Arrival

The forest should've been cold. It should've been cold, frightening and every other descriptor associated with darkness…. With gloom and terror.

And it was. Just not cold. Scott had been too busy to feel the biting midnight winds. From running around all day in search of Peter Hale, kissing Alison at the dance, to revealing his truth to her and the Argents.

His truth. His Lycanthropy. The very thing he was working so hard to reverse.

It was going exactly as Stiles and everyone else said it would.

And now he laid in the dirt cluttered with dead leaves staring down the barrel of a fifty cal.

Kate Argent stared down at him with an almost comically lacking expression for the intensity of everything. There she stood, fresh off of torturing Derek and now ready to put a hole in Scotts head. She even smiled as Alison struggled on the floor behind her.

Sadism lit a fire behind her eyes in those moments. The moments before it would all come to an end.

She shook her head and faked a frown, "Tsk….I do love those brown eyes."

Scott's lungs flexed, closing off his breaths and sending his heart into overdrive. Internally he flinched waited for the barrel to explode with light and pungent gunpowder fumes that would ultimately be burned into his skin forever.

"—Kate!"

Everyone froze at the unaccounted for voice. Masculine, barely restrained anger.

Christopher Argent stepped out from behind the charred and dilapidated remains of the Hale House. His black long coat hung about him like the freshly hunted pelt of a predator. Gamey…. lifeless yet intimidating. Fitting.

In a white-knuckled grip he held his firearms loaded with thick silver bullets. They gleamed against the blackness of his sleeves like fangs.

He came to a stop a dozen feet short of them all and squared up to Kate.

"I know what you did…." His eyes never left her.

Scott looked over at Kate only to find she looked more annoyed than anything else. She really was insane…

"Put the gun down." Chris ordered.

Scott had almost forgotten the weapon was aimed at him.

"I did what I was told to do." The sadistic machismo left Kate in her brothers presence. She didn't drop the weapon. Scott's heart never stopped racing.

"No one asked you to murder innocent people….. there were children in that house— ones who were human. Look what you're doing now?! Holding a gun at a sixteen year old boy. You have no proof he spilled human blood." Chris pressed. Pain and anger deepened the lines on his weathered face like physical cuts.

Kate turned away from Chris, looking back towards Scott down the barrel of her weapon.

"We go by the code." Chris said.

That time he caught Kates attention. Even more so when he spoke a series of words in a foreign language.

"Nous chassons ceux qui nous chassent."

Scott watched the gears turn in Alison's brain after hearing the words. She was still too shaken to speak clearly but he could make out her whispering voice.

"We hunt those who hunt us…."

Kate's grip on her weapon tightened— Chris responded and raised his without an ounce of hesitation.

"Put the gun down."

Kate was never much of a liste—

Everyone's thoughts were cut short as Chris fired into the night. The deafening crack echoed for miles and whizzed past Kate's face. Scott could hear the bark of a tree in the distance split.

Kate scoffed.

"….Or I'll put you down." Chris finished. As if the bullet flying past her face wasn't enough of a concluding statement.

Finally, Kate dropped her weapon.

Scott's muscles relaxed for the first time in what felt like hours. It felt like he was breathing for the first time again after an asthma attack. Life felt so precious in those moments. Unimaginably sacred.

….And like the roller coaster ride his life had been recently, the small up would be met with a divebomb downward.

The door to the Hale House screeched into the silence as it slowly opened. Shadows spread with every inch showing nothing and giving even less. Maybe that's what made it so horrifying. They saw nothing, they felt nothing from the house of horrors. And even so, they knew in those moments what was lingering within. Just waiting for the right time to strike.

Chris with all his years of training and combat spun to face the door, "Alison get back!"

Kate followed, aiming her weapon towards the door covered in chipped red paint.

Scott was on his feet in a flash, his weapons only waiting for the moment to unleash themselves.

They all backed away slowly without even knowing it. The intimidating pressure that began leaking from the opened door had a physical nature— a barely restrained madness. Like starved Wolves leashed on a thread.

"What is it?" Alison questioned in between battered sniffles.

As if she even needed to ask.

His mere presence started the change in Scott.

The fabric of his blue t-shirt stretched as his muscles grew ever so slightly. Fortifying and pumping with wolven power. The hair on his forearms and along his jawline thickened into dark brown fur as his facial features morphed seamlessly into something less human.

His breaths deepened as he looked up from the ground, eyes glimmering like liquid gold. "It's the Alpha…"