A/N / Edit: I normally leave my notes at the end, but there might have been some confusion about the beginning of this chapter. The italicized, centered text are flashbacks. The formatting was messed up, and indents don't work, so it seemed like it was all part of the same scene, which makes the conversation very confusing to understand. If you have any questions, please ask!


So many people have come and gone
Their faces fade as the years go by
Yet I still recall as I wander on
As clear as the sun in the summer sky


Chapter 9: Heartening


Her thumb slammed on the controller. Onscreen, her heroine swung a pixelated broadsword at her looming enemy.

"Have you decided to stop ignoring me, Liam?"

Sherry fixated on the screen, blocking out her memory of the earlier afternoon. Her HP level bar shuddered, the red value sinking closer to zero.

"I wasn't trying to ignore you."

"No!" she groaned. Her character fell to the digital ground, her HP bar now firmly resting at naught.

"We can play again," Liam suggested.

"You're obviously going to win again," she whined. "You have Superman reflexes or something."

"You're trying to tell me that you sort of kind of accidentally on purpose ran away whenever I talked to Mason?"

"Scott told me not to get anyone involved."

"With what?"

"Okay, we can play another game," Liam tried. He searched around in the TV cabinet. "Revenge of the Oni. I never got around to playing that."

"Alright, fine," Sherry relented. "Maybe my experience will give me an upper hand." She doubted it.

"You– you don't know? Sorry. Sorry, I can't — it's not my business to tell."

"Okay. Then I won't make you. But if this has to do with Scott's CGI fias—"

"It doesn't!"

She thought, from her hours playing Revenge of the Oni with Mason, that maybe it would take Liam at least half an hour to overpower her again. She was wrong.

As soon as Liam got a hang of how to manage his avatar, he was putting down ninja assassins (a term Sherry considered humorously redundant) every other second. He cleared the first level before Sherry had even killed half her attackers.

"So Stiles wants us to hang out?"

"I... I want to. If you're up for it, I mean."

"I'm done!" Sherry declared, throwing down her controller. "Mason was right. There is literally no video game you can't win. Except maybe The Littlest Pet Shop."

"What's that?"

She laughed, reclining in the sofa. "Never mind."

"You're smart, right?" Liam asked. "I can't understand the proofs we're learning in geometry."

She rolled her head over to look at him. "Is that your way of asking for my help?"

He smiled sheepishly, staring down at his hands in that endearingly awkward way of his. "Yeah."

"So what don't you understand?"

Liam rolled off the sofa and staggered toward his backpack, rifling through the mess inside until he found what he was looking for. "Here."

She looked over the worksheet, frowning. "Which part?"

He made an erratic waving gesture. "All of it."

"Dude." She pointed at the first problem. "It asks you to do a proof. This is a circle. There is a triangle outside of the circle and tangent to it. What does that tell you?"

"The triangle and the circle really like each other?"

She punched him lightly on the shoulder. "No. If you draw a line from the center of the circle to each of the tangent points, like so, you get right angles."

"Oh." He leaned over for a better look, his shoulder brushing Sherry's. She flinched, drawing away. "Is that for every tangent line?"

"Yes. Can you figure out how to solve it now?"

He stared at the paper, his eyebrows furrowing at the apparently labyrinthine problem. "I guess."

Sherry pushed the paper back to him and huddled in her dent in the couch, watching him as he attempted to prove the problem's statement. "There's a full moon tonight," she informed him spontaneously.

Liam froze. "Tonight?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"I didn't realize it was tonight."

"Obviously. What's going on?"

He shoved aside his math homework, letting it flutter to the floor, forgotten. "I have something to do. Can you call someone to pick you up?" He spoke quickly, a nervous lilt in his voice. "I have to do something in my room." With that, he sprinted out of the room. Sherry could hear his heavy footsteps pounding up the stairs, followed by the slam of his bedroom door.

She was shaken and suddenly remembered that she'd left her bike locked up outside of school when she'd taken the bus with Liam to get to his house. Pulling out her phone, she called Parrish, but was greeted only by voicemail. She groaned, but left a message anyway.

"Hey, Jordan," she recited, "I'm at Liam's house and I kind of left my bike at school. Can you come get me? Thanks."

Whatever Liam was doing, she had no reason to intrude yet. She settled back into the couch and started on her homework. She worked for about half an hour, until something clattered upstairs, sounding like Liam had just dropped ten feet of chains onto the wood floor. Sherry glanced down at her phone. Should she call Parrish again? He was probably working on something important, she decided.

With a deliberate sigh, Sherry stuffed her phone back into the pocket of her drawstring capris. She hopped up the stairs, taking them two at a time. At the top, she saw that all of the doors looked exactly alike, with nothing to distinguish which one was Liam's. She considered knocking on each door, but that plan was quickly thwarted when another crash sounded from the room down the hall.

She moved toward the door, the sounds of rustling and and metal scraping crescendoing as she got closer. "Liam?" she called. She rapped on the white door. "Liam? Are you okay?"

The noises stopped. "I'm fine!" His voice was low and throaty, almost like a growl.

"Did you break something?"

She could hear shallow breathing resonating through the interstices of the door frame. "I thought you left."

"I don't have a ride. Are you sure nothing's wrong?"

"Ask Scott," Liam bit out. "Or Stiles. For a ride."

"I don't want to inconvenience them. What are you doing in there that is so important?"

He didn't answer. The memory of Scott's glowing red eyes resurfaced in her mind. "The full moon," she realized. "That's... Liam? Are you sure you're not turning into a werewolf or something?" She meant it in a joking way, but she never got to know if Liam thought she was serious.

His window shattered. This time, Sherry already knew the sound of someone hurtling through glass. "Liam!" she cried, tugging at the door handle in vain. It refused to budge. The house was eerily silent.

She tore down the stairs and fished around in her backpack until finally she extracted a bobby pin from the debris at the bottom of her bag. She raced up the stairs again and fiddled with the door handle, jamming the pin into the hole in every way she could possibly fit it until the lock clicked. She kicked open the door, hyperventilating.

Heavy chains pooled next to the metal radiator. One link, snapped in half, was coated in shiny crimson blood. Sherry hovered over the broken window, staring down. Below, she could see a tiled patio floor, illuminated by the nearby streetlamps and the overhead moon. Liam was nowhere to be seen.

She whipped out her phone and called Parrish again, pacing Liam's room anxiously. After five tries, he still didn't pick up.

She tried the sheriff's number. Fortunately, he did answer. "Hello?"

"Sheriff! I need to talk to my uncle!"

"He's busy," he reprimanded. "Working on something important."

"It's an emergency!"

"You can tell me," he offered.

"No. It has to be him."

Sheriff Stilinski sighed. "This had better be as important as you say it is to justify me pulling an officer from duty."

The other end of the line crackled at gargled as the sheriff moved. She could faintly hear him in the distance, calling for Parrish.

"Sherry? What's wrong?"

She stared at the chains and the broken window. "Liam chained himself up, broke out, and then jumped out of his window."

"Is he okay?" Parrish was placatingly calm.

"I don't know. When I got into his room, he was gone. Why would he do that?" Sherry's voice shook.

"Don't worry," he commanded. "I'll be over there soon."

She nodded, forgetting he couldn't see her. "Okay."

Her phone beeped, signalling that the call had ended. With another glance out the window, Sherry plodded out of the room and back to her backpack. In a daze, she slipped her homework papers neatly into the pockets, fitting her pencil case into the niche available. Her actions were organized and smooth, yet her fingers trembled slightly. She sat down on the coffee table, hugging her bag to her chest as she stared out the front window. What would Liam's parents think when they came home from work?

Soon, pairs of headlights lit up the street outside. Sherry threw on her backpack and ran to the front door, unlocking it hastily. A team of official cruisers had not arrived. Instead, just Parrish's car and Stiles' jeep were parked out on the curb. Why Stiles? And then Scott stepped out from the passenger's side.

She cocked her head at Parrish. "What are they doing here?"

"Um, we're Liam's friends," Stiles stated obviously.

"Get in the car," Parrish coaxed. "Liam will be fine."

She narrowed her eyes suspiciously at the three of them, but acquiesced, tramping over to her uncle's sedan and plopping down onto the scratchy seat. The door slammed shut, isolating her to the silence of the car.

Beyond the rolled-up window, Parrish, Stiles, and Scott entered Liam's home, huddling together and discussing matters unknown to Sherry.

Shortly afterward, Parrish came back out, his face still arranged into that serenely unaffected look of his. He slid into the car and started the engine. "Scott and Stiles will find him."

"But you're the sheriff's deputy."

"Yes, and I trust them to find Liam. Did you want to go back to school to get your bike?"

She had no idea how Parrish could be so calm. Maybe it was a perk of his job. "Yeah," she allowed meekly.

"Alright." He hesitated, then placed his hand gently on Sherry's shoulder and gave her an honest, comforting look. "Don't worry, Sherry."

As always, that was easier said than done.


A/N: Sorry about not updating yesterday! I got busy and went to bed earlier than usual. I might start to update every other day instead of every day now, just so I can catch up on the chapters and you get a good length for each one. Thank you guys for all the support so far! This story is nearly at 2k reads! What are your thoughts on what just happened?

Remember to review, follow, and favorite! xx Delaine