All Shades of Blue

32

Nora, holding Mateo, paced across the floor of Derek's loft. She'd gone to visit him to find him gone, which worried her. She'd tried contacting him, but he wasn't answering.

Cora stared at Nora as she paced. "Nora, relax. I'm sure he's just busy."

Nora stopped and stared at her, shaking her head as she gestured to her ears.

She sighed. "Right." She typed out a message. 'What are you feeling?'

Nora laid Mateo down, pulled out her phone and began typing. 'I'm not sure. I don't feel in pain, which I guess is a good thing. But I'm worried about him.'

'You and me both. But I'm sure he'll come back soon. He always does. He wouldn't leave his mate or the kid he's come to like. You know that.'

Cora, hearing someone arrive, opened the door to reveal Stiles and he said, "Okay, so where's Derek?"

"We don't know," Cora replied. "He's been missing for two days. They were there for two days, waiting, hiding. That's what we're taught to do when the hunters find us... hide and heal."

Stiles frowned. "Okay, so is two days standard, then, or are we thinking Derek's on, like, some extended getaway?"

"Why do you care?"

"Why do I care? Let's see... Because over the last few weeks, my best friends tried to kill themselves. His boss nearly got ritually sacrificed. A girl that I've known since we were three was ritually sacrificed. Boyd was killed by alphas. I... Do you want me to keep going? 'Cause I can, all right? For, like, an hour."

"You think Derek can do anything about that?"

"Well, since he's the one everyone seems to be after, it's more like he should do something about it, yeah."

"I don't know. There's something different about him now. And it's not just Nora and Mateo being in his life. He wasn't like this when we knew him."

"What was he like?"

"A lot like Scott, actually," Peter said, walking down the spiral staircase. "A lot like most teenagers... Unbearably romantic, profoundly narcissistic, tolerable really only to other teenagers."

"And so what happened? What changed him?"

"Well, the same thing that changes a lot of young men... A girl."

"You're telling me some girl broke his little heart? That's why Derek is the way he is?"

"Do you remember Derek before he was an Alpha had blue eyes? Do you know why some wolves have blue eyes?"

"I just always thought it was, like, a genetic thing."

"If you want to know what changed Derek, you need to know what changed the color of his eyes."

Peter launched into a story about a younger Derek and a girl named Paige Krasikeva.

Stiles frowned. "Okay, so if Derek was a sophomore back then, how old was he? How old is were you? How old are you now?"

"Not as young as we could have been, but not as old as you might think," Peter replied.

"Okay, that was frustratingly vague." He sighed and turned to Cora. "How old are you?"

"I'm 17," Cora replied.

"See, those are answers. That's how we answer people."

"Well, 17 how you'd measure in years."

"All right, I'm just gonna drop it. What happened to Derek and the cello girl?"

Peter frowned. "What do you think happened? They were teenagers. One minute, it's, "I hate you, don't talk to me." The next, it's frantic groping in any dark corner they could manage to find themselves alone for five minutes. Their favorite dark corner was an abandoned distillery outside of Beacon Hills."