Chapter 4
Chapter Four
“Your mother’s going to text you in an hour telling you to eat the leftover food for lunch,” Dash said.
Slate loved his mother. She’d always made sure he felt loved—especially after he came out—but she was exhausting. “No. She’ll call. Texting doesn’t let her hear if I sound properly fed.”
“Oh, God. Please tell me she doesn’t know how to video chat.” Dash settled back into the couch, and his hoodie seemed to swallow him. “I will not FaceTime with her when we’re in bed. There need to be boundaries.”
Once his parents left, the house sounded quiet. It gave new meaning to “quiet after the storm.” “She does, we won’t, and absolutely.”
“Glad we agree,” Dash said. “Now for something I disagree with you about. Thomas can handle pretending to be a partygoer, but Oliver is still so na?ve. It will be obvious he doesn’t want to party.”
Slate had thought about Oliver’s participation, but while he had his doubts, it was still a good idea.
“Maybe not. Most of these guests act like perpetually high ghosts. They’ll probably notice his weird clothes, but then accept him as another dude who died young and wants to party.
Thomas is savvy enough to cover for Oliver. ”
“You’re matchmaking,” Dash said, throwing back his hood. “You sneaky little romantic.”
Slate couldn’t deny it had crossed his mind, but it wasn’t the reason he suggested it. “Who better to find out what these ghosts are up to than ghosts? They care about Oriskany Falls. And they’re already here.”
“And you’re trying to get them to work closely together, hoping they’ll figure out what we already see.” A smile spread across Dash’s face. “That’s actually brilliant.”
Slate felt the knot of worry in his chest loosen slightly. “I have good ideas now and then.”
Dash leaned in and kissed Slate’s cheek. “You’re still matchmaking, but your heart’s in the right place.”
Before he could move away, Slate pulled Dash closer. “I prefer to call it problem-solving. If it creates opportunities for our oblivious friends to spend quality time together, that’s just efficient use of resources.”
“Next you’ll be trying to take over my job,” Dash said, pressing himself closer.
Slate had dreams other than running ERP and maintaining the portal, but coding wasn’t one of them. “Nope, but I might have been working on a plan for a vacation house I’d like to build for us one day.”
“Really?” Dash bolted up so fast he nearly clocked Slate in the face with the back of his head. “You’re designing again?”
A flurry of thoughts rushed through Slate’s head—the plan was nowhere close to being ready, they might never build it, and how much he loved Dash. “You’ve been pushing me to follow my dream. I thought I’d start small. Something for us before I try to find clients.”
“That’s so great!” Dash wrapped his arms around him.
“I know it’s not ready, and you don’t want to show me yet, and I understand, but I really want to see it.
No pressure, because I don’t know dick about architecture, but this is so exciting.
I can’t wait to build it. Do I need to ask Grandpa Mort for money?
Not right away, but maybe give him a heads-up it’s coming. And…”
Slate cupped Dash’s face and kissed him hard to get him to stop. And if he got to kiss his favorite pair of lips in the process, that was also problem solving.
They broke apart, and Dash gasped for breath. “Why’d you stop?”
It had not been easy to stop, but if Slate hadn’t, they’d have ended up in bed. “We need to deal with our Gary problem.”
“Wow, if that’s not a cock deflator.” Dash made a show of adjusting himself. “But you’re right.”
Being right didn’t make it easier. “Let’s go find them before I forget about being responsible.”
Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t expect he could just find them, but Thomas had been lingering in the kitchen after he saved them. Slate didn’t see him, but he’d felt Thomas’s presence while they ate.
“They’re in the music room,” Dash said as they made their way toward the kitchen.
“You can tell that from here?” Slate asked. “Both of them?”
“Yes.” Dash shrugged. “I’m weird that way. They have very different auras, and I can pretty much tell where they are in the house. Sometimes I get the floor wrong, but generally I get the distance right.”
Slate needed to ask his father if he’d heard of any mediums with that talent before. “It’s not weird at all. It’s a helpful skill. I’m guessing it only works on ghosts you’ve been around a while.”
“Exactly. I doubt I could find Gary in a crowd.” Dash led them into the music room.
The moment they stepped into the room, Slate sensed two spirits. He couldn’t tell them apart, or even that they were distinct from each other.
“... so rowdy that they are ruining the festival,” Oliver said. “Didn’t their parents teach them any manners?”
Slate didn’t need a program to know who they were talking about. It also wasn’t a good sign Oliver didn’t like them already.
“They’re mostly harmless,” Thomas replied. “I can keep the more energetic ones away if you’d like.”
“Let me guess, discussing our newest guests in town?” Dash asked.
“Yes.” Oliver frowned. “They act like savages. You’d think the entire town belonged to them.”
His description nailed how the hippie ghosts acted. “We actually came here to speak to you about them,” Slate said. “We were hoping you could help us deal with them.”
“Gary or his friends?” Thomas’s expression shifted, and there was a hint of skepticism in his eyes.
“Both,” Dash said.
Slate sat on the loveseat while Dash stood beside him, playing with the strings of his hood. “We need help. As Oliver suggested, they’re rambunctious, and they’re not being careful. People are talking about weird activity in town.”
“I take it that’s bad?” Thomas asked.
“Bad enough that Slate’s parents showed up at dawn with emergency breakfast and a list of incidents around town,” Dash said. “They’re causing minor disturbances, projecting sounds the living can hear, and bumping into things and people.”
“Is that dangerous?” Oliver asked, straightening his waistcoat. “I mean, if people notice.”
Slate had second thoughts. The way Oliver asked, it sounded like he was worried about more than whether people noticed.
“It could bring a lot of unwanted attention to Oriskany Falls. Ghost hunters, mediums who try to banish any spirit they find, the media, and others who want to see ‘the haunted town’ will flock here. Apart from the disruption to the town, it could cause spirits to avoid the town. We have the only stable portal we know about. If ghosts don’t feel safe here, they won’t use it. ”
He left off how it would ruin his grandmother’s legacy, not to mention Ezra Reeves’s sacrifice.
“Most of these ghosts died in the sixties,” Thomas said. “Many died in the Vietnam War and never had a chance to enjoy being young. They’re making up for what they lost.”
Given that Thomas already knew more about the ghosts than he and Dash, asking him was the right move. “We understand they’re just having fun themselves, but we can’t let them disrupt our town.”
“What do you want us to do?” Thomas asked.
“Help us manage the chaos,” Slate said. “You can communicate with them in ways we can’t. Maybe you can explain the situation to them and get them to contain the more enthusiastic manifestations.”
“Think of it as spiritual crowd control,” Dash said.
Thomas looked at Oliver, and they stared at each other in a way that suggested they were silently communicating. After a few seconds, Thomas nodded, confirming Slate’s speculation.
“Can you give us some time to talk about this alone before we answer?”
The desire to get started on the problem warred with the reasonableness of the request. If they had doubts, they might talk themselves out of helping.
“That’s totally fine,” Dash said. “Take as much time as you need.”
Slate was too surprised to speak, so he nodded. A second later, Thomas and Oliver were gone.
“Sorry, but you looked conflicted,” Dash said. “Pushing them, specifically Oliver, to agree would be wrong. Thomas won’t be able to concentrate on what we need him to do unless he’s sure Oliver is okay with this.”
He was right, but it didn’t ease Slate’s concern that they didn’t have time to waste. “I know, but it feels like we need to do something or else we’ll lose everything.”
Dash put a hand on Slate’s cheek. “We are doing something, and we won’t lose anything.”
Slate remembered the previous year when Dash needed reassuring. “I know, but I’d gotten into the mindset that we’d have a calm holiday this year. I wanted to relax and enjoy it with you.”
“And we will,” Dash said. “We just have to deal with this one problem first.”
Despite how casually Dash spoke about the problem, he knew it wasn’t simple.
There was really only one way to deal with ghosts who harassed the living—banishment.
Slate didn’t want to resort to that, not with these spirits.
They were kids just enjoying the life stolen from them too soon.
But if they continued to create problems, what choice did he have?
He covered Dash’s hand with his. “Thanks.”
Dash’s free hand touched his neck a second before Thomas and Oliver reappeared. There was no tension in either of them, which meant at a minimum they agreed on their decision.
“We’re in,” Thomas said. “Where do we start?”
The quick agreement surprised Slate. He’d expected they’d agree—eventually. Slate assumed they’d want to see what they were dealing with first. “Well, I guess we should sit down and come up with a plan.”
“Oh, Lord.” Dash covered his eyes with his hand. “We’ve had weekly planning meetings since the first of the year. Renovations, landscaping, more renovations, the haunted house, and now this.”
“You forgot the portal schedule,” Oliver added.
“I might have tried to forget that,” Dash said.
“Fortunately for you, Oliver has outstanding organizational skills,” Thomas said.
“Me?” Oliver looked as if he’d been slapped.