"Going out, Mom," Laura said as she rolled off her bed, simultaneously hitting pause on the video playing on her laptop and closing the lid. Having werewolf parents was usually frustrating, but sometimes there were positives. Laura didn't have to yell through the house or actually go find her mother or wait long for her mother's acknowledgement.
Laura moved through the house quietly, not thinking about the text message her brother left her or what she might be walking into at the high school. She kept her breathing steady and it seemed to trick her heart into not racing, because no one bothered her on the way out. And even when she climbed into her car, putting the keys in, her hands didn't shake. There was no screeching out of the drive or flying down the street, well-aware that would attract attention. But once she turned the corner, Laura floored it, breaking every posted speed limit to make it to the school.
There had been strange werewolves in the Preserve. More than once, a couple of them had gone off to try to chase them down, even succeeded in getting one down. Until that high school kid had been bitten, the Pack had assumed they were omegas, and after the realization that there was at least one alpha among the bunch, they'd been careful.
Too careful.
"Fuck," Laura muttered, as she ran a stop sign. Luckily Beacon Hills wasn't the busiest of places and what little traffic was on the streets was easy to maneuver around. Traffic and people were distractions Laura little wanted to deal with, not when there were bigger problems.
"Just hold on, Der," she muttered, pulling to a stop in front of the high school and practically falling out of the car in her haste to get inside. Finding Derek was easy; all she had to do was follow the scent of blood.
The mess in the hall took her aback for a second. It looked like some terrible scene from a horror movie. But Derek was standing and through the rips in his shirt, nothing looked like it was actively bleeding.
"It's okay, Derek," Laura said, as she approached carefully, hands held up and dropping the nicknames for once. "We'll figure it out. But first, let's get away from this." This was, of course, the body on the ground and the pool of blood Derek was kneeling over. She reached out to grab his hand, making sure to keep her movements slow and sure.
When she was twelve, Laura wanted to be a vet. She spent all summer talking to Alan Deaton, demanding too much of his time, and when he finally kicked her out of the office, she would go search for hurt animals in the forest. After either terrifying the creatures into shock (and then death) or watching them run away from her, Laura begged her mom to show her how to be stealthy. Instead, Talia taught her how to approach frightened animals, slow and calm and steady, and it was a talent that helped her more than she liked to admit. She employed that now, carefully moving Derek down the hall and around the corner. The scent of blood followed them but at least the body was out of sight.