A/N: Okay, so bear with me as we get through more story here, I promise there will be some more fluff and adorableness to come, I just need to set this up so you're not disappointed! I hope you like it guys, really I do xo
~ ~ ~
“So let me get this straight,” Cassie said, her boots resting up on the table as she leant back in her chair. “We kept this thing alive, tortured her, took her blood, and held her hostage for weeks, almost months, just to slit her throat and string her up in the woods?”
“You know, it would help if you would listen to me when I explain things to you,” Cal said, spreading out maps and photos on the table with a scowl shooting across to Cassie.
“It would help if you explained them better,” she narrowed her eyes at him, tapping a pencil against her teeth.
“We held her until the right moment,” he said. “Long enough to draw the other two in, so when they saw her there, saw what we did to her,” he grinned, the image flashing across his eyes. “They got angry and now they’re riled up. It’ll make it easier to lure them in. Any little thing we leave for them to find, they’ll follow.”
“And then we’ll move on to the wolves?” she asked.
He nodded, turning around to take the beer off the kitchen bench and took a sip. “We’ll start with the smaller pack.”
“Why not Hale and his lot? They’re connected to the two Maeve’s, won't that be easier?”
"They’re stronger, we haven’t dealt with a pack that big before,” Cal said.
“We don’t know that all of them are wolves yet, some of them are human,” Cassie said and Cal rolled his eyes a little.
“You hoping lover-boy’s not involved in this?” he sneered. “He’s involved.”
“I know he is, that doesn’t mean that he’s one of them.”
“Believe what you want to believe,” Cal said. “They’re too strong for us to test out our methods on them, we need a smaller pack, one that will be easier to manipulate.”
“We’ve dealt with wolves before, they weren’t so difficult to dismantle.”
“Lone wolves, packs are different. Didn’t you listen to what Stancliff taught you?”
Cassie dropped her eyes from his gaze, staring at her feet up on the table. “Of course I did,” she said quietly.
“We go for the smaller pack first, then once we’re done with them we’ll move onto Derek and his lot. Right now we need to focus on the two subjects we have left.”
“We still have their mother’s blood stored up right?” Cassie asked and Cal nodded. “What are you doing with that again?”
He shrugged, “I’m using some of it for our immunity and the rest… I have a buyer to send it to. I told you that stuff was worth a fortune.”
“It should be,” Cassie smiled a little.
“It’s not worth as much because she hadn’t been feeding traditionally, at least not in the last few months,” he said. “Now we have to work out a plan to lure in the others, any ideas?”
“Well, your first plan worked a charm,” Cassie grinned.
“I don’t think it will work on these two, not in the state they’re in.”
“Why not?”
“They’re not going to care very much for a sad, scared little girl.”
Cassie narrowed her eyes at him, “I am not a little girl.”
His hungry eyes travelled down over her body and back up to her eyes. “No, you’re definitely not.”
He rounded the table and she slipped her legs off, sitting up straight backed in the chair. He squared up to her, placing two fingers under her chin and tilting it up to look at him.
“So do you have any ideas?” he purred.
She flicked an eyebrow, “One…”
“So tell me…”
“We’ve been tracking them for a while, when was the last time you saw one of them… sate their desires?”
He grinned, “Go on…”
“It’s only a matter of time before they have to, you know they can't restrain themselves. So when the first one cracks, maybe it’ll be your turn to lure one in.”
“Now,” he said, slipping his hand inside her jacket to brush over her bare shoulder. “You’re thinking.”
* * *
Chris Argent showed up at the veterinary clinic just after midday, Derek and Deaton already waiting inside.
“I hear you have a bit of a situation on your hands,” he said as they walked through to the back.
“Something like that,” Derek said.
“Well, what do you need from me?” he asked.
“Information?” Deaton said and Chris just raised an eyebrow. “We were hoping you knew of some other families or groups with whom you share a common profession.”
Chris nodded, knowing what he was asking. “How about we start with the whole story, Allison didn’t explain much to me in detail.”
So they regaled him with the facts of the last year and then again about the most recent events. Even Chris seemed a little confused but he stayed quiet until Derek was done.
“So where is the Maeve now?” he asked.
“I would say probably in the morgue,” Deaton said.
“And the two girls?”
“I try not to ask them too much, one of them has a fiery temper, the other one seems to have calmed down a bit since her actions last year,” Derek said.
“Tell me about the mother, how was she killed?”
“We can’t be sure, we know she must have had her blood drained at least once. When we found her blood in that cabin it was more than enough to be fatal but her body couldn’t have been dead more than a day when we found her,” Chris nodded again so Derek continued. “Her throat was slashed and she was pinned up to the tree with a dagger through her neck. Other than the blood she seemed quite clean.”
“Well, they could have been bloodletting, that would help keep her strength down. They also could have used electricity. That’s generally the way we would do it. I have heard that Maeve blood fetches a fair price in some black markets, it could be a group of illegal traders,” Chris offered.
“Do you know of any rings that operate around here?” Derek asked.
“A few, I try not to get involved if I can help it. We used to grow our own wolfsbane to use so we didn’t have to run in those circles,” Chris said. “We usually only need to if we run low on mountain ash.”
“I have a supplier a few towns over,” Deaton said. “I can enquire about the blood if it helps.”
“So long as it doesn’t put you in danger,” Derek said.
“I’m a regular customer and rarely ask questions, I’m sure this one won't hurt.”
“What about groups of hunters?” Derek turned to Chris who let out a heavy sigh.
“I know of a few,” he said. “There’s a family in Mexico, a few scattered through Chicago, might be one left in Atlanta. There used to be some in Montana and Colorado but last I heard they were all dead, and not through natural causes,” he sighed again, the pressures of having a sideline job like his were not few in number.
“In my opinion this seems like more than just a simple case of hunters,” Deaton said. “The way you described Dalia’s body sounded more like a ritual or a symbolic killing rather than the way a hunter would take down a werewolf, or any other type of creature.”
“Some of us had more traditional views,” Chris said. “Quite a few have beliefs that overlap with others, witchcraft and the likes. I once knew a guy who thought if he killed a wolf in a certain way it would give him more strength to take down the next.”
“It’s not witchcraft,” Deaton said with a smile. “You use mountain ash, wolfsbane, you’ve seen the effects of such things and there are many more natural substances that can affect the supernatural. It’s proven that energies can be transferred, and there are people like me who practice the religion of the old druids to draw on that natural energy, that power. Personally I’ve tried to distance myself from such things, they tend to attract trouble.”
“Well based on what you’ve told me I can only assume that whoever is behind this does more than just hunt down the supernatural. Like you said,” Chris looked to Deaton, “When people dabble in this kind of thing it leads to danger.”
“You’ll check in to those old families you know of then?” Derek asked and Chris nodded.
“I’ll help you, only because I know my daughter isn’t going to step back from this even if I ask her to, and I’d rather know the ins and outs than have to worry about her.”
“She’s got a lot of spirit,” Deaton said.
“She gets that from her mother,” Chris said and the room went quiet for a moment. “I’ll see what I can do.”
So they had Chris as an ally for now, and hopefully he could point them in the right direction but for the moment they were no closer to solving anything. Derek felt like he needed to communicate with Katherine about everything but she had proven that she was flighty and untrustworthy so he said nothing to her.
They were in for a long journey to come.
“You sure you’re okay Lydia?” Stiles asked as they met up for lunch in the cafeteria. “I mean you did kind of find a body in the middle of the woods without any direction.
“Stiles, stop asking me about it. I’m fine, it’s not like it’s the first time something strange has happened to me,” she said, sitting down at one of the benches.
“True, you… you did kind of help bring back Peter. Thanks by the way,” he said.
She gave him a glare that turned his blood to ice and he put his hands up in surrender.
“Has anyone talked to the psychopath about any of this? Or about the other psychopath?” she asked.
“The other alpha?” Stiles said through a mouthful of tuna-salad.
“Yes, the other alpha. As I recall he seemed quite taken with her,” she said.
Stiles shrugged, “I try to avoid him as much as possible so I don’t know.”
“Well maybe someone should talk to him,” she stared at him expectantly and he just scoffed.
“Oh no, not me. Maybe you should do it, he seems pretty smitten with you.”
She gave him another death glare and Jackson came to join the two of them.
“Dude, that’s the ball-shrivelling look, what did you do?” he asked and Lydia rolled her eyes.
“I just suggested that she have a word to Peter about the other pack because he seems to like her more than the rest of us,” he smiled.
“Okay,” Jackson said. “I don’t have a ball-shrivelling look, but I have Italian leather shoes and a kick that will do more than shrivel your limited supply.”
“Oh my god, I was joking. Jesus…” Stiles said.
Lydia stared ahead for a while, her lips pursed and he mind ticking over.
“You know,” she said after a moment. “It might not be such a bad plan.” Stiles and Jackson stared at her incredulously and she just sighed. “I mean, he might have some information about her that we can use, and you’re right, he doesn’t seem to despise me all that much.”
“Nope, no, not happening,” Jackson said.
“Well I wouldn’t go alone, you could come with me. Or I could take Allison.”
Stiles cleared his throat a little and Lydia just smiled.
“Please, he’d just manipulate you to get some kind of information to Derek. I don’t have an extra angle.”
“Whatever, he won't just tell you something he knows for free. Do you have any interesting information to trade?” Stiles said.
“You’re not serious about doing this are you?” Jackson asked.
“Why not?” Lydia said.
“He’s a fucking nut-job!” Jackson said.
“Then come with me,” she said.
“This is ridiculous,” Jackson griped, but it wasn’t a ‘no’.
“You know how to contact him?” Stiles asked.
“Isaac does,” she said. “We’ll go tonight.”
“This is not going to be a productive event,” Stiles said and Jackson reluctantly agreed.
“Have you heard much from Daisy?” Isaac asked Boyd as they walked with Scott to the parking lot after school.
Boyd shook his head, “Not a word.”
“Yeah well I wouldn’t be rushing to talk to you either, not after what happened to her,” Scott said.
“Erica hasn’t heard anything from Aiden either,” he said.
“Yeah well that’s not surprising. He seems like kind of a dick,” Isaac said.
“He is,” Boyd agreed.
“Does anyone else have a bad feeling?” Erica said as she bounded up behind them. “By the way I also agree with the fact that Aiden is a dick.”
“Doesn’t everyone?” Isaac said. “What do you mean ‘a bad feeling’?”
“No, I get it, I have a bad feeling too,” Scott said. “It’s like I know this week isn’t going to be good, it’s like we found one body and in our experience bodies usually come in groups.”
“He gets it,” Erica said with a grimace.
“You think we’re going to be out on patrol tonight?” Isaac asked.
“Hey, Derek’s not going to stop me. If there’s someone out there I want to find them before they find me,” Erica said.
“She has a point,” Isaac said with his big bright eyes as he looked over at Scott’s concerned face.
He sighed, “Maybe, but we don’t even know what we’re dealing with.”
Erica groaned loudly, “I am sick and tired of hearing you guys say that! If we don’t know, let’s check it out! We can’t keep sitting at the loft together having sleepovers like ‘ooh, I wonder what this is, ooh, maybe we should wait until one of us is dead.’ No, I’m done with that.”
Isaac fluttered his eyelashes at Scott who knew exactly what he was trying to say. Let’s try Erica’s idea.
“Even if you were going to do that, where would you even start?” Boyd asked.
Erica shrugged. “The scene of the crime.”
“You know you might be a genius, but this is a stupid plan,” Allison said.
She sat in the back seat of Jackson’s Porsche as she rode with him and Lydia to what they assumed to be Peter’s apartment downtown. Lydia rolled her eyes from the passenger seat and hushed Jackson when he tried to agree with Allison.
“Well then why are you here?” she asked.
“I’m not about to let you deal with him without ample back-up,” she said with a shrug.
It didn’t take long to get there. They buzzed the apartment number and were let up immediately, no confirmation needed. It was a nice building, quite new, well furnished. Peter’s apartment was much the same. It was immaculate.
The room was styled to perfection, it looked like something out of an interior design catalogue. It didn’t even look like anyone lived there and the three of them were beginning to wonder if Peter really did, or whether it was just a decoy to keep them from knowing his real place of residence.
“You know, this looks like the kind of place that a serial killer would live,” Jackson hissed.
Lydia rolled her eyes, “In case you forgot, he sort of was a serial killer.”
“Great work Lydia, that’s really comforting,” Allison said.
“No need to bicker,” they all spun around to the kitchen where Peter was leaning up against the wall. “It’s really not a becoming trait.”
“How do you do that? How do you manage to sneak around without me hearing you?” Jackson asked.
Peter smiled, “years of practice.”
“Can we skip the pleasantries, please?” Lydia said, folding her arms.
“Lydia,” Peter said, his smile growing even larger as he took a few steps toward her. “Always lovely to see you.”
He stopped in his tracks when Allison extended her arm in front of her, and electrified baton in her hand. Peter shook his head with a few tuts and looked up at Jackson.
“Can’t protect her yourself?” he said.
“Do either of them look like they need protecting?” he said with a raised eyebrow.
“I don’t suppose they do.”
“Just get straight to the point,” Allison said.
“Well, what is it that you want to ask me?”
“We want to know about Katherine and her pack, and we know that you were keeping tabs on them,” she said.
He looked at her as if he was confused – a clear deception. “Did you not have a recent interaction with her?”
“We did, but that doesn’t mean that we know any more than you,” Lydia said. “At least not about her and her pack.”
Peter cocked an eyebrow, a smirk on his lips. “You certainly know how to keep a man interested.”
Jackson growled a little and it made Peter’s smirk grow.
Lydia narrowed her eyes and smiled. “What can I say, I don’t sit on the sidelines any more, I’ve learned how to play the game.”
“Well then, I guess we have a conversation to hold,” he said. “Perhaps we could make it a little more private?”
Allison upped the power on her baton and Peter shrugged a little.
“Fair enough,” he said. “This alpha doesn’t respond to reason, she goes by her own rules and doesn’t really stand for insubordination.”
“That much… we know,” Lydia said.
“Well her original plan has been scrapped, she’s plotting something new, something fresh,” Peter said and Lydia just shook her head at him with a little huff and he rolled his eyes. “She’s planning an attack against Derek, and I suppose that means the rest of you too.”
“Why are you only telling us now?” Jackson asked.
“I only just acquired the information. I don’t know how successful she’ll be, her betas are a little flighty, but they’ll fight if she tells them too. I have to admire her training.”
“You know she’s violent with them, right?” Allison said.
Peter shrugged, “If it works, it works.”
“We’ll keep an eye on her, it’s not like we have nothing better to do,” Jackson grumbled.
“You might want to keep your eyes on your friend Danny too,” Peter said and Jackson made a move to step forward but Lydia grabbed his arm sharply.
“What are you talking about?” he snarled.
“Don’t blame me, I’m only the messenger,” Peter said. “All I’m trying to tell you is that when their efforts to steal away Derek’s betas failed, Katherine started to seriously consider her… other options.”
“Well she’s not going to get what she wants,” he said.
Peter just shrugged and folded his arms over his chest.
“Now, I think you had some information for me,” Peter grinned.
“What do you want to know?” Lydia asked.
“Why is the Maeve here?” he said in a low tone.
Lydia smiled. “The older one is dead, the mother. I found her last night in the woods.”
“You found her?” he asked.
“If that’s all, I think we’ll be leaving now,” she said, turning on her heel and taking Jackson’s hand as Allison backed up, still holding the baton out between them.
Peter’s lip just turned up in a smirk and he held his hands up in surrender before they were out the door and leaving the apartment building, hardly knowing anything new at all.
Jackson called Derek once they were back in the car, handing the keys to Lydia. Derek was sitting home at the loft with Stiles, regaling back to him the things that they had discussed earlier.
He told him what Chris said and that he had looked into the possibility that this could be a hunter, or group of, and had come up with a few possibilities. There was one who used to live in Colorado who seemed like he might have dabbled into acts such as this. He used his ties with market suppliers to gain access to things like wolfsbane and mountain ash and was becoming quite prolific in his attempts to wipe out the supernatural.
That lead was cut down when they saw that he had been killed less than a year ago. Chris was still looking into a lead from Atlanta but as of yet he had nothing that could help.
The phone started ringing and he answered it. Stiles watched his expression change, his lips spreading into a thin line and his nostrils flaring before he hit the hang-up button, still staring straight ahead.
“Derek?” he asked. “Hey, are you okay? What did Jackson say?”
“They talked to Peter,” he said coolly. “He says Katherine is plotting against us.”
“Oh my god, can’t that bitch just give up already?” Stiles groaned.
“I’m not going to wait for her to do something stupid,” Derek said, flicking through his phone.
“Okay… but, can you maybe not do anything stupid while you don’t wait for her to do something stupid?” Stiles asked and Derek just huffed out a little, sounding like an angry bull.
He scrolled through his old messages until he found the one he wanted and pressed call on the number. He put the phone to his ear and Stiles just sighed.
“You’re doing something stupid, I just know it…” he said, rubbing his forehead with his hand.
The ringing stopped and Derek growled down into the phone. “Don’t talk, just listen. I don’t care what you think I’m up to, I don’t care that you feel threatened, but you came into my town and pulled a gun on one of my betas and you’re relentless in your efforts to do damage. We’re not standing back anymore. You want a confrontation? You’ll get one. Meet us at my old house, be ready.”
“… Can’t wait,” her smooth voice came through calmly before she hung up and Derek put the phone down on the coffee table.
“You sure you know what you’re doing?” Stiles asked as Derek paced around the room to calm down.
“Call Scott,” he said. “Get him down here.”
Stiles knew that it wouldn’t be smart to argue with him right now, Derek was seething. There was only so much that one werewolf could take. He called Scott and messaged Jackson – who was more than ready to go for it.
“You’re not coming,” he said to Stiles. “Get Lydia, I want the two of you to go down to the hospital and talk to Scott’s mom about the body, find out what you can.”
“Can you please just promise to be careful?” Stiles said, standing up and walking over to where Derek had stopped his pacing. “I don’t want to find you pinned to a tree with a fucking dagger in your throat because of her.”
Derek sighed, pulling Stiles in and kissing his forehead.
“I promise I’ll do everything I can to stay out of harm’s way,” he said softly and Stiles scoffed.
“You’re an asshole,” he said, Derek having recited the promise he had made only the night before.
“I’ll be fine. Call Lydia now.”
Stiles sighed. “This bitch is going down,” he said sarcastically, taking out his phone to make the call.
~ ~ ~
A/N: Remember, I absolutely love your feedback and it inspires me to write more, so please let me know your thoughts on this chapter!
Also, please see the first comment of this chapter for a link to a poll on what the title of book 3 should be!