Sorry for the delay, guys! The last week has been nothing short of hellish. Still have a very sick dog. :( But I digress. Wrote this while listening to "Moonlight Shadow" by Groove Coverage, check it out, it's great.

Another thank you to my beta, Twilight684. This wouldn't be possible without her!

Disclaimer: I do not own Teen Wolf and am making no profit from this writing.

Chapter 2: Shadows on the Walls

"You wanna explain to me why Cora Hale is here?" Danny demanded after dragging Stiles into the bathroom (which, okay, did he think he was being subtle?).

"Do you guys not get along?" he decided to play dumb so that maybe his friend-slash-tech consultant, even though he had never formally agreed to that title, would drop it.

Danny scowled, "Stiles."

Dammit. He swallowed, his mind racing as he tried to come up with something to say that wouldn't make the other man storm out without giving him a chance to explain.

"Okay, look, I know what you're thinking, but just hear her out. We don't have a whole lot –" he winced when he saw Danny's disbelieving look, "Okay, we have, like, a phone call, but there is evidence of foul play!"

He still looked skeptical. Stiles took a deep breath, "You owe him. For Ethan."

Danny froze, his eyes widening at that. Stiles knew he was remembering the nearly two weeks Ethan had been missing, still in hiding even after his twin brother Aiden had been found three hours from Beacon Hills and taken to an intensive care unit. Lydia had eventually tracked Ethan to a small town in Washington, but it had been Derek who had actually found him and brought him home, both of them looking rather worse for wear (Derek had looked like he had a run-in with a monster truck, and Stiles had told him so).

They never talked about it – about why Aiden had been brutally beaten, or why Ethan was so frightened that he left his brother behind and ran to another state. Stiles had asked Derek about it a few times, but he had only ever shaken his head and claimed that it was Ethan's story to tell. He had always looked so tired when it came up; Stiles hadn't had the heart to press him beyond that. He had always assumed Danny knew more, but now, seeing the tension in his friend's jaw, he had to question his reasoning. For the first time, it occurred to Stiles that maybe Ethan had been as secretive as Derek had about what had happened that night.

"Fine," Danny snapped, "I'll do it because he saved Ethan, but after this, I'm done. You can't hold it over me the whole time you're working on this. He's still a jackass."

Stiles grinned, "That's all I'm asking, buddy. Just a few hours of your time, then you're free to go, no strings attached."

He thought he heard the other man mutter something like "there's always strings attached with you" as he left the bathroom, but he couldn't be sure.

They reentered Stiles' office, where Cora sat looking at a small picture frame. She set it back on the desk, looking embarrassed, when she heard them come in. Stiles felt his face go hot. Even without looking at the picture he recognized that frame. It was of him and Derek at Laura's birthday party. It had been taken only a few weeks before she died. Stiles could never quite bring himself to get rid of it, even after they broke up. It was a time when they were happy, and Derek had been mid-laugh when Scott snapped the photo. It was Derek in those moments when he forgot about the fire, before his sister's death destroyed and consumed him. It was the Derek he fell in love with, the Derek he still dreamed about sometimes.

He was distracted from his reverie by Danny opening his briefcase and pulling out…he didn't know what it all was, but he recognized some of it from previous cases with Danny and it all looked incredibly complicated. Danny set up his laptop and plugged in Cora's phone.

A minute later, Derek's voice was coming through the tinny speakers, "Cora, fuck, Cora…"

Danny paused the recorded message, rewinding and playing it again. "You hear that?" he asked.

Stiles raised an eyebrow. Cora just stared at him blankly.

He hit a few keys, adjusting something, before playing it again.

"Cora – zzzzttt – fuck, Cora."

"It sounds like bees," she said softly, her brow furrowed with confusion and, Stiles thought, concern.

"Electricity," Danny replied, nodding, before he resumed the recording.

"…it's the fire. Laura got too close, that's why –"

"Aw, sweetie. I really don't want to hurt you."

"Can you make out what he's saying?" Stiles asked, straining to understand the words among the scuffle that seemed to be taking place, but still unable to catch more than a hiss.

Danny adjusted something else.

"Zzztt – Kate – zzztt!"

"Why does it sound like a bug zapper?" Cora was quiet, her voice betraying only the slightest hint of alarm.

There was a mangled cry, and Stiles was struck with the horrible, painful realization as to just what he was listening to, "Oh God. She's…"

The others were silent, everyone's attention on the sounds coming through the speakers. Harsh pants were audible before he yelled again. Then there was a crackling sound and the line went dead.

"She's torturing him," Stiles whispered, fervently wishing for someone to correct him, even as his stomach lurched and he knew in his gut that he was right. Danny set his jaw, like he didn't know how to respond to that, but he didn't deny it. Stiles was so caught up in his own horror that he didn't notice Cora standing up until he heard the door slam behind her.

"She'll come back," he muttered a minute later when Danny looked like he was considering going after her. "She's just…"

"Yeah. I get it."

Stiles ran a hand through his hair, a nervous habit he only resorted to when he felt a panic attack brewing. "Okay, so Derek is being tortured by some crazy bitch. That's what we're saying, right?"

Danny nodded slowly, looking at him like he expected him to implode at any moment, "That's what we're saying, Stiles."

"Fucking hell," he threw his pen at the wall. He picked up his phone only to slam it back into the cradle. He clenched his fists hard enough that his nails left pink indents in his skin. None of it made him feel any better. Derek was being tortured and there was nothing he could do about it. He hunched over and covered his face with his hands, feeling the breaths start to come in faster and shorter.

"Stiles? Stiles, you need to calm down. Stiles – fuck. Lydia!" Danny was yelling, but he sounded far away, like he was at the other end of a tunnel. Stiles could hardly hear him over the voices in his head – Derek laughing, Derek whispering in his ear, Derek crying over his sister's dead body, Derek screaming. He had only ever heard Derek cry out in his nightmares, but he could hear him now, screaming and sobbing, "stop it, just stop, please, make it stop." Derek alone and scared while some psychopath tortured him, and God, what was she doing to him? Was she electrocuting him? Was she burning him? Derek couldn't take that, not with his PTSD, it would break him. Stiles had to find him, he had to protect him, he had to…

Lydia slapped him. He blinked, slowly coming up out of the haze.

"Stiles," Lydia was saying, "listen to me. Derek is alive, and you're going to find him because that's what you do, okay? You find people."

He took a few deep, shuddering breaths before nodding. Right. He had to stay calm if he was going to find Derek, and he was going to find him. Find him and fucking strangle him for making him worry like this.

"Danny, can you get anything from the call? A number, a location, anything?" he asked, focusing on what he could do right now for Derek. He couldn't fight Kate, but he could do this.

"Sorry, it's blocked. If he calls back I might be able to trace it," Danny replied, and he did genuinely sound apologetic.

They all turned around as Cora reentered the room, looking perfectly calm, as if she hadn't just heard that her only brother was being held captive and tortured.

"What do we do now?" she asked, stoic as ever. It had always baffled Stiles how she could turn her emotions off at the drop of the hat. The day Cora broke down would be the day pigs flew and the sky turned pink.

"If what Danny just told me is true," Lydia answered, "we call the police and let them take it from here."

"I already went to the police!" Cora snarled viciously. "I told you they said there wasn't enough evidence!"

"There's not enough evidence for us either," she insisted. "Enough to prove he's in trouble, not enough to tell us how to find him. He's been missing over a month. For all we know, he could be on the other side of the country by now."

"Which is exactly why we need to find him now!" the brunette argued. "She's had him so long – who knows what she's done to him! She could be taking him out of the country tomorrow!"

"Okay!" Stiles shouted. "Guys, stop, you're not helping."

They all turned to stare at him. Danny raised an eyebrow as if to say did you really want to piss them off? He ignored him.

"Cora, go home. Keep your phone on in case he tries to call again. Lydia, you can go home, I'll cover for tonight. Danny, can you email me that audio?"

His friend nodded, fingers already tapping away on his laptop.

"You don't want me to stay and go over the case with you?" Cora protested.

Stiles shook his head, trying not to seem exasperated.

Lydia didn't say anything, just looked at him with concern as he explained.

"I need some time to look over everything. I'll call you tomorrow if I have any questions."

She frowned but finally nodded, accepting her phone back from Danny and leaving without another word. Stiles could tell she was annoyed, but he didn't have the energy to soothe her ego tonight.

Danny packed his things up and left, tossing a quick "let me know if you need anything" over his shoulder.

He felt a little lighter knowing Danny must have been willing to forgive Derek at least enough to help with this. Then he turned back to Lydia. "What?" he asked a little defensively.

She shook her head slightly, "Nothing. Just, are you sure you're okay alone? I can stay."

He smiled at her. She always knew when he was upset, more so even than Scott. But he shooed her nonetheless, "I'll be fine. Go watch The Notebook with Jackson, or whatever it is you guys do."

She grinned widely and leaned forward to place a chaste kiss on his cheek before darting out of the room. He heard an "oomph" and a giggle in the other office, and knew she must have tackled her boyfriend. He tried to staunch the part of him that whispered vindictively, how long was Derek being tortured while you pretended everything was okay?

Because he knew, rationally, that Lydia didn't know. If she had known she wouldn't have kept it secret like she had. He knew, he knew she was only trying to protect him, but there was a part of him that still ached for Derek, that still felt viciously protective of him, and that part of him was furious that she had sacrificed Derek's safety for his feelings, however unknowingly it may have been.

Stiles spent the night searching for answers. He dug through Lydia's folders and pulled out the old file on the Hale fire. The photographs were grainy, some of them yellowed with age before she was able to retrieve them, but they painted a stark picture. Unfortunately it was one he already knew.

Still, Derek had mentioned the fire when he called Cora. He had seemed certain that Laura's death was somehow connected to the fire, and it was pretty clear to Stiles that he had been taken because of his relation to her – it was unclear whether it was because he was looking into her death or because he was looking into the fire, but there was a link there, Stiles was sure of it. And he was equally sure that he was going to find it, because if he wanted to catch a murderer, if he wanted to catch this Kate, he first had to understand her. He had to get into her mind, as much as he could.

He spread out the photographs from the fire on his desk and, in a row below them, the photographs from Laura's murder. It still hurt to look at her, to see Derek's beautiful sister, who had once been so vibrant and full of life, left in pieces for the carrion to feast on. It hurt, and he felt sick looking at her splayed out the way she was, but he knew she would have wanted him to find her brother, no matter what the cost. Just before she was killed, Laura and Derek had had a vicious fight, but Stiles had never doubted that the Hale siblings adored each other, even when they were at each other's throats. Laura had loved her remaining siblings, was so protective of Derek that he knew she had to be rolling in her grave right then.

It struck him as he was looking at the photographs that he didn't recognize the tattoo on her left wrist. The one on her lower back, peeking through the torn shirt, he recognized – it was the same one Derek had between his shoulder blades, the triskele. This tattoo, though, he had never seen before. It was another symbol, a red spiral. He thought back to Laura's birthday – Derek had been twirling her around, showing off (because of course he knew how to tango). It was one of the last times Stiles had seen Laura alive, and it was hard to forget that night. He could still remember her vividly, her wide smile and sparkling blue eyes, and he was sure her wrists had been bare. It was possible she had gotten it just before her death, but Laura was the type to show something like that off, so it seemed strange that she wouldn't have mentioned it.

Stiles' eyes slowly traveled down the desk, looking over each photograph. The morgue. The ink on her wrist was smudged, the spiral barely identifiable. The color had changed to a dark red that was almost brown. It didn't look like any tattoo he had ever seen. The way it was smeared…

He froze.

Suddenly the pieces fit. The spiral didn't look like a tattoo because it wasn't one. It was smeared the way it was, dried the way it was, because it wasn't ink. The spiral had been drawn in blood. He swallowed. Stiles was the only son of the sheriff; he knew what a mark like that meant. It was a calling card.

One is an incident.

He turned his eyes to the photographs from the second crime scene, where Derek had found the lower half of Laura's body, her silver charm bracelet gleaming brightly on her ankle. There were no spirals on her body that he could see there, but there was something strange about the way the body had been laid out. She hadn't been tossed there; she had been arranged, almost artfully.

Stiles picked up the picture and held it to the light, turning it this way and that.

There it was. When he turned the photograph upside down, the splay of her legs made the innermost swirl of the spiral, nearly identical to the one on her wrist. It was crooked and uneven, allowing for the fact that the human body could never bend in such a manner, but the intended effect was obvious. The spiral continued from one leg and spread around her in a trail of burned grass, not unlike a crop circle.

It had been disturbed (by Derek falling to his knees before his sister's corpse), and maybe that was why the police hadn't noticed it, but Stiles knew what to look for, and that made all the difference. He took a red pen from his desk and traced the pattern so that he wouldn't forget it later.

Two is a coincidence.

He moved to the fire. Those photographs were perhaps the most difficult to look at as he could make out some of the shapes burned onto the walls – shapes that were once human, once living, once people, people who were Derek's family! And he felt a familiar spark of fury at the thought that those black smudges on the wall had once been Derek's mother, his father, his aunts and cousins and brothers. Eighteen people had died that day, and there had been barely anything but bones and jewelry to bury. He could make out Laura's locket, now Cora's, on an unidentifiable husk that he knew must have once been Tahlia Hale. There were cufflinks and belt buckles, signs that their owners had been going about their daily lives only hours before the photographs had been taken.

Carved onto the outside of the door was a spiral.

Three is a pattern.

"Fuck," he whispered.

He scrambled for the folder with the photographs from Derek's apartment. He laid them all out on the floor (he was running out of space on his desk). There was nothing on the front door, nothing on the back, and nothing on the bedroom door either. As far as he could tell there were no signs of anything abnormal, apart from the rotting fruit and dirty dishes Cora had mentioned in the kitchen. If Kate or her associates (he wasn't ruling out that she had had help to kill that many people) had left their calling card, it wasn't in any of the pictures Cora had given them.

It made sense, though, he thought. Everything indicated Derek had left the apartment willingly. He had left his car, so Kate had probably picked him up at the apartment or nearby. Likely she hadn't had a chance to leave her calling card without invoking suspicion. Besides that, her previous victims – at least the ones Stiles knew about – were dead. It was possible she only left the spiral after she had killed.

It was painfully clear, however, that the spiral on the door of the old Hale house had been carved before they had been murdered. The door had been charred, the edges of the spiral burned away slightly, indicating it had been left either before the fire started, or soon after. Certainly, it had been completed before the fire reached the door.

The positioning of the spiral in each scene, though, it was strange. The first spiral was on the door, obvious to anyone who was looking for it. The second was on Laura's wrist, hidden slightly but still visible. The third was more subtle, enough that it would be nearly undetectable unless the observer knew what to look for.

He remembered the way Derek had collapsed – he had been a few feet away from his sister's corpse, and now Stiles realized he had stayed at the edge of the spiral. He hadn't touched Laura's body. At the time, Stiles thought he had simply recoiled from the gruesome sight, but now he wondered if it was more than that. He hadn't gone past the outer whirl of the spiral. On some level, he must have known.

Stiles was almost inclined to think it was some sort of warning sign, like the drug cartels that left bodies in strategic places to warn others out of their territory. There had never been any doubt in his mind that Laura's lower half was left where it was so that Derek would be the one to find her. She had been left near the old Hale house. Her killer had to have known that he and Cora would be the only ones likely to come upon the body; the Hale land was private property. Anyone else would be trespassing. If they had been trying to hide her they would have taken the bracelet from her ankle, they would not have left the upper half of her body at the edge of the preserve for passing cars to see. It had been a ploy to draw Derek in – leave his sister in pieces, make him go looking for the other half, so they could be absolutely sure he got the message.

At the time, Stiles hadn't realized the extent of the situation. Who could blame him? The Hale fire had been ruled accidental. From what little he pried out of Derek, he had discerned that Laura was poking around something, specifically a few days before she was murdered. Derek had said she should keep her head down and leave well enough alone. The older man had been freaked out, furious and terrified at the same time. Now, Stiles realized he must have known she was investigating the fire.

Stiles' first instinct was to call his father and ask him to reopen the case of the Hale fire, but he was afraid of what Kate might do to Derek if word got out. Besides that, his dad would want proof. The case was nearly a decade old; he would need more than a spiral on the door to reopen it. There had to be new evidence that pointed to arson.

He had to see the crime scene for himself. He had been to the preserve before, but never to the old Hale house. Trespassing laws had never really bothered Stiles, not if something interested him enough, but going to see the place where Derek's family had died just seemed wrong, and not in a good way. It would be violating his trust.

It still didn't sit right with him, and he knew Derek would be furious if he ever found out, but he knew it was necessary this time. The ends justified the means, he reasoned. It was more important that he find Derek – alive – than it was that he respect his privacy. He would bring Cora with him, see what she remembered from the fire. If nothing else, she could tell him if the spiral meant anything to her.

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