AnnouncementI didn't expect this chapter to go this direction when I started it, which is why it took so long to finish. I realized that I really needed to remind people that Amy has been daydrinking this whole time.

  The figure disappeared in a cloud of smoke.

  No, that’s not right. The figure disappeared as a cloud of smoke burst forth from behind me, bringing with it the strong smell of sulfur and a loud banging noise like a thundercp in my ear. It was a sound and smell anyone who’d been to a Civil or Revolutionary War reenactment would recognize, and I’d been dragged to more than a few of them. I was almost as afraid to look away as I had just been looking towards the doorway, but I just had to check.

  Anna was frantically ramming a ball home into the chamber of a flintlock pistol, having already primed the pan and dumped the charge down the bore. She spat, the wet paper from biting the cartridge sticking to the side of a server rack. She brought her pistol up, her off-hand already rising to the cock, ready to draw it back again for a follow-up shot.

  The smoke still hung in the air as the sound of footsteps rushed towards the tent. Gabe rushed in toting a rifle. Mrs. Everly followed soon afterwards, with a bck cat sneaking in the tent behind her before it closed.

  “What happened?” She asked in a muffled voice, like she was speaking through several yers of cotton balls. A more than fair question. The room smelled like sulfur, a woman was holding a British Sea Service pistol clearly prepared to use it again, and I was sitting on the ground, stunned. I hadn’t even realized I had fallen.

  “It was a- a- thing.” Anne answered, doing the same weird thing with her voice. Oh, wait, that’s just my ears. Lowering the pistol sheepishly, she said, “Whatever it was, it didn’t like a .62 caliber lead ball.”

  “No.” Mrs. Everly said. “They typically don’t. And sulfur? This isn’t from… Nice, I hate that modern bck-powder substitute shit.” She nodded approvingly.

  “What was that?” Anne asked.

  “Aren’t you supposed to know what you’re shooting when you’re shooting it?” Mrs. Everly ughed as she spoke. This was enough to earn a judgmental look from Gabe “No, you did the right thing. That was definitely a demon.” The cat hissed at this.

  “It was horrible” I finally spoke. “Evil.”

  “That’s the long and short of it. Evil entities that have preyed on humanity since the dawn of recorded history. It’s weird how people think they’re a ‘Christian’ thing when they long predate monotheistic Judaism. I do have to ask though.” She turned back to Anne. “Did you really only bring a bck powder pistol?”

  Anne lifted up her shirt, showing the butt of another, much more modern pistol. “Something like that? I wasn’t going to trust a .380 pea-shooter on it. It… I could feel it…” She shuddered.

  “I know the feeling. Can you believe there are freaks who actually willingly use those things? Like the past owner of this property. We’re waiting on the transtions still, but…” she looked at where Sandra’s cell-phone y on a table. “Well fuck, Liah was right. This really wasn’t the job to bring you on.” The st remnants of professionalism seemed to be fading.

  “Now I wish we had a few more people on-deck to deal with things.” She continued. “We knew that there was a slight chance of there being stuff to add to the Archives, but to think the moron actually was experimenting to this extent… Bleh”

  “Which moron?” I asked.

  “Cssified.” She said with a wink. An honest to God wink. Majorly infuriating. I already knew I was caught up in some sort of government fuckery, I didn’t need it rubbed in like that. But before I could get in a snide remark, she continued.

  “It’s a bit te for it, but what I said before about staying with a buddy isn’t enough, at least for you two. You need to stay with one of the ‘full-time’ employees at all times. I’m sure you don’t want to be babysat, but right now we don’t have a choice. This time it just fled when shot at, but next time…” I can appreciate the “ominously trailing off” trope in movies if it’s not overused, but in real life it's the worst.

  “What do you mean? We’re kind of flying blind here.” I demanded. “Next time what?”

  “Based on what Liah suspects, it could be anything from possession, corruption, seduction, madness, to straight up just killing you. It’s really a crapshoot. Some of the named ones can also do things like give you knowledge of unknown things, a university degree, or the location of treasure, but even then, it’s not usually worth it. And the tablets are written in cuneiform, not Latin or Hebrew, so I highly doubt we’ll get off that easily. Things were much more openly nasty back then before we had all this rationality in the world to get in the way of them working their magic.” She took a sip of water from a Camelback tube.

  “Couldn’t you have just warned us from the start?” Anne asked. Seriously, a bit more info would have been amazing.

  “Things don’t normally go this badly, and we were told it was worth the risk for trying to bring in new workers. You know, bureaucracy crap. We’re pretty new to recruiting this way since our organization was a lot more selective about hiring in the past. Budget issues and all that. It was only after we gank- nevermind. This was on us. Totally our bad.” Her confident demeanor trailed away as she sat down on one of the folding chairs by the monitors.

  “Do you expect an apology to make this somehow better?” I asked.

  “Of course not, that’d be absurd. It’d be much easier to deflect bme to my boss instead, but I’m sure she’d find some way to weasel out of it, and there’s no way you’re actually going to get any sort of compensation, so the best I can do is a verbal apology. Off the record, of course. Officially, you decided to volunteer for scientific research and we owe you nothing.”

  “That’s pretty fucked.” Anne hooks her pistol onto her belt as she speaks, more resigned than angry. “We get attacked by some weird demonic thing, and the most you can do is an unofficial apology?”

  “I’m not supposed to be one of the good guys after all. This is just a job.” Mrs. Everly shrugged. I really need to figure out her real name, it’s long been made clear that she’s using a pseudonym. “And in our defense, having to deal with demonic entities is always a possibility for ghost hunting, everyone who’s interested in the topic knows that. It’s just that this one seems a bit more corporeal than is typical. Less Exorcist and more Doom. So this is technically still within the bounds of what you came out here to do initially, it’s just more dangerous and with higher stakes.”

  “At least it’s not an eighties pop culture reference this time.”

  “It’s not my fault there’s so many references to Sumerian demons in eighties movies. I can only think of two, actually, but it’s strange that it’s happened twice. And again, you’re the one who decided to try hunting ghosts instead of just holing up in a university parapsychology b with a deck of Zenner cards.”

  I tried to think of a rebuttal, while Anne leafed through something on her phone. We did sign up for this after all. And even with all the government weirdness we’re still, well, hunting incorporeal beings. I’m I just experiencing buyers remorse? This seems like a case of getting what I asked for and not liking it.

  “That’s a lot of intimidation for someone with publicly posted pictures in a Madoka Magica cospy. Are you just happy you no longer have to fight alone anymore, ′Mami?’” Anne can be petty in her own way when pressured. “And this Stocking Anarchy cospy certainly is on the nose if you’re hunting ghosts and demons. And an Otherside Picnic couples cospy? I’ll admit, the two of you look pretty adorable, but why does your Sorawo have cat-“

  The first one to break under this scathing barrage of accusations of nerdiness was not, in fact, Mrs. Everly. I blinked, and the cat at her feet was repced with a red-faced Mrs- I never got her real st name.

  “She made me do that!” The aforementioned ears were ft as she yelled. “She was just like ‘oh, it’s the perfect representation of how gremlinly the character is’ when she’s the one who-“ she looked at our faces. I could only guess what my expression was, but the sck, shocked look on Annes face was only punctuated by her empty hand, the cell phone opened to an Instagram account on the ground.

  I looked at the fallen phone. Anne was right, they really did look cute together, holding hands with Mrs. Everly in a blonde wig, carrying guns with orange tips rather than the much more real guns that seem to be in vogue on this outing. The photo was taken in an abandoned ruin, and I had to wonder how they managed the translucent hand effect on- that’s not important. What the hell? What-

  “A weeb with a catgirl wife… you government spooks really are on a level above the rest.” Anne jabbed, but her face was still frozen in shock. She was still on the attack, but the wind had been knocked out of her sails.

  “I guess the cat’s out of the bag.” Gabe sighed, earning him a gre from the aforementioned feline. What the hell is up with these people?

  “Is this some sort of eborate joke?” I asked. It had to be. There was too much weirdness. That was the only logical expnation.

  “If only.” Gabe replied. “A witch with a bck cat as a familiar is incredibly cliché. Though I’m surprised you didn’t notice back at the cave. Or earlier. They haven’t been the most subtle.”

  “No one, I mean no one, would look at a group of heavily armed agents and think ‘oh, is one of them a shapeshifting cat girl?’ And what the hell do you mean ‘witch?’ Just because she has some weird sachets of herbs and a shapeshifting wife doesn’t mean-“

  “No, she’s the real deal.” Gabe cut me off, smiling slightly in amusement. “And not one of the well-behaved wiccan types.”

  “Goodness, you do one or two minor hexes, and next thing you know DHS is sending people to investigate you.”

  “DO you remember exactly who you cursed with incontinence a few months back? You actually almost got arrested for that!” Exasperation. And this is somehow more concerning than the earlier conversation about grenades.

  “Curses? Don’t be foolish. How could you possibly try someone in a court of w over something as silly as that!”

  “The incident was on live TV! And who else would have done it?”

  “There is no evidence whatsoever that he didn’t just like, do that. Senators are old, it’s only natural there’d be the occasional accident like that. Plus are you sure you shouldn’t be going after my boss? I don’t know what she did to the Secretary of the Interior but she looks one step away from a nervous breakdown, muttering about cockroaches in the walls. Compared to that, Senator Bloodfeast’s turd on the floor is cute.” She pouted slightly, the very image of false indignation.

  “Do you know how bad it makes our country look to have a sitting senator do that on CSPAN?” Gabe continued to argue. Did they even remember why they were discussing this in the first pce?

  “Maybe he should have been sitting, then it wouldn’t have rolled down into the aisle!” She cackled. “Someone takes their Metamucil. The fucker totally deserved it too, taking that much of our new budget to send to-“ She paused. “Hypothetically. Not that he was cursed. He just did that, you know? Being elderly is a hell of a drug, and he must be super unhappy about his favorite source of anti-aging supplements biting the bullet. And that I did do.”

  “And we’ve been stuck on clean-up duty ever since. Actions have consequences you know.”

  “Don’t look at me, I was just following orders.” She reached into her purse which, for some inconceivable reason, she was wearing over her combat gear, and pulled out another can of beer. She paused, looked at it, and tossed it to a surprised Anne. “You look like you could use it.” She reached back into her purse again, each time pulling out another ice-cold can to toss to another occupant of the tent. All the beers were ice-cold, and despite the combined volume of the cans being bigger than her purse it still looked full. She sighed contentedly as she cracked her can open.

  “You know what? Fuck it, you deserve our real names.” And only then did I realize she had rarely been without a beer in hand the whole time. “We’re all stuck in this together. Though you’re going to have to get used to shit a lot weirder than this if you want to deal with the payout I promised you.”

  AnnouncementEdit: I also just realized that some of the earlier chapters are in desperate need of a rewrite since they were posted without any meaningful editing. I'm going to bme the fact I was in grad school at the time for that.