"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-Fifty-Three: Upside Down And Right-Side Up
(The Massacre At Hawkins Lab, Pt. 5)
***
Rowan held onto Steve's shoulders as tight as she could. She didn't dare wrap her arms around Steve's middle, in case it undid her cauterisation, so she gripped his shoulders with a death grip as he rode the bike, pedals moving furiously. Beside them, Nancy and Robin were also pedalling the bikes while Leo and Valerie, respectively, clung on. Eddie rode his bike solo, and was in the lead. Not that Rowan didn't expect him not to be, given where they were biking to.
The bike skidded over a crack in the road, causing a bump to ricochet through Rowan. She gritted her teeth, fingers digging into Steve's bare shoulders.
"You okay?" Steve asked, between panting breaths from the exertion of riding a bike in a hell-dimension with knife-sharp, poisonous air.
"Fine," Rowan muttered. "You?"
"I'm fine. Peachy, even," Steve replied, and Rowan snorted.
But the humour faded as they left the suburbs, taking a path that Rowan didn't recognise. It must be another residential part of Hawkins, one Rowan hadn't gone through, instead using the regular way to get to the Wheeler house and back. But as they passed through a rotting park that would be nice on the other side, something prickled at Rowan, stirring her electricity uneasily. There was something off about this place, even more than it already was with it being in the fucking Upside Down...
That was Rowan heard the roar, and she saw it in the distance as they zoomed past it.
The Creel House, surrounded by a swarm she now realised was those fucking bats. The very same house she'd stood in front of for three months. But now she knew why, because that was where Vecna was, where he'd tormented Chrissy, Fred, Patrick, Max and Alistair for months. Where he'd murdered Chrissy, Fred and Patrick from and almost did the same to Max and Alistair. Where she and the rest of the Party had gone in to comb for clues about Vecna in the real house just yesterday. And she now recognised that darkness radiating from the attic as Vecna's power, a malevolent aura that had her own power go more haywire than it already did with the Upside Down.
Vecna was right there, and it was all Rowan could do to keep from teleporting in there and tearing him apart with her mind and electrocuting the pieces until they were ashes.
There was still so much unknown about Vecna, and they needed a proper plan if they were to actually kill him and save the world. Revenge would have to wait a little while longer.
But even as Rowan felt the sickening, insidious aura of Vecna's power, a frequency struck against hers—a frequency that was like the Upside Down's, wrong and twisted, yet not. It had confusion ring through Rowan.
