It was still so…odd.
Ever since he'd helped her with the whole Richie thing, her 'backseat passenger' as she still preferred to call him had become….
Quieter.
It still spooked the hell out of her seeing him pop up at random intervals throughout her day but the fact that they all happened without the annoying prodding to slice and dice everyone in the immediate area was an honest god sent for what was left of her sanity.
It was almost as if he were doing it just to check up on her as it were.
"I just want to help." He'd remind with that softer smile he'd given her just after he'd reminded her of the knife that had been her salvation from having to listen to Richie's crazed fanboy ramblings one second longer than she'd already had.
Yet she was still on edge every time she'd spot him lingering quietly in her own reflection or sometimes just out of the corner of her eye.
Unnerving even.
"Sam."
She only groans in response to the phantom voice whispering her name in her ear.
"Saamm." Her passenger tries again.
Still, she ignores him. Or at least she tries to.
"Look I'm only trying to help." Her father says his ghost-like voice almost sulking now at her continued refusal to even acknowledge she was listening to him.
"Sam."
Tara's voice now startled from the other side of the small hotel room the sisters were sharing for the night. "Sam, did you hear that?"
"Thank you, bratty sister."
At this Sam has to physically bite her tongue to keep the "shut the hell up." To herself least, Tara think she was talking to her as Sam rolls over onto her back rubbing the daze of sleep from her eyes with the heel of her hand. "Hear what Tar?" she asks only seeming to annoy the reflective image of her father glaring at her from the darkened tv screen.
Instead of answering Tara presses a finger to her lips with a low "Shh."
This time Sam hears it.
The high panicked whimpers of a dog somewhere close to their room over the sheeting rain of the ongoing storm outside the window.
The animal was clearly in distress before it started scratching at the closed for to the sister's room.
Poor thing must be scared out of its mind.
"Or scared for someone…" the image of Billy Loomis comments as his tired daughter pulls on her jacket and heads to the door with a stern "I got it so stop agitating those stitches before you start bleeding again." In her sister's direction when Sam notices how Tara was attempting to drag her still-healing ankle over to the side of the bed to follow her towards the door.
Almost as soon as she opened the door the shepherd mixed breed was jumping up in panicked excitement trying to both prod her into following it but also to make the small jump required to lick her face in genuine relief, she'd agreed to open the door.
"I'm coming buddy." Sam promised still doing her best to assess the tired-looking animal for any obvious signs of injury other than obvious anxiety and the curious drive to go back into the howl of the rainstorm.
This time Sam can't hide her gasp of shock when she'd lifted her head from finding off another of the dog's attempted nuzzlings to find the phantom image of her long-dead father standing out in the middle of the pouring rain. Like trying to see a clear image through static.
"Running out of time, Sammy." He says ominously
"Stay here." Sam orders more for her ghostly father's benefit than her sisters as she pulls her jacket tighter around her before running headlong into the storm after the already retreating dog that was her only guide in the sleeking rain.
A kind of 'this way' bark helps her the last few paces when the dog seems to stop beside two downed figures.
One that of a man who seemed to be either dead or knocked unconscious by the hit to his head on the rock he was propped against the other and obviously now the one in immediate need of aid was the woman the nervously whimpering dog was nuzzling with as if trying to get her to wake up.
"Just as young and innocent as Sydney was." "As young as you are now." He adds with an even more devilish grin as he looks from one to the other and back again. "oh the possibilities."
Any other time Sam would have had a jump scare at the sudden appearance of her dead father kneeling down beside the unmoving female on the ground. As it was Sam only gives an annoyed "I thought I told you to stay with Tara." As she strips off her jacket and wraps it around the woman's body for all the good it will do.
"Not how this works Sammy." Billy scolds tapping the side of his head with one blood-coated hand. "but I'd get her inside it I was you. Wouldn't want her dying from shock or exposure or something like that now would we?" He redirects his dead eyes falling back on the rain-soaked face between them. "Besides Tara's waiting. Alone." As if Sam needed the remind her as she gingerly lifted the woman wrapped in her jacket into her arms.
"Now the fun begins." Billy chuckles as Sam, the dog, and the unconscious woman in Sam's arms all make the long track back to the haze of rain-washed lights that was the hotel a few hundred yards from the woods in which they stood.