Three loud enough but still gentle knocks came to Chris Argent's ears.
The door creaked a few inches open to let young deputy Parrish peek through.
"Can I come in?" he asked.
"Sure,"
Parrish did so, he then carefully closed the door behind him and slowly advanced inside the room. He dragged a chair near the bed and proceeded to sit, in silence for a short moment, "I don't really know where to begin, I just thought I should talk to someone about it," he stated when he felt Chris's gaze weighing on him.
"What about?"
Although, Parrish shifted his attention towards the woman lying on the bed, "Is this the woman you found at the scene?"
"Yeah, but she was still alive, unlike the rest of the people there, she said her son was taken,"
" They were all human?"
"That we know, what we don't know is what did it,"
The deputy frowned and thought back to the conversation he had with Brayden and Scott, "There is a possibility the same creatures that attacked Scott, did this as well,"
"That remains a possibility for now, unless... you know or feel something that we...the rest of us can't know," speaking of knowing and feeling things, that last suggestion from Argent seemed like a good segway to the subject Parrish was really meaning to talk about.
" I don't know, I haven't really used that side of me that much before tonight," he confessed.
"When you found the banshee?"
Parrish replied to Chris's question with a simple nod.
"How did you trigger it?" Argent asked again.
" I thought about Lydia, every time I had a vision, she was there..."
"Makes sense, hellhounds and banshees are connected,"
" I already know that; I just seem to struggle more to trigger my ... Harbinger of death side... Compared to Lydia for example,"
"You both hold the title of harbinger of death sure... But you are both inherently different," Chris marked a short pause before continuing, "Lydia's only ability is to access the supernatural, which manifests through her hearing being tuned to a different level of that from others, and it runs in the family,"
"Like it was for Loraine Martin?"
"Yeah, they just access what can't be heard or seen by regular people, which is why they are not supernatural, unlike werewolves, kitsunes or wendigos who can't go through or touch mountain ash, banshees can,"
According to what Scott and the others told him, he, as a hellhound also had the ability to go through mountain ash barriers, the main difference however, is that he burns them, unlike Lydia who just passes through without any noticeable interaction. One thing boggled his mind though, Argent said that Lydia had only one ability.
" You said Lydia had only one ability? I mean I know she can predict death but what about her ability to scream or have visions and her dreams?"
" I was getting to that part, her visions come from the things she hears, from the voices that speak to her... to warn her, and the power of her scream doesn't really come from her, it comes from every dying scream she can hear,"
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" Is that why her scream was so powerful back at Eichen, when Valak drilled a hole in her head?"
" Exactly, she could access and hear every dying scream and it was just unbearable," Chris had finished explaining the origins of Lydia's powers. Jordan just sat there looking attentive and marveled at how awful it must be for her, to hear and feel the pain of so many people, when he himself struggled to handle his own. He snapped back out of his thoughts when Argent added,
" Your power on the other hand doesn't really come from you, it comes from a spirit that inhabited your body at the moment of your death, a spirit that works for Odin's hunt. Your or its, primary task is to protect the supernatural from whatever your instructed,"
" So... I take orders from the wild hunt?"
" Think about it, you didn't use your powers against the nogitsune or against Kate Argent and her berserkers, your powers only activated when your car was set on fire by your colleague, But! You took the chimeras and fought the beast, what do you think is the difference?"
" I was sent to fight the beast... Because the only other person who could stop him was a banshee but even then... She needed to know its true identity,"
" Yes, nobody else was strong enough, not even a true Alpha...That's why we had to freeze you almost to death...We needed to put you in contact with the spirit, to get you on the same page, it's much easier to gain control upon its powers when you know each other, or so to speak,"
" So, while Lydia accesses the supernatural through herself, I have to jump through a few hoops to get there..." Parrish finally concluded.
Putting words in their places the way Argent did, felt like finally sipping water after wandering for days under the sun in a dry desert, which may sound like an exaggeration to anyone other than Parrish, but then again nobody else was walking in his shoes. That conversation cleared the fog in his mind, it shut down some of the voices standing in his way.
He stood up, thanked Chris for his helping hand and left the hospital. Once comfortable in his car seat he gripped the steering wheel with both hands and stared at his reflection in the rearview mirror.
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, if there could ever be a moment for him to pitch in and actually make a difference, beyond vaguely patrolling around the town, if there could ever be a moment for that, then there was his shot. His breathing grew increasingly faster and louder as he hoped against all hope, to make some kind of connection, sense an energy or catch a sound, a voice...Contact, he desperately needed and tried to make contact with the spirit of the hellhound without losing control over his own body to it.
Alas, when nothing came of it, Parrish just sighed and reopened his eyes to face the cold hard reality and...
He froze, a shiver ran down his spine when it dawned on him that the colors and the atmosphere around him had changed, he was... No longer alone in the car. He could see someone from the corner of his eye, someone stiffly sitting beside him in the passenger seat... Someone wearing a deputy's uniform.
Parrish so very slowly and shakily turned towards the sight; the moment he laid eyes on it he lost every bit of determination he'd mustered to wish for a vision as a way to contribute to the fight somehow.
It was not an "it" but a "he", his colleague Wilson sat beside him, as pale as dead, his gaping eyes were surrounded by huge black circle bags, in a way that would seem excessive even for a panda. But the most horrific thing about his look was the thin line dressed across his throat, clear for a strangulation mark. Right underneath that mark, another one lied, only this time it didn't appear as a thin line but a large one, it was a gushing wound with blood oozing from it. His throat had been slit open.
Jordan's eyes were directly facing Wilson, so he'd stopped moving his head, though he couldn't quit the shiver, since... The nightmare wasn't yet over. Once again, from the corner of his eyes he'd captured another disturbing image, this time on the back seat of the car.
Deputy Gibbs's physical state wasn't any better from Wilson's: Identical dead stare, crusty cracking pale skin and more importantly the same slit throat and strangulation mark.
What bothered Parrish the most about them was the lack of life emanating from them, almost as if those bodies were just carcasses drained of their souls. The deafening silence of the moment didn't ease Jordan's anxiety, but he kept still in anticipation.
Then, as if on cue, both bodies cracked their mouths open in a grotesquely fast movement, but no ordinary voices came of them, no words, only... Radio static which kept getting increasingly louder with time running by until he heard it, the echoey voice uttering those words:
"Eichen! to Eichen! Eichen house! ..."
He listened to it play on repeat, getting further and more echoey by each second that passed 'til the loop was finally broken, the silence, the natural colors of the night and the temperature went back up to normal. Parrish stopped shivering when he opened his eyes to see his reflection staring back at him in the rearview mirror, his irises were glowing a fiery orange. He was sitting in the same position right before the vision, clutching the steering wheel with both hands.
He immediately knew what he had to do, he started the car and booked it towards Eichen house.