gym and was starving, so we ended up getting a ton, but I didn’t mind. They ordered from some local place, and it was better than any pizza I had ever had back home.

“So,” Luke said through a full mouth of cheese, “did you get a chance to watch the video yet?”

“Which one?” I asked, dunking the crust of my bread into the remains of a marinara sauce.

“What do you mean which one? We’ve got two videos that you were even in, and I don’t think we’ve done more than import the footage from the exorcism yet.”

“Oh, is the video from the Peter’s Building completely done, then?” He and Liam both nodded excitedly. “Then no, I haven’t seen it yet. Maybe we should have a movie night for it?”

“You guys can do whatever you want,” said Caitlin, as she piled up a plate with a few more slices of pizza, “but I, at least, am going back to my room to work on our next project.”

“Is it your room if you don’t even live here?” Liam asked as she walked away. She just flipped him off and kept walking.

“Well,” Liam said, grabbing the leftover pizza boxes, “I would be up for a movie night.” Luke nodded. “Shall we all head to the living room?”

We sat down on the pristine couches, plates full of pizza that I was worried about dropping, and Liam cast the video from his phone.

“What’s up, everybody! We’re Luke and Liam, and we’re here today visiting the Peter’s Building! This one might be familiar to you guys - we just visited this building not too long ago, but we’re here under different circumstances. This time, we brought someone who can see ghosts with us! Let’s back up and Introduce you to Andi!”

The scene cut to us in the car - the section they’d filmed when we were driving to the Peter’s Building. You could barely see anything because of the dark, but then Luke had turned on a small light to get a better shot.

“Stop!” I said, and Liam immediately reached out to pause the video.

There, in the corner of the screen, sitting right next to me in the car, was the little girl I’d seen in the original video.