Alone • Liam Dunbar

Six

Scott braced himself between the door to the loft and Peter and Malia when they move to bolt out of it. 

"Guys, wait." 

"For what? Kate's out there twisting her way into Derek's head, yet again. We need to find her." Peter says seriously, not a trace of smugness. 

Peter had his faults, but if he was willing to put aside his sadistic tendencies for a night to help us save Derek, then I didn't give a damn about his flaws. I was more than willing to fight beside him for Derek.

"All we need's a scent." Malia adds, unknowingly agreeing with her father. 

"That could take hours. If we want to get ahead of her, we need to figure out where she's going." Scott argues, still blocking their way.

"Not to underestimate my own cognitive faculties, but we're not exactly a brain trust of geniuses here." Peter holds his arms out to all of us, even himself.

I couldn't bother to argue. My own skills lay more in battle strategy and force rather than brainstorming. I could probably track Derek, but that would take time, and knowing Kate, she would do a good job of covering her tracks. She wouldn't leave anything behind for us to find. Beacon Hills wasn't too large of a town, but without any leads, we would be searching for days.

"Then maybe we should call one?" Scott suggests with a faint smile. He pulls out his phone, taps away on the screen, and eventually dials a particular number.

The line rings a few times but soon someone on the other end picks up. 

"You have no idea how perfect your timing is." Lydia's voice echoes through the empty loft from the speaker. She trembles as she speaks, making me uneasy. 

"What's wrong?" Scott asks, and Kira replies. 

"We came to a gas station to fill up Lydia's car, but it turns out she had a full tank and there was a very dead body in the bathroom. He's all over the walls and the ceiling. Kate has definitely been here." 

"What does it look like? Can you send pictures?" Scott asks them, earning low groans of disgust. 

"Uh, okay." Lydia clears her throat. 

There's some shuffling coming from her side of the call, followed by the artificial snap of a shutter. 

"To be honest, I have a perfect GPA in AP Biology and there are parts of the human anatomy I have never seen before on these walls." She mumbles. 

Scott's phone chimes a second later. He minimizes the call screen to pull up his messages from Lydia, tapping on the first image and scrolling through the rest.

Kira wasn't exaggerating when she said that the man's body was everywhere. The walls were covered with blood and chunks of meat, and the man himself was torn open on the bathroom floor. It was incredibly violent, and unmistakably Kate.

"Why would she want to kill a gas station attendant?" Malia shakes her head, not understanding the outburst we were looking at.

"I don't think she could help it. This was done in a frenzy, it's not murder. It's a symptom." Peter estimated, considering everything we've been piecing together since we arrived.

"A symptom of what?" Scott cringes at the image of a disemboweled man on his phone.

"A lack of control." I finish for Peter, earning a nod of his in my direction. 

"Derek said he's still having trouble on the moon, that he's still learning, so does Kate want to learn too?" Scott wonders. 

"No," Realization dawns on Peter's face. "She wants the Triskelion."