˗ˏˋ⋆ H E A V E N L Y ⋆ˎˊ˗
↳ 𝒙𝒙𝒊𝒙. 𝒅𝒆𝒂𝒅 𝒊𝒏𝒔𝒊𝒅𝒆
𝘵𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘸𝘰𝘭𝘧, 𝘴𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘸𝘰
(𝔉𝔲𝔯𝔶)
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"AHHH!" GRACIE CRIED OUT AS SHE FELL TO THE FLOOR, CLUTCHING HER ARM where the bullet was embedded and blood was seeping through the fabric of her shirt. She stared at the wound, trying to ignore the feelings it evoked, but they were overwhelming. The pain was intense –– far worse than anything she had ever experienced considering she had never been shot before.
Scott asked worriedly, "Grace, are you okay?"
The Hale girl glanced up at him, nodded weakly, and clutched her arm. Though, from the look on her face, he could tell she was in a great deal of pain.
"Get up!" Matt snarled at her again before she could answer Scott.
Gracie glared at him, getting to her feet and still clutching her wound. He pushed her toward Scott and she grabbed his shoulder to steady herself, inhaling deeply and wincing. She nodded at Scott, silently telling him that she was okay.
"Both of you, back to the front," Matt ordered. "Let's go!"
Back in the front room, Matt pushed Gracie and Scott past Stiles and Derek, who were both still lying on the floor. Both were still paralyzed and both were visibly furious, though the lack of sensation in their bodies left them unable to do anything about it.
"The evidence is gone," Gracie spat at Matt, repeating her earlier words. "Why don't you just leave?"
"You-you think the evidence mattered that much?" Matt scoffed, shaking his head. "No, no, I-I want the book."
"What?" Scott was confused –– so was Gracie, for that matter. "What book?"
"The bestiary," Matt told them. "Not just a few pages, I want the entire thing."
"That's Argent's bestiary," Gracie could not believe they were going through all of this for a glorified dictionary written in archaic Latin. "We don't have access."
"What do you want it for, anyway?" Scott asked.
Matt glared at Gracie and said to Scott, "I need answers."
"Answers to what?"
Matt lifted his striped T-shirt, revealing his stomach covered in scales just like Jackson's. "To this."
Letting out a gasp, Gracie's jaw fell and and her eyes widened as he held up his shirt, revealing the scales that covered the right side of his torso.
"Look, you want to talk to the Argents? Go right ahead. But we don't have the answers for you so just let us go."
Matt just shook his head and raised his gun to her head, cocking it.
"Give me your phone," he told Scott. "...or I'll blow her brains out."
"Okay, so, that was a bad idea, Gracie. Really, really bad idea," Gracie thought to herself as she stared down the barrel of the gun.
The problem with Matt demanding Scott's phone was that they had already given it to him when he first showed up. It was Stiles who was the one to remind the psycho about that. Luckily, he did so without any sarcasm, or else Gracie was sure she would have gotten a bullet to the head.
After marching Scott and Gracie back to Noah's office, he texted Allison on Scott's phone, asking her to bring the bestiary to the station.
"There," Matt threw Scott's phone back onto the desk and led him into the bullpen where the deputies usually worked. "You know, I feel sorry for you, McCall. Cause right now, you're thinking about how you're gonna explain to your mom that you healed."
Scott looked down at his wound. Blood had trickled down from beneath his stained shirt and had dripped onto his jeans as well.
"The sad part is, you don't even realize how incredible it is that you're actually healing," Matt went on. "Cause you know what happens to everyone else when they get shot? They die."
Gracie eyed him carefully, noting how he had emphasized the last word of his statement. And then she remembered their conversation at the rave. When he had told them –– through Jackson –– that people had killed him.
"You died, didn't you?" She asked, her mind racing. It took her a minute, but she thought about how he had been afraid of water until it clicked. "How did you drown?"
It made sense.
She remembered when she was younger, she had been thrown into the deep end of a pool at a slumber party, almost drowning in the process because she wasn't really a good swimmer at the time. Anyway, it was a while before she felt comfortable getting back in the water.
Matt shook his head slightly. "He shouldn't have let them drink."
"What?" Scott furrowed his eyebrows. "Who?"
"You're talking about Mr. Lahey, aren't you?" Gracie guessed. "He let the swim team drink?"
Matt nodded in confirmation. "I didn't know what was happening," he revealed. "I didn't know they had just won state and Lahey, he's letting his favorites come over to have a couple of drinks to celebrate. Who cares if they're seventeen, right?"
Scott cocked his head. "Were you at Isaac's?"
"He had this first edition Spider-Man—or was it Batman?" Matt recalled. "And we were gonna make a trade but then I went over there and I heard music. Everyone was having a good time and I saw Sean. He threw Jessica in the pool. And then—and then Bennett went in and––"
"––Bennett?" Scott interrupted. "The hunter?"
"And then Camden, Isaac's jarhead brother," Matt continued as if Scott hadn't spoken. "He grabbed me. He thought it was funny."
Gracie pressed her lips together. "He threw you in."
"I-I yelled that I couldn't swim but nobody listened. I went under and I swallowed water and no one cared," Gracie and Scott watched as tears drip down Matt's face. "I-I saw that Jessica had her hands down Sean's board shorts. Tucker's grabbing Kara. And I was drowning. I was dying and they were laughing."
The sadness, the complete devastation in Matt's tone made Gracie swallow harshly. Nothing justified him making Jackson kill these people but there was a part of her that understood. They had done something horrible to him and he wanted revenge.
"All of a sudden, I was just-I was lying by the pool with Mr. Lahey right above me. He said to tell no one and that it was my fault," Matt face crumpled as he imitated Mr. Lahey, "'What little bastard doesn't know how to swim? You tell no one!' And I didn't. I didn't tell anyone." He shook his head, disgusted. "I would see them at school and they wouldn't even look at me. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, I'd gasp for breath. And my parents, they thought I was an asthmatic. They-they even gave me an inhaler. They didn't know that every time I closed my eyes, I was drowning..."
Gracie wished that Matt would have told his parents about what happened. She wished that they could have gotten him help. She wished that he hadn't turned into this person.
"You know about that little white light that they talk about, the one you see when you die?" Matt looked to Gracie and Scott; both of them nodded. "Well, I didn't see anything. Just darkness. Everything was dark...but then-then came the Argent's funeral and everything changed."
"What do you mean?" Gracie didn't know what he was talking about.
"I was taking some photos and then, purely by accident, Lahey got in one of the photos," Matt told her. "I looked down at the screen on my camera and I just had this unbelievable rage inside of me. I-I just looked at him and I wanted to see him dead...The next day, he actually was."
Gracie nodded. Isaac's dad.
"You know, Einstein was right," Matt said thoughtfully. "Imagination is more important that knowledge. It was like something out of Greek mythology. Like—like the furies coming down to punish Orestes." Scott shot Gracie a confused look, and Matt caught it. "You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?"
"Was he the guy who stabbed out his eyes?"
"That was Oedipus," Gracie corrected him. "Furies are deities of vengeance. Their tears were blood and they had snakes as their hair. If a crime went unpunished, the furies would punish the instigator."
"Jackson is my fury," Matt declared, earning himself a disgusted look from Gracie. "You know, when I saw him the next night, it was like this bond had been cemented between the two of us. I knew he had killed Lahey for me and I knew he would do it again. So, I went to Tucker's garage," he scoffed. "I even paid for an oil change and guess what? He didn't even recognize me. So, when he wasn't looking, I took a shot of him from my camera. In a few hours, he was dead...So I took more pictures. All I had to do was take their picture and Jackson would take their life."
The lights flashed for a second before going out altogether. The station was bathed in darkness except for the few emergency lights.
"What is this?" Matt freaked out as Gracie looked around nervously. "What is this? What's happening? What's going on?"
"I don't know!" Scott told him.
A car pulled into the station's parking lot, its headlights flashing through the windows. Gracie barely had enough time to see more vehicles coming in before she was ducking to avoid the bullets being shot at the window. She ducked down behind a desk with Scott at her side, both of them looking at each other with wide, frightened eyes.
There was a flash as a couple of canisters were thrown through the window the bullets had just broken through. Smoke erupted out of them and within seconds, the room was full of it. Gracie coughed into her arm and tugged on Scott's sleeve, yelling, "Come on!"
Scott ran out of the room first, running straight to Jackson so Gracie could get around him. She dashed into the room where Stiles and Derek were being kept and knelt next to Stiles.
"Take him," Derek urged her. "Go!"
Gracie nodded and gathered Stiles' arms just as Scott joined them and Derek ran from the room. Scott helped Stiles to his feet and carried most of his weight as he and Gracie dragged him through the station with Jackson on their tail.
"Here, here, here," Gracie pointed to an upcoming room. They entered and set Stiles on one of the chairs. As Gracie went back to clutching her shoulder, trying to keep pressure on the painful wound, Scott quickly ran out of the room to see what was going on.
"I'm gonna go check on your dad and Miss McCall," the Hale girl told Stiles. "Don't move, okay?"
"Seriously?" he glared at her poor choice of words, sitting there –– paralyzed.
"Oops...sorry," she quickly apologized before leaving the room and making sure the door was shut firmly behind her.
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𝐀𝐔𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐑'𝐒 𝐍𝐎𝐓𝐄:
So that's chapter twenty-nine. What do you guys think? If you really liked it, please vote, comment, and share.