Billy's gone.
Ruby Buckley's world ended with him.
But Hawkins isn't done with her yet.
When strange deaths begin again, Ruby is pulled into the heart of the storm. Between shadowy nightmares, the town's newest outcast, and someone she was never s...
( songs for the chapter ) forever // the beach boys all out of love // air supply
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The sun had started to set, the sky shifting into deep blues edged with black. Spring had only recently stretched the daylight, barely two weeks of later sunsets, and Ruby still wasn't used to it. She supposed it was a good thing, though.
Nightfall was good.
Nightfall meant shadows.
Shadows meant Eddie was less likely to be spotted.
He was still a wanted man hiking through the woods, after all.
The air was cooling quickly, settling into the kind of chill that crept beneath clothes no matter how long they walked. Ruby couldn't seem to warm up. The constant movement didn't help, nor did the fact that the weather had been getting warmer by the day; spring was rolling in, thawing Hawkins. But she stayed cold.
Will had once told her that when the Mind Flayer lived inside him, he liked the cold. Needed it. The creature hated anything warm. After exorcising it, when Will finally had control of his body again, he couldn't shake the chill for months.
Ruby had thought, of course something with that cold a heart wouldn't tolerate heat.
Love was warm. Love filled. Love burned.
The Mind Flayer, now Vecna, was incapable of that warmth.
And Vecna lived, even now, somewhere in her mind. The thought alone sent a shiver crawling down her spine.
Ruby never liked being cold. The physical temperature didn't matter, it was what cold represented. Loneliness. Emptiness. A kind of quiet isolation she never asked for.
Winter itself wasn't the problem. Winter was her favorite season. She was born on the third day of Christmas, loved waking up to fresh snow blanketing the world on her birthday, loved the big coats, scarves, the flushed cheeks and red noses. She loved curling under oversized blankets with hot chocolate. Loved the coziness, the warmth inside winter.
The cold she hated was the other kind, the one that lived in the bones, that seeped into the bloodstream. The cold that accompanied being alone in a too-quiet house late at night while their parents were somewhere above the clouds. The cold of a power outage plunging everything into darkness. The cold of waiting for Robin to get home from band practice.
It was a feeling Ruby didn't know how to describe. But she remembered it well.
She and Robin were lucky, though, lucky to have each other. Their parents loved them, truly. But love from thousands of feet in the air still left a house empty. Their dad was a pilot; their mom, a flight attendant. They were barely home. When they did make it back, once, maybe twice a month, they had less than a week before they were packing again for the next trip.
