#posts: para

Calder Flynn pushed the back door shut behind him, making sure it was securely latched before stomping his boots to get the excess snow off. The snowstorm was picking up, and there had to be almost a foot of snow out there already, with more piling up by the minute, and no sign of the snow stopping. He’d wanted to make sure the horses were all safely in their stalls, and that the stables and barn were all warm enough and everyone was fed.

Now that he was back inside, he took off his gloves and hat, brushing snow from his shoulders as he called out to his younger brother.

Sandy was still badly shaken from her nightmare that had been more like a memory, not to mention the method she and Rory had needed to use to escape said nightmare.  And although she was relieved to be back in reality, reality wasn’t much less scary: they were trapped in a lair created by the djinn, who had tied them all up and begun to drain their energy.  But despite the fear Sandy was feeling at the entire situation, and despite the unsettling emotions that came with living your worst fears, and then needing to kill yourself to escape your worst fears, a bigger emotion was filling Sandy up now: determination and love.  She was determined to save her brother.  Although she had been unable to do so in the past, she knew more now, and she was in a position to actually help him.  Duncan was not just her big brother, he was also her best friend, and Sandy was determined to find him and help him.  She was just as determined to find and help the rest of her friends, too.  And somehow, that determination to help and the love she felt for her brother and friends overrode the fear she was feeling.

The cave was extremely dark, cold, and wet.  There wasn’t light streaming in from anywhere but the entrance, as far as Sandy could tell, and the deeper she went into the cave, the harder it became to see.  She tried to use the flashlight on her phone, but unsurprisingly, the battery was dead.  So instead, she felt around in the dark, hoping to find her brother or one of her friends.

Within a few minutes, her hand bumped against someone’s arm.  Sandy rubbed her eyes and blinked, trying to get her eyes to adjust further.  As they did, she gasped. “Duncan!”

“You don’t look so good, Nat,” Katie said with a worried expression.  “Maybe...do you want to stick with me?  Just for right now!  You can be a lookout, in case something comes while we are rescuing someone!  I think that would be super helpful!”  Katie was worried about Natalie.  She really looked like she could use a break.

Cami followed Ivy, hand holding onto the taller girl’s as tightly as she could. “Hey,” she said softly, point ahead of them and a little to the left. “I think that might be him.” She checked her pocket for the vial and pulled it out as they got closer.

Allison winced as she pulled open the apartment door, noting the painful strain ache still heavy in her arms and hands.  The dehydration everyone who had needed to go to the hospital had suffered had been easy to explain by saying they’d been camping and gotten lost in the woods, but it had been less easy to explain why so many of them had sustained similar injuries and strains to their arms and hands.  Many of them were scraped up, too, and Allison had a concussion; she was starting to wonder if the djinn had let her fall before taking her back to the cave.  They’d never really gotten a look at how it hunted, and although future generations might have liked to have that information documented in the bestiary, Allison was just glad the thing was finally dead.

Rubbing absently at her wrist, Allison headed for the elevator, thinking about all of her friends as she did.  She knew that they were all getting back into their daily routines, although slowly, and not without a few bumps in the road.  It was one thing to go through a battle against a supernatural creature hell-bent on killing them or destroying the town-- it was never fun, but they’d also had that experience before.  But it was another thing altogether to have been trapped in their worst nightmares for an extended period of time, and to have had to kill themselves, as well as see their friends do the same, in order to escape their nightmares.  Not only that, but Allison couldn’t shake how many of her friends nightmares had centered around the atrocities committed by her family.  The entire thing left her feeling a worn, deep sort of sorrow.

Andrew had helped a few of the others get their pack mates down as he searched the cave for his two pack members, Rose and Finn. He knew the others could handle waking their friends up, but he wanted to be the one to helps his own pack. Especially Finn, he might need both of them to wake him from whatever horrors the djinn was forcing him to endure. 

Stiles had found Rose before Andrew did, but that didn’t particularly bother him. She was awake and he could feel the rage seething from her, he felt it too. They need to find Finn. Luckily, their enhanced senses made maneuvering through the cavern easier than it was for the human members, and it wasn’t long before the two of them stumbled upon their missing pack mate, quite literally.