IN TOO DEEP || Liam Dunbar [3]

SIX

After what felt like both minutes and hours, the screaming started.

It was hard to tell how much time she'd spent in the strange train station, because time seemed to have a different meaning. Sometimes it felt like she'd been there just hours, and other moments it was as if she'd been stuck there with her brother for years. When she'd asked stiles the first time, he'd been in the same boat as herself.

No idea.

But to her it seemed that the more she thought about the people she loved — Scott and Lydia, her Dad, Liam and Mason, Malia — it made her feel more grounded and more part of the present world. But the longer she went without thinking about them, she found it was easier to accept what had happened; that the people who mattered most to her didn't remember she'd ever existed.

In those moments, however, that she forgot Katherine Stilinski had existed as well. Some days she couldn't recall what her bedroom had looked like, her favourite colour, or what job she planned to get once she'd finished with school. But the most chilling experience was when for a good chunk of time, she hadn't been able to remember her own name.

Stiles had spent what felt like hours with her, brainstorming to figure out what it was because he couldn't think of it either. They'd sat against the same wall they had when she'd first woken up from her trance-like to him calling her name, and gone through every possible name that sounded fitting; Kathleen, Katrina, Katie, Kristen, Kenna.

She'd cried when she remembered it was Katherine, and had then gone on to think about the people in her life at every opportunity she had. But mostly, she thought about Liam.

She'd already asked Stiles about it. Her exact wording had been can humans have anchors too?

He hadn't even looked at her. Liam?

Yeah.

Katherine was pulled out of her thoughts and froze at the sound of horses and whips cracking due to flashbacks of her past encounter with the hunt, only to have Stiles haul her as far away from the loading platform as possible and shove her under one of the benches. Him and Peter hovered just out from under the bench but still beside her soon after. "This place is really starting to fill up," Peter commented softly.

She just plugged her ears to drown out the sound of magical gunshots being fired.

"Wait a second...that girl, I know that girl," Stiles uttered out. She forced herself to look up and follow his gaze to a girl with light brown skin and curly hair wearing a BHSS lacrosse uniform that was clinging to a younger, similar-looking girl. "Her name is Gwen. She plays lacrosse." Several gunshots rounded off, sending green smoke into the air, and she flinched. "How long has this been going on?"

"This isn't a train station, this is a way station," she heard Peter heave out. "It's not gonna stop."

"What is it?" Katherine choked out after following his gaze up to the destination boards mounted up on the wall. "What are those places?" Her entire body was trembling, and it took everything in her to force it aside.

"Bannack? Canaan? I know you know something," Stiles finished for her."

"We gotta get out of here," Peter whispered so softly she almost didn't hear him. "Nobody is safe."

"Yeah, in here!"

"In Beacon Hills," he snapped frantically at Stiles. "Your friends, your family, everyone. You've gotta go. They're gonna be taken." Then he tore away from the bench and back towards the loading platform.

"Where are you going?" Katherine hissed after him, having successfully forced her panic down.

Her and Stiles followed hastily after him, trying to draw as little attention to themselves as was possible as they walked up the tracks in a direction the two of them seemed to know already. "What did you see up there? The towns. What did it mean?"