A/N: Hi, everyone! I hope you're all doing well. :) Thanks to everyone who's reading this, with bonus thanks to you wonderful people who reviewed last time: Amazeballs96 and Noorxoxo. Thank you so much for your lovely reviews! They made my day. :)

Anyway, I just realized how much fun I can have with this story by playing with bits and pieces of Irish and Celtic folklore and mythology. Ah, this is going to be great. ;D Anyway, much like Teen Wolf does, I'm going to be taking actual legends/myths and adapting them for storytelling purposes. So some stuff will be true to the original myths, some will be made up by me or adapted or so on. Enjoy! :)

Also, Peter's part in this chapter is smaller compared to Riley's, sorry! But there's exposition regarding the realm of the Lost Ones that can only come from Riley, so there's a lot of that in this chapter, world-building stuff and the like. ;D Anyway, there'll be more Peter in the next chapter; we'll get to see what else he gets up to while Riley's out hunting. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Read onward!

Chapter 4

"I have a question," Peter said to Carmen as he followed her down yet another featureless hallway.

"That does not surprise me," Carmen remarked, flashing him a crooked smile. "What's up?"

"It's about Riley," he began, then faltered, trying to work out the least obnoxious way to ask what he was wondering.

"Spit it out already," Carmen griped. "Your thinking face makes my head hurt."

Peter resisted the urge to snap his teeth at her. "What is she?"

Carmen blinked, like his question had caught her off guard. "She's Riley."

Peter snorted, rolling his eyes. "But what is she?" he pressed. "She used a spelled knife in the fight with the shadow hound earlier," he explained, "and said something about helping her sister with the wards protecting this place?"

"Ah." Carmen nodded. "Okay, I get your question now."

"And the answer would be...?" He growled at her when no response was forthcoming. "Are you going to make me beg?" Not that he ever would, but he couldn't help but wonder if that was what she was after, this strange woman who Riley called friend.

Carmen flashed him a sharp smile. "As entertaining as I might find that," she said slyly, "I suspect that I might not live through the experience." Before Peter could snap out a response, Carmen spoke again. "Riley's sister, Rhoswen, was a very skilled Druid. Emissary for a prominent werewolf Pack and everything." She gave Peter an unreadable look at that, then continued. "Riley, though..." Carmen made a humming sound. "Riley's different. She inherited some psychic skills from her father, but its the gifts she inherited from her mother that are truly impressive."

Peter couldn't help the growl of impatience that rolled out of his chest. "And those gifts would be?"

Carmen sent him a faintly annoyed look, like she was impatient with him, but answered anyway. "She's a mage," Carmen told him. "A damn good one, too, even though she never got a chance to be formally trained."

Peter scowled. "Why not?" he asked. "I mean, from age nineteen onward I understand, because she's been stuck here." He waved a hand around vaguely to indicate all of, what had Riley called it, Tech na cinn Caillte, the realm of the so-called Lost Ones. "But if she's that gifted, her training should have started sooner, before she was taken. Unless she was a bit of a late bloomer?"

Carmen shook her head. "No, her Spark manifested when she was, like, ten or something. But her parents were killed before they could start her training, so all she had was her sister. And don't get me wrong, Rose was a good sister and she raised Riley the best she could...but she was a Druid, not a mage; she didn't have a Spark, not like her mother and sister, so she couldn't really help Riley get control of her magic. Riley was pretty much on her own for figuring out her magic and her psychometry. The latter of which caused her a shitload of problems, too," Carmen added darkly.

Peter sifted through his memories, trying to recall what little he knew about psychic abilities in general and psychometry specifically; if he was right, it was some sort of tactile clairvoyance. "What happened?" he asked Carmen.

Carmen shook her head vehemently. "If you really want to know the details, ask Riley. What I know, she told me in confidence. All that I'm free to say is that she spent two of her teenage years locked away in a mental institution and it sucked."

A chill ran down Peter's spine, and his wolf stirred uneasily within him. "Did she happen to tell you the name of the facility?"

"Yeah," Carmen replied. "Some hellhole called Eichen House."

There were some days where Riley found it amusing that the entire empty town had a layout suspiciously similar to a circle of Hecate, the cobblestone roads curving and twisting and winding around the deserted buildings in just the right ways to make the overall effect something not-quite-random, but only if you were looking closely enough.

And there were even days where she found it interesting that town was surrounded by a tall brick wall that wrapped around everything, boxing in the entire town in a very distinctive triangle shape that was only visible if you climbed to the top of the windmill on the north side of town. Which was inadvisable to do now that the each-uisge viciously attacked anyone who went higher than a second story balcony; normally those spirit creatures kept to their water horse forms and therefore actual bodies of water, but a smaller sect of the things had assumed violent bird of prey forms, and even Riley didn't like to provoke them if she didn't have to.

Basically, the overall layout was a magic circled trapped in a triangle; presumably there was some sort of deeper meaning in it, otherwise why lay it all out like that, but Riley had never worked it out herself, and Rose had been taken as a sacrifice before she could tell Riley the secrets she'd learned.

In any case, sometimes the layout amused or intrigued her. On other days, though, it irritated her, frustrated her, and aggravated her beyond belief.

Today was one of those days. Not only had a sudden rain shower this morning washed away the chalk markings that she and Carmen had put up on the corners of buildings to help themselves navigate the twisting streets of the empty town, but she just honestly did not have the patience to make her way through the winding and intertwining roads to get to the wall when her shoulder was still tender and aching. Not to mention the fact that the sun, while not visible through the ever-present cloud cover and fog, would be going down soon.

And nightfall was when all the fun stuff really came out to play. Shadow hounds in packs, not just one or two. And the Sluagh, the transmuted and twisted souls reaped by the Hunt that had taken on unnerving physical forms that seemed to resemble devil rays; Riley wasn't clear on the details, but she knew that the Sluagh were dark souls, dark creatures, and that they fed on fear and pain and hunted down the Lost Ones just as the shadow hounds did, except where the hounds would just tear you apart to kill you or maim you so the Hunt could more easily grab you for a sacrifice, the Sluagh liked to play with you, whispering to you in the voices of lost loved ones and doing whatever they could to terrify you witless before swooping in for the real physical attack, the serrated edges on their tails ripping into your flesh even as their mouths with too many needle-like teeth tried to find purchase on your neck or stomach.

She loathed the Sluagh. She knew she maybe shouldn't hate them so much; they were lost souls, after all, and it wasn't their fault that the Wild Hunt had taken them and twisted them into something dark and disturbing. And deep down, she didn't blame them for what they were. She still hated them, though. And she definitely did not want to encounter any of them right now.

So, yeah, she needed to get to the wall, get over it, and do a quick hunting trip in the surrounding forest before sundown came and left her dealing with all manner of bloodthirsty nastiness.

Somehow, she managed to make her way through the town without encountering anything that wanted to chow down on her intestines. She might have found that suspicious, but truth be told she was too grateful to see the ten foot fall looming above her to wonder at why nothing was chasing her down the deserted streets, baying for her blood.

She took a moment to stretch a bit, testing her range of motion with her almost-all-better-but-not-quite shoulder. Then she wasted no time to clambering up the brick wall, taking advantage of the natural handholds in the stone until she was high enough to grasp the top of the wall and heave herself over.

Climbing back down was something she needed to take a little more slowly, because she'd learned the hard way that navigating her way through the forest with an injured leg was not a good idea by any stretch of the imagination; not only was it physically agonizing just from the overall exertion, but there were predatory creatures in the forest, too. Nothing as deliberately antagonistic as the beings found within the walls (and wasn't that ironic, that the supposedly empty town was more dangerous than the creep forest with its tall trees and ominous atmosphere), but a dangerous creature was a dangerous creature, and Riley wasn't going to take any chances, not right now.

Not now, with a sacrifice coming up and Peter Hale waiting back at the bunker.

Peter, she thought, a pang of longing and regret sharp in her chest before she shook her head abruptly. No, she told herself almost angrily. Focus. You need to focus, dammit. Everyone's counting on you to bring back something for dinner. Don't you dare let them down.

She carefully shimmied her way down to the ground on the outer side of the wall, and quickly but carefully hustled into the forest that was barely twenty paces away. It was a strange forest, with pine trees and oak trees and redwoods and eucalyptus all mixing and growing together despite the fact that in the natural world those trees all grew in totally different climates and environments. But she'd long ago given up making any sort of logical sense of this realm, and so barely blinked at the branches of a eucalyptus twining together with the branches of the pine tree next to it as she jogged into the woods and started making her way to where she and Carmen had set up the first snare.

It was disappointingly devoid of captured animals, so she moved on to the next snare; that one, luckily, had caught something, a moss hare that was the size of a full-grown Maine Coon cat.

Moss hares, she mused as she quickly dispatched it (and God, why did she still feel those little pangs of guilt as she took its life?), were another creature that she didn't understand with her logical mind. It was, at first glance, very similar to an ordinary hare or rabbit, with the long ears and the strong legs. But instead of fur, it has thick green moss covering its body, and its bones were stone. Literally, stone. She didn't understand how the moss hares could even have the strength to move their heavy little bodies given the density of their bones, but she figured that maybe that was why they were always so thick and meaty with muscles.

She slung the hare over her shoulder and quickly checked on the remaining snares (all empty) before doubling back and returning to the wall. Had it not been so close to sundown, she would have stayed and actually hunted, maybe tried to get a deer or some other type of big game since that would last them longer and mean that she wouldn't need to go out again so soon, but with darkness starting to fall even as she made it back to the wall and began the awkward moss-hare-across-her-shoulders climb...yeah, she couldn't risk staying out any longer than this, not when all the things that wanted to eat her would be coming out to play soon.

Once at the top of the wall, she carefully dropped the dead hare down onto the ground below and then took a moment -just a small, small moment- to look out over the fogged-in town and wonder if she'd ever get out. Or if this was all there was for her now.

From this angle, she could vaguely glimpse the way the town was laid out in that pattern, that circle of Hecate that no one seemed to figure out the reason for. And if she squinted hard enough, she could see past the most distant building to the strange empty watchtowers that signaled the inner ring of the town, and whatever lay beyond that, at the center of the circle.

Riley wondered, not for the first time, what was at the center of the circle...and by extension, the center of this eerie little town with its empty homes and unnaturally quiet streets where only monsters roamed.

She'd gotten a fraction of a glimpse once, back when the Hunt had taken Rhoswen for their sacrifice five years ago; all she could remember was light and shadows and blood dripping into a lake that couldn't possibly exist in the center of a ghost town. The situation was compounded further by the fact that what little she could remember was was disjointed and fragmented from how emotionally distraught she'd been at the time, drowning in grief and fury with her thoughts on an unending loop of Oh, God, this can't be happening, not here, anyone but her.

And then there had been a devastating wave of magic that had rippled out from that impossible lake and Riley's own magic had surged and writhed under her skin, burning like a thousand supernovas going off in her veins, and she'd blacked out, waking up soaking wet and shivering in the bunker.

Carmen had told her, once the worst of the shock wore off and Riley wasn't just staring blankly at everyone who spoke to her, that Riley had broughtherself back to the bunker. Apparently, she'd stumbled up to the two scouts that she herself had posted at the entrance earlier (before tearing off after Rhoswen), and garbled something at them about blood sacrifices, fae halflings, and someone named Belisama. And then she'd passed out, and remained dead to the world for ten days before finally waking up again.

Riley still didn't remember anything beyond that crashing wave of magic. If Carmen said that Riley had returned to the bunker under her own steam, Riley believed her. But she couldn't remember it. Any of it. And she knew enough about magical backlash and energy overload to know that she possibly never would, no matter how desperate she was to get back those missing moments.

Whatever had happened that day five years ago, her subconscious obviously considered it traumatizing enough so that only slivers of those memories slipped through to her conscious mind. It was annoying, but Riley knew better than to push. She knew herself well enough to know that her mental state was not precisely what one would call stable. She was high-functioning, sure, but she was an emotionally unstable mage with too much on her shoulders and she knew that if something didn't change soon she was headed for some sort of snapping point. She wasn't a basket-case exactly, but the potential was there, had been ever since her psychometry had started really blossoming during puberty and she had been forced to deal the assault of knowledge that she picked up from both the things and people she touched.

Memories of when she was fifteen came surging back with a vengeance, of that day when she'd sensed terrifying things from a horrifically twisted mind, and she forcefully shut those memories down (she didn't need to be scared of her psychometry anymore, after all, not when that ability had been so muted since coming here that she didn't even need to wear the enchanted focus bracelet she'd gotten as a gift for her eighteenth birthday), turning her thoughts to other things. Like how something in this realm really needed to change if she and the others were to have any hope of turning their existence here into something more than just a desperate struggle to survive.

But maybe things are already changing, she thought idly to herself as she scrambled down the wall and snatched up her hare. Peter was here now. That was a big change, in and of itself. Sure, the Wild Hunt took people on a relatively regular basis, and more during certain parts of the year, but Peter Hale? Not just a werewolf, but a werewolf from a prominent family. It was a bit more of a high profile target than usual, even if Peter had been locked in Eichen House for some reason.

...And that was something else she intended to get to the bottom of, too, once Peter recovered a bit more from the drugs and the magical abduction; the Peter she'd known would never have been locked into a madhouse like Eichen House; he'd been clever and sarcastic and sometimes a bit devious, but not insane or excessively violent...she couldn't imagine what could have gone so wrong in the last ten years that had resulted in her Peter locked away like she had been.

Then again, Riley mused, maybe taking a high profile target like Peter isn't really so strange. The Hunt had taken her and Rhoswen, after all, and her sister had been the Emissary to the Hale Pack. Maybe, she thought bitterly, now flat-out running through the streets back to the bunker because darkness was falling much more quickly than she liked, the Wild Hunt just takes whoever the hell they want and to hell with the consequences.

What she really wanted to know, though, was why they were taking people. Why take them, and why use them as blood sacrifices? What was the Wild Hunt trying to accomplish? Or maybe not the Hunt themselves...maybe they answered to someone else, just as the hounds and Sluagh answered to them? Either way, the need to know burned inside her like an eternal flame. That fire kept her warm even on the coldest and loneliest nights; even when everything seemed pointless and empty, the scorching desire to understand still remained.

She drew on that fire now, using it to give her an extra boost of energy as she ran, boots pounding against the cobblestones as she hurtled through the curving streets in the darkening gloom.

She reached the entrance to the bunker just as true darkness set in, and wasted no time in yanking opening the door, rushing in, and slamming and locking it behind her, pouring as much energy as she could afford to lose into the dozens upon dozens of wards that were layered on the entrance.

She probably didn't need to shore up the wards like that, they were holding strong just as they had been for countless months, but it paid to err on the side of caution and paranoia. If a shadow hound had attacked her during the day, it was entirely possible that something might try a direct attack on the bunker. Nothing should be able to get past the wards (anything that tried would end up resembling a lightning-struck tree...at best), but she wasn't willing to take any chances. Not with all the people here counting on her to keep them safe. Not with Carmen here. Not with Peter here, fresh from Eichen House and still as compelling as ever.

No, she would only ever take chances with her own safety; she would never, never risk the lives of those she was meant to protect. The ones she was responsible for, and the ones she cared about. And the very few she loved. Those ones...she'd protect them with everything she had, because she valued them too much to do anything less.

She'd always been on the outskirts of things in the real world, never getting too close to people, and the same mostly held true here in Tech na cinn Caillte as well, largely because the other Lost Ones didn't know what to make the mage who battled shadow hounds and survived to fight another day. The few people she became close to, though...there was very little she wouldn't do to protect them. After Rhoswen had been sacrificed, Riley hadn't let anyone else close, but Carmen had been stubborn, consistently there for her even at her worst times, even when she screamed and threw things and lashed out with her magic.

And Peter...

Peter had done the same for her, back...before. She'd been broken and hollow inside after getting out of Eichen House just after her seventeenth birthday, and even when her sister had brought her to the nature preserve to introduce her to the prestigious wolf pack she'd become Emissary for, Riley hadn't been able to scrounge up much enthusiasm, for anything really. It had been a totally different attitude, emptiness and apathy rather than the fury and wrath that had followed in the wake of Rose's death, but she'd definitely been just as broken, just in different ways.

But Peter had, for some reason, taken an interest in her. He'd sought her out from time to time, after pack meetings, and had needled at her until she'd actually engaged in a conversation with him, rather than just shrinking in on herself and averting her gaze. Somewhere along the way, their interactions had morphed into an actual friendship, pretty much the first true friendship Riley had ever had.

Even ignoring how her feelings for him had eventually grown far beyond friendship, she had an obligation to protect him just for that friendship alone. He'd treated her like a real person, at a time when she'd been struggling in a hundred different ways, scared and in pain and quietly out of control. He'd given her something to focus on, something to look forward to. He'd anchored her, and she'd never forgotten it. Never forgotten him.

She'd never stopped loving him, even after all this time. Even after seeing Alan Deaton's blank face ten years ago after Rhoswen had gone to him about seeing the Wild Hunt and realizing that even love couldn't help someone remember a would-be victim of the Hunt, she'd loved him. Even knowing that he was going to forget her, because if Alan couldn't remember Rhoswen when her sister was standing right in front of him barely a week after their engagement party, then there was no hope for Peter to remember Riley. Even then, she'd kept that love in her heart, because it was the most real thing she'd ever felt, and the purest.

She'd buried it, over the years. She'd had to, or she'd have gone insane from the loss. But that love had always been there, deep down. And now with Peter here, in this realm, a victim of the Wild Hunt ten years after she'd been ripped from a life she'd finally decided was worth living...

She didn't know what it meant. If it meant anything at all. But she wasn't going to risk losing a chance to find out. So she poured extra magic into the wards, determined to keep the darkness out.