Sorry about the delay on this - it's been a very busy fortnight. Disclaimer - I do not own these characters.

Tony's first reaction was, in retrospect, the obvious one: "Road trip!"

Unfortunately that instantly fell afoul of an amused look from Gibbs. "Yes and no DiNozzo. Yes for McGee, Fornell and myself. No for you and Ziva."

"But Boss-"

"DiNozzo, have you forgotten that you're both due in court today? The Grant case?"

DiNozzo closed his mouth and then bared his teeth in frustration. "Darn," he said eventually and in lieu of an earthier word. "Testifying in the prosecution of the world's dumbest would-be drug dealer. The man who was so dumb that he only discovered that he was importing laxatives when he sampled the product."

"And the poop hit the fan," said Ziva with a giggle. "Oh come on Tony, it should be a very entertaining trial. We'll have to try not to buck our guts laughing."

"Bust our guts, Ziva," Tony corrected half-heartedly. "Ah well. Too bad, I love a road trip."

"McGee – get in touch with Abby. I don't want to run into any nasty surprises at this Haven place. Find out if anything like this blood clotting event has ever happened there. Tobias – are we flying with real pilots or on some luxury piece of FBI crap?"

This bought him an amused look from Fornell. "Let me make some calls. The FBI does have a Learjet that's faster than the Navy transports with the bucket seats and the vomit bags that you love so much." He smirked and then left, pulling out his cellphone as he walked.

Once he was out of sight Gibbs looked back at McGee, who had been surreptiously typing at his computer. "Get down to Abby now and pull all the research that you can about this place, right now. I've got a sudden very bad feeling about it and I hate it when that happens."

As McGee disappeared towards the lift Gibbs stood and then jogged quickly up their stairs to Vance's office. He needed to warn Leon about this trip, just in case the Director of NCIS needed to turn a blind eye to anything.

Naturally the meeting with Leon morphed into a general meeting about several general operations which then resulted in a side trip to MTAC and a conversation with an idiot in the Pentagon about a covert ops situation that required more information being delivered than said idiot thought it merited.

When Gibbs walked wearily down the stairs he found a note from Tony on his desk. 'Gone to the trial with Ziva. Lucky us. Fornell said to call him at once about the flight. BUT – first go see Abby and McGee in Abby's lab. It's important.'

He looked at the note, frowned thoughtfully and then stomped off to the lift. As he stabbed at the button to get him down to the right level he pondered just why he was feeling so… odd. Well, perhaps odd was the wrong word. Unsettled perhaps? He had the feeling that they were dabbling on the edges of something larger than they thought.

For a moment he thought about Shannon and what his wife would have said about magic. She would have had great fun making up a string of new rules about that. And Kelly – well his little girl would have been intrigued. Given the fact that there was a good chance that she would have inherited his… well, gift, that would have made things even more interesting.

Which reminded him, he needed to have a word with Mike sometime soon. Given the fact that his retired friend knew a great deal about almost everything he needed to ask him if he knew about the supernatural. Chances were that the old bastard knew all about it, but had been 'protecting' him by being quiet about it.

The lift dinged, the doors opened and he strode out into the corridor. As he walked he frowned slightly. Interesting. No loud 'music', if it could be called that, from Abby's lab.

The reason for the silence emerged as he walked in. Abby and McGee were both staring, almost entranced, at the screen in front of them, which seemed to be filled with newspaper reports. By the way that Abby was knitting her fingers together, this was not a good thing.

"What have you got for me?" A simple question, but one which caused Abby to jump out of her skin and then spin around in an instant.

"Gibbs! This Haven place – you can't go there. It's… beyond hinky. It's super-mega-hinky with a side order of dangerous hinkiness attached to it!" Her hands flung out in front of her now, as she struggled to get the concept behind the words out. "I mean, it's off the scale hinky, if hinkiness had a scale, which I don't think it does, but I could work out a metric for it just in case."

"Abby…"

"That's a really interesting thought actually, to work out how hinky something is and then measure it on a scale, but I think I can do it and boy does this place expand the top of the scale and-"

"ABBY!" She froze and looked at Gibbs as if he'd just kicked a puppy in front of her. "What have you found?" Gibbs asked gently.

"Bad things, Boss, bad things." McGee said quietly. "A lot of odd things that have been covered up."

"Such as?"

"Well, if you look at the past two years, there's been a rash of mysterious explosions, one apparent tornado, one series of mysterious disappearances, followed by odd accounts of mere-people in the area, what seems to be an incident where trees attacked buildings and finally a highly localised seismic incident that levelled just the local lighthouse."

Gibbs looked at McGee, who pointed at some of the headlines. "Okay. And you said that someone's been covering this up? How did you work that out?"

"The local paper's called the Haven Herald and judging by the by-lines it's only got two people working for it – Vince and Dave Teagues. They write the stories and take the pictures themselves. And judging by the way that they downplay certain events that sometimes appear in other publications, they're suppressing how weird the place is."

"The earthquake," Abby broke in, waving her hands again, "The earthquake was a BIG giveaway. When the lighthouse fell to pieces they wrote it up as 'structural failure' and said that it wasn't a big deal. Problem is, it was. When lighthouses have accidents the Coastguard puts out automatic alerts saying that there's a hazard to navigation. They have to – a lot of amateur sailors and even some merchant shipping rely on those things. And as there's a lot of automation about these days they didn't know that when the lighthouse was automated they gave it a box of tricks that included weather instruments and a seismometer. The East Coast gets the occasional 'quake. Small ones, admittedly, but occasionally the odd medium one. The sensors went off the scale at the lighthouse just before it all collapsed – but nowhere else. A very powerful but very local earthquake? Yeah, right. Hinky."

Gibbs looked at the headlines again and then had a double-take. "What's this about a rain of marzipan?"

"Supposed to have been an explosion in a candy factory. That just happened to be miles away. On a Sunday. At 4am. Oh yeah, and the place doesn't even make marzipan."

"Ok," sighed Gibbs. "So – hinkiness. The place is odd. Crap. We're going to have to hide this from Fornell."

"I'm afraid so Boss," McGee agreed. "Plus if something does happen we need to hide it from him. Unless he already knows about the supernatural?"

This was a good point and Gibbs folded his arms and had a good mull. He couldn't remember Tobias ever mentioning anything that went bump in the night, but then his old friend could be damn closed-mouthed at times. Plus he was stubborn. He'd warned him against marrying Diane, but the damn fool had still done it. And people as stubborn as Fornell would often fail to shift their position when it came to admitting that perhaps they didn't know everything.

"I don't think that he does," he said eventually. "That said, I'm not willing to bet that he doesn't know. Tobias is a dark horse sometimes. Let's just get there and keep a close eye on things. And get to the bottom of this thing."

Abby wilted whilst at the same time looked steely. He often wondered how she could manage that. It couldn't be easy. Then she rallied slightly. "Ok, Gibbs. But please take care. And now, if you'll excuse us, I have to take my boyfriend into the next room and tell him to come back alive or he'll be in big trouble."

As she led a faintly blushing McGee into the other room Gibbs raised his eyebrows and then smirked. Well, he thought as he headed for the lifts, it took them long enough but they were there. He'd deliver the shovel speech later.

God, but he'd forgotten how much he hated the paperwork. Just being a detective was bad enough. He wondered, with a wry smile, how Dwight was coping with being Chief of Police in Haven. The paperwork for that position was worse. Ten times as worse.

Nathan Wuornos sighed and stood up to walked over to the window. It was raining in Haven, a soft drizzle that had smeared the glass with moisture. Leaning against the doorframe he stared out at the horizon. It had been a week since he'd come back from exile. A week since Duke had appeared with Jennifer, a girl who claimed to be linked to the Barn somehow, and told him that mad (but true) story about being in the Barn itself.

And still no sign of Audrey. He closed his eyes tiredly. Where was she? Who was she? Would she come back as Audrey, or would she think that she was someone else? What had happened in the Barn – what was the damn thing anyway?
Could they stop the Troubles, the supernatural events that were affecting people in Haven, without her? He didn't know. And he hated that.

Knuckles rapped on the doorframe to his office and he turned to see Dwight in the entrance. "We have a problem," the Chief of police said grimly, before walking in, closing the door behind him and then sinking into the nearest chair. "I just got off the phone with an old friend of your father's. Marion Bruin, in the FBI office in Bangor. Apparently there the three federal agents on the way here."

Nate groaned and sat back down at his desk. "Does she know what they're here for?"

His question was answered with a headshake. "Nope. She just know that they're coming up from Norfolk and Washington DC."

This was odd. "Norfolk?"

"Only one of them is FBI. The other two are from NCIS."

"Navy cops? Here? What for?" Then a horrible thought struck him. "Oh god, don't tell me that Duke's been smuggling again and the Coastguard called in the big guns."

"Not as far as I know. She's trying to find out more. Discreetly, of course."

Nate smiled at Dwight with a humourless grimace. "Well, if we wish that the Troubles would die down whilst they're here we'll be damning ourselves, won't we?"

"Too right," Dwight agreed with a sigh. "I've got to head out and investigate a robbery on Copley Street. Can you have a word with Vince and Dave? We need a united front on this I think."

"Can do. I'll have a word with Duke too. Just in case."