If one is to know a single fact about Gideon Lucas, it is this: When he says he's going to do something, he does it.

Once they've ravished their fries to nothing but crumbs, he barely gives her enough time to catch up and hop in the passenger side of the car before tearing out of the parking lot and screeching around the corner. He does slow once they've driven within bounds of downtown, but his attitude doesn't; in a matter of minutes, he's in and out of a building with a number scratched down on a napkin. His reason for tracking Boone's number down in the phone book is merely circumstantial. If they ever come across anything linking his number to the missing, he'll have it memorized. Smart, Lacey thinks, but what are the odds?

Then they're off again.

In all honesty, Lacey can't say she doesn't share in Gideon's fervor, she can't say she can't relate to the way his hands grip so tight to the steering wheel that his knuckles turn white. Every time she remembers the scratches on the back of that man's hand, a fire builds and blooms in her chest before dimming out again, a timelapse of budding snapdragons bursting open with petals of red and orange before folding in on themselves when night comes. Even though she knows, it doesn't change anything. Stella's still dead. Erie's still missing. And what of that other girl, the redhead with the small face? The more she thinks, the more parallels she starts to build: she won't dive into the belly of the beast for Darcy, but she might be getting herself into something twice as horrific for Erie.

She doesn't have Gideon doing most of the work with Darcy, though. He's the reason they're getting anywhere. We're actually getting somewhere, she thinks, incredulous. Heat flourishes and falls as various worst case scenarios flash in front of her eyes. But do we want to?

As they crawl through the streets as slow as legally possible, Gideon keeps himself hyper-focused on any hint of black paint that might show him where this man takes his SUV every day. Lacey has a much more important job and returns to it, tapping a bandaged finger along her phone screen and scrolling through the various social media profiles connected to Isaac Boone. He's a very active man, with much to dig through, so Lacey snuggles down deep into the faded fabric of the seat, lifting her legs up close and filing away any and every detail she can find. Stalkerish? Yes. Necessary? Also yes.

As she descends deeper and deeper into his timelines, she gets more and more accustomed with the type of life he lives, with the face he projects to the world. Sometimes smiling, sometimes smug. Sometimes he's got no face at all, just a jumble of symmetrical features she can't even begin to know how to read. In the background of one picture, she sees the train-tracks she came into Carrick on; he stands in the middle of them with a fringe of jaded green forestry waving far behind, arms wide open, blazer slung over one. She doesn't know how he does it, but even something as simple as this seems cocky with how stiff his body seems, with how filtered the setting sky is, with the quality of the photo - definitely professional. She finds another further down of the same aura, this time with a wide expanse of field behind him. Never-ending. The area strikes her as familiar. Coming in on the train, she'd seen the spirits of soldiers and lost souls trudging along, no destination in mind.

"Seems to hang out on the other side of town a lot," she says, continuing to scroll through with a rigid finger and narrowed eyes. "Bet he lives in some fancy, secluded spot out there."

"See if you can find anything about his house, then. Someone as rich as that, there's gotta be some unnecessary flex about it somewhere."

She finds bits and pieces. The deeper she digs, the clearer the puzzle becomes. A triangular roof with white panelling aged to soft creme and a comfortable brick chimney. Windows bordered by navy shutters. A wide porch, the sort you expect from homes deep out in the country. Summer trees sit in the background, a cozy distance from the house itself. Definitely a large family home, and definitely separated from suburban life. If they see it in person, they'll know it.

"Head towards the train station. It's somewhere up that way."

Gideon wastes no time. Stubby brick buildings and glistening streets give way to a distant shop here or desolate house there. They wind around a long curve, bordered by waving tendrils of dead grass with the occasional tree sprouting up, sprouting little green buds easily missed if you aren't careful. One of the bony fellas lays in the grass, staring up at leaves that refuse to grow. They pass him by quickly. The sky begins to drizzle and patter on the windshield, but it's not enough to warrant the wipers, so Gideon keeps going, focused on the destination, and Lacey keeps her head down, focused on the prize.

She plans to keep tabs on Isaac - she goes through all of the open apps on her phone and follows him, one by one, and makes sure to turn notifications on for any notice of where he might be, what he might be doing. She practically grinds his face down with her thumb every time she sees it. Something about that uninterested smile, something about his knowing eyes - it fills her with a disgust she usually only reserves for the unsettling appearances of the malevolent spirits tracking her down.

She still regrets not slamming the diner door into the back of his head instead of letting it tap the back of his shoe. He deserves much worse than a scuffed heel.

After following the last of his accounts, a loud ding! reverberates in her hands and it catches her so off guard she almost drops the phone. The notification pops up at the top of her screen, a preview: Isaac_Boone posted a photo. With wide eyes and frantic fingers, she drags down the notification and enlarges it.

Lacey squints at the image, a lightly filtered photo of some hipster bar somewhere in Des Moines. She swallows - he's out of town, and from the message posted with the image ("Nothing like doing business in a cozy hub in the middle of a big city! I plan to be here a few hours...#Travel #DrinksOnMe #whereisthisguy?"), it doesn't seem he'll be back for a while.

"We have time," she says, letting her chest loosen. She explains the circumstance while pulling up Google Maps in search of this secluded house out in the middle of nowhere. It's not hard to find after a bit of swiping beyond the railroad and an expanse of dead field. That's the house, all right. And there's not another one near it for miles.

She directs him past the train station, up the road until they find the nearest place to park next to the field that'll take them there. There is a thin road that winds through the forest up that way, but to be completely honest, she's not too convinced a demon won't pop out and send them careening off the road. Walking in plain sight puts her more at ease; so what if she tells a little white lie?

They emerge from the vehicle. With an arrow showing them where they are, Lacey intends to keep the map open in the palm of her hand, but with her other one, she reaches in and grabs a bag up from the floor of the car. Gideon, behind her, taps his foot against the asphalt. "Why are you bringing that purse? You'll probably lose something."

"It's not a purse," she says, slamming the car door and securing the strap across her shoulder and chest, "it's a satchel. And it's empty. If we find something important, we'll need someplace to carry it."

Not entirely true. As she walks across the lot and into the moist expanse of grass, she can feel the box of table salt shaking around behind the brown fabric. Never again will she leave the house without it. Especially not after that demon basically fingered her open wounds. A shudder leaves gooseflesh up her arms as a phantom pain skitters through her hand. Yeah, never again.

The grass breaks away to pebbles and rocks, colored grey and salmon and like dirt. They walk up and onto the tracks; Gideon bounds from one metal rod to the next while Lacey balances on a wooden slab until they've made it to the other side and to the beginning of an endless field. Corn or some crop must usually grow here; she sees their dead carcasses still decomposing. Other carcasses must be buried underfoot, surely. Somewhere in the field to the right. Or somewhere in the woods to the left, their fringe manicured by man to be straight. Somewhere, the dead roam, restless atop their final resting places, and Lacey can't see any of them.

As long as she's wanted to be able to say that to herself, it doesn't bring much relief, much comfort. Dare she say it: it's too quiet. It's always too quiet and it makes the air churn, thick and unsettled, as she breathes it. Silence has never bothered her before, so why now? Why does it only exacerbate the pain when she clenches her fists every time she remembers why they're walking this way, why she's letting her perfectly good shoes sink and get sucked on by the mud with every step? And that's another thing, with the water soaking through to her socks. She wants to tear at the wet laces and rip them off entirely just to say fuck it, I don't-

"You're angry," Gideon states.

"Who's angry? I don't know her," Lacey says. It's an impulse response, even she knows that much.

He throws his hands in the air like he never said anything at all, then lets them fall as he casts a lingering stare her way. She doesn't like the way his eyes beat down on her. She looks straight ahead.

"There's nothing wrong with being angry," Gideon finally says. "You should be angry. I'm angry."

Lacey scoffs. "Hardly seems like it. You're like a ray of sunshine locked up in a mortal shell. You don't seem angry to me."

"I am, though." He follows her gaze down the long field they've yet to see an end to. "I'm...Every time I think of that man...and when I connect that to what we know about Stella, to what we saw happen to Stella, I- it's kinda scary, how angry I get. It's intense. It's not me."

She opens her mouth to say something but finds that she doesn't quite know how to respond to that. His words strike a chord with her, makes her insides feel like they're melting down into this squishy, jelly center, because that's me, too. But the squishy center is spicy, and that heat spills into her bloodstream as every gut-wrenching image passes through her mind again: Stella's body, Babineaux's report, Isaac's hand. She has to swallow down a lump just to speak. "It's not fair."

"Life isn't fair," he says, "and that makes it so much worse. Nobody, nobody deserves to go out that way, or to die that young, or to die at all, really. And it makes me angry. But more than that it makes me scared. I'm scared. Erie is out there alone, or worse. Probably cold, probably hungry. Probably hurt. Bleeding. Barely breathing. Not breathing at all-"

He cuts himself off with a hitch in his throat, and for a moment, his step falters. Lacey only realizes he's stopped walking when she's five steps too far, and she turns to find his hand cupped over his mouth, eyes clenched shut. Maybe it's the moistened air between them, but his long eyelashes glisten against pink skin.

When she searches her brain for a way to respond, she finds herself empty-handed, standing with an awkward weight against one leg as shallow breaths move across the back of his hand. Should I say something? What am I supposed to do here?

With reluctance, she crosses those five steps and settles for a reassuring pat to his shoulder, though she's certain her palm probably feels more like a cold brick than fleshy comfort. Yikes. "There, there." She swallows. "We'll find him before anything really bad happens. If we find something solid here, we'll go straight to the police and he'll be out-"

He drops his hand away from his face, eyes still closed, but there's a rigidness to his features as he speaks, a deliberateness to them. "If we find something solid, I'm getting him out myself. We can't keep wasting time. I need him out. I need him here. I need to, to hold him and know that he's okay, that he's with me, that he's safe. That he's safe with me."

His eyelids finally peel open and show the whites of his eyes tinged pink, thin red vessels stretched across and covered in a thick layer of wavering liquid. With a particularly strong breeze, the liquid finally breaks and starts to stream down his cheeks, but he roughly rubs it away with his sweater sleeves and continues walking, pace elevated. His strides are strong. Too strong. You're angry, she thinks.

As she struggles to catch up with him, a thought strikes her that maybe, just maybe, Gideon and Erie are more than friends. Hell, Lacey is friends with Erie, but she's not all worked up like he is, not by a longshot. Maybe that's just one of the many differences settling between them, or maybe it's that and then some. Nonetheless, he's refocused on the task at hand, and so should she; on aching legs, she hurries along, glancing at where they are on the digital map in her hand.

"We need to turn up h-"

"There's an opening between these trees here," Gideon says, already jogging onto the byroad and into the shade of gnarled branches. Lacey curls her lip at the sight, but she can't particularly come up with an excellent excuse to not follow through now that they're this far. So she does.

Thankfully, the path is only bordered by trees for a few yards before breaking into an open clearing. Her eyes are drawn along just by the way nature holds itself in this little pocket; her gaze is forced to drift up the weak hill, across a distance of tall grass waving hello in hues of yellow and gold, and to the dark gloom of the sky hovering close to the trees about a mile or so out from where they stand now. Beneath the gloom stands a house. Two stories tall with attic space, it seems, and wide. Just like the house in Isaac's photos.

She takes a few steps forward but then there's pressure on her shoulder, pushing her down behind the diseased shrubbery. The back of her hand smacks at Gideon's. "The hell are you doing?"

"I just wanna sit here for a minute to make sure there's nobody else in the house. Y'know, to like, watch for people or listen for music or something. I don't feel like getting shot today. I can't find Erie if I go and get shot."

"That's the first time you've had a good idea that remembered self-preservation, but at such an impatient part of my day." She stares at the house through the blades of grass, stifling a sneeze when one tickles her nose. "Fine."

They give it five minutes - that's the longest she's seen Gideon sit still, but by then he's restless and fidgeting - and start to creep closer. Their legs swish through the brush awkwardly. Gideon has less trouble with his long legs, but Lacey is left struggling and stiff. "If I get ticks from this," she says, "I'm never going anywhere with you again."

"If you get ticks from this, I'll make a note to self not to shop wherever you get your jeans because obviously they're useless." His eyes are everywhere, never settled in one place for too long. "No cars in the drive. No lights on. There should be, with how dark these stupid clouds make daytime anymore. Like, it's noon, there should be light. But no. Now we're wasting electricity and hurting Mother Nature, but frankly, she's forcing our hands. Not this guy's hand, though. He's gone, definitely gone."

"We know that already."

"Looks clear," he finishes, lengthening his strides and leaving Lacey behind. She releases a lengthy exhale and picks up the pace. Soon, she's joined him in front of the porch steps. It's a wrap-around porch, and although it's supposed to match the same creme color as the outside panelling, it's tinted green by a reflection of hanging plants, white pots spilling over with leaves, and carefully manicured ivy weaved along the inside railing. Wind chimes hang from the gutter, and from their metal edges, water drips and splashes onto the already rain-slickened floor.

Lacey takes the first few steps. "I didn't take Isaac for a gardener. D'you think he does this when he's not killing-"

A rapid pattering rushes across the inside of the porch and comes bounding for her. Her chest alights with panic and she throws herself to the side. Her funny bone makes a metallic clang when it makes contact with a watering can settled on the banister, which now sits lopsided in the grass. Weird sensations crawl up and down her arm, and a flash of black flies down the steps and into the brush. A ghostly meow fills the air as it flees.

Gideon tries to hold back a cheeky grin. He fails. "Fuck off," Lacey says.

He does not, in fact, fuck off. But something does change with him once he skips those steps and into the dry space under the covering; his grin falls, his eyebrows pinch together, and his body stiffens as he reaches out and tries the front door. Just like that, he's back to this serious air that doesn't seem to fit him quite right.

When the door doesn't work, he tries the many windows at the front of the house. Then the ones at the side. None budge. When he's met her at the front door again, she swallows and scuffs her muddied shoe against the welcome mat. "Can't we just look for stuff around the house? We don't need to get inside so I'm not sure what you're...Don't look at me like that."

"We do need to get inside. He could be inside, Lacey."

"Wouldn't we hear him if-"

"He might not be able to talk!"

He's too close and his voice hikes up too much. Lacey takes a step back, but she misplaces it and her ankle bumps against a tall metal tin boasting a fern. Cool metal slides away, and she reaches out to catch it before it can spill out across the porch. A nervous laugh bubbles out of her throat along with a sigh of relief, but as she's about to right it, she catches Gideon squinting at the spot where it once stood. His eyes widen, and it's like the world blossoms before him.

"Oh, you stupid fuck," he says, crouching, "you stupid, stupid fuck. This is the equivalent of leaving your key under the mat so anyone who finds it can get in. Oh, he's so stupid! I'm so happy about that! This is the greatest thing."

He arises, silver glinting between his fingers. Before Lacey can protest, he's got the key in the lock and the door flung open, exposing a wide entrance, a polished home. She can hardly register that this is what they're doing now. Hell, she's still trying to process the slew of curses that just came out of his mouth. By the time she recognizes that they're about to waltz right in, he's already waltzed right in. Waltzed right in and taken off down a hallway, at that.

I'm gonna kill him.

She crosses the threshold and shuts the door softly behind her, prepared to deliver on her thoughts. Hopefully, it doesn't come to that.