Adria POV:

The arrival of the Living in the house filled the atmosphere with a nearly visible tension. Nellie and the children hid away in one of the second-floor bedrooms while I remained up in the attic for now. It was much better than being down on the first floor where Ross was lurking. He’d made it abundantly clear with the shifts of energy that tonight was going to be a very eventful one.

I had no idea what the succubus and he had done earlier today and frankly, I didn’t want to know or even think about it. Instead, I planned to keep to myself...for now. I couldn’t help but feel afraid of what might come. Ross seemed stronger than I’d ever known him to be before and I honestly wasn’t sure if I’d be able to stop him if he got out of hand.

Curling up into a ball, balancing on the rocking chair as the energy-conserving sphere I was at the moment, I tried to calm myself down.

The night was just starting.

~ * ~

Jared POV:

An hour into the start of the investigation was all it took to setup the static night vision cameras we were going to have Riley monitoring. A few adjustment instructions given over the walkie talkies from our main tech expert and we had an extra pair of eyes in six rooms throughout the house. West had jotted down notes during the interview of the staff and homeowners of rooms with the highest activity or significant history.

Said rooms were the children’s room on the second floor, the bedroom Adria had been killed in on the third floor, the downstairs sitting room, the second-floor study, the kitchen, and finally the attic. April played camera for West, starting their investigation on the first floor. Erin and I played a quick best out of three rock-paper-scissors matches to decide who would be the camera and who would be the one on-screen.

While West and I tended to rub the wrong way a lot of the time, I’d known Erin all my life. He’d lived a block down from my house and he’d been the first kid my age to ever believe me and not judge me when he found out of my abilities. I felt a little guilty though, responsible for the way his life had ended up. Growing up as kids, the two of us had been common targets for bullies.

Oddly though, Erin had never cared about himself. He was instead torn up by how I was treated as the monster or freak by the other kids. As the years past, he’d learned about the paranormal community and from then on he’d developed a passion to find ghosts, prove their existence, and shame all the non-believers. Considering Erin’s normally laid-back, care-free attitude and mannerisms it could be a bit of a shock when we were working and his passion would leak through in a way that clashed with what I’d grown up with.

I won the first match with scissors. Erin beat me with the next two, a rock followed by scissors. I thought for a few seconds of using my abilities to read deeper and see if I could pick up any fleeting ideas of what he might play next...But I didn’t do it. It would have been both a breach of his privacy and a silly reason to do something so invasive to my best friend.

Instead, I let out a tired sigh as I lost to Erin’s second rock play. I couldn’t see his grin in the complete darkness, as he had the camera and he’d been using it to record and see our hand motions. Hearing it in his voice instead, I couldn’t help but smile myself. Despite my own worries, I was happy to see Erin cheering up a little from the serious tension when we’d been outside of the house earlier. Erin just wasn’t Erin if he wasn’t at least a little goofy and cheerful. “Man, I didn’t think I was playing all that hard with rock today,” he sneered.

Rolling my eyes, I turned to start up the first-floor stairs. “Really, Erin?” I shook my head, bracing my hands out in front of me to feel my way around the house. We were about halfway up the stairs before Erin let out a long groan, reaching into the small backpack he was carrying to get a second night vision camera. “Here, bro,” he muttered as he held it out to me. “Keep this up and you’re going to be falling down these stairs and breaking both of our necks.”

I cleared my throat, a bit miffed, as I turned on the camera, waiting for it to boot up. “I’m not that bad, considering I can’t see anything.”

“Dude...Why can’t you just admit you’re clumsy? What’s so hard about that? Say ‘My name is Jared Mackley and I’m a clutz’,” he ordered like he was talking to a baby, encouraging it to speak.

“Ass,” I growled, using the now operational camera screen to guide me up the rest of the stairs.

The fans really like how much the two of us obviously care for each other, the sudden thought passed by. There aren’t a lot of shows like this where you can honestly tell that they aren’t faking that they care for each other. My lips twitched as I could already envision the comments and laughter that would come from the fans’ reactions to our game earlier. It had almost become something of a habit the two of us did. When Riley joined me or Erin, she tended to do the same. West and April saw it as a waste of time and scoffed at it, but it was a way to sort of distract ourselves from really bad locations.

...Just like this one.

Once I’d made it to the second-floor landing, the heavy pressure of oppression was much lighter. I sucked in a deep breath, panning my camera down the long hallway directly to my left. The energy up here was different than downstairs. It had a gentleness to it, an innocent curiosity.

Children.