"COME ON, WE GOTTA HURRY," APRIL URGED ISAAC, practically pushing him toward her car. All of a sudden, a voice coming from the trees made her stop abruptly. She whipped around toward the forest and asked the boy next to her, who had just realized that she had paused, "Do you hear that?"

He furrowed his eyebrows, having heard absolutely nothing other than cicadas and the distant yelling from the hospital. He was really confused because usually, he was the one that was hearing stuff she could not with his werewolf hearing. "Hear what?" She did not answer him and just started walking toward the woods. "April?"

"April..." hissed a voice, and she recognized it as the one that had been in her dream just a couple of hours earlier, the one of the creature with the wrapped up face.

She then realized that it was not just a nightmare. If she was hearing these things while she was awake, it was definitely not just in her dreams. She cautiously took more steps forward as she yelled into the darkness, "What do you want?"

"Come with me," it called softly, almost so quiet that she missed it, but she did not. She felt oddly drawn toward the voice, causing her to take more steps forward at a faster pace this time. She wanted to know where it was and what it wanted. She wanted to know what was going to happen.

"Hey," interrupted Isaac, grabbing her arm and making her snap out of the trance that she was in. She looked around and shook her head as she realized that she was back to reality before glancing up to see the concern in the boy's eyes. "You okay?"

She nodded quickly, sparing a final glance to the woods. "Yeah, I'm fine. Just thought I heard something in the trees." He did not seem convinced, but he allowed her to keep walking to the car, and he followed hesitantly.

"That was Isaac," he informed her as they stepped foot into the apartment. He had just gotten off the phone, and he seemed happy with whatever news he had just received. "They found Stiles. He was wandering around at the preserve, and they're bringing him to the hospital."

"Oh, thank God," she breathed out in relief as the approached Allison's room.

She knocked on the door loudly, and a few moments later, the brunette girl opened it with tired eyes. She was clearly very confused as she looked between the pair. They were both fully dressed and looked like they had been out somewhere. Isaac exclaimed, "What the hell have you been doing?:

"Sleeping?" the girl answered as if it were obvious, which it kind of was, judging by her attire and the fact that she seemed just barely awake. "What the hell are you doing?"

April frowned in confusion because before, she was wondering if Allison was just ignoring the phone calls and texts, but now she was almost sure that she hadn't gotten any. "You didn't get any calls or texts?"

The Argent girl shook her head before heading over to her nightstand to check her device while the other two walked into the room and followed her over. "My phone's off. I never turn my phone off." She looked up at them in concern, as if asking what was happening. They explained everything to her about Stiles and what was happening, and she questioned, "Sleepwalking? Is he okay?"

"Yeah, they found him a few minutes ago," the Lahey boy told her, repeating what he had just said to the blonde girl. "They're bringing him to the hospital."

"I don't know what happened...I never turn it off," Allison muttered. She frowned when she noticed a voicemail on her phone before tapping it to listen. A male voice began speaking rapidly in Japanese, causing all of them to scrunch their faces up in confusion.

The blonde boy and girl moved closer so that they could continue to listen to the unintelligible Japanese being spoken by the mysterious man on the brunette girl's phone, at least, they assumed it was Japanese. April quizzed, "Who's that?"

"I have no idea," Allison answered, and she had no clue who could have possibly sent it.

The next day at school, April came with them to ask Mr. Yukimura if it was Japanese and what the hell they were saying if it was. "You're right. It's Japanese," he confirmed before looking at the Argent girl curiously. "Who left this on your phone?"

"I don't know," she replied with a shrug, looking down at the phone as the message continued to play over and over again so that the teacher could listen to it and translate it. "All of the messages are the same, and they all say 'Blocked ID.'"

"Can you translate it?" April asked hopefully. Scott had told her that Kira and her family spoke Japanese — or a little bit at least from what he saw when he went to their house — and that was why they had come to their history teacher for help. They were surprised that he had not told them to call the police and try to track down who was leaving voicemails on her phone.

He nodded, listening carefully before starting to tell them what each part meant, "Mostly. The man speaking is giving instructions, actually. The first line is, 'All evacuees are required to stay at least ten feet back from outside fences.'"

"What does that mean?" Isaac asked in confusion. "What fences?"

"The fences surrounding a Japanese internment camp during World War II. After Pearl Harbor, Japanese-Americans were rounded up and put in camps. This man is reading instructions to prisoners upon their arrival."

Allison nodded along to what he was saying. Now that they had kind of an idea what it meant, they had to figure how roughly what kind of person would send a thing like that to her. "Well, where does something like this come from?"

"I have no idea because it's fake," the teacher responded, and when they all frowned at him, not knowing what it meant, he continued. "It mentions the name of the internment camp as 'Oak Creek.' There was no internment camp named 'Oak Creek' in California."

《❀》

APRIL HAD LEFT SCHOOL EARLY SO THAT SHE COULD be with Stiles during his MRI scan. They were doing all sorts of tests on him after he showed up the night before. He was still very shaken up, so Scott and April thought it would be best to be there for him during this process.

"I'm not sure I know how to pronounce this or if it's not actually a misspelling," Dr. Vandenburg, the man in charge of Stiles and his MRI, said to them in the room. The Stilinski boy was sitting in a hospital gown on the table of the machine, and Scott, April, and his dad were there with him. At that moment, the doctor was making the face that most teachers made when they reached Stiles's real name on the roster.

Knowing what he was struggling with and not wanting to have to deal with all of this, the sheriff impatiently corrected him, "Just call him Stiles."

"Okay. Stiles, just to warn you, you're going to hear a lot of noise during the MRI. It's due to pulses of electricity going through metal coils inside the machine," the man explained to the boy. It was nothing that he did not already know, being Stiles and all. "Uh, if you want, we can get you earplugs or headphones."

"Oh, no. No, I don't need anything," Stiles answered, shaking his head. He was brave like that. At the most, it was probably just going to be some loud whirring and maybe a couple of bangs, but that was just what the blonde girl was assuming. She had never had an MRI done before. She was just trying to convince herself that Stiles would be fine and that everything was going to be okay. This was just going to be a fun experience that they would laugh about someday. It definitely did not seem funny now, but maybe it would in the future.

Melissa offered him a comforting smile before pointing to the window on the other side of the room where they would be observing from. Well, only Melissa and Stilinski could since the teenagers were neither family nor employees of the hospital. "Hey, we're just on the other side of that window, okay?"

"Okay," the boy replied with a nod. After the adults left, he turned to his friends with a frown. "You know what they're looking for, right?" When they shook their heads, he continued with a hopeless voice. "It's called frontotemporal dementia. Areas of your brain start to shrink. It's what my mother had. It's the only form of dementia that can hit teenagers, and there's no cure."

"Stiles, if you have it, we'll do something," Scott assured him, and April tried to keep the tears from falling. She knew that that was what Stiles's mom had, and that was what had killed her in the end. There was no way that she was letting that happen to him.

Not being able to take it anymore, she lunged toward him and wrapped her arms around him, giving him a hug. He smiled slightly into her shoulder as he hugged her back, and after a second, Scott joined the embrace as well. The Sharpe girl mumbled to them, "It's us three against the world. We'll figure it out."

"You know the stuff you were telling me about chemo-signals earlier?" the McCall boy asked Derek as the three of them sat anxiously in the waiting room. "It reminded me of the time you were teaching me to use anger to control the shift."

"I think you ended up teaching me more about that," the man answered, causing the three of them to smile for the first time in a while.

Scott raised his eyebrows at him. "Are you teaching me again?"

"Think of it as sharing a few trade secrets," Derek answered. "You know, I took Cora back to South America, right? It's where she spent most of her time after the fire. But that's not the only reason I left...I needed to talk to my mother."

"Your dead mother?" the blonde girl questioned in confusion.

He nodded, confirming her words which just made everything more bamboozling. "She told me something that changed my perspective on a lot of things. She said that my family didn't just live in Beacon Hills — they protected it. This town needs someone to protect it. Someone like you." He pointed to Scott.

"And someone like you to teach me a few trade secrets..." the McCall boy added.

"Just to clarify, your dead mom told you all of this?" the Sharpe girl asked, still having no idea what he was talking about. When he nodded again, she just stuck her face in her hands and groaned, "I'm not even gonna ask. I did not get enough sleep to comprehend the answer."

A look of realization crossed Scott's face, and he jumped to his feet, causing the other two to do the same. The older one quizzed, "What?"

"He was trying to protect us," the boy informed them, and they were still very confused. He grabbed his jacket from the chair and tugged it on. When he saw the looks on their faces, he explained, "Stiles was protecting us — from himself."

"What are we looking for?" April asked because he had led them onto the roof to look for clues about why Stiles had been there before heading to the preserve.

"I'm not sure, but I think Stiles wasn't just up here struggling with himself," he answered, and he walked over to one of the cages that were around something electric, and April did not know what it was. "I think he was struggling not to do something."

He reached above the cage, following the chemosignals, and pulled down a duffel bag. He let it fall to the ground, and a bunch of tools came spilling out of it onto the floor. There were a bunch of different wire cutters and other supplies. They all looked up at each other in confusion when all of a sudden, the cage thing that they were looking at blew up and sparks started flying everywhere.

Then, a cord that had definitely been cut started whipping everywhere, electricity crackling as it swung.