Then
Blair reached out and touched Jim's forearm, silently telling the sentinel to dial back his senses. The kill zone was saturated with pheromones of the killer and the fading essence of the dead sentinel who spent the last hours of his life in unbearable pain, if the pictures tacked up on the walls were accurate. At first glance they looked faked, the sort of mock up you'd see in a television show or in a movie depicting violence, but a glance around the trailer where they were found backed up the pictorial story.
"How did you know to call us, Mr. Rios?" Blair inquired quietly, his attention split between the greyed face of the freaked out neighbor and his stoic sentinel.
The stocky man shuffled a moment, glancing up at them, then down at his shoes. They were the only safe places to look since everything else was splashed with blood and other darker organic remains.
"Mi prima is a guía too, Guide Sandberg. She's the one who told me about the casa de asesinato." His voice was hoarse, emotions veering wildly for a moment before he visibly settled himself. "Ella tiene fuerza de bajo nivel but she felt when murió de muerte violenta."
Blair wasn't surprised that a low-level guide had felt the sentinel's death. The agony of release would've been even more intense on the spiritual plane and would've affected any nearby guide, regardless of their sense-strength. Death was the greatest equalizer, especially when violent.
"She hear your Hunt, so she tell me to call." His English had steadily devolved in the past half hour since they arrived and he showed them where the murder had occurred. Blair wasn't surprised at his slip back to his natal tongue in a time of stress.
"Have you called the police?"
"No policía!"
"We'll take it from here," Jim said with clear dismissal in his voice. Mr. Rios nodded gratefully and quickly walked back to a trailer a few hundred feet away with a dark-haired woman staring at them through a dusty screen door. His cousin perhaps? Blair mentally waved away the idle speculation and turned his full attention back to his sentinel.
"Do we alert Major Crimes Unit?" It was a valid question since Jim's old department worked with them on occasion when S&G Center matters intersected with mundane crimes.
"No, we need our people on this before we release the scene to them. I have a feeling this is the Sentinel Killer's handiwork. I can smell him."
Blair nodded, and then flipped his phone open so he could scroll through the contacts until he found the correct number and pressed dial. While he listened to the ringing, the bond between him and Jim pulsed gently as he automatically adjusted his empathetic shield to help his sentinel parse the crime scene without letting it overwhelm him. If Jim was correct and this was the same killer they'd called a Hunt upon, this would be the fifth dead sentinel they discovered. Henry Ferguson, their FBI liaison, had given them a profile of the killer: a male who was in his late twenties to early thirties, a loner through circumstance not by nature, obsessive in his stalking, and driven by a profound loss which translated into toxic rage he unleashed upon sentinels. Henry believed the unsub chose young latent or newly emerged sentinels because they were easier to handle.
"Felix we found another…in a trailer park outside Pine Top…no, just us so it's a fresh scene. Okay, see you then. "
Blair turned back to the abandoned trailer – another similarity – and waited by the open door. He had already seen the ritually dismembered body once, no need to see the horror again. Jim didn't ask him to step back inside, but reached to hand him the stack of photos he took down from the wall. Blair girded himself before looking through the pictorial evidence. They started out as shots of the victim going about daily life – they would have to reach out to the local S&G center to see what high school aged sentinels had recently went missing. Within four photographs, the photographer had given up his long-distance stalking and moved to kidnapping as now the victim lay on a bed with his hands tied behind his back. The uncomfortable position didn't seem to pain him, though the slack lips and closed lids pointed to unconsciousness. Blair stopped looking when bloody symbols were carved into the sentinel's chest.
"Chief, c'mere."
Blair turned his face into his sentinel's chest and dry-sobbed. He couldn't understand the drive to kill; he knew murders happened every day in America, but the young sentinels hit especially close to home. He couldn't help but see Jim in each of their dead faces.
"We couldn't save them."
The large heavy palm never stopped stroking his hair and Jim didn't respond, but Blair knew the sentinel felt as deeply as he did even if he never voiced it. As Prime of the West Coast, all sentinels and guides fell under his purview, and were part of the loosely connected tribe made up of family prides and packs throughout California, Oregon, and Washington. Primes didn't call Hunts on a whim, and Jim was often riding the edge of ferine savagery as his territory was threatened by a vicious killer. Blair bleakly thought of the months passed without concrete results and the many more sure to come if their unsub wasn't stopped.
They only parted when Jim heard the familiar sound of Felix's van in the distance.
Now
"Oh honey," Melissa hummed as she finished the last stitch, gently patting a bandage in place. "You know she bonded formally with him."
Derek refused to look at her and instead focused on his bandaged hand. It wasn't as if he had gone out of his way to see her; she'd come into his place of work after all. He flinched when he remembered the floor she was going to.
"You knew?"
"We all did, but no one said anything because, well..."
Yes, he knew why. Hell, all of Beacon Hills knew why. It was one of the drawbacks of small town living. A cliche, but still accurate.
"I wish you'd warned me at least, Mel. It wouldn't have been such a shock." It wasn't as if he still carried a torch for her, Derek wanted to say. He had gotten over his heart-ache and sense of loss years prior, helped when she and Devon moved out of town after graduation. It made sense why they'd come back after college - his mother was still her Alpha after all, and few Hale sentinels left the mountain for long.
"Derek, I'm sorry, I thought your mom would've mentioned it, or your sisters."
He knew exactly why they hadn't: they didn't want to upset their poor widdle Derek with news about his ex-girlfriend, even if six years had passed since they broke up in such a horribly public way.
"It's fine, Mel, I swear. And this had nothing to do with her, really, it was me just being clumsy."
He ignored the pitying glance Melissa cast at him before turning away to clean up her station. It was clumsiness that caused his hand to clench on the fragile glass test tube when he spotted Paige gliding across the lobby and pressing the up arrow for the lift. He debated about saying something to her, when the doors opened and she stepped inside. Derek had stood there like a statue watching the numbers climb until it stopped at the fifth floor. The only doctors on that floor were OB-GYN, so there was no mystery as to why she would've gone there. He had no idea how long he lingered before the pain in his palm finally woke him from his daze and he sought out Melissa to stitch the six inch gash. Now he sort of regretted it because the older woman tended to mother him and want to (figuratively) kiss his boo-boos, be they physical or emotional.
"Oh, we have a new resident on the second floor. Timmons told me you were to avoid the privacy chamber during your rounds."
"What. Why?"
"Parrish found a half-naked feral on the outskirts of the Preserve this morning. Nearly ran him down in his patrol car because the kid ran across the road."
Derek winced. "Was he injured subduing the feral?"
Melissa shook her head. "Feral didn't put up a fight at all. He's severely malnourished and someone's been using him to experiment on. He had several burn marks, lacerations on his stomach and thighs, a broken collarbone and a badly healed bullet wound in his chest. They took him into surgery when x-rays showed metal fragments in the bone." She took a deep breath. "Dr. Patrick said he wasn't sure how the boy survived other than being a "goddamn insane sentinel.""
A growl rumbled in his chest and moved into his throat. He wasn't a sentinel like his mother and sisters, but he had the same instincts to protect the pack, the tribe. Sentinels who went feral usually had intense provocation. "Does he have a guide?"
"Alpha Deaton hasn't scanned him yet as they wanted to help him with the medical issues before delving into spiritual ones."
It made sense. "How old he is?"
"They don't know for sure, but he looks around eighteen or nineteen." Sixteen was the earliest most sentinels (non-violently) emerged, with nineteen being the most common age for boys. Girls differed wildly, though no one had managed to figure out why. Many chalked it up to their menstrual cycle and left it at that.
"So recently come online then."
She shrugged. They could only speculate until Alpha Guide Deaton said otherwise. Derek sighed and felt a little bad at the relief of having a feral in the hospital. He was sorry the kid had gone through torture, but at the same time a little glad the attention wouldn't be focused on him now that Paige was back in town. What was a little soured high school romance compared to a feral?