"I swear, if I'm dying tonight because of you, I'm gonna haunt your ass so hard, Harrington!"
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah! I'm gonna go full Poltergeist and shit!"
"Then bring it, Graveswood."
"Challenge accepted."
***
In which after years of suppressing their...
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Chapter One-Hundred-And-One: How To Break Into A Secret Russian Room (Without Dying)
(The Sauna Test)
***
Neither Aunt Aco or Alistair had come back home in the morning.
Rowan wasn't really surprised with her brother's absence when she woke up to an empty trailer—it was summer, after all, and Alistair was probably either at Will's, Mike's, Cami's or El's. But her aunt not being home... that had a knot of concern form in Rowan's stomach as she ate cereal, since Aunt Aco always tried to be home to let Rowan or Alistair know when she was leaving, and if neither her or her brother were awake, then their aunt always left them a note. With not even a note telling Rowan where her aunt was or had been last night, it made that concern knot tighter. And with the fact Russians were in Hawkins doing God knows what in Starcourt, even Alistair's explainable absence had Rowan worry about her brother, too.
The absence was very prominent in how empty the trailer felt, without any music or the voices of her family to fill up the silence and the smell of food to permeate the trailer. It was a feeling Rowan wasn't used to, where noise and chatter and life was always prominent that it was almost as expected as the the creaky pipes or that the sun was in the sky. To not have it felt... wrong.
It had Rowan almost look forward to figuring out a way to get into that room and see what the fuck was in those boxes the Russians were delivering about under the guise of mall deliveries, to ignore that unnatural emptiness of her trailer and the concern and worry twisting her organs into misshapen knots about where Aunt Aco and Alistair could be—and if they were safe.
But until Steve picked her up, Rowan decided to ignore all of that by getting ready—the only perk of being the only person in the trailer was no fights for the first hot shower, but that felt just as wrong as everything else—wearing the shirt she'd seen in the Gap that Chrissy had paid for, a non-ripped pair of shorts—just in case—and her Docs, and only bothering with deodorant and not putting on any makeup. By the time she was finished, Steve still wasn't here. Rowan hoped to God he was just running late, and hadn't gotten into any reckless altercations with the Russians, since the only fights he'd really won had been against inter-dimensional monsters and not humans—which, should be weird considering one would think you'd lose against the monsters and not the humans.
But, considering the time she had to kill and the fact none of her family had reappeared, Rowan thought she'd do some forward-thinking. Just in case.
So that was how she found herself at the Munsons' door, banging away until it opened and revealed the weathered face of Wayne Munson. Rowan held back a wince—she really hoped she hadn't woken up Wayne. With his long night shifts at the plant, Rowan knew the first thing Wayne did other than say hi or wake up Eddie was go to bed.
