A/N: Hi, everyone! Posting the second chapter of this sooner than anticipated, mostly because the sway that the plot bunnies hold over me hasn't let up in the slightest; I'm actually spending my breaks at work scribbling bits of the story in one of my many notebooks. XD Thankfully, I have a day off today to decompress and relax and plot at my own pace...regrettably I'm also in a continuous state of quasi-stress, because my state ID card (I don't have a license because I don't drive at the moment) somehow managed to magically disappear from my wallet even though such a thing is entirely impossible because IT LITERALLY NEVER LEAVES MY WALLET. *fumes* But. Anyway. Trying to stay positive and not think about the trip to the DMV I'll need to be making next week, so to cheer myself up, here's Chapter 2! :D

Chapter 2

Riley couldn't decide if she wanted to laugh or cry.

Or scream. Screaming seemed like a pretty good option, too.

Peter Hale. Peter fucking Hale. The universe was screwing with her, she was sure of it. She couldn't imagine what the punchline of this cruel cosmic joke might be, but she figured that some deity somewhere was laughing their ass off at her expense.

What other possible explanation could there be for the Wild Hunt taking Peter Hale, of all people. Especially now. If they'd really wanted Peter, why not snatch him ten years ago, when they'd taken both her and her sister? It's not like it would have been hard for them to do it; Riley had been standing less than a foot away from him at the time.

God, she could still remember bolting through the forest and screaming out his name, desperate to see his face one last time before the Hunt took her.

It was totally messing with her head to have him walking right beside her, after all these years of being utterly certain that she'd never see him again.

And, yeah, he had no fucking clue who she was, because the Wild Hunt had erased her from the real world, but whatever. He was here. Here, with her.

Curious as to who he might have become in the intervening years, she sneaked another look at him from the corner of her eye. She'd been so blown away by the realization that he was here, in the realm of the Lost Ones, that moving beyond the initial stage of stunned recognition had taken her longer than she'd like to admit. Literally, her mind had come to a screaming halt of Oh my God, Peter Hale, and her brain had only sluggishly rebooted once she'd given herself a very severe mental kick in the ass.

Now, she decided to take the opportunity to look at him more closely, and pinpoint the differences between the man beside her and the one she'd known a decade ago.

He was older, obviously, thirty-five instead of twenty-five, and he'd filled out quite a bit since then; Peter had always been fit, but now he was built like a cross between a GQ model and an MMA fighter, and she couldn't help but eye his physique a little longer than was strictly necessary.

His face was different, too, just enough to throw her off a little. He was still Peter, of course, because duh. They could both be senior citizens and she'd still be able to spot him a mile off. In any case, his features now were more mature she remembered, more masculine. He was still pretty, but it was a more rugged thing now, less young adult cheekbones and more sexy jawline. And Lord Almighty, that goatee.

Her Peter had never even had stubble; he'd almost always been clean shaven (with the exception of his extra furriness during shifts, but that was to be expected). So, yeah, that was different; it somehow made him more refined and more roguish all at once, and even though she'd never been a fan of facial hair, she couldn't deny that he wore it well.

Of course, he wore everything well; he was Peter fucking Hale. Even the drab in-patient scrubs he was wearing looked good on him...though they had her wondering just what facility he'd been in; not a medical place, because his werewolf healing prevented illnesses and healed up wounds so fast it wasn't even funny. And he'd mentioned being drugged earlier, which narrowed down the remaining possibilities even further...Honestly, there was only one place that came immediately to mind, and it was one that still cropped up in her nightmares from time to time. Still, she'd need to ask to be sure.

Not that I need to know, she reminded herself sternly. I haven't seen him in ten years. We're strangers. His life before coming here is none of my business. At all.

She was still morbidly curious, though.

All the nosy questions she wanted to ask were forgotten, however, when they rounded a corner and were faced with a snarling shadow hound, its fiery red eyes disturbingly intent upon them as it prowled closer.

"What," Peter said in a low voice as he looked over at the massive beast with a mixture of awe and alarm, "is that?"

"A shadow hound," she whispered back, reaching slowly for the knife she had tucked inside of her coat. "The Wild Hunt uses them for tracking prey and running down sacrifices. They patrol the streets here," she went on, one hand closing around the hilt of her knife as she squinted her eyes, trying to peer through the twisting shadows that wrapped around the creature and get a look at the gaps between the scaly material that covered its skin like some sort of armor, "but they shouldn't be out this early. They don't come out before dark!"

Peter made a plaintive shushing sound as her voice rose and the shadow hound growled in response and crept even closer. "It seems," he said, his voice a little too calm to be believable, "that this one, at least, likes to stroll while it's still light out."

"Motherfucker," was all Riley had to say in answer to that, then whipped out her knife and hurled it at the hound; it flashed through the air, the symbols she'd scratched into the metal flaring bright as the spells she'd layered into the weapon activated, helping it fly straight and true.

It went into one of the hound's front ankle joints, stabbing through the leathery skin, piercing muscle and severing tendons as it went. The hound let out a strangled yelp as its front left leg buckled beneath it, sending it crashing to the ground.

"Stay there," Riley told Peter, pulling out another dagger and testing the edge of the blade with the pad of her thumb. "Even hobbled a shadow hound can still-"

She broke off with a furious curse as she looked over and saw Peter walking forward towards the hound; it made her abruptly enraged at his sexy long legs because he was covering the distance very quickly and getting way too fucking close to the hound.

She lunged forward and grabbed him by the elbow with her free hand, yanking him back just as the shadow hound surged up from the ground, flailing out its uninjured leg in a savage slashing motion that missed Peter but caught Riley along the back of her left shoulder.

Pain lanced through her upper body, hot and piercing, but she ignored it. It was hardly the first time she'd been injured while in this realm and it wasn't going to be the last; all she had to do was end the fight quickly before the blood loss got to her. After that, it was just a matter of getting back to the bunker and getting Carmen to use one of the healing crystals on the wounds.

In the meantime... "What about stay back was too hard for you to understand?" she snapped at Peter, elbowing him hard in the ribs to force him even farther away from the still-thrashing shadow hound. "Blood and thunder," she said in exasperation, "you used to be intelligent!"

Peter opened his mouth as if to argue, eyes flashing bright blue (blue?! His eyes had been gold last time she'd seen him, what the fuck?!). "You're-"

"More experienced with shadow hounds," she all but snarled at him, increasingly fed up with him for reasons she couldn't pinpoint. "So shut up and stay put," she ordered, retrieving her dagger from where she'd dropped it the moment before.

And before Peter could say anything else, she bolted forward, ducking underneath the hound's paw as it tried to disembowel her. And then she somersaulted forward to bypass its snapping jaws and end up by its neck. It twisted its head, trying to snap at her, she was faster, plunging her knife into its throat and then dragging the blade through its flesh until she finally succeeding in severing its jugular vein.

Hot blood with both the consistency and color of liquefied tar gushed across her hands and sprayed across her face and arms but she didn't react, didn't dare pull out her knife and step away until the shadow hound had stopped thrashing and gone still.

Peter was, for one of the very few times in his life, at a complete and total loss for words.

Of everything he'd expected to happen in the fight with the, what was it called, shadow hound? Well, being bossed around and saved by Riley certainly hadn't been on his list of What's Going To Happen Here. And it had only gotten more surreal, particularly when Riley had rushed forward and slashed the hound's throat so deeply that Peter was surprised that she hadn't accidentally beheaded the thing.

"Come on," Riley said now, retrieving her knives and wiping them off on the sleeves of her already-bloodstained coat, which now seemed to permanently ruined from the sticky black blood that was soaking into the fabric. "Now we really need to hurry and get back to the bunker."

"Why?" he asked immediately, the word popping out of his mouth before he could think better of it. "You killed the hound."

And sure enough, Riley turned to give him an aggravated look, her gray eyes dark like thunderclouds. "Yes," she said said testily. "I killed a hound; one of the many that prowl this realm. One that shouldn't have been here to being with, not at this time of day. So tell me: do you really want to hang around to see if there are any more?" She arched an eyebrow at him in a challenging manner, as if daring him to argue with her.

God help him, Peter did open his mouth to argue with her (why, he didn't know; maybe it was the principle of the thing), but then his gaze drifted to the gashes across the back of her shoulder, where the rips in her coat were tinted red (red meaning it was her blood, not the hound's, and somehow that changed everything), and his mouth snapped shut. "Okay," he said instead. "Lead the way."

She blinked at him like she was surprised at his acquiescence, then gave him a long look that was more than a little suspicious, like she thought he was pulling her leg. She didn't question his sudden easy agreement, though, just gave a quick nod and started off down the street, holding her left arm at a certain angle in a way that Peter assumed was intended to help her injuries in some way; ease the pain, slow the bleeding? As a werewolf Peter had never needed to worry much about injuries that, for him, rarely lasted longer than a day at most.

He wondered briefly if he should offer to help her with the pain, then discounted the notion; not only did he barely know this woman, she didn't seem like the kind to accept that sort of help. Besides, she was now walking too quickly for him to pull her aside to ask about it; wherever this secure bunker of hers was, she certainly was in a hurry to get there.

Then again, considering the fact that there were supposedly more of those hideous shadow hounds lurking around somewhere, he couldn't exactly blame her for wanting to take shelter; he wasn't wildly keen on encountering another one of those beasts anytime soon, either.

They reached their destination after a brisk fifteen minute jog that took them through more empty, foggy streets that raised the hair on the back of his neck with their silence and lack of life. Eventually, Riley led him to a small squat building that had no windows and only one door, thick and metal and covered in enough wards that he could feel the magic crackling in the air from ten paces away.

"You did those?" he asked, tracing the swirling patterns and interlocking runes with an appreciative eye.

"Some of them," Riley said, her face oddly blank and her voice strangely impassive. "My sister did a bunch when we first got dumped here, and I added some more over the years."

"Your sister," Peter repeated, frowning. Something was...off, with Riley. She'd gone distant, in a way that made his wolf shift under his skin, uneasy and not knowing why. "Will she be down in the bunker?"

Riley gave a sharp bark of a laugh, bitter and pain-filled. "Not unless we've gone back in time five years," she said, grief and anger and guilt wafting from her strongly enough to make Peter curse his werewolf senses. "Rhoswen is..." Riley shook her head, and the anger and guilt lightened, leaving just old grief behind. "Rose was killed by the Hunt," she explained. "She got a little too close to working out a way out of this hellhole, so they snatched her and sacrificed her before she could finish the spells."

Peter swallowed hard, bizarrely grief-stricken by this news despite the fact that he'd never met Riley's sister. Why was he feeling this much grief for a woman he'd never met? "My condolences," he said after a moment, is voice rough, "for your loss."

Riley just shrugged, her face back to being an unreadable mask. She didn't even bother responding, just stepped forward and swiped a hand across a particular section of the wards, which flared extra bright for a moment before dimming. "Come on," she said at last, grabbing onto the thick metal handle of the door and twisting it. "We should get inside and get into the underground bunker before another hound scents my blood and comes looking for us."

Peter figured that that was probably a good idea, and wasted no time in slipping in through the proffered doorway, Riley close on his heels.