Howling to the Heart || Isaac Lahey

30.

"If Isaac didn't kill his father, who did?" Scott asked, the three of us standing inside the dark house a few hours later.

"I don't know yet," Derek answered and Scott started walking, the only one of us with a flashlight.

"Then how do you know he's telling the truth?" Scott asked another question.

Derek looked at both of us with a knowing look. "Because I trust my senses."

"Right, because they've never failed you before," I remarked sarcastically.

He shot me an annoyed look. "And it's a combination of them. Not just your sense of smell."

Scott stopped, looking at Derek as I snorted. "You saw the lacrosse thing today."

"Yeah," Derek sassed.

Scott cringed, looking away. "Did it look that bad?"

Derek grabbed his shoulder. "Yeah."

"It was painful to watch," I laughed, and we started to walk again. "It was so obvious that you were sniffing them."

"You wanna learn?" Derek asked, opening a door that revealed dark stairs leading to the basement. "Let's start now."

"You want us to go down there?" I raised a brow. He couldn't be serious, right? He only continued to stare at me, and I groaned, taking lead down the stairs.

"What's down there?" Scott asked, close behind my slow steps.

"Motive," Derek answered, with no other context.

"And what exactly are we looking for?" I asked, looking around the junk filled room at the bottom of the steps.

"Follow your senses." Once again, no other context.

"I have the urge to slam your head into the dashboard again," I muttered, taking cautious steps further into the room with Scott. Everything down here felt...creepy, strange, and angry. There was so much anger mixed with fear through this room.

"What happened down here?" Scott asked as I noticed a freezer and walked toward it, feeling as if it was calling to me. Now that was weird.

"The kind of thing that leaves an impression."

"Riah," Scott quietly said from behind me and I halted, looking at him touching a wall. "There's scratch marks."

"From humans or something else?" I asked.

"I think a human." He slowly stood back up, his eyes landing on the freezer behind me. "What's that?"

I looked back to the freezer and shrugged my shoulders. "I don't know, but I wanna look in it," I admitted walking toward it.

I stopped in front of it and Scott stopped beside me, the both of us sharing a worried look before I grabbed the lock. Suddenly, a light shined at us, and I screamed.

"Derek, you son of a bitch!" I exclaimed, glaring at him.

He only looked down to the lock clutched in my hand. "Open it."

"Say please," I snapped, still glaring at him.

Scott cautiously watched us, and Derek looked back up at me, holding my glare.

"I'm not opening shit until you say please."

"You're a pain in my ass," he scoffed. "Please, open it."

I smiled, looking down at the lock. "That wasn't so hard," I mused, ripping the lock off.

Slowly I lifted up the lid of the freezer and gaped in horror at the scratch marks covering every wall and the lid. There was even blood, like someone had scratched at it desperately.