Chapter 1: Espresso Exorcism
Nine at night draped Lumin Grove in a hush that always felt a little fake, like someone had put a mute filter over the town and forgotten that weirdness didn’t care about quiet hours. The neon maple leaf above Lumin Bean & Brew sputtered to life as I rounded the corner, casting a syrupy glow across the sidewalk puddles. It flickered, then steadied, buzzing like a sleepy bumblebee.
The bell over the café door tinkled when I pushed inside. A wave of warm air kissed my face: espresso, cinnamon, caramel, and the faint tang of industrial cleaner. The cozy chaos of the place wrapped around me with its mismatched chairs, thrifted oil paintings of stern geese, a wall of mugs that didn’t match any human aesthetic, and the chalkboard specials in Pepper’s loopy handwriting:
Maple Moon Latte
Graveyard Shift Cold Brew
“Look who survived the day shift,” I said to Zeke.
He was behind the counter with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, coaxing foam into a dragon that curled around a porcelain rim. He didn’t look up. He didn’t have to. He always knew when I walked in.
“Barely,” he said. “A guy tried to pay me in Monopoly money and then argued it was collectible currency.”
I dropped my messenger bag beneath the register. “You should’ve given him Boardwalk in change.”
Zeke flicked a glance at me. “You’re assuming I had the energy. I just rang it up as delusional tax.”
“Not bad.”
He finished the dragon and handed the latte to a customer. “That foam is anatomically inaccurate,” the customer said, peering into the cup. “Dragons do not have… latte scales.”
“We do what we can with steamed milk,” Zeke replied. “Enjoy.”
Just then Mrs. Donner barreled in, rattling a big plastic shopping bag full of who-knows-what conspiracy pamphlets. She wore sunglasses the size of serving platters despite the fact that it was night.
She slammed both palms onto the counter. “Harmony. Zeke,” she hissed, “your espresso machine is haunted.”
I blinked. “Good evening to you too, Mrs. Donner.”
She leaned closer. “I heard it chanting Latin last week. You two mark my words. You’ve got spirits in your coffee.”
“It was a broken gasket,” Zeke replies. “No spirits, I promise.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You’re both covering for them.”
Pepper whirled past with a clipboard, big round glasses perched on her nose, and her purple dyed hair yanked into a high ponytail that looked like it was fighting for its life. “Inventory, health code, and if one more customer asks if we serve blood orange for vampires, I am filing a complaint with the Department of You’re Not Funny.”
I leaned on the counter. “Your tail’s showing.”
She jolted. A brown-furred streak flicked into view at her ankles and vanished. “It’s stress,” she hissed. “Stress makes it… expressive.”
Zeke glanced at the clock and slid a ring with two keys off his belt. “Foam Picasso is clocking out.” He tossed me the keys, and I caught them one-handed. “Try not to summon anything I can’t mop up tomorrow.”
“Goodnight to you too,” I said.
He paused at the door, smirking. “You got this.” And then he was out into the lamplight, earbuds already in, shoulders loose, a day person slipping back into his normal.
The evening rush trickled, then thinned. The regulars cycled through: Harris the security guard, who asked for a triple shot and no judgment, a pair of teachers whispering over cinnamon scones while grading papers with red pens like they were staking vampires.
A teenage goth girl slipped in, eyeliner like pitch. She pointed at the café bathroom door. “It’s a portal to another realm.”
I rubbed my temples. “Look, kiddo. You can believe the bathroom’s a portal. Just… please don’t go conjuring demons in there. It’s bad for business.”
She shrugged and ordered a vanilla latte.
For a moment, the café settled into the warm hum I loved. Milk hissed. The grinder purred. The neon maple fluttered in the window like a heartbeat. I breathed. Maybe, just maybe, tonight would be a simple run of drinks and mild sarcasm.
The bell chimed. Noah stepped in with what I call ‘October Hair.’ It’s quite messy and somewhat wind-swept. He unzipped his EMT jacket unzipped and sighed as he reached the counter.
“Rough shift?” I asked.
He dropped into a chair near and leaned back, stretching out his legs. “You could say that. Old Mr. Thompson locked himself in his bathroom and refused to come out until someone promised him the local squirrels weren’t plotting his murder.”
I blinked. “…Were they?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Honestly, in this town? I’m not ruling it out.”
I snorted a laugh.
We slipped into easy banter. I teased him about his hero complex. He accused me of being Lumin Grove’s “weirdness magnet.”
“You mean I’m the problem?” I asked.
“I’m just saying… wherever you go, things tend to… happen.” He leaned on the counter, palms splayed like he was bracing the bar through an earthquake.
Pepper breezed out of the back, saw Noah, and stifled a grin. “Our favorite EMT. Care to test the maple-lavender experiment?”
“Pepper,” I warned.
“What? Lavender is calming.” She lowered her voice. “And I want to see if he blushes.”
Noah’s mouth quirked. “I’ll take a regular latte.”
The espresso machine made a suspicious gurgling hiss, like it tried to clear its throat before delivering a speech. A puff of cinnamon-scented steam whooshed out.
Noah raised an eyebrow. “That’s not… normal, right?”
“It’s just a little dramatic. Like me.” I waved it off. “Machines hiss sometimes.” But I heard the faint whisper of Latin under the hiss of steam. “Nope,” I whispered. “Not tonight.”
The neon maple leaf outside flickered.
“Pepper,” I said without moving my body an inch. “Do we have any salt?”
She was already on it, sliding a shaker across the counter like we’d rehearsed.
I drew a quick ring of salt around the machine’s base, because sometimes you could brute-force the uncanny into behaving if you gave it boundaries and a firm voice. That was my whole life: boundaries and a firm voice.
The machine hissed deeper this time. The steam wand jerked, and then, in a tragically theatrical flourish, the thing spat a jet of micro foam that curled into letters across the stainless tray: Ask About the Leaves.
Pepper inhaled like a balloon. “Harmony.”
“I see it.”
Then… a low voice emerged from deep inside the machine, chanting something definitely Latin.
In nomine caffeinae et saccharum.
Teen Goth was at the bar now, her huge eyes fixated on the letters. “Is this a… performance?”
“Absolutely not,” I replied. “It’s an… interactive art piece about seasonal produce.”
Noah ducked behind the counter. “Please tell me it’s not supposed to chant?”
“Of course it’s not supposed to chant!” I yelled.
The machine juddered. The lights dimmed. The bell over the door trembled without the door opening. My fingers went cold.
“Okay,” I whispered to the metal beast. “We’re going to breathe.” I laid my palm on the warm steel, inhaled cinnamon and steam, then muttered the half-prayer, half-chant I had pieced together from a cookbook and a three-hundred-year-old pamphlet on kitchen spirits: “By bean and brew, by cup and coil, by patience steeped and sugar’s spoil, be kind, be calm, be still tonight; we serve, we steam, we do not bite.”
“Did you just rhyme at it?” Pepper asked.
“Don’t judge my process.”
Noah edged closer like he wanted to help but wasn’t sure how. “Do you need—”
“I need a towel.”
He passed one. Our fingers brushed. Static snapped. The machine whined, and a string of caramel drizzle lifted from the counter, forming a perfect, shimmering maple leaf in the air before splatting back down like it had remembered gravity.
“Okay,” I said between my teeth. “Boundaries.”
I popped the front panel with my thumbnail and reached inside, feeling for the pipes and bones I’d memorized. My hand grazed something that shouldn’t have been there. It was a cool metal where there should have been tubing. I closed my fingers around it and tugged.
A tiny silver maple leaf charm dropped into my palm; its veins etched in delicate runes that pricked at my skin like a whisper. It was warm, like it had been sunbathing under a different kind of light.
The machine sighed like a creature settling back to sleep and the café exhaled with it. The lights steadied and a stray napkin fluttered to the floor. Conversation resumed in a jittery trickle.
Teen Goth whispered. “That was pretty awesome.”
Pepper grabbed the salt and sprinkled her own nothing to see here circle. “Everyone okay? Good! Loyalty cards double points for not posting that to The Lumin Grove Lowdown—”
“Pepper,” I spoke. “I wouldn’t bribe them with points.”
“I will literally name a scone after you if you keep quiet,” she told Teen Goth. “The Emo Eclair.”
“Sold,” Teen Goth said.
Noah’s gaze dropped to my fist. “What is that?”
I curled my fingers over the charm until the runes bit. I suddenly, absolutely, did not want him to see it. “A bolt,” I said. “Or a… washer. A metal thing.”
“Looks like a leaf,” he said gently.
“I’ll add it to the junk drawer.”
Pepper’s tail flicked. “We don’t have a junk drawer.”
“We do now.”
Mrs. Donner slammed her empty cup down with the satisfaction of a gladiator. “I knew it,” she announced to no one in particular. “Haunted foam.”
“Decaf next time,” I replied
Noah’s smile was careful like the kind you used around injured animals and people pretending they were fine. “You okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “Just need to clean all of this up.”
He didn’t push. He never did. “I’ll stick around. Help close, if you want.”
I wanted him to. I also wanted to hurl the charm into the nearest storm drain, and crawl into bed.
We went to work: wiping counters, stacking chairs, recalibrating the grinder that definitely had not sighed at me. Noah flipped chairs with quiet efficiency. Pepper vanished into the back with her clipboard and a mutter about finishing her paperwork.
When the last stool was flipped and the last customer left, I locked the register and tugged my jacket on. The charm sat heavy in my apron pocket, pulling at me like a magnet.
“Walk you out?” Noah asked.
Normally, I’d deflect. But my nerves were still buzzing from the espresso machine stunt. “Don’t you usually drive?” I asked.
“Car’s in the shop,” he said with a shrug. “Timing belt.”
That explained why he’d been hoofing it lately. He tilted his head, patient, waiting for me to decide.
My mouth opened to say no, but my brain hesitated. For a heartbeat, it felt like the whole room tilted toward him, like I was standing too close to a magnetic field.
“Sure,” I said at last. “Why not.”
His answering smile was small but warm. “Good. You look like you’ve had enough weird for one night.”
“Understatement of the century.”
Outside, the night was crisp. The neon leaf buzzed overhead, washing the sidewalk in soft red-gold as I locked the café door. The bell gave one last valiant jingle.
That was when I saw it: across the street, between two lampposts, the darkness wasn’t empty. Someone stood very still, as if carved out of shadow. No face, just a hood and the suggestion of human. The kind of stillness that didn’t belong to anything alive.
My heart did a rabbit impression. I told it to sit.
The streetlight above the figure popped, spilling darkness across the pavement. In the beat before it flickered back, I felt the charm shift in my pocket. It burned hot against my thigh and I fished it out with two fingers. The runes glinted like they were laughing.
When the light blinked back on, the figure was gone.
I swallowed hard. “Think I’ve had enough weird tonight,” I whispered.
Noah’s voice came steady from beside me. “Then let’s walk.”
And I did — falling into step with him, the charm clenched tight in my fist.
