Celia still had the kids at Gran’s house, so her house was empty when James got there the next day. He was alone, which was not how he wanted to manage this case. But since he was working off the clock, his options there were limited.

He did, however, have his phone on and dialed directly to Gabriella’s. She was working at Headquarters, elbow deep in research about this Blueberry Hill ghost. So he was technically on comms and within official safety protocols, even if the case was unofficial.

“Alright, I’m heading in, Gabs,” James said as he turned the key in the lock.

“Got it,” she replied, and he heard the sound of a notebook page flip beside her speaker. “Stay on the line, I won’t go anywhere.”

That was encouraging, at least. He didn’t want to be alone in the house with the boogeyman, but he was a professional. And weren’t most of the things they dealt with similar to this? Just because it was in the closet of a kid’s bedroom didn’t make it suddenly more powerful. If anything, scaring kids was pretty pathetic, right?

The shoes that Krissy had been putting on before Penny scooped her up and let them drop were scattered separately in the foyer, the little pink soles upturned. James took a breath as he saw them. The girls were fine. He’d gotten them out in time and maybe whatever was up there couldn’t hurt them, anyway. He didn’t know that for sure, but all it had done in the weeks it was here was scare Krissy when she was trying to sleep. 

Fucking coward ghost.

James went up to her room, grateful for the afternoon sunlight streaming in, despite the heat that came with it. He had to be at work for one and it was coming up on noon now. So he had just enough time to check out the room and the rest of the house to see what he could find for clues before he had to go to work and focus on official cases.

The room was completely ordinary. Krissy’s toys were mostly downstairs in the den off of the kitchen, so it almost looked too mature for a five-year-old. Still, stuffed animals spilled off of every available surface, and there was a dollhouse in the corner with Captain America jammed into the bathtub. James ran his energy sensor over every inch of the bedroom, getting nothing until it started clicking by the closet door.

That was weird, clicking wasn’t usually a sound that came out of this thing. Usually it emitted varying obnoxious beeps.

“Hey, Gabs?” James said.

“Yeah?”

“Can you go into my office and go to the middle left-hand drawer? There should be a user manual for this energy reader in there.”

He heard her get up and start toward his office, the sounds of an afternoon at Headquarters drifting into the phone as she passed through the house. But after a few minutes of searching, as the sensor continued to make the noise, she hadn’t found it yet.

“How about in the filing cabinet?” he asked. “This thing is making a clicking noise I haven’t heard before.”

“Could it be broken?” Gabriella asked.

“It doesn’t sound like it,” James replied, glancing at his watch. Maybe he could swing by Market Basket and get some batteries and come back. It’d be a tight turnaround, but as long as there was no traffic, he could still get the entire house done.

She was talking to someone on the other end, but she must have put her phone in her pocket, because he couldn’t quite hear what she was saying. Then she pulled her phone out again, and the sound was clear.

“Did you change the battery?” she asked.

“Yeah, yesterday. Could you please just get the manual?”

“Bradley’s looking for it in the filing cabinet.”

And now James was the asshole. “Sorry,” he said, face burning even more in the overheated bedroom. “I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

“It’s fine.”

It wasn’t, but she wasn’t going to call him out. Clearly he needed to actually get some sleep tonight if he was this jumpy. Last night he’d gotten home around eleven, but lay awake until almost three. Bradley said something on the other end of the phone, but James didn’t catch it. 

Didn’t matter, it probably wasn’t kind.

The sensor clicked again as he ran it along the crack under the closed closet door. “We found it,” Gabriella said. “Um, clicking means…” She paused as James tried to remain patient and remind himself she was doing this on the clock with plenty of other work to do. “Low energy levels.”

“Low energy levels?” he repeated. “Like, in the space or in the sensor?”

“I assume in space. It doesn’t say, but wouldn’t it consider low energy levels in the sensor a problem?”

She sounded like she was somewhat talking to him by the end, but mostly to Bradley. Maybe she was irritated? He wouldn’t blame her. 

“So maybe something paranormal was here, but now it isn’t.”

He opened the closet door, letting the sunlight shine in. The closet was filled with boxes, all lining the three walls, with a shoe rack resting between two of them.

“I’m wondering if there’s something about the closet itself,” James said as he ran the sensor around the doorframe. It was now beeping among the coats, which he took to mean stronger low energy levels.

He started moving boxes away from the walls, not quite sure what he was looking for. A talisman, maybe? Or some cursed object that would send the sensor off into a frenzy?

Or maybe it was a drawing on the wall. A hastily drawn sigil maybe six inches tall, tucked in the space behind the shoe rack, drawn in marker, and familiar to James in a way he couldn’t quite place.

“I think I found it,” he said, snapping a few pictures on his phone. “I’ll be back at Headquarters in about twenty minutes.”

***

James had about twenty minutes until his shift began, and he wasn’t going to have time to work on this while he was on the clock today. He hurried into Headquarters with a quick hello to everyone. Gabriella wasn’t in the living room, so he planned to find her and properly apologize for his rudeness on the call once he’d found the answer to this question. He’d go find her immediately after, but he had to solve this now and knew she’d understand.

He went straight into his office. There were a few reference books on summonings in there, most of them old, but still useful. He scooped three promising volumes off the shelf, adding more grime to the mess the folders had made, then sat down at his desk.

These books were helpful. Though, like he’d told Gabs a while back, these things tended to get out of date after a little while. This was a science too, even if people would never believe that. However, the steps to create a summoning sigil had remained pretty consistent over the centuries.

He couldn’t find the exact sigil, but that made sense. Sigils were so personalized that he wasn’t likely to find an exact match, then a convenient description for whatever creature was in his five-year-old niece’s bedroom closet. Looking at the thick marker lines, he could see that it was a summoning exercise of some kind. But what were the specifics in there?

“Made you coffee.”

Gabriella’s voice made him jump. “Oh, hey, thanks, Gabs. You didn’t have to.”

She came further into the office, setting it on his desk. “I’m sorry about earlier,” James said.

She shrugged. “You were stressed.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t mean I get to be an asshole to you.”

“You were fine. I wasn’t offended.”

She seemed to mean it, but James still felt bad about talking to her that way. He was better than that. Other captains might find it acceptable to talk down to their team or get snappy and demanding when they were stressed, but James didn’t. And he sure as hell didn’t do it to his younger cousin on top of that.

“What’d you find?” Gabriella asked him.

“Oh, check this out.”

He flipped his phone so that she could see the picture he’d taken in Krissy’s closet. She frowned down at it. “Do you think someone summoned a monster into the house?”

“Honestly, that’s exactly what I’m thinking,” James said. “At first I thought maybe it had to do with the history of the house, or maybe the land. Like, something happened there a couple hundred years ago and whatever it is woke up. But this is fresh. You can even see a smudge here.”

He zoomed in on the bottom of the image, where the Sharpie had smeared slightly on the whitewashed wall. “And I bet if I go back and look at that shoe rack, there’s a smudge on the back of it.”

“So someone is after Krissy? What the hell, James? She’s five years old.”

“I know,” he said, his stomach twisting slightly at the thought. “I want to call Celia and see if she’s seen this before.”

“This is going to sound ridiculous, but do you think Krissy could have drawn it? Or Pen? Not intentionally, but I’m thinking of those kids summoning the mischief last year.”

The fucking mischief that had left a handprint welt on James’s face and tried to trick Gabriella with the form of her dweeb boyfriend. No, that’s not nice, he reminded himself. But he didn’t like how this kid was messing with Gabriella. He might even prefer the mischief Elliot to the real Elliot. That thing had only tried to scam Gabriella, not called her a scammer and humiliated her in front of a house full of people. 

“I mean, it’s possible, but I just can’t see it,” James said. “But then that leaves Celia, which is even less likely. Or someone who’s been over. But she doesn’t have a lot of people at the house, she told me that. So Auntie Jules, Uncle Paul, Ashley, if she flew home anytime recently. Um, maybe some of the cousins.”

“No way.”

“Exactly!”

Gabriella laughed, and James looked down at the image again. “Someone could have sneaked in,” he said. “I wonder if she’s had work done on the house recently.”

Before he could pursue that line of thinking further, his timer went off. “And that’s all the time I have for that,” James said, reluctantly setting down his phone and turning to his computer. “I’m on all night, when are you out?”

“In about thirty minutes. But I can stay if you need me.”

“No, go on time. What are you doing tonight?”

She didn’t answer right away. James had been typing his password incorrectly into his email login, but glanced over to see her looking a little uncomfortable. “Gabs?”

She sighed. “I’m getting dinner with Elliot.”

James said nothing, but his face must have shown enough of his thoughts because she groaned and buried her own face in her hands. “Am I making a huge mistake?”

“Depends,” he said. “Is it a date?”

“No,” she said. “Or at least…no, I don’t think so? But he asked if we could meet up and talk in person. And he said he’d come down here for it, which isn’t something we usually did before. We usually met halfway and he just really wants to talk. I’m not going to bring him home or anything. God, I don’t even know what I want.”

James wasn’t going to do the caveman thing. Gabriella was an adult and she could do whatever she liked with whoever she liked. That said, this kid pissed him off. “Don’t let him jerk you around,” James said. “And don’t let him talk down to you. You’re smarter than he is, don’t forget that.”

“I don’t-”

“Gabs, I’m not just saying this because I don’t like him. You are smarter than he is. Got it?”

Gabriella nodded with a small smile, her face red. “Good,” he said. “Alright, you’ve been working on the Blueberry Hill Farm case? How’s that going?”

“It’s fine, I guess,” she said. “Everything is so ordinary, that’s what I don’t get. The phenomenon was documented thoroughly by LeRoux when she was running the case. Everything was apparently going smoothly, then it just got dropped and I have no idea why.”

“Maybe it was too ordinary and something bigger pushed it aside?” James suggested, leaning back in his office chair. “It’s unusual and unprofessional, but not entirely out of the realm of possibility.”

“Maybe,” she said. “I just don’t get it. I thought maybe they pulled the case, like what happened at the mall the other day. But there would have been a record of that.”

“I’m interviewing the woman who owns the shop tomorrow,” James said. “We’re going to put a camera in the cellar and see if anything comes of it.”

“Oh, you should check next door, too,” Gabriella said. “That was the other thing I wanted to tell you. The land was split up after it was sold. And LeRoux’s notes say the phenomenon was in the fields as well.”

James pulled up directions to the shop, then looked at the densely packed businesses around it on the map. “It’s either an auto body shop, a dentist, or a frozen yogurt place,” he said. “The shop is directly on the land, apparently the building that contains some of the original. So we’ll have to see which of these others were on the Blueberry Hill land and which were on the next parcel.”

“I can take a look,” Gabriella said. “There’s a couple things I need to do for the Viscoloid case, but I can try to squeeze in both before I leave.”

“Nah, you take Viscoloid now,” James said. “I told McGovern we’re doing all of this around our more pressing cases. If you get to it, great, but don’t stay late. I can look into it later.”

“Alright.”

“Looking at Viscoloid, I’m betting it’ll be about three days to solve. We’re tacking on a simple one for today too. Just an empty building that needs cleansing for bad energy.” James frowned at the notes he’d left on his desk that morning. “Though I might send you and Amelia on that one tomorrow instead of trying to do it tonight. Madelyn, Graham, and I are going UFO hunting and if I send Bradley, the bad energy meeting bad energy might destroy the city.”

“Just let me know,” Gabriella said. “I’ve got my separate binders going for each.” She laughed, then hurried out of the room and James tried to shift his focus to today’s cases.

---

CONTINUE TO CHAPTER 12