Animals

13.

CALLIE'S POV:

"What do the different colored strings mean?" I asked as I laid flat on my stomach watching Stiles pin things to his wall, kicking my feet back in forth from boredom.

"Oh, just different stages of the investigation." he turned around and smiled at me, "So green is solved, yellow is to be determined, blue's just pretty." he turned and shrugged at me.

"What does red mean?" I said looking at his wall with my head resting on my hands.

"Unsolved."

"You only have red on the board."

"Yes, I'm aware." he turned around, "Thank you."

I smiled at him until he returned it, "Did you get detention for pulling the alarm?"

"Yep. Every day this week. It's okay though, minus you having to wait for me to drive you home. But we were onto something." he said, his back still turned to me.

"Even though we couldn't find any proof of Barrow being there?" I asked.

"Lydia had been right every time something like this has happened." Stiles said still not looking at me.

"No scent. No bomb. And you got in trouble."

"Okay, look." he finally turned around, "Barrow was there. Alright? Lydia knew it. She felt it." Stiles said as he sat down in front of me, he glanced down at my phone to see that I had been texting Lydia the whole time I had been watching him, "Tell her that if she wanted to, I'd go back to that school right now and search all night just to prove it." I began to type out his message when suddenly he was grabbing me, "Get up. Get up now. We're going to the school. Tell Lydia."

****

"So what are we looking for?" I asked as we walked through the school, Stiles turned a doorknob for the chemistry room and it opened, "That was supposed to be locked."

"Yeah. I know. Either of you notice anything else?"

"It smells like chemicals." Lydia said, "They wouldn't have been able to catch his scent." I scrunched up my nose and nodded my head.

Stiles squatted down with his phone's flashlight and shined it down beside my feet, "He was here, performing a very minor surgery on himself." Stiles pointed to the small amounts of blood near my feet, I quickly moved away from it, "You were right." he said to Lydia.

"Then why don't I feel good about this?"

"Probably because he was here to kill somebody." I said even though it didn't help Lydia's feeling right now.

"But who?"

"That's what we got to figure out. We could spread out, start looking for anything." Stiles said, even though he order us to split up, he stayed beside me as I walked around looking for anything.

"Lydia, what are those?" I asked and pointed to the chalk board.

"Atomic numbers."

"Is it a formula?" Stiles asked.

"Not really." Lydia shrugged, "Nineteen's potassium. Fifty-three is iodine. Eighty-eight is radium. The first two make potassium iodide." she began to write on the board.

"Potassium is K?" Stiles asked and I placed my hand on my forehead and shook my head at him.

"From kalium, the scientific neo-Latin name." Lydia answered.

She continued to write out the letters when she stopped at the last one, "What's radium?" I asked.

"R-A." she wrote it slowly.