bonus #1: doors unlocked and open
author’s note: this story was originally published in the middle of chapter 5, but i like to move it to the end for the sake of pacing. it takes place around the time of ch5! also, i re-published the epilogue instead earlier, so you can ignore that email lol.
He isn’t sure, at first, what woke him up - he’s always been a fitful sleeper, and sometimes it doesn’t take more than the wind picking up outside to rouse him. He rolls over onto his back and shuts his eyes tight, trying to remember what he was dreaming about before, hoping he’s still on the edge of sleep enough that he can slip back into it. It’s not until he tries to focus on his breathing, like the Department therapist told him to do, that he hears the other sound in the room. It’s a scratching, scraping noise, like claws digging into the drywall, over and over. It’s coming from the closet.
Jacob’s heart lurches in his chest, but he keeps his eyes shut and his breathing even, pretending he’s asleep even though his heart is beating a mile a minute and there’s no way he’s going to get back to his dream at this point. The scratching continues. Jacob swallows. His mouth feels dry as a bone.
“Hello?” he says carefully. “Look, if you’re some kind of ghost or spirit or whatever, I’m not Austin. He’s gone.”
The scratching stops abruptly. Jacob strains his ears, but can’t hear anything else, except maybe the whisper of the closet door sliding open. But maybe it’s his imagination. He feels frozen in bed, sure that any second, something horrible is going to be standing over him, and he won’t be able to run. Without even trying, his mind conjures up the image of a hulking werewolf with claws the size of straight razors, huffing hot, pungent breath into his face.
You’re being an idiot, Jacob tells himself, balling up fistfuls of the duvet in his hands. There’s nothing there. You’re going to get up, and see that there’s nothing there. You’re going to see that it’s just a branch scraping against the window, and then you’re going to feel really, really stupid for panicking.
Then again, the noise was definitely coming from inside the closet.
Half panicked, half annoyed at himself for being panicked, Jacob reaches over towards his nightstand and flicks the lamp on. A cursory glance around the room reveals nothing out of the ordinary - no one standing in any of the corners, the window shut, everything on top of the dresser right where it should be. Jacob gets out of the bed and kneels down next to it, heart leaping up into his throat as he checks underneath, expecting - what? A dead body? A ghost to jump out in your face? This is little kid stuff, Jacob. Get it together.
There’s nothing there but the clear, plastic boxes he uses for storage. It’s not likely that a person could even fit under there, with all those boxes. And something the size of a werewolf? Definitely not. Jacob straightens back up, satisfied. See? Just paranoia. Just a funny story to tell the therapist ab-
The closet door is hanging ajar. Just by a few inches, but it was definitely shut when he went to bed. Jacob knows it was. It’s part of his unfortunate nighttime ritual of making sure no one is hiding in his room, waiting to assassinate the president of the Department of Paranormal Research.
But if someone came in after you were asleep…
Instinctively, Jacob slides out the top drawer of his nightstand, opens the hollowed-out Bible inside, and takes out his gun. He’s never had to use it before - not this particular gun, anyway - and maybe this is an overreaction, but “better safe than sorry” seems more applicable than ever right now.
“I have a gun,” he says, loud enough for anyone in the room to hear, and advances on the closet. Using his foot, he opens the door the rest of the way slowly, fully prepared to see something hiding in there among the clothes and shoes.
But there’s nothing - or no one - inside. Jacob steps into the closet, searching the clothes hanging up for any trace of another person. Nothing. Guess it was a tree branch after all.
He reaches out to push the closet open, so he can step out, and his blood turns to ice in his veins. There are marks carved into the back of the door, thin, long, jagged marks, like someone was scraping at the wood with a knife, or maybe their fingernails. Jacob reaches out to feel the damage, but his gut clenches, and he runs to the bathroom to vomit instead.
It isn’t until his stomach is empty and he’s dry-heaving over the toilet does he realize that he left his gun in the closet. Wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, he retraces his steps carefully. The gun is still there, sitting on the carpet, the closet door still flung wide open. Nothing changed. Jacob picks the gun up carefully and gets back in bed.
Someone was here. But they’re gone. Probably left as soon as they realized you were awake, when you thought you heard the closet door opening. Which means they’re either hiding somewhere else in the house, or they just...left. For good. But why would they do that if they came here to kill you?
Jacob swallows, still tasting bile. The Jones house is big, big enough for someone to hide in it without him finding them, even if he stays up and searches all night. Which he wouldn’t do. Too many opportunities for whoever this is to get the jump on him while he’s looking in nooks and crannies. Probably better just to stay up all night in bed, waiting to see if they try and burst through the bedroom door or window.
And if it’s just a ghost or something and not someone trying to kill me...well, they’ve probably gotten a good laugh out of this, he thinks bitterly. And if it’s a burglar, fuck it, let them take whatever they want. I’m not going out there.
Jacob reaches for the phone on his nightstand, staring at the number written down on the Post-It note attached to the keypad as he punches it in, even if he knows it by heart. He cradles the receiver against his head with one shoulder as it rings once, twice, three times. A fourth. Just as Jacob’s convinced he should hang up and try in the morning, he hears the click of someone picking up.
“What?” Finn says groggily on the other end of the line.
Jacob works at his bottom lip with his teeth, training his gun on the door, the safety still on. “Did I wake you?”
“Yeah. S’fine.” Finn pauses for a long time, so long that Jacob thinks he might have fallen back to sleep. “Everything okay? You never call this late.”
“I think someone’s in my house,” Jacob says quietly.
“Are you sure?” Finn asks, sounding suddenly much more awake than he was before. “Did you tell your bodyguard? I’m coming over.”
“No,” Jacob says, a little pained. “Don’t come over. I haven’t told August - I haven’t even left my room. I think they might have left, but I’m not sure - I heard this noise in my closet that woke me up, and when I got up and went in there, there were these...weird marks on the back of the door, like someone was scratching at it. I don’t know what made them. I don’t even know if it was a person at all - Austin used to deal with spirits and stuff and it could be one of those, but I’ve never been able to see them before, and -”
“Jacob,” Finn interrupts him gently, “slow down. Breathe. What do you need right now?”
Jacob takes a deep breath, setting his gun down at his side and trying to force the tension out of his muscles. He feels too tightly wound, like a rubber band ready to snap. “I don’t know. I have to stay awake, right? In case whoever did this is still in my house? God, I don’t even know how they got in, I keep everything locked -”
“Jacob, I come in through your windows on a weekly basis. They’re not hard to jimmy open from the outside.”
The window. Shit. Jacob looks to the bedroom window, and sure enough, the locking mechanism is slid out of place.
“Oh my God,” he says weakly, “yeah. I’m an idiot. Okay.”
“You’re not,” Finn says. “You’re just scared. Are you sure you don’t want me to come over?”
Jacob pulls his knees up, wrapping his arm around them. “Yeah. I don’t want to get you mixed up in...whatever this is. Like I said, I don’t know if they’re still here or not. But I have my gun, so if I see anyone creeping around, I’ll just shoot them, I guess.” He pauses, looking down at his gun, a hard, black shape on the white sheets. “You don’t think it’s one of your people, do you?”
He doubts it is, but he has to ask anyway. A lot of the criminals in Finn’s loosely-defined organization don’t exactly feel the need to answer to Finn, or to let themselves be micromanaged at all.
“I don’t think so,” Finn says. “It doesn’t sound like anyone here’s style. But I’ll ask around.”
“Thanks,” Jacob says. He can feel his eyelids threatening to droop, exhaustion setting in bone-deep as the adrenaline starts to wear off. “I’m going downstairs to make coffee. Can I call you back from the kitchen?”
“Of course.”
“Thanks.”
There’s no sign of anyone on his way downstairs. He manages to scare himself nearly to hyperventilation by stepping on a floorboard that lets out the loudest groaning noise he’s ever heard, but it’s the only incident of note. The kitchen is dark, and silent, and Jacob goes for the phone on the wall even before he starts up the coffee maker, punching in Finn’s number again and hoping he hasn’t dozed off.
“You know, whoever was in your closet is probably more afraid of you than you are of them,” Finn jokes, as he picks up. “Otherwise, why cut and run like that as soon as they knew you were awake? Most people would just say ‘fuck it’ and cut their losses and kill you.”
“That’s cheery,” Jacob says dryly, but a pair of his brain thinks, maybe Finn’s right. Because if they were hiding in the closet, in my bedroom, they couldn’t have been here to rob me or anything like that. So why cut and run?
“I’m just saying, it’s not the worst-case scenario,” Finn says. “Listen, I’m sure that whoever it was, they aren’t going to come back around looking for you now that they know that you know they were there. It was probably a newbie bounty hunter who chickened out.”
“Okay, but why the marks on the door?”
“Maybe they were bored. Maybe just to freak you out. Hell if I know.”
“I don’t like this,” Jacob admits, watching coffee drizzle slowly into the pot. “Something feels wrong about this whole thing. Just...off, you know?”
“Like I said, I can look into it, if you want,” Finn says.
“I’d like that.”
“Then consider it done.” Finn pauses, then continues. “Okay, asking a third time - are you sure you don’t want company? Because if you’re this freaked out, I don’t think -”
“You can come over for breakfast,” Jacob says, smiling wanly. He doesn’t want Finn to see him like this - exhausted and racked with anxiety, in probably vomit-stained pajamas. At least waiting until the sun is up will give him a chance to calm down, take his meds, and - well, maybe showering when there’s possibly someone else in the house isn’t the best idea.
“I’m going to go wake August up and have him help search the house,” he adds, looking out the kitchen window. The lights in the guest house, where his bodyguard August lives, are off. Hopefully he’s okay. “But I’ll send him back to bed before the sun comes up.”
“Perfect,” Finn says. “I’ll bring donuts. And, JJ?”
“Yeah?”
“Things are gonna be fine. Okay?”
“Okay,” Jacob says, trying to sound like he believes it.