AN: This is a collaboration between brethilaki and myself. Though I'm pretty sure she does most of the work...I just sort of throw my crazy ideas at her.
We do not own Teen Wolf or anyone in it. They are the original characters of MTV and whoever came up with the idea (Jeff Davis? Fuck I don't know).
Reviews/Thoughts/Concerns are greatly appreciated :)
Beginning:
Music reverberated through every arched opening of the Mediterranean house his family had acquired off-market a few years back. It was a sprawling palace of tan terracotta, red clay shingled and rising like a mesa out of the plain of an immaculately manicured lawn. His parents had paid around $2 million for the property, and it had always been one of their favorites.
But what would they say if they could see the bodies in the sitting room? Grinding and humping to the beat of whatever was the newest mainstream dance song—Derek didn't know. He never kept up with that shit.
It was a cavernous circular chamber, admittedly better suited to crowded parties than it was to family living. It echoed when empty, at least two stories tall and capped with a skylit turret—low pitched to match the rest of the roof and inky black in the moonless early morning. Where the second floor might have been was a half-moon balcony railed in iron filigree, the perfect place for Derek to keep an eye on his plastered guests. Someone had to, after all, and it certainly wasn't going to be Derek's equally plastered friends.
Tapping his fingers idly to the bass riff of another numbingly repetitive song, Derek looked at his watch and decided his friends, and more importantly his house, would survive without his supervision for ten minutes and stalked down to the first floor to grab one lone beer. Derek enjoyed drinking, but not getting drunk. Partying had never really been his...thing.
"Derek!" came the cry of someone intent on reminding him why. Derek sighed and tried to figure out if he could pretend he hadn't heard and evaporate into the crowd, but a broad hand had already clasped his shoulder a little too roughly. Great, it was Jackson. Jackson was a douche.
"Hey, happy birthday, asshole!" Jackson said a little too loudly and smiling a little too widely, eliciting an eye roll from his girlfriend Lydia, who had appeared behind him, looking more than a little fed up. "Awesome house!"
Derek smiled politely. He knew Jackson was only nice to him because Derek had more money that he did. Lydia had no such affectation.
"Yeah, it would be, if you would stop talking to Derek so we could find a bedroom," she sighed, giving Derek an apologetic look as she grabbed Jackson by the collar and strutted away with him in tow behind her. "Happy birthday," she sang over her shoulder and Derek nodded appreciatively and ducked into the kitchen before he could be stopped again.
No, this... this had always been Laura's sphere. Alcohol had flowed like water at her infamous parties, and the dancing had carried on until all the guests were passed out on the lawn—every Friday night like the Great fucking Gatsby, but more exclusive and without the redeeming social commentary.
The house had been almost eerily quiet since her death, empty and echoing. Until tonight's party, held only at Erica's insistence. Derek should have never told the girl his damn birthday.
"Derekkkkk," came a slurred voice from behind him, and speak of the devil. Erica sauntered up to him with a playful pout, blond waves gone slightly limp with sweat. "Comeeee onnnnn," she drawled. "Let's go dance! It's yer 23rd birthday for god's sakes! Let looooossseeeee." She latched onto his arm and dragged him toward the sitting room. It teemed with moving bodies, and the longer Derek stared at it, them more they seemed to lose their discrete shapes, melding in the dark into some long-torsoed and demonic thing, hundred headed and thousand limbed. Derek paused at the edge of the crowd, entranced by his own imagination, until a tug from Erica sent him stumbling into the mob and out of his thoughts.
"Get drunk! Go daaaanncceee! Have some fun you sour puss!" she instructed before going to find her lover Boyd, who gave Derek a pitying look as he was dragged into the crowd.
Derek sighed, but joined them nonetheless. Erica could be pretty scary when she didn't get her way. He waded into the group a bit, bobbing his head and shifting his body slightly to the beat of the music. As long as he at least pretended to try, Erica would get off his case. He looked through the crowd, eyes catching the top of a head of short, sandy curls. That would be Isaac, dancing with what looked to be his best friend Scott Mccall and Scott's girlfriend Allison Argent.
Scott and Allison had been dating since literally kindergarten, and were still inseparable. As fucked up as that may be, you could almost have called it sweet if it hadn't been for Isaac, who had met Scott in the eighth grade and wedged his way so deeply into their relationship that they seemed to have become a single entity, a three-headed, two-gendered hydra some smartass had named Scallisaac, the Scylla of Beacon Hills. It was uncannily fitting.
"Hey Derek! Great party!" a voice said from behind him.
Derek turned to see Danny Mahealani, everyone's favorite homosexual Hawaiian. No. Really. That is what he had always been called. By their school, town, everyone. Derek just called him Danny.
Derek flashed his million-dollar smile. "Glad to hear it. Can I get you another drink?" he asked, playing good host.
Danny shook his head, "Nah. I need to dance off the few I've already had." Danny waved at Derek before slipping away to find someone, most likely Jackson.
Jackson and Danny had been best friends since elementary school, which Derek had never understood. Jackson was a douche. Seriously.
Derek shook his head, deciding he had "worked the dance floor" long enough and was just about to slip away, when there was a loud pop and the whole house went pitch black. There was a scream and a series of groans. "Come on man!" someone yelled. Derek cursed. They must have blown a breaker. Working his way blindly through the crowd, Derek fished his cell phone out of his pocket to hold it in front of him like a flashlight.
"Okay! Okay! Everyone calm down! I'm going to go flip the breaker," Derek said loudly though with little hope of being heard over the chaos.
He put his cell phone on the brightest setting and made his way down one of the house's long, winding hallways. He kept a hand on the wall, weary of discarded beer cans as he tread, until he felt the ridges of smooth stucco framing basement door. Because of course the breaker box had to be in the basement.
Trailing his hand along the edge of the door, Derek felt a chill run up through his arm and down his spine, as if his hand had just read in the embossed plaster a Braille warning his mind could hardly comprehend. Unbidden, his mind darted back to the strange hallucination he had had at the threshold of his sitting room, and he shivered again.
This was the beginning of a horror movie. Starring Derek Hale and the demonic caterpillar waiting at the bottom of the stairs. He was going to die. Well. He'd like to say he had lived a good life, but it was actually pretty boring. Might as well get this over with.
Derek turned the doorknob, letting the door fall open of its own weight. It creaked loudly as it swung slowly into the thick darkness of the stairwell leading down to the basement. In the light, this corridor had never seemed long, but as Derek gazed down through the door now, he could not see the bottom, and even when he held his cell phone at arms length in front of him, it only illuminated the first few steps.
Taking a deep breath to calm himself, Derek started down, keeping one hand tight on the railing and the other clutching his cell phone. He could hear the house settling around him and rodents squeaking and scurrying away from his footfalls as he searched his surroundings with the faint bluish light. Bicycles, kayaks, the broken engine of a boat, all cast ugly shadows on the boxes behind them. Surfboards, trophies, that exercise machine his dad swore he was going to use... everything, it seemed, but a breaker box. The old wooden stairs creaked with every step, startlingly loud in the silence of the—
CRASH
Derek spun around as a mountain of boxes crumbled behind him, sending small shining orbs of green and red shattering against the concrete or rolling past his feet. Well. There went all of their Christmas decorations.
But what the hell had knocked them over?
Derek knew he shouldn't be brave. That guy always died. But he had to find the damn breaker box. He closed his eyes and took another breath before slowly making his way over to the fallen boxes, phone held high like a weapon.
The light from the phone let him see about three feet in any direction he looked, and as he picked his way forward he swept this three foot radius of vision for breaker boxes with one eye, keeping the other eye open for perverted Leprechauns and ax murderers and checking behind him every few steps.
Finally a wall appeared before him, so suddenly he almost broke his nose on it. He threw up his hands just in time, turning his head to the left to avoid collision, and there it was—the breaker box! Derek pried open the metal door, looking for whatever switch had knocked the power out—but the main switch was the only one that had been flipped. Weird. That switch only popped if there was a citywide outage or…someone flipped it. Derek reset it, trying not to think about that, muffled whoops upstairs telling him that his mission was a success.
As Derek turned around, about to head up the stairs, his ears pricked suddenly and his hair stood up against his suddenly burning skin. Had he heard... footsteps? No, it was the rats scurrying and the house settling, and—but then what? What was that shadow, like a human figure, emerging from behind a stack boxes to his right...?
And suddenly Derek was hauling ass up the basement stairs, heart beating so loud in his ears he barely heard the door as it slammed shut behind him. He leant back against the wall to catch his breath and pressed his ear to the door. No scratching, no footsteps, no sounds of pursuit. Nothing breaking down the door.
Huh.
It must have been the dark playing with his mind. He had seen his own shadow, cast in the light of his phone, and imagined it was something else. That was the only explanation.
Derek shook his head and straightened up before heading back to the living room. The music had not started again, but everyone was drinking, chatting, and laughing. When they saw them they cheered.
"Good job, hero," Erica said, nudging him with her elbow. The laughter picked up, someone poured Derek another drink, which he accepted grudgingly and sipped sparingly, and the party started to pick up where it had left off.
"Turn the music back on!" someone yelled. There was a static sound followed by the dark syncopation of dubstep intro—not the usual top forty dance-pop, but no one seemed sober enough to care. The rhythmic tension built, growing in the air, settling over the crowd as the guests began undulating against it, trying to find a beat. The tension threaded through them, pulling them taught until every body was frozen with baited breath waiting for the drop of the bass. The music teased, teetering on the edge, pulling thin like a rubber band until it reached the point it either had to snap...
...or break.
Derek staggered forward, grabbing a wall with one hand and a stumbling Erica with the other as a colossal crash shook the house to its foundations. The music stuttered and stopped and a dusting of plaster knocked free from the walls settled over the stunned silence.
"Holy shit! What was that?" Scott cried in an alarmed trill, but Derek could only frown.
There was another noise, like an explosion, so loud this time that when the house shook the windows shattered, showering the party guests with shards of glass like a deadly rain. Derek put his back to the explosion, blocking Erica with his body from the aftershocks and falling glass. Others were taking refuge under furniture or covering their heads with their arms. Derek surveyed the scene in disbelief before turning back to Erica.
"You okay?" he mouthed.
Erica nodded.
A voice rose above the chaos: it was Scott.
"Is everyone alright?" he called, standing up in the rubble and looking around the room. Eyes peered back at him from under tables and behind the recliner and couch, and screams and sobs died down into a shocked calm. Derek let go of Erica, handing her to Boyd before carefully walking over to peer out into this backyard through one of the glassless window frames.
"I don't see anything…" he announced, frowning more deeply.
"Maybe it's the North Koreans," Jackson suggested.
"Jackson. Never reproduce," Isaac snarked.
Lydia huffed and rolled her eyes. "Maybe we should just check the news," she said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
"Good idea," Allison agreed, grabbing the remote to Derek's 55" HDTV and turning it to... static. She flipped through the channels: static, static, static... a black screen... more static... a black box appeared in the middle of the screen informing them that there was "no signal."
"I thought you had like... fiber-optic cable…" Isaac said, eyes flicking between Derek and his TV.
"I do," Derek frowned.
"So…what does that mean?" Isaac asked.
"It means…that there's no signal," Derek answered dryly.
"It means that there is no news, no TV, and no help!" Jackson elaborated, beginning to hyperventilate. "Everyone we know could be dead. Our parents. Our other friends. Our teachers. The government. Everyone!"
Lydia placed a hand on Jackson's shoulder, quieting him.
"Calm down, okay?" Derek said in frustration. "Everyone just calm down. There has to be a reasonable explanation—"
A second explosion, smaller but nearer than the first, sent wood, plaster, and insulation flying from the wall behind Derek, knocking him to the ground. Gathering his wits Derek propped himself up on his shoulders and stared up at what had to be another, perhaps concussion-induced, hallucination: a six-foot-tall, gangling, razor-furred creature, gray and feline, saliva dripping from its foul-breathed snarl as it studied the group of humans like a house cat waiting to pounce on a fly.
The tight and terrified silence that followed was broken suddenly by a shrill scream, which the monstrous cat answered with a roar and a leap, claws flashing white—then red as they dug into the flesh of the horror-stricken girl who had cried out, blood spattering the white tile floor and the faces of her nearest companions. Some of them scattered backwards, some watched frozen in terror as her skull was crushed between the cat's jaws with a sickening crack, her body ripped in half by a jerk of the cat's head and her upper half chewed and crunched and finally swallowed.
Derek found himself unable to move, staring as the cat began lapping at the blood still spilling from the lower half of her corpse.
"Derek! Derek! Jesus Christ, come on Derek!" came an urgent voice, followed by a slap in the face.
Boyd grabbed Derek by the front of his shirt and hauled him up, dragging him outside of the house, where the rest of his friends had already fled.
"There are still people…" Derek said, looking back at the house, now filled with the sound of screams and cracking bones.
"We can't help them. We've got to go," Boyd said, dragging Derek further. The others fell quickly in line behind them, and Boyd did not stop until they were at the top of the hill overlooking the house, three blocks away. He let go of Derek, who landed on his ass with a thump and watched in shock as his parents' house was engulfed in flame.
In fact, the whole neighborhood was on fire. Derek could see his neighbors silhouetted against the flames, fleeing their houses only to be overtaken by the grotesque shapes of what he could only assume were similar catlike creatures.
"Derek! Come on! Snap out of it! We need you!" a female voice broke through his trance.
Derek shook his head, looking up at Erica's worried face.
"Derek," Erica whimpered, face a mirror of the terror that clenched cold around Derek's gut.
Derek sighed, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. His friends needed him. They needed to get somewhere safe and sheltered where they could figure out what the hell was going on. He needed to take charge.
Finally opening his eyes, Derek stood up, hugging Erica close. Holding her as she cried, he looked around at the other survivors. Scott, Isaac, and Allison sat huddled together, watching the destruction. Jackson and Lydia stood a few feet away, staring at him with fear and confusion. Boyd and Danny stood behind him, waiting on Derek's instructions. And that was all that had escaped.
"We've got to keep moving," Derek said, letting go of Erica.
"But where, Derek?" Jackson snarled, drowning his panic in anger and lashing out in a desperate attempt to find some blame, some reason, in random misfortune. "There's nowhere! Look around!"
"So what? You want to just give up then? Fine, maybe you'll distract the thing long enough for those of use who still want to live to get away!" Scott shot back, looking up from Allison's shoulder.
"Scott," Derek snapped, drawing on the authority his money had always entitled him to. "Not now." He set his face in a stern glare then, and addressed the group. "I'm moving on. Follow me or not, that's your choice—but if you want to survive, I wouldn't stay here."
Isaac stood up, looking at Derek and pointedly away from the burning neighborhood that seemed to hold everyone's gaze like a magnet. "I'm with you," he said. Then, "Come on, guys. Scott. Allison. Derek's right, we can feel sorry for ourselves later."
"Fine," Jackson spat. "But what's your plan, tough guy?"
Derek ignored him and started down the other side of the hill with Isaac and Erica in tow.
"Um guys?" Allison said, standing up to follow.
"What?" Derek asked curtly without even looking back.
"I'm all for getting out of here..." Allison backed up slowly as she spoke then turned on her heel to take off sprinting. "...but I suggest we run!"
As she called to her friends over her shoulder Allison's words were slowly overtaken and drowned out by the bone-chilling crescendo of a feline growl, announcing the approach of another monster. Derek whipped his head around to see it mounting the hill, bared fangs catching the red glint of swirling inferno that had been his home, bared fangs almost close enough that he could see or imagine strips of flesh stuck between its teeth.
He grabbed Erica and ran, eyes scanning the path ahead and fixing on a building to their left: Handy Hank's Auto Repair, dark and dirty and itself in need of repair, but tactically superior to the naked vulnerability of open air.
"To that shop!" Derek yelled, steering his younger friends leftward.
Of course, this would be the moment that Erica tripped over her own pivoting feet, twisting her ankle and nearly pulling Danny and Boyd down on top of her in a desperate bid to keep on her balance.
"Shit shit SHIT!" she cried, holding her ankle with one hand and trying to push herself up with the other.
Danny and Boyd stopped to lift her between them, dragging her towards the shop. She hobbled forward, wincing in pain each time her weight landed on her bruised joint, but not daring to slow to a gentler pace.
They were already too slow: Derek summoned the courage to glance behind and saw the monster-cat within seconds of overtaking them all. There was no way they would make it to shelter... unless something stopped it. Without pausing to think, without taking his eyes off their imminent death, Derek turned his body in line with his head so that he was facing the creature full on, and dug his heels into the ground in resolution.
"Derek?" Scott hesitated on the threshold of turning back. "Derek, come on what the—!"
"Why are you stopping?!" Derek shouted, looking frantically back at him. "Get into the shop!"
Scott's eyes widened in realization and he wavered just a second longer—"Derek, no...!"—until Allison grabbed his shoulder and physically dragged him toward the building.
"Scott get them out of here!" Derek ordered with all the authority he could summon. Reassuring himself as much as Scott, he added, "I'll be okay!"
As Scott nodded and broke out of Allison's grip to herd his surviving friends to safety, Derek felt a current of hot, acrid air raising the hair on the back of his neck. Taking a deep breath and setting his shoulders, Derek released the paralysis of his fear in deep sigh and turned slowly to face the beast. Maybe he would die, but dammit, at least he would die protecting his friends.
Derek tried not to shake as the cat raised its claws to strike, but could not help the warmth of relief that washed over him when it paused mid-air, looking at something behind him. It was short lived: with a sudden feeling like the bottom of his gut caving in, Derek realized the monster was looking at his friends, and the screams that followed told him that it was not alone. Derek clenched his eyes shut and felt hot tears gather behind his lids. It was all in vain after all. He would die, and his friends would still be eaten.
The first monster lost interest in the commotion behind him and pounced. Derek flinched and prayed for his death to be swift—if for no other reason, then to spare him the pain of hearing his friends die. He forced his eyes open to glare into the glowing eyes of the predator bearing down on him and found the courage to spit, "Do your worst you son of a—"
BANG
Derek's challenge was interrupted by a flash like supernova that left his vision spotty and his eyes in pain despite his haste to cover them. As unpleasant as this was, it was positively euphoric compared to the prospect of being ripped limb from limb and devoured by a giant cat—which seemed to have it worse than Derek did. In fact the creature barely had time to howl pitifully before literally turning to ash right in front of Derek's recovering eyes. Its companion seemed to have fared no better.
Looking up and around for the source of this miracle, Derek was barely able to make out, through a snow of cinder, a single human shape. It was slender but unmistakably male, not tall but not short, with skin so fair his short brown hair looked almost black against it, and pale pink lips that twisted in a smile as he stared down at Derek. All these details registered one by one as white dulled to black and its afterimage cleared from Derek's vision. Blinking slowly, Derek realized that the man—barely more than a boy—was reaching a hand down to help him to his feet. Derek took it, and the man's smile widened.
"Looks like you guys could use some help."