Chapter Four: The Road

She hadn't slept well the night before. She spent the night tossing and turning in bed, climbing out of it to pace around her bedroom only to climb back into her bed. She couldn't get her impromptu meeting with Derek Hale out of her head, no matter how hard she tried. She didn't know the man, but she thought she had a sense of him. He might be dangerous, but she was certain that he wasn't a killer.

But as she paced around her bedroom at three o'clock in the morning she wasn't sure if she had the right to be certain about anything.

She felt like her head had just barely hit her pillow when she woke up the next morning to an urgent text message from Sam telling her to get her ass to the school. There had been another attack.

Another animal.

Just like Laura.

But so much more violent.

This attack looked more like what she would imagine a wolf attack would look like. It wasn't clean, there were claw marks and blood everywhere. She was surprised to learn after arriving at the school that the bus driver had survived. He was in critical condition, he probably wouldn't survive the night, but he had at least survived the attack itself.
She was there when the police department found him in the woods behind the school, there to watch as they pulled him out of the woods on a stretcher. He was screaming. Behind her, in the school, she could hear students screaming too and she turned to see students pressing their faces against the classroom windows, staring wide-eyed as the driver was loaded onto the ambulance. Stiles and Scott among them.

She caught her brother's eye and he reached into his pocket, deliberately pulling his phone out of his pocket and waving it in her direction. Then he looked down, his fingers moving quickly over the screen. A minute later her own phone buzzed in her pocket, a text message.

[January 13, 2011 11:15 AM]
Mischief: Lunch is in 30 minutes.

[January 13, 2011 11:16 AM]
Mischief: Meet us outside the cafeteria in an hour?

[January 13, 2011 11:16 AM]
Mischief: We need to talk.

Darcy glanced back up at the window and saw Stiles still staring at her, waiting for an answer. She held her own phone up to let him know that she had gotten his texts and she nodded. She'd be there.

Now, she just had an hour to figure out how she could get into the school without looking like a total creeper.

…..

It turned out that it wasn't that hard to get into the school. The ladies who worked in the front office had been working there for decades, they remembered Darcy's face and seemed genuinely happy to see her when she walked in. Darcy had smiled and made small talk, answered questions about college and her brief time in New York before she had returned to Beacon Hills to help her father with Stiles.

Her brother turned out to be the gateway into the school. One of the women had smiled at the mention of her brother, "I assume that he is why you're here," she guessed.

"What?" Darcy asked, then she nodded, forcing a smile onto her lips, "Oh right, yeah, he forgot something that he needs for class -" she shifted, turning so that she could dig through her bag, looking for anything that she could pull out of it that Stiles might need for school. He definitely didn't need her eye liner, her mace, or her chapstick. She bit her lip and kept digging.

The older woman mistook Darcy's frenzied digging and assumed that Darcy meant to leave whatever Stiles needed with them at the front desk.

She waved her hand gently, "Don't worry about it, honey," she told her, her voice gentle. "He's at lunch right now so he'll be in the cafeteria, you know where that is. Just go give it to him yourself, alright?"

Darcy glanced up at the woman and nodded, "Do I need to sign in or anything?" she asked. "Get a guest pass?"

The woman shook her head, waving her hand again, "Nah, we know you sweetheart. Besides, if you're up to no good, we know where to find you."

"Alright," Darcy said slowly, waving once more to the receptionists before she turned and left the office. She'd been given a green light and the last thing she wanted to do was overstay her welcome and have one of them ask her what she needed to give Stiles.

The school hadn't changed much since she had been a student there and she was able to move through the hallways with relative ease. She was about to climb the stairs up to the second floor when she heard her brother and Scott coming down them. In typical teenage boy fashion they were having what she assumed was supposed to be a private conversation … at broadcast noise levels.

"You're a terrible bowler!" she heard Stiles yell.

"I know!" Scott agreed, a moment later she saw them walking down the stairs and she moved toward them. "God, I'm such an idiot!"

"I have to agree," Darcy cut in, coming up behind them.

"Darcy?" Scott asked, surprised, turning slightly to catch sight of her. He smiled down at her and Darcy bit back the jealousy that a sixteen year old was taller than her. "Hey! I didn't recognize you, I thought you were some nosey freshmen." He threw his arm over her shoulders and tugged her into his side to keep her from getting run over by another student.

"Hey Scott!" Darcy greeted him. Her own arm slipped around him to give him a gentle side hug before she stepped away from him. "Why are you an idiot?"

"She might not be a freshman, but she's definitely nosey," Stiles told Scott as he wrapped his own arm around her and began to lead them down the hallway. He tilted his head down so that he could whisper to her, "Scott was supposed to go on a date with this new girl Allison, but over lunch tragedy struck. It became a hang out and they're going bowling. And Jackson's going to be there."

"A hang out?" Darcy echoed, as if it were the biggest tragedy she'd ever heard of. "Bowling?" she shook her head, "Scott, you haven't been bowling since I took you guys when you were eight." She jabbed Stiles in the ribs with her index finger, "I'm still mad about that by the way. It was supposed to be a date and then you cried until Dad made me agree to take you guys too."

"Good times," Stiles said with a wide grin and a nod. "We did you a favor. You were too good for Mikey Berry."

Darcy decided to ignore that.

"Is that why I'm here?" she asked, glancing between the two high schoolers. "Because you want my advice about what Scott should do to get out of this hang out?" She glanced at her brother's friend, "Because I'm sorry kid, but there's no way to fix that. Hang outs are the kiss of death when it comes to dating."

"That's what I'm saying!" Stiles announced loudly. "You might as well be her gay best friend. He and Danny should just hang out and go bowling together."

Scott sighed, "This is all so confusing," he announced, his face scrunched up in desperation. "First there's the thing with the bus driver. And then I asked Allison out and instead we're hanging out. And -"

"Wait!" Darcy interrupted, stepping out from under Stiles' arm so that she could dart forward. She turned, walking backwards so that she could face the two teenagers. "What thing with the bus driver?" She glanced between the two of them. "Is that why I'm here? Do you know something?"

The two boys looked at each other. "Are you writing about the attack?" Stiles asked.

Darcy shook her head, "No?" she asked. She sighed and nodded, "Yes?"

Scott's brows furrowed even more in confusion as he mimicked her answers, first shaking his head and then nodded. "Which is it?" he asked.

"Indirectly?" Darcy answered, her voice tilting up at the end, making her answer a question itself. "There's someone covering the actual attack. I'm investigating what happened to Laura Hale, but will probably also be covering this attack. They look very different, but both are being attributed to animals, you know?"

The boys glanced at each other, silently communicating. "You're still writing the Laura Hale story?" Stiles asked slowly after a long silence.

Darcy nodded, "Yeah I went to the Hale House yesterday morning -"

"I told you not to go there, Darcy!" Stiles told her. Scott reached out, his hand wrapped gently around her elbow and he tugged her gently, silently moving her out of the way so that she didn't run into another student.

"Hey!" Darcy snapped, gently slapping Scott's hand away as she turned to look at her younger brother. "Let's get one thing straight here. I'm the adult here. You don't tell me anything. I'll go wherever I want."

"He's right," Scott spoke up. "You shouldn't go there though. Derek Hale is -" he cut himself off, glancing toward Stiles, his eyebrows raised. Stiles glanced back with wide eyes and shook his head. "He's not what you think he is," Scott finished lamely. "And you should stay away from him."

"What do you mean he's not what I think he is?" Darcy asked, her gaze moving between the two boys.

"He's just not," Stiles told her. The bell rang and Darcy thought she heard him whisper Saved by the bell, under his breath. "Look, Dee, I can't tell you what to do, but you should stop writing this story and you should definitely stop going anywhere near Derek Hale. Especially at night. Especially when the moon is full. That's when the bloodlust is -"

Scott grabbed his arm and yanked him back, clapping his free hand over Stiles' mouth. "He's kidding!" the kid yelled as he started to pull her brother away from her. "We've got to go to class. You should go do … whatever it is you do. But stay away from the woods. And also the bus. And the woods. Okay bye!"

Darcy watched them as they both turned and practically ran down the hall. What the hell had just happened?

…..

Stop going anywhere near Derek Hale. Especially at night. Especially when the moon is full.

Her brother's panicked words played on repeat in Darcy's head as she drove the next evening. She hadn't seen him since their bizarre conversation the day before. He had come home from school late and made a beeline for his bedroom, locked the door and refused to leave. He had left the house that morning before she had gotten out of bed.

Stiles acting strange wasn't exactly … strange. But there had been something about his panic at the thought of Darcy still working on the story that stuck with her. He was so worried about her being anywhere near Derek Hale, so worried. It didn't make any sense to her.

That afternoon she had driven out to the lab in San Francisco. She hadn't gotten much out of her meeting with the lab tech. The bite marks on Laura Hale's body were similar to a wolf, pair that with the hairs left behind and the tech was convinced that despite being cut in half she had died of mostly normal circumstances. As far as he was convinced, unless Derek Hale had a trained wolf that killed people at his command there was no way he could be held responsible for his sister's death.

As she drove now, it occurred to Darcy that Derek Hale having a trained, killer wolf was perhaps not the strangest theory she could think of regarding what had happened to his sister.

Which brought her back to the strange things Stiles had said yesterday at the school.

Stop going anywhere near Derek Hale. Especially at night. Especially when the moon is full.

Darcy's brows furrowed as she glanced through the windshield up at the moon in the darkening sky. Her appointment with the lab tech had ended at 5:30. San Francisco was about two and a half hours from Beacon Hills and she was a little more than halfway home.

It was already dark.

The moon was rising.

It wasn't full, the full moon had been a week ago. It was actually getting smaller, at least for now, but it would be full again in another three weeks.

Especially when the moon is full. That's when the bloodlust is -

"What bloodlust?" she thought to herself, shaking her head. "And what the fuck does it have to do with the full moon?"

Something outside her window caught her attention and her gaze shifted to the left. She hadn't taken the highway home, it would have taken her three hours to get out of the San Francisco suburbs if she had. Instead she had stuck to backroads. Now, she was skirting the far end of the preserve and there was something running alongside her car, just beyond the tree line.

She couldn't really see it, not in the dark, but she could sense it. A tingle at the back of her neck as if she was being watched, a flash of glowing red in the trees.

The road was completely empty in front of her. Keeping one eye on the trees on the side of the road and one eye on the road, Darcy leaned over slightly, digging her phone out of her bag and quickly calling her brother.

"Darcy?" Stiles picked up on the first ring. "Where are you? Dad said he thought you'd be back by now."

He sounded worried.

Darcy forced a laugh and shook her head, "I'm on my way home," she promised him. "San Francisco took a little longer than I thought it would. I'm about an hour away, but -"

She stopped talking. There was that flash of red again.

"But what?" Stiles asked. He still sounded worried.

"I was thinking about the conversation with you and Scott yesterday?"

"About how lame it is that he's hanging out with a girl he wants to date? And that they're going bowling with a kid that hates him?"

She knew her brother, probably better than either of them would ever want to admit. He was making a joke to try to distract her.

"No," she told him. "About the other part? The part where you told me to stay away from Derek Hale. And where Scott told me to stay out of the woods? Normally I would just chalk it up to you two being weird teenage boys and just forget about it. But I ran into Derek the other day when I went to the Hale House and -"

"You saw him?" Stiles cut in, interrupting her before she could finish. "You didn't tell me that you saw him. What did he do to you? Did he say anything? About Scott?"

"He didn't do anything to me," Darcy told him. "He didn't really say a whole lot either. And why would he say anything about Scott?"

He hesitated, "No reason." A long pause, and then, "So you saw him at the house and what? Stared at each other until one of you left?"

Honestly that was probably one of the better descriptions of what had happened at the Hale House the day before. Not that she was going to tell him that. "He told me that I needed to stay away from the preserve as well," she admitted. "And that I should pass the story off to a different reporter."

"Well, good," Stiles told her, though he sounded a bit irritated. "Maybe you'll listen to him."

"Why is everyone so concerned about the woods?" Darcy asked.

There was another flash of glowing red outside her window. Two dots, evenly spaced. Like eyes. A shiver ran down her spine.

"Listen, Dee," Stiles told her with a sigh. "There's just things out in the woods. That could be dangerous. No one wants you to get hurt."

"Things connected to Derek Hale?" Darcy asked.

More hesitation, "Maybe?"

"Things with -" she couldn't believe she was going to say this, the dark and Stiles' panic from the day before were playing with her head. "Red eyes?"

"Red eyes?" Stiles echoed. She wasn't imagining the panic in his voice now. "Have you seen something with red eyes in the woods? Darcy?"

"I think I'm seeing it right now."

A whispered curse and a bang came across the line, as if Stiles had accidentally tripped over something in his room or knocked something over. The familiarity of it made Darcy smile, it slowed her rapid heartbeat, quieted some of her fear. She was just being paranoid, the dark and Stiles' weird statements yesterday had just been playing with her mind. She was imagining this, the red lights had to be some sort of reflection on her windows.

There was a completely innocent and normal explanation for it.

There had to be.

"Where are you?"

"Driving, Stiles. I told you that."

"No. Where are you?"

"About an hour south of Beacon Hills," Darcy told him with a sigh. "On the 162."

"So the preserve's on your left?"

"Yeah."

"Whatever you do, do not stop driving. Alright?" Stiles asked her, he still sounded panicked. "No matter what you see or hear."

"What I see or hear?" Darcy echoed, shaking her head. "Stiles, you're starting to worry me here. What's going - Fuck!"

"Fuck?" Stiles repeated. "What fuck? Why fuck? What's happening?"

"I don't know," Darcy told him. Her car, which had been coasting down the road at a smooth sixty miles an hour had made a strange sound and slowly coasted to a stop, she at least had the foresight to steer it toward the side of the road. "My car stopped."

"Stopped? What do you mean stopped? What happened?" He was yelling now.

"I don't fucking know, Stiles!" Darcy yelled back. "I'm not the car guy, here! I was driving and now I'm not! The car just … shut off."

She was starting to panic. She knew that he could hear it in her voice. He took a deep breath. "Shut off as in stalled? Or shut off as in everything turned off, battery's dead? Can you start the car again?"

"Shut off as in everything turned off," Darcy answered, taking a deep breath of her own. "The dashboard lights are off," she reached up, trying to turn on the ceiling light, "the safety lights won't turn on." She put her foot on the brake and turned the key, trying to start the car again, for two seconds she held her breath, hopeful, and then she sighed, dropping back in her seat, "No, I can't start the car again."

He was better now, trying to be more relaxed so that she wouldn't panic. "Alright," he told her, repeating the word a few times to himself. "It's fine. You sit tight, stay in the car. Do not get out. I'm coming to get you. I'll be there in -"

"An hour," Darcy interrupted in a deadpan.

She caught sight of lights behind her in her rearview mirror. No longer small, glowing red ones, but headlights. She breathed a sigh of relief when their emergency flashers turned on and they slowed down behind her.

"Fifty minutes," Stiles contradicted. "Closer to thirty if I break all traffic laws known to both God and man."

"Someone just pulled up behind me," Darcy told him. "They're getting out, looks like they're going to help. I'll hitch a ride with them."

"Are you an idiot?" Stiles yelled at her. "Darcy! Do not -"

She hung up on him before he could continue yelling at her and climbed out of her car, holding a hand up above her eyes to try to shield them from the car's headlights as she smiled at her would-be knight-in-shining-armor.

"You have got to be fucking kidding me," she whispered when she recognized them.

Dressed in, what she assumed was his regular outfit - a tight t-shirt, leather jacket, and jeans, Derek Hale did not look surprised to see her. Though Darcy wondered if he would have let it show if he was surprised. His gaze darted quickly toward the tree line, "What happened?" he asked, nodding toward her car as he shoved his hands in his jacket pockets. "Are you alright?"

His gaze drifted back to the trees and then back to her face. A circuit it would repeat a few times before the end of the conversation.

"I'm not sure," Darcy told him, answering his first question. "Everything was fine and then the car just shut off." She took a breath, realizing that her description was not the most helpful. So she added, "Engine stopped, dashboard lights turned off, radio is dead, safety lights won't turn on. I tried to start it again and nothing happened. I'd say it was the battery, but I changed it last month."

Actually Stiles had changed it. Darcy knew nothing about cars.

Except how to drive them. She had the speeding tickets to prove that.

Derek did not seem surprised as he nodded, his gaze moving from her car to the tree line again. "Could be the alternator," he told her, as if that was a diagnosis she should have come up with on her own. "Has the battery warning light come on recently?"

"Not since I changed the battery," Darcy told him.

He nodded and pulled one of his hands out of his jacket. "May I?" he asked, extending his hand out, palm up toward Darcy.

Darcy stared at his hand for a moment, unsure of what he was asking for. His palm was still facing up, extended toward her, as if he was waiting for something. Slowly, she reached her own hand out and gave him a quick, gentle low five, her eyebrows raised in confusion.

His lips twitched, "Your keys," he told her slowly. "So that I can look under the hood?"

"Right," Darcy agreed with a quick nod. That made a lot more sense. She pulled her keys out of her back pocket and dropped them in his hand. She was quiet as she watched him move toward the car, unlocking the doors so that he could lean in the driver's side to pop the hood. "I don't suppose we could agree to forget about that awkward high five?" Darcy asked him as she followed him around to the front of the car.

He smirked, turning to glance up at her for a moment before he turned back to her engine. "Unlikely," he told her as he fished his own phone out of his pocket, turning on the flashlight so that he could actually see the engine. Darcy moved around the car so that she was standing next to him, not close enough to touch him, but close enough to feel the heat radiating off of him. The man was warm, as if he had a space heater hidden under his jacket.

It didn't take him long to find whatever he was looking for. "There it is," he told her, nodding at some indistinguishable part of her engine.

"Of course," Darcy agreed, nodding as if she understood what she was looking for. "There it is."

She thought she heard him chuckle, "Your alternator's been damaged," he told her. He was quiet for a moment, his brows furrowed, his jaw clenched.

"What?" she asked.

He shook his head, "Nothing," he told her. He was lying, she could tell. He shut the hood and handed her back her keys, "It's gonna need some work," he told her. "Nothing you can do about it tonight. Grab your bag, I'll give you a ride back to Beacon Hills."

"Are you sure?" Darcy asked, already moving toward the passenger seat to grab her purse. She didn't want to cause him any trouble, but the last thing she wanted to do was sit on the side of the road for the next hour waiting for Stiles. "I don't want -"

"I was headed that way anyway," he told her with one final glance toward the trees. "Hop in."

Darcy nodded, pausing just long enough to send a quick text to Stiles to let him know that she didn't need him to pick her up.

[January 14, 2011 6:59 PM]
Doodles: Don't worry about the ride. Derek Hale's bringing me home.

And then, because she knew that he would blow up her phone. She switched it to silent and threw it to the bottom of her bag as she climbed in the passenger seat of Derek's camaro and shut the door behind her.

Author's Note:

So this came much later than I expected! I meant to upload this on Sunday, but my laptop started doing this super fun thing where it shuts off every three minutes. I have no idea if I can fix it.
(Serves me right to buy a cheap one.)
Yesterday I was finally able to transfer everything from the laptop onto a USB (good thing too considering that I already had fourteen chapters of this story typed up on the old computer) and I am now posting this from the Macbook I bought in 2008. That still works, even thought it has to be plugged in. If I unplug the charger it just automatically shuts down.
BUT it will work until my new computer gets here.
Not a whole lot happened in this chapter, but there were some funny moments (at least I hope that you found them as funny as I did while writing them) and it's gearing up for something REALLY GREAT in the next chapter and the one after that.
Does anyone remember where we are right now? Any guesses?
Anyway, thank you to those of you that reviewed the last chapter! Reviews are like air for me! So yeah, keep that shit up!
I hope that everyone enjoyed this chapter, if you did why don't you make my day and slip into that review box to let me know?
To the Guest who's really excited that the OC isn't a minor: SAME. That's kind of why I started writing this. My stories on this site tend to be me, trying to provide something that I've been looking for and could not find. And most of the Derek/OCs the OC is a minor. Which is ... gross. Also a little insulting to Derek Hale. And also gross.
And so ... here she is ... a fully grown adult. Because that's what he deserves!

Anyway, that's it.
Thanks for stopping by guys!
Until next time,

Chloe Jane