Mutual Anchors || Liam Dunbar [1]

022

•C h a p t e r t w e n t y - t w o•

-E i c h e n H o u s e-

☾ ☾ ☾ ☾

♪ If you're down, he'll pick you up
Doctor Robert
Take a drink from his special cup
Doctor Robert ♪

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I park by the school and look at the letter Thalion left me. Thursday is tonight, which means I'm meeting him for the first time. If things get complicated again today, I won't be able to see him.

He probably expects that possibility, too.

I'm getting out of the car and I see Lydia and Malia walking by. I catch up because I want to tell them what Scott told me this morning.

"Hey, Valeria-"

"Hey," I interrupt them. "Did Scott tell you yet?"

Malia's holding some weird book, but I can't see much of it because she's put her hand down. "He called Stiles."

"Yeah, well, they mentioned that someone was stealing the bodies. Tracy and Lucas', too. We just don't know who's doing it," Lydia nods, and I take Malia's book.

"What the hell is that?" I ask, noticing that the cover of the book shows the strange scientists who killed Lucas before our eyes yesterday.

"That's the book Tracy had in her room," Malia replies. I raise my eyebrows, because how could she possibly know? "Yeah, I admit I was in her room looking for a little bit."

"Is that what you were doing while a werewolf scorpion tried to kill us?"

"Valeria, I-"

"I'm kidding," we go through the school door. "They look exactly like-"

"Like the men in the masks," Malia finishes for me. That can't be a coincidence. It's definitely not a coincidence.

"The Dread Doctors by T.R. McCammon," Lydia reads slowly, as if thinking about each word separately. We stop at her locker while she takes out some textbooks.

"What?" Malia looks at her.

She shrugs. "I don't know. There's something about it," Lydia shakes her head. "Has anyone actually read it yet?"

I open it up and find it's about three hundred pages long. "Well, that will be wonderful."

"Just me, and I didn't understand any of it."