Welcome back, everyone!

I hope you all had a really great holiday!

Well...obviously I didn't meet my goal of finishing this story by the end of the year, but thank you all for sticking with me despite my slack updating schedule.

Special thanks to leeancie for adding this story to her favourites list, delmar17 for following, and to jansails, & Sarah Amin for your wonderful reviews. I am incredibly thankful for all of your support and encouragement.

There's only one more chapter after this one, but I'm thinking of doing an outtake or two as well. So if there's anything that you think I may have missed or want to read a chapter from a different point of view, let me know.

:-D

EPOV

I knew it would happen eventually.

"You'll never learn anything from that," my father had said.

"It'll rot your brain," was my mothers opinion.

But I knew.

I knew that eventually all my lonely years spent pouring over comic books and science fiction movies would help me in the future. Obviously I never imagined that it would be this future, but that's beside the point right now. The important thing is that my knowledge helped Jacob, and because of that he is now willing to help us.

I'm a hero.

Explaining everything to the others was surprisingly easy. I guess, after experiencing time travel first hand, the hows and whys of our situation don't really matter anymore. We just want to go home. And while Jacob may have gotten us into this predicament, he's also the only one who can get us out, so we all have no choice but to forgive him and accept his help.

Well...almost all of us.

James Witherdale.

Despite everyone else's attitude changes, he continues to be a dick.

At least he's consistent...

"Oh he wants to help us, does he?" he laughs humourlessly. "How very fucking generous of him, considering this is ALL HIS FAULT!"

"Relax, man," Emmett says cautiously, placing his hand around James' shoulder. "We get to go home, that's the most important thing, right?"

"No it's not," he says angrily, shrugging out of Emmetts hold. "Who says we have to go back? Why can't we stay here? There's plenty of animals to hunt for food and we've got more than enough chicks to help us repopulate the place. And if we run out, we can just get Tonto over there to bring us more. This place is practically a fucking paradise."

"What about our families?" Jessica asks, hysterically. "They've probably been going crazy these last few days looking for us."

"Actually, it doesn't work that way," Jacob interrupts. "You may have been here for days, but in your time you've only been gone a few hours."

"See, no-one's missing us," James says happily. "So why don't we just stay for a while longer, and if we like it here, we can stay for good."

Stay here?

And they thought I was crazy.

As idealistic as James' plan is, there is no way that we can stay here. Our families and friends may not miss us now, but when they eventually discover us missing they will, and if everyone's parents are anything like mine and Alice's, they won't stop searching until they find out what happened to us. Hell, our parents would probably lead the search party themselves.

We're leaving, end of story.

"I hate to rush you," Jacob says seriously. "But I need to return to my time soon, and when I do I will be performing the ritual again send you back to your time immediately. So you need to decide now."

"We're staying-"

"We're leaving-"

James turns to glare at me as I speak over him, silently challenging me to defy him again. I can see his eyes that he's just looking for a fight, so there is no way that I'm going to give him that satisfaction. As Jacob said, we don't have time.

"We're leaving," I repeat, turning to the rest of the group to confirm my decision. They all nod their heads in agreement. From the corner of my eye, I can see Jacob's gaze locked on James. An intense look passes between them, and if I didn't know better, I would almost say that they were having a silent conversation, but Jacob quickly turns to me before I can think anything else of it.

"Are you ready?" he asks simply.

Are we ready?

Hell yeah!

"Ready when you are," I say excitedly. "What do we have to do?"

"All you have to do is lie in the center of the site and wait," he replies. "I will take care of the rest."

We quickly gather in the middle of the camp-site and lie down. I look to Jacob.

"Ready?" he asks again. I nod my head and watch as he slowly surveys our surroundings before turning back to me and smiling.

Then he's gone.

And I'm left with a weird sense of deja vu...

His smile...

I've definitely seen that smile before...