A/N: I almost completely forgot to answer the past two anonymous questions I got through the reviews. I did answer them but only as an update to the respective chapters so there's a chance the guest users haven't seen them yet, so I'll just re-answer them here: HABIT and Firebrand are characters from EverymanHYBRID and TribeTwelve respectively, both are Slenderverse/Slender Man YouTube ARG series similar to Marble Hornets. I loved HABIT's concept too much to not include him in here.

Also! I forgot to mention this: the SCP numbers I've assigned throughout this story are not canon. I add the S suffix at the end of their item numbers to denote they are only part of this fanon and not the SCP canon. In other words, the NoEnd House is not a canon SCP object, but it is one in this story.

A pale hand reached around the doorframe and she pulled the trigger.

Something collided against the open door, slamming it hard against the wall behind it, almost as loud as the echo of the gunshot. As soon as she turned the barrel at it, a dark blur moved in between them and slammed itself against the wall in the hall outside, before moving back into the darkened room again and crashing against the wall right beside the door, almost two steps away from where the detective stood, stunned.

Jack took a step back to separate himself from the blur, now standing in the dim light flooding in from the hallway into the enclosed room. She could hear the low growl reverberating from his throat as he stared down at something crouching against the wall—something almost brilliantly white that stuck out like a sore thumb in the darkness of the room.

She barely registered Jack calling for her to stand back when the white figure launched itself off the wall and towards the latter, dissolving the two back into another incoherent blur. The next thing she knew, a flash of white hurtled across the table and crashed hard against the chair on the other side, collapsing once again into an unmoving chalk-white lump half-entangled with the bent metal chair.

"Get out, detective!" His voice was rasping in between his heaving breaths, and a shiver crawled down her spine. "Now!"

She saw a brief glimpse of something moving in front of her and snapped her head back just in time to see the white figure flung itself straight for her; she felt the slight recoil from her gun when she pulled the trigger before her knees collapsed, and the next thing she knew, air rushed past above her skull, and something struck the wall behind her, missing her by only a mere quarter of an inch as little chipped flakes of concrete started falling onto her hair.

Within the same breath, a dark blur rushed over and slammed the white figure to the wall beside them, then threw it over back to the chair and across to the other side of the room. Jack's hand reached up and snatched something above her head before appearing over the intruder in the blink of an eye, and she caught the glint of a silver blade too late before he drove the weapon straight into the shoulder of their pinned-down assailant.

She clamped her hand around the grip of her gun and raised it, pointing the end of barrel straight at the cannibal.

A slow, rasping cackle echoed from across the room.

"Oh, I've missed you, too, old friend. It really has been too long."

She could barely hear the grating speech over the pounding of her own heart against her ears, but a cold shiver ran down her spine the moment it spoke. Keeping her gun aimed in their direction, the detective slowly got back up to her feet, and with shaking legs, limped her way halfway across the room. Her eyes caught a glimpse of the pinhole-pupiled eyes and the wide, red-lipped grin stretching painfully across a bleached face staring up at the eyeless cannibal towering over him, and her grip started to shake.

She almost jumped when whiteness suddenly blinded her vision, for at least two seconds before she forced herself to blink and the glare dimmed gradually into a comfortable amount of brightness illuminating the room they were in. The back-up generator shouldn't have taken this long, she thought.

A low snarl rose from the cannibal's chest as he glowered down at the intruder, pressing a single boot down on the latter's chest. "You shouldn't have come here," he breathed out through seething teeth.

A rasping growl appeared from the doorway and the detective spun back around to face it. A dog was her initial thought—a Siberian husky with dark grey fur covering most of its body, and large white patches over its entire face, ears and abdominal area, except she could've sworn it was tinted with a light shade of pink even in the dim lighting. It wasn't any ordinary dog, though; she was sure no ordinary dog would have the wide, toothed, almost human-like sinister grin stretched underneath the muzzle, like the dog standing in the open doorway, staring at her now.

And when its eyes found her, the growl grew louder and it stretched its lips even further, when a short, sharp whistle rang through the room, immediately turning the mutt's attention to where Jack stood, hovering above his former friend.

"Heel, boy," he called out to the dog, and much to her surprise, it stopped growling, briefly returning its mouth back to normal before it obediently trotted across the room, avoiding direction Bishop was in, and over to the cannibal's side. The creature then plopped down beside his heel, beside the ever-grinning, paper-white face whose scoff quickly turned into a painful grimace.

"Smile always did like you more than me." A few droplets of blood sputtered out from the intruder's mouth, onto the white collar of his ivory clothes. "Must be something about you feral freaks. You know, between one mutt and another."

"Shut up," Jack growled back at the stranger, then pressed his boot harder against the latter's chest. "The fuck are you doing here, Jeff?"

Jeff the Killer tilted his head to the side, the spine-chilling grin returning to his face as he stared back at his former ally. "What am I doing here? What do you think I was doing here? I'm rescuing your sorry ass, you sonofabitch, and this is how you repay me?"

"Rescue me?" The cannibal scoffed. "The fuck do you think I am? Some damsel-in-distress?"

Jeff grinned even wider, though the detective could've sworn there was a slight twitch in his eye in spite of him. "Well, I thought I'd do my old buddy a favor and spring you out before shit goes to worse like the first time around."

Jack scoffed again. "Yeah? And where were you that first time, huh? Why now? Why not then? Too much of a coward to go up against the big guns?"

"Hey, look, about that—" Jeff closed his eyes briefly and clicked his tongue. "I didn't know you got caught until after you got caught, okay? You know, those walls are pretty thick, and they've got some tough security in there. It would've been, like, trying to bust you out of some maximum-security prison, or worse, the Tall Man's playground."

The Tall Man. So, he knows about him, too.

"That's never stopped you before."

Jeff frowned, though the upward-carved corners of his mouth created a distorted mess sent an uneasy chill down the detective's spine. "Well, I've been thinking the past few months. Been putting some more value on my neck."

"Didn't know you could even think."

"I don't have super healing powers like you do," the killer quickly interjected, furrowing his forehead at the cannibal for only a brief second before his face relaxed and the twisted grin returned. "But, hey, look, I'm here now, aren't I? So, why not let bygones be bygones, and we get the fuck out of here while we still can?"

Jack closed his eyelids and sighed loudly. "I didn't get caught, dumbass. I turned myself in."

The ever-grinning killer's lip began to quiver, and his eyelids twitched. "You're kidding." He paused, likely thinking Jack would refute his own statement, but when the cannibal turned his face away from him, Jeff frowned. "You've got to be shitting me. They have one of those Foundation freaks in here, Jack. He's out there in the frickin' hallway, for Christ's sake! Smile pounced on him before I even told him to!"

Jack briefly glanced at the dog with clear indifference before turning back to his former comrade. "You think I haven't known that by now?"

Jeff blinked, staring wide back at the cannibal as his smile began to falter. "Are you high? Are you, like, smoking or something? Have you eaten in a while, or—"

"It's none of your business, jackass." Jack pressed his boot down harder, and a small sound came out of Jeff's throat. "You really, really shouldn't have come here."

"And what about that bitch over there?" Jeff spewed out another few more droplets of blood, almost spitting in Jack's direction. "She's pointing her gun at you, and you're okay with this?"

Jack turned his head ever so slightly, as though acknowledging the barrel of the detective's Glock aimed right at his chest, and her index finger twitched. She might have acknowledged this was a young man in pain a mere few moments ago, but the past minute had been her wake-up call; he was stronger than anybody in this building, moved faster than the rest of them, too. Her eyes couldn't even register what he did and where he was going until all the action was over. He made quick work of the bloodthirsty serial killer pinned underneath his boot without so much as batting a single eyelid. He could snap her neck before she could even pull the trigger if he wanted to.

But he didn't. Something inside of her had to tell herself that. He didn't, and she wasn't going to, either.

And he gazed in her general direction as if acknowledging this same fact, before he turned his head away and stared back down at the grinning killer. "Check on Gilliam," he murmured, just loud enough for her to hear him, then gave the dog another brief glance. "He might need some medical attention."

A single ringing chime echoed through the room. Her arm tensed involuntarily and then she blinked hard, consciously letting her bated breath escape her lungs as she turned her attention to the source of the intruding sound.

Skye's phone was on the ground, right between the table and where she stood, its screen lighting up like a single Christmas light amidst the shadow of the table.

Glancing one last time at Jack, the detective slowly lowered her gun and quickly bent down to pluck the phone from the floor. "It's him," she said upon reading the text notification.

"What did he say?"

"What? What did who say?"

She unlocked the phone and opened the message. "'Not here,'" she read aloud. "'But take caution. Expect the unexpected. If you're lucky, you all escape alive, or you die a swift and painless death. Nevertheless, best of fortunes.'" How thoughtful, she thought grimly. "'P.S. if you find them, tell her the chessboard is waiting.' Signed, F." She glanced up from the phone and looked toward Jack. "Chessboard?"

The eyeless man shrugged. "Their business, not ours. But it looks like HABIT's not lying. He does have them with him."

"Who has who with him?" Jeff snapped his head at both of them, frowning. "The fuck you guys are talking about?"

"That settles it," Jack continued, completely ignoring the grinning killer as he finally lifted his boot from the latter. To the detective's surprise, Jeff laid still on the ground, his features twisted into curious confusion, still entrapped in a child-like trance. "I'll go find them, then I'll come back here as soon as I do. And here's hoping he won't have done anything to them by the time I track them down, too."

"Wait, Jack." The detective scoffed, taking a step forward as the eyeless man started towards the door. "You can't go in there alone."

He stopped and turned back to her, his gaze just a few inches off to the side of her direct line of sight. "I don't have a choice," he murmured insistently, shaking his head once. "I can't just sit here and wait. I actually have a chance now. I'm not going to waste it while it's still there."

She raised the phone in her hand. "You heard what that text said. You need backup."

"I'm not going to risk any more lives on us."

"Someone is trying to frame you for murder." She took a deep breath and sighed. "Can call it witness protection, if you ask me."

He took a few moments to ponder exactly what she meant, frowning deeply when the realization came over him. "No. I can't let you do that, detective. Gilliam won't either. Look, no offense, but you have your own job to worry about." He shook his head again. "There may be something in Toby's belongings that can lead you to Clock—his room is at the end of the hallway. You already know who we are, we've got nothing left to hide. Feel free to ransack the whole place if you have to. It wasn't going to last, anyway."

Her shoulders fell. "Jack—"

"Update me on the case when I get back, okay? I want this bastard caught as much as you do."

If he gets back, she thought with a frown. It was a suicide mission. She didn't even need the text to tell her that it was. "And what about him?" she asked instead, and nodded to the side, where Jeff the Killer remained lying still on the floor, his own weapon still buried deep into his shoulder.

"I'm right here, you know," he chirped, grinning slyly at the two of them.

She frowned. "You're just going to leave him here with us—"

"We can take him."

Bishop spun to face the door and didn't bother masking her sigh of relief. Gilliam stood in the now-brightened hallway, leaning his side against the doorframe—his hair was a disheveled mess, his jacket was unbuttoned with a torn left sleeve, his shirt was soiled and his tie was crooked, and she could've sworn there was a bite mark on the collar of his shirt. He looked like he had been mauled by bears, she thought grimly, but she was all too relieved he was still standing otherwise, when the black-and-white mutt in the corner of her eye started growling again.

Gilliam shot a stink eye at the dog and scoffed.

"I came here because I thought it was you two who did the deed," he sighed instead, turning back to his partner at first, then at Jack, then finally to Jeff. "I suppose one out of two is good enough for now."

"Oh, hell no." Jeff's hand shot up and grasped at the handle, not realizing how deeply embedded it was until he tugged on it and scrunched his face from the pain. The dog whimpered. "You are not throwing me over to the fucking G-men—"

"Actually, you know what? I won't," Jack suddenly said, turning his direct attention back to his former comrade, hollow sockets staring down at the grinning killer without so much as a single hint of emotion across his face. He inhaled deeply, then sighed. "I'm taking him with me."

"Wait, what?"

"What?" Bishop echoed Jeff in her own bewilderment, eyes glancing back and forth between the eyeless man and the grinning killer below them. "Jack, you can't be serious."

Jack looked up and stretched the corner of his lip, before quickly returning to his neutral expression as he turned back to Gilliam at the doorway. "Well, as long as it's okay with you."

"Can you even trust him?" she asked.

He shook his head again. "No, but I'm not giving him a choice." As if to illustrate his point, he slowly lifted his foot again and hovered it above Jeff's injured shoulder, then began to press down next to where the knife handle stuck out. Despite his unwavering grin, Bishop could almost see the embers of red flaring in the killer's eyes.

Gilliam slowly shifted his weight from one foot to another before taking a single step into the room, eyes glaring at everyone. "This was not part of the deal, Jack."

"And I'll still uphold my end of it," the cannibal bargained, briefly glancing at the agent before turning back down to Jeff. "Me and him, package deal. Can't promise I'll bring him back in one piece, but I'll try."

Beneath the boot, Jeff scoffed. "Great. So now I'm a bargaining chip, huh?"

"Shut up." If Jack still had his eyes, Bishop thought, she could see them rolling up to the ceiling before turning his head back at Gilliam. "I would assure you I'm a man of my word, agent, but Skye and Toby aren't here to attest to that. So until then…"

Bishop looked toward her partner and saw the wrinkled lines across his face. She wasn't sure how much pain he was in—it didn't look like there was bleeding anywhere, but his face and torso were all scratched up, with chunks of fabric missing from the torn sleeve. Gilliam closed his eyes as his hand went up to swipe the corner of his mouth, and a few moments later, he sighed.

"One piece, Jack," Gilliam breathed through his teeth, raising a single index finger up to the cannibal as though the latter could even see it. "I assume you want the dog, too?"

Jack glanced at the mutt, who had since remained silent in the former's presence, and made a small nod. "His nose is still better than mine," he said, sniffling a little. "One thing I know about HABIT's domain, there's no reliable way to track down the nearest portal, but the dog should be able to sniff it out sooner or later. Sooner than I can, at least."

"The entryways. Right, speaking of—" Gilliam cleared his throat and tried to straighten his posture, doing his best to take another limping step into the room. "I figured that might be a problem for you, but I've been thinking about a way to work around that."

Jack gazed at the agent, eyebrows arching upwards, body leaning a little forward when both he and the detective saw Gilliam's unstable form tipping a little too much to one side, only for the agent to stretch his arm out and grasp the corner of the steel table in the center of the room before he could fully topple over.

"I'll need to make a few calls first." Gilliam managed to reach the closest chair and didn't hesitate to sit down, as his hand reached to his back pocket to fish out a pair of handcuffs which he quickly tossed over to Jack's direction. "And pull a few strings, maybe call on a couple favors. It'll only take a minute."

Jack stood still for a few solid seconds, gaze fixated on Gilliam until he had to bend down and twist Jeff over so he could restrain the crazed killer with the handcuffs. "You don't have to."

"No, but it should help get things moving along right away," Gilliam pointed out, and fished out his own cellphone from the inner pocket of his suit jacket. "Better than waiting for one of those portals to appear somewhere. No telling if there even is one in this state alone. The sooner you get them out, the better it is for all of us."

Then he turned to Bishop, and she couldn't help sharing a small smile with him before he punched a button on his phone and turned his sole attention back to it. She crossed her arms as she switched over to Jack, watching him toss the helpless Jeff over to the bent chair, glaring at the latter as though daring the latter to retaliate. He didn't though, instead grumbling under his breath as he tugged the arms bound behind his back, hissing through his teeth and finally resigning when the knife in his shoulder shifted a little too much, and the deep red stain on his white clothes started growing again.

Staring at the embedded blade, Bishop clicked her tongue and sighed. "Can't talk you out of this, huh?"

To her surprise, the eyeless man blew a breath through his nose, making a strange sound that bordered between a scoff and a laugh. "You know, you remind me of someone, detective," he said, stuffing his hands in the pockets of his jacket as he leaned against the wall behind him, casting his gaze to the table between them. "A friend of Skye's. I think he was a journalism student, but he had the nose for these things like you do. Curious and stubborn, often to a fault, too." Then he paused, lowering his gaze. "He tried to find her, too, after the Operator took her the first time. I told him it was too dangerous. Don't think he listened."

"Is he still alive?"

"Think so." Jack nodded solemnly. "Think she went to meet him when we passed Colorado. You know, when we were running from the Foundation." He tilted his head at Gilliam. "Wanted to tie loose ends and all that. He's lucky, though. Didn't go too far into the deep end of the pool."

"I joined the force to protect people, Jack." Bishop drew in a deep breath and stared straight at him, studying his features. "People like you and Toby and Skye included. And if I have to get my hands dirty to do it, then—"

"You forget that I've killed people, too, detective." He threw a brief glance at Jeff. "I'm not proud of it, but I know I'm worse than some of the others you've tossed in those cells back there. Worse than this pathetic bastard, too, even."

Jeff snickered under his breath.

"You can't protect everyone," Jack continued, turning his hollow gaze to the detective for a single moment before casting it off to the side again. "You can't save everyone, either. Not without sacrificing yourself along the way. I mean, look what happened to Skye."

"Looks like we're in luck."

Gilliam sighed loudly as he forced himself to stand up, taking his phone away from his ear and returning it back to his pocket, glancing between Bishop and Jack, who immediately fell silent after the agent spoke. Gilliam noticed this, of course, but paid no mind to it, grunting under his breath as he started making his way back towards the door.

"It's only about an hour's drive from here," he said.

"What is?" Bishop asked, frowning.

"The nearest confirmed entryway to the Ark," Gilliam replied, sharing a brief glance with Jack before turning back to her with a hint of a smile on his face. "I know this ordeal has been sidetracking us for too long, but—" He clicked his tongue and nodded at her. "Are you up for a ride, partner?"

The detective stared blankly at him, crossing her arms and looking towards the side before turning her attention back to him with a smirk of her own. "A ride?" She shook her head. "Hey, you know what, I'm just glad you offered in the first place." As the agent held back his chuckle, she nodded at his attire. "Might want to freshen up before we leave, though."

Gilliam raised an index finger and tipped it at the detective. "Thank you, for that reminder."

He spun around and headed out the door, while Bishop lingered behind him, looking over her shoulder and watching as Jack grabbed Jeff by the collar and hauled him off the chair, dragging him over to the detective waiting for them by the hallway.

Behind them, the deranged sociopath's cackle rang through the air. "Just like the good old times, huh, buddy?"

Jack growled under his breath, but said nothing in return.

"We're here."

Bishop unbuckled her seatbelt and peered out the window, frowning at the sight. "Gilliam," she said. "Where are we?"

When they mentioned 'portal' back at the station, the detective was expecting to see some magical swirling, circular doorway hovering mid-air in an open field, like something straight out of a fantasy or science-fiction movie. And when Gilliam drove the car into yet another mundane suburban neighborhood close to the outskirts of town, almost too similar to the locations of their crime scenes as of late, she thought he had taken a wrong turn, or at the very least was going through the area on their way out to the highway leading out of New Haven.

She didn't expect that when they arrived at their destination, she would be looking out to a three-story Victorian house standing solemnly tall at the end of a deserted cul-de-sac, sectioned off with yellow police tape.

Gilliam switched the engine off and unbuckled his own seat belt, leaning a little towards her to gaze out the same window. "SCP-630-S," he said, then leaned back and unlocked the doors. "Also known as the No-End House."

"The No-End House?" Jack scoffed from the back seat, though his voice was tinged with a little nervousness that was almost too easy for the detective to miss. "You can't be serious, right?"

"What?" Bishop opened the passenger door and exited out the car, still unable to tear her eyes away from the building looming before them. A cold shiver crawled down her spine as she studied the structure. There was a little patio with a small set of stairs leading up to the singular front door in the center. The windows were too dark to peer through, or perhaps boarded up from the inside. It was built out of wood, with an eerily dark coloration as though painted black but worn down over countless years of harsh weather. The only splashes of color before her were the police tape, which presumably encircled the entire property, and the slightly desaturated patches of grass and dirt directly surrounding the wooden structure. It was the only building in this entire street, a lonesome house sitting at the end of the road, isolated away from all the other modest homes several yards back down by the intersection. "Is this like a haunted house or something?"

"Or something," Gilliam replied, moving to stand beside the detective as he stared up at the house alongside her. "Not your average haunted house, though. For one, the inside is bigger than it looks. There's no telling how many rooms there are in there, but people can only go through about six to nine, maybe ten at a time. Which ones they go through, is a different question on its own." He nodded at the house. "Urban legend says each room houses a horror more terrifying than the last."

"Sounds like something they would advertise to kids to make them spend their money here on Halloween night," Bishop said.

Her partner scoffed. "Yes, besides the fact that the deeper you venture into the house, the less likely you are to come back out."

"Yeah, I've heard a lot of bad things about this place." Jack called from behind them as he yanked Jeff out of the back door by the latter's forearm, while the eerily-grinning dog leaped over them and settled by the eyeless man's heel. "Nothing about the House being a portal to the Ark, though."

"We have a working theory," Gilliam stated, looking over his shoulder at the two killers. "The handful of people who have gone through the house and survived, have all described different experiences in each of their final rooms. Mostly parallel universes, each with different defining aspects of their own."

Parallel universes. Bishop closed her eyes. Her head was beginning to spin again.

"We think the House is a hub connecting all these different realms and such. It all depends on which door you choose to go through. One of them might even lead you to the Operator's realm, if you're that unlucky." Gilliam leaned back a little and sighed. "You just need to find the right one."

The Operator's realm. If you're unlucky. Bishop scoffed.

Jack walked up to the two investigators, still dragging his former comrade behind him as the dog trotted beside them. "And how can we know which door is the right one?"

"Well, you said the dog can sniff it out, right?" Gilliam glanced briefly at the deformed Siberian husky, then turned his attention back to the eyeless man. "Our research on the House has been very limited, considering it moves too much and we have yet to find a reliable method to contain it, much less navigate it. But the House should narrow down your options, better than having to trek through the entire country to find one of those portals."

"And if we don't come out?" Jack retorted back with furrowed eyebrows. "You said only a handful of people have ever survived it. How can we even know for sure the portal's in there?"

Gilliam remained silent for a few moments, enough to draw Bishop's attention back to them. He glanced between the other two, drawing in deep breath before expelling it out with a long sigh. "Out of the people who've been through the house and lived to tell the tale," he began, "one of them didn't go out through the same way they came in. In other words, they went into the house, through the front door, through some of the rooms, but came out someplace else. A Seven-Eleven, to be exact."

Bishop raised an eyebrow and frowned. "A Seven-Eleven."

Gilliam nodded. "The final door he went through was like some of the others. The door led him out of the House, but into a world that looked exactly like ours, with few key differences: it was always perpetual night, and not a single soul was around for miles. When he checked his phone, he said the date was almost three months before the date he first entered the House. When he reached a footbridge, someone jumped him from behind, said something about not inviting him there. Next thing he knew, he burst through the back door of a Seven-Eleven, back in broad daylight, all the way in New Jersey, eight hundred miles away from where the House was."

Jack scowled. "Yeah, that sounds like something HABIT would do."

"So, I take it the house does lead to his realm. This Ark, or whatever it is." Bishop nodded slowly, breathing out a quick sigh. "Speaking of which, I almost forgot something."

She spun around and headed back for the car, opening the passenger door to pluck something from the glove box, before throwing the door back shut and returning to where she stood before. When she finally reached the men, she held her hand out and handed the brown paper evidence bag over to Jack with a muted smile over her face.

"Your personal effects," she said, and Jack's hollow sockets grew a little wider. "I figured you'll at least be needing your equipment back for the time being. And, well, another weapon aside from a bloody kitchen knife."

Jack held the evidence bag in his hands for several seconds before his hand finally let go of Jeff's sleeve to reach inside, immediately out a familiar deep blue mask with both cheeks streaked with trails of dried black substance. She wasn't sure if the mask was the first immediate object in the bag he would be able to pull out, but Jack stared at the mask for another moment before replacing it over his face, once again concealing his true features away from the rest of them.

Beside him, Jeff snickered under his breath. "Back at it again, aren't we, buddy?"

"Shut up." He retrieved his other belongings from the bag, including two silver scalpels, before stashing them away on his person, in his jacket or the pockets of his trousers before discarding the bag. "So." Jack's voice was a little muffled behind the mask, and Bishop felt as though she was staring at a completely different person than the young man standing beside them moments before. "I guess this is where we part ways."

Gilliam nodded then took a step forward, discreetly placing something in Jack's hand. Bishop saw a glimpse of the metallic sheen of what she presumed to be the key to Jeff's handcuffs before Jack enveloped his fingers over it and stuffed it into one of his pockets.

"If HABIT does decide to throw us out in the middle of nowhere in New Jersey," the eyeless man continued, turning his hollowed gaze between the agent and the detective, "We'll head straight back to the police station?"

"We'll be around. There is no telling how far this case goes, not yet anyway. But even after the case is closed, I'll be around," Gilliam assured with another nod, offering Bishop a quick knowing glance as the detective returned it with a mildly confused frown. "I hope you will keep your word, Nichols. Remember, we can and will find you if you don't."

Even despite Gilliam's slight threat, Jack offered them both a feeble shrug, hand once again clasped around Jeff's sleeve as he started tugging the latter towards the patio. "Not like I had anything planned for the next few years, anyway," he called back towards them with a shaky chuckle. "Honestly, rotting in a cell in some containment facility with your freaks in lab coats poking instruments at me for the rest of my life doesn't sound too bad, come to think of it."

"Yeah, maybe for you—"

Jack shoved the white-clad killer up the stairs, not even caring less about how the latter came close to stumbling over his own feet. The eyeless man then turned back to the other two, giving them one last friendly salute before climbing up the steps himself and placing his hand on the knob of the front door.

"Are they going to be okay?"

She could see Gilliam gazing down from beside her, jaw tensing before turning his eyes back up to the house. "If it eases your worries for them," he murmured lowly, as though to make sure that only the two of them could hear him, "they will be. All things considered, I'm surprised they've survived this long. And after all they've been through, I doubt they'll stop fighting now."

"Good." Bishop swallowed the lump in her throat, turning her head down before she heard the front door click one last time, and forced herself to breathe. "Then let's get back to work, shall we?"