"SO, WHAT ARE YOU SAYING?" Scott questioned once Stiles and April arrived at the hospital along with the sheriff. Apparently, two of the doctors were missing, and they had both been kidnapped in the same night. That meant that the human sacrifices were moving onto the Healers section.

Sheriff held up a hand to slow him down as he asked. "Hang on. Hang on. They were both in the car?"

"No, Dad, they're trying to tell you that it was two separate kidnappings, okay?" his son explained to him exasperatedly, trying to focus on the fact that there was no way that this was a coincidence. It just could not be. "Two doctors, both gone."

"So, whose car is this?" Stilinski quizzed, gesturing to the car next to them that had arrived at the hospital with no one in it. Scott and Ethan had found it which brought the police there to investigate.

Melissa piped in to the conversation because she knew more about the victims than they did since she worked at the hospital and actually knew them, and she informed the man, "Dr. Hilyard, the on-call doctor. The ER attending is the one that never made it back in."

"Let me just focus on getting your story first, all right?" Noah told the McCall woman before turning back to the best friends that were standing in front of him, waiting for him to tell them to do something. "Boys and April, give us a second."

"Sure," the blonde girl told him as the boy nodded. They heard a siren in the distance approaching when they stepped over to the side of the conversation to talk.

Scott looked up at the sheriff's son with raised eyebrows as he questioned, "So, these are definitely sacrifices, right?" If they were not sacrifices, then that was one crazy coincidence.

"Yeah, it's one Deaton mentioned — healers," the Stilinski boy told them. April was still shocked that they went after two people in one night. Whoever was sacrificing these people must be on a clock. They were moving fast.

"What about Danny? He threw up mistletoe. That's not a coincidence, and if he hadn't been with Ethan, he probably would've died," Scott added, and the Sharpe girl recalled when he told them that Ethan had brought Danny to the hospital because he could not breathe, and Melissa saved his life. "Danny's not a healer."

Stiles just shrugged because he had no clue either. Then he froze when he saw his father talking to someone urgently on the phone. He looked to Scott and pointed to the man. "Can you hear that?"

As the McCall boy listened, April's eyes wandered to the trees that surrounded the hospital. Her eyes paused when they landed on a figure standing in the shadows. She could only see have of their face, but she knew that they looked familiar. It took her a moment before she realized who it was. 

Elijah. 

She furrowed her eyebrows in confusion when she realized that it was him. Why was he there, and why was he lurking in the dark trees? As soon as she glanced away and looked back, he was gone. She was bewildered, but Scott's words pulled her attention away from that.

"The found a body."

 "How are you?" Isaac asked April as she sat next to him on the floor and stared at the wood, clearly deep in thought. It did not seem like it was thinking about rainbows and unicorns either. It seemed bad.

After the hospital, Scott drove April back to his house on his motorcycle because it was late, and he did not feel like driving all the way to her house even though she didn't even live that far away from him. He also somehow convinced her to sleep in Melissa's room with him to make sure that she wasn't the third sacrifice.

She was fine with it because she hadn't planned on getting much sleep anyway. The only problem was that Isaac would be there as well because ever since Derek kicked him out, he had been staying in Scott's guest room. The three of them snuck into the woman's room after they were sure that she was asleep.

She looked up at the sound of the Lahey boy's voice and yawned slightly as she answered, "Tired."

"You should get some sleep then," he told her since she was not the one on watch at that moment. In fact, her watch was after Scott's, so she had a little bit before she would have to wake up. "I'm on watch anyway."

"I can't sleep," she informed him, shaking her head a little bit with a sigh. She had been having trouble sleeping lately. That always happened during that time of year.

He furrowed his eyebrows at her in confusion. "Why not?"

"It's a stupid reason," she muttered, looking away from him as she bit her lip. She hated talking about it. She should've just tried to go to sleep when he told her to. Why the hell would she start that conversation now?

"I'll be the judge of that," he replied, but when he saw her hesitant features, his face fell a little bit, realizing that it was not some silly reason. It was something different. He assured her, "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to."

She leaned back on the wall behind them and exhaled as she informed him, "No, it's fine. It's just that, uh, my mom's birthday is coming up in a couple of days. I don't usually get much sleep this time of year."

"Oh. That's not stupid," he said. He did not know much about what happened to her mother since he had been ten years old when it happened, but he knew that she had died from what he had heard over the years. He supposed that he could have looked it up, but he felt like that would be an invasion of privacy even though it's all of the internet. He wanted her to tell him when she was ready, if that day ever came.

She looked at him in confusion. "What?"

"You said that it was a stupid reason," he reminded her, and she nodded, remembering. She just said that so that he might realize that it wasn't that bad and not ask. "That's, like, the opposite of stupid."

"Thanks," she mumbled, a small smile crossing her face. She became suddenly aware of how close their faces were, and her heart began to beat a little faster. She could tell by the way that Isaac's ears twitched that he could hear it.

She took a deep breath before breaking their eye contact and looking toward the window. She missed the frown that crossed his face at that. She glanced at him again to see that he was looking at his lap. After a moment, she licked her lips before somehow building up the courage to slowly lean her head on his shoulder. He tensed up for a second in shock before he relaxed again and smiled down at her.

For the first time in a couple of days, she drifted into a good, deep sleep.

《❀》

"GUYS!" Melissa yelled, causing all of the teenagers on the ground to jerk awake and scramble to their feet and stare at her like deer caught in headlights.  Isaac's head that was resting on top of April's when he was asleep shot up as he twisted awkwardly. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Uh, we were watching over you." Isaac looked back and forth between both of the McCalls and the blonde standing next to him for help. She just shot a thumbs up at him, cheering him on silently.

Scott nodded along, confirming his story. They were just trying to protect his mother despite how weird it looked. He exclaimed, "We wanted to make sure you weren't the third sacrifice!"

"But both of you were asleep,,," she pointed out, confused, and that was when April realized that no one had ever woken her up for her shift. Someone fell asleep during their watch before hers.

The McCall boy's eyes widened as he also realized what happened before he turned to the boy with the curly hair. He yelled at him, pointing the blame at him as well, "You were on watch last!"

"What are you talking about?" the Lahey boy questioned with furrowed eyebrows, trying to remember what happened the night before that did not have anything to do with the Sharpe girl. However, that was all he could remember. "You were on watch last."

"Isaac was on watch when I fell asleep," April told them, raising her hands in defense of herself as the blonde boy shot her a playful look as if she had just betrayed him completely.

As she sent back an apologetic look, he reconsidered his claim when he remembered what had happened. He looked to Melissa sheepishly, "I might have been on watch last."

"My heroes," the woman replied with an amused expression as she smiled at her son and his friends. As weird as it was, it was cute that they wanted to watch over her. "Wait, didn't you say that they were all doctors? I mean, I haven't had an M.D. recently attached to the end of my name, so I think I'm in the clear."

"Yeah, but it could just come under any kind of healer, Mom, and you were definitely a healer last night," Scott reminded her about how she saved Danny's life.

Melissa sighed before gesturing for them to get to moving. "Yeah, well, I'm not gonna be anyone's human sacrifice today, so all of you get your butts to school."

Once they got to school, they had Mr. Harris's class. Both fortunately and unfortunately — mostly fortunately — the man was still missing, so Ms. Blake was their substitute for that day at least.

"Good morning! As you all know, Mr. Harris is still missing — I mean, sick," she told them once they all got settled into the class. "Anyway, I'm filling in while we all hope and pray for a more qualified substitute to take my place. Okay, so let's get started, shall we?"

"Hey, my dad said that the ER attending wasn't strangled but did die from asphyxiation — they just don't know how," Stiles whispered to his two friends as the woman began to write something on the board.

Scott nodded slowly. "Do you think the on-call doctor could still be alive?"

"I don't know, but Scott, there's got to be at least twenty other doctors in that hospital at least, you know?" the sheriff's son pointed out to them. "Any one of them could be next." Scott's phone buzzed, and he leaned over the desk to tell the person that he could not talk at that moment since they were in class. April took that chance to turn to the Blake boy next to her.

"Elijah, can I ask you a question?" she quizzed with raised eyebrows.

He looked at her with a slightly confused expression but nodded anyway. "Yeah, sure. What do you want to know?"

"Were you, by any chance, near the hospital last night?' she questioned, and she did not really know what to expect. He probably would not have said yes even if it was true because it would make him seem suspicious.

He shook his head slowly. "Nope. Why?"

"No reason," she muttered, "Thanks." She turned back to the front and stared at the board with a blank expression since she wasn't actually paying attention but thinking about something. She could have sworn that that figure was him. Maybe she was just going crazy. Scott's face as he brought the phone away from his ear interrupted her thoughts. She asked, "Scott, what happened?"

"Deaton's been taken."