At Twilight (TW/TVD Crossover)

Chapter 11

Chapter 11

"What the hell did you do, you goddamn idiot?" Gregoria Harper snarled at the inferior being quaking before her.

The younger woman's eyes widened in surprise, fear clear in their depths. "I did us a favor. Now we have a wolf for next month and won't have to depend on that filthy mutt.." She spat the last two words with a distorted snarl belying her cherubic face.

Gregoria closed her eyes on a sharp inhale, every muscle in her body tense with barely leashed anger and power. She wondered why she bothered sometimes. "He's not a rogue, Octavia. He's in a pack. Derek Hale's pack to be specific. Hale was already sniffing around and now you've just given him and that runt McCall a reason to dig their noses deeper into our business."

"I was just trying to help. I thought you'd be happy. I thought you'd be proud, mo-"

"Go," Gregoria interrupted her sharply. "I'll take care of this mess, your mess, again." Octavia scurried away, face flushed with shame.

The woman leaned back in her chaise, blonde hair coiling around her shoulders like pale snakes, while she tried to pinch away the tension creeping through her skull. How was that ... fool her womb's lot in life? She settled in deeper with a sigh, her brain firing on all synapses to come up with a plan for the unwanted runt in her basement who'd seen too much.

It wasn't long before the perfect solution dawned, her lips curling into a terrifying smirk.

The distinctness of rustling and guns being loaded a ways from them caught Caroline, Derek, and Scott's attention.

Their heads snapped in the same direction simultaneously.

"Fucking hunters," Derek growled. "We need to get out of the woods, we're not gonna find Isaac under a hail fire of silver bullets."

Caroline didn't pause to think, or else she might've rethought her next words. "Let's go to my place. We can camp out there until they clear out."

Derek hesitated for a moment before giving his nod of agreement while the boys had already begun speed walking to her as soon as "my place" was out of her mouth. She had a feeling their urgency had less to do with hiding out from the hunters and more to do with assuaging their curiosity about where she lived. Nosy fuckers. She wished she had a coffin handy so she could pretend she slept in it ala True Blood.

She sped off in the direction of the manor, chuckling at Stiles' exasperated, "Oh, come on!"

Caroline was sitting pretty on her front steps when they finally broke through the trees.

"You live at Forbes Manor?! How did we not put that together?" He whispered to his friend.

She saw the exact second the light bulb went off.

"Miss Sophia was your mom? I didn't know she had kids." Stiles asked, his eyes drinking in the property.

"She didn't." Derek answered gruffly.

Her eyes flew to him. "You knew my aunt?"

He gave a brief nod and nothing else. She contemplated pressing him but decided to hold off until the boys weren't around. Which meant she'd have to get Derek alone. Soon. Her cheeks heated and her eyes were drawn back to him just to realize his own were already fixed intensely on her.

"Why are you working for chump change as a sub when you have all this?" Stiles emphasized 'this' with his knobby arms waving in the general direction of the manor.

"I don't like to be bored." Or alone. "C'mon, let's go inside."

"So, what's your plan?" Caroline started, "To find Isaac."

"Is that your way of offering to help? I thought I was a predator?" He grimaced from where he sat on a stool across from her in her kitchen. Her eyes roamed his features, drinking them in, grateful for the excuse of southern manners to keep her eyes on him. She was comfortable with that framing.

The man had no reason to be that attractive. None.

"Technically, I wasn't wrong about you being a predator ... just the kind of predator you are." She sent him her most charming grin. "And I still don't think you should've turned Erica. Does she even know what she's in for?"

"She knows what she's out of."

Caroline thought back to the girl she met on her first day at Beacon Hills High and quietly accepted his words as truth.

"As for Isaac," The alpha released a weary sigh, aging decades past his twenty-five years before her eyes. "I honestly don't know. First I need to figure out what grabbed him. What's been grabbing wolves and butchering them for the past few months. We've just been chasing our tails, us and the police."

Caroline's chest tightened. "He's not the first wolf to go missing? Wolves from your pack?"

"No, Isaac is the first one of mine they've grabbed." He scrubbed a hand down his jaw in barely restrained frustration. "And that's another thing that's throwing me off. The others weren't wolves before they were grabbed."

She stared at him in stunned silence. Images and sensations she had buried deep for a decade forced their way to the surface. Beeping of hospital machines. Startling awake, her airway obstructed. Ravaging thirst. A full moon. A bonfire crackling towards the sky. Sharp scent of blood. Screaming. So much screaming. Opposing witches' voices rising with the dead language. Tyler. Oh God, is Tyler dead? Heart wrenching pain blazing through every square inch of her body.

"Caroline. You okay?" Derek's voice transported her back to the present.

She cleared her throat, shaking off the hell she'd been dragged back to. "Are you telling me something's grabbing regular people off the streets, turning them, and sacrificing them on full moons?"

"Basically." The boys' made their way from wherever they'd been exploring to join her and Derek in the kitchen. She had a pizza in the oven for them and the timer had just gone off. They were trying to eat her out of house and home, having already raided her fridge for what was left of this week's grocery run. For a human, Stiles kept up with his best friend without a problem.

"So, it's a wolf then. But why kill them? That's not very conducive to building a pack."

"You'd think, right?" Stiles snorted.

"I don't understand why they'd grab Isaac then. He's already turned." Caroline mumbled while pulling the pizza from one of the ovens.

"Maybe they wanted a premade wolf lunchable this time."

Caroline snorted before sending Stiles a blank stare. "That's not funny." Her eyes flashed to Derek. Torment lined his face.

"You're right." Stiles said, hands rising in the well known sign of surrender.

"What would a wolf be doing sacrificing other wolves though? What's the gain?" Scott groused.

"What it always is-power." Derek was back to being the cool, unbothered man she was used to seeing on campus. He'd pulled himself together in her brief exchange with the boys but she couldn't get the image of his other face out of her head. She wondered how many times a day he had to quietly gather himself like that. She eyeballed him, picking up on his wan complexion and the pockets of gray under his eyes. Those same eyes, a deep forest green filled with a worry he couldn't shake, flitted to hers before returning to the boys.

"Maybe it's a regular serial killer, who just happens to be a werewolf, and is just getting his rocks off or something. We always have weird rogues coming through town that we have to chase off." Scott said hopefully into the charged silence.

"It's so sad that that's a preferred option." She sighed. Tension gradually slipped into her muscles as her mind moved through possibility after possibility on the limited information she had. Hybrids, witches, who knew what else. Her eyes flitted back to Derek. She would pull every thread until something turned up to alleviate even ten percent of whatever the man across her island was carrying.

Jesus, Caroline.

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