Fear is a smell.
Most people do not know that. They think fear lives in the mind, in racing thoughts and shallow breath. That is only half of it. Fear seeps out through skin. It lingers in rooms long after the person leaves. It attracts things.
Ghosts love fear.
I learned early that if I wanted to survive, I could never let them think I was uncertain.
So I stopped being polite.
The first time I realised arrogance worked was when I was fifteen.
The ghost was small, a woman who had died choking alone in a rented room. She hovered near the ceiling fan, face frozen in perpetual surprise, fingers twitching like she was still reaching for help that never came. She had been screaming for weeks, rattling doors, flickering lights, making the landlord blame faulty wiring and bad tenants.
When I walked in, she rushed me.
That was the mistake.
I laughed.
Not kindly. Not nervously. I laughed the way people do when they are unimpressed.
"You done?" I asked.
She froze.
Ghosts do not expect to be dismissed.
I stepped closer, met her gaze, and felt the familiar pressure behind my eyes, the tug of death recognising its own. I did not flinch. I did not apologise. I told her exactly where she died, exactly how long she had been dead, and exactly how little power she had over me.
She left quietly.
I walked out of that room taller.
Something clicked into place.
Confidence was not just protection.
It was dominance.
By the time I was eighteen, I had stopped pretending this was a curse.
Curses imply unfairness. They imply innocence.
I was neither.
I had power. Power demanded use. The world does not reward restraint. It punishes hesitation.
I started taking jobs.
At first it was favours. A friend of a friend. A cousin who swore their house was haunted. A shop owner whose storeroom refused to stay quiet. I did not charge much. Enough to eat properly. Enough to keep my mother from asking questions I was not ready to answer.
Then someone paid me real money.
A factory owner. A man with blood on his hands and ghosts in his walls. He did not ask me to help them. He asked me to remove them.
I quoted a number that made him blink.
He paid it anyway.
That was the moment I stopped pretending ethics were simple.
I told myself I was not responsible for what people did in life or death. I told myself I was a service provider, not a judge. I told myself money was neutral.
Lies get easier with repetition.
My reputation grew the way bad habits do.
Quietly at first. Then all at once.
People talk. Especially when something works.
I leaned into it.
I dressed better. Spoke sharper. Smiled like I knew something everyone else did not. I let people believe I was fearless. I let them believe I enjoyed this.
The truth was uglier.
Fear never left me. I just stopped letting it drive.
I learned to provoke ghosts deliberately. To insult them, belittle them, mock the things they clung to. Anger made them sloppy. Sloppy ghosts made mistakes.
Mistakes ended hauntings.
"You are not special," I would tell them. "You died like everyone else."
Some screamed. Some attacked. Some broke.
Every time I walked away intact, my confidence hardened.
By the time the press found me, the persona was already built.
They called me a ghost hunter.
I hated the term.
I used it anyway.
The first interview nearly got me killed.
They filmed in an abandoned hospital, cameras sweating under harsh lights, crew pretending not to be afraid while absolutely being afraid. The place was thick with death. Not violent, but exhausted. Terminal patients who never got closure. Nurses who stayed too long. Doctors who learned to compartmentalise until it hollowed them out.
Ghosts layered the halls like fog.
The producer asked if I was nervous.
I smiled for the camera.
"Nervous attracts attention," I said. "I prefer to stay ignored."
A lie.
The moment filming started, everything surged.
Ghosts do not like witnesses.
Something grabbed the boom mic and flung it down the corridor. Lights flickered violently. One of the cameramen dropped his rig and ran.
I stood my ground.
Not because I was brave.
Because if I moved, they would know I could.
I insulted them. Loudly. Publicly. On record.
"You are dead," I said. "And still boring."
The air compressed. Pressure slammed into my chest. A hand closed around my throat.
I grinned.
"You see," I continued, voice strained but steady, "this is why no one visits you."
The grip loosened.
The ghosts retreated, offended more than enraged.
The footage went viral.
People loved me.
That terrified me more than any haunting.
Fame changes the math.
Money follows attention. Attention follows spectacle.
I started charging more. Not because I needed it, but because higher prices filtered clients. Only the desperate and the powerful remained.
They were worse people.
Their ghosts were worse too.
I stopped asking questions I did not want answers to.
That was around the time I met Mira.
She was not impressed.
That alone made her dangerous.
She worked sound for a streaming network, sharp eyed, sharper mouthed, unimpressed by mysticism and immune to charm. She watched me the way predators watch each other, assessing angles, waiting for missteps.
"You play this up," she said after a shoot. "The arrogance."
I did not deny it.
"People want confidence," I said. "Fear makes bad television."
She snorted. "You are afraid all the time."
I looked at her then, really looked.
Most people avoided my eyes once they realised I could see things they could not. Mira held my gaze like she was daring me to flinch.
"Everyone is afraid," I said. "I just refuse to let it show."
"That is not the same thing as control," she replied.
She was wrong.
I proved it to myself nightly.
My mother moved out of the city once I could afford it.
I paid for the house. She pretended not to know where the money came from. We did not talk about ghosts. We did not talk about my father. Silence was our compromise.
I visited less often as my work escalated.
Distance is another kind of protection.
The more famous I became, the lonelier it got. People wanted access, not intimacy. They wanted stories, not truth. They wanted the confident hunter, not the kid who once sat on a bathroom floor shaking after banishing his own father.
So I stopped being that kid.
Or I buried him deep enough that he stopped asking questions.
The call about the resort came on a Tuesday.
Private line. Serious money. Global exposure.
The owner wanted the hauntings removed and documented. He wanted proof. He wanted control.
I wanted the challenge.
Something about the description felt wrong. Not chaotic. Not desperate.
Intentional.
Ghosts with purpose are dangerous.
I accepted anyway.
Because by then, arrogance was not just armour.
It was identity.
I genuinely believed there was nothing I could not handle.
And that belief was about to get me killed.