#sterekwitchhunt

~*~

Stiles honestly makes an effort to find the owner of the quill, but it appears to belong to no one. Well, Isaac makes an attempt to claim ownership, but it is so obviously fake that Stiles laughs in his face. Stiles even asks Derek because he usually sits near him and Lydia in the library, so it’s possible he might have seen something. But Derek denies any knowledge, so that’s a dead end, too. The only thing that confuses Stiles is how Derek’s ears turn red when Stiles asks him whether he knows anything about the quill - almost as if he has something to hide, though what that might be, Stiles can’t begin to guess.

The quill is too useful (and expensive) to not use, though, so Stiles decides to use it from now on - if the real owner does appear eventually, it won’t matter, after all it’s spelled with an endless supply of ink anyways. And either way, it’s the exact same blue as Stiles’ broom, old but trusty Roscoe, so really it was clearly meant to be.

Roscoe is probably the oldest broom in the whole school, older even than the school brooms the first years learn to fly on. Those get switched out every five to ten years, whereas Roscoe used to belong to Stiles’ mum and is older than Stiles. But a good broom isn’t just the spells originally put on it, but the trust and belief of its rider, the magic that infuses the wood and straw. Stiles and his dad are living in a muggle neighbourhood, so flying Roscoe was out of the question, but before coming to Hogwarts where he could finally actually fly it, he used to get it out each week and clean and polish it, cutting off crooked ends, oiling the handle and re-adjusting the footrests. And when he finally got to fly it, the first flying lesson in Hogwarts, Roscoe jumped into his hand before he could even think “up”, nevermind say it.

Stiles tried out for the Quidditch team first thing second year, and each year since actually, but he never got in. Sometimes he wished it worked more like muggle sports, where you have substitutes, so that he’d at least be able to make it second line, if first was that out of reach, but sadly, the wizarding world only ever had one set of players for one team, so no Quidditch for Stiles. That didn’t mean he stopped flying, oh no! Poor Roscoe had been collecting dust for too long already. Each Sunday morning, he got up early and took to the skies. The nice thing was that he had the pitch for himself usually, as no one else wanted to get up early on a Sunday. The quidditch teams usually trained on Saturdays and few others flew just for the sake of flying.

But half way through September, there’s someone else already on the pitch when he arrives. Derek Hale is making lazy circles around the hoops and when Stiles hesitates, not sure if it’s okay to join him or not, Derek swoops down and actually offers to leave if Stiles wants the pitch to himself!

“Or we could play one on one a little, if you want to,” he adds after a moment’s hesitation. “I have both a quaffle and a practice snitch, so we could do either of those.”

“One on one with the quaffle sounds fun,” Stiles says, not quite sure that this is actually happening. Derek Hale wants to play Quidditch with him?! But who is Stiles to look a gift horse in the mouth—he already knows that this gift horse has bunny teeth and that they are adorable.

Playing with Derek is actually far more fun than just flying around alone, Stiles finds. Derek is competitive, but not annoyingly so, just enough to make beating him a real challenge. Stiles is quicker, despite his older broom, but Derek has the bulk and reach on him, and the sheer power to put behind his movements. When he puts his all into throwing the Quaffle, Stiles quickly learns to duck rather than throw himself in its path. They are pretty evenly matched, all in all, and to Stiles’ surprise, but delight, Derek suggests meeting again at the same time next week for another game. And Stiles agrees, and finds himself already looking forward to it.

Poor Roscoe suffered a few new scratches and crooked or broken straws, but it’s nothing that a little tender loving care cannot take care of. And that evening, Stiles finds a brand new broom servicing kit at the foot of his bed, filled to the brim with highest quality polishes and oils and everything else a broom might need.

Once again, there is no note.

~*~

The broomkit is where Stiles starts getting suspicious. The quill could be explained away, and yes, even the chocolates, though no one else got any. But a broom servicing kit? Just for him?

“Perhaps someone is pranking me,” he tells Lydia, who smoothly transfigures his eyebrows into feathers.

“Well done, Miss Martin, five points to Ravenclaw,” Professor McGonagall praises as she walks by and Stiles tries to glare at Lydia, though that’s hard to do with his brand new feathers fluttering with every twitch of a muscle.

“Are you even listening to me? Someone left me broom servicing kit! On my bed!”

“You needed one, didn’t you?” Lydia asks, impassive to his plight.

“Well yes, but that’s not the point!” Stiles exclaims and Professor McGonagall interjects:

“Focus, Mr Stilinski! Your transfiguration needs to be smooth in both directions by the end of the lesson or you’ll get an additional three feet of parchment!”

Stiles’ first three attempts at the transfiguration fail to do anything, until Lydia calmly corrects his grip on his wand and gets her eyebrows singed off in thanks on the next attempt.

“Seriously Stiles, McGonagall is right, you need to focus! If my eyebrows are not in perfect condition by the end of the lesson, three additional feet of parchment are going to be the least of your problems!” she chides and then offers:

“None of this sounds malicious in any way - perhaps someone is simply trying to court you?”

“Court me? Who would want to court me?” Stiles yelps and his spell misfires, transfiguring Lydia’s lashes instead of eyebrows into feathers. At least it works this time. Lydia blinks—very slowly, probably because of the sudden weight of the feathers—and then glares at him.

“I really wouldn’t know; I’m more tempted to kill you at the moment myself! We haven’t got enough data to draw any conclusions on that. So perhaps you could just stop messing around and fix this!”

“Sorry, I really didn’t mean to,” Stiles apologises and concentrates hard to transfigure her lashes back to normal. Thankfully it works and McGonagall who has silently appeared next to him actually claps.

“Very well done, Mr Stilinski. That was a very precise transfiguration, ten points to Slytherin. But if next time you could stick to the task given and not complicate matters for both yourself and Miss Martin, I’d be much obliged. Both of you may get started on your essays now, if you please.”

When she has moved onto the next student, Stiles insistently asks Lydia:

“Do you really think someone could be courting me?”

“The facts all point towards it,” she replies and then adds, grabbing his hand and squeezing it: “You are a catch, Stiles, okay? Don’t forget that, and whoever is courting you better shouldn’t either, if they don’t want to deal with me.”

Stiles smiles and squeezes her hand gently back. It’s moments like this one that remind him why Lydia is his best friend, even across House borders.

~*~

As if his secret admirer had only waited for Stiles to get a clue, the gifts start coming more rapidly now. They range from small, like a pouch of cough drops and a vial of pepperup potion when he’s feeling a little under the weather, to a new cloak when his old one suffers a tragic accident in Potions. Some gifts arrive via owl in the Great Hall, but most simply appear on his bed. Not a single one includes a note or any hint at who might have sent it.

Thus, Stiles embarks on a veritable witch hunt—or wizard hunt, who knows what his secret admirer identifies as. The owls are always school owls, freely available to whoever does the trek up to the Owlery, so that’s a dead end. The gifts aren’t giving him much either, other than that his secret admirer either knows Stiles very well, or is keeping a close eye on him, and that money is not an issue for them. Stiles’ last hope is his bed. Or rather, the fact that gifts keep getting left on his bed. It’s not as if just anyone can walk into the Slytherin quarters and up into the Sixth Year Boys Dormitory, repeatedly at that, without anyone noticing.

The only people besides Stiles himself that regularly enter this room are his roommates and thus, armed with the power of logic, Stiles confronts them, demanding to know whether one of them is his secret admirer.

“Why would I court you when I have Erica?” Boyd asks in return and Isaac actually replies with: “Ew, no!”

“Well, thanks for that, guys,” Stiles retorts, feeling more than a little disgruntled. Not that he was particularly enthusiastic about either of them courting him, but really, they didn’t have to be so vehement in their denials. They are not super close, but Stiles would have said they are friends, though Isaac’s “ew no” is making him rethink that. Way to be rude, Lahey.

Those three, Isaac, Boyd, and his girlfriend Erica, a fellow Slytherin, too, at least don’t begrudge him his sorting into Slytherin like most of the house still seems to do. Even after five years, Stiles is still the odd one out in Slytherin, ambitious yes, cunning, definitely, resourceful, without a doubt; he could even be pretty ruthless if the situation called for it. But what too many of his housemates still couldn’t overlook was that he was “just” a half-blood. And one that had grown up more muggle than wizard, even, because of the early death of his mom. His dad did his best, but having no magic himself and none of mom’s family around, Stiles’ life before Hogwarts hadn’t involved much magic, even though he had been aware of its existence.

Sometimes it felt as though everyone else was right and the Sorting Hat had been wrong. When Stiles had let slip something along those lines one Sunday during their now routine one on one Quidditch match after the Seventh Year Slytherins had ganged up on him again the night before, he’d been surprised to hear that he wasn’t alone in that feeling. Apparently Derek’s sorting into Hufflepuff had caused a minor earthquake, too.

“Everyone from my family has been a Gryffindor,” he had explained, “going generations back. When I was sorted into Hufflepuff, some of them could not believe it and took pains to inform me of that, too. So from home, it was all ‘you should have been in Gryffindor’ while at school everyone had apparently agreed that I should have been in Slytherin instead. Their reasoning was based on my facial expressions of all things, which is even stupider than a family tradition.”

“You do have a pretty bad case of resting bitch face,” Stiles had mused and had then had to get every last morsel of speed out of Roscoe to escape from Derek’s tickling figures. It had made him feel better, though, to know he wasn’t the only one whose sorting was controversial. It was also nice to be able to add another point to the list of things he and Derek had in common. It was getting rather long.

~*~

The notes start appearing one week before Halloween. One each morning, via owl to the Great Hall, and written with a bespelled quill, so the handwriting doesn’t give anything away.

On the 25th, the note says:

“I’ve been trying to gather enough courage to talk to you for a while now, and this year is my last chance. I hope you’ve been enjoying my gifts.”

“It’s probably a Seventh Year,” Lydia says when Stiles shows her the note later and keeps talking across Stiles’ spluttering denials, because what Seventh Year would notice him? And then not dare to talk to him.

“The last chance is the important clue here—we are here for another year after this one, so if it was anyone from our year or below, this wouldn’t be their last chance. That only fits a Seventh Year. Now stop cutting your beetles and start crushing them or your potion is going to explode later.”

On the 26th, the note says:

“I admire your intelligence and your thirst for knowledge. It amazes me how you can make even the most random subjects sound fascinating and how you are interested in a wide range of topics, striving to deepen your understanding of them. I wouldn’t know boredom for the rest of my life as long as I could always talk to you.”

Stiles doesn’t show that one to Lydia. Instead he keeps it close and furtively rereads it several times during the day, his heart fluttering each time. There’s someone out there who doesn’t find his ramblings annoying, but interesting? Who likes how he can become obsessed with particular topics and has to find out everything about them as quickly as possible? It almost sounds too good to be true.

The note on the 27th arrives just as the other two have, via owl during breakfast, but this time Stiles is anticipating it, impatiently waiting for it, really. This one is shorter, but it still makes Stiles’ heart beat faster when he reads it:

“I admire your loyalty. Friends and family are of utmost importance and so few people realise that. I’m glad you do and hope to earn your loyalty one day, just as you’ve already earned mine.”

The note on the 28th says:

“If I could draw, I’d draw your eyes, for they have bewitched me. But as I can’t, I’m only left with my words, which are inadequate in comparison. Your eyes are the colour of whiskey, of amber, of molten gold, a gleaming fire and a deep pool that I long to drown in. I hope they won’t shutter in disappointment when they fall upon me.”

Stiles spends an embarrassing amount of time in the bathroom that day, staring at his own reflection, trying to see what his secret admirer sees in him, in his eyes. But all he sees is brown and a question: Who is writing to him?

The note on the 29th makes him blush and hide it away immediately, safely stowing it away until he can reread it in the privacy of his bed:

“I dream of your lips. I dream of their touch, their taste, your touch and your taste, your warmth and your bite. My dreams are sweeter than reality, for in them I hold you and touch you and you hold me and touch me in return. I long for your touch, your lips on mine, your body against mine, kiss chased by kiss, touch chasing touch. Would you also dream of me, I wonder?”

The handwriting on the note on the 30th is shaky, for once not smoothed out by a quill’s magic:

“I’m scared shitless, if you want to know the truth. I’m scared you’ll laugh in my face, or politely turn me down. It’s why I kept quiet for so long—it’s easier to dream when it’s just a dream. Reality threatens to turn the dream into a nightmare and I’m scared that instead of loving me, you’ll hate me.”

The note on the 31st, Halloween, is the shortest of them all:

“Meet me in the kitchens after classes?”

Stiles is a nervous mess for the rest of the day, which is a shame because he loves Halloween, and what’s better than Halloween in a castle with actual witches and wizards and ghosts? He’s sure his site is going to bruise because Lydia has elbowed him so often to draw his attention back to the here and now. Thankfully none of his teachers notice his distraction or he might have ended up getting detention and having to stand up his secret admirer.

It’s the thought that dominates his mind the whole day: Today he’ll get to meet his secret admirer. It makes the note he got yesterday suddenly so much more relatable, because as excited as Stiles is at that prospect, he’s also scared shitless. What if it was all big prank after all? What if he’ll come into the kitchen and it’s a bunch of Seventh Year Slytherins who’ll laugh at him and his romantic naivety? Or what if he does actually have a secret admirer, but it’s someone he can’t stand?

And what if it’s someone he likes? Somehow that’s the scariest option of them all.

The day both creeps and speeds by, every second lasting hours and every hour over in seconds and before Stiles knows it, he’s standing in front of the painting that hides the entrance to the kitchens and is trying to get his breathing under control. He didn’t know if this was a date, so he didn’t dress up, but he also didn’t know if it wasn’t a date, so he at least cleaned up after classes were over, wanting to look if not his best, then at least good. He’d probably have to settle for acceptable, but his secret admirer surely knew what they were getting themselves into.

Finally Stiles plucks up his courage and tickles the pear in the portrait.

The kitchens are as warm and friendly as ever, busy with the dinner preparations, but the house elves welcoming and excited to greet a guest nevertheless. This time he doesn’t get directed towards a table, though, but to a small door near the end of the kitchen that he’s never before noticed. When he steps through, he finds himself in another kitchen, much smaller, more like one you’d find in a regular household. It is filled with candles and magical Halloween decorations - bats flying just under the ceiling, dramatic cobwebs hanging over the cabinets, and pumpkins of all shapes, colours, and sizes everywhere.

And in the middle of the room stands Derek Hale, slightly pale but for his red ears. He is cautiously smiling at Stiles, as if he’s unsure of Stiles’ reaction still.

“Hello,” he says and Stiles answers dumbly: “Hi,” overwhelmed by the situation still.

“I know Halloween is your favourite holiday and as we can’t go trick and treating here, I thought we might carve some pumpkins together and just, talk?” Derek continues and Stiles blinks as he’s trying to process all of this.

“You are my secret admirer?” he asks finally and Derek actually blushes and ducks his head.

“Yes, I am. Sorry, I probably should have said that first thing. I hope you are not disappointed now.”

“Dude, no!” Stiles exclaims and immediately wants to kick himself, because really, ‘Dude’? “I’m not disappointed, seriously, so not disappointed, I’m just trying to wrap my head around this still. You are actually interested in me? Like, for real?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to say with the gifts and notes,” Derek replies and Stiles nods, mentally going back through all the gifts. So many of them make sense now that he knows they came from Derek, like the quill right at the beginning, or the broom servicing kit after their first game together. There’s just one question left:

“But how did you get them into my room? Do you know our password?”

Derek shakes his head.

“I asked Boyd and Isaac to help me. They would leave them on your bed for me.”

“That dick!” Stiles exclaims and quickly adds in explanation: “Isaac said ‘Ew, no’ when I asked him if he had anything to do with it, the dick.”

“Where you hoping he was giving you gifts?” Derek asks, his face suddenly blank, and Stiles vehemently shakes his head.

“God no, we’re friends, but no, really no.” He hesitates a moment but then decides it’s time for him to be brave, not just Derek, and says quietly: “I wasn’t hoping it was you either, but only because I didn’t dare to. I didn’t want to be disappointed if it was anyone but you. I’m very, very happy that it was you after all now, though.”

Derek ducks his head, but Stiles can still see the smile that’s stretching his lips and impulsively reaches out to grab his hand. After a moment of surprised stillness, Derek intertwines their fingers and squeezes gently. Stiles squeezes back, suddenly very giddy, and says:

“Now, you promised me pumpkin carving. I demand the biggest pumpkin—I’m going to make a dragon!”

“You can have all the pumpkins you want,” Derek promises and Stiles has to dart forward and press a kiss to his lips. It’s just a peck and it’s only just Halloween, but with the sense of how Derek’s smile tastes and feels burned into his brain, Stiles feels as though Christmas has come early.

Perhaps a dragon won’t be the first thing he carves after all.

A heart seems much more appropriate.

Stiles can see a second person in his periphery, dressed so darkly that she almost disappears into the murk. “Jake.”

Strong hands yank Stiles around and slam his back into the post so he’s facing the dark scowl of some guy in a green hoodie that’s stained and halfway to ‘tattered.’ Something creaks above him, catching Stiles’ attention and making him look up. A heavy, rusted hook swings gently over his head. “Oh, great! We’ve got meat hooks too!”

The man presses his hand back over Stiles’ mouth. “Shut up! Some of us actually want a break from the hooks this time around!”

“Jake!” The girl beside presumably-Jake grabs his arm and shakes it. Jake whips around to her and opens his mouth, probably to say something rude, but goes absolutely still. The girl with the dreadlocks is also standing frozen, eyes locked over Jake’s shoulder.

Grrrrrrrrr

Jake turns slowly toward the source of the low warning rumble. Derek bares his fangs and leans in closer, red eyes in their full glowing state. “Don’t. Touch. Him.”

“New killer! New killer!” The girl turns on a flashlight in her hand and shoves it into Derek’s face. Jake yanks Stiles away from the post and shoves him into the girl, herding them both toward the sparse trees and scrub that were allowed to grow among the stacks of tires.

“Run! Run, now!”

Stiles opens his mouth to point out that his boyfriend only looks like a serial killer (and only acts like one when he has to but he probably won’t say that part), but two hands grab onto him and drag him into the maze of scrapped cars. Stiles is surprised by the strength in the pair of them, and stumbles over his own feet, trying to keep up with them to avoid just being dragged through the dirt. Turning a sharp corner, Stiles is shoved against a stack of heavy tires that don’t even budge under his weight.

“You’re just gonna piss him off, dude,” Stiles says, rubbing his chest. “Also, you’re a lot stronger than you look.”

“Everything pisses them off.” Jake grabs the sleeve of Stiles’ hoodie. “Red? Seriously? What were you thinking?”

Stiles bristles and slaps his hand away. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t get dressed expecting the forest to eat me!”

The girl elbows Jake, glaring at him. “He’s really new. Be nice.”

“I am being nice, Claudette,” Jake says, and Stiles makes a mental note that Jake is clearly a liar. He yanks the shoulder of Stiles’ hoodie. “Take this off. It’s going to get you on a hook.”

Stiles shrugs out of the hoodie mostly because he wants answers more than he wants to argue about it. “Okay, hoodie is off. Now… explain literally everything you’ve said since we met.”

Jake stares at Stiles’ chest. “Are you seriously wearing an actual target on your shirt?”

“Again where I didn’t expect to be here,” Stiles repeats. “And also, why does it matter? What are we hiding from in this creepy junkyard?”

“From whatever almost cornered us at the hook,” Claudette says. “He’s new, though. We don’t know what he does. But you can bet it’s something bad.”

“Oh, that was just Derek,” Stiles says, making a face as Jake pulls off his own hoodie and shoves it over Stiles’ head to hide his shirt. “He’s with me. He does…” Stiles wants to finish that sentence with ‘me, also’ but this is probably not the time for that. “Good stuff.”

“The guy with the glowing eyes and fangs was… a survivor?” Jake shakes his head and grabs Stiles by the back of the collar and hauls him away from the tires. “You’ve got a lot to learn here, but we need to keep moving and find the generators. Lesson 1 is that anything not human is going to try to kill you.”

“I think I know Derek, and he’s totally harmless and o-” Stiles gets cut off by a beefy arm grabbing Jake by the back of the neck and yanking him away. Stiles really does have the worst timing ever.

“Run!” Claudette tries to pull Stiles back with her, shining her flashlight in Derek’s eyes again. Derek snatches the flashlight away and snaps it off.

“Stop doing that.” He hauls Jake around to face him. “And you. Stop touching Stiles.” He shoves Jake away and turns to Stiles, wrinkling his nose. “What are you wearing?”

“I’m blending into the forest,” Stiles says, flapping his arms in the loose, worn sleeves of the hoodie. “My shirt was apparently too much like an invitation.”

“You smell.”

“Shut up. I’m camouflaged.”

Derek looks around the forest. “From what?”

“We don’t know. From you, we thought,” Claudette says, holding her hand out for her flashlight. “If we’re the four survivors in the trial, then it’s some other killer.”

“Look, I feel like you guys are continuing a conversation we weren’t here for,” Stiles says as Jake turns and heads through the maze of stacked tires and low scrub.

“You’re gonna need to learn to fix generators.”

Claudette sighs. “I wish Dwight were here. He’s better at them.”

Stiles opens his mouth to ask, yet again, what the hell is going on and why the hell they’re apparently fixing shit in the middle of a junkyard. He doesn’t get that chance because something happens, and Stiles’ brain can only quantify it as A Thing.

The green dust kicks up and there’s a throaty, inhuman wail. The thing that appears from the dust is human in shape, but bent and gnarled, standing at a strange angle. There’s a wide black space in her head that might be a mouth. It’s female. Or used to be. There’s a split second where the thing just stands there, solid on the ground and yet somehow feeling like it’s dangling from strings.

Stiles doesn’t notice the massive claw on her right side until she’s swinging it.

“Hag!” Claudette snaps on her flashlight as she’s screaming. “It’s the Hag, run!”

Jake grunts sharply as the claws hit him across the shoulder, spattering red on the white of the birch trees behind them. When Claudette swings the beam of her flashlight into the thing’s eyes, it stumbles and hisses. Claudette grabs Jake’s wrist and sprints into the piles of wrecked cars.

“Come on!” she yells. Derek grabs onto Stiles, pulls him up under one arm, and takes off after them.

“What was that?” Stiles asks as Derek catches up, running alongside Claudette. “Was that thing human?”

“Did she fucking look human?” Jake snaps. “She’s the killer this time!”

“What the fuck do you mean ‘this time’?” Stiles flails a frustrated hand at Jake. “You keep saying shit like this! How often do you end up getting chased through this place by monsters??”

“A lot!”

“Shut up!” Derek and Claudette say at the same time.

“She’s going to hear you!” Claudette hisses.

“And you’re both annoying.” Derek pauses just long enough to grab Jake and heft him up over his shoulder. Jake hisses and bites back the grunt of pain as they take off running again.

Claudette looks behind her and gasps. Stiles tries to see over his shoulder, but can’t see around Derek’s arm as well. There’s more footsteps, though, with an odd gait to them. It has to be the monster… thing. The Hag, she’d called it.

“Derek, faster. Faster, man!”

“We can’t leave her,” Derek hisses. Right. Derek can’t carry all three of them. Not a slight against his werewolf strength, more a lack of arms thing.

“We-”

“Take him into the jungle gym! Try to find a med, check the chests!” Claudette orders, then breaks away from the group before Stiles can ask what the hell any of that is and where they’re supposed to find a chest.

“Claudette!” he yells, just as she vaults through the open window of the shell of a bus and disappears. The strange footsteps taper off. “Shit. Where are we going?”

“In there,” Jake groans from up on Derek’s shoulder. The thing they run into isn’t a jungle gym. It isn’t playground equipment at all. It’s a long wall of crushed cars and junk, stacked unevenly so there are gaps in the middle of the piles, and more stacks of tires. And a rusted pickup truck still mostly intact. It appears to be mostly just a lot of places to hide, or a lot of shit to duck around while being chased.

“I don’t see a chest,” Stiles says, looking around as Derek finally sets him back on his feet.

“It’s a junkyard. Why would there be chests?”

Stiles pauses and considers that. It’s really easy to get sucked into these weird habits these people have. “Fine, whatever. I’m just gonna rip strips off my hoodie.” Which sucks, because he likes that hoodie. But he can’t use Jake’s filthy sweatshirt to wrap around an open wound. He’ll just kill the guy from an infection.

“I’m gonna go after that thing that was chasing us.”

Jake eyes the long strips Stiles produces from his hoodie. “Those are gonna be really easy to see.”

“No more so than your blood. Hey, find me a weapon while you’re out,” Stiles tells Derek, crouching beside Jake and dumping his homemade bandages on their new friend’s lap.

“Doubt there’s a bat around here. What do you want?”

Stiles shrugs. “Anything long and heavy. See if there’s a bigger flashlight or just a non-jagged piece of junk.”

“Just wait until you hear the screaming,” Jake growls, hissing as Stiles begins wrapping the bandages around the claw marks. “The Hag will leave her on one of the hooks. You should be able to get her down and bring her back.

“…Yeah, why don’t you go now,” Stiles says, because it sounds entirely nicer for Claudette if they just avoid that altogether. “Like now.”

“Gone.” Derek climbs through a window in the junk and Stiles hears his footsteps run off.

“You have to be quiet,” Jake says, gingerly sitting up and lifting his arm to give Stiles more room to work on it. “You have to run from her and avoid her.”

“What, you guys just let her impale you on hooks?” Stiles ties off a strip and grabs another one. “How are you still alive.”

“You have to fix the generators until the door out of here works.”

Stiles knows weird rules when he hears them. Beacon Hills has her own weird rules. You stay out of the woods. No one ever does a license check on Eichen House. New kids enrolled in the high school with no paperwork, no transcripts, nothing. The front office staff changed all the time. No one ever thought any of it was weird. Stiles thinks his is a little easier to brush off than monsters jamming people onto meat hooks, but his is not to judge. “Yeah, well… we’ll go fix them as soon as Derek gets back.” When in Rome and all.

“Just listen for the scream.”

The scream doesn’t come at first. There’s a lot of faint noises that aren’t human. Hisses. Growls. First they’re the click-y sort that the Hag made. Then they’re more of Derek’s sort.

Then there’s a scream. Long and dry.

Stiles presses his back against the heavy wall of junk behind him, perched under Jake’s arm, ready to haul him up and run if he has to. His legs ache from the tension coiled in his muscles but he holds the position. And his breath.

Claws jut in through the open hole in the middle of the junk. Stiles bites back a scream in the hopes that the Hag’s ears are in as bad of shape as the rest of her.

“Son of a… push on the back for me,” Derek growls.

Claudette makes a miffed sound. “Ew, no. Just carry it around.”

“Fine, I’ll do it myself.”

The claws wiggle a little, and then the whole goddamn arm comes flying through the window and flops onto the ground beside Stiles and Jake. Jake stumbles back across their hiding space until he falls back against the pick-up truck.

“Seriously, Derek?” Stiles unfolds himself and nudges the arm with the toe of his sneaker, taking care not to focus on the ragged bits at the end.

“It’s long and heavy,” Derek says as he climbs through the window after his prize. “Just like you wanted.”

“You think you’re funny, but you’re not.” Stiles sighs and grabs the arm below the shoulder. The flesh and muscle that was left on it is as leathery as it looks, but the bone is surprisingly sturdy. And heavy, thus the flesh-ripping claws.

“I’m hilarious.”

“Not.” Stiles hefts his new weapon over his shoulder. “Alright. Guess we’re going on a hag hunt.”

“Stiles!” Scott yells, hands cupped around his mouth to amplify the sound.

“Derek!” Isaac calls, then strains to listen in the dark forest. “Where the hell did they go?”

“I don’t know.” Scott scratches the back of his head in frustration. “They can’t just disappear, you know? But I can’t smell them!”

“They’re somewhere,” Isaac huffs. “Let’s just regroup with Erica and Boyd and-” Isaac’s mouth stops working promptly as the forest around them just… wobbles and bends and then some dark void pries itself open. Giant, spindly legs hook out of the void and strain on it, pulling the blackness open further. More legs throw four people out of the maw, sending them sprawling onto the forest floor.

“Aw, you don’t want to play now?” Stiles rolls to his feet, brandishing something long and jagged at the legs. “Not so tough, are you?”

“Is that… an arm?” Isaac asks, watching Stiles proceed to beat at one of the legs with it.

“I… think so? Who are they?” Scott gestures at the two people who run up to join Stiles. The girl begins trying to pummel the legs with a flashlight while the guy just proceeds to stomp on the ones holding the gap open. One of the legs grabs onto the misshapen arm Stiles is using and pulls at it. Derek grabs onto Stiles as he tries to play tug-of-war for the arm.

“Stiles. Drop it.” Stiles growls and loses his grip as Derek yanks him back. The legs immediately retreat into the blackness, taking the arm with them. The gap swirls closed, leaving the forest quiet and… whole again, with no tear through the middle of it.

“Scott! Isaac!” Stiles wriggles free of Derek’s arms and rushes over, pulling Scott into a one-armed hug. “Dudes, we have got a hell of a story for you.”

“Yeah, like where were you?”

Isaac nods at the two new people being herded over by Derek. “And who the hell are they?”

“We’ll talk about that on the way to my house. I gotta get my bat before we go back.”

Scott blinks and scratches his head, watching Stiles and Derek leave the clearing with the other two following them like ducklings. “…Back where??”