“-ke up, kid.”

  Cecelia slowly opened her eyes… ‘Damn it!’ “I was just taking a break!” she rushed to expin, jumping to her feet (and then almost falling back on her butt because she’d been sitting on the floor, leaning against a desk, and neither of her legs had woken up when Agent Fisher shook her shoulders). Neal was gone, though Cecelia could hear him talking with Agent Beller nearby. Then she noticed the night sky outside the windows. “What time is it?”

  “Late,” Agent Fisher replied, gesturing for the girl to start moving. “And I don’t want to know more than that. You were sleeping for a few hours. Let’s go.”

  “Uh, go?” Cecelia repeated, trying not to sound nervous. She stumbled a few steps until her limbs finally woke up, though the pins and needles feeling took a few feet past that. “Did you guys figure something out? Was there another event?”

  Agent Fisher paused and, at first, the intern thought her kinda-boss was waiting for Cecelia to open the front door for her. She tried to lean around the agent, but the woman reached out and put her own hand on the push-bar-thing. “I’m taking you home.” ‘Why does that sound like a threat?’ “As I said, it’s te.”

  “I don’t mind staying,” Cecelia said, reluctantly following Agent Fisher out into the night. She didn’t get a response, just the ‘click’ of fancy shoes over pavement. She thought about making a break back to the agency but immediately tossed the idea. ‘Besides, I need to get back and finish everything anyway.’ The brunette had gotten too caught up in the weird airship, ghost-murder, and pigeon, but none of that was reted to what she’d worked so hard on.

  Well, not directly reted. (She hoped.)

  ~

  Agent Fisher had just started her car when a cell phone rang. Cecelia, once again directed to the backseats, caught the woman letting the back of her head drop against the headrest, muttering something under her breath as she pulled out her phone. “Can’t you just let it go to voicemail?”

  “Not this one,” Agent Fisher groaned before tapping the screen. “Yes?” Cecelia had to hold back a giggle because that tone was exactly how she would have guessed the agent answered calls. “No, we’re still in the parking lot.” The intern leaned forward, seat belt growing tight against her chest. “With all due respect, can’t one of the others go? Roger mentioned some ‘acquaintances’ when we were outlining pns.” ‘Pns?’ Was Cecelia being dropped back off at her apartment only for the agent to go off without her? The thought made her frown, but she quickly cut off any disappointment. ‘That’s a good thing!’ she reminded herself. ‘The deal is only two more day – really, only one at this point. Nothing that’s happening in this world will matter anymore once I’m back home and can finish everything up.’

  “—it’s that pce?” Agent Fisher groaned, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Alright, I’ll check it out.” Whoever was on the other line said something that had brown eyes meeting Cecelia’s own through the rearview mirror. “She is, and, yes, I do. Yes, Miss Echo.” Oh, that expined why the call needed to be picked up.

  “What’d Miss Echo say?” Cecelia asked as soon as Agent Fisher hung up.

  “Sit back in your seat,” was the immediate response. Then, “She asked if we could swing by the Alun’s House near the state’s university and —“

  “The what house?” Cecelia knew interrupting was rude, but that was a name she hadn’t heard before supposedly near her campus. Sure, she had never gone ‘exploring’ around the area, but she had listened to a lot of conversations from the back of cssrooms. In some ways, she was more informed than the school’s newspaper. “Was it on that old map?”

  A heavy sigh from the driver as the car started moving. “Probably. The name’s leftover from the family that owned it centuries ago.” Headlights from other vehicles on the rode lit up ugly business buildings along the road. “It’s not an uncommon spot for active events. Either Wilma, Bobbie, or I get called out to the damn pce every few months, whenever some idiots decide to ignore the ‘keep out’ signs.”

  “Ohhh, you mean the Madness Mushroom Manor,” Cecelia realized. Of course non-college students wouldn’t call the old house on the very edge of the campus that silly name. “Aren’t there actually dangerous mushrooms or mold there?” She’d been tempted in the past to check the pce out, but had never managed to do so. Cecelia might be an intern on the ‘government’s ghost hunting team,’ but that didn’t mean she was a fan of creepy, dangerous, old houses that were a suspension-risk.

  “Unfortunately,” Agent Fisher said, flicking on a turn signal. “For the record, it’s all mold. I have masks and gloves in the passenger compartment and, if you want to go in, you will wear them properly without compint.”

  “Absolutely,” Cecelia agreed. She wasn’t suicidal, after all.

  ~

  They were almost at the abandoned house when Cecelia realized that she’d — once again — forgotten that getting back to her apartment should be her main priority. ‘At this rate, we’ll actually solve the case before my time is up, and I’ll never have the chance to finish it.’

  ~

  Not smming the car door shut, Cecelia shivered as she looked up at the Alun’s House/ Madness Mushroom Manor, and it wasn’t only because of the natural chill in the air. The building was falling apart more than her apartment building, with cracked windows, splintered wood, and only a handful of roof shingles left. No one was quite sure how it ended up in the university’s possession, and the college hadn’t been able to get rid of it. Agent Fisher had parked half on the gravel driveway and half on the dead wn, in sight of some half-assed ‘keep out’ and ‘danger’ signs taped and nailed to the surrounding trees.

  And, far worse than the outside of the manor, was the inside. Or the rumors of what it was like inside — anything not stolen had been left to rot. Never mind P.A.R.A.L.L.E.L. being called out here a few times a year, so were paramedics. More than a few kids had ended up dropping out of the college after a bad night here, either too scared to stay nearby or in medical debt.

  Or dead, on a few occasions. But that was always chalked up to overdoses or abuse.

  Agent Fisher nodded her head to a tall man at the rusted gate that surrounded the mansion. “That must be Roger’s acquaintance,” the woman muttered as the guy returned the nod and walked away. “The one who called it in.”

  It was hard to tell with the ck of street mps or other lights, but… “I think that’s the art professor,” Cecelia said, rubbing her arms to try and warm up a little. “He lives right off campus.” Right as she finished talking, she hear the familiar rumble of the golf cart-like vehicles staff used to get around the university.

  Agent Fisher turned and started walking towards the abandoned house; Cecelia following her lead up the cracked concrete. “Whoever he is, his report said that the whole pce ‘flickered in and out of sight’ for a minute.” The agent handed Cecelia one of the masks and pairs of disposable gloves she’d been carrying in her hand since getting out of the car before pulling on her own. She also had a small, knitted or crocheted shoulder bag with her. “Given the history this pce has, Miss Echo wanted someone to make sure no morons were in the pce tonight.”

  Cecelia scrunched her nose at the pressure from the mask, trying not to be worried. “What are the odds of that?” She said, faking a joking tint to her words. “I mean, after the air blimp yesterday, who’d come bother a supposedly haunted, definitely spore-infested, creepy old house?”

  “College students.”

  “Hey.”

  Agent Fisher gnced at Cecelia. “So nobody from any of your csses immediately came to mind when you asked that question?”

  “…I’m still insulted.”

  “I don’t care. And I don’t want to be here longer than thirty minutes, so hurry up.

  ~

  Inside the manor was just as bad as Cecelia had imagined it. Using her phone as a fshlight, she slowly lit up sections of the living room the front doors opened directly in to. Most of the room was empty. An old, once-fancy couch with sunken cushions and lots of stains. A few tables that wobbled from the slightest breeze. It was impossible to tell what color the rge carpet had once been, now crusty from however many decades of uncaring shoes stomping dirt and trash into it.

  And, once Cecelia moved her light to the walls, multiple colors of mold. The young adult adjusted her mask, making sure it was fitting correctly. “Are we going to search the whole pce?” “Unfortunately,” Agent Fisher replied, closing the front door but leaving it unlocked and already walking down the hallway. Cecelia trailed behind, wincing at every squeaky floorboard she stepped on, which was most of them. “People don’t tend to come out when the government drops by. Let me know if you see anything strange. With the overps getting worse, we’re concerned that pullings might as well — more of like what happened to that man at your pce. As small as the agency is, she’s requiring everyone to investigate in pairs when possible.” That expined why Cecelia had been brought along. “What do you mean, getting worse?” She had some ideas, but desperately wanted to be wrong.

  They’d reached the way-to-rge dining area (one of those massive silver chandeliers hanging from the center of the ceiling, probably too rge or too dangerous to remove to sell) before moving back towards what ended up being a kitchen. There were signs that some people had been there recently, such as chip bags and other small pieces of trash. “More frequent,” was the short reply as Agent Fisher yanked open the pantry door. “There were more today all over the city. Bobbie spent all day specially looking for weird occurrences on the internet and tracking them. Entry to the basement is over here,” the woman added, her phone fshlight revealing a warped and rotted door. “Make sure you don’t tear the gloves on the door knob. They’re all rusted and chipped in this pce.”

  ~

  The pair didn’t stay in the basement (celr was probably more accurate) long – it was an open space filled with dust, cobwebs, dead spiders, mushrooms, and smelled bad.

  It was as Cecelia was stepping back into the kitchen, almost off of the very unsteady and creaky staircase under her feet, that she saw it. The room around her seemed to fade, somehow becoming more decrypted. The kitchen counter had rge dents and all the cabinet doors had been yanked off and tossed around. A puddle of water was expanding from underneath the sink and over the floor. Overhead, the electricity that she didn’t think was supposed to work anymore was just barely enough to power a few flickering lightbulbs. From the dining room, she could have sworn she heard footsteps. Maybe shouting.

  And then the Madness Mushroom Manor was back. Dark. Quiet.

  “Don’t just block the way,” Agent Fisher grumbled from behind her, still on the stairs. “Did you see something?”

  “A-Ah, yeah.” Cecelia shook her head, the movement making her feel… fuzzy? Well, shit. That generally wasn't a good sign. She managed to take the st few steps off the stairs despite her wobbly legs. “The kitchen looked different and I heard stuff from the other room.” The intern’s head was starting to hurt and not in the eye-strain-headache-forming way. She reached up and pressed the back of her right hand against her forehead.

  Agent Fisher’s eyes scanned the area, nding on the intern st. “I need more of a description than that, ki- Damnit.” The woman closed the gap between them, holding up three fingers.

  “Three,” the girl answered before the question was asked. “I think my body’s just compining about how te it is,” Cecelia tried to joke. Considering how she normally stayed up past this, that was unlikely. Then again, the st two days had been pretty exhausting. “Really, it’s already going away.” And that wasn’t even a lie. Her head was still pulsing a little but the mild dizziness was almost gone.

  “I’m not risking an intern getting pulling sickness on my watch. Or whatever else you can pick up from all this mold,” the agent replied, crossing her arms. “Head back out to the car. Take this,” she added, pulling a dimensional separator out of her shoulder bag. “Activate it if you still feel sick once you get out there. I need to check the rest of the rooms on this level and on the second floor, but that won’t take me long.”

  “But what about Miss Echo’s buddy-system?!”

  “One, don’t call it that. And two, if I’m not back out in ten minutes, call the agency.” Agent Fisher pointed towards the front doors, on the other side of the dividing wall with peeling wallpaper. “Figure out how to actually describe what you saw while you wait.”

  ~

  Cecelia did not pout as she followed her kinda-boss’s instructions. Once she’d left the kitchen, her headache had gone away completely and the world had basically stopped spinning. On one hand, she knew there was no reason to risk feeling ill again trying to catch up with Agent Fisher on the second floor. But she felt guilty, leaving the woman to investigate by herself and…. No, Cecelia just needed to follow orders and get back home to finish her project.

  With a sigh, she grabbed the thankfully not-disgusting fcked gold doorknob and… Frowning, the brunette jiggled the knob, and then again but harder. Nothing. So she tried to turn it with both hands, even leaning to the right to turn the damn thing. She could feel the lock under her gloves but she couldn't get them to turn! ‘Why isn’t it opening?! No front entrance locks from the outside.’

  Well, she was finally getting the full-on haunted experience she’d expected from her apartment complex.

  Turning around, everything in the house seemed normal. No fuzzy feelings or décor changes. No sounds besides doors creaking open as Agent Fisher searched the rooms down a long hallway.

  Cecelia really didn’t like this.

  Taking a deep breath behind her mask, Cecelia slowly breathed out. “Agent Fisher?” she called, turning left from the living area instead of the right that lead to the dining area. Multiple spots on the walls had the shadows of long-gone paintings and pictures. Each door she passed and peeked into were empty rooms with the occasional mattress or table left behind. “I—”

  “I told you to go wait outside.” Cecelia jumped as the woman she was looking for stepped out from a room on the opposite side of the hallway as she’d been looking.

  “I can’t. The front door won’t open.” The agent raised her eyebrows. “I’m serious!” Cecelia insisted. “It literarily wouldn’t open. I couldn't get a grip on the locks to turn them either.”

  Agent Fisher’s mask visibly expanded from the force of her heavy sigh. “If I find out you’re making this up—”

  “Then go try it yourself!” Cecelia snapped. Why were old people always so sure they were right and that ‘the younger generation’ was wrong?! Except… Except this older person was her boss, and she was an intern. Oops. “I’m so sorry!” she backtracked. “Honestly, I’d be fine with being wrong in this case. I didn’t—!”

  “Save it.” Was the agent mad? She didn’t sound any madder than she usually did. “I still want to you go wait by the exit. There’s—”

  There was a crash from upstairs that made both women startle, almost like someone had fallen over something. “Front door,” the agent ordered, heading towards the drooping stairs with a quick pace.

  And, really, Cecelia should listen. She didn’t need to be getting into any more trouble.

  But….

  Agent Fisher didn’t look at her as the intern jogged down the hallway to catch up. “Kid.…”

  “Buddy system,” Cecelia shot back and taking the groaning stairs one at a time despite how much she already wanted move faster. However, she didn’t want to fall through the staircase if the old wood to broke under her shoes. Once her feet were on the mostly more secure second floor, she was in such a rush to find the source of the crash that she somehow missed the person running down the empty, dark hall until they hit her.

  A bone shaking cold smmed into Cecelia and then passed through her; the impact hard enough that she was knocked to the floor and the figure – dark clothes and blond hair –stumbled before their footsteps faded away. Agent Fisher had crouched down beside the intern and was asking something, but Cecelia was too dazed to understand any words. That…. That had been a ghost, right? An active overp. And she had fallen from the shock? But it felt like someone had just full-body tackled her….

  It wasn’t her kinda-boss’s voice that broke through her hazy, but a pained shout from down the hall. ‘Someone else?!’ And then it was her kinda-boss’s aggravated voice kicking the girl’s brain back to mostly full function. “~~~couldn’t just go outside like~~~. I ~~~damn door better be ~~~ superglued.”

  “T-There’s another person,” Cecelia forced out, using the dirty wall to help support her weight as she rose to her feet. Wait, where was—? ‘There!’ She crouched down to grab the separator that had fallen from her hands when she fell while pointing down the hallway. “Down there. I heard another shout. We need to—”

  The agent groaned. “I’ll check. Then we leave. You stay behind me,” she added, grabbing Cecelia’s arm to yank the intern out of the way. Agent Fisher didn’t run but she was walking at an almost jog-like pace. As they moved, the walls seemed to twist, getting darker and more stained. As if the intern hadn’t been still disorientated from being run into my an overp.

  Another sound came from behind the st half-rotted door down the hallway as Agent Fisher shoved it open, the door knob threating to leave a dent in the wall it bounced off of. Cecelia’s eyes snapped closed at the scene before she forced them open a peek.

  The wooden floor was bare in some pces and covered by a gray carpet in others. There were shadows of furniture but too blurry and shifting to tell what besides the basics – a desk, some chairs, maybe a picture on the left wall. A window let in the moonlight from the far wall, illuminating as much as it could with all the dust, spiderwebs, and cracks. And, at Agent Fisher’s feet was the person who kind of looked like the figure that had run into Cecelia in the hallway. They had a simir hair color and length, at least. Anything more than that was impossible to tell since they were blurring in and out of sight.

  And then there was the blood, pooling onto the ground from the person’s head.

  “The Separator—"

  Cecelia already had the Dimensional Separator out before her kinda-boss finished the order. Activating the item, the girl dropped to her knees and smmed it down next to the guy’s head, leaping back as soon as possible to get away from the blood. But the pulling didn’t seem to slow.

  “Kid.” What was that a hint of in Agent Fisher’s voice? “Hurry it up.”

  “I started it!” The brunette gnced down at the unmoving person, adjusting her phone light to see better. They looked like they had fallen unconscious, which was never really a good thing. “It’s not like there’s power levels on these things!”

  Agent Fisher cursed and… took a step back. “Then get ready to drag him out of the room when I say go.”

  Dread creeping down her spine (there weren’t a lot of hard-set rules in P.A.R.A.L.L.E.L. since the whole field was new but ‘Don’t touch people being pulled’ was one of the few they did have), Cecelia leaned around the older woman and hesitantly followed the other’s phone light instead of her own. And then very much wished she hadn’t.

  There was a second figure she’d somehow missed, lurking in the corner on the other side of the room. They didn’t cast a shadow, and she couldn’t make out much – the longer Cecelia tried to look at the figure, the more her head started to hurt again. It was as if her brain had been so confused over the st five minutes of what was in the base universe and what was overp that it just gave up and marked everything as ‘too weird to look at.’

  At least the second person appeared as surprised to see Cecelia and Agent Fisher as the pair were to see them. But that respite disappeared when the brunette realized that the figure was holding something long and cylindrical in their hands. ‘I should have tried harder to get back to the car.’ “D-Did we just…?”

  “Stumbled upon a potential homicide?” Agent Fisher had the hand not holding her phone/light sneaking into her bag, and Cecelia was both curious about what her kind-boss kept in her kinda-purse while not truly wanting to find out. “Like I said, get ready to drag—“ The figure turned and swung their weapon into the closest window. Gss shattered while also remaining whole; shadows moved without matching anything.

  And the maybe-murderer was gone, jumping out their version of the house’s window.

  …

  “I hate this pce,” Agent Fisher grumbled after a moment of silence. “How’s the victim?”

  Moving her phone light back to the unconscious person, Cecelia noticed that, while the blurriness was finally ending (the separator had clicked off at some point – very helpful), the red wasn’t fading. She crouched back down and held the back of her hand near the person’s nose. “Breathing,” she responded (her own heartbeat still so fast she could feel the pulses in her chest and down her arms). “But I think he really got hit in the head.” Even though the maybe-murderer hadn’t actually been there. ‘What’s happening to cause this?’

  With another curse, her kinda-boss crouched to move the person’s hair. Cecelia flinched back when the phone lights lit up a nasty, bleeding bump. “Call an ambunce,” Agent Fisher told her. “Tell them to note it’s reted to an agency case. Then go outside and wait. Break down the door if you have to.”

  This time, with one final gnce at the bleeding person, Cecelia ran for the exit without question.

  ~

  The EMTs had given Cecelia a bnket while Agent Fisher expined what happened to Miss Echo over the phone. Most of it was what the brunette already knew since she’d been right there, but the was a surprise towards the end. The woman gestured for Cecelia’s attention before continuing to speak. “The victim woke up at one point while we were waiting for the medics, using that term very loosely. It was hard to make out anything he was saying, but I caught something about a dare and a mad ex who was supposed to have moved away.”

  There were too many thoughts competing for room in Cecelia’s head, but most summed up to, ‘I’m gd my two exes never tried to murder me.’ Or maybe they had, in another world. Maybe another Cecelia had a much worse break up than hers had been.

  Cecelia’s mind kept whirling until Agent Fisher hung up. “We’re done here, so head back to the car.” The woman paused before adding, “Keep the bnket, if you need to.”

  She didn’t need to, but the chilly air was enough that the brunette kept the soft fabric wrapped around herself. A sad attempt at protection against the night.

  ~

  No city ever truly slept, so as Cecelia stared out the window of Agent Fisher’s car, she let the bright lights blur her vision like they did the stars. The route was familiar – it was the same as the bus she sometimes took ho—Wait. “Agent Fisher. The agency is—“

  “I know. I’m taking you home. And then we’re going to have a little chat about your ‘art project.’”