October 5, 1931

Peter glances up just in time to catch the giggling weight of his daughter, managing a tired smile as she nuzzles her smooth cheek against his neck. He hasn't seen Malia in two days, and it must seem an eternity to the child. Corrine is standing a few feet away, the picture of cold elegance as she studies the sharp points of her nails.

"Mama took me to the park," Malia crows, cheeks flushed with color. "We saw the leaves changing colors an' duckies!"

"You did?" He tries to put excitement in his voice, doing his best to make her think how she spent her afternoon is the most important thing in Peter's world. At best, it's maybe tenth on a short list of things that he cares about. Malia is too young to notice the insincerity of his words, continuing to babble away and waving her hands in exaggerated motions.

"And then I threw a rock at an old lady!" Peter looks to his wife again with arched brows and she shrugs a shoulder in response.

"She was being rude," Corrine says by way of explanation. "She's lucky all Malia did was throw a rock at her." Malia turns her big brown eyes back to Peter, expression as solemn as a three year old can manage.

"Mama says biting is a last resort."

"Well, maybe not last…." Peter gives her a sharp look and she rolls her eyes with her entire body. "Okay, okay, but biting is definitely a good way of showing people that you don't care for their opinions."

"Your mama is a crazy woman," he tells Malia, and his smile is genuine when she giggles this time. "Now, why don't you go to my office and play for a bit and then I'll take you home." Malia pokes her lip out in a pout as he sets her down, but there's no fit as she starts off down the hall.

"Is it safe letting her roam like that?" Corrine comes to stand next to him, watching their daughter skip away.

"The patients are locked in their rooms for the night. Let the girl have some fun gawking at them." She scoffs, shaking her head in disbelief. "Relax, Cory, she's a Hale. We're bred to survive." He presses her against one of the walls, mouthing at her neck and letting smug satisfaction roll through him when he feels her go malleable beneath his palms.

"Your family is bred for trouble, Hale." Her voice is a vibration against his lips, nails scratching lightly along the back of his shirt. "I need to get back to work."

"Marcy can handle it." He's slowly making his way down towards her collarbones, beautifully angular things that bruise so wonderfully under his teeth. Dark red blossoms against brown, roses in freshly tilled earth. He wants to devour this wild thing, consume her until there's nothing left except for the supernova beneath her skin.

"Marcy is currently home with her son. Apparently Elias has come down with this stomach bug that's been circulating through his classroom." Corrine shrugs and waves it off, no big deal for so small a child to be sick as long as the child isn't theirs. "I'm the only competent person in the basement until she returns."

"Why doesn't her husband help her?"

"Szymon is useless and you know it." And, yeah, Peter can't necessarily argue against that logic. He only hopes Elias inherits his mother's brains and common sense. Otherwise, the Stilinski line is doomed. "Now, if you'll excuse me, Doctor Hale." She pushes teasingly against his chest, not nearly as hard as she's capable of.

"Daddy," Malia shouts, and Peter's turning his head to look behind him. She's not standing in the lobby like he'd been expecting, not unless she's hiding in the guard station. "Daddy, help me! Mama!" Corrine really does use all her strength to push him away this time, sending him toppling backwards to the floor as she sprints past him.

"Malia! Where are you?" There's no immediate response and Peter's heart is beating so violently that he's surprised when it doesn't shatter his ribcage like it's made of confetti. He's up and moving in seconds, chasing his wife through the institute.

"Mama! Mama, it hurts!" Her little voice echoes, bouncing off walls and seemingly coming from every direction at once.

"Mal!"

"Baby," Peter screams, kicking open his office door and shattering the wooden frame. There's a piece of notebook paper on the floor, covered in childish scribbles with droplets of ink from Peter's pen, a single handprint against the gray carpeting. "Mal, are you in here?" He checks under his desk as Corrine hurries through the rows of offices, even going so far as to shove his filing cabinet out of the way in the off-chance Malia had wedged herself between it and the wall.

"Malia?" There's a tremendous crash down the hall and the building seems to ripple under his feet, the force of it enough to send him stumbling against the wall to stay upright. The scream that follows haunts him even after he dies six days later.

They don't find Malia.

Stiles glances up as Boyd and Erica come storming back into the bar area of the lobby, splotches of red decorating a hand towel that's pressed against Boyd's palms. Red mottles the front of his shirt as well, ripped in places to reveal abraded skin with flecks of gray caught in it. Erica is beautiful in her fury, like Hera on a quest for revenge in her bare feet and form-fitting dress.

"I take it that Derek got you with one of his little tricks." It's not phrased as a question, Stiles already having a pretty good idea. Sometimes Derek goes too far with these sorts of things, still a little boy with a morbid interest in how the body works, excited about small gushes of blood and the smell of oil as he begins working on a new ride.

"Whatever the fuck that was, it had nothing to do with your husband," Erica snaps, baring sharp white teeth. Stiles thinks of wolves and jaguars and a crushing sense of doom. "Something dragged Boyd three hundred feet hard enough for his yarn to cut his hands!" Stiles doesn't respond at first, more focused on how green the olive in his martini is. There's also another of Matt's camera's in there, bobbing around like a dead fish.

"Come here, let me see your hands," Jackson says, getting up and placing his tumbler of bourbon on a table. Boyd holds them out after a stern look from his girlfriend, a fine tremor running through them. Stiles leans forward over the bar, squinting to better make out the crisscrossing marks, overlaid in red and swelling. It looks like the bleeding has stopped at least.

"Does he need stitches? Cause I'll use Derek like a battering ram to get us out of here and to a hospital." She looks capable of doing it, too. Erica has that particular brand of ruthless loyalty that can translate to murder when necessary. Stiles likes that in a person, one of the few traits he can respect even if he doesn't feel it towards his husband. He'd kill for his dad, Lydia, and Cora, but he'd just kill Derek.

"No, no. It looks worse than it is. Maybe have it checked out when we get out of here, but it's nothing to worry about as long as we bandage it." Jackson looks over his shoulder at Stiles, raising his brows. Stiles raises his own in return, not moving from his spot behind the bar. "Jesus Christ." Jackson continues muttering under his breath as he walks through to another room, coming back with a linen table cloth that he's tearing into strips. "First aid kit is under the bar, Erica."

"On it." She strides over and hip checks Stiles out of her way, grabbing the white metal box and giving him a glare of epic proportions before going back to the others.

"Are you guys sure it wasn't Derek," Stiles asks after a moment. "I mean, his tricks can get downright nasty sometimes. Dude nearly took my head off with a guillotine when we had that French-themed Halloween party two years ago."

"And how sorry I was that you moved too soon," Derek says, coming into the room with Lahey behind him. His pristine suit is covered gray dust. "What the fuck happened to you guys? Lahey showed me the saturation chamber and you two just took off."

"What," Boyd asks. "No, you two pulled the disappearing act on us. We came back into that room and there was no sign of you. We thought you guys had gone through this little doorway, but the only footprints we saw were ours. Next thing I know, I'm being dragged through the halls like a fish on a hook."

"Yeah, ghosts like fucking with people," Lahey shrugs. "It's kind of their thing. Sometimes they'll move your stuff or confuse your perception to get you lost or drown you in a tank of blood the size of a Buick. I suggest you all avoid the last option, it's just as bad as it sounds."

"What are you even talking about, man? Ghosts?"

"Yep, and they still don't compare to the Darkness. Unleash that and we're all screwed." He moves over to one of the stools and slumps onto it like he's past exhaustion and heading straight for a full-blown panic attack, Stiles pushing the martini across the bar for the other man to drink. Lahey barely even pauses to remove the camera before downing the glass like a shot. "Keep 'em coming."

"You really didn't have anything to do with this, Derek?" Boyd holds up his bandaged hands, the crisp linen speckled with blood.

"Hand to God," Derek says, raising his right hand like some kind of Boy Scout. "I was with Lahey the entire time."

"Did you at least find the master control so we can get out of here?"

"Nope, doesn't seem to exist at all."

"That's ridiculous!"

"Blame my great-grandfather. He's the one that designed this death trap." Derek swipes a hand roughly over his arm, stringy bits of dust floating to the ground like feathers. "Looks like we're all stuck here until morning, so we might as well turn it into a group sleepover in here. I think splitting up would be a pretty bad idea."

"Kind of like when the white jock of any horror movie gets drunk and wanders into the woods," Stiles says dryly. "Unfortunately, our walking cliché has gone off on her own to investigate."

"What? Where'd Kate go?"

"She said something about Peter's missing daughter and your uncle Erik freaking out when they were teenagers." The color seems to drain right out of Derek's fast, leaving him a sick ashen color. Stiles glances away quickly, reminded for one heartbreaking moment of his mother, the ashen tone that faded to wax seconds before the heart monitor had flatlined.

"Lahey?"

"That would be upstairs in Peter's old office. The old story is that he sent her up there to play while he talked shop with his wife. They heard her start screaming that someone was hurting her and took off in a frenzy. All they found was a half-finished drawing and an inky handprint."

"How does a kid just go missing?"

"They searched this place top to bottom for six days; dragged patients out of their rooms, brutally interrogated them, and killed a few. Most people agree that the brutality of those final days is what triggered the riot. Malia Hale's body wasn't found even after this place was cleaned out."

"My uncle told me that he saw a little girl here…." Derek trails off, eyes going misty as he remembers a happy childhood. Stiles had liked Erik Hale, liked all his tattoos and his rebel-without-a-cause attitude. Derek used to act like that until he had a stick surgically implanted in his ass. "He went in on a dare and said a little girl with glowing gold eyes tried to claw his eyes out."

"Yup, sounds about right."

"Then I guess we'd better go find Kate and hope she's still got her eyeballs when we do."

Kate isn't the type to scare easy. She can count on one hand the times that real fear had curdled in her stomach and tried to squeeze the air from her lungs—the night of the Hale fire when she'd snuck back out of the house just thirty minutes before it went up, the day Victoria was murdered in cold blood right outside her home, and the day when Alli grabbed for a bear trap and Kate had yanked her away just before the thing could close around her little hand.

Her brother says she's warped, but he says it with a fond smile and a pat to her cheek. Her mother had called her a freak, said it with hate in her eyes. Her father said she was just like him, and then he'd cracked her over the head with a bottle of Wild Turkey. Everyone has an opinion and none of them actually matter. Kate knows exactly who she is and that's all that matters.

All that being said, she can feel tendrils of icy fear prickling up her spine like claws, trailing along each knob and leaving red marks in its wake. The second floor is creepy in a way that the first floor isn't, cold and clinical and barren. There are rust stains on the railing along the wall, ceiling tiles missing to reveal leaky pipes that groan on occasion, and some sort of black gunk that's been sprayed over a gray wall.

Kate keeps moving all the same, holding up her phone to capture everything. Even if she can't get back on TV with her hunting show, she could always coerce her brother into writing a horror script with her and this place gives a lot of inspiration.

She stops at a dead end, the door on her left boasting a frosted glass window with a name printed along the bottom in gold flakes. Peter Hale, Director.

"And what are you hiding in your office, Petey?" The door opens with a loud crack as the swollen wood is forced out of the jamb, white paint embedded in the side from where it had been stuck. The office on the other side is almost disappointing, just plain white walls with stained carpeting that hasn't been replaced in ages, the stale smell of it enough to make her nose scrunch up.

She brings her phone up all the same, laughing when she presses against the desk and it collapses to the ground with a cloud of soot. There's a filing cabinet tilted on its side a few feet away, the metal blackened and warped from extreme heat.

Kate sweeps her phone in an arch to capture the broken windows with their jagged glass, the metal paneling that's locking them all inside, and down to the black handprint standing out starkly against the matted gray carpeting. She kneels down to get a better look, lowering a hand to run over her new find and coming away stained with ink. It's fresh, about the size of Allison's hand.

A low, rumbling chuckle makes her stand straight up and spin around, phone up and ready to capture whoever startled her. There's no one there, just the empty doorway that leads back out into the hall.

"Hello?" She takes a couple of steps forward, arching her neck to try and see if they're hiding just beyond the busted frame. "Who's there?"

"Haven't you heard what happens to blonde girls that wander around in another person's home?" She spins and nearly trips in her haste, a faint wisp of acrid smoke hanging in the air. Still, no one is hiding over there in the empty space.

"Jesus, I'm losing my mind." A body presses flush against her left side and hot breath washes over her face, almost damp against her ear when the intruder speaks again.

"Then you've come to the right place, Miss Argent. I'm something of a specialist when it comes to treating insanity." Kate's head feels frozen in place on her neck, refusing to turn and look at the man that's close enough for her to feel a burning cold coming off of him. There's no heat in spite of the smoke. "I think I can squeeze you in."

"A wonderful idea," a woman says, teeth bared in a smile as she steps out of the shadows. She's gorgeous, dressed in the bright white uniform of a nurse with a figure that would make Marilyn Monroe jealous, red lipstick smeared over her mouth like a gash. "You're sick, dear. Not to worry, we're going to make you all better."

Fear rises up her throat like bile as a clawed hand grabs her throat, yanking her backwards into the shadows and smoke and dark things.

Kate Argent's scream makes the building ripple and the Darkness writhe.