a/n: I hate almost every single word of this. but ignore me, enjoy it. reviews validate my fragile self-esteem.

Stiles had a lie prepared for if his dad caught him sneaking back in, something about how he'd crashed at a fellow employee's after staying later than they'd anticipated, but it didn't end up being necessary. His dad was sound asleep when Stiles crept back into his house in the wee hours of the morning. Then, after a couple of hours of much needed rest, Stiles greeted him over breakfast and lied evenly when his dad asked him what time he'd gotten back home. His father seemed to accept his fib seamlessly, but Stiles didn't press his luck. No, he was pretty sure surviving the full moon night in the sanctuary miraculously unscathed had used up all his luck in that lifetime.

Seriously, he needed at least a hat or something to commemorate the event.

So, he treaded carefully the next few days, going to and coming from work as usual. He was even on his best behavior with Finstock, and gritted his teeth on his tours like a good worker boy. Stiles had never been more well-behaved in his entire working career that seemed genuinely concerned. Baffled by the sudden lack of crap from Stiles, but a happy kind of bafflement, Finstock rewarded him with gift shop duty, and Stiles spent the next two days until Lydia's day off working diligently.

He didn't even consider heading back down into the sanctuary just yet. No, he needed…time. A couple of days, he told himself, after he'd go see what there was to see at the old lot. After he had answers, he'd go back to see Derek. And Scott, Scott primarily. Definitely. Scott was his priority, totally.

Yeah.

But Scott… God, Stiles felt like shit thinking about him. As much as the self-imposed ban on seeing Scott ate at him, he knew he'd have to figure out how to put on a brave face to see his best friend again. There was no way he was letting Scott see a fearful Stiles, no way in a million years he'd do that to Scott.

So Stiles stayed away, perfected his poker face, and as he'd promised Lydia, he didn't try to make the trip to the lot himself, no matter how the sweetly siren call of curiosity sang.

What was over there? Burning with curiosity and the promise of a new lead in the case, it took every ounce of Stiles' meager willpower to resist popping over there early. But if anything, he was a man of his word. His investigation wall grew thick and cluttered with new pieces of paper, everything they had tracked down on the site, endless conjectures of what might be over there, and Stiles sat on his bed staring at it nearly every second of downtime he had. He was about to get his questions answered, and it was all he could do to make himself wait until they were.

xx

On the fourth day he called in sick, coughing dramatically into the receiver in a hopefully convincing manner. The girl on the phone didn't take much to win over, however, and let him know that he had the day. Finstock might have suspected something was up owing to his unusually tamed behavior the last few days, but Stiles would worry about his boss when he returned to work the next day. When the agreed-upon hour came, Stiles pulled on some hiking boots and loaded into his jeep. He texted Lydia to let her know he was on his way and pulled out of his driveway.

Fifteen minutes later he pulled into Lydia's and didn't bother to stop the jeep. He honked once and after a couple minutes Lydia emerged, followed, much to his immediate surprise and latter chagrin, by Allison. He yanked his keys from the ignition and jumped out of the jeep.

"What is she doing here?" he asked sharply. Lydia made a face when the pair reached him.

"She's coming with us," Lydia told him.

"Uh, no she's not," Stiles returned, arms crossing over his chest. Lydia cocked her head to the side.

"And why, pray tell, not?"

"Because she's - she's,"

"My friend, your friend, and fully aware of our situation," Lydia cut him off.

"What - you told her? Lydia, why would you tell her?" Stiles fought the urge to pull at his hair. There were a great many urges that Lydia inspired in him, and that was probably the one most often felt.

"Why wouldn't I?"

"Oh, I don't know, maybe because her parents are hunters, and possibly involved in the great big deadly cover up we're trying to uncover?" came his retort.

"Exactly. She's in a family of hunters. Hunters possibly connected to all this. And she's also a hunter in training, and my best friend. If she hasn't gone to them by now with all that I've been telling her about our little investigation, I think we can trust her," Lydia reasoned. He hated when she did that.

"Well, Lydia I disagree with you. Vehemently. I don't think we can trust her like, at all," Stiles was adamant. Allison rolled her eyes next to Lydia.

"Hi, yeah. Standing right here and I don't appreciate being talked about like I'm not," Allison cut in. Stiles didn't want to look at her, but he did.

"And? What do you want?" Stiles asked hotly.

"I want to help," she said simply. "I'm a hunter in training. I have knives and a taser if anything goes wrong, and no I haven't gone to my parents about any of this, nothing that Lydia's been telling me about the situation. I want to know what's happening as bad as you do, and I want to know if my family is involved in any of this. I have a personal stake in it too, just like you two," Allison said, looking between them both. Stiles stewed for a moment longer, trying to dissect the reasons why he didn't want her to come. In truth, another head wasn't detrimental to their little operation and could very well prove an asset. Grudge against her aside, Stiles believed what she was saying about not having rat them out to her parents. She had no reason to lie about that. After a moment more of trying to come up with an argument outside his own pettiness, Stiles sighed.

"Alright fine, get in," he grumbled, yanking open the door to his jeep. He climbed into the driver's seat while Lydia took shotgun. Allison sat in the back and Stiles, still fuming under his breath, started driving.

Lydia navigated. They'd pulled the location from the records Danny'd found in the sanctuary database. Stiles was vaguely familiar with the location, but the exact spot would take some getting to. It was nearly an hour before they reached the turn, some miles outside of town right where he and Lydia had thought it was. To an uneducated eye it looked like nothing more than part of the surrounding forest stretching out for miles on either side of the interstate. But on a closer drive by they saw what looked like a turn off. They doubled back, grateful the road was empty and they could pull a U turn, and took it.

The road they'd seen was not much more than a path, heavily overgrown that had nearly been totally retaken by the surrounding fauna, but Stiles' jeep just barely managed it. Stiles drove slow, unsure of what they were looking for beyond the few crumbled remains of foundations visible from the road. The sanctuary grounds themselves would be huge, spread for a couple miles around the area. There had been no blue prints or maps of the place to be found, so they were flying essentially blind in trying to locate where any buildings might still be standing and useable. They drove in relative silence for a stretch, all three of them looking out into the trees for some kind of indication of what they were looking for. The path in front of them kept going for who knows how much further and didn't seem like it was taking them anywhere. If there had been a sanctuary here at any point in history, it was long gone and buried with the passage of time. Stiles was beginning to think they'd hit a dead end when Allison called out.

"Look, over there," she pointed off to the left where a small concrete structure stood mostly intact. They hadn't seen anything else and it was a promising lead as any, so Stiles turned his jeep and cut through the low brush separating them. He didn't have to trample many small plants, only a yard or so of underbrush separated their little path from a wide if overgrown clearing the concrete structure stood in. Stiles pulled up to it and stopped his jeep. The three of them filed out and gathered around it.

The structure was lower than it had looked from the road, squat and square. It looked like the entrance to a storm cellar. There was a heavy set of rusty metal doors set into the face of it, the doors looked old and worn but the electronic keypad set in the concrete next to them sure didn't.

"Well, would you look at that," Stiles mused, crouching down level to the pad. The keypad looked identical to the ones used for all the Beacon Hills facility's doors, complete with even a card slider. After close inspection, Stiles sat back and said, "We may have a bit of a problem."

"I got this," Allison said, stepping up. She kneeled down next to him and pulled a couple key cards from her pocket.

"What the heck are those?" Stiles asked.

"I may have been more suspicious of my family than I let on. I found these keys in their things. I figured they might come in handy, here," she said, handing them over to Stiles. Stiles took them, turning them over in his hand. They were flat and black on one side, white with one black magnetic strip on the other. There were no words, just numbers printed in black on the backside. Each had different numbers, all were six digits. He tried the first, nothing happened.

"Whose was that?" he asked, handing it back to Allison. She turned it over and read the numbers.

"My dad," she said. "Try my aunt's next," she pointed out which one it was and Stiles tried it. Nothing happened, and he handed it back. She handed him the last. He hesitated before swiping it, but when he did to his surprise the lock let out a ding and one of two green lights lit up on the side.

"Yes!" he shouted, but they were only halfway there. Allison's eyes narrowed beside him, but she took the card from him and turned it over. She punched in the numbers that were printed on the back. The second green light came on and the door let out a mechanic hiss.

"Whose was that?" Lydia asked. Allison stood, pocketing all three cards.

"My grandfather's," she said coolly, and the look on her face didn't brook questions. She pulled open the metal doors with some effort, they were heavier and thicker than they'd looked. Blackness greeted them when Allison let the doors fall open to either side, and a ladder ventured into its depths. It looked rickety and it creaked when Allison put her boot on the first rung, but it held steady.

"Last chance to back out," Stiles said, looking to Allison and Lydia. Allison might as well not have heard him. She steeled herself and began the climb down. Lydia looked a little less sure, but nodded. She let Stiles help her start down the ladder, and after she was far enough down Stiles started the climb himself. He wished he had some way to make sure the door stayed open, prop it up somehow, but if no one else came it shouldn't be a problem. He would worry about it when it became one.

It was dark going down the narrow shaft, but luckily the dim lighting had made the ladder look longer than it actually was. The climb down was relatively short and Stiles hopped down onto an aged brick floor covered in moisture and moss. There was a dripping sound coming from somewhere down a long, dark hallway. There were a couple of exposed bulbs hanging at intervals on the ceiling, and Stiles could see down far enough to know the hallway went quite a ways. A few bulbs were illuminated, which meant Danny hadn't been wrong about the electricity. Metal hatches were set into the wall along the right side, some closed, some open, some missing.

Beside him, Lydia pulled out a small pink digital camera and took a picture.

"You brought a camera?" Stiles nearly jumped at the flash.

"You didn't?" Lydia shot quizzically. Well, he'd brought his phone, but no, Stiles hadn't thought of that. He was glad he had Lydia.

The trio looked between each other and began slowly down the hallway. They tried each of the hatches; some wouldn't budge from rusting or other damage, but some gave way with a couple of hard shoves. Whoever the ubiquitous 'they' were, they weren't hiding anything in these rooms. The ones they did get into were small, dark and empty save for rusted metal structures that were too weathered to determine the function of.

Lydia took pictures in each of them. Her camera had the memory space, and they had no idea what was relevant yet so she argued why not? Stiles wasn't about to stop her, until he caught her taking one of Allison with a peace sign thrown up.

"This is serious. We're doing serious investigation things," he quipped. The girls laughed him off and Lydia took a shot of his grumpy face pulled into a pout. Giving up, Stiles continued on.

The rooms seemed to resemble the processing rooms of Beacon Hills, with obvious structural and functional differences as they were underground. On closer inspection each room had metal hatches set into the ceiling, and Stiles wondered aloud if these processing rooms didn't use to have some kind of lift system when in use. It was a neat idea, but not what they had come for. The girls stopped his fixated mind in its tracks, pulling him from one room that had more intact machinery to continue down the hall. In the last room they checked the hatch had fallen in and the hole let in a ray of midday sunlight. Grass and leaves had fallen through, and bugs crawled along the walls.

Nothing of suspect in any of the rooms they'd checked, and no way into the others, they continued down the hallway all the way down as far as it went, and when they reached the end there was another heavy-set metal door blocking them from going further. Like the entry hatch, there was another key pad keeping it locked. Allison pulled out her grandfather's keycard again, swiped it and entered the code and it got them through. The door opened with a pressurized pop.

Allison pushed the door open and the three of them stepped through onto metal grating.

"What…the hell," Stiles whispered. The door had led them out onto a grated landing that looked out over a big open room with dark grey brick walls and plenty of cold lighting. The room underneath them was full of serious-looking scientific equipment, complicated gadgets and machines that Stiles could only guess at the purpose of. It looked like some kind of mad scientist's laboratory mixed with a meth lab.

The room was filled with the hum of electronics in use, lights blinking and beeping on the machines below. None of it looked aged, none of it looked like reused machinery from the sixties. Everything in the room below them was new, in fairly regular use, and Stiles didn't like the look of any of it.

"What is all this?" Lydia asked, walking forward and touching the metal rail of the landing. She leaned over a little, taking in the whole room.

"I have no idea, but it can't be anything good," Allison said. There was a spiral metal staircase that led down from the landing to the lab below. All three took the stairs, Stiles first and the girls close behind. They split up to search the room, staying within eyesight. Stiles took a row to the left, combing over the setup to get some kind of clue as to what the purpose of the place was. There were tabletops covered seriously scientific-looking equipment, microscopes and beakers and flasks full of mysterious contents. Monitors displayed numbers and figures that made no sense to him. Stiles opened a small cabinet full of small phials in trays and pulled a row out, picking up a few of the small things to see if he could make anything out on the labels. Meaningless strings of words and letters told him nothing. The substance inside was like black ink, but Stiles knew it couldn't be anything as simple as that. He put it back, frustrated, and moved on. Large metal tanks lined the walls, cautionary labels on the side to warn him of high pressures or toxic chemicals inside.

"You guys find anything?" Stiles called. There was no guarantee no one else was around, but so far they hadn't seen another living soul. No one came running at Stiles' shout, so he figured they were okay for the time being.

"Nothing that I can make sense of," Lydia called back.

"Me neither," Allison added. Stiles, giving up making sense of the place, circled back to the girls.

"Is there anything here that could give us something to go on? Lydia, you're some kind of genius right? Shouldn't you know what this stuff is?" Lydia looked at him like he'd just suggested the sky had turned green.

"Just because I know how these things function, Stiles, doesn't mean I know what they're being used for. Sure, if I had time I could maybe take a look at some of those compounds under a microscope, but what we need are files, hard evidence. Digital copies, notes, something. This is no meth lab, whatever research or experimentation they're doing down here they'll be keeping records of it. No way someone with this setup wouldn't be keeping things recorded," Lydia said. Getting and idea, Stiles ushered them back to the computer he'd passed. It was still running some kind of program and didn't look like any kind of operating system that came standard with your average Dell, but it had a keyboard and a mouse.

"Think you can figure something out with this?" Stiles asked Lydia. There was a swivel chair nearby, she pulled it over and sat. She put her hands to the keyboard.

"I can try," she said. Stiles and Allison stood behind her, watching as she typed commands and tried to coax the machine into giving her some kind of clue. When their hovering got to be too much, she shooed them away, demanding some thinking space. Stiles and Allison took up meandering around the room, kicking around more of the equipment to see what they could find.

"Wonder why no goons have shown up yet to string us up," Stiles said aloud. A place with that kind of set up had to have people working it. Many people. This place was obviously a hub of illegal werewolf-related activities, and Stiles guessed whatever the purpose of the lab was it had something to do with experimentation on werewolf kind. The disappearances made sense, in that light. Take a bunch of werewolves no one would miss and you've got a veritable steady supply of lab rats. It kind of made Stiles want to light a match and watch the place burn, but they had to have evidence. They had to find something they could use to end it all for good, whatever the hell they were doing.

But back to the empty evil science lab problem. Allison shared his thoughts.

"This place is obviously staffed," she nodded towards an empty used coffee cup that had left a ring on a note pad on one desk. Evidence of life where there was none currently in residence.

"Maybe it's their day off?" It was his only guess.

"We haven't seen or heard anyone since we entered, nor have I seen any cameras or monitoring but I won't trust that luck to hold. Whatever we do I suggest we hurry up," Allison made a fair point. Stiles nodded.

"Alright," he said, scanning the level. Two hallways branched away from the room, one leading left and the other on the far side of the room heading the opposite direction. "Once Lydia is done we'll keep going, and we'll stay together." The pair gave Lydia a few more minutes, then made their way back to her. She was finishing whatever it was she'd done, and spun back around on the chair to face them. She looked rather pleased with herself.

"Find anything?" Stiles asked.

"Maybe, I don't really know. I found files that looked like experiment logs, nothing I could understand at the moment but if I spend enough time with them I'll be able to work them out," she said.

"We don't exactly have all the time in the world, Lydia," Allison said.

"Not at the moment, no, which is why I made copies and put them on this," Lydia replied and held up a tiny black SD card.

"Where the heck did you get that?" Stiles asked, but got his answer a second later when she pulled her pink camera from her pocked and inserted the card back into it. Stiles nodded appreciatively.

"Clever," he praised. Lydia smiled, stood.

"Shall we?"

The three left the lab, taking the hallway to the right. Unlike the big lab, the hallway they'd picked was lit only by emergency strip lights on the floor. The further they got from the big room's light the less they could see, but Allison had the answer for that. She pulled out a tiny hand-held flashlight from her back pocket.

"Sorry, only have the one," she said.

"See?" Lydia said, turning to Stiles. "Aren't you glad we brought her?"

"Yeah, yeah," Stiles retorted, then stopped the trio. "Hey, Allison, shine the light up here," he asked. She complied, swinging the flashlight up to the door they were stopped in front of. There were several along the wall, metal hatches just like the floor above, but these weren't rusted or old. They were new-looking, thick metal, and by the sheen Stiles could tell they were coated in silver. There were name plates next to the door. Stiles didn't recognize name on the door before them, so they moved to the next one and Stiles did a double take.

"What in the world?" Allison asked in hushed breath. On the side by the door was written Peter Hale.

"Allison, keycard," Stiles ordered, and after a moment of fumbling between the flashlight and her pocket she handed the flashlight to Lydia and gave Stiles the card. Under the nameplate was another keypad, and Stiles swiped the card. To his dismay the card was rejected, the light blinking red.

"What the hell is this Stiles?" Lydia whispered as the light from the flashlight moved away from the door. Lydia shone the light on the door across, illuminating the name Talia Hale, and two more down from that door Cora Hale, and at least half a dozen more names that Stiles didn't recognize. Lydia kept the light up for each of them to see if the card would work on any of them, but it didn't.

They were trying their luck on an unmarked door when Lydia gasped and dashed away with the light.

"Lydia - hey, it's kind of really dark in here," Stiles called after her, jogging to catch up from where she was staring blankly at the nameplate of a door further down. Her hand came up to clasp over her mouth, and her hold on the flashlight was shaking.

"Lydia, what is-," Allison began, coming next to stand next to her.

"Oh, Jesus…," Stiles muttered. The nameplate read Jackson Whittemore.

"Card - give it to me," Lydia turned to Allison and pulled the card from her hand when Allison didn't move fast enough for her.

"Lydia, it's not going to work-," Allison tried to object but Lydia swiped the card regardless, then again when the red light blinked on and again and again when it rejected her.

"Lydia-," Stiles tried to stop her but Allison was on it, trying to calm Lydia down and get her to step away from the door. Lydia was shaking and her face was screwed up in effort not to cry. Stiles' mind whirled. His hands started shaking, and while Allison tried to keep Lydia calm, he did his best to keep himself together too. He smoothed his hands down on his shirt, ran his fingers through his hair. Then he noticed something.

He took the light from Lydia.

"Guys, the door-," he called their attention.

"What?" Allison asked.

"It's busted," he said, running his fingers along the seam between door and frame. The part near the handle was misshapen, warped out of place. The handle wouldn't turn without the keypad unlocking it, but he gripped it tight and jimmied it. There was movement, but he couldn't quite pry it open. With enough force, however, it would give. He was sure of it.

"Move," Allison ordered, and he didn't argue. She took hold of the handle, put a boot against the wall and with a grunt, pulled back on the door. Something gave way on the mechanism with a great clank and the door swung open. Lydia was the first to rush in, Allison right after her and Stiles brought up the rear with the flashlight.

The room was small, cramped, empty of anything else besides a giant cylindrical tank installed on the opposite wall. Wires and tubes rooted the tank, disappearing into holes in the wall. At the base of the tank there was a panel of knobs and switches and a digital screen that was cracked to hell. The glass of the tank was shattered, a gaping hole right in the middle. Shards of glass littered the floor, but whatever it had held was no longer there.

Behind them, the door swung shut. All three jumped, and Stiles may or may not have let out an embarrassing noise in fright. Stiles and Allison rushed to the door, Lydia stayed staring blankly into the tank.

"It's okay," Allison said, testing the door. "I think that was automatic, it should still open," she said, giving the door a shove to prove her point. That was one less thing to worry about, so Stiles turned the light and his attention back to the room. He approached Lydia slowly.

"Stiles…what the hell is all this?" Lydia whispered. He desperately wished he could give her some kind of explanation, but he was at a loss himself.

"Come on, there's nothing here anymore," he said. "We've got to keep moving." Allison had gotten the door open again, and the three left the small room visibly shaken. They paused outside, debating on whether or not to press on or call it quits and bail. None of them voted for the latter option.

"Stiles-," Lydia whispered in a tiny voice, pulling on his sleeve. He looked to her, but she was looking at the floor. He pointed the flashlight down to see what she had noticed, and a sick feeling curled in his gut. He knelt down, touched the streak to make sure but it was unmistakably a smear of old, dried blood.

"Up here, too," Allison said grimly. Stiles pointed the flashlight up and like she said, there was another smear along the wall at about knee height. As if there weren't enough adrenaline pumping through him at the moment, another spike shot his emotions up to a peak. Stiles swallowed, stood, and slowly crept down the hallway, swinging the flashlight around the floors and walls looking for more. More they found, getting thicker and leading straight down the hallway. As they followed the trail a smell started pricking in his nose. An awful, dirty smell that got thicker and heavier as they moved down the dim hallway. Every inch of Stiles was telling him he was not gonna like what he found at the end of the trail, that this was a terrible awful idea and he should turn tail and run.

But he had to know.

The trail of smeared blood led on, and they followed it all the way down the hallway to an arch. The three stopped a few feet away from it, the silence thick between them, no one daring to speak a word. Stiles' heart hammered in his chest, every instinct telling him to turn tail and get the fuck out of there.

But he couldn't stop himself from moving forward. The second he turned the corner, he regretted the decision. He took one look, gagged, fought the overwhelming urge to vomit. He reeled back, pressing himself against the wall outside, fist in his mouth to fight the bile. Lydia and Allison moved forward to see what he'd reacted to, but he instinctively reached forward and grabbed Lydia by the waist to keep her from entering. Allison he didn't manage to stop, he heard her gasp and stumble back but he couldn't look again just yet.

"What is it, what the hell-," Lydia demanded, pulling against Stiles' grip. He desperately didn't want her to see any of it, but his limbs were numb from the shock and revulsion and she broke free of his grasp and stumbled after Allison. A beat later both he and Allison were after her to keep her away from it, from seeing it, but they were too late. Lydia's scream echoed off the stone, piercing the dead silence. Allison pulled her out of the room, but Stiles was frozen where he was. The first time he hadn't seen much more than a glimpse, but this time he couldn't tear his eyes away from the carnage in front of him.

Dozens of bodies littered the room. Not bodies intact and neatly lined up in rows or in a pile on the floor. In pieces. Strung out and ripped apart. Blood, gore, organs, stripped from bones like wet paper and flung on the walls like a child had thrown a tantrum. It was dripping from the walls, dried and crusted over but still reeking. Men, women, some in lab coats still intact enough to identify, all in various states of decay. It wasn't fresh, this hadn't happened recently.

"Stiles-," he felt a hand on his sleeve, pulling him back. It was Allison, he recognized dimly. It felt like her voice was coming through a long tunnel.

"Stiles we have to get out of here," she insisted, tugging harder. Stiles let himself be pulled, his feet turned on their own and he backtracked away from the room. Once outside he fell against the wall, slumping to his knees. Lydia stood in the middle of the corridor, shaking silently. Allison stood next to her, gritting her teeth and fighting the urge to break down. She paced, pulling at her hair, glancing towards the archway like she couldn't help it. Stiles noticed all these things, his senses hyper-aware, but it was like someone had shoved cotton balls into his ears. His world was narrowing down to specific details, the blink of the emergency strip lights on the floor next to him, the sound of Lydia's shallow breaths, the way the flashlight beam danced in Allison's shaking fingers. When had she taken it from him? He couldn't recall, he didn't care.

They sat like that for a while. No one said anything. No one asked questions or reacted in any way beyond silent, consuming horror. Stiles, the one with a brain that ran a mile a minute and couldn't stand sitting still no matter the circumstances, was the first to move.

He stood and numbly put a hand in his pocket, drawing his phone from it and switching on the camera function. He didn't look up as he approached the door, he looked only through the view on his screen. That way he tried convincing himself he was watching a movie, he wasn't seeing it in front of him. He plugged his nose and breathed through the fabric of his t-shirt, and took as many pictures as he could make his hands stay steady for. He couldn't take more than a few, he had to back out again or his lunch really would be joining the mess.

Shaking, covered in a light sheen of sweat, he rejoined the girls. He moved toward them, locking eyes first with Allison, then with Lydia. Allison looked shell-shocked, like she'd retreated inwardly to deal with it. Lydia wasn't as good at keeping composure, but her tears had stopped and she was only just shaking in Allison's arms. Stiles moved forward to put a hand on her shoulder.

All three snapped to attention when a loud metallic clank echoed from somewhere far away.

"What the hell was that?" Lydia nearly screamed, voice tight and hysteric. A second sound, closer, had them all turned towards the mouth of the hallway.

For a second time, Stiles' blood ran cold.

Illuminated in the dim light from the lab stood two figures. One, a man, tall and dressed in what looked like a long coat. The other was no man, nor any beast Stiles could think to put a name to. It crouched on all fours, and Stiles could distinctly see a long, reptilian tail undulating back and forth in a hypnotic manner. The thing let out a long, low hiss that echoed in the hallway, bouncing off the walls and sending chills down Stiles' spine.

A moment passed, and Stiles didn't breathe. Then, without warning, both figures moved. They were lightning-quick and they disappeared in the opposite direction as the trio, fleeing back into the lab. Allison hesitated only a moment longer, then let go of Lydia and sprinted after them.

"Allison!" Stiles bellowed after her, then when she didn't stop, he let out a string of very foul cusses. He didn't have time to think, to plan, to dissect what the fuck was happening, all he could do was grab the nearly-unresponsive Lydia's hand and pull her with him as he sprinted after Allison.

She was taking the stairs up out of the lab by twos, and Stiles let go of Lydia's hand to catch up to her. Lydia had regained herself, and followed behind just a couple steps. Allison was out the secondary hatch before Stiles could catch her, and down at the end of the hall the way they had entered Stiles caught a glimpse of the reptilian figure disappear up the ladder.

Allison reached it first and was up it in the blink of an eye. Stiles went after her, and Lydia followed. On the surface the light was dimmer than he had figured it would be, the sun was already setting and the shadows cast by the trees were long and dark.

"Allison-," Stiles called when he didn't see her immediately. His head whipped around, looking for her and the shadowy figures she was chasing. The hairs on the back of his neck hadn't gone down, and for a few seconds more his heart hammered in his chest thinking he'd lost Allison along with whatever the hell that thing had been. Then he spotted her, yards away in the clearing. Relief at the sight of her washed over him.

"Allison, what the fuck- was that," he shouted, and she turned. He couldn't get much else out. Chase over, his need to breathe finally kicked back in and he doubled over, panting. His stomach churned, and the image of the room full of carnage was brought back to him in full, gruesome detail. The adrenaline of the chase pumped through him, making the contents of his stomach twist and flop until he couldn't fight it. Allison was coming back to them, she was saying something, but he couldn't focus on her. He stumbled a few feet away from where he'd been standing and retched up the contents of his stomach.

Numbness spread over him. His brain fought to process everything running at a million miles an hour through his mind. Most of it centered on what the fuck any of that had been.

Fuck.

Fuck.

What the fuck.

Stiles couldn't even begin to process it, not right then. He pulled himself up, ran shaking fingers through his hair. He breathed, closed his eyes, and brought his hands over his face.

"They're gone," Allison was saying. Her voice was shaking, she wasn't nearly as in control as she'd seemed. "Both of them, I have no idea where they went. I don't see them, I don't know what the hell they were but we need to get the fuck out of here, right now. Stiles, keys-," she said insistently, and her suggestion pulled him out of it. He stuck his hand into his pocket, pulled his keys out. He looked at Allison, then at Lydia. They both stared back at him for a moment. Allison's eye held his with a look of determined focus, Lydia's were wide and blank. No words came to him. He silently turned from them and trudged back to his jeep.

xx

"Who do we tell?" Allison was the first to speak, but not until after all three were piled in his jeep and Stiles had reached the main road. He'd driven like a maniac to get out of the underbrush, crashing through foliage without a care. His hands gripped the steering wheel tight, his knuckles white. Allison sat in the passenger's seat, Lydia was curled in on herself in the back.

"Tell what?" Stiles asked coldly.

"What do you mean, what? All that shit we just saw, everything down there - whoever it is that was in there, whatever it was next to him - they're out. I'm pretty sure that whoever and whatever they are, they're the ones that killed all those people down there. Who are we going to tell about that, Stiles," Allison said, every word sharp. Stiles stared dead ahead at the road.

"Who can we tell?" he returned. She scoffed.

"So, what, we just keep silent?"

"I don't know, Allison!" Stiles yelled, hands going rigid on the wheel. He couldn't think, he couldn't do this. His foot slammed the brake and he veered off the road, parking them on the shoulder. He breathed deep, trying to get enough air into this lungs to calm down and think.

"Stiles-," Lydia said from the backseat, reaching forward to touch his shoulder. He jerked away from her.

"That was some serious shit down there," he said.

"Well no shit, Sherlock," Allison retorted. "What made you think that, the dead bodies?" Stiles ignored her.

"But who the fuck knows who's responsible for that. Who was in charge, who let any of that happen. You saw all the shit down there, there was a lot of money involved in setting that up and running it. Whatever they were experimenting on, whoever they were experimenting on, researching, whatever - who was doing it? Who was in charge? Your grandfather's key got us in there," he said, turning to Allison. "So hunters are involved, I was right about that but who else? Just because their cards didn't work doesn't mean your dad or aunt doesn't know about this place." Allison blanched.

"No! My father - he'd never-," she protested, but a look darkened her face.

"But?"

"But Gerard. I wouldn't put something like this past him. Him or Kate," she admitted.

"Exactly. Two high-ranking hunters that are associated with the sanctuary. But they aren't the ones running it, that's sure as shit. So maybe they're just hired hands, maybe they're just in charge of the supply. Peter Hale, Talia, Cora, the other members of the Hale family. Dead bodies, moved over there and I guess preserved for two years for something. Laura may have had her own tank in there - then Jackson-," Stiles stopped himself.

"Oh God," he heard Lydia whisper from the back. "Jackson, what did they do to you?"

No. Stiles couldn't react to that. Not just then, he couldn't do anything to get Lydia's mind off it. He had no answers, he had nothing to say to her. He pinched his eyes shut, he focused.

"I don't know," he said. He shook his head, eyes still closed. "I don't know, I don't know."