Dinner was loud. With so many people in one space, voices blended to a point where it was impossible for James to pick out what anybody was saying unless they were right next to him or just across the dinner table. But that was just what happened at family events, and today was Auntie Ruth’s ninety-first birthday.

There were probably about fifty-five people in the house right now. It was hot out, at the very end of August, and the humidity of the past week had kept James in an unpleasant, sweaty daze when he was out in the field. But right now they were inside Auntie Ruth and Uncle Joseph’s dining room with three fans and an air conditioner doing their best to cool things down. 

As many people as possible crowded around the dining room table, then spread out onto further tables in the kitchen and living room. James was crushed between his cousin Layla and Uncle Richie as he ate his salad. Gabriella was across from him, between their cousin Justin’s boyfriend (whose name James had forgotten), and Uncle Tommy, who had been keeping up a lively conversation about work with Gabriella. James wished he was close enough to fully engage with them, but he was only catching every fourth or fifth word.

The deep slice across the right side of Gabriella’s face had healed, but there was still a vivid, raised scar that ran from beside her ear to the side of her mouth, tugging the edge of her upper lip slightly upward. She was self-conscious about it, and it didn’t help that this was the first time a lot of the family had actually seen her since the accident on a case when a broken window had cut her so badly. 

Obviously news got around the family, and the local ones had seen it through various states of recovery. And she’d been working with James nearly every day, to the point that he almost didn’t notice it anymore. But the conversation at the party had definitely dimmed for a noticeable second when she and Auntie Carrie had walked in earlier. 

James was frustrated with them all on her behalf, even though Gabriella hadn’t seemed surprised or angry. Hopefully that meant she was feeling a little more confident now. Like his second in command, Amelia, had said more than once, Gabriella wasn’t the only one on their team with a prominent facial scar. Their teammate Madelyn had a vivid scar over one eye from her own workplace accident. And Madelyn was beautiful. James might not say that quite as loudly as his teammate/housemate, Graham, but that was just because first, he was the captain of their branch and Madelyn might not appreciate that. And second, Graham was the one who was clearly crazy about her. And like with Madelyn’s scarring in the horrific aftermath of her fall, Amelia also wasn’t wrong when she said Gabriella’s scar wasn’t nearly as bad as she thought it was.

It was really nice to see her not seeming to care about it tonight. She was smiling as she talked to Uncle Tommy, her hands moving as she described some case, nearly knocking over a salad bowl at one point. And Uncle Tommy was just as enthusiastic, while Justin’s boyfriend seemed to pretend he didn’t hear the word “ghost” at any point in this conversation.

It was rare that James and Gabs had the same days off, but they’d made a point of this for Auntie Ruth’s birthday. James had made the schedule a month and a half in advance, with the others being very patient through its several iterations. Thankfully, he didn’t have to work around Bradley’s school schedule for another week, so it had been easier than he’d anticipated But that didn’t mean it was actually easy. 

But here they were and nothing was going to go wrong. Supernatural or otherwise.

“Hey, Gabriella.”

Uncle Richie called her name from beside James and she looked over, still smiling about whatever Uncle Tommy had just said. James looked over too and Uncle Richie was grinning at her.

“Wanna know how I got these scars?”

He said it in a creaking, poor, but still recognizable Joker impression. Stunned, James could only look at him for a second. The smile faded from Gabriella’s face as she turned red. “What?” she asked, looking at him in disbelief.

Uncle Richie was still grinning foolishly at her. “You gotta finish up,” he said, motioning toward her dinner, which was half-eaten in front of her. “You gotta get back to Arkham before Batman catches you here.”

“What the fuck?” James demanded.

The table went quiet almost immediately. Gabriella stood up, her chair nearly falling behind her as she hurried out of the room, squeezing between chairs and bodies to get toward the front door. “Rich,” Uncle Tommy said, his voice completely calm as James got up and followed Gabriella toward the front door, her mother close behind him, cursing out her brother-in -law as she went. “Let’s you and I go out back and discuss this.”

“Oh, come on,” Uncle Richie said with a forced laugh as everyone looked at him. “It was a joke! She knows it! I was just trying to make her feel better.”

“Come on,” Uncle Tommy said, lifting his huge frame out of the chair and standing imposingly across the table from him. “You’ll say those things to a little girl, now let’s go have a conversation between the two of us.”

Uncle Richie still wasn’t standing, but James was nearly at the door now anyway, so he’d leave Richie’s fate in Uncle Tommy’s hands. The metal screen door creaked as he pulled it open, then slammed behind him. The unexpected noise made him jump, and he tried and failed to catch it before it clicked shut in front of Auntie Carrie.

Gabriella jumped too, where she was sitting on the old swing at the other end of the short wooden porch. She wiped her eyes quickly as they came outside.

“He’s an asshole,” James said, sitting next to Gabriella. “Uncle Tommy just told him to go out back with him so Tommy can kick his ass where Auntie Ruth can’t see.”

Gabriella nodded, but didn’t laugh like he’d hoped she would. Auntie Carrie sat on her other side and took Gabriella’s hand. “I forgot,” Gabriella said quietly, her free hand moving toward the rigid scar, her finger running down it almost absently. “I was talking to Uncle Tommy about that thing we saw behind Market Basket the other day and I wasn’t even thinking about it. I was so scared to come here tonight, I was thinking about not coming but I remembered you cried over the schedule.”

“I did not cry,” James said indignantly, looking at Auntie Carrie. “It was a bit of a tough moment, but I didn’t cry. Ask Bradley.”

She laughed slightly now, but there were still tears on her own cheeks. One ran down the line of scar tissue. It wasn’t a particularly thick scar, and while it pulled up her lip slightly, it didn’t impact movement or speech. It was just there, tough and visible. She’d said something about how it was going to be the first thing people noticed about her. James wanted to disagree. He wanted to say they’d see her eyes or her devotion or just what an amazing person she was. But he also knew that wasn’t true. They’d see those things after they saw the scar, especially if they didn’t already know her.

“We can leave if you want,” Auntie Carrie said. “We don’t have to stay.”

Gabriella glanced at James. He’d been telling the truth, he hadn’t actually cried at any point in the schedule making process. Sworn, of course. But he also wasn’t going to guilt her into staying when, now that Uncle Richie had made his drunken asshole Joker comment, her scar was going to be even more of a topic of conversation than it already had been. “Go,” he said, squeezing her shoulder. “You don’t have to stay.”

“Thank you.”

She hugged him, holding tightly for a little longer than usual. Finally, she was the one who let go. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said.

“Looking forward to it.”

Gabriella and her mom had driven over together from Gabriella’s little studio apartment in Fitchburg, about two towns over from Auntie Ruth’s Lancaster home. Gran’s house had been in Lancaster too, along with James’s childhood home. 

He’d grown up in a condo in a modernized farmhouse, while both Gran’s and Auntie Ruth’s homes had been updated as little as possible over the years. He’d spent enormous amounts of time at Gran’s as a kid, but not so much here at Auntie Ruth’s.

This place was large and imposing, probably older than a lot of the buildings they’d investigated in Lancaster. And they’d done a lot of work in Lancaster lately. Everywhere, really. But there seemed to be some kind of ghostly fluctuation happening in this particular town. Thankfully, it was right next to Leominster, where their branch of the Foundation for Paranormal Studies was located. So he didn’t have to worry too much about the gas budget on top of more esoteric concerns.

Gabriella and Auntie Carrie left a moment later, after going in to say goodbye to Auntie Ruth. She hadn’t seen what had happened, and they didn’t tell her, since Gabriella asked that they just leave it alone. The only other person she talked to was Uncle Tommy, who had hugged her alarmingly hard on the way out. 

James watched the car leave from the swing, then glanced at his phone. No texts. He sent one to Amelia.

JAMES

How’s everything?

Amelia wrote back immediately.

AMELIA

Fine. How’s dinner?

JAMES

My shithead uncle did joker impressions at gabriella, so she just left.

AMELIA

Fucking asshole

Amelia had met enough of the family by now, or at least had heard of them in detail from James, to know how it was. He put his phone back in his pocket and was about to go inside and see if his salad was still where he left it, when six of his cousins came out the door, one after the other. Jarred, Celia, Ricky, Angie, Bobby, and Teresa, all of them coming straight out and gathering on the porch around James.

“God,” Teresa, who was twenty-six and lived in California, muttered as she took a seat next to James on the swing. “Why do they all suck?”

“What happened now?” he asked.

Jarred, who James was pretty sure was close to his age, just shook his head and hopped up on the old wooden railing. “After he was done being a dick to Gabriella, he started in on Justin, asking when he was getting a girlfriend. I think he and Damien left out the side door.”

“I’m gonna fucking kill him,” Angie said as she took the last swing seat. 

James had no doubt she would. She was Gabs’ age and more of a hothead, getting in a fair amount of legal trouble that James did his best not to learn too much about. But she was a good kid. He’d babysat her for years when they were younger and they always got along.

Nobody said much for a few minutes. Angie pulled out a cigarette and James did his best not to look too disapproving as she lit it a little ways away from everybody. Then the conversation picked up, just a little and mostly among the others, who were all younger than him. All of his cousins were. Celia was the closest to his age, at thirty-three. But she also had three kids, something James found scarier than anything he dealt with at work.  

“I have to figure out babysitting next week,” she was saying to Ricky as James came back from wandering thoughts about some of the cases they’d dealt with in the past week. “We’re ridiculously short staffed at the hospital right now so I can’t get off work. Their usual babysitter is gone for a month, Mom’s away, and Adam’s working. No one else is available. So I’m still kind of fucked.”

“Can you sign up for one of those babysitting sites?” Ricky was asking. He was an online entrepreneur, at least part-time, so apps tended to be his solution to everything.

“Maybe,” Celia said, chewing on a blue-painted fingernail. “I don’t know. I think I’m just being nervous, but I feel weird going to those.”

“People have to be background checked in order to be on them,” Ricky pointed out.

“What nights?” James asked.

He shouldn’t be volunteering for anything, should he? He was in charge of an also understaffed team and working ridiculous hours. But as she laid out the two shifts she was looking to cover, of course they fit perfectly into his work schedule.

“I can stay with them,” he said. 

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I won’t be much fun, but you guys are close enough to work that I’d have no problem getting there after.”

“Oh my God, thank you so much.”

“Have you checked if James is background checked?” Ricky cracked.

James flipped him off while still facing Celia, who had taken Angie’s spot on the swing when Angie stepped away with her cigarette. “I get out of work at four on Thursday,” he said. “I’ll run home, shower and pack, and get to your house by five?” “Perfect. Oh my God, you’re my hero. The girls are going to be so excited too.”

Celia had three little girls. Penny was eleven, Krissy was five, and Jenny was a baby. She’d gotten a divorce while she was pregnant with Jenny. Their dad, Adam, was still very involved with the girls, but worked long hours too, especially on his non-custody weeks. 

James didn’t get a lot of time with any of the next generation these days, so he was actually looking forward to it. Plus, it had been about three years since he’d babysat for more than a quick trip down to Market Basket or something like that. Having a night with the kids could be fun.

“Oh, wait til you guys hear about Regina’s new boyfriend,” Angie said, stubbing out her cigarette in a flower pot already lined with cigarette butts. “Do you remember Greg from the Moulton school? He’s got this cousin and apparently Regina is madly in love with him…”

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CONTINUE TO CHAPTER 2