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When Clarke wakes, it’s to the feel of metal tight against her wrists. She opens her eyes slowly, and with effort—her body feels sluggish and heavy. Her head throbs, and so do her arms. She tries to stand, only to realize she already is—specifically, hanging. The toes of her boots barely scrape the floor as she shuffles. She’s dangling from her wrists, wrapped in heavy iron chains hooked to the ceiling. Everything is dim, and it takes a moment for her eyes to adjust but when they do, she sees she’s in some sort of stone-walled room with no windows.
The small groan from her left makes Clarke turn—which is difficult, and involves her swinging her body around like a pendulum, but eventually she does it. Thalia is also chained and dangling, several feet away. She blinks and squints around, trying to see through the dark.
“I’m here,” Clarke calls, voice hoarse and aching. “I think we’re underground.”
“No shit,” Thalia snorts, glaring in Clarke’s general direction. Human eyes—she probably can’t see very well. “You tied up too?”
Clarke nods, then realizes she can’t see it. “Yeah,” she glares up at the chains around her wrists; they’re starting to chafe, and her skin feels raw. “Iron chains. Heavy duty.”
“Great,” Thalia mutters. She’s changed drastically since Clarke knew her. She’s chopped her dark hair into jagged layers, and dyed a few electric blue. Her eyes are ringed in black, which she hopes is makeup and not bruising. She’s wearing all black, it smells like leather, with Bite Me scrawled across her shirt. Thalia snarls, and Clarke realizes she’s been staring. “What,” Thalia snaps. “Something on my face?”
“Your freckles,” Clarke shoots back. Some things have stayed the same, apparently. Thalia seems taken aback for a moment, before looking away. “You’re different.”
“Yeah, well,” she says wryly. “You too. Guess we’re even.”
“You’re a hunter.”
“And you’re a wolf,” Thalia rolls her eyes. “Now that we’re both updated, maybe we can focus on getting the fuck out of here.”
She’s right, and Clarke is too emotionally exhausted to put up much of a fight anyway. Her childhood best friend just tried to kill her some hours—days? Minutes? It’s hard to tell without any sunlight—ago, and she’s currently chained in some sort of dungeon. She’s having an off day.
Clarke glances to her right, expecting to see Fox dangling like her and Thalia, but instead she finds the space empty. A quick glance around the rest of the room lets her know Fox isn’t with them.
She hasn’t really felt any strong emotions since waking up, beyond a sort of vague irritability, but now—now she’s scared.
And fucking angry.
“Did you see them take Fox?” she demands, and Thalia gives her a mean grin. She’s not used to seeing her old friend looking so vicious, and it’s unsettling.
“No,” she says. “But I hope that wherever it is, the bitch’s rotting.”
Clarke flinches involuntarily. “You don’t even know her,” she says hotly. “It’s not like we asked to be this way!”
Thalia mulls over her words for a moment. “No,” she concedes. “But she chose to commit murder, and that’s unforgivable.”
Clarke stares, not really sure how to equate Fox with murder. “You were about to kill us in the woods,” she points out, annoyed.
Thalia makes a gesture Clarke thinks might have been a shrug, but it’s complicated by the chains and ends up making her drift to the side a little. “Eye for an eye and all that shit,” she explains.
Clarke huffs. “So murder’s okay if you don’t do it first?” she demands.
Thalia gives another mean grin. “Then it’s not murder,” she says. “It’s revenge.”
Clarke lets out a guttural groan—she doesn’t have time for this. She needs to escape, and find Fox, and get back to her pack. The air here smells like stale rot, and it’s making it hard for her to breathe.
“Do you have anything to pick the lock with?” she asks, and Thalia gives her an incredulous look.
“If I did, would I still be hanging here?” she asks. “Why don’t you just shift or something? Put your freakiness to use.”
“My freakiness is about to save your ass,” Clarke bites out, studying the chains. She’s pretty sure her wolf paws are bigger than her human hands, so they might pop the metal screws. Or they might get stuck, and then she’d be a hanging wolf, which would only be a little better than what she is now.
“You’d think they would’ve used silver,” Thalia muses. “That’s what we have—metal chains and cages, to keep you from wolfing out.”
“Wolfing out?” Clarke snorts—it sounds like something out of some monster B-movie. Thalia tries to shrug again. Clarke takes a moment to mourn the loss of her Mom sweater, now stained with sweat and coal dust, and about to be shredded when her body changes. Maybe she'll ask Miller to make her a new one, or goad Bellamy into asking for her.
She focuses on the strength she knows is bubbling under her skin, and feels her nails begin to sharpen. Her teeth get too big for her face, and her tongue is swelling which makes it difficult to speak, but she bites out a question anyway. “How many of us do you keep in cages?”
“I dunno,” Thalia says mildly. “Half a dozen that I’ve seen. Probably more—my parents have been hunting a lot longer than me.”
Clarke tries to nod but it takes too much effort—it’s taking everything she has not to lunge for Thalia’s throat, instead focusing her attention on the metal chains. She can hear them creaking as she lets her bones thicken, and fur is starting to sprout down her arms. She hasn’t shifted like this since the last full moon, and she’s always been sure to have Raven and Wells chain and muzzle her first. Bellamy and Octavia have offered to let her and Lincoln shift with them at the pack house, but keeping Raven in her sight helps her stay levelheaded, and she doesn’t really trust bringing a human into a wolf den on a full moon.
She keeps her thoughts on Fox, and the cuffs snap quickly. She drops to the ground, turning towards Thalia, who looks impressed, and a little annoyed by it.
“If you rip me apart,” she threatens darkly, “I will give you so much shit.”
Clarke laughs, which comes out as a gust of air from her snout, and pads over. She studies the chains for a moment before leaping up and snapping them with her jaws. It hurts a little, but only for the second. Thalia lands a little less gracefully, and Clarke lets herself feel smug about it.
“Stay close,” Thalia mutters as they creep towards the door. Clarke snorts pointedly, hoping to get her message oh, so now you want me around, across. Thalia scowls, which is a good sign.
They slip out into the hall, also carved in the rock and limestone, and peer around the corner. They don’t see anything, and Clarke breathes in deeply, but all she can smell is more rot and wet, sunless earth. There’s a hint of something like wood smoke, but it’s faint and a little hard to focus on. It makes her nose burn, so she pants shallowly.
“God, can’t you breath quieter?” Thalia mutters. “Fucking mutts.” Clarke head-butts her in the thigh.
The farther they walk, the darker the passageway grows, and the smell of smoke grows stronger. They’re rounding a corner when Clarke hears it.
Hissing, like when they’d first been captured. She freezes, jutting the front of her body in front of Thalia in a half-hearted attempt at protection. Thalia may be a hunter—one that tried to kill her—but Clarke still doesn’t want her to die.
The creature looks vaguely human—it has a head, a body, two arms and legs—but the similarities end there. Its skin looks to be made of the same material as the walls around them, and its fingers taper off in knifepoints. It has four long, sharpened toes on its skinny pointed feet, and it’s stepping delicately with its heels up in the air. It’s tipping its face up, dipping its forked tongue out every few seconds, as if tasting the air like a snake.
It has no eyes—the skin below its forehead is smooth down over cheekbones straight to its chin. Beside Clarke, Thalia stiffens and sucks in a breath. She’s radiating fear, skin pale and sweaty.
The creature turns towards them sharply, mouth curved up either in a smile or sneer, and lunges. They lurch back in opposite directions, and it grasps at the space where they’d been, blindly.
Ah. It can’t see them.
It’s tongue slithers out again, and it turns towards Thalia with a leer. Clarke jumps just as its sharp little fingers grab Thalia, digging roughly into her arm.
She lets out a scream, and the creature hisses as smoke seeps from its pores. Clarke’s mind goes blurry at the edges, and she struggles to make her way towards them.
Thalia’s second scream is louder, and sends a jolt of energy through Clarke’s bones. She leaps, and sinks her teeth into the monster’s shoulder. Its shriek is windy and hollow, but it flinches away from Thalia in pain.
Clarke doesn’t hesitate—the smell of Thalia’s blood is thick in the air, and it makes her boil over. She grips the beast’s throat with her jaws, and wrenches out its jugular. It splutters pitifully for a few seconds before the heavy scent of death fills the small cavern, mixing with the wet rot and faint smoke.
Thalia whimpers, propped up against the wall, hand pressed to where the monster had gripped her. She’s staring wide-eyed and fearful at the space above Clarke’s head.
She turns slowly, mouth still filled with the strange blood; it doesn’t taste like metal, not like the blood of humans or animals. Instead, it tastes sickly sweet, like rotted fruit. She tries not to lick her muzzle.
Another of the creatures, smaller this time, with feminine curves and limp dark hair falling over its shoulders, stands just in the archway, uncertain. Clarke can smell its fear, and something else. Determination, maybe. She tenses for a fight, filled with the confidence of a fresh kill. She tries not to let that bother her.
“I am not here to hurt you,” the creature says slowly, trying to calm them. “I want to help you.” She pauses. “My name is Maya,” she adds.
Clarke snarls—she’s still burning for a fight, can still smell and taste the blood, and the creature smells weak. She’d be an easy kill; almost not worth it.
Clarke shakes the thought from her head, mildly horrified. Killing shouldn’t be easy, and yet it was. And will be, she knows that now. She eyes Maya distrustfully, and then turns back to Thalia, trying to stand up on her own and gritting her teeth stubbornly.
“You are injured,” Maya points out. “I can lead you to the exit—were either of you bitten?”
Clarke turns tips her head at Thalia in question. She’d seen the monster’s fingers break through the hunter’s skin, but wasn’t sure if she’d been bitten.
Thalia winces but shakes her head. “Really fucking sharp fingers, though,” she bites out. Maya nods solemnly.
“It is good you were not bitten,” she sighs with relief. “Then you would not have been able to leave.”
“Yeah, that’s me,” Thalia growls. “Little Miss Luck. Are we leaving this Hell hole, or what?”
Clarke sandwiches herself between Thalia and Maya, just in case, and lets Thalia grip her fur as she limps along the hall. Maya peeks around each bend before waving them forward, and periodically has them pause in the shadows while another of her kind passes by.
Finally, the cavern starts to lighten and the air smells cleaner, and crisp. Maya slows just before the final turn. “I cannot follow beyond here,” she apologizes. “We burn in sunlight.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Thalia grounds out.
Clarke shifts back, which is conveniently easier than going wolf. She’s done this enough times around her pack to not feel any self-consciousness about her nudity, and she refuses to feel it now. Thalia, for her part, ignores her altogether, but Maya seems to blush. Well, the brown of her cheeks looks a little pinker.
“My friend, she was with us in the forest,” Clarke blurts, anxious about leaving without Fox. Maya nods.
“She’s being held separately—I’ll get her out,” she says, and Clarke can smell how sincere she is. She reaches to lay a hand on Maya’s stony shoulder—to her surprise, it’s not terribly cold or hard. It feels like earth that’s been softened by rain.
“Thank you,” she tries to offer a smile, but it comes out as a nervous wince.
Maya only nods and creeps quickly back into the cavern. Thalia shoots Clarke a glare. “I won’t kill you if you won’t kill me.” She frowns, like she’s a little disappointed in herself for offering a truce in the first place.
Clarke nods, fighting the urge to shake on it—they aren’t friends anymore, and this isn’t a business deal. She glances down to Thalia’s hand, still clasped over the wound on her arm. “You should get that checked,” she says mildly. “In case it’s infected. I can take you to my healer.”
She wonders if she should refer to Lincoln as a healer—he’d certainly helped Fox, but she thinks healer might infer something a little more complicated. He runs a mostly-empty lodge and usually wears a bathrobe.
Thalia grins wryly. “Thanks but no thanks; I’m not going to your werewolf castle, or whatever. We’ve got our own healers.” She drops her hand, revealing a nasty scar—no blood, or missing flesh. And it’s definitely in the shape of a bite.
Clarke hisses in a breath. “You were bitten,” she accuses. “You heard Maya—you can’t leave!”
Thalia barks out a mean laugh. “Watch me,” she snaps, and steps out of the cave.
Clarke follows warily. She understands why Thalia lied—she probably would have, too, just to get out of the mountain—but she isn’t sure what that thing’s bite might do to her. If it’s anything like the wolf virus, Thalia should probably wait out the symptoms at the lodge, just in case.
She’s about to mention it to the hunter, when Thalia doubles over a few steps outside of the cave.
“What is it?” Clarke demands, rushing over.
“Get away,” Thalia snaps, glaring even while bent in on herself. She’s clutching her middle, and her irises have narrowed into cat-like slits. Her jaw works, and Clarke can see the points of her teeth sharpening, spilling out from her mouth. The bones of her cheeks and shoulders look ready to split the skin.
“You’re shifting,” Clarke breathes, and she can’t help but stare. This is what they see, she realizes, thinking of Raven and Wells’ open admiration whenever she and Lincoln change.
But instead of fur, steam begins to rise from Thalia’s skin, and she’s growing paler with each moment. She lets out a pained groan, and then a sharp gasp before standing, turning her face towards the sun.
She goes up in flames a moment later.
Clarke stumbles her way through the forest in a daze and is almost home, before she realizes her mother is still away on her retreat. So she shifts gears and heads to the Blake house. The sun is swallowing the sky, which she thinks means it’s late afternoon, so she can’t have been gone for very long. She’d managed to lift a bathrobe from someone’s clothesline, and she thinks she understands why Lincoln always wears them.
She’s just coming up the drive when Octavia and Monty come bursting out onto the porch.
“Jesus fuck,” Octavia breathes, shoulders sagging. “Where have you been?” She frowns, glancing over Clarke’s shoulder. “And where’s Fox?”
“The mountain,” Clarke sighs, feeling more exhausted than she’s felt in a very long time. Maybe ever. “We were taken.” She can still feel the monster’s blood caked to the skin around her mouth, her neck, behind her ears. She’s sure her teeth are stained with it. “I couldn’t get her out—we have to go back for her.”
She collapses onto the porch steps, and the wolves seem to suddenly realize she’s covered in blood, with burn marks on her fingers. Monty drapes himself over her like a worried security blanket, and Octavia crouches so her glare meets Clarke’s eyes.
“What happened?” she demands.
Clarke heaves a sigh, eyes sliding closed without her permission. She’s just so tired. Her bones feel like rubber, and it’s a struggle to even sit up. She’s not sure how she’d even managed to hike home—the cave had been deep in the mountain, nearly a three-hour walk. She couldn’t even muster the energy to run.
“You’ve been missing for two days,” Monty says quietly. Clarke lets her head droop onto his shoulder. All she can think about is Thalia, tipping her head back and just letting herself burn. She hadn’t even screamed; it was like she knew it was coming.
She thinks of Fox, somewhere in that dungeon, and shudders.
Octavia runs nervous fingers through Clarke's hair. “Wells covered for you at school,” she comforts. “Bell and Lincoln haven’t stopped looking for you.”
“Sorry,” Clarke offers.
“Don’t be,” Octavia says fiercely. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Clarke thinks back to that night, pushing Harper and Finn into the kiln. The feel of a throat between her lips, the blood rushing down her throat. Thalia turning to ashes in her hands. She squeezes her eyes tighter. “Yeah.”
Monty goes inside to call Bellamy, and he shows up within minutes, panting and dripping with sweat with eyes wild. He stoops down to pull her close. “You’re here,” he breathes, pressing his nose to her hair.
He doesn’t ask her what happened, or where she’s been, or where Fox is. He carries her upstairs and lays her out on the futon, curling around her. He’s wearing the same clothes from Monday, and they’re caked with mud and sweat and fear. Now he just smells like relief, and warmth, and need.
He needs her, she can feel it, and he knows she can. It forms a weight in her stomach, but she doesn’t think she minds. She’s pretty sure she needs him too. That’s a little uncomfortable, but right now she’s too exhausted to worry about it.
“Sleep,” he says into her neck, breath hot on her skin. She needs a shower, but she’s too tired to stand.
“I don’t take orders from you,” she mumbles, exhaustion slurring her words. Bellamy chuckles, the noise sending vibrations down her spine. He grips her tighter, hands digging into her hip bones.
“Think of it as a suggestion, then. One you can’t say no to.”
“Sounds awfully like an order,” she says suspiciously. He hums against her neck, breathing in.
“You smell like smoke.”
“You smell like sweat,” she shoots back. “You don’t see me complaining.”
“I’m not complaining,” he says. “I’d let you in my bed, even if you smelled like a trashcan. Which, incidentally, you do.”
Clarke huffs but doesn’t deny it, and he chuckles. She falls asleep to the sound.
When she wakes the second time that day, the sun is setting, and Bellamy is still warm against her back. She can tell he’s awake, and turns to face him.
“You don’t have to,” he says gently.
Clarke cuts him off, pressing her fingers to his lips. “Fox and I were in the woods,” she whispers. She’s afraid if she speaks any louder, the memories will come flooding back. “A hunter found us—Thalia, an old classmate of mine. We’d been friends, when we were little, and—” She takes a breath and tries to focus; her childhood years with Thalia don't matter, not anymore. “We were fighting, but then there was this—this hissing, and smoke, and I collapsed.” Bellamy has grown tenser as the story’s gone on, and she moves her hand to his neck, stroking the skin there idly.
“I woke up in some underground cave, in the mountain. Thalia was there—we were chained up, to the ceiling. I shifted and broke us out, but,” she pauses to swallow, tasting the bitter stale blood still caught in her mouth. She tries not to gag. “One of the, the creatures that took us, it was there, and it bit her. I killed it. Another one—she said her name was Maya—she helped us escape. She said she’d get Fox out. That her kind, they can’t go out in sunlight. And then when Thalia walked outside, she started changing. Like us, but different. She went all pale, and sharp, and then she just…she caught on fire. She burned to death.”
The words feel surreal in her mouth, but Bellamy listens quietly, never blinking away. When she finishes, he lets a hand roll up her side until he’s cupping her jaw. “You did what you had to,” he says. “To survive. To come back.”
Clarke nods. “I know,” she says, and she does. She’s not suffering survivor’s guilt, but—she still took a life, and no matter what the reason, she doesn’t ever want that to be easily done. She still watched a childhood friend turn to ash within seconds.
Bellamy leans in to press his mouth to her hairline. “You survived,” he repeats. “You came back.”
Clarke pulls away so she can meet his lips with hers, and she shivers when his licks inside, washing out the blood and dirt until her toes curl. His hand drifts under her robe, pressing her close so his skin burns against hers.
The bedroom door crashes open from the force of Raven’s kick, and she stands in the doorway, hands on her hips, scowling.
“Not even a fucking text this time,” she growls. “Jesus, Clarke. Maybe you could have fucking let me know you were okay before jumping in bed with your boyfriend!”
“We just woke up,” Clarke defends, a little petulantly. Heat is still pooling in her stomach, and she can smell the smoldering arousal on Bellamy, so she’s a little disappointed by the interruption. It’s been a trying day; she could have used a couple orgasms.
Instead she sighs and sits up, retying the bathrobe in place, while Bellamy whines pathetically. Raven looks generally unimpressed by the pair of them.
“Octavia said you and Fox were abducted by mountain aliens,” she declares. Clarke shrugs; it isn’t that far off.
“Sort of, I guess. I’m not really sure what they were. Lincoln might know.”
Raven nods, all professionalism now that she knows Clarke is safe. “So what’s the plan, boss?”
Clarke spares one last thought for Thalia, and then puts on the hunter’s mean, angry smile. “We go back,” she says. “And we get Fox out.” She can feel her wolf blood starting to simmer. “And then we kill them.”