Continuity: pre-series (or at least pre-season 2) for Vampire Diaries, and early season three for Teen Wolf.
The good thing about Mason was that he was dumb. He had just enough street smarts to not fuck things up too badly, but if he had had the fortune to have been a vampire instead of a werewolf, he wouldn't have lasted two weeks.
She'd overheard him talking on the phone with some wolf friends (case in point—dumb. She had been on the other side of the house, well within listening range) about something going on in California. Wolf packs were on the move, and packs were growing fast.
"Go check it out," Klaus ordered.
"Why? Apparently they're…different," Katherine said, phone pressed to her ear while she shaved her legs on the edge of the bathtub. "They don't go 'full wolf' or something."
Klaus had sighed heavily. "Katerina, darling, last time that I checked, this spell doesn't specify which particular species of werewolf I need. Go. Call me when you have something more useful to tell me."
He ended the call without another word, and Katherine rolled her eyes and let the phone drop to the floor. "I'm using his AmEx," she said under her breath, and turned on the faucet to rinse the foam from her legs.
It took Katherine about twenty minutes to recognize that Beacon Hills was boring as hell. This town was supposed to have the single greatest concentration of werewolves on the West Coast? It didn't even have the "Southern charm" that Mystic Falls still purported to boast. The downtown was tiny (so tiny that she found one of the pack's subway old hideouts just by making a single circuit of the blocks with a half-interested nose) and surrounded by woods. It had a gay club, though, and that was a plus. Femmes were the tastiest.
She kept waiting for a vampire to show him or herself—she could have used the company, and the intel—but after several days shopping and nights at the bars and clubs in town, not a single one stepped out of the shadows. It looked like she was really on her own here, and was going to have to do all of the grunt work herself.
(This is why she always worked in teams. Fuck Klaus.)
These wolves were better at hiding themselves. She caught whiffs of their scents here and there, in the same way that humans got scent memories, but before she could track them, the smell was gone. She could have tracked Mason and every other wolf she'd met in Florida across the country and back, but not this group. If she were lucky, she could follow the trail for a block, maybe two. The old rail station was different—they'd lived in there for months, clearly, and the lack of moving air meant that their scent still clung to every surface. Four wolves had lived there, but Katherine would never tell Klaus that it took her hours with her face all but pressed to the old, cracked vinyl of the rail cars to even begin to differentiate between the scents. Her breakthrough had come not with differentiating between the wolf smells, which was eerily similar between the four of them, but the human smells. One woman, three men. Three of the four were teens and the other post-puberty.
Still, though, Katherine struggled. She missed the old days where people didn't bathe daily and then cover themselves in mass-produced deodorant, perfume, and clothes all washed with those god-awful "mountain spring" and "clean linen" detergents. Prohibition had been golden; back then, a vampire could figure out a human's drink of choice with a single inhale.
Teenagers meant school, though, and that's how Katherine found herself sitting on the top row of the bleachers on Friday night, watching a lacrosse game and keeping a weather eye out for anyone that looked…wolfy. She'd been enrolled at a community college in Florida just for kicks while she was looking for Mason—it had been a good cover story. But high school had never been in the cards for Katherine, and sometimes she wondered if she could sufficiently fake being younger than eighteen. High school seemed like a fun and easy gig, and Katherine knew that she would be able to teach the cheerleaders in front of the stands how to properly land a flip. Sure, she could compel the entire faculty into letting her in, but if she wanted to be truly undercover she would need to find parents to enroll her and go to parent-teacher conferences and PTA meetings and host sleepovers…
Nah. She'd compelled people for a good length of time, but a year or more seemed to be pushing it.
There. A breeze had picked up, and the scent of a wolf touched her nose. No—Katherine closed her eyes—there were two. Three, maybe? Mixed with sweat… She opened her eyes again and swept the field from goal to goal, looking again for any irregularities.
Then she saw it—two on the field surging forward with more power in their legs than their frames would suggest, pivoting and weaving with more finesse than their speed should have allowed. McCall. Boyd. She committed the names from their jerseys to memory. A good start.
Katherine stood and made her way down the bleachers, flipping her hair over her shoulder. The trees behind the bleachers rustled with another strong gust of wind, and a Beacon Hills player further down the bench stiffened and looked over his shoulder. Cute, Katherine thought. Those cheekbones could cut glass. She watched him tilt back his head and breathe deeply, and she took note of his name as well: Lahey.
On her way home from the game, Katherine made sure to stop by the grocery store and pick up the most heavily scented laundry detergent and toiletries she could find. Mason had told her she didn't smell like anything, but either he was lying or these wolves really were different.
Scott McCall's mother seemed to take almost exclusively night shifts at the hospital, leaving her son at home by himself. With her standing and experience, it was likely that she was able to choose her shifts, which meant that she was perfectly okay leaving her son at home by himself at night. On Monday, while Scott was at school and Melissa was running errands, Katherine slipped into the house via the window she'd seen Scott going in and out of on a regular basis. The wolf scent was strongest in Scott's room; weakest in Melissa's. His father, then? Katherine supposed, flipping through Melissa's clothes. Her fingers lingered over a purple wrap dress—it was cute and Katherine wanted it, but it was one of the nicest things Melissa had in her closet and she would definitely notice if it were missing. "God, I hate this gig," Katherine muttered, and slipped back out of the house.
Vernon Boyd lived in the projects, and Katherine flashed across the parking lot and through the sliding glass of his apartment's patio door as quickly as possible. The boy's scent was well entrenched in his room, but Katherine could tell that he didn't stay in his own bed every night. Maybe he had another den—but then wouldn't Scott McCall be having sleepovers too? Unless they weren't part of the same pack… His parents' room was devoid of any wolf scent, just like Scott McCall's. Katherine's eyes narrowed, and she started rummaging through drawers until she came across a manila envelope full of government documents. His parents had been married for twenty years, and Vernon carried the same last name as his mother's husband. Strange, Katherine mused, sliding everything back into its place.
She spent the entire drive to the Lahey house forcing herself not to call Klaus. Issac Lahey would either confirm or deny her suspicions, and she would not call Klaus a moment before then.
The yard in front of the Lahey's house was grown up, and Katherine was surprised to see that yellow tape still stretched across the front doorway. The newspapers had said that Issac's father had been killed and that the investigation was on-going, but she had assumed that the house would have been released by now. But no—the air was still and musty inside, and dust had settled on tables and shelves. Tableware lay shattered on the floor in the kitchen with an evidence number next to it. On her way to the stairs, Katherine passed the door to the basement and paused. She smelled…fear. sweat. blood. The stairs creaked on the way down, and she saw the lock on the freezer as soon as soon as she rounded the corner at the bottom of the stairwell. She slid the sleeve of her sweater over her fingertips and lifted the top, took in the gouges along the inside shell. Issac Lahey was, what, sixteen at most? And the smell of terror was caked into the plastic. Katherine scowled and let the lid drop.
She called Klaus on her way back to her apartment. "It's not genetic," she tells him when he picks up. "At least, not for all of them. Three of them are teenagers, and as far as I can tell, their parents are one hundred percent human."
"Phrases like 'as far as I can tell' don't make me feel very confident in your efforts," Klaus said, his voice crackling through the phone. Beacon Hills had pretty shitty reception.
Katherine rolled her eyes. "Well, there's space on my couch if you'd like to fly in and conduct your own investigation."
"No need to be fresh. I'm simply stating my expectations."
"And I will meet them," she bit out, pulling into her parking spot. She needed to stay on Klaus' good side, so she needed to give him the information he required as soon as possible so that she could get back to working her way into Mason Lockwood's trust. "I got a lead at my last stop. I'll be in touch." She hung up the call and looked down at the scrap of paper she'd found tucked underneath the mousepad on Issac Lahey's desk.
Derek Hale – 634 2348.
Bringing the paper up to her nose, Katherine grinned.
She smelled a werewolf.
Scott was being unusually quiet, even for Scott. He had been distracted all during practice, and now he was shoving his lacrosse equipment into his bag like the locker room was on fire.
"Heyyy, buddy," Stiles said, sidling close. "What's the matter?"
Scott barely spared him a glance. "My mom's not working tonight. I gotta get home." He zipped up his bag and threw it over his shoulder.
"So it's just like every other Wednesday night, basically."
Scott paused and cast a wary glance towards Isaac and Boyd, who were toweling off after their showers. Finally, he bent his head close to Stiles'. "I think someone was in my house," he told him. "In my room and my mom's. They went into her closet."
Stiles gaped at Scott. "How…do you even know that?" Scott's mouth pulled to one side and Stiles sighed. "Oh, you smelled them, of course."
"You too?" Boyd asked, and Scott and Stiles turned to him in surprise. "Yeah, someone was at my apartment too. Went through my parents' drawers." He bent down to pull his clean clothes out of his bag, apparently unconcerned.
"Okay. Sooo," Stiles rubbed his hand over his hair. "Can't you like, track them or something?"
"They don't smell human," Boyd cut in again with a shrug. "I'm not about to go chasing after something that doesn't smell normal."
"Then they were at the game, too, up in the bleachers." Isaac said, pulling on his shoes. He set his elbows on his knees and looked up at Boyd. "We should tell him."
"No." Stiles shook his head, but Scott was already nodding along with Boyd and Isaac. "No, no, no. C'mon can't we do anything without telling Derek about it?"
Katherine had to give Beacon Hills one thing: the weather was actually pretty great. "Well, there was one family," she was telling Klaus, eyes closed and face turned to the sun. The other restaurant patrons on the patio chattered around her, paying no attention to her conversation. "So maybe it can be genetic. The house is basically a burnt out shell, but I'm making my way through – " Her eyes snapped open when she heard the chair across from her scrape away from the table and someone sit down. He was a bit older, maybe mid-thirties, and he fixed her with a smirk and a raised brow. "Gotta go, Niklaus," she muttered, and pulled the phone away from her ear. "And you are?" she asked the man across the table, tossing her phone into her purse.
"Peter Hale," he replied, lacing his fingers across his stomach and leaning back in his chair.
Katherine smiled tightly. "I was wondering where you'd gotten off to. Wonderful to see that you've been able to overcome your vegetative state." He shrugged, watching Katherine take a sip of her espresso.
"Medicine these days," he said, signaling for a waiter, "it works miracles. Yes—I'll have coffee, please. Black, no sugar. You can add it to her tab." The corners of Katherine's mouth turned down at that, and Peter Hale raised an eyebrow at her. "Sweetheart, with how you're put together, you can afford to buy me a cup of coffee. After all, I've been chasing your trail all around town. I've worked up quite a thirst."
Katherine ran her tongue over her teeth and then flashed him a grin. "Sounds like a personal problem. Maybe you should take some more time to rest and recuperate before joining the big kids."
Peter chuckled and then leaned forward to rest his forearms on the table. "Oh, you're a member of the big kids? Who would have known?" he said, purposefully sweeping his eyes over her body.
With a sweet smile to the waitress bringing Peter's coffee, Katherine reached out and grabbed onto his hand with a crushing grip. He inhaled sharply, and Katherine watched with masked triumph as his bicep tightened in an effort to jerk his hand away. To any ordinary observer, Katherine and Peter looked like any other May-December couple holding hands across the table. "Thank you so much," she told the waitress, and when the woman turned away, she tightened her grasp until she felt the bones of his metacarpals grind together. "How did you find me?" she asked him, rolling the bones against each other.
To Peter's credit, the initial shock of the pain had worn off, and the only outward sign of his discomfort (discomfort was putting it lightly—Katherine knew just how many nerve endings were in the human hand) was the tight line of his mouth and the rigid set of his shoulders. "Honey," he ground out, "not even a whole bottle of essence of twilight or whatever it is you kids are using these days could cover up your tracks."
"And you were able to pick me out of this entire patio by your nose alone?" Katherine asked, and then tilted her head to the side. "Have you ever considered a career in a K-9 unit?"
With an easy laugh, Peter rested his free hand on top of their joined ones. "Your heartbeat is uncommonly slow," he told her, and Katherine felt something prick the back of her hand. She looked down to see his fingernails had grown out into sharp, icy points that stood out starkly against the dark olive of her skin.
"Interesting trick," she said with a drawl and smirk.
"I showed you mine, now show me yours."
Katherine rolled her eyes and leaned back in her chair. Peter immediately snatched his hand back, flexing the purple fingers to return some feeling. For a moment, they surveyed each other in silence, until Peter turned his head to watch a couple hug in parting on the other side of the patio's railing.
"I hope you'll forgive me for being rude but my patience is running thin these days," he told her, looking upwards and squinting into the sunlight. "My nephew and his friends have developed an idiotic plan to catch you in some sort of … half-cocked bait and trap scheme because simply confronting you was too direct of a method for the Hardy Boys fantasy they like to pretend we live in. Let's make this short and sweet, shall we? Who are you, do you have a 'boss'—" he said with exaggerated air quotes, and Katherine knew that Peter was repeating a list from some sort of group planning session "—why are you here, what do you want? 'What are you' goes without saying, I think."
"If I gave up all of my information the first time someone asked for it, I wouldn't have survived this long," Katherine said in a dry voice, pushing her chair back and standing up. She slung the strap of her purse over her shoulder and flippantly gestured to the drinks on the table. "You'll get this, right?" she asked, and turned to leave without waiting for an answer.
"You're not even going to tell me your name?" Peter called as she walked away, her curls swinging behind her.
She paused, and pivoted to face him again. "No," she called back, and he spread his forearms out from their perch on the arms of his chair. Katherine drank in the stretch of the fabric across his chest, his flat stomach, and the way the corners of his eyes crinkled as he smirked at her. God, if only all older men were as fuckable as he is. "I'm sure you'll find a way to earn it, though," she finally said, and turned away, leaving him alone at the table, with only his coffee for company.
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