Starlight Web (Moonshadow Bay #1) - Yasmine Galenorn Page 0,49

equipment to make certain it’s all working?”

Hank shook his head. “I thought we’d do that right after this meeting.”

“Can I watch?” I asked. “I’ve never used any ghost hunting equipment and I’d like to be conversant with it before we head out.”

Caitlin linked her arm with mine and drew me toward the storeroom. “Be my guest. I love talking about gadgets.”

As she opened the storage room door, I glanced back to find Tad staring at me, the look on his face unreadable. I wasn’t sure what he was thinking, but I hoped I could put up a good front and convince him he’d hired the right person for the job.

Thirty minutes later, I was more or less versed about paranormal gadgets and how they worked.

Witches relied on our trancework and senses, rather than on gadgets and whatsits. Then again, we also had our own props and gadgets—our wands and daggers, cauldrons and brooms and everything that made up a witch’s altar.

By the time Caitlin was done with me, I knew how to use several of the easier cameras, the FLIR, and the EMF reader. Some of the equipment was too complicated to teach me to use in what time we had before leaving, but at least by the time Caitlin was done with me, I knew enough so that I wouldn’t mess up the readings by turning the wrong knob or pressing the wrong button.

During that time, Hank seemed to warm up to me. He showed me how to hold some of the cameras, and he sorted through a pile of clean thermal underwear and found a pair that would fit me, along with an undershirt.

“We have extra sleeping bags, and we’ll be taking a battery-operated space heater to huddle around, but you might want to wear these. It’s going to be cold and we won’t be doing a lot of moving around.”

“Exactly what will we be doing?” I asked, accepting the warm leggings and shirt.

“We’ll go into that room where you got clobbered and set up there first. Tad and Caitlin will stay there while you and I head upstairs to do a brief observation run. The fact that you heard movement up there means either we have ourselves a squatter, or an animal made a nest up there, or…and this is the most likely, we have more ghostly activity. We need to know which one it is.”

“Have you ever found squatters or animals? I mean, something other than a ghost?” I asked, holding the thermal underwear up to me. It looked like it would fit. “These are clean, right?”

He snorted. “Of course they’re clean. We wash everything when we come back from a run. Though you might want to get your own. Spending a night in the cold isn’t out of the ordinary for what we do. We keep spares on hand, but most of us have full camping gear, a top-notch sleeping bag—everything we need to bivouac in any situation, whether it’s midsummer or midwinter.”

I paused to make a note on my phone to buy camping gear and long johns.

“As to whether we’ve ever found a natural cause for what someone thought was a haunting, or other UL—”

“UL?” I asked.

“Urban legend. Anyway, the answer is yes. Last year we were sent out to investigate a potential Jersey devil–like case, but it was just a wolf shifter who…well, this was worse than a UL in this case. The wolf shifter had been hexed and when he transformed, he couldn’t finish the shift. He couldn’t return to his human form, either. He died after a few days, and the witch who cast the spell was brought up on charges by the tribunal of Court Magika. He was stripped of his powers and sent to prison out on Gull Island.”

“Why would he want to hex the shifter?”

“Love triangle…the wolf shifter was the husband of the witch’s mistress.”

Court Magika was a tribunal who pronounced sentence on cases that just couldn’t fit in the normal court systems. Made up of a council of witches who were also lawyers and judges, Court Magika had the power of life and death at their fingers.

“That’s horrible,” I said, thinking of the poor shifter. Caught in mid-transformation, he would have been in incredible pain, unable to fully shift either way. The strain on his body had to have eventually killed him.

“Trust me, the witch who cast that hex paid for it. Life on Gull Island, especially when you’ve had your powers stripped, is no walk in