Three Conversations in the Eye of the Storm

or alternatively: Angst and Schmangst

"How are things over there? Eating your parents out of house and home again?" Sam grinned, and the scene displayed on Tucker's phone swam and juddered as she presumably readjusted her phone on her knees. She and Danny had managed to convince Mrs. Foley to let them stay at Sam's house even after they'd seen the lurkers out front, mainly by just sorta refusing. Danny was not going to let anyone else find out about his spooky side; he was uncomfortable enough with Mrs. Foley already, averting her eyes and stepping a bit heavier on the floor whenever they interacted. So now it was 4 p.m. on Thursday and Sam and Tucker were Facetiming across town. Tucker may complain about the universe at large fairly often, but he did truly appreciate how the interdimensional ghost fog hadn't messed with their cell service.

"They stocked up yesterday in case there's an aftershock. How about you guys, do you have enough?"

"Yeah, now that our resident bottomless pit is gone." Sam was sitting on the carpeted floor of her house's smaller dining room, leaning against a dark wooden chair leg with a big window to the side yard letting in dim aqua-tinted light behind her; her face was in shadow but still easily visible. Tucker had spent enough time in her house to know she was just around the corner from the main entryway.

"Gee, the sad thing is you have no idea how nice it is to be eating meat again! I've been having steak for dinner every night!" Tucker needled. He himself was sitting in the living room, listening with one ear to the faint comforting sounds of his mom and dad moving around the kitchen.

"Shut up, nature-murderer. Oh, and Danny's out again."

Tucker's grin drooped, its foundation undermined by the sudden seriousness in her tone. "Is he good?"

"Yeah, I mean he was fine this morning, you saw him at school. He says hunting stuff is still getting easier. And also he says the thing in the gym isn't there now but it might have dropped back in while we were at school. And apparently it feels familiar?"

"He for real has met the poltergeist hanging out in your mom's Zumba gym? I mean, I don't wanna be the asshole who assumes all ghosts know each other, but…."

"Heh. We need to get that guy a social life."

"Well, at least he has a robust spiritual life already." Cue the exaggerated groans.

"Honestly, I don't even–"

Something crashed on the other end. Sam screamed and covered her head with her arms, although Tucker only caught the first part of this movement as his screen became an erratic swirl of greys and blues before finally resolving itself into a view of the ceiling and part of a chair from right next to where chair leg met carpet. The perspective made Tucker feel like a human who'd wandered into a house of giants. "Sam?! Sam!"

Seconds passed. Then: "Holy shit! What the fuck?!" Sam's voice was faint and grainy, but grew in volume toward the end. In another second, Tucker saw her huge hand reaching toward him as she, now standing, picked up her dropped phone. The perspective shifted to shakily show a side view of her face; she was breathing heavily and displaying an odd mixture of caution and fury. "Someone threw a fucking brick through my window!"

"Is there anyone there, are you okay?!"

"Nah, whoever did it is gone, apparently."She was still for a moment, just breathing, and then her one visible eye widened. "Ohhh shit, wait, the salt line!"

So Tucker was left to have another heart attack on his couch as she ran back to the window and checked on the barrier. It seemed fine, she reported after a minute, but just in case she went to grab the salt from the kitchen while Tucker worked on getting his heart rate under control again.

Once he was once more able to process events semi-logically, he realized there were several less obvious but still important things wrong with this situation. "Wait, did you seriously go toward the loud crash to investigate?! Why didn't you try to get out of there?!"

Sam, swinging her phone by her hip instead of bothering to hold it up by her face, did not dignify this with a response, hustling to the kitchen and grabbing salt, tape, a plastic bag, and a dustpan. "Who the fuck would throw a brick through my window?! I mean, I've been told my attitude isn't the greatest, but I didn't think I'd pissed anyone off that much."

"You need to call Danny! Like, now!"

"Haha, that's…probably smart, yeah, I'll do that now."There was this odd quality to her tone, somehow overly flippant, businesslike, and dazed at the same time. She might have been a little bit in shock. "Don't tell your parents about this, okay? I'm not letting someone drive me out of my own fucking house."

"Sam, that's stupid, you–Sam!" She had hung up. Hopefully it was because she was calling their one supernatural and combat-competent ally back to the house where she was stuck all alone cleaning up a pile of glass, and not just because she liked dramatic exits.

"Tuck? Is something wrong with Sam?" Angela Foley stood in the doorway between the living room and the hall leading to the kitchen, brow furrowed in worry. Tucker hoped he didn't look as frazzled as he felt.

"Uh. ...No. I mean, yeah, she's fine. She's just a little stressed."

The degree to which Angela Foley believed this reassurance is extremely ambiguous. However, whatever the case, she let it be, leaving Tucker to sit on his couch and breathe very consciously and ponder his recently discovered talent for gross understatement.

~(*0*)~

Danny reentered the Manson mansion at a run, not even pausing to flinch as he crossed the threshold. Or so Sam presumed given the volume of the thud as her front door slammed open. She idly checked the kitchen clock—approximately two minutes since her call. "Sam! Where are you, are you okay?"

"I'm in here!" Sam shouted from the kitchen. She came out with a dishrag draped over her hands, tiny shards of glass still clinging to the fibers. She almost collided with Danny as he sped down the hallway and had to sidestep him at a brisk walk to redirect his momentum back toward the front of the house. "Scene of the crime is back this way."

The brick had landed plopped on one side of the Mansons' blue carpet, no longer surrounded by any big shards of glass but with a halo of invisible points still glittering in the sunlight when she shifted her viewpoint. "I just kinda left it there," Sam commented of the brick as Danny took in the scene that he apparently hadn't noticed on his way in. "I don't really know what to do with it. Like, could I just put it in the trash can? Is that weird?"

Danny took a moment to register her question, still glaring at the innocuous piece of masonry. "It—huh. I mean, I guess?"

"Right? Like, it's not hazardous waste or anything, but it feels weird just throwing it away like that."

"Yeah—" Danny started absently, clearly not listening. "Did you see who threw it? Or like, anyone who was around?"

Sam, standing a few feet behind him and to the side, began folding up the towel in her hands, careful to keep the remaining glass pieces pouched on the inside. She noticed with some vague irritation that her hands were still shaking. "Nah, there was no one there when I looked." She came up next to him and crouched to examine the brick more closely, as if she would find some message there that she hadn't noticed two minutes before. Maybe even the thrower's autograph, in sharpie and a curling script. The brick remained frustratingly blank; she'd already tipped it over with two cloth-shrouded fingers to check the bottom. She kept her eyes on the brick when she next spoke. "Do you have any ideas? Maybe a few, um...extranormal ones?"

"I could get their scent." Danny indicated with his chin at the brick sitting innocently on the wood flooring.

Sam stared at him blankly for a minute. "You…. You're gonna sniff the–"

"I'm joking, I can't actually do that."

Sam stared at him for a moment. He smirked slightly, for the first time since he'd arrived. And Sam was startled to hear herself laugh, high and abrupt, at the sheer ridiculousness of their situation. The lingering floaty feeling in her brain started to clear up a little.

Danny's smile widened. "...Dash probably could."

"No."

There was a pause. Sam and Danny's giggles faded. Danny cleared his throat. "Sorry about this. I should've been here."

Sam looked up from the brick again, confused and a little uncomfortable. "What? You were out beating up cannibalistic ghosts, I feel like that's clearly more important."

"I mean, yeah, but there's not that many left anyway, and Red Hoodie's doing a pretty good job on their own." He paused. "I just feel like—shit, this is all my fault, isn't it? I got myself fucking ghostnapped and released all this shit on you guys. Fuck." He stood up from his crouch and paced across the room. "Sorry. I just—I've been sorta high off the ectoplasm levels for a while and I don't remember if I apologized yet. That whole situation was pretty pathetic. Sorry."

Well. That had escalated quickly. Gee whiz, Sam really wished Tucker were here right now. She was so not good at this stuff that it was almost funny. She could say something sappy about how it wasn't his fault or whatever since it clearly wasn't, but would he even believe that if he was irrational enough to be thinking it was? Anyway, their relationship thus far had consisted mainly of memes and murder accusations; she didn't know if she could say anything sincere and touchy-feeley and not have it sound sarcastic.

Ugh, it had been less than two seconds and this already felt so awkward. She laughed nervously and groped for something to say beyond "no, seriously, it's fine, we're totally chill."

"Okay, but hear me out: You're like that guy from Indiana Jones."

Danny, who had been leaning against a wall and avoiding eye contact, stopped looking uncomfortable in favor of looking confused. "Uh...which movie?"

"I don't remember, but you know that guy who comes out and is doing all that martial arts intimidation-y stuff that's really impressive and then Indiana Jones just shoots him?"

"...Yeah, and I'm missing your point."

"That guy's probably super impressive when he's fighting other hand-to-hand people, but I mean, realistically, what do you expect him to do against a gun? He wasn't prepared for it and couldn't prepare for it, so you can't really blame him for being shot. It's like you with witchcraft. 'Cuz, like, your whole ghosty deal makes you super good at fighting ghosts and I guess, like, monsters and stuff, but you're at a natural disadvantage against occult stuff, a lot of which is specifically devoted to summoning and dealing with ghosts. An unknown human serial killer with knowledge of the occult is literally the worst possible opponent for you. How were you even supposed to prevent that whole thing from happening?"

Danny still looked confused. "I mean, I—I probably could've broken the circle with a little more time."

"Really?" Sam crooked an eyebrow.

"...Eh. It's 50/50."

"See? There you go." A thought occurred to her, and though she cringed at the cheese, she added it anyways, sounding it out. "And hey, that's why Tucker and I are here. If you could just beat up all of Amity's problems, we wouldn't have anything to do."

"...Heh. Sure, I guess." Danny definitely looked embarrassed. Seemed they both wanted to be done with this conversation. Sam did what she did better and changed the subject.

"Okay, so what should we–and by we I mean you, I've cleaned up enough–do about the little tiny glass shards too small to pick up?"

"Weaponize them."

"I like the way you think."

~(*0*)~

Tucker sat hunched over his computer, the blue-white glow of the screen illuminating the lower half of his face as he scrolled through sketchy site after sketchy site after Wikipedia article. In the aftermath of the Brick Incident, he'd felt the need to be doing something useful, and he'd remembered someone mentioning that if it was two killers using the same undisclosed-to-the-public ritual then maybe they'd gotten the ritual off the internet somewhere. If he couldn't find anything resembling it online, then that theory could be semi-confidently discarded. If you eliminated that possibility, then it meant the killers knew each other. And that seemed like a very good thing to know.

If, of course, there actually were two killers. He was grasping at some very thin straws here, as usual. But anyway, he could afford to shore up his occult knowledge a bit on the side.

Two hours of research later, Tucker was very glad he'd used his special uber-protected FBI-unfriendly fourth pager, Denise, because otherwise he'd definitely have tossed up a few red flags in a government facility somewhere. His research techniques were a bit more sophisticated than the average high schooler's (Denise had some wonderfully sketchy browser extensions, for one thing), but ultimately they boiled down to searching different combinations and variations on "human sacrifice," "contract magic breaking ritual," "wrist candle circle pentagram," "criminal human sacrifice," "three human sacrifice," "multiple occult holiday human sacrifices," "wechuge occult ritual," and "satanist churches near me" (plus a few minutes of looking into "ghost summoning open portal ritual" just for kicks). He'd also tossed what he was looking for out as a special favor request to a few of his less easily freaked-out online friends, but he doubted they'd find anything. He certainly hadn't. He was frustrated and hungry with very little to show for it. Either they were working on incorrect assumptions about the parameters of the ritual, or it was from a very obscure site or not on the internet at all. Either way, it seemed unlikely two like-minded creeps in a relatively small area of Illinois had gotten ahold of it at the same time. It seemed most likely that the two killers—if there were two killers—had made contact at some point. At least once.

Which got Tucker...where?

Not very far and craving pizza pockets, that's where. Well, two creeps who knew each other were probably easier to look for than one, right? And at least he'd done something with his time.

Knew each other…. There was something there that made his spine tingle, but he didn't know what.

Tucker had just opened his search history, preparing to clear it and shut down his pager, when one set of keywords in particular jumped out at him.

"multiple occult holiday human sacrifices"

Wait. There was another angle he could pursue right now that was both easy and potentially very useful. Excluding the whole Danny thing, which they'd agreed didn't seem at all like part of the normal pattern, the killer only seemed to strike on the nights before occult holidays. That meant they could predict and anticipate him! Tucker's fingertips hovered over the keypad, preparing to begin a new search into occult, religious, and otherwise significant and vaguely ominous days in October.

And they remained hanging there, as he realized with mounting horror that he didn't need to search to figure out at least one. Not only was it obvious in itself, it had also been mentioned often enough in his time paging through spelling error-ridden ceremonies on virus-incubating websites.

Halloween. Samhain, All Saints' Eve, Nos Galan Gaeaf, Mischief Night. The most significant occult-associated day of the year in the Western tradition was just three weeks from now. If something big was going to happen, it was probably going to happen then, and it was probably going to be very, very bad.

Tucker shut down his PDA with a decisive click and went into the kitchen to eat way too many pizza pockets and stare fixedly at the wall.

~(*0*)~

Tucker dreamed about Amber McClain that night, and the next one. She seemed angrier, if at all possible, and both nights he woke up sweaty and shaking. On Friday evening the power went out, so his room was dark when he woke up gasping at 2 a.m., and he almost had a heart attack when his hand, fumbling for the useless switch on his bedside table lamp, touched something that felt like warm skin. (It was his leather wallet, which had been sitting directly below the lamp while the power was still on.) He was also seeing the fox more often, around corners or just four paws in the crack under a door, and one time he could've sworn it nipped his ankle with cold, sharp teeth. He skipped school on Friday, and so did Sam and Danny. His parents had a lot of hushed conversations and took turns casually being in the same room as him whenever possible, which he appreciated under all the layers of anxiety. He felt tired most of the time, but that was nothing new.

Sam, often with Danny in the background now, Facetimed for hours, several times on Friday and Saturday. Even though the city was opening up internally, it was still strictly quarantined with respect to the outside world, with the government people (somewhat to their credit, Tucker supposed) resisting even the most generous of bribes. As such, Sam's parents remained stuck outside the orange plastic barrier for the foreseeable future.

On Saturday at around 4:30, Sam called without texting, which was a little weird. It was also just a voice call, no video. Tucker pressed the cool glass (plastic, really) of his phone screen to his ear.

"The thing in the gym is back," Sam stated, with no prelude.

Tucker breathed out deeply, letting all the air out until he felt it pinch in his chest. "Shoot. That's pretty nerve-wracking. Is Danny there?"

"He's upstairs keeping a—heh, keeping a third eye on it." Her tone was still light, but her attempt at levity fell flat on the airwaves between them and was promptly run over by several outgoing emails. "I'm watching the front. There's a bunch of people out here again."

"Anyone you recognize?"

"Yeah, I think I know some of them from school. Is Paulina answering her phone?"

"Still no." Tucker had called and texted her various "what the helllll" messages like, six times today alone. Radio silence, still.

When Sam didn't respond for a second, Tucker abruptly refocused on the voice on the other end of this call. "Sam, are you okay? My dad and I can come over there right now if you're getting a bad vibe."

"No, yeah, I'm fine. It's just a bunch of loitering teenagers. And one possibly man-eating ghost. Nothing new."

"You sure? We're coming over tonight anyway…."

"Yeah, it's fine, we'll just stick to that plan." A beat. Tucker remained quiet; it sounded like she wanted to say something.

"You know, it's kind of funny–" she laughed a little, breathily. "Okay, so I used to play soccer when I was a little kid, right? Like, AYSO. Little league. I sucked. But I was really competitive, and I remember whenever we were near the end of a night game, and we were losing, and I was all flushed and hot even though I could feel the chill on my skin–I would get really angry, at the other team. And I remember thinking, 'If I just push myself as hard as I can, and go as fast as I can and don't stop, then we'll win.' Like it was impossible that we could lose if I just tried my absolute hardest. So I would go faster than I ever had, and of course we would still lose. But still, the next game I'd think that again, and I'd be just as convinced."

Tucker paused, considering how to respond. "I mean, I think everyone does that. We trick ourselves into feeling like we have more control than we really do."

"Yeah, and I guess there was also the kiddie TV of the early 2000s. 'Anything is possible if you just believe!'" Tucker could just imagine her making a little Reading Rainbow in the air with her hands. She sounded so tired. "Believe in magic, believe in spirit chalk and summoning circles, believe in yourself. And then it turns out you actually can believe in at least two of those, and you still can't do anything! You know?" She took a shaky breath. "It's just–it's terrifying. Especially now. I guess it's like I can't–I feel like I can't abide a, a limited existence. Or at least, I really hate understanding it."

"...I'm sorry."

Although Tucker couldn't see it, Sam pressed the heels of her palms into her face, and when she pulled them away her eyelashes spiked oddly in different directions over red eyes. "No, I'm sorry. I'm getting all weird and philosophical on you. I'm freaked out. Ignore me."

"Nah, it made sense. This stuff is freaky, and I've been frustrated too. But it's getting better, right? And all things considered, it really hasn't been that long."

"That's right, Tristan got shish-kebabbed in, like, mid-September, didn't he? Less than a month ago?"

"Hah, I've lost all conception of time, my friend. It was like six Lucky Charms boxes ago."

"I do not respect that as a measure of duration. Mostly because you eat cereal at a truly alarming rate."

"Hey, a man has needs."

"Gross." Tucker started to say something in response, but then Sam interrupted. "Okay, I gotta go, Danny's yelling something from the other room. See you in four hours?"

Despite himself, Tucker smiled. "I'm bringing vegan chocolate cake mix."

"This is why you're my favorite, Tuck."

"See ya."

"Bye."

Click.