Saving Matthew Patrick

Tracing a Scent

Nessa POV

"Give me your computer. He's getting cocky. He just opened a literal pathway from your computer to his."

"Wait, what does that even mean? Is he going to wipe my drive?"

"Probably." I started typing away furiously, trying to detect where his connection is coming from. "I hope you have backups of that. I'll try saving whatever I can later when this is over, I promise." I saw the timer change, cutting off twelve hours, bringing our time down to just about thirty minutes.

"Whoever you are, you, girl who's helping them, you're out of your league. I am Wraith, king of red rooms." Whoever was talking, he was using some sort of filter to mask his voice. I started working on undoing everything he put into hiding his identity; all I needed to do was keep him talking.

"Seriously? You call yourself king of red rooms? Gag much?"

"You are still out of your league, Miss Geron." I let out an exaggerated gasp. "That's right, I know your name, where you live, the names of your closest friends. I've got your entire life in my little palm right now. It was so easy. You were so easy."

"Please don't hurt my family," I fake-whined.

"Stop tracking me down and I will." His voice cracked a little at the end there, and now we had his real voice ringing through, loud and clear. "You let me end this letdown sell out excuse of a person and I'll let your family live. I'll...wait, what?" I heard him gasp, in fear, like his own personal Bogeyman had risen up from the blackest pit of Hell just for him. Which, to be honest, that's exactly what I was in the first place.

"What's wrong?" Steph asked me. "Why did he stop?"

"The Bogeyman's come for him, and he's just realizing it now. When I looked for those red rooms earlier, I let out a little calling card to every room I came across. It's a sign showing that not only did I find them, but I'm coming to get them. Since I can only save Matthew, though, I forwarded the addresses of the four remaining red rooms to the local police, the FBI, what have you, and left this guy all to myself." The song was a distorted, glitched out lullaby, like something you'd probably hear in DDLC circa Act 2.

"Evangeline," he whispered. "Evangeline's found me."

"You didn't make it terribly difficult, Wraith," I spoke into the mic, and my voice rang out through Wraith's speakers on the other side.

"I can hear your voice on the feed!" Steph whispered.

"You were so arrogant, so pretentious, that you opened a gateway, a literal path for me to just follow on back to you. You went through my personal information, bragging that it was so easy, but it never occurred to you why? Why it seemed too easy? That's not a very smart thing to do. You led me straight to you, you overconfident piece of shit."

"NO!" I could hear the fear in his voice now. I quickly noted his address and put Steph's laptop down.

"Where are you going?" Steph sounded frantic. "What's going to happen now?"

"Now...well, now I'm going to rescue your husband, Mrs. Patrick." I touched my necklace, and thought of the address.

***

A/N: We're getting to the saving part! Almost there! Woo hoo! Are you liking the story so far? 

Question of the chapter: What's your favorite song right now? For me it has to be these three: Set It All Free from the Sing! OST, Getaway Car by Taylor Swift, and Perfect Symphony by Ed Sheeran and Andrea Bocelli. There's also the current song I'm using for an upcoming emotional AF edit, but I won't say because that will give the entire edit away, and I want to keep it a secret somehow. 😅

The gang will see you all here in 24-48 hours (I'm feeling sickly so I might not touch a computer outside of work tomorrow. I so sorry) with a new update, and until then I'll chat with you over in the comments section and on Twitter (muddy_orbs). Bye!