Burning Love | Max Mayfield X Maleoc |

5.3

The next day after the sauna test, the party were finally on a different place which was Jay's house, more specifically on Jay's room that was large enough to fit all of them.

Will and Lucas were on a small couch, Lucas was eating a box of S'mores Crunch cereal that he stole from the Maldonados kitchen while Will was just aimlessly flipping through the pages of one of the many books Jay had on his room, Jay and Max were in the bed holding hands while Mike was looking attentively at El who was trying to search for any of Jay's parents, Will's mom and even her own dad, Jim Hopper.

El sighed and nodded, "I found him." she finally said, gaining the attention of everyone else who awaited for more information.

"Where is he?" asked Max, squeezing Jay's hand and leaning closer to El.

"Woods." she simply said, Jay sighed and ran his free hand through his hair.

"What are they doing?"

"He's with your parents... And Will's mom." El said as Jay nodded softly, already suspecting that his parents weren't around because their cars weren't outside of the house, however, Will seemed confused of why his mother would be with Jim.

"My-My mom?" he asked confused and El nodded.

"What are they doing?"

"Ill... Annoy." El said slowly gaining confused looks from everyone, "They're going to Ill-annoy." she said one more time before Mike crouched at her level.

"Illinois? Illinois, like the state? The state of Illinois " he asked as El took of the blindfold and shrugged softly, some blood running on her nose.

"Mike, with all due respect, she probably doesn't even know how to spell the word 'Platypus', do you really think she'll know to spell or say Illinois correctly? Give her a break." Jay said, Max slapped his arm while Mike just flipped him off for indirectly saying that El is not smart.

"Ill-annoy." El said again, stammering a little.

After this Max took El to Jay's bathroom while all the boys stood in the room, the girls were taking their sweet time and this was starting to get on the nerves on Mike, and the situation didn't helped his state.

"Something's not right. I can't get Hopper off my back all summer, now all of a sudden, he's hiking with Will's mom and Jay's parents to Illinois? And Dustin's MIA, too? I mean, this can't be a coincidence." rambled Mike quickly while pacing around the room.

"What does it matter? The bottom line is, they're not here. It's up to us." stated Lucas gesturing himself and all the others, Mike and Jay turned to look at him confused.

"Up to us to do what exactly?"

"Find Billy and stop him."

"And that's where your plan fails, Lucas." begun Jay sighing, "Yes, we can beat Billy but we need to know where he is, El could help on that but you saw it yourself, she can't always find people at first try. Then she finds him, then what?" Mike nodded and pointed at Jay in agreement.

"We burn the shit out of him and make sure he doesn't escape this time." Lucas replied.

"Okay, then what?"

"Then we win."

"No, see, that's the other problem. We DON'T. We don't win. We got the Mind Flayer out of Will before and he just came right back. We don't just have to stop Billy, we have to stop the Mind Flayer." said Mike.

"How in the hell do we do that?"

"I don't want."

"But she could know." suggested Jay, everyone turned to look at him as he pointed towards the bathroom door where Max and El were still in.