"So he´s the problem?" Stiles asked, once Scott had explained his encounter with Liam the previous day. Scott shrugged and hooked up in his backpack, he hung his helmet on the bike and headed after Stiles towards the high school.
"I don´t know," Scott admitted after a minute or so of silence. "I don´t think it was a coincidence though." Stiles nodded, it probably wasn´t. Things rarely were. He considered telling Scott about his sleep problems, because he still didn´t sleep too well. But maybe it was just because he was still worried about going to sleep, gotten a bit too used to the thought of sleeping resulting in the Nogitsune taking over. It was a hard lesson to completely unlearn. His eyes flickered to Lydia, Kira and Malia who stood together and talked about something. Kira was leaning on a locker with the two others on either side of her. He figured Lydia might be qualified to giving him advice, after all she had gone through something similar with Peter.
Suddenly Lydia seemed to catch his eye, and she and the two other girls headed in he and Scott´s direction. Which meant their current topic, "Is Liam from the freshman class a murderer?" would have to be dropped for now. Not for Lydia and Kira´s sakes, they had both been in the preserve, but because of Malia. Because Stiles still hadn´t asked Scott his opinion on the telling Malia stuff policy.
"So Biology," Stiles ever so smoothly switched the subject, secretly cursing at how idiotic it sounded, once Malia and the other girls were in hearing range. Scott shot him a weird look, a little confused about the sudden switch of topic. He had every right to be, but suddenly the dots seem to connect in Scott´s inner dot-to-dot book, and he shot Stiles a look. The annoyed eye roll that Scott usually reserved for when Stiles was arguing with Isaac too much, apparently it´s appropriate use had been extended now.
"Dude, you haven´t told her?" Scott asked. Stiles was about to come up with a smart ass answer, but presently he didn´t have a useful one. "She knows the stuff about Derek, why not the rest?" Again Stiles couldn´t come up with a good answer, so instead he just left it to Malia to ask the inevitable question.
"What rest?" Malia asked, and Stiles definitely caught the disapproving look Lydia sent him. Lydia knew more about being kept in the dark, than the rest of them did. Clearly she didn´t like that he had chosen not to tell Malia. After all she did know about supernatural things, she was a were coyote after all, and the more he thought about it, the more it didn´t make sense that he hadn´t told her. Malia could be a great help tracking the creatures in the forest.
"You know Lydia´s a banshee," Scott began his explanation as they headed towards the main building of the school. Malia had to slow down a bit, because Kira and Scott were walking slower. "She wailed two nights ago, and we found a dead body in the preserve. It looked like some kind of big creature had attacked."
"Do you know what?" Malia asked, she could probably guess the answer though. It would be a no, considering it had only happened two days ago, they hadn´t quite reached "We know what the problem is, let´s solve it" mode yet.
"No," Scott said, and Malia did not look surprised either, just like Stiles had predicted. "We saw it in the woods, and me and Kira chased it trying to figure out what it was. But before we could, something else attacked us, and the first one ran."
"We could try to track it," she suggested once Scott was done explaining it. "Kind of used to tracking things by smell and stuff," she continued with a small smile.
"Not sure that would work," Lydia said. "It´s been almost two days, and the tracks could be decaying because of other animals and the weather by now." Stiles knew they would be, if only by a little bit.
"Well," Malia said, shooting Stiles a glare. "I guess that´s what you get for not telling the coyote girl sooner."
"If you think you have a shot you should try," Scott added in, before Stiles could come up with a comeback. "We might find something useful."
"You never know," Kira added, and thereby said something for the first time in the whole exchange. Stiles suddenly noticed that Kira´s left hand had slipped into Scott´s, but decided not to comment on it, and just leave it alone. There were more important things, than his best friend´s current relationship status. Well for now anyway, he would definitely bug Scott about it at some other time. Besides if they continued this for much longer, they would be late to Biology and he and the teacher already weren´t the best of friends. Which was his relationship with most teachers to be honest.
Scott hit the brake of his bike, and Malia let go of him and jumped down on the forest floor. He had agreed to take her to the forest, since Stiles, Kira and Lydia were doing research and homework this afternoon. Before they had driven out here, he had explained what he suspected about Liam. If they found any scent that reminded them of him, then the suspicion would definitely grow, and it would be a lot more likely that Liam was involved in some way.
The preserve was just as quiet as usual, as soon as he switched the motor on his bike off. Malia´s eyes were already darting around the parking lot, and Scott gestured for her to follow him through the forest in the direction he and Kira had ran two days before. Scott wasn´t sure if the police was still working the crime scene, but if they were the rest of the forest would have to do. He didn´t want to mess up Sheriff Stilinski´s investigation. It would also be just a bit hard to explain why he and Malia just happened to be tracking near a crime scene. It wouldn´t be the first time Scott could potentially be caught sneaking around a crime scene, but he had a feeling, that with his dad still hanging around, it would be a lot more difficult to get out of without giving an explanation. An explanation Scott was not sure he could give.
"Hey Scott?" Malia dragged him out of his thoughts. "I thought we were tracking, not memorizing the shape of every leaf on that tree." Scott realized he had stopped walking, and hurried towards her.
"Is that even possible?" he asked, to which Malia shrugged.
"Werecoyotes exist, so who knows right?" They continued for a while longer in silence, both smelling and searching for tracks. Malia had some practice from her time as a coyote, but at the same time Scott couldn´t help but think, that it would be an awful lot easier to track down this thing, if the Argents had still been in town. Both Allison and her dad were excellent trackers, and he and his friends had benefitted from that on multiple occasions, especially the night Boyd and Cora were running around in the woods.
He had been meaning to talk to Allison, he had actually been just about to call her last night, to tell her about the murder in the woods, but then he had stopped himself. It felt weird, like something he was not supposed to do. They had left for a reason, to get a new start and it had barely been more than a week since they arrived. You didn´t call someone who was getting a fresh start after a week, trying to get them back to the place they had just left. Allison needed her space, and he was determined to let her have it, at least for now. He told himself, he would call her if things got really bad, but to be honest he wasn´t sure he would.
A sudden oddly familiar and fresh scent ripped him out of his thoughts, and Malia looked to have noticed it too. It seemed to be coming from a more northern direction, than the one where they had originally been heading. Scott wasn´t entirely sure if it was Liam, but what he was sure about, was that it was one of the two creatures that they had tried to follow. There was only one way to find out if it was Liam though.
"This way," he gestured to Malia, and they both went in the direction of the scent, still looking out for other signs of something, or someone for that matter, supernatural creatures having been around. Both himself and Malia stayed quiet now, they didn´t make much noise either, the upside to being out tracking a creature and being a werewolf or a werecoyote. The flipside was of course that they were tracking a murderous creature, which had managed to overpower Kira two nights ago.
The northern end of the preserve had a lot fewer trees, which was why it didn´t make sense as a hiding place, at least not in Scott´s mind. There was a highway running along the northern edge, and in between here and the highway, the terrain was mostly flat too. He had been out here a few times. After he had become a werewolf, he had started testing how long he could run. It was a lot longer than it had been before, now that he no longer had to worry about his asthma. But despite having been out here before, and more than once, he strongly suspected Malia knew the terrain better than he did.
After they had walked for a few more minutes, they noticed the tracks. Branches were broken in half, and footsteps from some sort of animal were visible on the muddier forest floor. Their walk only continued for less than a mile more, before the tracks stopped. It was not like they slowly got fainter, they just sort of disappeared.
But what now met their eyes was a lot more interesting, because it looked like some kind of hide out. The scent was stronger here too, and if it had not been completely empty, Scott would almost have thought that the creature was here. Malia bowed down and moved into the hide out, Scott wondered for a moment if he should follow, until he decided to do so. He wanted to see what the hide out did hide; maybe it could be something useful. Scott hoped it was.
It almost looked like a bat cave, well the animal version of a bat cave anyway. The hide out was obviously being used by the creature he and Malia had been tracking, because there were signs of something living there scattered across it, a pile of sand where something had rested and footprints too, and not all of them animal. Unless humans just had happened to stumble in here, that made it even more likely there was a shape shifter.
"Take a photo of it," Malia told him. Just when Scott was about to ask her, why she couldn´t do it, because if it had been anyone else they would just have done it, Malia explained herself. "The first week I was home, before I got sent to Eichen House I broke the shower head and the fridge door. Let´s just say my dad doesn´t trust me with expensive objects."
"Okay then," Scott obliged to her request and took photos of several of the footprints. Some of them were set with shoes on, so maybe that could be useful in some sort of way. Just when Scott was about to stuff his phone back into his pocket, the loud cartoony wolfhowl, Stiles had put as his ringtone echoed throughout the hideout. Malia shot him a glare, and Scott shrugged. "Stiles´ fault."
"Scott?" Lydia answered on the other end, quite a bit of panic in her voice. Something it was a long time since he had last heard in the girl´s voice.
"What´s wrong?" was the immediate question he asked.
"It´s-," Lydia began slowly. "It´s Kira, something is seriously wrong."
Author´s note: this took a while, I´m sorry about that. First I had a problem on how to execute the Scott and Malia scene, and then the next problem arose in the shape of a huge 8 page paper followed by a english final. But I wanted to get this out to you before I leave for Italy on Monday, because I´m not sure you´ll have another update before that. Hope you enjoyed the chapter.