Nature and Nurture: Finding the Perfect Blend

Chapter 21: The Camp

Stiles thought for sure the boy would go to the nearest car park area and drive off, and he'd been trying to figure out what to do if that happened. Instead, they were moving further into the forest towards the Nemeton, making him stop to check it really was safe.

Nothing was out of place, except for the wrong feeling which lay under everything, soaking into the preserve.

Stiles stopped as the boy did, watching him rest and drink a sip of water. He was curious as to how this boy, at his young age, got endurance such as he was showing.

They were in a natural depression, carved into the earth from rain running down the nearby mountainside. It was deeper than the boy's head and quite narrow. He'd walked along it for a while, the ground too steep to climb back up. Stiles presumed he'd keep following it.

When the boy called someone on his phone, Stiles listened in.

"It's me, I'm coming through. ... Well, maybe I'm telling you because I don't feel like being shot, or maybe it's because it's protocol. Could be both. ... Then why don't you check." The boy hung up and rolled his eyes skyward then leaned back against the ditch wall with his arms crossed, seeming content to wait.

As Stiles waited with him, up above the ditch behind a tree, he cast himself into the air to check who the boy was waiting for. What he found surprised him. He thought he knew the preserve pretty well. It was huge, so he hadn't travelled all of it while living there, but he'd made sure to map the area around the Nemeton and what he was seeing right now did not fit with what had been there before. It was wrong. The whole area was wrong. This ditch was supposed to end and then turn into more forest, with no real landmarks or anything to make it stand out.

He must have gotten turned around in his head somehow and was in a different part of the preserve to where he thought they were. But when he floated up above the trees on a wind gust, he found he was right in his first assumption. He could tell where the Nemeton was, knew the mountains, the hills, the valleys around this area.

So what was he looking at then?

There was an opening up ahead where the ditch widened into a flat area. It looked like a bowl of earth had been scooped out, leaving an almost circular rim, around which the trees grew thickly, giving cover for the men who'd pitched camp within.

Stiles flew around on the breeze.

He dipped below tent lines, brushed up into the air above a fire pit. The site had been well-lived in. He counted two men in the camp, both as feral looking as the boy was. One was a white-haired older man. He had so many wrinkles he must have spent his entire life outdoors. He was standing near two square sheets of metal lying flat on the ground.

The other man, middle-aged, short, stocky and angry looking, was coming down through the camp towards where the boy was waiting, a gun held loosely in his hand. By the way he moved, this guy didn't seem to have any hunter training either.

Stiles still hadn't found Brine anywhere and was beginning to feel desperate when he dropped back into his body. If Brine wasn't at the camp, where the hell was he? Stiles stayed behind his tree, watching as the man came into view down in the ditch. The boy looked up at the approaching footsteps and followed when the man gestured with his head.

Stiles texted this new development to Derek. He explained as best he could about the area being different to how he remembered but still couldn't work out how that could be. It was like the more he thought of it, the more his mind grew weary and unfocused.

Derek almost immediately texted back, telling Stiles to stay put and wait for him, wait for the pack.

Stiles was about to ask how far away they were when he worked out why the metal sheets in the camp had struck him as odd. They were coverings to pits. Large enough to hold two men maybe. Down in the earth, where they couldn't get out. Stiles' heart started thumping hard at the thought his dad and Parrish may be only a few hundred feet away.