𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐅𝐈𝐅𝐓𝐄𝐄𝐍

𝘛𝘙𝘈𝘗𝘗𝘌𝘋

BEFORE YOU READ!!!

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS CHAPTER HAS MENTIONS OF SUICIDE. IF THIS IS A TRIGGERING SUBJECT FOR YOU, PLEASE DO NOT READ OR PROCEED WITH CAUTION/AT YOUR OWN RISK. STAY SAFE, MY BABIES!

━━━  THE GIRL WHO SHOWED UP TO THE MCCALL HOUSE, QUINN, WAS VISIBLY SHAKEN. It took Meilani a good while to get the girl to stop shaking and finally tell the pack what had happened to her before she showed up at Meilani's house. She'd gotten a flat tire while driving home and two cars had pulled up behind her, the men instantly giving Quinn the wrong sorts of vibes when they all got out and offered to help her with the tire. That feeling only being proven right when it turned out she'd gotten a flat from a hunter's arrow. It didn't take long for Quinn to put two and two together before she lashed out on the men — hunters — that surrounded her. She'd barely made it out before she got back in her car and sped off to the McCall house, the closest wolf scent she'd found.

Plus, it was becoming more and more apparent to Meilani to her name was becoming a name in just about everyone and anyone's mouths. She was starting to feel like a celebrity and not even in the fun way.

Deciding the best course of action would be to go to Noah and tell him about what happened, the pack and Quinn piled into Roscoe and made their way over to the Sheriff's station. Upon arriving to the Sheriff's station, Meilani caught a familiar scent in the air that she'd hadn't had to deal with in a while, but she shook it off. No way that he'd still be lingering around if he hadn't bothered her or the pack since helping bring back Stiles. Right now she had to focus on the current problem at hand: hunters.

"Sweetheart, I'm not letting them out," Noah said, plopping the file onto the desk between him and the pack, Quinn sat in the corner on the couch. Two wolves had been brought into the station for murder along with, as Meilani had smelt outside, Theo Raeken. However, said murder had been in self defense when the two had been attacked by a bunch of hunters. "We have got two bodies covered in slash marks. They confessed to killing two people."

"Yeah, hunters, Noah!" Meilani defended, throwing her hands up in exasperation. "They — it was self-defense!"

"Meilani, they were people. Self-defense or not, they're still here, the other guys are dead. There's a process I have to follow here," Noah stressed to Meilani, his face showcasing that he was sorry but he couldn't do anything to help his future daughter in law either. 

Meilani puffed out her cheeks and dropped her hands back to her sides, her features turning desperate. "Yeah, but you know what's happening around here. Noah, Gerard almost killed me . . . again! It's not for them."

Noah shook his head and jerked a finger in the direction of the back holding cells where the two wolves were kept. "This may actually be the safest place for them in Beacon Hills. At least I can protect them here."

Meilani pursed her lips and exchanged a look with Isacc, Malia, Lydia and Liam next to her. She flickered her eyes back over to her future father in law and placed her hands on her hips. "Would Stiles think that? Especially if one of your deputies is working for Gerard?"

"You're really gonna use your fiancé against me when you haven't even told him what's going on in the first place?" Noah deadpanned at Meilani who merely shrugged in defense. "Look, I know these deputies like the back of my hand. I know their families, their kids, their siblings. I know who they are and I trust them."

"You know who they were," Liam corrected the sheriff, laying his hands flat on Noah's desk. "There's something out there. Everyone's afraid. And it's getting worse."

Meilani ran a hand through her hair, grimacing slightly when the diamond on her engagement ring got caught in a curl. She didn't even want to think about how she looked right now . . . besides crazy. "Yeah, you can't protect two werewolves from hunters if they are already on the inside."

Noah exhaled heavily, appearing like he wanted to be anywhere else at the moment. His eyes shifted over to the couch where Quinn shifted uncomfortably, the lingering scent of nerves still heavy in the air around her. "It's Quinn, right? You sure it was a depty who shot you? Absolutely, one hundred percent sure?"

Quinn slowly nodded her head, lifting fear glazed eyes to the sheriff. "I saw flashing lights — a police car. I . . . I saw a badge, a gun, then they shot me. They shot me in the head and that's all I remember."

"There's a couple holes in her story," Noah said to the pack, turning his gaze from the still frightened wolf to the teens standing before him.

"Maybe because she got a bullet in her skull. Sometimes that leads a person to forget things . . . or stop breathing," Isaac quipped, earning himself a swift elbow to the ribs from Meilani. He yelped quietly as he rubbed his sore side with a glare at Meilani. 

"I hate you, Lans."

"I love you, too."

Meilani stepped closer to the desk and fixed Noah with the best innocent and puppy like expression she could muster. The same expression that usually had Stiles melting in about two seconds and scrambling to do whatever she'd asked. It was a look she perfected over the years and she really needed it to work now if she was going to help the two wolves in lock up. "Noah, we need to get Jiang and Tierney out here before anyone realizes that they are even here."

Noah let out a small scoff of a laugh and shot Meilani an incredulous. "Yeah, and then what, Meilani? Because I can't exactly just let them go. They murdered someone. Look, if there's a problem . . . "

As if on cue, a bright white light of explosion happened outside the sheriff's station. The light nearly blinding as it shone through the windows of the station and Noah's office. Noah muttered a curse to himself as he rushed out of the office and into the station where his deputies already had their guns drawn and slowly approached the double doors, the blinding light still bright through the windows.

"I assume you know who's out there," Parrish said, rushing in from the back lock up area. "You know they'll be armed to the teeth, right?"

"Which is why I won't be," Noah simply said, removing the gun from his holster and placed it onto the desk with the McCall pack piled into the open doorway of the office. "Parrish, I need you to stay here, get some deputies, check the exits and hope we are not completely surrounded. Keep an eye out. Let's make sure we're all on the same side here."

Meilani held her breath as Noah slowly made his way outside the sheriff's station, her hand gripping onto the sleeve of Liam's gray long sleeve shirt who stood behind her. She pushed back on the beta and scrambled back into Noah's office to peek through the blinds on the window, watching as Noah slowly approached the whole team of hunters that stood outside in the parking lot. She could hear him make a sarcastic remark about them having permits for all the weapons in their hands. 

Malia stumbled away from the mirror and frantically shook her head, alerting the pack around her. "We have to get out of here!"

"Give him a chance, Lia. He knows what he's doing," Meilani assured the Tate girl, though she wasn't sure if she was assuring her more or herself. Noah typically had a good track record of getting himself through situations, something that definitely transferred down to Stiles. However, that didn't mean that Meilani was internally freaking out about her father in law stepping into the line of fire when there were ruthless hunters out there ready to do anything to get to the wolves inside.

"I am giving him a chance! He can talk all her wants, but we have to get the hell out of here!" Malia argued, sounding incredibly freaked out over the whole situation.

"How do we get Tierney and Jiang out?" Liam countered, reminding the girl of the two innocent wolves that sat around like sitting ducks waiting to die.

Meilani stepped away from the window, the words being exchanged outside becoming muffled now as her focus remained on her panicked best friend. "Lia, it's our job to keep them safe, okay? Liam's right, we gotta figure out how to get them out, too."

Suddenly, the office door swung open again and Meilani let out a groan at the sight of Theo Raeken. The sight of him alone was enough to the make the situation ten times worse and she had half a mind to chuck him across the sheriff's station. "It's not my job to keep them safe."

Liam growled deep in his throat and Meilani had to shoot her hand out quickly to tug him back. "Let me kill him!"

"We can leave him to be the hunter's next claim! Can we just go?"

"We're not going anywhere, don't you get that?!" Quinn snapped, arms wrapped tightly around her middle in defense as cowered near the wall between the windows. "We're trapped in here. They have all the windows and doors covered. We're going to die in here."

"Does someone want to kill her?" Theo remarked, pointing a finger in the frightened girl's direction.

Lydia rolled her green eyes at Theo, choosing to ignore the boy's back handed comment and motioned to the windows behind them. "Guys, there's only a dozen of them out there. We can take them."

"Lan, you heard Noah before when he told us about the Jiang and Tierney — they're the last of Satomi's pack. We can't leave them behind. We couldn't save Brett and his sister . . . but we can save them."

Meilani let out a breath, her brain running at a million miles per minute. She knew that there was some way that they could take Jiang and Tierney with them. They just had to figure out how to do it. "Okay . . . we go, but Jiang and Tierney are coming with us."

Luckily for Meilani and the pack — at least, Meilani was taking this as a good thing to keep herself sane — Noah had come back in after they released Jiang and Tierney from their cells, telling the pack that they had until midnight to work out a plan. That Monroe decided to give them a few hours to bring out the wolves and they'll leave without a word . . . and several dead bodies. Meilani took this as a good way to start thinking a better plan than using Lydia's Banshee scream to knock out hunters like they were bowling pins and her scream was the bowling ball.

"We're gonna need to call for help eventually," Parrish voiced out loud while the deputies around him began to load up their own weapons with the pack slamming desks up against the entrance ways to keep unwanted visitors out.

"Any help we call is gonna risk exposing Meilani and the others," Noah shot down instantly, shaking his head and waving his hands to try and stop Parrish from suggesting any more. "I'm not gonna risk these kids' lives, especially not one who is like a kid to me!"

"If they see actual werewolves, they're not gonna be able to tell the good guys from the bad."

Noah frowned softly, glancing over his shoulder to where Quinn sat by herself once again. Her shaking had finally stopped but she did still look freaked out over everything and Meilani didn't blame her. She'd been trying to keep her own nerves in check ever since the bright white light showed up with the hunters. She needed to be levelheaded to lead her pack and help Noah any way that she could. It would be impossible to do that if she let her emotions and nerves take the wheel. "If Quinn is right about one of our deputies, I'm not sure we're gonna be able to tell either."

The hunters were really trying to push their way in and cutting off any communication as all the cell phones instantly lost service within seconds of the doors being boarded up. Lydia hadn't even been able to get the radio to work in one of the spare offices in the back. The lights in the sheriff's station had effectively been cut off and just about any electricity in the whole building, leaving the pack to have to use their wolf senses instead. 

Malia huffed as she dropped onto the desk behind her, eyes sweeping around the room as if in search for anything out of the ordinary. "How easy is it to cut the power in a sheriff's station?"

"Too easy," one of the deputies snapped, before a teenage boy was chucked out from the room off to the side. 

Liam must have known who the kid was because his eyes had instantly lit afire at the sight of the baby faced, blue eyed teenaged boy on the floor. "Throw him the hell out of here!"

The teenage boy visibly shook at Liam's words, eyes going wide in terror as he pushed himself to sit up on the floor. "No, no, no you can't. Okay? Please don't. She'll know I screwed up."

"He's with them!" Liam cried, trying to get at the boy on the floor but Meilani held him back before her beta could do something he'd regret later. "He's a liar and he's sick in the head."

Noah cut his eyes over to Meilani, silently asking the alpha if he should follow through with Liam's claims. With one look at her feral beta and the pure emotion in his face, it only took one nod from Meilani to nod along. "Alright, and he's under arrest. Lock him up, Parrish."

With the boy — who Meilani learned was named Nolan from Liam — being locked up and put away for the time being, Meilani chose to sit with her back against one of the walls in the room as she tried to work through what was a good tactic to get herself and the wolves out of this. She not only had her own pack's lives to think about, but now she had to worry about Jiang and Tierney along with the other deputies and Noah. A distraction of some sort to get them out and safe, but every single thought Meilani had only ended flatly as they very well could be caught in the end.

Not that Meilani had more than five minutes of thinking time before a pin being pulled followed by an item being tossed onto the floor followed. Meilani's eyes widened at the sight of the tiny smoke grenade and ducked her head just as Parrish shouted at everyone to get down and cover their heads. The hiss of the smoke was heard and Meilani coughed lightly as the smoke infiltrated her lungs, slowly getting to her feet as Malia and Isaac both rushed up to her with Lydia running to check on Quinn who started to shake again.

"What was that?" Malia breathed, eyes scanning around the chaos that the smoke grenade caused for the group trapped in the sheriff's station.

"A distraction," Meilani gulped, ears perking up as she tried to listen for anyone's heartbeat that could give away who did it. A tilt in the beat that would show who was nervous more so than they should be at the moment, but her ears didn't pick up on anything that could point out who did it. Not with so many heartbeats going at the same time and all of them slightly elevated due to the fright of the sudden grenade.

"They said midnight!" Noah yelled over the hissing sound of the smoke, storming over to the barricaded doors to get outside and give the hunters a piece of his mind. Though, before he could get too far in taking down the barricades, Parrish's hand landed on the sheriff's shoulder.

"It didn't come from out there," Parrish noted, tugging Noah back before he could remove anything from the doors and leave them vulnerable. "It came from in here. It was one of us!"

As if the universe wanted to give them their answer, Liam came back into the room from wherever he'd disappeared to and held Nolan up by the back of his jacket. A vial was in his free hand with a shiny, purple liquid inside. Meilani's heart shot down to her feet at the sight of the wolfsbane in her beta's hand. "Wolfsbane, Lan. Nolan was trying to kill Jiang and Tierney. There's something else you need to see, too."

Meilani squeezed her eyes shut and inwardly groaned to herself, but followed after her beta after he handed off Nolan to Parrish who ran over to help out. She was lead to the holding cell that Jiang and Tierney were held in and she rose an eyebrow at her beta. "Liam, what — "

"Show her your eyes!" Liam demanded, fury evident in his features as he stared down the two wolves who avoided eye contact. "I said show her your damn eyes!"

"We never said we were innocent," the blonde girl, Tierney, mumbled to Liam in response.

Meilani's lip curled at the way Tierney basically brushed the duo off. It only lead Meilani to believe that they were truly hiding something and her hands wrapped around the bars, her alpha eyes glowing as she roared at the two wolves. "Show me your eyes now. Before I rip these bars in half and make you do it."

Without a word, Tierney and Jiang tilted their heads up to look Meilani in the face, light blue eyes glowing back at her. The trademark of a wolf who had taken an innocent life. As if anything else could get worse at the moment. The sound of the cell door opening alerted Meilani and she stared at Liam who somehow gotten himself a keycard. He merely shot Meilani an innocent smile to which she ignored for the moment.

"Tell me what happened and you and I both know I can tell if one of you are bullshitting so I suggest it's the truth or you won't have to worry about a hunter coming for your asses," Meilani demanded, brown eyes bouncing between the two wolves. "Well . . . I suggest one of you start talking. I only have so much patience and if I'm asking my pack to risk their lives for you, then you better start telling me the truth. What happened?"

Jiang, the dark haired boy next to Tierney, exhaled shakily and sat up straighter. "Okay . . . Satomi didn't want to fight. We were on the run for two days, but they were everywhere. Then it was just us hiding in the storm drain while Satomi tried to talk to them, but they didn't want to talk. She died so we could keep running."

Tierney shrugged next, pulling one of her legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around it. "Then we just . . . stopped running and we started hunting them instead. It's not hard to use public records to find where someone lives. All you need is a name."

Meilani's jaw ticked in irritation, hating the fact that these two wolves had gone out and killed hunters who hadn't killed anyone that they knew. Killed hunters who