Appetite for Destruction

There's A Bad Moon On The Rise

The three days after Laura's death were the longest three days of my life.

Everything reminded me of her. Stupid, little things like a smell or the way I entered the room and saw her but didn't and it was just memories dancing on the edge of my perfect vision. Only it wasn't so perfect anymore because I saw red sometimes and other times I only saw the blur of the world around me.

This wasn't supposed to happen - none of this was supposed to happen. The fire, the running, the way we lived but weren't really living, then Laura... I didn't know what to do because it had been the three of us for so long, the last of the Hales - the ones who weren't in a coma anyway - and I thought it would always be that way, us against the world.

That was gone now. Laura was gone and there was nothing we could do to get her back.

No one even noticed when I stalked through the town for information, for some air, for a bite to eat that I didn't even taste, as if she wasn't dead. As if she was still there and all I had to do was find her and apologize for not finding her sooner. Only when I got back to the house the mound of dirt that hid her body was there - half of her body, some traitorous voice inside my head reminded me - buried next to the home the rest of my family had perished in.

Now Beacon Hills had taken our sister from us too. We never should have let Laura come back here alone; we should have been better siblings, better Betas. When she told us she was going to find the people who killed our family we should have fought harder to keep her in New York, or pushed harder to join her because we were a pack and we were stronger together and -

Laura was dead. I felt the gush of blood in my palms where my claws pierced skin and I forced them back into fingernails.

The stairs of the house were charred and unstable under my feet, matching the charcoal black of the walls. The house was a perfect reincarnation of my memories yet at the same time it was completely unrecognizable, burned and hollowed out like a grave. The floorboards creaked beneath my weight in the exact same pattern as I remembered.

With my hands buried in my pockets I entered the master bedroom. It was almost empty, scrapped of the wardrobe, the old wooden desk Dad had built with his own hands, the paintings - because Mom loved to paint - even the curtains were gone. The only thing that remained was the twisted metal of what once had been a bed. It was the only room on the upper floor with a stable roof so we'd set up camp here with our sleeping bags and duffels.

The house was far from habitable, but it felt... right, staying here. Like an act of defiance, living in the very house they'd tried to exterminate us in.

Derek was perched on the edge of the bedframe, looking drawn and haggard. I knew I looked just as bad; neither of us had slept more than a couple of hours since finding Laura's body and Derek was running himself into the ground trying to find her killer. I wordlessly handed him one of the coffees I'd picked up on my way back and all-but collapsed onto my sleeping bag with my own drink.

Derek didn't touch the coffee, staring intently at the piece of paper in his hand. There had been a bag in the room that used to be Laura's bedroom that we'd found during our search of the house, Laura's scent clinging to the clothes inside. The only other thing inside the bag was a piece of paper with a strange drawing - whoever drew it was no artist; the strange symbol could have been a dog or a horse, and I assumed the thing in the background was supposed to be a sun. There was a single word in Laura's handwriting on the back of the paper: Harris.

The mystery surrounding Laura's death was growing more confusing by the day.

"There's a new Alpha in town." Derek said out of nowhere, and I stared at him blankly. This was the sort of thing I didn't have nearly enough awakened brain calls to deal with on so little sleep. Caffeine built empires, economies, and a steady supply of Java Junkies, and for every snobby purist preaching the virtues of tea I challenged them to take on Derek Hale without a bit of fortifying black sludge in their veins.