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[therealxajacity]

GHOSTBUSTERS: TERROR IN PARADISE

In a sunny Gold Coast suburb, Cecelia, an Indigenous Australian living alone, is targeted by a viscious entity.

Who's she gonna call? That's complicated.

This novella is set in the Ghostbusters universe and takes place long after the events of Frozen Empire.

PART 1: TOUCH OF EVIL

Steam enveloped Cecelia as she stepped from the shower and stretched for her towel. Wrapped in the soft, bronze-coloured cotton, the young woman leaned forward to wipe fog from the bathroom mirror and froze. The noise was louder than ever before, almost like a gunshot. It vibrated the walls and trembled up her feet from the tiles.

      Damn, she thought. Always when it’s most awkward.

     She pinpointed the disturbance instantly. The townhouse was modest: two bedrooms with an ensuite upstairs, a second toilet, kitchen, laundry, lounge/dining room and a small patio downstairs. Opposite the base of the stairs was the front door—the source of the bang.       Mysterious noises had plagued her for weeks and were now a daily occurrence. Worse, they always happened when she was alone and vulnerable: showering, using the toilet, or about to fall asleep in bed. When she cleaned the house or did her laundry, she heard nothing. Not a peep while she read on the patio or worked on her laptop in the dining room. Cemeteries weren’t as peaceful as her second bedroom, a space she’d planned to turn into a work office but remained unfurnished. Her lounge was a den of serenity, though her parents would argue their housewarming gifts made that room, if not a private area, a personal one. Ancestral shells and rocks from the Yugambeh people made it so; a collection any indigenous Australian would be proud of.

     Cecelia’s breath caught. Footsteps tramped methodically up the stairs. In addition to the ferocity of the downstairs blast, staircase activity was abnormal.

     Snap out of it, Cecelia! Nothing about these noises is normal!

     From the top of the stairs, one could turn left and down the hall towards the empty second room or right towards hers. The intruder veered her way. Whatever stranger stalked her home would soon be at her ensuite door.

     She shivered beneath her towel.

     Why did she listen for so long? Naked beneath that towel or not, she should be hightailing it down the street. 

     Yeah right! On the broken legs she’d earn leaping out the bedroom window? Escaping her home was only possible via the front and rear patio doors, both of which were impossible to reach when the hallway was blocked by a massive-sounding assailant!

     Or was none of this real, as her recently dumped ex-boyfriend Eric had claimed whenever she’d voiced concerns about the noises? “Probably imagining it,” he’d said, never having heard them himself. “Or a rodent problem.” During their final argument about it, a frustrated Cecelia emoted that he wasn’t being supportive enough. He’d called her crazy, and that had been the end of them.

     The problem was that Eric’s words had instilled doubt, and consequently, she’d done nothing to discover the sounds’ origins. Not because she’d agreed with his assertions. Her inaction was practical. Getting somebody to check the wall spaces meant calling the rental agency. They’d deem the matter non-urgent since no tangible damage or physical evidence existed. Past experiences with non-urgent issues had resulted in waiting forever for responses. Hell, getting the lounge’s air-conditioner fixed had been a six-month ordeal!

      Yet there were occasions she’d deemed the matter urgent. These incidents occurred while she was alone in bed and drifting off to sleep. Confessing them to Eric had been a tipping point, fuel for his unfair criticism. “Of course that’s when it would happen!” he’d declared. “You were probably dreaming!” But she was positive she’d been awake when those unseen hands had begun caressing her. On one occasion, they’d actually pinned her to the mattress. Podcasts Eric had insisted she listened to labelled similarly described reports as ‘sleep paralysis’—a neural mix-up where your body is in sleep mode but your brain is awake. Granted, that was a possible explanation for the bed attacks. However, it didn’t explain the noises she heard while she was up and fully conscious.

      Scratching or pattering across the walls was most common, though you’d be hard-pressed to label these as phenomena. As a teenager, she recalled watching TV when a similar-sounding rhythm had caught her attention. The culprit had been a giant, hairy-legged spider, startling at the time but comprehensible. Critters in the drywall could be the case again here.

      Except that her gut told her it wasn’t.

      And now, the true culprit had smashed in her front door and thudded up her staircase.

      A frightening idea arose: What if it was Eric, sore at being dumped and wild for retaliation? What if he’d always been responsible and was gaslighting her?

      The footsteps halted as if the intruder (Eric?) read her mind.

      Patter patter patter. Along the ceiling, across the skirting boards and down the walls.

      Could whatever was in her hallway be simultaneously inside the roof and bathroom walls? Her ex didn’t seem capable of such an elaborate scheme.

      Pitter-patters crisscrossed the large frameless mirror in front of her. Swirls in the steam, thick in the small ensuite, attracted her attention. Cecelia blinked, squeezed her eyes tightly and shook her head to clear the impossible. Nothing changed the vision. 

      You’re not crazy you’re not crazy you’re not crazy, she thought, for the first time unsure if this was accurate.

      Patterns emerged upon the mirror like a dozen invisible fingers, cutting through the condensation with an irritating and protracted series of squeaks.

      Too shocked to flee, Cecelia’s mouth twitched, a scream locked in her throat, the key to release it missing.

      This was not Eric or a random intruder. No human intruder.

      Cecelia’s shivering became a racking tremor as the shapes on the mirror connected to form letters and then a simple, terrifying phrase:

      Tonight you’re mine.

      Cold air wafted across her face from an unseen source, clearing the foreground and drying the mirror. A pinkish-purple-coloured skull appeared in the reflection, which parted the background fog as it advanced from behind her. Its glowing red eyes crackled and sparked as if charged with electricity. Clawed hands shoved her forward and pinned her against the basin. Violently, those claws ripped the towel away. Feeling utterly defenceless, the key found its way to her throat, and Cecelia released her trapped scream.

      The door to her ensuite crashed open. A flood of cold air buffeted her exposed body, which was now damper from sweat than her recent shower.

      God save her; what else had come to participate in this horror?

      A new noise was introduced: something powering up. A red glow—probably the monster’s eyes—intensified in her peripheries. Restrained and unable to turn her head, she couldn’t be certain. All she could do was pray that when the demon killed her, it would be quick and painless.

      Glass exploded beside her face, shards propelled everywhere, a few grazing her cheeks. Heat like she couldn’t imagine licked her skin. Smoke infiltrated her nostrils. There was a churning electrical buzz and flashes of orange and blue. Inside the bathroom, the echoing cacophony was deafening. Screaming again, she kicked forward against her vanity cupboard to escape, movement possible now those beastly hands had released her. A deep and guttural roar joined the discordant mix, a cry of rage.

      It might have been seconds or minutes before Cecelia reopened her eyes; the preceding events were a blur. Crouched and cowering beneath the sink, she had no recollection of dropping there. Her face was sore, cut and possibly scorched. Littering the tiles around her were bits of broken mirror and globules resembling pink hair gel.

      What the hell had just happened?

      “Let me know when you’re decent,” a baritone said from around the corner.

      The intruder!

      “Are you hurt?” the voice asked.

      It was too much base for her ex, nor was it a voice she recognized. “Whoever you are,” she said, “I’m calling the police.” It was a bluff easily undone. All it would take is a notification to reveal her phone beneath her pillow. Meanwhile, if she could stand and lock herself inside the bathroom without cutting her feet on the glass— Shit! Lock what? The door was hanging halfway off its hinges.

      “Glad to know you’re not dead,” the hiding person stated.

      “Who are you, and what do you want? Try to touch me, I dare you! I’ll rip it off, for real!”

      “Rip it off?”

      “Your penis!”

      “I got what you meant.”

      “Well, believe it!”

      The intruder hesitated before continuing. “Is that shrill tone because I singed you or wrecked your bathroom?” He paused, and after considering it, said, “I guess it could be both.” The voice was getting closer. “When you report this, mentioning it happened while trying to save you might be helpful.”

      A large man appeared in her splintered doorway. He wore an undersized khaki tan jumpsuit (the sleeves and pants legs were sheered to accommodate his size). The fabric above the outfit’s left breast was torn, exposing a hairy nipple she found as unappealing as the man’s black hair, which, upon his head and around his face, hung long and unkempt. The man held one hand up as if surrendering; his other was draped across his face. “Not looking,” he said, “in case your bits are still showing.”

      Using her arms to cover herself, she reached for the bronze-coloured towel.

      “I wouldn’t use that,” the man warned. “Glass shards might have stuck to the fibres.”

      “You said you weren’t looking!” she snapped, noticing the gap between his fingers.

      “You weren’t responding and I was worried.”

      “Well, stop worrying and get me some clothes!”

      The man vanished into her bedroom. As he disappeared, Cecelia caught the second tear in his outfit: a small patch below the right shoulder. Given the stranger’s state, she was shocked he didn’t reek or look filthier.

      A baritone voice drifted from the direction of her wardrobe. “Can I get you some Betadine? Band-Aids?”

      Mindful of her footing, Cecelia stood and reviewed herself in the fragment of mirror still attached to the wall. She washed the scrapes with soap. Merely grazed, her wounds had already coagulated. “I’m fine,�� she said. “Clothes are what I need.”

      “There are a few choice dresses here,” the man said. “A flashy little yellow number or—hey, this blue one with the white dots is—”

      “Those are clubbing dresses! Just get me jeans and a T-shirt!”

      “Pretty casual,” he stated, sounding unimpressed.

      Exasperated, she was tempted to leap out naked and try her luck in the dirty clothes hamper downstairs. It wasn’t ideal, but at least she could escape her house and scream for help.

      Then again, if this guy wanted to attack her, would he be trying to find her clothes to wear?

      “I said jeans and a T are pretty casual,” he called out.

      “Have you seen what you’re wearing?” she snapped. “Anyway, why would I want to… impressing you is not a priority!”

      “Ow, ow, shrill again,” he remarked as if in pain. “Even from here, that’s piercing.”

      She heard the rustle of wardrobe coat hangers followed by sliding wood as he rummaged through drawers. “Ok,” he said at last, “I’ve got jeans and a white t-shirt that says,” he paused, presumably to read it. “It says, ‘Crazy? I prefer the term hilariously unstable.’ Shit, I hope that’s not true.” More to himself, he muttered, “That shrill voice though.”

      “Just pass them in here!”

      “Let me find some panties.”

      Picturing that stranger’s grubby fingers rifling through her delicates caused Cecelia’s stomach to tighten. Grinding her teeth, she said, “I’ll get them when I’m dressed.”

      “You planning to wear them on the outside?” the man said, thrusting his choices from around the corner.

      Shaking her head that he should select a white novelty shirt (one joking about her mental stability, no less), she was thankful that at least she was dry enough that it wouldn’t become instantly transparent. Her long black hair was still damp, so she wrapped it into a bun.

      “Stay where you are,” she called out before exiting, peeking around the corner to spy precisely where he was. Moderate as the room was in size, it was large enough that some of her tensions were alleviated when she spotted him by the bedhead. She could dart out and slam the room’s door if needed, closing him inside long enough to sprint down the stairs and out to freedom.

      “If you can hurry with your panties so we can debrief and I can be on my way,” the man said. “We need to get our stories straight so you don’t get confused and tell the cops I was the attacker.”

      “For all I know, you were!” She didn’t believe this and wasn’t sure why she said it.

      “You think I resemble that hairless dick?”

      “How do I know that’s not a wig and fake beard?” she accused. “Your jumpsuit has enough pockets for countless disguises!”

      He stared at her blankly. “So your shirt is accurate then.” Then he tugged at his hair and beard to demonstrate their verity.

      Cecelia’s lips pressed into a thin line. Who was this guy to snipe at her? He looked like… She racked her brain for a comeback. “Well, you look like Charles Manson.”

      Confused more than affronted, the man crossed the room to examine himself in the mirror above the dresser he’d been digging through. “Huh,” he said. “Fair. But in my defence, there aren’t many reflective surfaces where I shower.”

      “Where is your shower? A swamp?”

      After frowning at her for a moment, his face ultimately morphed into its standard look of ambivalence. “Good luck when that demon returns,” he said. “Like I said, try to remember things accurately when you talk to the po-po.”

      She backed up at his approach and struck a defensive pose in anticipation of attack. “I know Krav Maga.”

      “That the one that teaches penis-ripping?” Without breaking stride, the man progressed to the stairs, a beachy scent lingering in his wake. “Maybe threaten the monster with that next time,” he said, descending the staircase. “Not that demons have genitalia for you to tear off. But if you say it scary enough—I know Krav Maga!—Who knows? Worth a shot.” He paused at the first-floor landing directly opposite the busted front door. “I’ll lean the door, and maybe you can drag something heavy against it.”

      Cecelia’s fists remained on guard, watching from the balustrade as the man crunched over the splintered wood, placed the front door at a skewed angle over the entrance, and vacated her premises.

      “Good riddance,” she muttered, surprised to feel guilt over how she’d treated the guy. Since he was obviously homeless, the whole swamp thing was a low blow. Besides, he was surprisingly clean and not unpleasant-smelling. Most illogical was that there’d been something comforting about him. It must be his eyes, she mused, which were a warm hazel.

      The night air was cool and carried a hint of pine as she sprinted into the street after him.         “Hey, you,” she said, chasing the stranger to the dark side of the street.

      “Hud,” he said, not stopping.

      “Fine, grunt at me; way to sulk.”

      “My name,” he said, pausing and tapping his chest as if talking to a non-English speaker, “is Hud.”

      “Fine, Hud. Look, you said demon. You saw that, too? A ghost, like on the news?” Searching his face for truth and confirmation she wasn’t crazy uncovered a new thought.His jumpsuit no longer appeared a random choice. “Wait, are you… do you work for the…? I’ve seen ads warning of growing incidents, and the Gold Coast branch seems to be constantly recruiting.”

      “I definitely don’t work for them. Well,” he tilted his head from side to side as if weighing options. “Not officially.”

      “But you did? Or you know someone in the compan—”

      “I’m familiar with what attacked you because I’ve been tracking it. Trust me, ‘They’ don’t know shit about what’s after you.”

      “Why are you tracking it if you’re not an employee?” She grabbed the tatters of his sleeve. “And why would you be wearing their uniform?” She circled to his rear and tried to angle him towards the streetlights for a better inspection. Secured to his back was a Compressed Neutrona Wand, a tool the company advertised increased fieldworker manoeuvrability. She stepped back and reviewed his attire again. “Did you steal all this?”

      “It was left to me.” He waved the topic away. “Look, all I want to do is bust that creep. If you can do me a solid and not call the so-called professionals, I’ll solve our problem.”

      Flustered, she said, “You’ve multiplied my problems!”

      “Come again?”

      “You broke my door! I don’t own that place; damage gets deducted from my bond.” She threw her hands up. As if Hud cared. Even if he did, he wouldn’t have the means to reimburse her. “Forget it, I’m going to my Mum’s.”

      “Oooh,” Hud said, spoiling her getaway. “I’d avoid visiting loved ones for now. When that thing latches onto someone, it tends to follow them around.” He paused while she processed this, and when he spoke again, his voice was genuine. “With the proper tools, I can fix something temporary with your door. In return, please don’t interfere with my hunt.”

      “It’ll follow me to my Mum’s?” Cecelia asked, stomach sinking.

      “Worse is if it fancies her.”

      “Then, I’ll go to a motel,” she said.

      “Perfect, no big deal if you lure it there to kill them; who are they to you?”

      Cecelia shivered. Was she trapped at home until this thing was caught?

      “And you’re not worried it’ll target you?” she asked Hud.

      A bitter smile touched his face. “If only it would.”

      Inviting Hud into her home was not high on her list of desirables, but his authenticity affected her. “Fix my door,” she told him, “and you can patrol all you want after that.”

      “Deal,” he said. “But keep your expectations reasonable. I can’t mend it like new without proper material. What I can do is enough to stop crooks waltzing in.”

      The trees flanking the road rustled in cheer, and the breeze carried another waft of pine her way. It mixed pleasantly with the ocean aroma Hud exuded.

      “Come on,” she said and steered him back towards her home. “But look, while you’re fixing the door, it’s the law that I report what happened so you know I have to call them. I won’t rat you out,” she added when he turned to flee. “I’ll even give you some food.”

      The man’s lips smacked as he weighed her offer.

      “Consider it this way,” Cecelia persisted, “sharing what you know could help bust the demon.” She didn’t tell him it was also to have someone official record the man’s presence, just in case her instinct about him was wrong.

      “This,” Hud said, thumbing the CNW on his back, “is what will bust the demon.”

      She scoffed, already feeling way too comfortable with the guy. “If another mirror needs exploding, you can use it.”

      He shrugged, seemingly unoffended. “You make an omelette…” He raised his hands as if to say, ’nuff said.

      “Well, not to make you feel bad, but those reflective eggs aren’t cheap. And like the door you’re sort of but not really fixing, they’re not likely to be covered by my insurance.”

      “Get the materials, and I can fix the bathroom, too.”

      This was probably an empty boast, but she’d let him prove himself with her door and then consider future repairs. If he was capable, the savings in labour would go a ways towards repaying his debt. “I’m happy you’re prepared to fix what you destroyed,” she told him.

      “You should be,” he said. “Not only because the damage was done to save you, but because you’re forcing me to deal with them. It’s only because we’re bonding so hardcore that I’m sacrificing all this dignity.”

      She halted him in front of the door he’d shattered off its hinges. “Listen, Hud, we’re not bonding. You’re here for carpentry and to help with a supernatural matter. That’s all.”

      He tilted his head. “Is that a practised coy, or have I brought it out in you?”

      As condescendingly as she could, Cecelia patted him on the chest. “I’ll fix the door myself.”

      “Kidding, kidding. Fine, there’s no bonding.” Hud raised his hands in defeat. “I’m just here to help.”

      “Good,” she stated, noting again how disarming the man was. She should be careful of that. Charming men with kind eyes weren’t necessarily kind people. Plus, charm went a long way, but there were limits to what she’d accept in a rebound relationship. Unemployed, homeless people were off limits.

      She nodded at her resolution and tightened her emotional shield against another unhelpful observation: beneath all that hair was a potentially handsome guy.

      What a waste, she mused.

      “Sacrificed your dignity,” Cecelia muttered as they crossed the smashed threshold of her home.

      “You joke,” Hud said, “but only because you’ve never dealt with a Ghostbuster before.”

PART 2: INVESTIGATION

“I thought you were fixing this,” Cecelia said through strained breaths. Her small frame struggled to hold the front door an inch off the ground so it remained aligned with the newly drilled hinge holes.

      “Use your body weight,” Hud suggested as he rummaged through an empty ice cream container full of assorted screws.

      “Can’t I set it down until you find the right screws?”

      “Best you don’t,” he said, his face curtained by his hair. He casually sorted through metal as if her torso weren’t moments away from a population of hernias.

      “Couldn’t you have held this and I found the screws?”

      “Toned-looking girl like you must go to the gym,” Hud said, upending the bucket of screws onto her kitchen bench with a loud clatter.

      “I don’t do weights!” she groaned. Sweat coated her body, and her muscles began to quiver.

      “Is working out easier when you talk the whole time?”

      “Are you seriously telling me to shut up?”

      “Not that bluntly,” Hud stated. Then, glimpsing her about to put the door down, added, “You’ll set us back if you do that. Crooks could be lurking; this is the Goldy, remember.”

      “Then get over here!”

      “Not much point of that without the right screws.”

      “It’s slipping!” Strands of hair were escaping her bun and falling into her face, exacerbating her discomfort.

      Pausing his search, Hud turned towards her and frowned. “You said you had the correct-sized screws. You didn’t mention they were mixed up among all this shrapnel. I expected this to be quick.”

      “Forget it…” she said, sweat stinging her eyes and hoping she wouldn’t squash her toes with the heavy fire door when it landed.

      In three quick steps, the broad-shouldered, six-foot-two vagabond caught the door and lifted the weight off her. Cecelia stumbled and collapsed onto the carpet, her fingers stiff from how long they’d been folded around the door’s edges. Meanwhile, Hud propped the door up on his bare foot, kept it in place with one hand, and used a power drill with the other to affix the appropriate side to the doorframe.

      “You could have held it yourself?” she sputtered, her urge to slap him tempered by her exhaustion.

      “Again,” Hud said and assisted Cecelia up, “we needed the correct size screws first.” She watched him test his handiwork by swinging the door back and forth a few times. “Ain’t no locking this,” he said, playing with the strip of doorjamb wrenched free when he’d kicked his way in. “But if we close it and lean something heavy against—”

      Flashing patterns of blue light faded up on Hud’s face, the bright glare intensifying in tandem with the hefty rumble of an approaching engine.

      “No siren,” Hud mumbled. “Bummer.” He sulked away from the door, crashed onto Cecelia’s sofa and stared mutely at the blank TV. With the overhead lights in the lounge off, he was all shadows. It matched his mood, which had worsened since she’d reported the attack to the Ghostbusters’ Gold Coast branch. Hud had sniped about the organization in general terms yet been unwilling to give a specific reason for his dislike.

      Cecelia studied him curiously and recalled their chat about it immediately after she’d called the branch. Hud had only begun drilling the new hinge holes for the door then. “You don’t even like the ads?” she’d asked him. “Who ya gonna—”

      “Keep singing and the next hole I drill is through my head.”

      Rolling her eyes, she’d said, “Well, the news has shown them helping tons of people. Just because they fired you doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t be grateful for them, especially now that ghosts have spread into more neighbourhoods.”

      Hud had merely grunted. In retrospect, it might have been her mix of prying, assumptions and singing that caused him to assign her door-holding duty.

      She flexed her fingers as the recollection ended. “You think Ectomobiles are ambulance or hearse conversions?” Cecelia asked Hud as the company’s trademark white 1959 Cadillac pulled into the driveway. If the guy was a former employee, he should know.

      “Don’t care,” Hud grunted from the couch. Then, with less snark, he said, “But I can admit to digging the siren.” Petulantly, he added, “Whoever they sent couldn’t even get that right.”

      “Are you going to be like this all night?”

      Hud paused. “Probably.”

      Radiant bursts from the rotating roof lights infiltrated the apartment, periodically bathing everything inside blue. At such close proximity, Cecelia needed to shield her eyes. “They’re not going to blast the neighbourhood with the siren when it’s not an emergency. The demon is already gone.”

      Instead of listening to her, Hud’s fingers vigorously searched the area below the sofa’s armrest.

      “It’s not a recliner,” she informed him.

      He groaned and fell against the rear cushion, yelping as the CNW dug into his back. Complaining louder, he slid the weapon off its V-Hook and laid it beside him.

      “My deepest apologies none of this matches your usual high standards,” Cecelia said.

      The gruff engine waned, but the lights remained on, keeping the person who exited the vehicle silhouetted. Cecelia opened the door wider in preparation for the field operative, startled when the blue glow died, and her foyer fluorescents sharply defined him.

      He cut a slim figure in his uniform: a flight suit the colour of Hud’s, complimented with an army-style pistol belt, black leather jump boots and grey elbow pads. The rest of him was bulked with gear, and she wondered how someone so thin managed to carry it all. Hooked to the man’s left shoulder was a two-way; over his right and hanging like a handbag was a medium-sized box with a cord connected to a long, burnt mahogany-coloured rod. A Proton Pack was strapped onto his back, a traditional Neutrona Wand fastened along the right side. Clipped to his belt at the hip was a black, oblong-shaped device with a handle and folded silver wings. Much of this paraphernalia she’d seen in ads, though she couldn’t recall what they all did.

      “Cecelia Winterstone?” The man asked. Except for his clean-shaven, severe countenance, the paranormal investigator had the appearance of a local: tanned with sun-lightened hair.

      “Yes,” she said, surprised at the break in her voice. It was suddenly hard to believe this man was at her property. It was like having a fully armed cop standing there on official business: a little intimidating.

      “My name is Gene Riscraven,” he said, supporting the red and black surname patch stitched across the left breast of his coveralls, just below his two-way. “I’m with the Gold Coast Ghostbusters. You called in a supernatural disturbance?”

      “Yes,” she said, clearing her throat and mining confidence. “Please, come in.”’

      He stepped inside and tried to close the door behind him. With the latch and doorjamb demolished, it wouldn’t comply.

      “Your assailant did this?” Riscraven asked, helping her position a pair of kitchen bench stools against the door to prevent it from swinging open.

      “Tangentially,” she replied and felt her face redden.

      “Interesting,” Riscraven said and followed her to the base of the stairwell. He removed his Proton Pack and the grey box with the wooden-looking rod and leaned them against the newel post.

      Cecelia swallowed against the persistent thickness in her throat. “Should I take you to the crime scene?”

      “Shortly,” he replied. “Let’s review what happened first.” He indicated a chair at the dining room table. She moved to it while he pulled out the chair opposite her.

      She sat and marvelled at his demeanour. The Ghostbuster made Hud, who was probably ten years older and more typical of the guys she knew, seem positively juvenile.

      Riscraven paused before sitting, head turned in Hud’s direction as he noticed him for the first time. “You involved in this, sir?”

      Still slumped on the couch and obscured by the lounge’s darkness, Hud sighed. “Intimately,” he said and sprang up. He prowled to the dining room table and drew the chair nearest Cecelia, sliding it closer to her. Sand cascaded off his tattered flight suit as he sat, littering the table.

      “How you wanna spin this disc, Gene?” Hud asked Riscraven, sweeping the sand onto the carpet. Cecelia frowned but elected to withhold her rebuke. Hud had already spread enough sand around; what was a sprinkle more?

      The paranormal investigator sniffed blatantly as he sat with them, probably expecting a smell to match the vagabond’s unkempt appearance. He reviewed Hud’s outfit, which was plainly recognisable in this well-lit area. “A CWU-27/P coverall,” he noted.

      Hud grinned as if he weren’t under suspicion. “A fellow patron of Pacas op shop. Great selection there, huh?”

      “Interesting,” Riscraven said, retrieving a small digital recorder from one of his many pockets. Turning it on and situating it on the table between them, he stated the date and time and gave a brief scene summary. Then, “I’m sitting here with resident Cecelia Winterstone, aged…?” He lifted his eyebrows to her.

      “Oh,” she cleared her throat and leaned closer to the recorder. “Twenty-six.”

      “Race?”

      “Indigenous Australian.”

      Riscraven shifted his eyes to Hud. “Also present is…?”

      “Yes, present.”

      “Your name,” the Ghostbuster stated patiently.

      “Hud.”

      “Full name, please.”

      “Hud,” he repeated. “Singular, like Banksy, Prince or Coolio.” He crossed himself in respect to the deceased.

      “Interesting,” Riscraven said.

      “Interested in a lot, aren’t you?”

      “Yes,” Riscraven remarked. “What’s your relationship to Miss Winterstone?”

      “Saviour.”

      “No,” Cecelia said. “That’s not his… we don’t have a….” She frowned at Hud and tsk’d. “I mean, technically, he arrived at a time when I was—”

      “She’s worried about the optics,” Hud mentioned to Riscraven as if confidentially. “If you want to document my race as Afro-Cuban, we can avoid the whole white saviour issue.”

      “You’re Afro-Cuban?” Riscraven asked, taking him seriously.

      Hud laughed.

      “He didn’t save me,” Cecelia said, frustration mounting. “Hud interrupted the attack.”

      “Semantics,” Hud said.

      “Saved implies the danger is over,” she told Hud. Back to the recorder, she stated, “I won’t be safe until that thing is contained.”

      “Thingbeing a demon,” Hud said.

      “We won’t know the class or species until I’ve conducted my investigation,” Riscraven said.

      “Class seven demon,” Hud said.

      Riscraven studied him closely. “Interesting.” He pulled out his phone. “I’m going to consult—”

      “Thesaurus dot com?”

      “Hud!” Cecelia snapped.

      The snipe didn’t seem to discourage Riscraven. “The Tobin Spirit Guide app,” he stated. “Can you please describe what you saw, Miss Winterstone?”

      “I could simply tell you which demon,” Hud said.

      Riscraven’s gaze shifted to Hud. “We follow protocol for a reason, Mr Hud. And that means we don’t guess.”

      “It’s Spitswapper.”

      “How do you…?” The Ghostbuster frowned and his eyes narrowed. He swiftly composed himself and told Cecelia, “Don’t let him influence you, ma’am. Please, in your own words, what did you see?”

      There was no risk Cecelia could be swayed by Hud; she couldn’t name a single demon. She scrunched her face and tried to visualise her assailant. “It was really foggy when it appeared.”

      “It produced vapours?” Riscraven asked, using the app to input her response.

      “No,” Cecelia said. “I’d been in the shower.”

      “I see,” Riscraven stated. “And it’s guise?”

      “Guise?”

      The Ghostbuster looked up from his phone. “Most entities are ethereal. Transparent. However, when it serves them to be seen—if it serves them—they conjure a guise: visual and often accompanied with sonic cues. Some species do this by possessing a living host. Others self-manifest the guise.”

      “Like a fake appearance?” Cecelia asked.

      “More like an exaggeration. It’s akin to deimatic displays—commonly called ‘startle displays’ in the natural world. Like when a mantodea—commonly called a praying mantis—produces rasping sounds and reveals bright colours, simulating eyes and an open mouth. Or the Chlamydosaurus kingii—commonly known as the frill-neck lizard—which gapes its actual mouth, lifts its tail and expands its frill.”

      Hud raised a finger to interrupt. “It might save time if you stick to the common names.”

      “I wasn’t facing it,” Cecelia said, lowering her gaze. “It was hard to see properly. But in the mirror, before I was… pinned, I saw a purplish skull with red eyes. They crackled.”

      “Sure did,” Hud agreed.

      “Interesting you say pinned,” Riscraven observed, lifting his attention from the app. “Had it tried this before?”

      “A couple of occasions in bed.” She described the incidents, anticipating a critique similar to Eric’s. She looked to Hud when she was done, who she was surprised to see had dropped the facetious act to listen carefully.

      “Didn’t see it during the bed assaults,” Riscraven summarised. “What about its grip? Was it firm or soft? Did it feel like a single appendage or multiple? Was there any residue?”

      “It felt like a pair of firm hands. No residue.” She furrowed her brow. “There is some kind of gunk in the bathroom, though.”

      “But not on the bed?”

      She shook her head.

      “Anywhere else in the home?”

      “No residue. But sometimes I hear noises. Different from the crackling.”

      “The crackling you heard from its eyes?”

      “Yes. The other noises could have been anything, though. Explainable, even.” Really? Or was that Eric talking?

      “What sort of noises?” Riscraven asked.

      Cecelia’s lips compressed into a line while she gathered her words. “In the walls—or on them. Scratching. More often tapping noises, like tiny feet running around. We thought it might have been rats or bugs.”

      “We?” Riscraven queried. His confused gaze flicked between Cecelia and Hud.

      “Not me,” Hud said. “I know bugs can’t pin you to the bed. Not unless there are a million of ’em.”

      “My ex-boyfriend,” Cecelia clarified and sank a little in her chair.

      “He witnessed these occurrences?” Riscraven asked.

      Cecelia shook her head.

      Riscraven kept typing into his phone. “Any other unexplainable phenomena?”

      “Just tonight,” she answered, happy the Ghostbuster dropped her ex from the discussion. “On my mirror, a second before it attacked, the thing wrote: Tonight, you’re mine.”

      “Interesting.”

      Hud raised a finger to interrupt. “Could any of this be intriguing?”

      “A statement of capture and/or ownership,” Riscraven noted, blocking Hud out. “This does help narrow down the class. It’s a shame you don’t have a better visual description.”

      “I know exactly what it looks like,” Hud said. “I’ve seen it heaps of times.”

      Only Riscraven’s slightly wilting shoulders clued them to his feelings about this. “Very well, Mr Hud,” he said, waiting for the man to proceed.

      “It’s Spitswapper.”

      The corners of the Ghostbuster’s mouth twitched. “No conclusions yet.”

      “You don’t even want to look it up?”

      “We don’t start with conclusions,” Riscraven stated, “because it can taint our memories of what we actually saw. Suddenly, we’re changing things to fit a hypothesis instead of reaching it scientifically.”

      Hud sighed and threw his hands up. “It’s an ocean dweller. That’s not a hypothesis; I’ve seen it there.”

      “I presume you reside at the beach?” Riscraven sniffed him again.

      “For now.”

      “At Surfers Paradise? I saw a yellow Free-2-Rent electric scooter out front.”

      “Off Old Burleigh Road,” Hud said.

      “Address?”

      “Just gave it.”

      Without a shred of empathy, Riscraven stated, “To be clear: you’re homeless.”

      Embarrassed though she was for Hud at this question, Cecelia leaned in, curious to hear him confirm the conclusion she’d already made.

      “It’s not illegal to be homeless,” Hud stated. “Provided you don’t breach the Summary Offences Act of two-thousand and five.”

      Cecelia’s eyes widened. As if reading her mind, Hud said, “Pays to research while you’re able. Also, if you’re going homeless, don’t waste money on booze and smokes. Buy a toothbrush, soap, hair and fingernail clippers. Maintain some dignity.”

      “Thanks for the tip,” Cecelia said, as if ‘going homeless’ was a lifestyle choice she’d ever consider.

      As though deaf to Hud and Cecelia’s exchange, Riscraven placed his palms facing outwards. “Mr Hud, I’m not a lawmaker or a police officer. I’m simply gathering facts.”

      “Because you think if I’m homeless, my testimony won’t be credible or reliable.”

      “For the moment, my opinions don’t matter. Now, please describe whatever you can about the entity. Stick only to what you saw.” Riscraven’s thumb was poised above his phone’s screen, ready to enter whatever Hud told him.

      The scruffy yet clean vagabond contemplated continuing. A look from Cecelia motivated him to plough forth. “When it materialises, its guise is bald, with no ears or nose. Red eyes that occasionally electrify, like she said,” Hud motioned to Cecelia. “Its head, when you see it, exists purely from crown to upper jaw, which ends jagged like a row of sharp teeth. No lower jaw. It has a long tongue that whips out from the neck when it’s ready to attach itself to a host.”

      “Attach to a host?” Riscraven queried, pausing from looking at his phone to study Hud.

      “Best way to describe it,” Hud stated.

      “We’ll return to that soon,” Riscraven said, back on the app. “Can you complete the physical description—the body shape and colour?”

      “Body is uniformly narrow at the top and flares at the base, like a thin person wearing a wire-frame dress from centuries ago.”

      “It’s clothed?”

      “No, that’s its shape. Doesn’t have legs, just a cone-shaped bottom. It floats, so it probably doesn’t need legs.” He took a deep breath. “Arms are sinewy but strong. It has two hands, each with three fingers and a thumb, all ending in yellow claws. Overall colour is a purplish-pink and it’s covered in protruding veins.”

      “Veins?” Cecelia asked, a sour taste flooding her mouth. Imagining this thing in her house and touching her brought an urge to vomit.

      “It doesn’t look smooth,” Hud continued. “Just a series of pulsing cords.”

      “What else?” Riscraven asked.

      “That’s not enough?” Hud asked with a flare of impatience. “Fine, it looks like a giant dick in a dress!”

      Riscraven looked up momentarily and then began swiping his finger on his phone.

      “You should get yourself checked,” Cecelia told Hud and gave a minor tip of the head to his crotch.

      “I didn’t say my dick,” he replied.

      “Let’s move along,” Riscraven suggested. “Anything you can add regarding its behaviour?”

      Hud sighed. “It’s fast. If I had to guess, maybe, fifty or sixty K’s. It slows during attack, though. Leaves goo behind.”

      “That’s the residue I mentioned in my bathroom,” Cecelia told Riscraven.

      “I’ll take a sample during my field review,” the Ghostbuster assured her. “It’s likely ectoplasmic. However, it’s worth testing in case it’s psychomagnotheric.”

      “Common terms, professor,” Hud reminded him.

      “Ghost or else mood slime,” Riscraven said, voice tinged with irritation.

      Hud reacted like a naughty child, pleased to have evoked an emotive reaction from the teacher. “The slime is pink,” he told Riscraven, “which often presents as psychomagnotheric. However, since I’ve never seen anything coated by the goo reacting to emotional states, my guess is ectoplasmic.”

      A new emotion danced on Riscraven’s face: astonishment. It faded quicker than a reality TV show celebrity. “Let’s move on to its behaviour. You said you’ve seen it attach to a host when it corporealises. Can you explicate?”

      “I’d love to explicate,” Hud said. “Anything to drag this out.” He took a deep breath as if deep in serious thought. “The tongue,” he stuck his own out and grabbed it between his fingers, “hickths ou’ an’ lathooths—”

      “Speak clearer, please?” Riscraven asked.

      Hud leaned closer to the digital recorder, tongue still gripped, “Lathoethsss—”

      Clearing his throat, Riscraven said, “Mr Hud, another way this will go faster is sans the theatrics.”

      Hud released his tongue and straightened his posture. Motioning to Cecelia, he said, “Bet she understood.”

      Goaded into the bet, Riscraven looked to Cecelia. She acquiesced, but only to keep the peace. “The tongue flicks out, and lassoes… was as far as he got.”

      Giving her a wink, Hud turned to Riscraven and leaned back in his chair, hands laced behind his head. “I’ll use small words for you. Once the tongue has wrapped around a victim, it pins them and…” Something passed over Hud’s face, and he dropped his hands to the table. The subsequent detail seemed to remind him of the seriousness of this case, and the sarcastic facet of his personality evaporated. “The demon… fills them with some kind of poison. I think.”

      “Why do you think that?” Riscraven asked.

      Jaw clenched, Hud said, “Because I’ve seen a victim and she appeared bloated, almost like a drowned body.”       “Interesting,” the Ghostbuster said, either oblivious or indifferent to Hud’s emotional state. “Is there anything else you can share?”

      Hud shook his head, “Nope.”

      Turning off the little recorder and pocketing it, Riscraven sat in contemplation.

      “Anything you might want to share?” Hud asked. “We didn’t just invite you here to listen.”

      Instead of responding, Riscraven returned to his phone. “Hmmm,” he said, eyes darting back and forth as he read.

      “Useful, isn’t he?” Hud asked Cecelia, mordancy wholly resumed.

      Riscraven spun the face of his phone their way to reveal what he’d been studying. “Is this what you saw?”

      Hud’s mouth twisted in recognition. “You know it is.”

      Presented with high-definition images of the monster (detailed close-ups of the long tongue being particularly grotesque), Cecelia shuddered for the millionth time that evening.

      “I need to examine the bathroom to be certain,” Riscraven said, “but I’m almost convinced your accoster is a class seven, semi-corporeal, free-roaming Metaspectre.”

      “Phew.” Hud feigned wiping sweat from his brow. To Cecelia, he said, “Feels better to know, right?” Then, to Riscraven, “So we’re clear, what’s this Metaspectre called?”

      Riscraven’s lips thinned. “Reponere Furantur.”

      “More commonly called…” Hud’s eyes flicked to Cecelia as he awaited the Ghostbuster’s reply.

      “Spitswapper,” Riscraven conceded.

      Hud winked at her, but his charm fell to the wayside as the demon’s moniker crystallised in her mind. Somehow, Riscraven’s acknowledgement of the name connected it to the monster in a disturbingly real way. “I’m definitely going to puke,” Cecelia said, her stomach turning.

      “Let it out,” Hud told her, casually keeping the stray hairs from her bun off her face as if her throwing up all over the table was perfectly acceptable.

      “I wouldn’t do it here!” she said, anger diverting her nausea.

      “You do you,” Hud said as if she needed his permission.

      “If it is Spitswapper,” Riscraven said, “it’s extremelydangerous. We’ve been chasing it for decades. The total of its victims is relatively small given how long it’s been active, but when it strikes, it’s lethal.” He stood from the table. “Please excuse me while I secure another piece of equipment from the Ectomobile.”

      “Can’t fault his manners,” Hud said as the Ghostbuster departed the home. “You think this guy knows what he’s doing?” he asked Cecelia. “I told him I knew what we were hunting and because of this,” he indicated his shabby appearance, “he ignored me. Then he spends most of the time on his phone. Anybody can Google.” His wavy black hair swayed across his face as he shook his head. “It’s all the franchising they did; diluted the service.”

      “Rant out of your system?” Cecelia asked.

      Hud chuckled. “My rant don’t expire, Cece; I’ve got the lifespan of a Proton Pack.”

      Clattering at the home’s tiny foyer as Riscraven re-entered interrupted their conversation. “Franchising was unavoidable,” he said as he resealed the door and strode back to the dining table.

      Since Hud maintained his confident poise despite being overheard, Cecelia shrank a little on his behalf.

      “Closing the gateway opened at Central Park West in ’eighty-four,” Riscraven explained, “didn’t prevent supernatural seepage and a substantial increase in paranormal activity worldwide. It wouldn’t be feasible for the founders to globe-trot from North Moore Street to catch them all.”

      “Of course not,” Cecelia agreed.

      “As for a layperson Googling or even using the TSG app,” Riscraven proceeded, “that’s akin to a sick person researching their malady on Web MD: a recipe for misdiagnoses. Understand that there are hundreds of supernatural species within the seven paranormal classes. They can appear similar but be vastly different in temperament. Some of your descriptions—if not interpreted correctly—could have us thinking we’re dealing with,” he waved his hands as if pulling an example from thin air, “a succubus. Hence, we follow protocol.”

      “Does a textbook accurate label mean you’ll bust it any differently?” Hud asked with a condescending glare.

      Riscraven scrunched his face as if the question was absurd. “It adjusts how we approach it.”

      “Which makes sense,” Cecelia emphasised to Hud so he’d forfeit. His perpetual belligerence was not the asset he presumed it was.

      Shutting his lids and raising his eyebrows as if to say, whatever, signalled Hud’s surrender. This was good enough for Cecelia, who hopped up to stand with Riscraven.

      The Ghostbuster had slung the grey box with the wooden-coloured rod over his shoulder again. He also ported new arsenal. On his head were a pair of green goggles with protruding black and silver lenses, which could be flopped down onto his face when required. In his hand was a transparent cylindrical device about three feet long and with the circumference of a pizza. A strip was cut out an inch from the top of one side to create a handle. At the bottom, the cylinder was joined onto a two-inch thick transparent disc, wider in diameter than the cylinder. Atop this disc flashed various coloured lights; its base sported small multidirectional wheels.

      “Confirmation we’re dealing with Spitswapper will bring good news,” Riscraven said. “By all accounts, the demon can only conduct a physical assault once per twenty-four-hour cycle. Then it needs a recharge.”

      “Recharge?” Cecelia asked.

      “It’s to do with how it burns and replenishes its energy. Flying saps a portion of its stamina. The intense burst of an attackdrains the rest.”

      “Doesn’t burn much dancing on my walls,” Cecelia noted. “It can do that for hours.”

      “It remained incorporeal when this occurred, yes?”

      She nodded.

      “This requires much less energy and can be prolonged. In fact, because of the energy it drains when striking, Spitswapper can spend months taunting intended victims in advance. Prey incapacitated by fear is easier to snare.”

      “Prey,” Hud remarked, joining them at the stairs after a quick visit to the couch. “And this was the good news,” he said to Cecelia.

      “Please show me the crime scene,” Riscraven asked Cecelia. The pair climbed the stairs; Hud followed at their rear.

      At the entrance to the ensuite, Riscraven set the cylindrical transparent unit on the carpet and fitted the Ecto-Goggles over his face. He turned on the grey box attached to the strap over his shoulder and unhooked the long wood-coloured rod, holding it out like a magic wand. It made little puffing sounds. Next, he unclipped the curved rectangle with the silver wings from his belt; gripping it by the handle, he turned it on. This device emitted beeps. Using all his gear simultaneously, he paced Cecelia’s bedroom.

      “I heard a person can’t do multiple things at once with a hundred per cent effectiveness,” Hud said from the bedroom doorway.

      “The readings will alert me to anything worth paying attention to.”

      “Really?” Hud said. “When your Sniffer is missing its hand pump?”

      Cecelia gently elbowed him.

      The Ghostbuster chuckled briefly as he examined the dresser. “We haven’t needed those for years. It works automatically now.”

      “What is that thing, anyway?” Cecelia asked.

      “It’s just one of their little toys,” Hud answered.

      “Cute,” Riscraven said. “But Ghostbusters don’t ever refer to our equipment so flippantly. This is a Bacharach Ghost Sniffer. Five-hundred model.”

      “Mustn’t think laypersons can read, either,” Hud muttered, pointing at the clearly visible label on the side.

      “What does it do?” Cecelia asked Riscraven.

      “Filters spectral articles in the air. The main unit draws them through the tube for analysis. Right now, the Sniffer is providing me with a detailed breakdown of any supernatural activity exhibited here; as opposed to the PKE,” he said, lifting the other gadget, “which purely measures psychokinetic energy.”

      “I’ve seen you guys using that smaller one in your ads,” Cecelia said. “Shouldn’t the wings rise?”

      “They will if the meter detects anything.”

      “Ghost vibes,” Hud said and winked again.

      “I got it,” she said and returned the wink with exaggerated posturing.

      After circling the room and checking the walls, roof and various bits of furniture, Riscraven neared the bathroom. The PKE’s wings rose, and the lights running across them pulsed faster.

      “This is where it happened,” Cecelia said. “You can see the goo.”

      “The tapping in the walls,” Riscraven said before entering her bathroom, “happens in the bedroom and ensuite. What about the other rooms in the home?”

      “I hear it in the downstairs toilet, too.”

      “What about the kitchen?”

      “No,” she answered.

      “I didn’t see the second toilet when I came in. Where is it located?”

      “Behind the kitchen,” she said. With her hands, she plotted a visual schematic for him. “It goes: the entrance where you came in, kitchen to the right—you would have seen that.”

      Riscraven nodded.

      “And then behind where the kitchen sink is, there’s a small laundry, and off that is the toilet.”

      “That’s very helpful,” Riscraven advised her. “If you and Hud can wait out here, I’ll take more readings and sample the slime.”

      “Careful of the glass,” she warned the Ghostbuster, though undoubtedly he saw it all over the floor.

      “Won’t cut through these,” he said, stamping his boots for show. Then he reattached the PKE and rod to his belt, freeing his hands to activate the cylinder. It hummed like a low-voltage vacuum, and when he set it on its wheels and let it go, the thing acted like one, a forward-facing laser scanning and targeting globules of slime and sucking them up into the storage unit above. While it worked, Riscraven resumed scanning the bathroom using the Sniffer and PKE.

      When the humming stopped, all the slime had been collected. “You got it all!” Cecelia exclaimed, relieved she’d not need to mop the goo up herself.

      “Usually, we’d only use the Ecto-Vac to sample evidence,” the Ghostbuster said, flipping his goggles up again, “but I figured the lab would appreciate extra for testing purposes.”

      “Would’ve got more points pretending you were being helpful,” Hud stated.

      Riscraven cleared his throat. “More good news—”

      “Good as last time?” Hud said, earning a harsher elbow from Cecelia that caused him to grunt.

      “Indeed,” Riscraven said, oblivious to Hud’s sarcasm and noting Cecelia’s physical rebuke with mild confusion. “My Ecto-Goggles are an extension of the E-Vac and PKE meter. Converting the data into visual information, I was able to analyse the slime. It’s definitely ectoplasm. Then, I checked the density of negatively charged particles in your bathroom. The speed of molecular decay and the Sniffer’s readout authenticate our theory that your problem is, indeed, Spitswapper.”

      Hud slapped his cheek and opened his mouth in mock amazement.

      “If Spitswapper,” saying its name soured Cecelia’s mouth, “succeeded, how would it have…” she swallowed, curious to ask her question but terrified to know the answer. “Hud said,” she turned to him, “you said you saw a body, and it was bloated?”

      “Maybe we should save this for daylight,” Hud suggested. “No point scaring yourself now when it’s not coming back tonight.”

      “Spitswapper has declared ownership,” Riscraven stated. “While not tonight, it will be back. It doesn’t stop until it’s completed its goal.”

      “Nice bedside manner,” Hud said.

      “Tell me,” Cecelia demanded. “What does it do?”

      Hud took a step back to let Riscraven explain. Worry painted his face. “I warned you,” he said, crossing his arms and leaning against the bedroom wall opposite the bathroom.

      Cecelia expected a long-winded and detailed answer, so she was taken aback by Riscraven’s bluntness. “It swaps spit with you.”

      Shaking her head less in incredulity and more from a refusal to believe, Cecelia opened her mouth, closed it, and then said, “Come again?”

      “Its common name should make it obvious,” the Ghostbuster said. “Its tongue is a proboscis that drains saliva from your body while simultaneously pumping its own into you. Hence, spit swapping. That’s why you only find its ectoplasm,” he lightly kicked the goo-filled cylinder, “when it’s actually attacking. It’s essentially drool.”

      Like a zombie, Cecelia stumbled to the staircase.

      “You good?” Hud asked and took a step towards her.

      A perplexed-sounding Riscraven called after her. “Miss Winterstone?”

      From an amble to a gallop, Cecelia tore down the stairs, flew through her kitchen and laundry and emptied her stomach into the second toilet.

      When she returned to the top floor, portions of Cecelia’s face, hair and t-shirt dripped from where she’d clumsily drunk and splashed water onto herself post-vomit.

      “I had the same reaction when I found out,” Hud told her while Riscraven continued to study her curiously. Hud next turned to the Ghostbuster. “Something I never learned is why it lives at the ocean?”

      That the discourteous vagabond was finally consulting him seriously elevated Riscraven’s pride. “Excellent question. Salt molecules are made of sodium ions and chloride ions. Hence, salt water is a good conductor of electricity.”

      Collecting herself, Cecelia frowned at them. “Mind involving me in what you’re talking about?”

      “Spits recharges there,” Hud told her, then consulted the Ghostbuster again. It was strange for Cecelia to see him suddenly taking this professional seriously. “You said correctly identifying ghosts adjusts how we catch them. Well, now you’re satisfied with what we’re after, what’s the plan?”

      Riscraven stared blankly. “Another sensible question, thank you, Mr. Hud. According to the Ghostbusters Field Manual,” he retrieved his phone and opened another app. He started reading it. With his finger, he swiped the screen and kept reading. This went on for minutes. Hud and Cecelia shared an unimpressed side glance.

      “Indeed,” Riscraven stated when he was done. “It’s a team job. Spitswapper’s preternatural reflexes have proven too quick for a single exterminator in past encounters. However, through flanking and an effective series of feints and parries, our scientists theorise the demon can be boxed and trapped.”

      “Easy,” Hud said, dusting his hands and smiling at Cecelia.

      “Not easy,” the literal-minded Ghostbuster interjected. “But, given the trouble this thing has caused Ghostbusters over the decades, I should have no shortage of volunteers desirous to return with me tomorrow to end its terrible reign.”

      “I’m desirous to see that, too,” Hud told Cecelia, which she knew meant he planned to catch it before the Ghostbusters did.

      “One thing that I haven’t been able to determine,” Riscraven said, interrupting her thought, “is why it broke your mirror. You didn’t mention that in your report.” It was not a rebuke as much an observation. “Property destruction isn’t really this entity’s MO.”

      Cecelia flushed. “Oh,” she said, suddenly worried about getting Hud into trouble. “Maybe it wanted to up the scare factor?”

      “Possibly,” Riscraven stated. “Have there been any other violent interactions?”

      She shook her head.

      “Things moving on their own? You may be infested by a secondary spirit—poltergeists being a common example.”

      “Guess that makes me a noisy ghost,” Hud said, raising his hand in confession. With a look, he reassured Cecelia he knew what he was doing.

      “You did this?” Riscraven asked him.

      “Yep.”

      “You thought the writing meant the demon was in the mirror,” Riscraven concluded. “And tried to punch it.”

      After snickering at the Ghostbuster, Hud said, “I saw it in the doorway. And as for punching it…” he shook his head. “Gene,” he tsk’d him. “You, of all people, should recognise the work of a proton stream.”

      Like a reproachful parent, Riscraven’s chin sank to his chest, his eyes peering up at Hud. “What do you mean a proton stream? There’s no way you have a Proton Pack.”

      “No, no, no,” Hud said, waving the idea away.

      “No,” the Ghostbuster reiterated, emitting a relieved chortle. “Of course not.”

      “It’s a CNW.”

      Riscraven seemed to require a moment before this registered in his brain. “A what?” He examined Hud up and down, searching for evidence. “How do you have a… you fired a Particle Thrower at this young lady?”

      “It’s called a Neutrona Wand,” Hud schooled. “Compressed model.”

      “I know what it’s called! I was using layman’s terms!”

      “Ghost-catching gun would have been more layman.”

      “Where is it?” Riscraven took a giant step forward.

      “What’s the big deal? It’s not like you have to be licensed to use your gear.”

      “Of course you do! These days, anyway,” he added thoughtfully. “If nothing else, you have to be trained to use it.”

      “Really?” Hud said through a half-smile. “I’ve seen footage of your co-founders back in the late twentieth. They used to tear. Shit. Up.”

      Outraged like mooned royalty, Riscraven scoffed. “Nonsense. They were completely professional.”

      “If that’s what you call professional…”

      “The co-founders’ conduct is beside the point,” Riscraven snapped. “What were you planning to do if you hit your target? The positively-charged subatomic anti-particles fired from your wand only temporarily incapacitate ghosts, spectres, revenants, shades, wraiths, apparitions, spooks, demons,” he emphasised the latter as if to say, like in this case. “Need I go on?”

      “Please do, it’s a fascinating list.”

      “My point,” Riscraven said, “is that without a Muon Trap, all you would have done is chuff the thing off. Soon as you released your wand, it’d be loose again and sore as hell.”

      “Is this a penis metaphor?” Hud asked, then mouthed sorry in response to Cecelia’s stern look. “Anyway, where’s your ghost trap?” he asked Riscraven.

      “In the Ectomobile!”

      Hud looked at him patronisingly. “What good is it in there?”

      “I don’t need it here; we’ve established the culprit is Spitswapper and won’t be back tonight!”

      “You were only confident about that after your examination. Meanwhile, you brought in your Proton Pack—which you left downstairs, by the way. What would you have done if Cece’s attacker hadn’t been Spits and had hung around up here? Punched it?”

      Riscraven sputtered for a reply. When he managed to speak, his arms flailed wildly. “My pack is still in the property and the ghost trap in the driveway!”

      “Muon Trap.”

      “You said ghost trap,” Riscraven’s arms flailed wider. “It is a ghost trap; commonly called a Muon… not commonly…” He exhaled and slammed his balled fists into his thighs. “It’s the same thing!” Sweat beaded on his temple and dripped beneath the Ecto-Goggles. “But you had no trap nearby. A-a-and!” He wagged his finger at Hud. “Even if you had a trap, how long did you plan to keep it in there? They have a limited battery life, and if the positively charged laser protection grid within it goes off…” he laughed hysterically.

      “Is that a question?”

      “Not for a cretin like you!”

      “Name calling is beneath us, Gene.”

      “Where did you plan to transfer the entity?” Riscraven barked, crossing his arms and glaring intensely. “You got an ECU on the beach?”

      Hud frowned. “Emergency Control—”

      “De Ecto Containment Unit!”

      “Shouldn’t that be DECU?”

      Well, Hud’s broken him, Cecelia thought as the Ghostbuster stormed up to Hud and tried to spin him around.

      “A lesser man might call this assault,” Hud said as the Ghostbuster he greatly outweighed feebly swayed him. The attempt was, however, enough for Riscraven to glimpse the CNW hanging from the V-Hook affixed to Hud’s back.

      “Gozer’s Minions!” Riscraven cried, staggering from the sight. “It’s true. You’re not permitted to have that!”

      “It was a gift,” Hud stated, amused at the mess he’d made of the previously stoic field agent.

      “Impossible. Official Ghostbusters tech is proprietary and not for sale, which means,” a lightbulb seemingly lit in his head, and he unfastened the two-way from his shoulder. “You’re under arrest for theft.”

      “Hold your gavel there Judgey McJudgerson. You can report this, but you’re the one who’ll be busted.”

      “Ha!” Riscraven cackled with increased hysteria.

      “Laugh all you want, but I have ownership papers for this thing under Hudgins.”

      Riscraven’s attention was torn from the two-way. “Hudgins?”

      “Happy now?”

      Evidently, this did make Riscraven happy. A measure of the stoicism Cecelia feared had been obliterated returned. “Authenticating your claim is a simple task.”

      “Go for it,” Hud said, not a twitch or flinch suggesting a lie. Of course, he could also be a superb bluffer.

      Riscraven fixed the two-way back upon his shoulder, curiosity allowing him to regain the rest of his calm. Wiping the sweat from his eyes, he asked, “So you were a Ghostbuster?” He inspected Hud’s coveralls again and, before waiting for an answer, asked, “Why are you wearing a female-cut uniform?” Again impatient for an answer: “Which branch? Not ours here; I know every Gold Coast employee.”

      “Sydney,” Hud said. “Three years ago.”

      “That’s national HQ,” Riscraven said and sniffed haughtily. “You must have been fired. There haven’t been redundancies in the industry since the nineteen-nineties.”

      Hud’s eyes narrowed.

      Treating the shaggy-haired man’s silence as confirmation, Riscraven continued. “They ripped your insignia off,” he pointed to the holes in fabric at Hud’s right arm and left pec, “so you couldn’t misrepresent us.” Nodding as if he had it all figured out, he concluded, “Disgraced, you weren’t able to find work and conceded to a life of vagrancy.”

      “Field workers don’t need PhDs in psychology anymore,” Hud said, “but you…” he offered a slow clap. “You’re a legit mentalist.”

      Misreading the compliment as genuine, Riscraven said, “Well, parapsychology is required; I attained my doctorate earlier this year. Psychology is optional.” He paused as if building suspense and then pumped his eyebrows with pride. “I opted.”

      “Dr Gene,” Hud said and clapped again.

      “It’s Dr Riscraven, but I don’t like to insist on the title. Some might argue, ‘Why not? You spent years earning it?’ What they don’t realise is it doesn’t serve a field agent to sound arrogant. So, unless my credentials are questioned, I let my work speak for itself.”

      Hud’s eyes turned slowly to Cecelia and then slid back to Riscraven. “No, we wouldn’t want you sounding arrogant.”

      An awkward silence followed that Cecelia was keen to end. When it did, she regretted having wished for it.       Behind them came the sound of tiny feet, pattering along the walls and growing steadily louder.

PART 3: DEMON IN PARADISE

Everyone’s face dropped.

“Pest control ever get around to checking your place out?” Hud asked.

      Cecelia shook her head, eyes wide.

      “No need for concern,” Riscraven said, scanning the walls. “These Nomex uniforms offer a high degree of protection against ectoplasmic substances.”

      Cecelia considered her flimsy outfit and Hud glanced at his own tattered coveralls.

      “I guess you’re okay then,” Hud told the Ghostbuster.

      “Maybe we should head to my lounge,” Cecelia suggested. “It never goes there. I think it’s afraid of my indigenous artefacts.”

      “Thinking demons care about religious or totemic cultural paraphernalia is a human conceit,” Riscraven dismissed, pursuing the sounds in the room with his PKE meter. “A misconception propagated by pop culture. A ghost might care if it was religious in life.”

      It was hard to define why Cecelia was bothered by this. Perhaps she’d found comfort in believing the pieces from her culture held power, that they were more than beautiful relics.

      “Learn that from an app?” Hud asked the Ghostbuster.

      “From study,” Riscraven said. The silver wings of the PKE meter flew to their limit, and the device beeped wildly. Gaping at the results, he uttered, “Reponere Furantur.”

      “But you said it had to recharge before it struck again,” Cecelia said, heart racing. She retreated from the walls and edged up against Hud. Somehow, having him there was reassuring.

      “Exactly,” Riscraven said. “Hence why this is so—”

      “Interesting?” Hud proposed.

      “Indeed,” Riscraven said, sliding the active meter into its holster. “I’m going to get my pack and a trap from the car.” He headed for the stairs.

      “What do we do if it returns while you’re gone?” Cecelia asked.

      “It can’t have replenished entirely,” Riscraven said as he descended the staircase. “Not in the brief window it’s been away.”

      “All good,” Hud said and pulled his CNW. “I’ve got just the condom to bag this ugly dick.” He flicked a silver switch near the handle. The bass and whine of the unit powering up filled the room.

      “Wait!” Riscraven exclaimed. He was halfway down the stairs and started heading back their way. “Not a chance; you aren’t licensed to use that and will cause more damage than you already have. Switch it o—”

      The tapping on the bedroom walls rushed to the stairwell like a speeding drum roll. A loud timpani pounded directly behind the stunned Ghostbuster.

      “Get your gear!” Cecelia shouted at him.

      “Okay, but—” He never finished. A purple and pink blur materialised from the wall at his rear, the demon corporealising, arms out, claws landing heavily upon Riscraven’s shoulders. Clutching the Ghostbuster tightly, it raced him up the remaining stairs. Riscraven’s legs were bent behind him, and his feet dragged into each step as he was propelled towards Hud and Cecelia.

      The violence of the attack caused a horrified mask to stretch across Riscraven’s face. Instinctively, Hud put an arm around Cecelia (whether to support or for support, she didn’t know), and they braced for impact.

      A hair’s breadth from them, Riscraven halted as if he’d hit an invisible wall. Above him, the demon’s face leered, eyes crackling with red electricity. The thing spanned nearly six-and-a-half feet from the top of its head to the bottom of its flared lower torso. Absent a lower jaw, the impression was of a hungry predator with a gaping maw.

      “Do… something…” the Ghostbuster begged.

      “Get back,” Hud told Cecelia, moving her away and taking aim. Before he could fire, the demon’s tongue whipped from its sticky, purplish throat and curled around the Ghostbuster’s face. Hud tried to get a clear shot without hitting the man, but Spitswapper kept shifting position, making this impossible.

      “It’s… starting to—” A gargling noise usurped Riscraven’s speech. Slime seeped at the corners of his eyes, trickling down his cheeks like tears. The demon’s tongue widened. Soon, hardly any part of the Ghostbuster’s face was visible.

      “Shoot!” Cecelia pleaded.

      “I’ll hit Gene!” Hud said, thwarted wherever he aimed as if the demon could anticipate every new area targeted.

      “Let him go!” Cecelia shouted and lunged forward, grabbing Riscraven by the waist and trying to pry him free. Meanwhile, Riscraven’s eyes, practically all that remained visible of him beneath the thick, slimy tongue, rolled back and presented purely white. There was a sick gurgling noise, and the Ghostbuster began to throb and contort like a blow-up doll being inflated and deflated in alternating breaths.

      “Try to keep him in place and keep your head low!” Hud shouted to her, trying to flank Spitswapper before it could pivot and re-shield itself with Riscraven.

      “It’s too fast!” Cecelia shouted.

      “Go left!” Hud shouted, to which Cecelia, confused and panicked, yanked Riscraven right.

      “Perfect!” Hud said, predicting her mistake and darting the other way to secure a target zone. He pressed abutton on the wand and unleashed an orange and blue stream of particles at the demon’s side. Roaring with rage, Spitswapper unfurled its vile tongue and dropped Riscraven at Cecelia’s feet.

      Stepping over the Ghostbuster like a man possessed, Hud advanced, proton stream tearing long and sparking strips from the walls and ceiling as he chased Spitswapper out the room and into the hallway. Even over the loud CNW, Cecelia heard Hud shouting, “Damn you to hell!” until the veiny creature had struck and vanished through the wall. Hud was a few steps down the stairs after it before Cecelia’s voice stopped him.

      “Call an ambulance!”

      “But the demon—”

      “Gene’s still alive, but not for long!” she shrieked, holding the Ghostbuster on his side in the recovery position, a technique learned in first aid training. A trickle of slime dribbled from Riscraven’s mouth, but a finger probe suggested no blockage. She turned him onto his back, rechecked his mouth and peered as far down his throat as possible. Nothing was visible. If nothing obstructed his airways, why wasn’t he breathing? How long could a heart keep pumping without oxygen? She tilted his head and breathed into his mouth twice, suddenly fearing that if there was something in his throat, this might be worsening the blockage.

      Practice drills during first aid training had made her feel competent. Under the stress of a real situation, she didn’t know what else to do.

      “I don’t have a phone!” she heard Hud shout from the staircase. “Use the two-way on his shoulder!”

      “It’s shorted out because of the slime!” she said.

      “How about your phone?” Hud said, still from the stairs.

      Cecelia’s adrenalin skyrocketed; she couldn’t remember where it was. Too much required her attention. Focussing purely on Riscraven, she watched for any rise or fall of his chest.

      Nothing.

      An idea struck her. She located the Ghostbuster’s car keys and threw them in Hud’s direction. “See if there’s another two-way in his Ecto,” she said, rechecking Riscraven’s neck for a pulse. Miraculously, despite him not breathing, his heart remained strong.

      She heard Hud race down the stairs, knock the chairs holding the front door closed out the way, and exit.

      Monitoring the prone Ghostbuster felt like eternity. Worse was contemplating the demon’s return. Having reappeared tonight when it was supposedly unable to opened the possibility of a third attack. What would she do then?

      “…way too long,” Cecelia heard Hud say as he re-entered her apartment. “And there’s nothing else you can do until then?” He grunted as he bound up the stairs, scraping against the wall as he came.

      Cecelia leaned over Riscraven to check his vitals. Regularly, she’d turn him to his side and try to scoop out whatever was lodged in his throat—presumably more slime—but hardly a trickle ever came out.

      “Tell them I can’t get the slime out and it’s clogging his airways!” she told Hud as he entered her bedroom. “I don’t think I should give more breaths.”

      Hud waved her away as if she was making it hard for him to hear the person on the walkie-talkie. He dropped a ghost trap by the bathroom door and Gene’s Proton Pack by the opposite wall. “Just hurry,” he said into the two-way, turning a nob that cut the communication with a brief crackle.

      “Why didn’t you tell them?” she demanded.

      Hud leaned over Riscraven and searched his pockets until he located the man’s cell phone. He held it up to Cecelia and placed it on the carpet beside her.

      “Shit,” she said and flushed red. Considering how often the Ghostbuster had used it, she felt stupid for forgetting and guilty for the implications to Riscraven’s life.

      “Slipped my mind, too,” Hud said and inspected Riscraven closely. Then he sat back on his haunches and muttered, “Huh,” with a measure of awe.

      “He’s going to die!”

      “They said as long as one of us keeps contact with him,” Hud scrutinised Cecelia’s positioning to ensure this was happening, “he’ll live.”

      “Contact how? What do we need to do?”

      “Just touch him. Even a toe is enough.”

      “That makes no sense!” Despite feeling her fingers on Riscraven’s pulse, she felt the need to ensure they were definitely on him.

      “Does anything about this make sense?” Hud asked.

      “Are they sending someone to help?” she queried. “We can’t sit like this all night. What if that thing returns?”

      Hud nodded and filled her in. “Another Ghostbusters unit is on its way, but being that the closest branch to us is in Brisbane and currently working another job, it probably won’t reach us for hours.”

      “Hours!”

      “Let’s keep this on,” Hud asked, examining the PKE meter in Riscraven’s belt. It hummed and buzzed steadily but was otherwise still. “It’ll warn us if that thing comes back without signalling its arrival on the walls first.” He sat against the wall opposite her, a few feet away. “We’ll take shifts maintaining contact with him. Use your foot; you’ll need your hands free if dick appears.”

      “If his dick appears?” she shouted.

      “Not his,” Hud told her, indicating Riscraven. “I meant Spitswapper.”

      “Just call it that or the demon!” she admonished, jumpy and dubious of the cavalier way they were to care for the unconscious Ghostbuster. “I need to know if his pulse drops; otherwise, I won’t know to start CPR.”

      “Long as one of us is touching him,” Hud said, “he’ll stay comatose until the med unit arrives. Lady I spoke with assured me. This is a supernatural issue; don’t expect logic.”

      Cecelia scanned Riscraven’s body regardless, a habit from first aid training. Constantly leaning over him was stiffening her shoulder. Reluctant as she was to concede, she carefully shifted her weight and dug a foot beneath Riscraven’s torso. This allowed her to stretch and lean against the wall facing Hud. Most of her hair had slipped from the bun, so she finally shook it all free. The wavy black strands cascaded past her shoulders, catching Hud’s attention. He pretended not to notice.

      “If we hadn’t detached him from that thing as quickly as we did,” Hud stated and finished the statement with a finger across his neck.

      While Cecelia processed this, Hud crawled over and brought the Proton Pack and trap closer to them. Visibly debating whether to give her the CNW or the pack, he ultimately gave her the smaller unit. “Be careful with this. It was a gift.”

      The scaled-down Particle Thrower was light and scarcely the length of her forearm. Thin in depth, its shape was triangular, somewhat evocative of a paper airplane. The buttons on the handle were labelled but too ambiguous for the weapon to be turned on or fired intuitively. Cecelia opened her mouth to query them when a noise interrupted her.

      “My bad,” Hud said and patted his stomach.

      Cecelia eased back down. As her panic receded, she remembered the reward she’d offered Hud for fixing her door. “There’s pizza in the fridge,” she said. “Half a bottle of Pepsi, too. Have as much as you want.”

      Hud thought about it. “I’m not thrilled at the idea of Spits returning for you while I’m down there.”

      “You’re right,” she said, dragging Hud’s leg over to rest on Riscraven. “If it’s gonna come back for me, it’ll probably appear up here.” She got to her feet, stretched her back some more and turned to the doorway.

      “Don’t,” he pleaded, obviously uncomfortable at her leaving without his protection. “I’ve gone longer without food.”

      “Back in a sec.”

      “Wait!”

      She paused again.

      “If you need to use the CNW,” Hud said, “flick the Activateswitch on the left. Aim the nozzle at your target and push Intensify. Then hold on. It’s not as powerful as a full-sized Neutrona Wand but it still kicks when it fires.”

      “And Gene made it sound so difficult,” she said, winking in a way that felt very Hud and hurrying to the kitchen. Choosing fruit, cold pizza and a soft drink, she wondered what had made her behave flirtatiously. This wasn’t the occasion for frivolities, nor was Hud her type. Perhaps if he was employed, had a haircut and took a shave…

      She was in her room again within two minutes.

      “No glasses?” Hud asked while she lowered herself, and the food, to the carpet. The apple and mandarin she’d been balancing on the pizza box rolled off and in his direction as though telekinetically summoned.

      “It’s all yours,” Cecelia said, swapping Riscraven-contact duty with him.

      It took Hud a moment to accept this, and then he nodded in thanks. “Not everyone is so generous,” he said, eagerly opening the grease-stained box and grabbing the first pizza slice his fingers connected with. “I’ll try not to spill on your carpet.”

      As if an identical thought struck them, they examined the eviscerated walls and the mirror shards decorating her nearby bathroom floor. “Probably wouldn’t notice if you did,” Cecelia remarked.

      “Fair,” Hud said, and the pair actually smiled. It turned into a laugh. The shared absurdity of what they were going through and that they’d be laughing about it made it harder to stop.

      “If you didn’t laugh, right?” Cecelia said through persistent fits of giggles.

      Hud nodded and started to settle. “Plus, I ran out of tears years ago.”

      Cecelia was still catching her breath from the giggle-fit when the weight of his words sank in. Quickly, the atmosphere turned sombre and she again wondered about Hud’s past. Perhaps if she tactfully asked him about it, he’d open up.

      Evidently, he was simultaneously pondering her. After his third slice of pizza, he asked about her ex. “If it’s still raw,” he said, “we don’t need to discuss it.”

      “Not raw,” she half-lied. “We only dated a few months. Ending it was my decision.”

      “Doesn’t mean it was painless,” he observed, a little too astutely.

      With a hint of emotion that betrayed the half-lie, she revealed how the mysterious noises in the house weren’t the reason they’d split. Rather, it was Eric’s inability to hear her or support her feelings.

      “Valid,” Hud said. “Communication is key. Only works when it’s both ways.”

      “Exactly,” she said, surprised at Hud’s sensitivity. It was an opportune moment to ask him about his past.

      Again, he spoke before she could. “Is Cecelia a common indigenous name?”

      “Oh.” Surprised again. “No.”

      “My school didn’t spend much time on first nationers,” he added, taking a swig from the Pepsi bottle.

      No schools did, Cecelia thought. It didn’t help that the indigenous community comprised less than four per cent of the country’s population. All this made it easy for the non-indigenous populace to pretend the land’s original inhabitants didn’t exist. “First nation is a white person’s label,” she said. Then, to reassure him, she added, “It’s fine. The label comes from a good place, even if it’s kind of been forced upon us.”

      “Is there something you prefer?” Hud asked, and because she knew he was also coming from a good place, she resisted the urge to simply say fellow human beings. 

      “Indigenous is fine,” Cecelia said and watched him relax. “Anyway, I was named after my great nan’s sister—not an indigenous Australian but a South Sea Islander. Her mum came from Vanuatu.”

      “Vanuatu?” he asked, hunching forward to listen carefully.”

      “We were brought over as blackbirding.”

      Hud’s expression was blank with ignorance.

      “A term for what slavers did,” she explained. “Kidnapping was easier for them than cutting sugarcane themselves.”

      “You say it so matter-of-factly.”

      “Doesn’t mean I don’t get mad sometimes. Or just sad. Wish I could say Dad’s ancestry fared better. My indigenous side comes from him, from the Gurang tribe. You’d know their land as Bundaberg.”

      Hud silently processed this data. The uneaten slice of pizza in his hand drooped until it was about to fall. “How did he get the surname Winterst—”

      “My turn for the next question.”

      Beneath his shaggy beard, Cecelia saw Hud’s lips purse. “Why am I homeless?”

      It was such an obvious question; she wasn’t shocked he’d guessed. “You can tell me it’s none of my business.”

      He shoved the flaccid slice of pizza into his mouth and picked up the final piece from the box. “You think I was fired like Gene said?”

      His intuition was so accurate it made her face redden. Hoping to add some levity, she said, “Probably for your terrible aim.”

      “Gene didn’t imply that.”

      “Err…” A grin parted her lips, a terrible habit that occurred whenever she was nervous, embarrassed, and unsure how to handle it.

      “Sensitive,” Hud said, turning her smile into a nervous giggle.

      “Sorry, it’s not funny.” The more she tried to restrain it, the worse it got.

      “It’s fine; it was a fair shot.” He raised his eyebrows in anticipation of her reaction. “Not a pun person?”

      His good humour settled her. “Is that why you’re mad at the Ghostbusters?” she asked.

      Like someone needing a swig of booze for courage, Hud swung the Pepsi to his lips. The motion was too quick, and the drink frothed and spurted into his mouth. He coughed and tried to play it off as nothing, struggling for breath. He wiped the brown liquid from his beard and carefully brushed sticky strands of hair behind his ears. His eyes were watery when he cleared his throat and looked at her. “Smooth,” he croaked.

      Again, they shared a laugh, but a twisted smile lingered on Hud’s face. It was pained and bitter. “Lenora was always fearless,” he said. “My wife,” he clarified.

      Like the power had been cut, Cecelia’s mirth vanished. His wife?

      Hud chuckled, a humourless sound. “Bloody stubborn, that woman. Probably why she suited the job so well. You remind me of her, which sounds like a come-on, but I’m serious.”

      “Bloody stubborn isn’t the come-on you think it is,” she said.

      “Call it determined, then.”

      “Better,” she agreed. “Lenora is a Ghostbuster, too?”

      “She wastheGhostbuster,” he clarified, reflecting a moment. He leaned forward to check Cecelia’s foot remained connected to Riscraven and then settled back against the wall. “Sydney had the first Australian branch, converted from the Woollahra Fire Station. They’re always converted fire stations, you know.”

      Having seen Ectomobiles driving out of enough of them in ads or on the news, Cecelia nodded.

      “We were super familiar with GBHQ. Woollahra Public School—where we met in grade three—was across from it on Forth Street. Lenora was fascinated by the place. All emergency services, actually. Even at eight-years-old, she wanted to help people. This urge made more sense to me as we got older because of how her dad treated her. That man…” he drifted off into a personal reverie that set his face grim. “Some people are dealt shitty cards with the families they’re born into.”

      Family was a core facet of indigenous culture, and because Cecelia had enjoyed an idyllic upbringing, she couldn’t personally relate. However, she had read and seen enough online to intellectually understand.

      “He was abusive?” she asked.

      Another shadow crossed Hud’s face. “It was bad,” he said, shaking off the private recollection. “So you might have thought that her old man being bumped off by a connected bookie when she was fifteen was a win.”

      Considering the death of a parent as a positive thing was difficult to empathise with. She’d be devastated if anything happened to any relative.

      “It was for a while,” Hud continued. “Until the prick reappeared four years later. The Ghostbusters came, zapped and trapped him and,” he slapped his hands together. “Lenora had found her calling.”

      It made sense, though why Hud took issue with the profession remained mysterious.

      “We married a year later,” Hud said. “She was twenty, still a cadet. Any job in emergency services is a serious commitment—I’d reconciled already—but I wasn’t prepared for how much of her it would consume. Studying for her PhD and on-the-job training meant I saw Lenora most when I’d be working a site and Ecto tore past. Even if it was a block away, the siren screamed her proximity.”

      “Site?”

      “I was a tradie on my way to managing a crew,” he said, almost like it didn’t matter. “And I was proud of her, you know? She was helping people like she’d always wanted to.”

      “You should have been proud.”

      “I said I was,” he snapped, though his ire passed quickly. “But there’s more to life than work.”

      No arguments from Cecelia there. Her job at the bank was not a passion. It earned her enough to pay her bills and enjoy hot showers. It wasn’t the added responsibility that deterred her from promotions; it was the extra hours she’d be expected to work, tilting her work-life balance in the wrong direction. So she could imagine how sharing life with someone career-dedicated like Lenora might cause conflict and, from where it seemed his story was headed, divorce.

      “Were you still together when you moved here?”

      “I moved here for her,” he stated. “We’d been living in Kings Cross in a one-bedroom apartment—”

      “She wasn’t required to live at the station?”

      His head jerked back like the question was crazy. “Nobody does that anymore. Although,” he seemed to reconsider, “our place was less than ten minutes’ drive to the Woollahra Station, and that convenience meant she practically did live there.” He took a deep breath. “Which is how we’d lived until I’d had enough.”

      “Divorce,” I muttered.

      “What? No, I confessed how I felt and asked her to switch roles to something less intensive.”

      “Oh, I assumed—”

      “We’d known each other since we were eight. I can still,” he closed his eyes, “picture her at every year of her life, starting from then.” Opening his eyes, he said, “You don’t leap from that kind of bond to divorce without fighting to stay together.”

      “I’m sorry, I just… because divorce is so common, I must have…” She waved the words away. “Terrible assumption.”

      “Yeah,” he agreed, making her feel doubly awful. “Communication, remember—super important. I should have communicated my feelings sooner. The downside to knowing someone so long is that you can rest the relationship on cruise control and expect it to take care of itself.”

      “Why didn’t you speak up sooner?” Cecelia asked, not an accusation; she was curious.

      “Lenora was following her calling. I couldn’t ask her to give that up. Instead, I sussed out if there was another role in the company that might be equally fulfilling and return time to us. Incredibly,” he rolled his eyes, “she’d already been considering a move to R and D: a nine-to-five role with advancement opportunities that would pay better than fieldwork.”

      “That’s great,” Cecelia remarked, still unsure where the problem lurked.

      From how Hud’s face sank, the revelation was coming. “Before that, we didn’t speak much about her work—not her career prospects; never specific cases. I could have asked, but resenting how much it occupied her, I didn’t want to waste more time talking about it.”

      “Were you ever worried about her?”

      “About the job being dangerous?”

      Cecelia nodded.

      “Lenora was capable, and because she didn’t worry, I didn’t. Might sound weird, but I always figured the reason she was so cool with it was because compared to her old man, fighting ghosts was easy.” He squeezed his eyes shut tightly, and when he opened them, they were adrift in memory. “She applied for R and D and got it. The week before the transfer, she’d been working a gig at a massage parlour off Hall Street—super close to the beach.” He swallowed. “That last week of fieldwork, I got funny about it for the first time. Started asking if she’d ever had close calls—scary incidents. She said something interesting; at the time, I wondered if it was simply to appease me. She said: ‘The existence of ghosts isn’t scary but reassuring. People have speculated about life after death for millennia. But since the late twentieth century, we’ve had confirmation of an afterlife.’ That comforted her.”

      Ghosts and Ghostbusting had always existed in Cecelia’s lifetime, so this philosophy was odd to consider. “I suppose for kind people,” she mused, “an afterlife is a nice thought.”

      “There’s nothing nice about death,” Hud said, flat and cold. “Not for those left behind.”

      Cecelia felt a need to swallow, but her mouth was dry. Suddenly, she understood where this tale was headed.

      “When she reached the massage parlour on Hall Street,” Hud continued, “it was late. Only the manager, who had been closing up, remained on site. He was irate that nobody came the night before when the thing he’d called about had presented itself. But the Ghostbusters were busy and understaffed and… anyway. It was considered a non-urgent routine investigation, which once identified as legitimately supernatural—from all this gear,” Hud said and pointed to the Sniffer and PKE meter still attached to Gene’s prone body, “would be revisited the next day by the paranormal forensic unit. So Lenora investigated. The entity appeared. She fired at it with her CNW, but the thing didn’t stay corporeal long and flew off before she could hit it.” Hud reached for the Pepsi and found it empty. His brow furrowed, and Cecelia knew it had nothing to do with the drink.

      “That night, I’d conked out on the couch in the lounge around eleven and never heard Lenora come home. Whenever this happened, she’d wake me after her shower and bring me to bed. So I was confused when I woke the following day still on the couch.

      “I found her in our ensuite when I went to use the toilet the following morning. She was bloated and slick with pink slime. The way she looked,” again he clenched his eyes shut; his voice cracked. “You’d think she’d drowned. I prepared to do CPR, knowing that it was already too late but refusing to believe it. As I leant over her I heard tapping on the walls. It travelled around the bathroom like the patter of invisible legs. The demon appeared behind me. Before I could react it flew off. Tearing out the house after it, I caught its trail, a red blur headed toward the ocean. It was too fast to chase, but what could I do, anyway? I didn’t even know how to turn the damn CNW on back then.”

      “I’m so sorry,” Cecelia said, genuinely heartbroken.

      “Before calling the cops and the Ghostbusters, I hid her CNW and told them it was missing. Nobody was catching that thing but me. I also requested her uniform, which I was allowed to keep, provided the nametag and no-ghost logo were stripped. Impersonating a Ghostbuster is a federal crime,” he advised.

      To Cecelia, this made sense, given the rule applied to all other natural emergency service agents. “And they ripped holes in her uniform when they removed them?”

      Embarrassment washed over Hud’s face; his fingers pulled loosely at the tattered fabric. “I probably should have let them do it,” he said and swallowed hard. “But after receiving condolences instead of useful info from the Ghostbusters in her unit, I was pissed off and wanted them to know it. Might have made a slight spectacle of myself in the branch when I threw the torn pieces at them.”

      It was hard for Cecelia to criticize Hud’s behaviour, considering what had motivated it.

      “Another item I kept,” Hud confessed, “was Lenora’s two-way. Similar to a police scanner, you can pick up incoming calls, reports and ghost sightings. It let me track anything I heard that fit Spitswapper’s description. This was when I learned its name, by the way,” he added as an aside. “Problem was, the damn thing was always gone before I reached it. More often than not, it came and went so quickly that even the field agents missed it. Forensic units would come for samples later, but I didn’t stick around for that. Studying it was not my goal.”

      “It might have helped you catch it?” Cecelia speculated.

      Hud shrugged his shoulders. “It didn’t help the Ghostbusters. And so weeks went by, and I grew desperate. Work was less important than vengeance, and finally, the contractor I worked for gave me a choice: return or be replaced. Guess what I chose?”

      “And you chased the thing here?”

      He nodded. “It’s taken me nearly five years to find it.”

      “Something doesn’t make sense,” Cecelia said. “You said you were chasing it through the Ghostbusters scanner. But until tonight’s attack, I’d never reported it. And I did that after you burst in.”

      “Nah, I haven’t been able to use the scanner since I sold my car,” Hud answered, as if this was no big deal. “Where would I charge it?”

      “But then, how did you know it was here?”

      “Fate, if you believe that sort of thing. Coincidence is probably more likely. Let me go back,” he said, waving the air like erasing words on a whiteboard. “After I left my job, I sold whatever was in the apartment, cancelled the lease and lived out of my car. I had savings for food. And petrol, needed to follow where the scanner sent me. On the nights with no reports matching the demon, I conducted long-range patrols, focussing around the massage parlour and the streets between Kings Cross and Bondi—any place I knew it’d been. I’d been showering at one of the rinse ports at Bondi the night it burst out of the water, meters from where I’d parked. Three nights in a row, I waited at that spot on the beach, spying it spring from the water and soar off in the same direction. By then, I’d sussed out how to use the CNW, even came close to tagging the thing once. It’s not that CNWs are tough to aim; that veiny dick is just so hard to hit.”

      “You never called the Ghostbusters to help?”

      “Call on what? I had no phone.”

      “You had a two-way.”

      “Using that would have revealed that I had it.”

      “So you allowed it to go on rampaging?” Cecelia’s anger flared and caused Hud to jolt up in surprise. “Who knows how many more could have been killed? It could have killed me!”

      Her words hit home, and Hud winced as if in pain. “I wasn’t in the best headspace when Lenora died,” he said. “And spending so much time since then solo, well, you can lose sight of the bigger picture.”

      “That doesn’t make it better,” she said, unsatisfied.

      “I know,” he said, sounding genuine. “This is not an excuse, but reporting it after the third night wouldn’t have mattered. Spits didn’t appear again in that location. Must have been fed up with me shooting at it.”

      “Get to the part where you tracked it here.”

      He nodded, probably happy to move past his selfish motivations. “Right, well, I still had my car and the two-way in Sydney. After weeks without any hint of the veiny di—” his face flushed and he corrected, “demon, I picked up a conversation where a Ghostbuster was assigned something closely resembling it. The fieldworker had encountered Spits before and figured he was being sent after it. The dispatch operator shut his theory down. Queensland branches were now logging reports of it, most recently at the Gold Coast.”

      “And that’s all it took for you to drive here?”

      “What else did I have? Soon after arriving, I ran out of savings, and without money for petrol, I sold the car and started living at Surfers Paradise, on the beach.”

      “So you couldn’t travel or track it?”

      Hud flushed with embarrassment. “It wasn’t the most thought-out plan. Free-2-Rent scooters were useful, but searching was a crap shoot. From a year of sightings in and around Sydney, I knew it probably needed the ocean to hide in. So I made a home near a large sand dune where I could be sheltered from one side. Found a golf umbrella I could adjust to shield me from the others. I’d travel the Surfer’s shoreline every night, hoping to catch sight of it and praying it didn’t migrate again. I’d sleep with the CNW wrapped in a plastic bag and buried beneath me so nobody would see and try to steal it. Did this for four years before my gamble paid off.”

      “Four years,” Cecelia marvelled. “I’m amazed you never gave up.”

      “Revenge is a powerful motivator.”

      “And you chased it to my home?”

      “Essentially. Though, that was a mission in itself. Something else I’d gleaned from months scanning on the two-way was the demon is a creature of habit. It identifies a target, travelling between them and whatever section of the ocean is most convenient, back and forth along the same route. It harasses its target until it rejects them or chooses to hone in. For my wife, Spitswapper was charged enough and honed quickly. Luckily for you it took longer to decide, and I had the chance to follow it a little further during each expedition, until I finally spied its destination: your townhouse.”

      “You’ve put a lot of work into this,” Cecelia acknowledged. “And I might have considered myself lucky if you had a flipping ghost trap!”

      Hud paused. “When you say it like that, it sounds like a waste of four years.”

      “You think?”

      Dismissing her reprimand with a shake of his head, he lifted the rectangular trap by its handle and said, “Or was it?”

      Cecelia groaned and rolled her eyes. “You give too much credit to coincidence.”

      “Or is it fate?”

      “We going to have this debate?”

      Near Cecelia’s knee came an increased intensity of beeps and the tiny hum of gears. Her eyes landed on the rising wings of the PKE meter. The accompanying rhythm of the lights increased in tandem with the elevation of the wings.

      Patter patter patter; the noise tearing up the walls.

      “It can’t be,” Cecelia muttered, anxiety climbing. She squeezed her foot further beneath Riscraven’s torso to better secure contact and collected the CNW off the carpet, cradling it tightly.

      “This demon sure has the hots for you,” Hud said, gazing around the room for signs of it.         Cecelia flicked the silver switch on her weapon labelled Activate. The wand powered up with a resonant ding.

      “Push the Intensify button to shoot,” Hud reminded her as he hurriedly strapped on the full-size Proton Pack. He fossicked around the Neutrona Wand until he’d hit the relevant switches. It hummed to life and blinked.

      “Flanking this thing is going to be tough with you immobilised,” Hud said, brows furrowed in thought. “I’ll try and push it between us when it corporealises. Soon as one of our streams snares it, the other cuts theirs off and throws the trap.” He placed the yellow-and-black-topped unit beside her leg and held up the pedal connected to it via a thick black cord. “Stamp on this once to open it and a second time to suck the demon inside.”

      “Okay,” she said, heart pounding in her ears.

      Hud stood and followed the taps around the room. “Shit, also,” he said and turned back to her. “Couple things I learned from eavesdropping on the two-way: we cannot cross our streams. And don’t look at the trap when it opens.”

      “Okay,” Cecelia repeated, bleary-eyed from the late hour and the situation’s intensity. What if that thing latched onto her again and succeeded this time? Seeing it attack Gene worsened the thought, and she hoped she’d remember the instructions needed to detain Spitswapper and prevent her slimy demise.

      “You’ve got this,” Hud said when he noticed her trembling. “We’ve got the tools.”

      “If only we had the talent,” Cecelia said, giggling nervously. Feeling confident was tough with their invisible enemy menacing around the room.

      Hud stalked the noise, wand at the ready. The longer this went on, the worse Cecelia’s anxiety grew. She was sweating and almost hit the Intensify button when the tapping loudened. As if sensing her fear, the demon circled her location, entering the ensuite she sat across and drumming on the tiles. As if this wasn’t nerve-racking enough, the mirror shards began sliding around the floor, and it was soon apparent the demon might launch them like flying daggers.

      “Let’s minimise the threats,” Hud said and tried to balance the askew door closed. Too damaged from when he’d kicked it open earlier, it kept tilting off its hinges. “Slide away from the doorway,” he told Cecelia as he worked on sealing it. “Just in case it—argh!”

      He lifted the heavy wood like a shield as the collected mirror blades shot at him. A hail of breaking glass crashed and echoed inside the room, and Hud bravely clung to the door to jam it against the doorway.

      “Bloody hell,” he stated when the ensuite was shut enough. He checked his fingers for cuts. “Any get through?” he asked Cecelia.

      Jacked with energy, she doubted she’d have felt it if any had. With the nose of her CNW pointed at the bathroom door, she scanned herself and shook her head. Hud, meanwhile, had backed away from the door, pointing his larger Neutrona Wand in its direction.

      “If we get lucky, it’ll appear right there,” he said, the words no sooner from him than the door rattled with a violent pounding. The noise jumped to the adjacent wall and danced along the roof.

      More excruciating minutes passed while Hud trailed the bumping thuds around the room. During his third lap, he paused and frowned. “It stopped.”

      Cecelia held her breath. Could they have outlasted Spitswapper? If it had lost its stamina, it’d finally need to retreat to the ocean and recharge.

      Hud was on the other side of her bed when Cecelia saw the purplish tongue apparate in the reflection of the window. It had scarcely uncurled when the rest of the pulsing monster materialised behind it. Cleverly, the demon angled its arrival so that the long-haired man prevented a clean shot from her.

      “Duck!” Cecelia screamed, and Hud reflexively obeyed her. Pressing the Intensify button caused an orange and blue proton stream to rocket from the wand’s tip, juddering Cecelia’s arm and making it difficult to hold the CNW straight.

      Spitswapper anticipated the blast and darted sideways, causing the electric bolt to smash through the window and into the night air.

      The demon remained fully visible when it targeted Cecelia, its maw widening and tongue whipping straight at her.

      Without thinking, she fired her CNW again. The demon pivoted. The stream missed, but Hud’s own entered from the other side and pushed the monster back towards her.

      Flicking her stream sideways connected it with the demon. She shouted with triumph as it ensnared the beast, the noise as the proton streams spewed from the two weapons deafening inside the small room. Focussed on keeping the demon in place, she didn’t notice when Hud cut his stream and crawled her way to grab the Muon Trap. She was only aware of it when the black and yellow striped twin gates at the trap’s top sprang wide, and a white glow burst forth.

      Blazing colours splashed the room more vibrantly than a nightclub dancefloor.

      Foot raised above the pedal, Hud’s face was alive with emotion. Without the bright flashing lights, Cecelia suspected he would look equally wild. The moment he’d been waiting years for was upon him: justice for his wife and revenge against the demon that had derailed his life. Madness converted to triumph as the purple and pink veined demon, writhing within Cecelia’s proton lasso, twisted to look at him. Electricity sparked and crackled from its vicious red eyes.         Grinning, Hud shouted, “You’ll get no pleasure from this box, dick!” Down slammed his foot on the pedal, and an extra intense torrent of light rocketed from the trap, which whined as it dragged the demon into it. Cecelia remembered to stop shooting and did so just in time, turning away until the howl of the demon ceased and the blinding brilliance in front of her had darkened. A quiet beeping noise emitted from the trap and it started to smoke.

      Hud walked over and nudged it with his bare foot. Tendrils of blue electricity zapped him. “Shit!” he shouted and hopped on the spot.

      Cecelia laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks. “You were this close,” she said, thumb and index finger held a centimetre apart, “to being cool.”

      “Suppose you think you’ve earned bragging rights because you saved me?” Hud said, flinching through the lingering pain of an electric shock.

      With pride, Cecelia realised she had saved him. A second passed between them, and Hud smiled, radiating gratitude for what they’d experienced together and how she’d validated his sacrifices.

      Those damn kind eyes, she thought.

      “Am I a ghost?” a weak voice gurgled from the carpet.        The Ghostbuster was moving.

EPILOGUE

“Gene!” Cecelia cried, her foot still wedged beneath him.

      The previously incapacitated Ghostbuster rolled awkwardly onto his side and vomited a litre of slime. “Not a ghost,” he said and vomited some more.

      When he was done, he sat up and regarded them calmly. “Apologies for the carpet.”

      “You okay?” Cecelia asked him, to which Gene nodded weakly. The vomit was gross, but after what they’d experienced, it was manageable, and a reasonable price to pay for the Ghostbusters surviving.

      Frowning at the mess, Hud asked her, “You need to spew again?” His own face was growing paler by the second.

      “Do you?”

      Hud nodded, covered his mouth and took off downstairs.

      Cecelia waited with Gene until she heard the toilet flush. Hud was still down there when a knock came at the front door. “Ghostbusters,” a voice called from outside. “Is anybody home?”

      She heard Hud remove the chairs against the front door and let them in. “Took your time,” he said.

      “We came from Brisbane,” a male-sounding voice replied in defence. “Are you the home owner?” The voice dripped with doubt.

      “She’s upstairs. I called you in.”

      “I see,” the voice said. Cecelia heard more people entering.

      “We only need the nurses now,” Hud stated. “You three fieldies can wait in the car.”

      A deeper man’s voice: “We were told there was a class seven—”

      “It’s upstairs,” Hud interrupted. “Trapped.”

      A feminine voice. “How did you—”

      “Can we do the report tomorrow?” Hud asked. “It’s very late.”

      There was a brief conference and then grumbles as the three Ghostbusters Hud evicted exited her home.

      A different feminine voice said, “Please, lead us to him.”

      Footsteps climbed her staircase.

      Ushered into her room was a Polynesian-looking Ghostbuster with the nametag Ioane, along with a masculine, Caucasian partner whose surname read Moore. Both wore white cuts of the Ghostbusters uniform, patched with a modified no-ghost logo on their sleeves. In these versions, the standard doughy ghost held a caduceus in its left hand and had wings extending from its back.

      The pair carried a gurney and wore CNWs on their backs and the typical field agent paraphernalia on their belts.

      “Riscraven, you’re awake!” Moore said to their seated and wobbly intercity colleague. He bent down to check on him.

      “Apparently,” Riscraven answered. “Have we met?”

      “At the national conference last year,” Moore said, trying to keep Gene relaxed before they started examining him with their equipment.

      “Did we dance?” Riscraven asked, earnest in his partial delirium.

      “Alas, no,” Moore told him. “But if we did, it would have been a nice break from all those Zeddemore Industries engineering lectures.”

      “Thanks for taking care of him,” Ioane told Cecelia.

      “It’s not after me,” Riscraven whispered to Moore as if he’d been asked. “I was just in the way. It wants the pretty one.”

      “Let’s not reduce the young lady to that,” Moore told him, sniffing until he located what he was smelling. His eyes practically popped out when they saw the smoking trap. “You were serious,” he told Hud. “You busted a Reponere Furantur?”

      Ioane, who had been unpacking a first-aid kit with a printed logo on the case matching the one on her shoulder, stopped to see what had affected Moore. Equally stunned, she told Cecelia, “Ma’am, you caught a class seven that’s been on our hit list for decades.”

      Moore added, “And believed to have been terrorising people for centuries.” Trading places with Ioane, he bent over and picked up the trap with an awed expression.

      “We both caught it,” Cecelia said and motioned to Hud.

      “We did?” Gene asked.

      “Couldn’t have done it without you,” Hud said, patting Riscraven on the back.

      “Of course not,” Riscraven replied.

      Ioane, who had been unfolding the gurney by the stairs, whistled as Moore fixed the trap to his belt so it could be taken back with them. To Hud and Cecelia, she said, “We’ll have to get you guys on the payroll.”

      Cecelia laughed. “No offence, but after this experience—”

      “We’ll let you know,” Hud said. Cecelia was surprised not to detect any irony. “Not every department requires PhDs or fifteen-hour days,” he told her.

      Ioane and Moore assisted Riscraven onto the gurney and began affixing electrodes to him.

      Moore asked Cecelia, “Are you free tomorrow if the GC branch sends a forensic unit here to take samples and ask some follow-up questions?”

      “Samples like this?” Cecelia said, pointing out the transparent, slime-filled cylinder on the bathroom tiles.

      “That’s a start,” Moore said, impressed again. To Ioane, he said, “I’ll collect the E-Vac once we’ve loaded him in.”

      Ioane nodded to her partner and inserted a cannula into Riscraven’s hand.

      “We’ll still need to come back tomorrow,” Moore told Cecelia. “Government protocol.”

      “No problem,” Hud and Cecelia answered in unison.

      “Great,” Moore said. “We’ll need reports from both of you.”

      “I’ll be back tomorrow, too,” Riscraven said as if on auto-pilot. “For my car. Where’s my keys?” He tried to sit up on the gurney. “Where’s my Proton Pack?” He grew flustered as he scanned for it.

      “Try to stay calm, Gene,” Ioane said.

      “They’re unlicensed to use it!” he exclaimed.

      Hud shrugged. “Could be anywhere,” he told the slime-covered Ghostbuster. “You made a big mess; lots of damage.”

      Diverted by the accusation, Riscraven said, “If you file an insurance claim on our website, we should get back to you in the next financial year.”

      “It’s only August,” Cecelia said.

      “Claims are … one moment,” Riscraven turned his head and spewed more slime onto the carpet, causing Ioane to leap away. “FAQs are online,” he concluded and was carted away.

      Hud and Cecelia watched as the Ghostbuster paramedics carried Riscraven downstairs, out the door and into their Ectomobile, which was parked behind Riscraven’s. The engine blared and blue lights spun.

      Moore ran back inside and up the stairs. Picking up the E-Vac, he said, “Someone from the company will call in the morning to let you know when the forensic unit is on its way.”

      Cecelia nodded and thanked him again. A moment later, he and the other Ghostbusters reversed off her driveway.

      “Almost doesn’t seem worth them having come,” Hud told Cecelia as they watched the departing vehicle from the balustrade.

      “Because we caught Spitswapper?”

      Hud shook his head. “None of them used the siren.”

      Cecelia looked at him and smiled. Ghostbusters branches were popping up nationwide. She was confident Hud would hear another Ectomobile siren.

      He might even be the person blaring it.

THE END

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[army-author]

namjoon scenario | midnight coffee

❝ Your boyfriend has an odd habit of waking up at ghastly hours to work on his latest novel. You would complain about disrupted sleep, but waking at midnight comes with its perks...❞

➝ pairing: author namjoon x barista reader

➝ word count: 3.0k

➝ genre: fluff

➝ warnings: implied smut

➝ author’s note: this is a valentine’s drabble for my fic ‘americano’, you don’t need to read it to enjoy this. this was requested ages ago (last valentine’s day actually, oof!), and i’m so sorry for the wait. hopefully you enjoy this, and have a lovely valentine’s day, and a lovely every day!

Moving in with Namjoon led to you discovering some odd habits of his. Like the way he needs to be on the left side of the bed to fall asleep. Or the way he likes to turn up cheesy music full blast, and have it pounding around the rooms when he’s cleaning the house. Or the way he’ll wake up at ridiculous hours in the middle of the night, suddenly hit by inspiration, and need to leap out of bed, and rush to grab a coffee and his laptop, so he can sit up writing out the next scene for his new novel.

So you find yourself waking up to darkness, hearing the soft crumpling of sheets, as Namjoon carefully rolls out of your bed, breath caught in his lungs, trying not to wake you up. You can’t help but let out a soft groan, pulling the blankets up to your chin in protest.

“Sorry,” he whispers, his voice cushiony on your ears despite the horrendous time of night… or is it morning? “I didn’t mean to wake you up again.”

“What’s wrong?” you croak back, throat clogged after sleep.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he leans across the bed to smooth down your hair, and press an indulgent kiss to your forehead. You can feel the ghost of his lips when he parts from you, “I just need to write. I had an idea.”

“Can’t it wait until morning?” you ask, wiping at your eyes, and breathing in deep, hoping more oxygen in your lungs will help you feel more awake. Everything feels like it’s floating above you. You need more sleep.

Namjoon stands up from the bed. You hear him bump into the chair where he’d thrown his jeans and t-shirt from yesterday, and then comes a rustling of cloth and the clinking of his belt. “No,” he says, “If I sleep now, I’ll lose my inspiration.”

Sitting up, you let the world wobble as your body adjusts, and then blink over to his dark shape, pulling his t-shirt over his head.

He pauses, looking at you. “Go back to sleep,” he soothes, “I’ll be in bed soon.”

You pout, although you know he won’t see it in the dark.

“Rest,” he insists, moving back to bed, and leaning over to give you a hug. You melt against him, unresisting, as he gently pushes you back down, pressing you into the soft mattress. You close your eyes, feeling his shape fitting snugly against yours, until he moves away again, leaving to sneak out of the room. You listen to his footsteps padding down the landing, and then the thump, thump, thump down the stairs.

You lie for a few minutes, waiting to feel sleep descend on you again, but the cold space beside you, where Namjoon should be, keeps you awake, your ears attuned to his soft noises carrying to you from downstairs. You know he’ll be going to the office to pull out his laptop, where he’ll sit down with a huff, and begin typing, with the same concentrated look you know so well. It’s the same look you watched a year ago, when he would come into the café you worked at to write his novel, while you served him americanos – the look where his lips pout, and his brows fold down, and a crease appears on his forehead.

There’s no way you can fall asleep now. Throwing off the duvet, you shiver as the cool air slaps your bare skin. You reach across to the bedside table to check your phone: 00:24. That late? Or is it early? You blow out a breath, and then double check the date below the time: 14 February. It’s now Valentine’s day. Despite your limited sleep, you smile. Your second Valentine’s day with Namjoon. It brings back all the memories of last year. You and Namjoon had just started dating, and he was beginning to plan his third novel – he told you it would be a romance, and you knew you were the inspiration. After that, he’s only been writing on the topic of love, because as he says: “Love is the only thing worth writing about. It’s the best thing humanity has.” You’d gone out to a café that day, on a date. It had been a long time since Namjoon had been to a café without the intention of working, so he told you. It had been a while since you’d been to a café, without having to work behind the counter, making coffees. It was a fresh experience for both of you.

You had sat over steaming mugs: Namjoon with a black americano as always, and you with a caramel latte. It tasted different from the way you made it, but you liked it. The morning was whiled away with you and Namjoon occasionally sipping your coffees, and sharing small pieces of each other. You’d learnt with every second you spent together that he was perfect for you, down to the number of kids you both wanted, your dream house, your outlook on the world, the universe, and the possibility or impossibility of a deity.

If you hadn’t known it before then (and you had), that day had solidified every feeling: you loved him. You had more love for him in your heart than you knew what to do with. All you could do was smile at him over coffee, and reach for his knee under the table, and hold onto his shape beneath your fingertips, grounding you down.

Now you’ve moved in with him – and have been living with him that way for a few months. Your love is more certain than ever, even with all his weird habits. Even when he wakes you up at 00:24 in the morning.

With a dazed smile, still caught in flossy webs of happy nostalgia, remembering a time when you were just getting to know Namjoon, and hadn’t shared your first kiss, hadn’t lain naked with him in your bed, carefully learning about every inch of each other, and hadn’t known for sure that he was your soulmate, you shake yourself from a glazed grin, and slide out of bed to dress yourself in the dark.

Sneaking into the landing, the light spills up from downstairs, straining against your sleep-deprived eyes. You descend the stairs, pulling your hoody further around you, still cold after the warmth of blankets. Hesitating by the office door, you wonder about going in to see Namjoon, but then decide you want coffee first.

You pad to the kitchen, where your cat is curled up on the windowsill, her sides rising and falling. Her shining green eyes peer over as you flick on the lights, and go over to the coffee machine, pressing a button to froth the milk. “Sorry, Emerald,” you coo, stretching out a hand to her in apology, “You know how Namjoon is when he has a new idea.” Emerald bumps her head against your outstretched hand, with the beginnings of a purr, before she remembers that she should be angry at you for disturbing her sleep, and slinks out of your reach.

With the milk well frothed, you make two coffees. It’s not as good as the coffee you could make with the machines in the café, but you still think you do a good job with the milk frother Namjoon got you for Christmas.

Carrying the two mugs, you struggle with the kitchen door, trying not to spill any of the precious liquid gold, well caffeinated. It rolls around the inside of the mugs, frothing, eager to escape the rim. With a soft grunt, you manage to flick the handle, and push the door open with your hip, sneaking across to the office.

As expected, Namjoon is hunched over his laptop, his brows scrunched. He barely registers when you walk in, until you place the coffee in front of him, and the fragrant steam rouses him.

He looks up to you, eyes glowing from the laptop screen, “Thank you, honey.”

“No problem,” you set down your own coffee, and drape yourself around his shoulders, hands coasting across his chest, forward and back in soothing motions.

“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” he says, as he picks up the mug and blows on the surface, displacing frothy bubbles, before taking a sip.

“That’s okay,” you kiss his neck as you murmur the words into his skin, “I’ve gotten used to you by now, haven’t I?”

He laughs, and with you leaning against him, the sound moves through you in a rumbling wave.

“Well, thank you for being so understanding,” he says. He twists his head, just as you go in to kiss his cheek, and catches you at the edge of your lips. You kiss him again, properly, the feeling of his mouth on yours tingling through you.

As he pulls away, you murmur, “Happy Valentine’s Day, Namjoon.”

His eyes widen. “That’s today?”

You smile at his surprise. “Yep.”

“Aw no,” he leans back in his chair, “I didn’t mean to mess up your sleep today. I was going to get us up early and go out for coffee like we did last year.”

“We can still do that,” you say. As the clock slides to 00:30 on his laptop screen you highly doubt it. You were never good with early starts, particularly when your sleep was disturbed.

“No way,” Namjoon shakes his head, “It’ll be a nightmare to drag you out of bed tomorrow morning, especially after that.” He nods to the coffee, it’s smell already making you feel wide awake.

“Well, that’s okay,” you reassure, “We don’t have to do anything special for Valentine’s Day. I’m happy, so long as I spend it with you.”

Namjoon swivels his chair around, so he can wrap his arms around your torso. You take the opportunity, with him away from his screen, to swing your legs over his, and settle in his lap. “Good,” Namjoon rumbles in your ear, “Because I only want to spend the day with you.”

Even after a year and a few months of hearing this from him, it still has the ability to send an army of butterflies to wage war on your stomach, so that you squirm in his lap, and snuggle your nose into the space between his neck and his shoulder.

He laughs, shaking against you, making your head bump lightly up and down. “So, what do we do today? To make it special, I mean.”

You cast your eyes up to the ceiling, in the guise of deep thought. “Oh, I don’t know,” you say, drawing out the words slowly, as your fingers walk their way along his shoulder blades, and down his spine, “I’m sure we can think of a few ways to entertain ourselves.”

Looking back to him, you find he’s smiling at you, his dimples popping up. You lean in to indent kisses on them, which only deepens them further, as his smile stretches. He gives a contented sigh. The words “I love you” might have been breathed softly, barely there. You press a few more kisses along his jaw, and down his neck, and confirm the words as he breaths them again, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” you murmur, your fingers walking back up his spine again, until the come to rest at the nape of his neck, cradling him where his skin is soft and downy, just where his hairline begins.

His eyes are dark and glossy, like black coffee, in front of you. He leans closer, his lips almost grazing yours, and you move back a little, playfully, so he kisses the air. “Hey, don’t you have writing to be doing?” you ask.

“Don’t tease me,” he groans, a happy groan, his eyes closed. You take the opportunity to kiss his eyelids, the light blue veins quivering under your lips.

“This is what you get for disturbing my sleep,” you joke, as he opens his eyes and hits you with another surge of pleasure when you see his dark dilated pupils, wide and black.

Before he can complain any more, you close the distance, and meet his mouth with your own. He’s warm, his tongue soft. He feels like velvet against you, as you move your lips with his, moving your hands to catch a fistful of his hair. He tastes of your coffee. His fingers slide down to your waist, around your hips, past the waistband of your jeans. You sigh against his skin as he breaks away, and you share a look – you know what it means, as much as he does. When your eyes stare deep into his, his back at yours, searching deep, as if he can get inside you with his very soul, clambering in, and making himself cosy behind your irises. Looks like this normally end with you lying on your back in bed, breath ragged, a smile etched on your face, and your muscles shuddering in pleasure.

You know Namjoon is ready for this as much as you are, you could say the word, and he’d take your hand, lead you upstairs, and back to bed, where he’d keep you awake a lot longer than you’d both intend.

Your eyes flicker to the bright, white light of his laptop screen, and decide it’s not time yet. You’ve interrupted him in the middle of a sentence, white space stretching down below his blinking cursor, empty and yawning like an early morning.

“Later,” you promise him, as you feel his hands moving up from your hips, to brush across your chest. His gaze is focused on yours. “You need to do a bit more writing,” you remind him, stepping off from his lap, and giving his hair an innocent ruffle, so that it falls across his face all wrong.

He grins, “What on earth did I do to please the universe and get rewarded with you?”

“I don’t know. I guess you’ll just have to accept that you’re an amazing person, if the universe rewarded you with an equally amazing person.” You stick your tongue out at him, and then move over to the corner of the room, where you pick up one of the many books that sit piled up, and pick up your place again, while Namjoon begins typing. The rhythm of his fingers on the keys becomes a kind of melody, dispersing on the air, resonating through your blood and nerves.

A few minutes lapse into an hour, as the pages sweep past you, transporting you to a fantasy kingdom that’s not quite as exciting as your own personal – and very real – fantasy found in Kim Namjoon, discovered in the bend of his smile, in his dark cosmos eyes, in the dips of his body, where muscle and skin meet, in the crook of his arm, in his hard chest pressed to you, in his laugh, his scent, his gentle touch in the early morning when he wakes you up – his everything. All of him. Better than anything you’ve ever read about.

You smile, looking from the pages, and find him looking up from his laptop to smile back. “I’m done.” His breath comes out husky, after not being used for a while.

“Finished?” you ask, just to check what you’ve already heard.

“I’ve got through all I can for now,” he leans back in his chair, and stretches his long arms up the ceiling, pleasuring in the luxury of stretching every muscle.

“Well then,” you set the book down, and stand up, moving across to him. Your hand cards through his hair, feeling it fall through your fingers, as they move down to his face, where his stubble is just beginning to show after his last shave, and then down his neck, his torso, his stomach, lingering. “Why don’t we go back to bed?”

He raises his eyebrows at you, and you copy the expression, you lips lifting up halfway, as he says, “I’d love nothing more.”

Then, before you can react, he stands up in one swift motion, and grabs you around the waist, picking you up. You scramble to wrap your arms around his neck, as he tries to find purchase on your legs, and hold you, bridal style. He almost drops you a few times – and you wonder why you put your body in his arms sometimes, when you’ve seen what he can do to china plates, and his own phone screen – but you can only laugh, and hold on, as he finally balances you against him, muttering, “They make that look so much easier in movies.”

You kiss his temple, and then bury your face in his neck, as he carries you upstairs, with your body bumping against his, and then watch in amusement as he struggles with the handle on your bedroom door, with you still in his arms. Finally, you’re tumbling into bed with him. Above you, he leans down, reverently pressing kisses along your neck, down, until your hoody prevents his lips going any further. You help him remove that barrier, pulling it over your head, along with your t-shirt, and giggling, as his warm mouth goes back to greet your skin. He keeps moving down, sending tingles across every nerve, spreading out to your toes and fingertips as he moves from your chest, down to your stomach.

“Is this what you want?” he asks, as he lingers with his hands on your hips, curling his fingers under your jeans.

“Of course,” you’re already breathless.

“You’re sure you don’t want to sleep,” he smiles. He already knows the answer is ‘no’.

“Well I’ve had coffee,” you reason, “I don’t think I’ll be sleeping for a while anyway.”

“Then I suppose we’d better make the most of that caffeine, before you get tired again.”

You smile, coasting your hand across his hair, as he smiles down at you. “Happy Valentine’s day, Namjoon.”

“Happy Valentine’s day. I love you.”

[END]

author’s note: thank you so much for reading! i hope you have a lovely valentine’s day, make sure to tell your friends, family and loved ones how special they are to you :’)

[scandalsavagefanfic]

So I love angsty brujay as much as anyone but can we get doting!husband Bruce and hot trophy husband/professor Jason who is alarmingly good friends with a lot of the society SOs and uses the info for cases and everyone else is like wth and Bruce is just 😍

Yes! 

I saved this for after the angsty post B&R #20 thing I did so that I could have some sweet, fluffy brujay to make me feel better.

Hope this is kind of what you meant :D

Black Onyx and Gold (Read on AO3)

Words: 2846

Rating: E

Warnings: BruJay, blow jobs, hinted Stephanie Brown/Cassandra Cain… that’s pretty much it. 

[[Jason was never found/taken in by Bruce. Steph is a politician.]]

Bruce never tires of the view when he exits his closet(which is really more of a dressing room) in the mornings. The body sprawledout in his bed is smooth and tan, the sunlight coming through the giant windowshighlights the curves of hard muscle running down the boy’s back, strong armstucked under the pillow. There’s a small wet spot from where he’s drooled inhis sleep.

He approaches the bed, smiling softly, fastening hiscufflinks. The only thing that could make the scene better is if the bit ofsilvery sheet draped over the flawless swell of Jason’s backside slips lower.Or off completely.

Unable to resist, Bruce gently brushes the lock of whitehair, a wonderfully unique birthmark, off the much younger man’s peaceful face.

Jason hums in his sleep, following the light touch before groggilyblinking his eyes open.

“Mmmm… time ‘sit?” He sighs contentedly, leaning intoBruce’s hand as it cups his cheek.

“Nearly six.”

Jason groans and tries to bury his face in the pillow.

“I don’t even have a class today,” he whines, voice muffledby fabric and Eider down, “You’re a very mean, evil man, waking me up soearly.”

Bruce gives a small huff of laughter before lightly dragginghis fingertips across Jason’s shoulders to slowly travel along his spine.

“I have a board meeting at eight,” Bruce rumbles as hisfingers approach their target, “There’s a couple of minor matters to take careof before it starts but I have few minutes if you want to… have breakfast.”

Jason giggles as Bruce’s fingers nudge the sheet just enoughfor the satiny material to slink off him like liquid.

“Breakfast, huh?” He says, turning over, sleepy sea greeneyes flickering in amusement, unconvinced.

Bruce just smiles at him innocently, eyes snapping to theflash of black onyx and gold on the younger man’s hand.

It’s still so new. The sight of it continues to make hisheart leap.

He reaches out, feels Jason smiling happily, watching asBruce takes his hand, lifts it to his own lips and kisses the wedding band.

Jason takes the opportunity to slip his hand around Bruce’shead, tangling his fingers in Bruce’s still (mostly) black hair, and pulls himdown.

The younger man’s lips are soft and warm and even thoughJason hasn’t brushed his teeth yet, Bruce can’t get enough of the taste of him,a lingering flavor of the bourbon they drank last night clings to his tongueand Bruce sucks on it playfully, chasing the flavor of alcohol and Jason.

He moves from his husband’s lips to his jaw, down histhroat, across his chest. He pauses to worry at a pink nipple with his teeth, coaxingout those pretty little choked off gasps he likes so much, before licking thelines of the valleys between Jason’s abs and finally making his way to hisdestination.

It doesn’t take long, once he gets Jason’s length in hismouth. Jason is always so sensitive but especially in the morning, when he’sstill soft and sleepy, all breathless moans, arching into the mattress, onehand twisted in the sheets the other gripping Bruce’s hair tight.

The way the younger man comes undone, so open and trusting,so expressive… Bruce would do anything for him, anything to keep him.

He knows that’s what the kids are worried about. But hetrusts Jason, more than he’s trusted anyone from outside the family in a verylong time.

He knows that troubles the kids too. But they don’t know himvery well yet. Bruce is positive they’ll like him once they do.

Jason finishes with a muffled cry around the fist he’s movedfrom the sheets to his mouth, the gold of his ring flashing in the morninglight. He’s always been vocal about his enjoyment, but ever since he officiallymoved in, he’s been trying to be considerate of that fact that Damian and Tim stilllive down the hall. Even though Bruce has told him the walls and doors are thickenough that they won’t hear.

Swallowing, Bruce lets Jason slip from his mouth, reaches upand gently takes Jason’s hand from where he’s biting down on it, rubbing histhumb over the indentations of his teeth. Then he presses his lips to hislover’s for a sweet, prolonged kiss before standing.

His intention is to check his slacks in the mirror, see ifhe’s wrinkled them too noticeably and change if he must.

But his wrist is snagged in a strong, soft hand, and in onefluid, graceful movement, Jason has pulled him back to sit on the edge of thebed and knelt in front of him.

“I don’t have time,” he objects weakly. A brilliant grinflashes up at him, clever fingers deftly undoing the button, the zipper.

“Guess you’re going to be late then.”

The world dissolves around him, everything narrowing to the wet,velvet heat of Jason’s divinely filthy mouth. The things this kid does with histongue, his teeth, his lips. Sometimes Bruce wonders if it’s an addiction.

When Jason’s intensity and determination is focused entirelyon him, Bruce never lasts.

But the younger man pulls off him with a wet pop when Bruceis moments away breaking.

“Look at me,” Jason rasps and and that’s when Bruce realizeshe has his eyes squeezed shut.

He fixes his gaze on Jason’s face. The pupils in those greeneyes are blown wide under heavy lids, his cheeks flushed pink, lips red frombeing stretched around Bruce’s remarkably long, thick cock.

Jason gives him a mischievous little smirk, makes a show outof wrapping his left hand around Bruce’s member. Black and gold, metal andstone, cool but quickly warming as it slides up and down the heated, red fleshwhile Jason leans forward and ducks his head, gently sucking Bruce’s balls intohis mouth, simultaneously giving Bruce a lovely view of the curve of his ass.

Unlike Jason, Bruce isn’t usually vocal. But he can’tcontain the little shout that is punched out of him. He watches his seed shootdown the line of Jason’s spine, watches as gravity drags it lower and lower, asit disappears between the rounded swells of his cheeks.

Straightening up, Jason licks the tip of his cock, cleaningit of the last drops of release. Then gives him a smug smirk before slipping hisarms around his waist and nuzzling his face against Bruce’s chest.

“I like the ring too,” he says into the lavender silk ofBruce’s shirt.

Bruce hugs him back, kisses the top of his head. Doesn’tbother asking how Jason knows. The boy lives in his head, he’s known that for awhile now.

“You keep staring at it,” Jason answers the unasked questionas he pulls back and stands.

“Hm. It looks good on you,” Bruce hums, pointedly givingJason, standing before him without a stitch of clothing or shame in just hiswedding band, a hungry once over.

The smile that blooms across Jason’s face is radiant and helooks like he’s ready to go another round.

Despite that, he nods at Bruce’s rumpled state. “You’regonna want to change.”

Jason has the shower running when Bruce emerges in a newsuit.

“I’m heading out,” he calls, popping his head into the lavishmarble room.

Jason pauses before stepping into the steam and tilts hishead.

“You gonna brush your teeth?” He asks.

“Already did.”

Jason gives him an exasperated but amused look. “I meanafter you just—"

Bruce leans in, cutting him off with another deep probingkiss, then pulls away and says, “Nope.”

His husband snorts and rolls his eyes.

“Don’t forget about the fundraiser tonight,” Bruce says onhis way out, moving quickly enough to miss the bulk of the grumbling.

 —————————————————————————————————— 

Bruce knows Jason isn’t the most social of men. The galasand fundraisers and charity events are a part of Bruce Wayne’s world and theycan be stressful or tiring for a more reserved, private person. But despiteJason’s grousing and preference for quiet evenings in front of a fire insteadof a band, with a book, instead of a crowd, he always manages to charm andenchant the scions of East coast aristocracy.

He watches his husband from across the room, barely payingattention to the conversation happening in the group around him. Jason islaughing easily with a handful of young women, much closer to his age thanBruce. The sudden reminder that he’s in some interesting company has himwondering if the much older husbands of those much younger women love theirwives as much as he loves Jason. Whether they love them for more than theirpretty appearances.

Jason is a vision. His burgundy three-piece is, unlike allthe silk and cashmere in the room, tweed. Bruce made sure Jason’s wardrobe wasbeyond reproach, that everything was of a quality that would blend with thewealthy. His brown suede Oxfords are the softest Italian leather, his floraltie is silk, his white button-down cost way too much for even the finest cotton.Even though he’d blend better with the extravagance in one of his other suits,one in black or grey or blue, Jason is more comfortable when he gets to behimself, even in a small way, like wearing tweed. Even at the risk of snidecomments. Which is probably why Jason has never replaced his old horned-rimmedglasses with something more fashionable.

Sharp green eyes catch him staring and they smile at eachother.

Bruce has an overwhelming urge to sneak his husband away toone of the many dark nooks around the manor’s grounds.

By the time he refocuses on his immediate vicinity, thegroup he was speaking to has dispersed, apparently losing interest in his… lackof interest.

He grabs a drink from a passing tray and starts trying tofind his kids. Cassandra is where she always is at these things, glued toBarbara Gordon’s side as the Police Commissioner’s daughter interacts easilywith high society. Dick and Tim are speaking to a group of 20-30 somethingsabout business. Or rather Tim is talking and Dick keeps glancing around likehe’s looking for a reason to excuse himself. And Damian is…

“Well, at least he fits in with the other trophy wives.”

Bruce frowns, glancing down at Damian and following his gazeto where Jason giggles with a beautiful, young blond woman.

“Come with me,” he mutters, putting his hand on his son’sshoulder to guide him out to the veranda.

Damian heaves a long-suffering sigh. But if he wanted toavoid another lecture, he should have avoided another tastelessjoke at Jason’s expense.

“I understand that my relationship with Jason is difficultfor you—“

Damian snorts and looks out into the darkness of thegrounds.

“—And that you and your siblings have your reservations,” hecontinues, deciding to ignore the little outburst. “But none of you have reallyeven spoken to him. You haven’t made any attempt to get to know him. You’remaking a lot of judgments based on very little information.”

“I think I have plenty of information, father. You are verywealthy, Jason is very attractive. The most obvious motivations are usually theones at play.”

Bruce narrows his eyes. “Damian. Jason is a doctor and a professorof abnormal psychology. He’s an authority in his field. His research and inputhave greatly increased the efficiency and effectiveness of Arkham, helped captureand incarcerate super-criminals even before he started helping with… our nightjobs.”

“Yes. Teachers and doctors who do most of their work pro bonomake enough money for it to be absurd for us to think it a factor in his…interest in you. And I am certain that you, a man surrounded by some of thegreatest minds in the world at any given moment, are more interested in a man’sbrilliance specializing in a soft science rather than the man’s much moreexceptional looks.”

“Damian.”

“Father.”

They stand in a silent statement for a long moment.

“You’ve made a number of unfair assumptions. First of all,even if Jason wasn’t incredibly intelligent, he would still be deserving ofrespect. He is kind and generous both of which are wildly underrated traits. Ofcourse I’m physically attracted to him, attraction plays a role in allrelationships. But I married him because he’s selfless and compassionate. Heloves this city as much as I do. And he loves me as much as I love him.

“Second, he married me because even now, despite hisaccomplishments, he is constantly patronized and dismissed due to his… humbleorigins. He faces more and more of it the higher he climbs, the more esteemhe earns, the more exclusive his circle of peers and colleagues becomes. I’vealways treated him with dignity, come to his defense when necessary.

“And finally, as if to help drive my point home, the youngwoman he was speaking to in there is not a ‘trophy wife’, as you so tactlesslysuggested. And your instinct to label her as such speaks volumes to your ownbiases. Stephanie Brown is one of the youngest representatives to serve in thestate legislature. She grew up in the East End, just like Jason. They’ve donequite a bit of work together to help Gotham’s less privileged neighborhoods.”

Damian shifts uncomfortably, eyes downcast. He scuffs thesole of his shoe against the flooring.

Bruce puts his hand on his son’s shoulder again andsqueezes.

“Jason is the one who asked for a prenuptial agreement. He’sasked that I don’t touch my will until you are all comfortable with him. Hetries to interact with you and, while none of you are openly rude… you haven’texactly made him feel welcome.

“All I’m asking is that you give him a chance. Speak to himand see where it goes.”

He turns to go back inside.

“Sorry, father. It’s… difficult… to know how to act aroundhim. He’s not much older than us but… he’s you’re husband and it is…complicated.”

“He’s not your parent. You’re all too old for for that and,more importantly, he doesn’t want to be. But he could be a friend.”

“Of course. I’ll… try. Promise.”

Bruce puts his arm out and wraps it around Damian’sshoulders when the teen approaches.

“Thank you, son,” he says as they rejoin the party, “Maybe youcan say something to your brothers too.”

Damian nods and heads off. Bruce loses him in the crowd,making his way to Tim.

“Hey, you,” a warm, rumbling voice purrs into his ear,immediately making him smile, “Where’d you disappear to?”

Jason’s arm snakes round his waist and Bruce returns thehold.

“You promised you’d never leave me alone at one of thesethings,” Jason continues, whispering, before Bruce can answer.

“Hm. Apologies, my love. I was… speaking to Damian.”

“Ah,” Jason grunts, then smirks up at him, “Did he call me a‘harlot’ again?”

Bruce snorts at that eventful memory. “A ‘trophy wife’.”

Jason’s laugh rings like sweet music and Bruce can’t helpbut smile as he watches him, completely smitten.

“Well, I think I may have gained some brownie points withCass.”

“Cass has always been the best about our relationship. Sherespects Barbara and Babs respects you.”

“True. But now she doesn’t have to takes Red’s word for it,”he nods to where Cassandra is gazing wide-eyed and captivated by a cute blondwoman speaking animatedly, hands flying as she communicates with gesture asmuch as words, “I thought she and Steph would hit it off.”

Bruce takes Jason’s hand, plays with the black and gold band,and just gazes at him for a long moment.

“You’re staring, old man.”

Turning to face him, Bruce pulls Jason into his arms andwaits for sea green eyes.

“You are remarkable. Did you know that?” Bruce murmurs tohim, forgetting that there are dozens of other people very likely watching them,“Absolutely singular.”

When Jason’s face flushes pink and he laughs it off, tryingto pull away, Bruce just tightens his embrace.

He closes the distance and presses a chaste kiss to theyounger man’s lips. Then he leans in further, lips brushing the shell ofJason’s ear as he whispers, “I’m going to skip patrol tonight. While the kidsare working, I’m going to take you apart. Slowly. Make you scream like you usedto. By the time I’m through with you, you won’t be able to get out of bed fordays.”

Jason shudders. And then balks when Bruce releases him and walksaway to mingle. He only just makes out Jason’s muttered “Asshole.”

Half an hour later, Bruce catches Dick and Damian standingwith Jason, chatting. Jason looks a little surprised but obviously thrilled at theunexpected inclusion.

For the first time in a long while, Bruce is optimisticabout the future. Or rather, his own future and how happy he’ll be in it.

[drymastercarpetcleaninggc1-blog]

Drymaster Carpet Cleaning

Drymaster Carpet Cleaning offers the following services; Carpet Dry Cleaning. Carpet Steam Cleaning. Heavy Duty Industrial Carpet Cleaning. Fabric Sofa Cleaning. Leather Sofa Cleaning. Tile and Grout Cleaning. All Hard surface Cleaning. Water Damage Restoration. Urine Treatments. Spot and Stain Treatments. Colour repair treatments. Rug Cleaning. Anti Allergen Cleaning. Mattress Cleaning. We service homes, offices, factories, hotels, motels, nursing homes, clubs, schools, real estate agents, etc. Drymaster has been operating since 1990. We take pride in our work ensuring quality of workmanship for you the customer.

Drymaster Carpet Cleaning Gold Coast

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[ourmarkrainesworld-blog]

Gold Coast Carpet Care

Owner Name:

Mark Raines

Address:

1/45 Nerang Street

Gold Coast, QLD

4215

Phone:

04-8001-7886

Website:

https://www.goldcoastcarpetcare.com.au

Business Email:

carpetcaregoldcoast@gmail.com

Category:

Carpet cleaning

Hours:

Monday: 7:00 am–6:00 pm Tuesday: 7:00 am–6:00 pm Wednesday: 7:00 am–6:00 pm Thursday: 7:00 am–6:00 pm Friday: 7:00 am–6:00 pm Saturday: 7:30 am–1:00 pm Sunday: Closed

Keywords:

Carpet cleaning, carpet steam cleaning, upholstery cleaning, tile and grout cleaning, mattress cleaning, water damage restoration and pest control

Description:

Gold Coast Carpet Care is cleaning at its very best. For over 15 years, we’ve been cleaning and extending the life of carpets in the Gold Coast, from Logan to Tweed. Our team have developed an outstanding reputation for excellence. As experts in commercial, residential and bond cleaning, we're the number one choice along the Coast. We specialise in carpet steam cleaning, upholstery cleaning, tile and grout cleaning, mattress cleaning, water damage restoration and pest control. Call us today on 0480 017 886 and find out what keeps our customers coming back to Gold Coast Carpet Care.

[cleaningmatebrisbane]

Carpet Cleaning Gold Coast - Cleaning Mate

Carpet Cleaning and Pest Control Gold Coast is finally here. Cleaning Mate is renowned for being one of the Brisbane’s leading cleaning companies, and we are now offering a comprehensive range of professional carpet cleaning services right here in Gold Coast. We believe in our business and service, and we are committed to providing all of our clients with quality service at an affordable price. Don’t pay too much for your carpet cleaning, just call us today for Gold Coast Carpet Cleaning.

Cleaning Mate Carpet Cleaning Gold Coast services at radius of about 20km from the Gold Coast CBD. Our carpet cleaner’s gold coast offer several services, including Carpet Steam Cleaning, Pest Control, Rug Steam Cleaning, Mattress Steam Cleaning, and Upholstery Steam Cleaning. We have been successfully been operating in the Brisbane for last 9.5 years, and have expanded our services to Logan, Redland Bay, and Ipswich areas, and now the Gold Coast! Contact us today for a free quote. Call your mate, Cleaning Mate, the local Professional Carpet Cleaning Brisbane company.

[matresscleaning123]

Professional Steam Clean |Mattress Steam Cleaning Gold Coast

You can count on nothing less than the most excellent standards when you choose Anchor Mattress Cleaning’s skilled steam cleaners on the Gold Coast. Call us to get a free estimate

[carpet-surgeon]

Professional Carpet Cleaning Services

We offer a range of floor and carpet cleaning services throughout the Gold Coast. We understand your home is important. Which is why we have dedicated ourselves to high quality professional floor and carpet cleaning using the best technology. Your carpets are one of the biggest investments in your house. Therefore you should always call on quality carpet cleaning services on the Gold Coast.

100% Satisfaction GuaranteeOver 10 Years of Experience

Our Gold Coast carpet cleaning technicians work hard to stay up to date with the latest technology and product knowledge. To ensure we give you the best carpet cleaning service throughout the Gold Coast.

We know your carpets deserve expert care. We aim to provide you with affordable and completely professional steam carpet cleaning services on the Gold Coast with our proven carpet cleaning equipment.

Our carpet cleaning services include: Expert Carpet Cleaning, Pest Control, Upholstery Cleaning, Water Damage Restoration, Pet Odour, Mattress Cleaning, Stubborn Stain Removal, Tile and Grout Cleaning.

A clean household ensures your family is healthy and happy,  and we aim to help you keep it that way.

We know your home is much more than an investment to you. That’s why we provide expert advice and strive to maintain its value as part of the service.

We have over 10 years of experience in carpet and tile cleaning. We will look after your home as if it were our own throughout our carpet cleaning process.

Trust us to get your Gold Coast carpets looking and feeling brand new again.

[icarpetcleanandpestcontrolau]

Rug Cleaning Brisbane

Whether you are a new homeowner or have been living in your home for many years, Rug cleaning Brisbane services can help you keep your beautiful rugs looking their best. Rugs are often a great investment, and professional rug cleaners can help you get the most out of your rugs by treating them right the first time. Professional cleaners such as iCarpet Clean and Pest Control Solutions can help you get the best possible results on your rugs.

iCarpet Clean and Pest Control

Carpet cleaning and pest control Brisbane, Logan, gold coast or anywhere else come with various challenges which our experts are trained to handle.We can clean a variety of carpets as well as rugs cleaning , upholstery cleaning, mattress cleaning  and keep a strict check on pest infestation altogether. Our services are all-inclusive and quite affordable for an average home or office.Whether you want someone to clean your upholstery to the highest standards or condition your carpets to remove deep-seated dirt and allergens, our carpet cleaning Brisbane service can be the ideal match for your needs.

We provide elite services designed to make your space sparkling. Our work is guaranteed 100%, so you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Our staff is well trained, professional and ready to take on even the hardest job with confidence and smile. So if you have a carpet or upholstery cleaning job, we have got the right experts for you.

All Aces Rug Cleaning

For rug cleaning in Brisbane, All Aces Services offers quality services and competitive rates. Our experienced team is here to help you with all of your cleaning needs. We have locations in Murarrie, Queensland. For your convenience, we have included a map below. Once you've located the office nearest to you, call us to schedule an appointment or fill out our contact form. We look forward to hearing from you! We look forward to helping you keep your rugs and carpets looking as good as new!

Sunstate Cleaning Services

When it comes to professional rug cleaning, Sunstate Cleaning Services are the way to go. They have been servicing the Brisbane area since 2000, and their trained technicians will treat your rugs with care and professionalism. Not only can they clean rugs in your home, but they also offer deodorising services to keep your rugs fresh and smelling good. And if your rug is stained with pet odours, they will also handle that as well.

Supreme Cleaners

When you need a good rug cleaning Brisbane service, look no further than the services of Supreme Cleaners. These professionals use cutting-edge technologies and productive cleaning tools to remove even the toughest stains from your rugs. You can book your rug cleaning service 24 hours a day, and you can even get it done on the same day! The name Supreme Cleaners is one of the most trusted brands in the area. You can count on them for excellent service and affordable prices.

All Aces

Empathy is not the first word that springs to mind when you think of the cleaning sector, but the operations managers at All Aces Rug Cleaning Brisbane know that it's a critical component of success. Their team enjoys the challenges of the cleaning industry and believes that teamwork is key to their success. They have even treated vehicles and homes contaminated by methamphetamine labs. While empathy is not a common trait in the cleaning industry, this attribute is essential when dealing with the aftermath of drug use and sludgy conditions.

Carpestology

When it comes to rug and carpet cleaning, nothing beats the expertise of a family business like Carpestology in Rug Cleaning Brisbane. The company offers a range of cleaning services, including hot water extraction cleaning. Customers can rest assured that their property is in good hands, since they use safe cleaning products and techniques to give their carpet and rug the freshest and cleanest appearance possible. Whether your carpet needs a deep steam cleaning or a basic cleaning, Carpestology will provide you with a quality service at a reasonable price.

Encapsulation

Rug cleaning in Brisbane is more cost-effective when you use encapsulation. Its accessories last a long time, making the initial cost of encapsulation cleaning a lot less than other methods. However, the bonnets and pads used for this process are subject to wear and tear. Unlike bonnets, which are used for other methods, encapsulation bonnets must be properly cleaned and laundered after use.

iCarpet Clean and Pest Control will take care of everything your needs in Carpet Cleaning and Pest Control Services in Australia. Call our team today to book and Carpet cleaning and pest control Brisbane, Logan, gold coast or anywhere else come with various challenges which our experts are trained to handle.

[goldclasscarpetcleaning]

Spot Cleaning Gold Coast | goldclasscarpetcleaning.com.au

There are numerous advantages of hiring a spot cleaning Gold Coast service. The services offered by these companies include pre-vacuuming, stain treatment, rotary agitation, dry padding, and rotary steam cleaning. The company also provides pet oil and urine treatment, and will remove any visible stains from your carpet. The cost of a spot cleaning Gold Coast service depends on the amount of dirt and staining present on the carpet.

Using professional spot cleaning services is recommended to remove a large amount of stains on a large surface area. Carpets can become stained from urine, which can permanently alter the colour. Professionals from Drymaster use different methods and chemicals to effectively remove the stain. They steam clean the affected area, apply urine treatments, and use a water claw to extract the stain. Depending on the severity of the stain, a carpet lift may be necessary.

Besides removing stains, the professional technicians of Stain Solutions Gold Coast can also clean mattresses and upholstery. These materials can harbor bacteria and germs, which make them unsanitary. These services are available in Tweed Heads and Brisbane. You can also contact them for more information about their services. You can trust them with the job, and they are guaranteed to give you a 100% satisfaction guarantee. When you hire a professional carpet cleaning service, you can rest assured that your carpets will be spotless.

Stain removal Gold Coast is made up of five outstanding technicians. The most experienced technician, Mark Greenham, has been working with the company for 18 years. He is also related to the carpet industry - his parents are in the carpet business. In addition to offering superior service, Stain Solutions Gold Coast also offers excellent customer service. So, whether you have a stain on a floor, a couch or a mattress, a stain cleaner is your best bet.

If you have a pet, you can call Stain Solutions Gold Coast to clean your carpets. In addition to carpet cleaning, the company also offers tile and grout cleaning. Their professional services are available in Tweed Heads, Brisbane, and Tweed Heads. So, you won't have to worry about finding a great spot cleaning service in your local area. It's important to know that you're getting the best service for your money. You can also get a 100% satisfaction guarantee by contacting them.

Stain Solutions Gold Coast has 5 outstanding technicians. One of the most experienced is Mark Greenham, who has been with Electrodry since 1999. He has family in the carpet industry, which makes him a great choice for spot cleaning. However, if your pet has a dirty carpet, don't wait any longer. Your pets will be happy to see a fresh and clean carpet! Your Goldcoast area pet will thank you for it.