"Come here often?" a voice came to Noshiko's ears and plucked her out of her cogitations.
"Satomi-san," she acknowledged, turning around only slightly towards the woman behind her, "But to answer your question, no, this is the first in quite the long period of time for me,"
"Figured so," said Satomi in her usual calm tone. She walked forward and stopped near Noshiko, "Reminiscent?" she asked the celestial kitsuné.
"I suppose, if one may call it so. This is where the story started after all," said Noshiko, looking up at the metallic scripture above an apparently abandoned gate. The sign spelled the title "Oak Creek" out.
The two women stepped over the overgrown and unkempt greenery, walking through the entrance in complete silence. They moved around the run down concentration camp, their eyes darting about freely, allowing old and... Painful memories to resurge.
It wasn't a happy place by any means, everywhere they both looked, they saw the shell of a tragedy. However, it didn't stop Noshiko's face from adorning the ghost of a smile. For a very short moment, she'd caught the sweet scent of chocolate, before it eventually faded along with her smile once she'd remembered how things had ended for all of them there.
"His body is still in Eichen?" Satomi didn't need to specify, for Noshiko to understand whose body she was talking about. She knew very well that Satomi was talking about none other than Reese.
"I believe so. In the basement," she answered.
They both stood at the beginning of a long and narrow corridor, looking intently at all its details; its walls, its floor, the dirty and dusty pipes, it's ceiling that, for some reason appeared to hang lower than the last time they checked. Satomi had a gentle hand on Noshiko's back. She wasn't putting pressure, she wasn't moving, it was just there for comfort. Satomi thought her friend needed that, at the very least.
"The place where it all ended," said Noshiko, her eyes forward.
"For our generation at least," said Satomi in a sigh.
"You got me good back then, I gotta give it to you!" A third voice blared through the haunting hallway.
The two women lifted their gazes, and glared ahead at the creature that came out of the shadows. The voice was unfamiliar, but the tone was anything but that.
"I would have welcomed you back, but I am afraid I would have been lying if I did," said Noshiko sternly.
"Yeah, and we both know how much of a bad liar you are, Noshiko," he said, walking towards them.
Neither of them took a step back, instead, Satomi spoke up, "I see you stole another innocent life," she half asked, half stated.
"Come on now, have some faith in me, will you? This young man was about to take his own life anyway," he said, gesturing towards his own body.
"A nogitsuné has no faith," stated Noshiko in a cold tone.
"Right, we're tricksters. Then again, so are you my dear Noshiko so, lower that chin of yours when you talk my way," he said.
"You and I are not, and will never be the same," she said through gritted teeth.
"What business do you have in this place, demon?" asked Satomi.
He put his hands up, feigning an innocent demeanor, "I am not here to start a fight, if that's where your minds went. Shocking! I know," he said with a smile.
Noshiko squinted her eyes at him, "What is it then?" she asked, suspicion eating at her features.
"Well, sunset is in a few minutes... I just wanted to remind you how the game worked and who comes out to play by night. I thought we kinda owed that to each other. You know how it is between us, old foxes," he paused for a moment to let a sinister giggle out, " Ow! And I really, really wanted to be the first to see your faces when it all goes to hell," he laughed harder at the end of his sentence.
Neither Noshiko nor Satomi knew what he meant by that exactly. But they were both sure, that whatever it was, it was bound to be something coming straight out of their worst nightmares.
*****
"So far, nothing," Lydia admitted, an air of defeat weighing her features down.
Corey had gotten up. He started fiddling with furniture, picking stuff up, then putting them back in their previous places shortly after.
"Okey, but according to you, why would you get your grandmother's name as a clue?" said Mason, still seated across from Lydia.
"Well, this is the place where the whole deadpool thing started. Lorraine hid an old computer behind a wall in the study upstairs, but it's gone now anyway so, I am left with nothing else," she said.
Mason looked away from Lydia. His eyes first landed on Nolan who, appeared to be deeply pensive, but then, his sight fell on his boyfriend, Corey. The latter had gotten his hands on a cardboard box, stacked with old vinyl records. For a moment, Mason sat still, before an imaginary light bulb ignited above his head.
He instantly turned towards Lydia again, "Hey Lydia! You said that you got the first key for the deadpool code, by playing a vinyl record upstairs, right?" he said.
"Yes, that's exactly what happened, why?" she asked, before following his gaze towards Corey's hands, he hadn't noticed that the rest of the room was focused on him yet, "These are just my father's old records," she slightly shook her head dismissively.
"Got a better idea?" Nolan interjected.
The four began to rummage around, until one of them yelled out from a room that he'd uncovered a record player, it was Nolan. After dusting it a tad, they placed the first disk on it, waiting and praying the ancient thing would actually work.
Nothing. Nothing useful to their case at least. The first thirty or something disks were all ordinary music records. By then, Nolan went out to breathe some fresh air into his lungs and Corey sat on the couche behind Lydia and Mason, he was twiddling on his phone; the app he was using, emitted a sound effect that did nothing to improve Lydia's mood nor expand her patience, though she still remained quiet about it.
The banshee was seriously considering calling it a quit, but Mason insisted on trying one more. He played the disk and they both waited and... Waited, for nothing to come out of it eventually.
"Hear anything?" Mason thought that, just because he couldn't hear a thing, didn't mean that a banshee couldn't either.
"No, I can't hear a damn thing!" she inhaled deeply then exhaled in annoyance, all the while bringing her hands up to cover her face, rubbing her eyes in the process then moving her fingers towards her temples, "And for the love of god!" she swiftly turned towards Corey, to yell at him about that stupid sound effect that's been nagging her for a good while, that ridiculous tone that resembled the ringing of an old phone.
But once she'd made an entire hundred and eighty degrees turn... She stopped, her words dying in her throat. She didn't see Corey, nor did she see the couche he'd been sitting on. She couldn't see anything from the room she was previously standing in for that matter. She simply wasn't there anymore.
"Mason?" she turned to him, only for her to realize that he'd disappeared as well.
The only thing that had remained from the previous scene, was that same ringing she'd been hearing. But it had morphed into something much similar yet so different at the same time. Right then, it sounded like the constant ringing she'd always heard in the sheriff station. Her eyes slowly came to the same conclusion, after having to adjust to the new lighting conditions. She was indeed standing in the sheriff station.
Only, it was empty of all and any soul. She found herself standing alone in there, desperately scanning around for clues or a thread in order to pull an explanation her way. She took a few weary steps forward before immediately halting and looking down to her feet. Even through her shoes, she could feel that she'd walked onto a sticky wet kind of substance, viscous and gooey.
That was how her irises fell on the dark crimson colored matter, covering the floor of the entire place. Once she lifted her eyes back up, she couldn't unsee what she'd already seen. Blood on the floors, blood on the desks, blood on the walls... Blood, blood everywhere and anywhere she looked.
Her eyes widened, her breath hitched in her throat and her heart rate quickened. Her chest began to go up and down faster as she spiraled down a fit of hyperventilation.
"Lydia," his voice came from one of the corners, she couldn't see his face, for his figure was darkened under the shadows that were casted upon him.
"Parrish?" she uttered as she finally moved towards him.
But her hopes were crushed when she was able to see the entirety of his face at last. His eyes empty, his skin dry and punctured by multiple shrapnel pieces, some were profoundly lodged into his flesh and others only hanging superficially on the surface, a deep shade of red liquid trickling down from the gashes.
"What happened?" she asked in a quiet murmur, more tears welling in her eyes the longer she stared at him.
"He did it again," that answer didn't come from Parrish. Instead, it came from a different familiar voice.
Lydia whipped around herself, only to catch sight of the sheriff. His condition seemingly much worse than Parrish's. His skin all riddled and torn by the same type of materiel that Jordan had on his face.
"Who did it again?" she tried to ask them, but no matter how hard she shook them, she couldn't seem to get to them. she kept on repeating her question over and over, in hopes that, they turn to look at her instead of through her, like they were at that moment. She frantically ran between Parrish and Stilinski, until something made her stop all of it at once.
A loud, brain shaking and ear damaging boom, blew from the other side of the room. She stood in shock, gawking at the origin of what she later came to understand was an explosion. Looking down again, the floors were no longer only colored in red. But there were also carrying several bodies, all dressed in deputies' uniforms.
Somehow, through the crisis, and all her senses screaming at her to give up and just let her body drop to the ground. Somehow, through all of that, she realized it was nothing more than a vision of the near future. A vision that would become a reality if she wasted more time than she thought she already did.
She bolted towards the doors marking the exit of the station, and just as she jumped through them, she felt a set of arms wrap themselves around her figure.
"Lydia? What's happening?" Mason's voice blared into her ear.
It took him and Corey a few seconds to shake her out of her crazed state. She stopped, looking at nothing in particular for a moment, then, her eyes darted up towards Mason, "Call the station! Hurry! Tell them there's a bomb in the building," she said, tears streaming down cheeks.