Fic || The Darker Part of Darkness
*c:thisnewjoe, c:stiles stilinski, c:derek hale, p:stiles stilinski/derek hale, pt 238: threaten, rating:t, type:fic
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Author: thisnewjoe
Title: The Darker Part of Darkness
Rating: Teen
Pairing/s: pre-Stiles Stilinski/Derek Hale
Character/s: Stiles Stilinski, Derek Hale
Summary: Stiles and Derek halt their journey to Satomi's land and investigate a powerful, deathly odor in the forest.
Warnings: None
Content Notes: Contains Rants, short attention-span theater, and very undesirable tasks
Submission Type: Fic
Word Count: 2,709
Prompt: #238, "threaten"
Author's Notes: I received feedback in last week's one-shot that left me thinking about what would happen next for these guys, and this is what came out of that process. I also think the title is dorky, and I'm keeping it anyway.
"We didn't even make it out of town, Derek." Stiles is hissing at Derek from the treeline.
There's an angry growl in response. Stiles is getting better at pinpointing the source of wolfy responses in the pack, but he half-suspects the wolves have a secret ventriloquism power because they seem to throw their voices around in their beta and full-shift forms. Lucky jerks.
Whatever Stiles muttered in reply goes missed by the wolf. The sweet repulsive stench of deathly ichor is nearby. With one ear angled toward the young human man, he scans the underbrush with his other ear, listening for any suspicious sounds or silences against the background noise of the forest. He forces himself to sniff the air in rapid pulses, keeping the scents fresh in his snout and alive in his mind. There were deer here today. A fox marked a bush a few days ago. A snake raided a quail nest a couple hours ago. Nothing yet helps him identify a direction to go to identify this things polluting the woods.
"The bugs are quiet." The wolf is about to growl again when a whispered, "Oh, sorry. Shutting-up now" passes through the bushes. The wolf thinks, "Idiot", as loudly as he can at the barely-silent young man a few trees away.
Stiles has a hard time keeping his mouth shut, and he passes on the impulse to do the lock-and-key motion with his hand over his lips. It's only partly because he's pretty sure Derek can't actually see him from wherever he is at. He's also unsure if their potential adversary's vision might be motion-based, so he stills himself again. The wolf should appreciate his good sense in this tense moment. After all, it's dark here, much too dark for regular human eyes to identify anything except the tiny pecks of starlight between needles on the trees above.
After a minute of absolute silence, where even the bugs sounded far away and there was no crunching of things in the underbrush, Stiles mind threw him an idea and he lept after it, rummaging somewhat unquietly through his backpack for a rolled-up bundle of things he hadn't yet let anyone else see. He smiles to himself, admiring his handiwork and tugging at the leather straps that hold the bundle closed.
In the darkness, the wolf smells the chemicals used in recently-tanned leather. It is a brief distraction from the death and decay, and he follows it for a few steps before realizing that Stiles must be up to something. Whatever he's up to usually works out, but not without help. Derek pads quietly and low across the forest floor, listening for any sign of movement that might signal a threat. In a few paces, he finds himself being shushed by a grinning Stiles.
Stiles keeps eye-contact with the wolf for a moment longer, then reaches to pull at a young sapling in the ground. Derek watches him pull it out slowly, chanting almost breathlessly as he does so, and flicks his ears briefly in the direction of Stile's motion before listening around them again. After a moment, he realizes he can't hear anything beyond an arm's reach anymore. He looks at Stiles, tilting his head questioningly at him, and the young man just laughs.
"I've got this, buddy. Look, I forgot that I figured out how to do a scrying and that I could see in the dark now, so... here you go." Derek flashes his red eyes and flaps his ears back and forth. Stiles watches him for a moment. "Yeah, and I also figured out how to wrap everything inside a silent spell that conveniently hides us from outside view." Derek plops down in a stubborn sitting position. "What, did you think I haven't been practicing everything I'm studying in these bestiaries? There's a lot of sloppy spell notes, so I'm mostly avoiding those to keep myself firmly stuck in this dimension-"
Derek tries hiding his yip of surprise in an aggressive growl, and Stiles pretends not to have noticed.
"Don't be such a worrywolf, Derek. I'm not doing any of those spells, which is what I just said." He shakes his head, then looks around. "Okay, we gotta get after this thing. My little plant friend here," he holds up the little green sapling, "can help us out."
Derek can tell he's withholding something. He huffs a deep breath out and glances around.
"Look, I need you help with the next part; my nose isn't sensitive enough to find this thing, and I think I can help your senses enough to let us find it."
The wolf gives Stiles a skeptical side-eye and stands, turns, and plops his ass down again, curling his tail around himself and looking outward into the forest. He ignores whatever Stiles says afterward, and now that he's really looking out, he can see that the spell Stiles wove helps his eyes pick up lots of details farther away than he normally can. They're sharper, too, and more sensitive to movement. He can't hear the deer he is looking at, with only it's ears poking out above the scrubby plants scattered throughout this part of the forest.
Stiles can't tell what's got Derek interested, but he watches Derek's tail twitch and notices the wolf quietly lick it's chops, as if it's found something particularly delicious. He mentally logs these as interesting side-effects, and hopes things don't get too far out of-
"Derek!" he hisses. The wolf stands immediately and glances in the area Stiles is pointing at. Derek sees nothing and shakes his head.
"Really?" Stiles scratches his head, more perplexed now at Derek's seeming incapacity to see this very scary thing than he is at being able to see it himself. "Try your beta form, maybe?"
Derek's half-shifted form has senses that are very good compared to humans, but still lacking compared to his full wolf form. He's reluctant to change, but Stiles pokes him between the shoulders with a stick-inconveniently the one place out of biting reach-and Derek turns to him, flashing the most annoyed look he can at the irritating human menace. Stiles is looking off to their left, though, pointing into the distance with the stick.
"Are you seeing this, dude?" Stiles exclaims, seeming extremely loud and intense against the near-silence of the last several minutes.
Derek takes a fighting stance. "How sure are you that we can't be heard?"
"Entirely. 100 percent." Stiles watches the frail figure in the wilderness, perhaps 40 feet away from them. It stands bony and rigid. It holds bloodied daggers in its hands. The mouth of the thing is open wide, and everywhere it points, the darkness seems to deepen. It eats the starlight. Stiles squeaks, "maybe 99 percent?" He holds the feeble twig in front of himself protective.
"I see something dark out there. It's kinda lumpy and misshapen." Derek squints, trying to see if he can get a clearer view.
Stiles corrects him sharply. "No, Derek, it's kinda skeletal and eating the starlight."
Derek tilts his head again. If Stiles had been looking at him, there might have been a dog joke there. Derek shifts into full human before Stiles gets a chance, and the werewolf notices an immediate change in his perception of the in the trees.
"I might know her."
"How could you know her? Another one of your zany murderous ex-girlfriends? The last one was a real roller-coaster for us all, buddy."
"I think she's a god. Might be Aztec, but it's been a while since I studied the legends." Stiles glances at him, wondering just how much mythology Derek actually keeps locked inside his furry head. "She shouldn't be here, Stiles."
Following the glance, Stiles finds himself looking again at the face of the man standing next to him, still in a fighting stance. Derek looks wound and ready to attack or defend, as needed. Stiles is specifically not looking at anything below the scruffy neck, certainly not admiring the round, muscled shoulder and the beautiful curve of that flexing tricep. "We gotta figure out how to get you wolves to transform with clothes when you return to human form." Then there's the way the muscles along the sides of Derek's abdomen are woven like armor under his skin, and which move like precision machinery. Derek's back muscles twitch as each breath fills the mighty lungs of that fantastic werewolf form...
"Did you forget to take your medication today?"
Stiles is immediately offended. "Hey, Sourwolf! Of course I d-..." He shakes his head. "Yeah, I guess I must have." He forces himself to focus on the silently looming danger nearby. "Sorry, I'm trying."
Derek lowers his voice. "I know you are. You just gotta stay focused so we get out of this." He says it calmly, partly to soothes Stiles, and a little bit because he needs the help refocusing, too, since he again caught Stiles gaping at him. The wolfy growls a pleasant hum in Derek's mind, and mentally pokes him to notice how the younger man's hormones shifted during the moment of distraction. Derek tries to push away the memory of the spicy scent that left warm gravel moving in his chest. Derek took a deeper breath to center himself. Damn. That did not help...
"I kinda need to survive tonight, too, man. There's nothing I want more right now than that." Stiles feels through his kit while staring at the figure in the distance. She is scanning the air and eating the light, standing in her spot among the trees. He guesses she is sniffing around for something. Stiles sincerely hopes it isn't them.
"Someone called her here, Stiles. She belongs in Mexico, and wouldn't have come here unless someone treated human remains badly and moved them to Beacon Hills." Derek crosses his arms and keeps himself turned somewhat away from Stiles, lessening the chances for additional distractions in the young man's already strapped attention-span.
"Micteca-something, right?"
"Mictecacihuatl? How do you know about her?"
"She's in Great-Grandma Argent's bestiary. Seems the leader of the Calaveras clan and Great-Great-Grandma Argent spent time hunting her in the past. I decided to write about it in my American History class. They didn't say she was chasing after misplaced human bodies, though. That seems like an important detail. I forgot her name because I was mostly copy-pasting several quotes in an attempt to get the paper up to 30 pages."
Derek knows he's going to regret asking, but so long as the god is standing relatively still in her current location, he allows himself to risk asking, "Isn't that class about the history of the United States?"
"Yes! It is! And it's completely inappropriate to look only at US history given the broad intersections of political, social, economic and cultural history that came out of all the changes happening in the Americas since Europeans started invading en masse." He looks disgusted, but Derek lets him continue, keeping his eyes focused on the creature of myth in the distance. "Columbus never landed on the mainland, and he started the genocidal mania that gripped this hemisphere for hundreds of years." Stiles huffs, incensed, "We shouldn't keep teaching social studies as if the heritage of the countries in both Americas, and I mean North and South, are taught as well. So I included some legends and kept most of the truth in them, but added some spice of my own."
"Spice, as in hypothetical facts from the Argent bestiary?"
"Yeah, maybe. These are important things to know. People should know this stuff! It could save lives!"
"Stiles, they'd have to believe you. Wait!" Derek shushes him with a hand up, and takes a breath before continuing. "Do you think that, maybe, if you don't mind, you could work on a plan to get us out of here? Your schoolwork isn't important right now, and I don't think I should try intimidating her."
"What? No! First, the paper was only assigned to be five pages, and I rocked my research pretty well. Second, she's probably going to go away if she finds the bones she's looking for. Somebody must have taken from from down south put them out here somewhere. We should help her find them." Stiles is still avoiding looking directly at Derek, so he gives him a side-eye and adds, "Those tomb-raiding assholes have no respect for life."
"For life? And don't think I didn't notice that reference."
"Yeah, for our lives. And good, I'm glad you did." Stiles huffs, feigning indignance. "Well, you'd probably be able to get away from her in your full wolf form because she's really only interested in humans, and you, fluffy, don't really qualify."
Derek slaps him up the back of his head.
"Ow! Fuck, dude!"
"Think, Stiles. What did the Argents say about getting rid of it?"
"I just told you: We gotta find the bones and bring them to her. She doesn't do much else, really, other than hide in the shadows as the festivals of the dead. We should probably stay several long paces away from her, just in case, you know? I prefer to be entirely out-of-sight, of course, but I don't know if she has eyes."
"She has open eyes in the engravings, so assume that she can see you."
"Huh. There weren't pictures of her in the bestiary. I didn't know what to expect."
Derek false-gasps, clutching his chest, "You mean to say that you didn't include a 3-by-5 glossy print with your history paper?"
"Obviously I will next time!" Stiles feebly sasses back. "And when did you start becoming so verbose? You're normally silentwolf, or brooding-in-the-corner-wolf, or slamming-puny-humans-into-the-wall-wolf. What's got your tail in a ruff?"
Derek shifts back to wolf form. It keeps him from laughing, but he sits on his tail just to make sure Stiles doesn't see any potential wagging that might occur. He pokes his paw at the edge of the bubble around them, and tilts his head questioningly.
"Should be fine. Just don't go far, and keep quiet out there. This thing is actually starting to take some effort to maintain, so come back quick, okay?"
Great. Of course. This was supposed to be a nice drive to see Satomi. Knowing Stiles, this magic bubble is likely to pop sooner, not later, and then they might or might not be in real trouble.
A part of Derek wishes the hunters were honorable, and could be trusted to take care of this on their own.
"Want me to call Chris?" Stiles offers, as if reading Derek's mind. Derek nods in response, and crosses the barrier.
On the other side, there are night forest sounds in the far distance, but most creatures big and small seem to be keeping quiet so long as the lady is here. Derek watches Stiles dial on his phone, then look frustrated, then easily imagines the reason for the upset expression crossing the other man's face is because the magic barrier is probably blocking cell phone signals. Stiles holds his phone up and shakes his head, confirming Derek's suspicions.
Alright, let's see if we can find the body, and he resumes sniffing again, feeling his way past the scent of the god of death and finds another trace in the wind of freshly rotting flesh on bones several paces further out. He sets himself to the grisly task of finding the bones, then figuring out how to get the god herself to find them.
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Author: thisnewjoe
Title: The Darker Part of Darkness
Rating: Teen
Pairing/s: pre-Stiles Stilinski/Derek Hale
Character/s: Stiles Stilinski, Derek Hale
Summary: Stiles and Derek halt their journey to Satomi's land and investigate a powerful, deathly odor in the forest.
Warnings: None
Content Notes: Contains Rants, short attention-span theater, and very undesirable tasks
Submission Type: Fic
Word Count: 2,709
Prompt: #238, "threaten"
Author's Notes: I received feedback in last week's one-shot that left me thinking about what would happen next for these guys, and this is what came out of that process. I also think the title is dorky, and I'm keeping it anyway.
"We didn't even make it out of town, Derek." Stiles is hissing at Derek from the treeline.
There's an angry growl in response. Stiles is getting better at pinpointing the source of wolfy responses in the pack, but he half-suspects the wolves have a secret ventriloquism power because they seem to throw their voices around in their beta and full-shift forms. Lucky jerks.
Whatever Stiles muttered in reply goes missed by the wolf. The sweet repulsive stench of deathly ichor is nearby. With one ear angled toward the young human man, he scans the underbrush with his other ear, listening for any suspicious sounds or silences against the background noise of the forest. He forces himself to sniff the air in rapid pulses, keeping the scents fresh in his snout and alive in his mind. There were deer here today. A fox marked a bush a few days ago. A snake raided a quail nest a couple hours ago. Nothing yet helps him identify a direction to go to identify this things polluting the woods.
"The bugs are quiet." The wolf is about to growl again when a whispered, "Oh, sorry. Shutting-up now" passes through the bushes. The wolf thinks, "Idiot", as loudly as he can at the barely-silent young man a few trees away.
Stiles has a hard time keeping his mouth shut, and he passes on the impulse to do the lock-and-key motion with his hand over his lips. It's only partly because he's pretty sure Derek can't actually see him from wherever he is at. He's also unsure if their potential adversary's vision might be motion-based, so he stills himself again. The wolf should appreciate his good sense in this tense moment. After all, it's dark here, much too dark for regular human eyes to identify anything except the tiny pecks of starlight between needles on the trees above.
After a minute of absolute silence, where even the bugs sounded far away and there was no crunching of things in the underbrush, Stiles mind threw him an idea and he lept after it, rummaging somewhat unquietly through his backpack for a rolled-up bundle of things he hadn't yet let anyone else see. He smiles to himself, admiring his handiwork and tugging at the leather straps that hold the bundle closed.
In the darkness, the wolf smells the chemicals used in recently-tanned leather. It is a brief distraction from the death and decay, and he follows it for a few steps before realizing that Stiles must be up to something. Whatever he's up to usually works out, but not without help. Derek pads quietly and low across the forest floor, listening for any sign of movement that might signal a threat. In a few paces, he finds himself being shushed by a grinning Stiles.
Stiles keeps eye-contact with the wolf for a moment longer, then reaches to pull at a young sapling in the ground. Derek watches him pull it out slowly, chanting almost breathlessly as he does so, and flicks his ears briefly in the direction of Stile's motion before listening around them again. After a moment, he realizes he can't hear anything beyond an arm's reach anymore. He looks at Stiles, tilting his head questioningly at him, and the young man just laughs.
"I've got this, buddy. Look, I forgot that I figured out how to do a scrying and that I could see in the dark now, so... here you go." Derek flashes his red eyes and flaps his ears back and forth. Stiles watches him for a moment. "Yeah, and I also figured out how to wrap everything inside a silent spell that conveniently hides us from outside view." Derek plops down in a stubborn sitting position. "What, did you think I haven't been practicing everything I'm studying in these bestiaries? There's a lot of sloppy spell notes, so I'm mostly avoiding those to keep myself firmly stuck in this dimension-"
Derek tries hiding his yip of surprise in an aggressive growl, and Stiles pretends not to have noticed.
"Don't be such a worrywolf, Derek. I'm not doing any of those spells, which is what I just said." He shakes his head, then looks around. "Okay, we gotta get after this thing. My little plant friend here," he holds up the little green sapling, "can help us out."
Derek can tell he's withholding something. He huffs a deep breath out and glances around.
"Look, I need you help with the next part; my nose isn't sensitive enough to find this thing, and I think I can help your senses enough to let us find it."
The wolf gives Stiles a skeptical side-eye and stands, turns, and plops his ass down again, curling his tail around himself and looking outward into the forest. He ignores whatever Stiles says afterward, and now that he's really looking out, he can see that the spell Stiles wove helps his eyes pick up lots of details farther away than he normally can. They're sharper, too, and more sensitive to movement. He can't hear the deer he is looking at, with only it's ears poking out above the scrubby plants scattered throughout this part of the forest.
Stiles can't tell what's got Derek interested, but he watches Derek's tail twitch and notices the wolf quietly lick it's chops, as if it's found something particularly delicious. He mentally logs these as interesting side-effects, and hopes things don't get too far out of-
"Derek!" he hisses. The wolf stands immediately and glances in the area Stiles is pointing at. Derek sees nothing and shakes his head.
"Really?" Stiles scratches his head, more perplexed now at Derek's seeming incapacity to see this very scary thing than he is at being able to see it himself. "Try your beta form, maybe?"
Derek's half-shifted form has senses that are very good compared to humans, but still lacking compared to his full wolf form. He's reluctant to change, but Stiles pokes him between the shoulders with a stick-inconveniently the one place out of biting reach-and Derek turns to him, flashing the most annoyed look he can at the irritating human menace. Stiles is looking off to their left, though, pointing into the distance with the stick.
"Are you seeing this, dude?" Stiles exclaims, seeming extremely loud and intense against the near-silence of the last several minutes.
Derek takes a fighting stance. "How sure are you that we can't be heard?"
"Entirely. 100 percent." Stiles watches the frail figure in the wilderness, perhaps 40 feet away from them. It stands bony and rigid. It holds bloodied daggers in its hands. The mouth of the thing is open wide, and everywhere it points, the darkness seems to deepen. It eats the starlight. Stiles squeaks, "maybe 99 percent?" He holds the feeble twig in front of himself protective.
"I see something dark out there. It's kinda lumpy and misshapen." Derek squints, trying to see if he can get a clearer view.
Stiles corrects him sharply. "No, Derek, it's kinda skeletal and eating the starlight."
Derek tilts his head again. If Stiles had been looking at him, there might have been a dog joke there. Derek shifts into full human before Stiles gets a chance, and the werewolf notices an immediate change in his perception of the in the trees.
"I might know her."
"How could you know her? Another one of your zany murderous ex-girlfriends? The last one was a real roller-coaster for us all, buddy."
"I think she's a god. Might be Aztec, but it's been a while since I studied the legends." Stiles glances at him, wondering just how much mythology Derek actually keeps locked inside his furry head. "She shouldn't be here, Stiles."
Following the glance, Stiles finds himself looking again at the face of the man standing next to him, still in a fighting stance. Derek looks wound and ready to attack or defend, as needed. Stiles is specifically not looking at anything below the scruffy neck, certainly not admiring the round, muscled shoulder and the beautiful curve of that flexing tricep. "We gotta figure out how to get you wolves to transform with clothes when you return to human form." Then there's the way the muscles along the sides of Derek's abdomen are woven like armor under his skin, and which move like precision machinery. Derek's back muscles twitch as each breath fills the mighty lungs of that fantastic werewolf form...
"Did you forget to take your medication today?"
Stiles is immediately offended. "Hey, Sourwolf! Of course I d-..." He shakes his head. "Yeah, I guess I must have." He forces himself to focus on the silently looming danger nearby. "Sorry, I'm trying."
Derek lowers his voice. "I know you are. You just gotta stay focused so we get out of this." He says it calmly, partly to soothes Stiles, and a little bit because he needs the help refocusing, too, since he again caught Stiles gaping at him. The wolfy growls a pleasant hum in Derek's mind, and mentally pokes him to notice how the younger man's hormones shifted during the moment of distraction. Derek tries to push away the memory of the spicy scent that left warm gravel moving in his chest. Derek took a deeper breath to center himself. Damn. That did not help...
"I kinda need to survive tonight, too, man. There's nothing I want more right now than that." Stiles feels through his kit while staring at the figure in the distance. She is scanning the air and eating the light, standing in her spot among the trees. He guesses she is sniffing around for something. Stiles sincerely hopes it isn't them.
"Someone called her here, Stiles. She belongs in Mexico, and wouldn't have come here unless someone treated human remains badly and moved them to Beacon Hills." Derek crosses his arms and keeps himself turned somewhat away from Stiles, lessening the chances for additional distractions in the young man's already strapped attention-span.
"Micteca-something, right?"
"Mictecacihuatl? How do you know about her?"
"She's in Great-Grandma Argent's bestiary. Seems the leader of the Calaveras clan and Great-Great-Grandma Argent spent time hunting her in the past. I decided to write about it in my American History class. They didn't say she was chasing after misplaced human bodies, though. That seems like an important detail. I forgot her name because I was mostly copy-pasting several quotes in an attempt to get the paper up to 30 pages."
Derek knows he's going to regret asking, but so long as the god is standing relatively still in her current location, he allows himself to risk asking, "Isn't that class about the history of the United States?"
"Yes! It is! And it's completely inappropriate to look only at US history given the broad intersections of political, social, economic and cultural history that came out of all the changes happening in the Americas since Europeans started invading en masse." He looks disgusted, but Derek lets him continue, keeping his eyes focused on the creature of myth in the distance. "Columbus never landed on the mainland, and he started the genocidal mania that gripped this hemisphere for hundreds of years." Stiles huffs, incensed, "We shouldn't keep teaching social studies as if the heritage of the countries in both Americas, and I mean North and South, are taught as well. So I included some legends and kept most of the truth in them, but added some spice of my own."
"Spice, as in hypothetical facts from the Argent bestiary?"
"Yeah, maybe. These are important things to know. People should know this stuff! It could save lives!"
"Stiles, they'd have to believe you. Wait!" Derek shushes him with a hand up, and takes a breath before continuing. "Do you think that, maybe, if you don't mind, you could work on a plan to get us out of here? Your schoolwork isn't important right now, and I don't think I should try intimidating her."
"What? No! First, the paper was only assigned to be five pages, and I rocked my research pretty well. Second, she's probably going to go away if she finds the bones she's looking for. Somebody must have taken from from down south put them out here somewhere. We should help her find them." Stiles is still avoiding looking directly at Derek, so he gives him a side-eye and adds, "Those tomb-raiding assholes have no respect for life."
"For life? And don't think I didn't notice that reference."
"Yeah, for our lives. And good, I'm glad you did." Stiles huffs, feigning indignance. "Well, you'd probably be able to get away from her in your full wolf form because she's really only interested in humans, and you, fluffy, don't really qualify."
Derek slaps him up the back of his head.
"Ow! Fuck, dude!"
"Think, Stiles. What did the Argents say about getting rid of it?"
"I just told you: We gotta find the bones and bring them to her. She doesn't do much else, really, other than hide in the shadows as the festivals of the dead. We should probably stay several long paces away from her, just in case, you know? I prefer to be entirely out-of-sight, of course, but I don't know if she has eyes."
"She has open eyes in the engravings, so assume that she can see you."
"Huh. There weren't pictures of her in the bestiary. I didn't know what to expect."
Derek false-gasps, clutching his chest, "You mean to say that you didn't include a 3-by-5 glossy print with your history paper?"
"Obviously I will next time!" Stiles feebly sasses back. "And when did you start becoming so verbose? You're normally silentwolf, or brooding-in-the-corner-wolf, or slamming-puny-humans-into-the-wall-wolf. What's got your tail in a ruff?"
Derek shifts back to wolf form. It keeps him from laughing, but he sits on his tail just to make sure Stiles doesn't see any potential wagging that might occur. He pokes his paw at the edge of the bubble around them, and tilts his head questioningly.
"Should be fine. Just don't go far, and keep quiet out there. This thing is actually starting to take some effort to maintain, so come back quick, okay?"
Great. Of course. This was supposed to be a nice drive to see Satomi. Knowing Stiles, this magic bubble is likely to pop sooner, not later, and then they might or might not be in real trouble.
A part of Derek wishes the hunters were honorable, and could be trusted to take care of this on their own.
"Want me to call Chris?" Stiles offers, as if reading Derek's mind. Derek nods in response, and crosses the barrier.
On the other side, there are night forest sounds in the far distance, but most creatures big and small seem to be keeping quiet so long as the lady is here. Derek watches Stiles dial on his phone, then look frustrated, then easily imagines the reason for the upset expression crossing the other man's face is because the magic barrier is probably blocking cell phone signals. Stiles holds his phone up and shakes his head, confirming Derek's suspicions.
Alright, let's see if we can find the body, and he resumes sniffing again, feeling his way past the scent of the god of death and finds another trace in the wind of freshly rotting flesh on bones several paces further out. He sets himself to the grisly task of finding the bones, then figuring out how to get the god herself to find them.