A/N: Reviews and rates are beyond appreciated. Favorites will probably make me love you forever.
The sheriff had taken the two of them to the spot on the Main Road where they'd found Scott, bloody and unconscious. Scott guessed that if they made a straight line east, they'd come across Sarah's body, if not the wolf itself. However, they'd been walking for ten minutes now and still hadn't found a trace.
"Are you sure this was where you found me?" Scott asked the sheriff, scratching the back of his head in confusion and frustration, staring at the stretch of decaying leaves before him. "I know Sarah had only been about five minutes from the Main Road."
"This is where we found you," the sheriff replied, calling back to the two boys significantly behind him. "If you do think it was a wolf, it probably took Sarah's body as food for the pack. Our best hope is tracking it back to the den."
"I'm really hoping you know how to track wolves," Stiles shouted, birds stirring in the trees.
"My grandfather was a Mowhawk, son," Sheriff Stilinski sighed, turning around. "Step one: keep your voice down so the damned thing can't hear you from ten miles away." His son blushed, nodding with embarrassment. "Scott, what about you? What can you tell me?"
He opened his mouth to reply, but had nothing to say. He had no clue. Last night, everything had been in a state of disarray. Broken branches had littered the thicket, blood had been smeared everywhere, and there was a distinct drag line from where he'd tried to carry Sarah. Now, it all seemed as though nothing had happened here.
"I can't tell," he replied honestly. He'd tracked many a deer before with his father before he'd gone to Mexico, but deer were easy to find when they were being chased. The path they picked through had broken twigs with tufts of reddish hair, and their hoofs sank deeply into the moist ground. This scene of attack had been seemingly concealed by a master criminal. There wasn't any evidence.
Sheriff Stilinski continued ahead of them, Stiles struggling to catch up and Scott falling behind. Cursing his ineptitude, he struck at one of the trees with the butt of his rifle. A small branch splintered off where he'd slapped it, striking the back of his hand as he recoiled from the blow.
"Ow," he complained, picking out the shard of wood, wincing at the droplets of blood which sank down his hand and fell to the ground. Suddenly he was overpowered by a rich, coppery scent. It filled his nose, making him want to gag. "Can you smell that?" he asked Stiles, covering his mouth and nose. Still, the smell pervaded, making him feel light-headed.
"Smell what?" Stiles asked, pausing. "I can't smell anything."
"It smells like blood," he managed, taking a few deep breaths, the smell leaving him in a few moments. "Couldn't you smell that?"
"I couldn't smell anything," Stiles maintained, looking back at his father, who'd stopped to see what they were doing. "Was it Sarah?"
"I don't know," he replied honestly. The smell still lurked just under his nose, as though it was buried. "I can still smell it. Just a little bit." He sniffed delicately. There it was – a sharp tang, metallic in nature, mixed with a dull, musky, decaying smell. "There's blood under the leaves," he told them, staring at a small rowan tree, blooming with bushels of bright red berries.
He finally recognized it – it was the tree Sarah Chamberlain had been propped up against when she'd been found. "This is it," he said excitedly. "Sheriff, look underneath the leaves. Under that rowan tree. That's where I found her."
The sheriff stooped to his knees, shifting aside the wet leaves for almost thirty seconds, seemingly growing more and more irritated by the absence of any real evidence. "Are you sure?" Scott nodded, urging him to continue. For a few more seconds, he dug through them, until withdrawing his hands with a horrified expression on his face. The leaves were saturated with blood. It was the spot where Sarah had been murdered.
"You two, go back to town. Take the Main Road. I want you to get both of the deputies and tell them to meet me here immediately."
Stiles nodded. "And then what? Do we follow him? Are we coming with you? We're coming with you, right?"
"Hell no," he said gruffly, standing up and wiping his hands on his trousers. "You two are missing school right now."
"School can wait!" Stiles cried, exasperated.
"More importantly," the sheriff continued without pausing for his son's complaints, "when I brought the two of you out here, I wasn't sure if Scott was telling the truth or not. If he'd had a hallucination or something. But now, there's a dangerous beast out here. I don't want kids investigating it."
"We aren't kids," Stiles protested fiercely.
"You're sixteen years old, Stiles!" the sheriff shouted, becoming red in the face. "I'm not arguing with you! Take Scott with you, and go back to the town. You two need to go back to the school. I don't want you talking about what you found. Sarah Chamberlain had a little brother, and I don't want him to hear about his sister's death from gossip. Is that understood?"
They both nodded, Stiles still protesting about having to return to the school. Grudgingly, he trudged ahead of Scott, mumbling to himself about how unfair it was. Soon, they reached the Main Road. "What I don't understand," Scott finally said, his hands in his pockets as he stared at the bright blue sky, "is how it got covered up that well. Wolves can't do that."
"What I don't understand," Stiles countered, coming to a stop, "is how the hell you knew it was there."
"I recognized the tree," Scott told him, confused.
"No, you told me you could smell something, and then my dad dug up the blood. How did you do that?"
Scott shrugged. "I don't know. I guess I just did. It doesn't matter. The important thing is finding that wolf, and making sure it doesn't hurt anyone else."
"Alright, fine," Stiles sighed, shaking his head. "How did your super wolf manage to hide the body, Scott? Did he wish it away?"
"Maybe it wasn't a wolf," Scott said quietly, staring warily at the woods around him.
"Oh, right. It was the Big Bad Wolf, and Sarah Chamberlain just happened to be Little Red? What does that make you, Scott? The grandma, or the lumberjack?" Stiles laughed, pushing him forward as they continued to walk again.
"Seriously, Stiles. What I saw didn't look like a wolf. It looked like something else to me."
"Scott, maybe you hadn't noticed, but it's 1851, not 1692," Stiles told him, looking serious. "There's no such thing as werewolves. We don't hang people for being witches anymore."
"Well, what if it wasn't a wolf, or a werewolf?" Scott insisted. "Something killed Sarah, and something attacked me, and something hid the body. What if it wasn't something? What if it was someone?"
Stiles looked prepared to scoff at the idea, but at that very second, a young man stepped from the edge of the woods, blocking their path. Scott jumped back, startled and moderately terrified, reaching for the rifle on his back, and Stiles let out a wailing scream.
"Shut up," he ordered, his voice sounding as though he was sick with a cough and it was perpetually hoarse. "What's the matter with you?"
"What's the matter with you?" Stiles countered, finally snatching the rifle off of his back and managing to point it in the young man's general direction, although Scott had had his sights trained on him for the past forty five seconds.
"I just stepped out of the woods," the man argued. "You two are the ones who have guns pointed at me."
"Alright, we'll put down the guns if you tell us who you are," Scott replied, putting up one of his hands in a conciliatory gesture. "Does that sound good to you?"
"My name is Derek Hale," he snapped. "And who are you two? You know you're on private property, don't you?"
"No, we're not," Stiles laughed. "This is the Main Road."
"You're in my driveway," Derek growled, pointing at the ground. It was bumpy and rocky, obviously not the smooth paved road they had been on. It was long and winding; they couldn't even see the house at the end.
"We must have accidentally turned off of the Main Road," Scott said hurriedly. "We're sorry, sir."
"What are your names?" he asked, staring at the two of them as though recalling their every detail for memory should he later need to kill them.
"My name's Jackson Whittemore," Stiles lied. "This is my friend Jim. We'll be leaving now, sorry to bother you, Mr. Hale." He spun on his heel, dragging Scott back to the Main Road. He turned back, trying to see Derek, sensing something off about him. However, he had already vanished.
"Talk about creepy," Stiles muttered. "Maybe he's the one who's killing people in the woods. You alright, Scott?"
He nodded, his mind not on his friend, who kept talking. He was thinking about the smell in the woods. It hadn't been normal; the blood had been under several inches of leaves and at least two feet away from him. Since when could he smell blood? And then, talking to Derek Hale, he knew he felt that same strange sensation. He could smell something, something that wasn't right with him. It was almost like he wasn't human.
He pulled his hand out of his pocket, staring at the back of it for a few seconds before realizing that the small scratch that had been there twenty minutes ago was now totally gone. Scott knew he'd always been a pretty fast healer, but not like this. It was as though there had never even been a trace of a cut. He pressed his fingers to his side again, remembering the night before. He was certain that he'd been bitten, that he'd felt the monster's teeth stick into him.
How could he have healed such a grievous wound overnight?
"Scott? Hey, Scott? Have you heard anything I've been saying?"
"Yeah," he lied. "I was just thinking. Sorry."
"Well, we'd better have a pretty good excuse for not being in class on time for Mr. Finstock. I for one do not want to deal with his wrath alone."
"Yeah, sure," Scott nodded, stopping before the bridge crossing. "I have to take care of something. I'll see you later." He wandered down the cobbled path toward the mill, ignoring his friend's wild protestations.
He kept his head down and his hands in his pockets as he wandered down the street, enjoying the breeze rippling through the fields of grain around him. He'd been walking for about three minutes when he abruptly stopped, and not of his own will. He'd stumbled into someone.
Blushing and apologizing, he backed away, only to be stunned into silence. A young woman was gathering wood from the ground, which had obviously only previously been in her arms. She was apologizing just as profusely, her cheeks bright red. She had long, curled dark hair, which swung loosely around her shoulders. Her gown was simple, without the crinoline Lydia and the women in town were always sporting, but it was obviously well-made.
"I'm Allison," he finally heard her say, as she came to her feet, the wood haphazard in her arms.
"I'm Scott," he stuttered, reaching out his arms to take the pile from her. "Do you want some help?"
"Oh, I'm fine," she replied, and he heard a distinct accent in her voice.
"You're new here, right?" he asked, staring at her longer than he should have. Her eyes were dark brown, but they sparkled like copper in the afternoon sun, and there were two small dimples in the smile just underneath the corners of her lips.
"My family and I just moved from Quebec," she responded. Now he could clearly make out the Quebecoise twang in her words.
"That's… cool," he managed, sounding like an idiot.
She laughed, unsure of the reply. "Thank you? I really should get back to putting this inside now. Nice to meet you, Scott. I'll see you around town, I'm sure."
"Yes. I'll see you." She laughed again, her hand giving a tiny wave of goodbye, so she wouldn't lose her firewood again. Her skirts swayed as she walked back into her enormous stone farmhouse. Shaking his head, he realized he really needed to get back to class. Mr. Finstock was going to kill him.