Alone • Liam Dunbar

Part III: Malia Tate

Theo told her that her friends needed help. That they needed her. 

It had been such a long time since she was the one that they needed. Maybe that's why she agreed to go with him without thinking it through, because she needed to be needed.

Lately, they'd all been split. Not talking, not helping one another. As a coyote, Malia was used to it, being on her own, but being a part of a pack changed that part of her. She got attached to them. It was entirely unplanned and not anything she would have sought if she hadn't felt responsible for helping Stiles after his possession, but that didn't mean she regretted any of it.

After losing Kylie and her mother - her real mother - she knew how important it was to hold onto family. That's why she fought so hard not to let them go but she could only do so much without them holding on, too. She'd tried to talk to them about it but her attempts always fell flat. Usually, Stiles helped her with that; with finding her voice, but she didn't have him anymore, did she?

She'd known about what he'd done to Donovan, piecing together the separate clues just like he would, and she didn't care. But he did. He cared about the blood on both of their hands. He always made it seem like he understood, but she guessed the story changed when he was the one someone might call a monster...

There'd always been cracks in the foundation of who they all were but only recently did they start to split open. Though, it's not as if that was solely their fault. Their cracks could have been repaired if it had not been for Theo Raeken.

Theo Raeken, the boy that pretended to be their friend, the smirking face that got too close, the one with all the charming words that were really just poison under the disguise of a cure.

Malia didn't know all of what he'd done, but from the simple fact that she was currently fighting for her life against a bloodthirsty teenage chimera that he locked her away with instead of helping her friends, she assumed he'd done more damage than she could repair.

He'd said Hayden was dying at the hospital, and she should be there for Jac when it happened. Malia knew she couldn't offer words of condolences, but she could be there, and for Jac that had always been enough. So, she followed him. She believed him. It was so easy for him to trick her. It also didn't help that upon their arrival in Beacon Memorial's parking garage, Malia could pick up on the mercury from Hayden, and Melissa's signature lavender perfume. Even Argent's red SUV which Jac had been holding onto for the past few months was there, with her and Liam's scents all over it.

Theo hadn't been completely hiding the truth from her, but that was the point. The most believable lies were the ones based in truth.

He had led her upstairs and told her the others had been hiding on one of the floors undergoing construction. The one he took her to was grimy and littered with plastic tarps on the walls and floor. If Malia had actually cared enough to use her senses and protect herself, she may have picked up on the fact that though her friends were in the same hospital, they weren't on the same floor. Unluckily for her, she didn't realize that until Theo was shoving her into a room with a reinforced door that he swiftly padlocked behind her.

It didn't take much for her to break the door down. With her already bubbling aggression and the supermoon provoking her, it was a minute at most. The problem was that Theo was gone by the time she escaped, and hadn't left her completely alone.

She wandered around the floor trying to find clues of her friends' whereabouts, still trying to accomplish the task of helping them. She found no trace of them, though. Only empty blood bags that created a makeshift path. She followed it cautiously, soon coming face to face with another one of the Dread Doctors' human experiments.