Scott's pack gathers outside the Stilinski household. Derek goes as well, because even though he was never officially invited into the pack he got the text. He figures Scott probably doesn't know anything about expanding his pack or maintaining the bond between its members. To be fair, neither did Derek when he had his go at playing alpha, so being included in the mass text will have to do.

Isaac is the one who called it in - a small fact which brings Derek a moment of pride, echoes of his time as the alpha back when the beta was his, not Scott's. That's my beta, he can't help but think. He did good.

Then again, that's not his place anymore, and he's come to accept that. It was too much responsibility for him, anyways, not that he'd ever admit it out loud. Certainly not to someone like Scott, who really hasn't earned much of his respect just yet. Especially with the way he's heading this pack at the moment, talking about containment and trapping the thing his best friend probably turned into.

Speaking of Stiles, Derek somehow has doubts that the teen is going to turn into much of anything dark and evil. Maybe a sad little rabbit, with a broken leg and big round eyes or something equally pitiful and in need of protection. He just doesn't have it in him to be a monster.

Probably.

The pack has gathered into its customary circle, with Derek a short distance away as usual, listening to their haplessly cyclical conversation. It kind of hurts to hear, and he'd make a snide comment if he hadn't been just as bad.

"We need to go after him," Isaac is saying, mouth twisted in worry or anxiety, or both. Derek had never gotten as close to him as he'd wanted. "He was still human when he left the house, but he was moving fast."

"Headed where?" Lydia asks sharply. "To the city?"

Isaac shakes his head. "The forest," he replies. "He looked like he knew where he was going."

"He's probably made it to the tree line by now," Kira says, biting her lip. Scott nods, accepting this statement of the obvious.

"Isaac, Malia, go follow him," he orders. "Keep us updated as you go. Do whatever you have to to keep him in one place when you find him, okay?"

Isaac and Malia nod silently, visibly unhappy, and do as instructed. Derek silently watches them go, resolutely not saying a word. Like maybe, Malia can't track scents for shit yet or I could find Stiles in half the time. Because Scott didn't ask that of him. He never does.

Derek did this to himself, really.

Scott doesn't bother to watch his pack members go; instead, he turns to the Stilinski's front door and has a fist raised to knock.

"Scott," Lydia says disapprovingly, arms crossed, "it's ten at night. The Sheriff might be sleeping."

"Oh, he is," Scott says dismissively, "but he might know something about what Stiles plans to do. It's important that we find out what he was going to do as soon as possible."

Okay, this, Derek can't resist. "Before what?" he pipes up, tilting his head in mock curiosity. "Before your best friend turns into a murderous beast bent on killing everyone?"

Scott rounds on him immediately. "You don't know that," he hisses, fists clenched and eyes flashing. A very large part of Derek wants to cower, give in to the alpha before he really gets into it, but the rest of him is fairly unimpressed. He raises an eyebrow instead.

"That's how you're treating this whole thing," he points out. "You're acting like Stiles is going to be some sort of threat."

Lydia shifts to his right - so she agrees, then. It's not like her to hold her tongue, but then she's nothing if not pragmatic. She wouldn't let herself get her hopes up without weighing the chances first.

Scott just makes a rude noise. "That's how you see it," he argues. "Stiles is my friend. I just want to help him."

"By talking about tracking him down and keeping him in one place until you can try to reason with him?" Stiles is hardly going to cave just because Scott asks him to. Derek's only ever seen that particular brand of stubbornness in Laura, and there's no reasoning with it. Not really.

"It's not what you think," Scott protests, before biting his tongue and turning away. His bad mood is visible in the tense line of his shoulders as he raises his fist again, this time knocking loudly on the door. Derek resigns himself to a horrible experience with Stiles' father. Who thought it was a good idea to make an idiot seventeen year-old a true alpha, again?

There's a good minute of silence for the humans - not so for Scott and himself, the only ones left with supernatural senses, who can hear Sheriff Stilinski stumble his way down the stairs, half-awake at best. Kira fidgets quietly beside them.

The door opens to a view of the Sheriff yawning behind one fist, dressed in a police academy tee and too-long plaid sleep pants. He looks like shit, Derek thinks to himself, all sleep-rumpled and unhappy. He clearly knows what this is about, but isn't going to be the one to bring it up first.

"Scott?" he queries, blinking at the group on his doorstep. "What are you doing here?"

McCall doesn't even bother with pleasantries. "Stiles is gone and we need to know where he went," Scott says, clipped and to the point in true out-of-character alpha fashion. It doesn't look all that great on him yet. "Can we come in?"

"Of course," the Sheriff answers promptly, shaking off any sleep-comfort in favor of professionalism. After all, this is a business meeting. An interrogation, Derek thinks with a sigh as the Sheriff takes a step backwards to allow the pack into his home. If anyone were really going to listen to his opinion, this is where he'd speak up and tell them what a shitty idea this whole thing is.

Scott, Kira, and Lydia all take the offered couch with some hesitation, Scott in the middle and the two girls on either side. It's standard I-am-the-alpha posturing, and Derek is almost relieved that he at least knows that much. Except not really, because it's blatant and kind of silly. Besides, if Scott had more sense, he'd allow one of the girls to head this future disaster they're all calling a decent conversation. The alpha just doesn't have the tact for this job. Still, Derek feels obligated to show his support for the kid, so he stands off to the side of the couch. The Sheriff stands in front of the couch, obliquely facing Derek - the only other legal adult in the room, he realizes. It must be subconscious, because McCall is clearly the authority figure here.

McCall, who starts this whole shit show off with, "Did Stiles tell you anything at all?"

Derek has to suppress a wince at that. Oh, yeah. Tactless.

"Whoa, Scott," the Sheriff says with a half-smile, half-grimace, waving a hand out of habit. "What are you talking about?"

Lydia nudges Scott subtly in the ribs with her elbow, and he frowns a little in response

"Mr Stilinski," she says, shooting Scott a look, "Stiles ran away maybe an hour ago. We have two members of the pack - Malia and Isaac - going after him to try to convince him to come back, but…" She purses her lips, changes tacks. "It could be bad if they can't."

Stilinski's lips press into a thin line. The kind gleam in his eye dims when everyone's expressions turn shifty and uncomfortable. "And why is that?"

"He didn't tell you anything?" Scott repeats desperately, looking as though he wants to be anywhere but here, in this very moment.

"He didn't have to," the Sheriff says severely. Derek sees the moment when he regrets his tone. It must be hard for him, he thinks, watching closely as he deflates. "What with the way he was clinging, I figured it would all be pretty final. Not death final, though?" he checks suddenly, anxiously. His thoughts clearly have taken a dark turn; Derek himself has run through them before. Did I misjudge? Should I have pushed? Have I lost my last family member forever? Was I not enough? Why?

No one seems to know quite what to say to this. There's a long moment of silence before Scott comes to the correct conclusion and responds correctly. "No! God no," he says quickly, looking appropriately horrified. "He's not going to die. He's just going to… change, a little."

"Change a little," the Sheriff repeats ominously. Scott winces.

"Uh," he starts, swallows, "he was cursed by a witch?"

"Cursed?"

The reluctance returns and the alpha fidgets in his seat. Kira leans into his side. He seems to draw courage from the action and tries again. "Apparently… when the nogitsune thing happened, a few months ago?" He peers up at Stilinski, who's got his arms crossed and a frankly thunderous expression darkening his fatherly features. "Right. Um. Stiles ended up accidentally killing this witch's sister at the hospital, and so now that witch has it out for him. A serious vendetta, and all that."

Scott's word choice hasn't done him any favors with the Sheriff. It was probably the Stiles killed a person or twenty, remember? aspect.

"What did they do to my son."

"He cursed Stiles to turn into the form of his true spirit," Lydia cuts in on Scott's nervous hemming and hawing. She looks slightly flustered, but keeps a firm expression, even when Stiles' father turns his attention to her.

He hmmms, still looking skeptical, but Derek can sense that he's feeling more amenable to the idea. Stiles probably spent years gushing about how smart she is, after all. "And what does that mean for Stiles?"

Scott looks immeasurably grateful for her concise explanation, and picks it back up when she raises an eyebrow. "The witch spent a lot of time talking about darkness and evil, and how it's going to be awful…" He clears his throat. "The witch definitely wanted to make Stiles turn into something terrible. We're worried he might hurt someone."

"Something terrible? What, like some kind of monster?" the Sheriff demands, appalled. Then he latches onto the other important part. As it turns out, blotchy flushing is genetic in the Stilinski family. "My son wouldn't hurt anyone, Scott."

"Sheriff," Kira says gently, sadly, "Stiles might not be himself when he does it."

Stilinski pales horribly. His hand reaches behind him for the arm of the chair as a guide for when he sinks back to sit heavily there. His breath gusts out in a pained sigh, and Derek finds it suddenly hard to breathe past the sadness thick in the air. "Hasn't he had enough of this?" he asks the floor. "Doesn't my son deserve a goddamn break?"

Scott looks like he just watched someone die in front of him.

"Sir," Kira continues softly, "we don't want him to do anything he'll blame himself wrongly for." The again remains unspoken. "We came here to ask if you have any where he might go to hide, or to - to keep himself away from us. Just in case."

"Of course he would," Stilinski mumbles crossly. A hand rubs down his face. "Fine. And what are you going to do when you find him? If Isaac and Malia can't reason with him."

"Catch him," Scott says succinctly. "If we have to, we'll find a way to contain him until we can break the curse."

"Contain him how, exactly?"

"Um," Scott tries, "we'll use chains? And stuff? Just the standard restraints and chains we already had, and whatever else we may need."

"Let me get this straight." Stiles' father leans forward in his chair and glowers at them. "You want me to tell you where my son might have hidden himself away - so he doesn't hurt anyone - so that you can chain him up like some sort of animal?"

"It's for his own good -" And oh, that was the wrong answer, even if chains are standard fare for werewolves.

"Someone shut him up," Derek snaps at the girls. Kira's hand slaps over Scott's mouth and Lydia slaps him upside the head, earning an outraged expression over Kira's hand. Derek faces the reasonably incensed Sheriff and tries to do damage control - something he's never had to try before, and faced with the task of calming an angry father, something that seems impossible.

"Sheriff," he said, raising a hand in the universal sign saying I mean no harm. "We're going to get through to him. If Isaac and Malia can't convince him, Scott will. If not Scott, then Lydia. We'll find a way to help him with as little violence as possible," he says slowly, surely. He gives the man a significant look, one the man returns after a moment of deep thought.

"Well, at least one of you knows what to say," he says gruffly, relaxing in increments. Another sigh gusts out of him. "Fine. If none of you can make Stiles listen, I'll give it a go. Not a word," he adds fiercely when Scott opens his mouth wide enough to encompass Kira's hand. "If my son'shumanity is at stake again, you can be damned sure I'll be there."

"Stiles wouldn't want to hurt you," Scott finally gets out, straining to pull Kira's fingers away from his mouth. It looks like a difficult task.

"He won't," Derek interrupts firmly. "We're not going to let him get that far."

The Sheriff looks immeasurably grateful. Derek immediately feels like the worst person in the world.

Scott is glowering at him. "You can't make that promise," he says lowly. Derek just shrugs, because yes, he can. This whole pack flies by the seat of its pants on a regular basis and still comes out more or less in one piece. One little promise to keep a pack member from losing his shit completely should be easy.

"He would do it for any of you," Stilinski says darkly. Scott's mouth snaps shut. Thank god.

"Thank you for your time," Kira says hastily, getting to her feet and swiping at her skirt. She touches Scott's shoulder. "It's very late, and we need to figure out how we're going to divide our time between - um -"

"Between making sure Stiles is okay and finding out how to break the curse," Lydia finishes smoothly. She, too, rises to her feet, tugging Scott up by the arm. She smiles professionally. "Have a good night, sir."

The Sheriff nods cautiously at her. She correctly takes that as her cue to pull the alpha bodily from the room. Kira smiles awkwardly, seemingly at a loss for what to do, and waves before following. Derek is a little slower in following, but the silence goes on long enough that he, too, decides to make a break for it. He's in the hallway when Stilinski calls after him.

"Hale," he states. Derek pauses. He can feel the eyes on the back of his head. "You keep in touch, you hear me?"

"Yes, sir," Derek says eventually, and, with nothing else forthcoming, makes his way out the door.

**8**

Isaac and Malia meet them all in the loft, laden with ripped clothing and mournful expressions. The shredded cloth reeks of sweat and pain. Derek frowns at them hard while Isaac explains that they somehow lost Stiles' scent at the mound of clothes, not far into the forest. Then Malia makes a comment about how they should have kept looking anyways, and Scott has to put a stop to the ensuing argument. Lydia brings them all back on track by listing off their three goals for the next few days: find Stiles, track down the witch, and come up with a way to break the curse before something happens. Everyone shares a conflicted look.

"I'll go," Derek says, and when they all turn to stare at him, elaborates. "I'll look for Stiles. In the forest. I'm more familiar with it than any of you."

Scott looks horribly grateful. Maybe Derek should volunteer his help more - the alpha may not know that he has the right to ask. He looks a little more confident already, and has no trouble dividing the rest of the pack based on their skills into the other two tasks. He waves Derek off immediately, requesting a text every few hours to know what he'll be doing.

The first thing Derek does when he makes it out of the pack's earshot is message the Sheriff. He details the pack's plan and his own place in it, which at the moment Stilinski considers the most important. He promises to keep the department away from the woods until Derek gives the all-clear in exchange for an honest vow to not hurt Stiles. Derek has no problems agreeing.

He starts at the Stilinski household, following the sad-sick scent Stiles has left behind down the street. It leads him directly across a block and a half to the treeline. He'd never realized how dangerously close Stiles always was to all the bad things that happened in these woods. Derek finds an oak drenched in the teen's scent and resolves to lead anything that could hurt someone much deeper into the forest, far enough that most creatures wouldn't bother with the distance to the neighborhood.

As it turns out, his beta and the werecoyote muddled the scent trail so thoroughly it becomes easier to follow theirs than it is to eke out the hint of Stiles beneath it all.

It's frustrating to not be able to track the scent. It winds between the trees, shifting between pain and fear and something oddly like satisfaction, of the grim sort. There's one particular clump of underbrush and close-together trees that smells the way the clothes Isaac collected had, and Derek knows the trail ended here for the young weres. It should be child's play to pick it up himself and keep going, which is why he's so irritated right now. There's not a hint of Stiles anywhere past the scattered red fibers, minuscule remnants of the shirt he'd been wearing. A short distance past that he finds torn up shoes - they look like they've been shredded by claws or talons. It's disconcerting, because there's nothing other than human here when it's visually obvious no human could have done such a thing.

Maybe he grew wings and took off into the sky.

Scott doesn't like the tentative conclusion he's reached, Derek observes as he taps out a quick response to the SHIT NO WTF STILES W WINGS? he got in return for the opinion he shared.

\\ Maybe he just turned into a bird.

SM/ GROAN. IF HES A MONSTER PIGEON IS2G

Okay, then.

**8**

IL/ a little bird told me you lost the scent too. not so smug now are we der?

\\ Shut up Isaac.

IL/ :)

**8**

LM/ Really, Derek? You've got Scott convinced Stiles has turned into an oversized pigeon because you won't admit you couldn't keep a sweaty teenager's scent? Fix this.

\\ It's plausible.

LM/ If Stiles were to turn into any bird, it would be a canary, not a pigeon.

\\ So tell him that.

LM/ Is your manly pride worth that much?

**8**

\\ Scott get Lydia off my back.

SM/ no dude im busy she says stiles is a canary from hell

\\ She's lying Scott get her to leave me alone.

SM/ find the canary from hell then well talk

\\ Scott.

SM/ she says it might be on fire

**8**

LM/ Look out for fiery canaries, Derek.

\\ I hate you.

**8**

By the time the sun peeks above the trees, Derek has found no sign of small flaming birds (or large ones) in the woods. In fact, there seems to be nothing out of the ordinary at all. The birds twittering in the early morning are both aggravating and completely normal. The predators are all the same: foxes, owls, dogs and the occasional person weaving around the usual routes. The herbivores are the same.

The idea had come to him that maybe Stiles had, in fact, turned into a fox, resembling the roots of the nogitsune, but he'd shaken the thought away with extreme prejudice. That isn't fair, he'd told himself firmly. Not that the witch's logic was at all fair when he cursed Stiles to begin with. All the same, he walked the paths the foxes followed and found nothing. He neglected to share this suggestion with the pack, and they clearly have nothing important to tell him, so he's been out of contact for a few hours now.

Which is why he's alone when he gets himself cornered by the wolf.

It's a long-limbed, gangly beast, all spindly legs and bared teeth. Its eyes glow a violent ice blue. It's got Derek backed into a tree outside the old Hale house, hackles raised yet curiously not growling, and it smells like pack.

"Who are you?" he asks the wolf, confused. It smells a little like everyone, no scent strong enough to truly discern its identity. He didn't even know one of the pack could fully shift into a wolf. "Is this because I haven't texted any of you? You can blame Scott for that. He told me to share only important information - are you Scott?" But it can't be Scott. It can't be any of the pack, because none of the wolves have blue eyes except for him... unless it's Isaac. Isaac's eyes are naturally blue, aren't they?

The wolf grumbles at him and leans forward, shoving its face into his knee. He freezes, startled, as it takes a deep breath. That's definitely not Isaac behavior, Derek thinks wildly, confused and a little worried. He watches as its furry head pushes a little closer, ears twitching, and breathes in a few more times before inching back and staring up at him.

The wolf's eyes are a deep, soulful brown now. It's almost coyote-like in build, with its wide paws, narrow muzzle, and large ears. Its fur is shorter, too, and several colors: greyish brown over its head and back with a healthy touch of ginger, dark brown at the tail, and creamy white from its jaw to its belly.

The thing is, even though it smells like pack, it can't possibly be. Peter was a grey wolf, back when he could fully shift - that monstrosity he turned into when he stole the Alpha power from Laura was the twisted result of six years of insanity. He'll never fully shift again, but since he bit Scott, the new alpha will also be a grey wolf should he manage it. Derek himself takes after his mother in many ways; if he ever pulls it off, he'll be a black wolf. With this in mind, so will Isaac. Malia is a true coyote, and her shift doesn't look like this. Kira's a kitsune, and Lydia's not a were anything, so it can't possibly be her. That rules out everyone in the pack, he knows, except -

His true spirit.

The wolf looks up at him expectantly with a familiar tilt to its head.

"Stiles?" he breathes. Its ears perk up and it - he, Stiles - gives one short, sharp yip. The wolf headbutts his knee and he slides to the ground, staring in shock. "Oh my god. Stiles."

He reaches out with one hand, not really sure what to expect. But Stiles comes right up to him, dropping his furry weight onto Derek's thighs and nudging his nose into his outstretched hand until he gets the hint. Derek dutifully strokes the wolf between the ears, stunned and feeling the first stirrings of panic.

How the hell is he supposed to tell the pack?