Chapter Text
“Soooo, what do you think about the new location?” Ryan asked as he entered the office, setting down two cups of coffee on the table.
“I say it’s bullshit,” Shane rolled his eyes as he brought the drink to his lips, “I don’t think any demon is going near that house.”
“Your shaney senses aren’t tingling? That’s why you’re so sure?” Ryan snickered.
“Shut up.”
A few hours later, infront of the week’s doomsday home, Shane realized he was very much mistaken. The building was infested with demons, and they seemed to be having a blast. ‘Oh, Ryan is so going to freak,’ he thought to himself. He might regret it later, but there was no way he’d confess just how much activity he was seeing right now. He didn’t want his friend to be in danger, and much less have a heart attack. The demon swallowed hard, and kept his expression as neutral as he could. He helped his friend with the recording equipment as he tried to find a plan to scare all of these things off without them ganging up on him.
He sneezed as he crossed the threshold.
“You okay big guy?” Ryan asked, turning around.
“Yeah, this place is just so dusty. It probably wouldn’t sell for a buck on Craigslist,” he joked, looking to his left, directly at a shadowy figure. It flinched, and dissolved into dust. Shane’s eyes widened.
Huh, is it really that easy?
“If the murders didn’t happen, the feng shui alone would’ve ended up killing them.”
Ryan chuckled. He hated to poke fun at dead people’s decor, but Shane was right, no one in their right mind would be caught dead with curtains like that .
Unfortunately for the demon, more spirits littered the house, and while it wasn’t too hard for him to send them back to the other dimension, it became frustrating trying to convince Ryan that he was simply admiring, or rather, scrutinizing the home and nothing more. The human wasn’t entirely fooled, and as the night progressed, the more he thought he saw his friend doing weird shit. Confirming his suspicions, once they exited a doorway, Shane had growled at the air.
“You channeling your inner Wolfman in there, Shane?” he asked.
“No,” the taller man snapped, then softened his tone, “I am channeling my inner Stolas .”
Ryan bgan snickering, and so did Shane. The viewers would find it a bit bizarre to laugh this much at such a stupid joke, but some things just can’t be given the needed context.
And Shane was trying, so desperately hard not to blow his cover on what he was seeing. So, he was covering it up with humor. It seemed to be working, until about half an hour later, when he started picking up whispers that only he could hear during the flashlight segment. It was mostly gibberish, but the sounds were so persistent and nonstop, it actually angered him. He snarled quietly to make them go away, and it worked, for a few minutes.
This time, they were voices. Distinct, human voices. ‘You will never find me’, followed by cocky laughter. ‘I could punch you in the nose and you wouldn’t know who it was.’
He resisted the urge to shout, but the noises were growing in intensity and getting harder to ignore. Shane couldn’t focus on Ryan’s voice anymore, but pretended to, going by lip reading and intuition. They wound up going to the basement, the cries in his head getting drowning out the hard creak of the steps, giving him a gnarly headache.
But the straw that broke the demon’s back was what he heard on the last step. ‘I’m going to break your little human bit by bit and you’re gonna watch.’
A violent head jerk and an animalistic howl. “You wouldn’t DARE-”
“Shane? You okay big guy?” Ryan asked from the ground floor.
The tall man whipped around and jumped over the last stair as he put his arms over Ryan’s shoulders, a scared look in his eyes. “No, okay, I’m sorry I lied, there are demons here, or, well, one demon, but that’s beside the point, they threatened to torture you!”
“Wait, slow down a bit!” Ryan put his hand up defensively, Shane was practically shaking him at this point. “Can’t you like kill the fucker or something? They can’t be that powerful right?”
“Thing is, I kinda forgot to ask Luci how the whole ‘banishing demons’ business works, so I have no idea how to deal with this!”
Right after he said that, his eyes snapped up to a point behind his fellow ghosthunter. A bright blue light tinted his eyes that same colour, causing Ryan to turn to look too.
A swirling vortex that was getting darker by the second lay before them, objects that hadn’t been cleared out getting sucked in. A feral-looking shape hovered over the mass. Its eyes glowed a blinding white. It had the body of a centaur, and its hiss rang deep into the foundation of the house.
Ryan swallowed sharply. “Run?”
“Run.”
Booking it up the stairs didn’t pose any threat with the adrenaline, but getting out of the house was a whole other issue. The walls seemed to elongate beyond reality, and the demon was gaining on them, perks of having four legs instead of two and all that.
Ryan, being only human, was starting to fall behind. Shane noticed, turned around, and seeing his best friend so very close to the homicidal creature, he made a split-second decision to drop his glamour.
He jumped to grab his friend and flew out of range of the hellish nightmare’s ridiculously large jaw, the fear he was experiencing making him fly faster than the walls could grow, and finally, he saw a bright light up ahead-
Misjudging the length of the open front door, Shane’s wings caught on the doorframe, the momentum sending them sprawling into the yard.
The centaur shrieked from inside the house, brown fists banging on an invisible barrier. It huffed angrily, muttering something before giving up and disappearing back into the basement.
Ryan and Shane both looked at each other, the shorter man out of breath. Fumbling to get up, the night sky making his vision unreliable, Shane took out his flashlight and shined it at his pal.
Ryan squinted at the building while slowly rising to his feet. Seeing no more threats, he relaxed. He then glanced at his hand, a loopy grin forming on his face. “The camera’s still working!” He managed to get out between wheezes, holding the object high in the air.
Shane grimaced as he looked over his shoulder between his wings. “That was my favourite shirt.”
“We literally survived an encounter with a murderous space-distortion demon, the camera’s not broken and I didn’t drop ut, and you’re concerned about your shirt gaving holes in it? Unbelievable. Come on man, we’ll buy you another one. In the meantime, I have some footage to review.”
“You’re not posting that.” Shane warned.
“Of course I’m not, ” the human scoffed, offended he’d even suggest such a thing. “I just want to see how it looks like on tape.”
“Surely not heroic, I can guarantee that.”
————————————
A week later…
Shane walked into the office, coffee mug in hand. “So, how’re those dailies looking?”
Ryan rolled his chair in a 180. “Well, apart from us screaming our heads off and that demon sounding like a corrupt audio file, there is a frame where we can see both your horns and the centaur.”
“Oh, by the way, that’s Deimos, they say hi,” the taller man said as he hung his coat.
Ryan blinked multiple times, baffled. “They have a name? And the Greek myths got something right apparently?”
“Yeah, I asked Luci about it, apparently that demon just loves scaring people. Turns out they were just playing a prank on us, but Luci let it slide, since we sent quite a load of spirits back to hell. I really hope I don’t have to put that in my resumé.”
Ryan laughed, closing the tabs on his computer. “Well, that was embarrassing. Just goes to show, there’s no such thing as a perfect being.”
“You can say that again. I just hope I won’t screw up this badly again.” Shane looked at his watch. “Come on, it’s nearly 2:30, I didn’t reservate that voice over booth for hours!”
“Yeah sure, I’m just waiting for the computer to turn off.” The human looked back at his screen, and finding it black, closed the lid of the MacBook and grabbed it.
The two men made their way out of the room, bantering and laughing as they left. However, neither of them noticed the usb key they left behind on the table…