The Fortress, Assailed

or alternatively: This Cannot Fairly Be Called Intelligence Work

All of Wednesday the 25th was spent snooping. Unsuccessfully snooping, to clarify. Tucker and Sam lurked in doorways and listened in on any and all conversations in every period, and at lunch they agreed to hang out with their respective sophomore and senior friends to get a bead on those populations. Danny lurked much more subtly (he was good at that) in hallways and empty rooms, making use of the slightly enhanced hearing he'd reluctantly admitted to that morning. Nothing. Danny and Tucker did both report a ping or two on their respective radars, now that they were paying attention, but they weren't able to identify the specific people who gave them those reactions; Tucker's "ick" sense was much stronger and seemed to be more precise, but all he could say at the end of the day was that it had been someone in his computer science class and at least one sophomore. Tucker had also forgotten to do his physics homework what with the whole séance thing, so he lost brownie points with Mr. Marcel. Not a great day overall.

Despite Sam and Tucker's strategizing session in the car before school, Thursday looked to be turning out the same for the first hour and a half after the bell. Seeing as that carpool war room discussion had involved Sam taking her mind off the road and, several times, her hands off the wheel (to "gesture more eloquently"), Tucker now felt obligated to turn up results as soon as possible, if only to justify having risked the lives and limbs of all of the drivers on their route that day. Nonetheless, nothing out of the ordinary caught anyone's eye until second period—English, the one class they all had together. The classroom smelled like ham today, the grey light through the windows barely supplemented the flickering fluorescents, and the historical quote posters on the walls seemed to be sagging more than usual. Just as Lancer was winding down a very long and vaguely propagandistic speech about Quiroga's use of narrative voice, something bounced off the side of Tucker's beret.

He glanced around in confusion and caught Danny's wide, purposeful eyes. Danny nodded toward a small piece of paper crumpled on the ground next to Tucker's sneaker. After checking to make sure Lancer was still occupied (he'd taken to diagramming on the board while continuing to talk, with effort, over one shoulder. Geez, someday soon the guy was going to end up in a neck brace), Tucker folded painfully over the bar connecting his chair to his desk and snagged the note off the tiles.

In capital letters, bolded by somebody's re-scribbling all of the lines several times with a dying pen, it read, "DASH SMELLS FUNNY." The message was underlined twice.

Tucker's first reaction was to snicker under his breath. Then his brain caught up to him. He stared again at the two emphatic lines under the sentence, then looked up, wide-eyed, back at Danny, who nodded furiously. Danny, who was seated right behind the hulking red-sweatered monstrosity known colloquially as Dash. Danny, who had supernatural senses.

And come to think of it, Dash's very presence had always terrified Tucker, hadn't it? Dash set off his fight-or-flight response just by being in the room. Now Tucker was forced to ask himself whether that really was just instinct born of painful experience…or something more.

He passed the note on to Sam the moment Lancer seemed fully absorbed in his diagrams (drawing a "jungle" that looked more like several heads of broccoli) and watched her proceed through basically the same series of reactions as him, ending with the look of wondering disturbance he himself still wore. After class, they all declined to join the rowdy parade that filed into the hallway, instead lingering in the empty room to confirm their game plan.

"We haunt him," Danny said decisively. He took a moment to look smug while Tucker and Sam both groaned.

"Phrasing notwithstanding, that's what Tucker and I were saying in the car," Sam said. "Follow him around, listen to his conversations, see if anyone else could be involved in whatever he has going on, and try to come up with a plausible excuse to pump him for information."

"We could just catch him alone and confront him," Danny hazarded. "I mean, there are three of us, two of whom have supernatural abilities and one of whom has fighting experience."

"Hey, I did Taekwondo for like three years in elementary school."

"Okay, one and a half of whom have fighting experience."

Tucker stuck out a foot to deter Sam in case she really did attack Danny and patiently tuned out her mostly joking rant. When the bickering seemed to be winding down, he jumped in. "Okay, so I'd prefer not to confront a serial killer under any circumstances? Just, like, me personally? Anyway, if we're wrong he'll think we're crazy and tell everyone, which my already fragile street cred definitely won't survive. And come on, I know he's a violent asshole, but do you guys really think Dash is capable of murder?"

Danny raised his hands in a casual "don't shoot me" sort of gesture and stepped back. "I've met him exactly once, so I'm going to leave this one to you guys."

Sam bit her lip. "I don't know. He can throw a punch, sure, but he was really shaken up when that guy kicked the crap out of him sophomore year. I sincerely doubt he'd be capable of killing his best friend's mom." She paused, ruminated. "Then again, that's what everybody says, isn't it? When you find out Greg down the street is a killer? 'Oh, but he was such a nice boy, he fed my cats when I was away…'"

"Well, he's only the first kid we've narrowed down with connections to the paranormal; there are at least two more," Danny pointed out, hiking a hip up onto one of the front desks (perilously, in Tucker's experience–those desks were tippy) and reinserting himself into the conversation. "And we're not in any rush."

Sam frowned, but with purpose this time. "Yeah, true. Okay, we'll investigate him subtly first and see where it goes from there. Most likely he doesn't have anything to do with the murders and his mom just brought home the wrong Raggedy Ann doll or something."

"Cursed dolls? Are those a thing?" Tucker felt impelled to ask. He and Sam both turned to Danny.

"I don't know, probably?! You guys just assume I know all of these things!"

Tucker was midway through pointing out how, from their perspective, that was an entirely rational assumption when the bell rang and two freshmen clattered into the classroom, signalling the end of the five-minute passing period. "Crap, I'm gonna be so late!" he yelped, frantically shoving pens into his bag. His next class was two buildings away. He sprinted out of the classroom, Sam and Danny right behind him, and began the arduous process of shoving and dodging his way through the teeming halls.

~(*0*)~

At lunch Danny, with his slightly better hearing, was the primary lurker. Sam and Tucker sat with him two tables away from Dash, Kwan, Star, Paulina, and two seniors they didn't know, maintaining a stilted cover conversation to mask the fact that he was eavesdropping. They were in the common area of the school library. Students technically weren't supposed to eat there, but the librarians had given up on trying to enforce that rule after a year of creative smuggling techniques, and now they just kept the exterminators on speed dial to deal with this week's mouse or roach infestation before the damages could get too bad. The library had tall ceilings with windows toward the top, so shafts of natural light arced elegantly overhead and almost entirely avoided the inhabited levels. Two rows of freestanding bookshelves standing about six feet high lined the perimeter of the surprisingly small room, and then larger bookshelves lined three of the walls, leaving only one expanse of orange-beige wallpaper uncovered, along with a set of large glass doors. The view they provided of the open courtyard outside just barely prevented the illusion of the library being cramped, since five fake wood tables, all generously tattooed with black carved-in initials and the occasional curse word, took up most of the open floorspace in the middle of the room. All five tables were occupied, so the space was louder than Tucker would've considered optimal.

"Okay," Danny began, squinting and hunching unconsciously over the uneaten sandwich in his hands. "They're finally getting around to something interesting. Keep talking!"

"Gee, I sure do love The Office, don't you?" Tucker exclaimed with a wide, plastic grin. Sam groaned and put her face in her hands.

Danny listened in silence for long enough that Tucker was able to finish his cafeteria lasagna without any significant pauses in his and Sam's extremely natural-sounding conversation. When Dash and Kwan started getting up and collecting their bags to head to football practice, Danny finally freed him from his misery by leaning in with a slightly too-wide grin. Tucker, still watching their targets over Danny's shoulder, was relieved to see that Dash didn't spare the eavesdroppers a glance. He tracked Protein Steve and Steroid Stu's progress–very covertly, he thought–across the library to the doors behind him, and then had to quickly spin back to Sam when Kwan shot their table a confused look while holding the door open for Dash. Still, Tucker didn't think he'd been caught staring. He relaxed back into his seat.

That's when he made direct eye contact with Paulina, still sitting with the seniors, over Danny's shoulder. She raised both perfectly manicured eyebrows expressively.

Tucker quickly lowered his eyes to stare at the middle of the table. Against his will, he felt himself blushing.

Sam gave him a look, but Danny hadn't noticed, too busy dishing the dirt. "Okay, so mostly they were just talking about weekend plans and some TV show and stuff, but then Kwan started bugging Dash about where he disappeared to a few weeks ago. Apparently he skipped out on a nighttime football game, so they were all giving him a hard time about it, and he didn't have a good explanation. Then Kwan mentioned that he's actually blown off their plans a few times with no explanation, always at night. That's super weird, right?"

"Yeah, that's really weird," Sam agreed. "Really convenient that they would talk about it right when we were listening, too. So now we pretty much have to follow him around every night until he does whatever it is again, right? Like, we're morally obligated."

"You say that like you're looking forward to stalking some random high schooler in the long term. Dude, this is going to be so boring. And time consuming. And difficult, logistically." Tucker pushed aside his lunch tray and slouched into its place on the table, resting his chin on his crossed arms. This way, Danny's head blocked him from Paulina's view.

"We can take it in shifts," Sam defended. "Share the burden."

"Communist."

"Hey, wait, I have enough on my plate trying not to get murdered by the undead all the time," Danny broke in, excitement having given way to petulance at the direction of their conversation. "I'm not doing more than an hour of stalking a week, even if it is for a good cause."

"For real? But you're our best lurker!" Tucker attempted to look pitiful. It was ineffective.

"Sam is the goth here; that makes her automatically the best lurker. I'm, at most, an incidental emo. Which is significantly better than a voluntary emo."

Tucker tried a bit longer, but Danny wouldn't budge, and it was eventually decided that Sam and Tucker would follow Dash after school today and they could figure things out from there.

So that's what they did. Tucker knew what Dash's car looked like (grey sedan, nothing special), and it turned out that he parked basically right in front of the main steps, so they waited until that conspicuous red Letterman was halfway out of the parking lot and then peeled out in Sam's car before decelerating and beginning an uncharacteristically subtle, slow pursuit. Tucker had expected it to feel like he was in an action movie, but the most exciting thing that happened was Dash forgetting to signal before he turned once, meaning Sam had to change lanes in a hurry to keep him in sight. They got excited when they realized he was going toward downtown Amity rather than heading home, but instead of continuing onto the freeway he pulled into the decaying parking lot of the Westside Mall. Sam parked in a space two rows away, front tires kissing a pale cement wheel block that was cracked down the middle, leaving its long, rusty rebar fasteners partially exposed to the air. The parking lot always smelled like wet asphalt and weed.

Dash locked his car and strode through the doors of the mall, absently tossing his keys in the air with a level of coordination Tucker definitely envied. Sam and Tucker followed, waiting until Dash was almost around the corner before coming into the range that would cause the automatic glass doors to slide open—they didn't want the noise to make him turn around. Then, of course, they had to jog to catch up again, and there was a moment of panic as they turned the corner and thought they'd lost him before Tucker spotted him on the "up" escalator. Luckily, the crowd in the mall was still sparse, probably because it had only been a little under two weeks since a murder victim's body was found behind the bowling alley. Tucker was stricken with a sudden, morbidly curious urge to go find the dumpster where Schulker had been found. He quickly squashed it.

Tucker and Sam walked very fast and very casually to the escalator, barely giving themselves time to hesitate and make that lightning-quick calculation people always make before stepping onto something in motion. As a result, the mild jolt caught him by surprise. The escalator vibrated slightly, purring, the impression of warmth beneath his feet. Above them, ahead of two teenagers and an older woman in a jacket reminiscent of several famous dictators, Dash stepped off onto an expanse of faux white marble.

They managed to play this game undetected for awhile. Dash bought a smoothie and a pretzel and walked into a bike shop. Their luck ran out exactly 37 minutes after they entered the mall, when Dash walked out of the bike shop and made a beeline for one of the mall's small indoor seating areas. Tucker and Sam had retired to it after ten minutes of browsing unconvincingly through women's clothing stores (all the clothes were just slightly out of style) and then discarding the prospect of loitering behind a big marble pillar like complete creeps. The seating area was convenient because it was near the bike shop, it was designed for loitering and therefore wouldn't earn them weird looks, and it was surrounded by large fake tropical plants in artful pots in hopes that patrons occupying the stained cushions and wicker chairs would feel immersed in nature. The plants weren't great at accomplishing this effect, but they were very good at screening sitters from view from most angles.

Unfortunately, on this particular occasion they failed in that mission as well. Dash marched right up to the area, shoved aside a few plastic palm fronds, and halted directly in front of Sam and Tucker, who were frozen in the act of getting up to flee. Sam recovered first, casually sliding back to lounge in what was essentially a lawn chair and raising one eyebrow at Dash. Tucker took a moment longer frozen on the edge of his seat, and he settled back much less smoothly into a straight-backed posture he could easily run from.

Dash took in this reaction and snorted. He skipped past any preamble. "Why the fuck are you following me?" he asked, effortlessly looming, like a fortress on a sheer cliff.

Tucker assessed him. He didn't seem particularly angry; mostly just confused and annoyed. They could get out of this one pretty easily if they just played it smart and subtle–

"Are you sure you want to talk about that here?" Sam riposted with audible disdain. She paused for dramatic effect, giving Tucker just enough time to curse nine generations of her ancestors, one by one and with personalized venom. "We know."

Dash was not a good actor. He glanced from side to side, hunched his shoulders a bit, and then caught himself and squared his shoulders more aggressively. "Know–know what?" he half-muttered.

Sam narrowed her eyes. Again, entirely for drama purposes, Tucker could tell. "About you."

"I don't—I don't know what you're talking about; you're the freaks who've been following me around—" He was working up a bluster, and soon there would be no stopping him.

Sam took a gamble. "We know what you are," she whispered harshly.

Dash paused mid-sentence, buffering. Threateningly. Tucker could see the anger mounting in the way he widened his stance, clicked his teeth together. Oh, they were gonna die. They were gonna die and it was going to be painful, and slow, and entirely the fault of one Samantha K. Manson IV, and Tucker would spit on her grave from his own.

Abruptly, half the tension dropped out of Dash's stance. The fortress aged a few hundred years, and the cliff eroded. "Shit," he growled, mostly to himself. Then again, louder. "Shit. Alright, how did you find out, and what do you want?" He lowered his bulk into the wicker chair next to Tucker's, ending up in a pose much more similar to Tucker's "poised-to-flee" posture than Sam's "deceptively relaxed supervillain." The rounded back of the chair didn't help; he had to arch his neck awkwardly to fit.

Tucker needed to step in, although at this point it was mostly as damage control. "I mean, we're not going to tell anyone!" His voice squeaked a bit. "We just want to…know how it happened?"

Dash sighed heavily. Tried to get comfortable in the chair. Failed. Sighed again. "Okay. So it's a year and a half ago." His voice, possibly unconsciously, was lowering and softening as he spoke–maybe to prevent passers-by from hearing, or maybe just to inject into this incongruous setting a few milliliters of the ambiance of a good ghost story.

"I'm getting out of my car, in my own driveway, at about two in the morning after a party. Maybe I'm a little out of it. Anyway, I'm fumbling through my cupholders, trying to find my keys, and I hear something moving in the bushes. I'm like, okay, that sounded big, but I gotta lock the car or my dad's gonna kill me. So I finally find my keys under the seat or something, and I lock my car, and between the car and the front door something–something huge jumps onto me." Tucker noted with interest that, just with the retelling, Dash's pupils had blown wide, deerlike and eerie.

"I'm screaming and rolling around, trying to fight this fucker off, right? And that's when I feel it bite me, on the arm. And–you ever watched Shark Week? It's the weirdest thing, but right then I remember once somebody saying a shark's snout is weak, and if you can hit it on the snout it'll leave you alone, so I reach out with my car keys and I stab this thing in the face. And it lets go and runs off into the woods behind my house. And that's when my dad comes out, woken up by all the screa–the yelling, and sees me sitting in the driveway covered in blood and drives me to the hospital. Wasn't that deep of a wound, actually, but we thought I might've had rabies."

"And did you?" Sam had leaned forward, drawn in by his tone and the way he was telling it. It surprised Tucker, how good Dash was at telling this story, and that he was even bothering. Then again, this was probably the most exciting thing that had happened in his life, and maybe he'd never had the opportunity to tell anyone before.

Dash actually laughed. Short, but genuine. "No. I only found out later what I had, about three weeks later, when this lady who looks like a soccer mom–she's even got that mom haircut, you know, the spiky hair in the back?–with, like, a gnarly bandage on her face shows up at my house and tells me 'Hi, my name's Marinette, I live down the street, oh and you're a werewolf now.'"

"Holy shit," Sam breathed. "So that's really what you are?"

Dash frowned, the spell of the story breaking like an egg across his face. "Wait, I thought you knew."

Tucker coughed. It was probably time to come clean, before Sam could say something worse. "Uh, sorry. So, we knew you were something, cuz I'm…psychic, sort of, and I sensed it? But we didn't know exactly what? Sorry. Again." He shot Sam the dirtiest look he could muster. This time, she at least had the self-awareness to look embarrassed.

"Are you kidding me?! You got me to expose the pack–she's gonna kill me!" He started to get to his feet, anger mounting. A mom with two kids glanced curiously into the seating area at the noise. "If you tell anyone–"

"We won't tell anyone, seriously! Anyway, who would believe us?!" This particular speech brought up very old memories, tasted sour on his tongue, but didn't hurt as much as Tucker might've expected.

Dash looked slightly mollified. He glared, clenching his fingers on the seat of his chair. "There's–there's people. I haven't told my parents. Marinette said if it got out…it could be really bad."

"And you haven't told your friends?" Sam ventured, skeptical. "I thought you and Kwan were, like, joined at the biceps. Or, sorry, I can do better–joined at the lack of neck."

"Yeah, you're fucking hilarious, Manson." Slowly, Dash settled back into the chair. "Paulina knows something's up; I haven't told her exactly what. But Kwan and Star's dads are both part of like, a hunting club. They go out and shoot stuff together on the weekends. From what I've heard, it is not a good idea to be messing with that."

Tucker's brain stalled for a minute. For the first time in that conversation, he was able to completely forget the cold, unpleasant way his skin was prickling, and the faint smell of blood. Because, well: "Wait, wait, wait." There was a manic energy building in his chest; he trapped it beneath his epiglottis. "Are you telling me–" He had to pause. Dash was giving him a weird look. "Are you telling me. There are werewolf hunters."

"Nobody will really give me a yes or no answer–" The rest of Dash's answer was drowned out under Tucker's peals of laughter. Sam started giggling too, a little hesitantly, although it seemed like she didn't really get it. She was something of a sympathetic laugher. Several mall patrons looked through the leaves as they walked past, and smiled at the deceptive picture they made–three teenagers, having fun at the mall. Dash just looked irritated. "What?"

"Sorry, it's just–" Tucker struggled for breath. "Werewolf hunters. It's just–it's just too ridiculous."

"More ridiculous than ghost portals?" Sam countered skeptically. "More ridiculous than summoning somebody with 'dead man's blood'?"

"Yes! I'm sorry, there's just" –wheeze– "no way I'll ever be able to take werewolf hunters seriously!"

Dash growled–not really, but, like, close–and a distant part of Tucker's mind registered that okay, his teeth werejust a little too long. "You're laughing about people whose literal job is hunting me down to kill me."

"Oh, look, I've offended the werewolf." This was too much. Tucker exploded in another round of uncontrollable, air-gulping laughter, Sam joining in with a little less force.

"Fuck you, Foley. I'm leaving. Don't follow me." He stood up and loomed again, switching his weight between the balls of his feet, reminding Tucker of the combination of sixth sense and instinct twitching down his spine. Dash had scrunched up his nose in incensed disgust, baring his teeth in the process. The smell of blood got stronger. "If you try to blackmail me with this, we will kill you. And that's not a fucking joke. You hear me?"

The manic energy was still there, emboldening Tucker, dampening his common sense, so he didn't make any assurances. Somehow, the discovery that his childhood tormentor was a werewolf had made him far less scared of him. "Hey, I'm psychic, remember? You come for me and I'll r–uh–rip you apart with my mind."

Dash faltered, glancing at Sam. "Can he really–?" He cut himself off, but not before Sam could figure out the full question and give him a wide, gleaming, truly wicked grin.

"Oh, 100%. I've seen him do it. Takes him 20 seconds, tops."

"...Fuckin' freaks." Dash had apparently figured out that he wasn't going to win this one. He stormed out of the seating area with far less dignity than one might expect from an apex predator of the night.

Tucker and Sam looked at each other and burst out laughing again. It wasn't actually funny; it was just that it was really funny.

"Okay, so I'm thinking it probably isn't him," Sam gasped out once she'd almost recovered.

"Yeah, he–he has an alibi for where he goes at night, at least once a month," Tucker agreed. "And anyway, I doubt he would be out here ritual-sacrificing people with a kitchen knife when he can literally turn into a kickass wolf."

"Oh my god, Teen Wolf was right about so many things," Sam said in a tone of awed reflection. "I hate it."

Tucker paused, reminded of how they'd gotten here. He didn't like to get into it with Sam–he generally followed a policy of pacification, containment, and silent disapproval in their friendship–but this needed to be said. He sobered at the thought, and in preparation. "Hey, I know it worked, but seriously, warn me when you're going to do something like threatening a supernatural creature and potential serial killer, okay? That's twice now, dude, and it's actually not smart. Like, you realize, right? We're laughing now, but this stuff is dangerous. We could get really hurt." He paused again, considering, debating if he wanted to pull this card, deciding it was worth it."I've seen it." And it was terrifying.

Sam had opened her mouth like she was about to retaliate, but she subsided at the reminder. Wow, Tucker had actually gotten through that thick skull. Incredible. She was sitting up from the back of the lawn chair, and the plastic leaves behind her head crowned her with a spiky green halo as she spoke, haltingly.

"Okay. That's fair. I really do understand, Tuck; I know I joke about it, but this isn't a game to me. I'm angry at whoever would do that to people. I want justice for them–maybe not Schulker, but the other ones. And we aren't going to accomplish anything without taking risks." She visibly caught herself as her tone edged toward belligerent at the end, and she wrung Debate Team Sam out of her voice before continuing. "But yeah. I'll be more careful, and I'll give you a heads-up if there's a risk I really think is worth it."

Privately, Tucker doubted she actually understood the danger. How could she? She hadn't seen blood splattered on a stall door, dripping off the hinges, and known she had about a 50% chance of continuing to live on a lazy afternoon in a library bathroom. Sunny-lawn suburbanite kids weren't programmed to understand mortality. Tucker doubted he fully grasped it, either, and hoped he never would.

But in the history of their relationship, this was an almost unprecedented victory. Tucker would take it.

~(*0*)~

Speaking of fraught relationships, Sam dropped Tucker off at home around 10 to find his mother standing in the entrance hallway, still in her impeccable tan suit from work, arms crossed. His seventh sense–specifically, his teenager sense–warned him that this was not a good sign.

"Where were you, Tucker? I texted you 45 minutes ago, and you didn't respond."

"Oh, crap, right!" He'd seen the notification when the text came in, and intended to respond, but then their waiter had come with the check for dinner and he and Sam had had to figure out who was paying card or cash and they'd forgotten to ask the waiter to split the check in the first place. He pulled out his phone, and sure enough the text was still there, unopened, along with two more he hadn't even noticed. His phone was still silenced from their brief and unsuccessful stint of stalking Dash. "I'm sorry, Mom, I was out to dinner with Sam at Old Tom's Transdimensional Thai and I just totally forgot to reply."

"That's not good enough, Tucker!" He'd been half watching her and half scrolling through other texts as he talked–oof, there was a missed call from her, that wasn't good–but now his head swung up, fully alert. He was surprised at the emphasis in her voice. Looking more closely, he realized she was really irritated. Maybe even angry. Was she…shaking a little bit? She was standing, tense, with one hand on the dark knick-knacks table that stood against the right-hand wall of the short hallway before it opened into the kitchen and living room. It was a high-ceilinged space, and it opened quickly, but in this situation it still felt claustrophobic.

"I'm really sorry!" he said hurriedly. "It was bad, I know, and I'll answer everything quickly in the future, but I told you I would be out with Sam all afternoon; what's the big deal?"

That was definitely the wrong phrasing, and he cringed as soon as he said it.

"The big deal is that there is a serial killer in our city, Tucker, and your cousin got stabbed in the middle of the day! So when I text, you answer, and when I call, you definitely answer!"

Was she going to cry? Please, don't let her cry. Tucker shifted uncomfortably, readjusting his grip on his backpack with one hand, the other still on the door handle. Behind him was the open door, a rectangle of night, dark in a way he hadn't really been aware of until lately. He closed it.

"Thank god I didn't call your father. Thank god it was just me who had to sit here for 45 minutes wondering if my son was–" She broke off. Shoot. Tucker had really messed up.

"I'm really, really sorry, Mom." And he realized that he was. His satisfaction from the day was dissolving in his mouth. "I'm okay, and I promise I'll answer everything as soon as I see it from now on, and keep my phone off silent. And I'll make sure you know where I'm going, and I'll make sure I'm always with someone. I have been making sure I'm always with someone." Tucker deliberated for a second, then locked the door and walked forward to give his mom a hug.

She returned it, and now he could tell that she was shaking, but only slightly, and he would guess more from anger than fear. She hadn't cried. He'd scared her, but not enough that she would cry. Still, the shame dripped hot and acidic into his stomach, and he hugged her tighter.

"I won't do it again," he mumbled into the cool fabric on her shoulder.

"You're damn right you won't. And you're coming home by eight until this person is caught."

He pulled back, stumbling a little as his backpack overbalanced him. "Eight? Mom, I mean, nine–"

"No, I am not having this argument with you! Sunset is at seven; eight is more than generous!"

"But–" He cut himself off; the shame sloshing in his stomach and, admittedly, the impulse toward self-preservation both whispered to him that this was not the time to push. "You're right. I promise. Home by eight. …But do you have to tell Dad?" He wasn't exactly eager to get yelled at twice.

She sighed, dropping her left hand back onto the table and slumping a bit, letting it take more of her weight. "If it's settled, then I guess we don't need to discuss it further. But I trust you to honor that promise." She said "trust" like she meant "expect;" Tucker supposed it was more of a mixture of the two.

"I will. Can I go to bed now?" He worried once he'd said it that it had come out as snippy, rather than as the genuine question he'd intended, but luckily she either understood or was willing to overlook it.

"Yes. I'm glad you're safe." She stepped back and toward the kitchen, shaking off the distress of the evening with audible effort. "There's leftover penne in the fridge if you want to pack a lunch tomorrow."

Tucker started toward the living room. "Thanks, Mom. Does it have that tomato sauce? With the nuts?"

"Yep."

"Ooh, yes, then I am definitely stealing those before Dad can get to them."

"It's not exactly a heist if you have carte blanche from the lady of the house."

She was rallying! Yet another success in a long and storied career! He pushed his advantage. "I would actually describe it as more of a smash-and-grab? Less elegance, more pasta-fueled rage and desperation."

From out of sight, Angela Foley's voice floated to him, disembodied and not the least bit eerie. "You'd better not be doing any smashing in my kitchen, Tucker Charles. Most of my glassware is older than you, and it's certainly done more for this family over the years."

"I am hurt, Mother! Wounded!" Tucker called over his shoulder as he padded up the stairs. For some reason, it was a lot easier to discount even the threat of spectral intruders when he could hear his mom making tea in the microwave a few yards away.

The argument stayed with him, though. He supposed, now that he thought about it, that eight really was a generous curfew given the circumstances. Inconvenient, if he, Sam, and Danny had to stalk anyone else, but reasonable, especially given how shaken up she'd been.

It brought back what he'd been thinking, earlier, about suburban kids and the possibility of disaster. About how even after seeing blood on a stall door, he still couldn't quite grasp the concept.

Maybe one day, when he had kids–that's when he'd get it.