Archive of Our Own

Allison was dead.

Allison was dead dead, was in the morgue—a stabbing victim, and oh god, he was going to throw up. He was going to throw up, and then he was going to unclench his fists, but he couldn’t do either of those things. His body wasn’t his body, was brand shiny-new, and god, oh god, he could barely move, he was so nauseated.

The nogitsune was dead too, or as close to it as it could get. Buried again, at least. And that, that was even worse than when he was possessed, because what if something happened again? It was Beacon Hills, it could happen. And there was this spiral, in his head, not a revenge spiral or a Special Moon Spiral, but a big black gaping chasm where all the bad thoughts, all the things the nogitsune said, all the things it didn’t have to say, to get Stiles to fold.

Terror, and anger, and fucking fuck, a panic attack so intense he curled around his body, gasping, choking with it. His vision went white around the edges, his head going fuzzy, and he thought, this is it, I’m dying.

Then strong arms wrapped him up, and Stiles flinched away even though he knew those particular arms, instinct telling him to get away because she had too many teeth when she smiled, just like her father.

Malia’s fingers bit into his fists, and he found them relaxing, opening and closing around hers. He watched thick bands of darkness flowing up her arms, like arteries in reverse. Distantly, he wondered if this was because she was a werecoyote or if it was because she was a girl. She dug her nose into his neck and he stopped wondering, finally relaxed enough to sleep.

It was the first time he hadn’t had a nightmare in months.

When he woke up Malia was still there, glaring at his laptop, which was on the password prompt screen. His mouth felt fuzzy and he was too hot. There was a glass of water on the desk from his dad, with a note under it that he read through the exhaustion:

Had to get to work. Your friend ate all your breakfast, but there’s stuff in the freezer. Love you.

It made his heart clench up, and it was hard to swallow the water at first. After that he drank deeply, even though it was warm and Malia was watching him with both eyebrows raised. She looked more like Peter than anything else, which was a weird disconnect because she was Malia, who he’d gotten to third base with (and probably got tetanus with, come to think of it). Knowing who her father was, knowing that she was a murderer’s daughter, didn’t mesh with the person he wanted to maybe kiss some more.

“Your computer won’t let me do anything,” she said, and Stiles leaned into what should have been her personal space and typed in his password. He was smart, so it was mostly numbers, and he was a dick, so it was a sex joke.

“Do you know how to use it?” he asked. “Because the system’s really different from when we were kids, you can find anything now and not even try, and--” And she was on Google already, even though she was hunt-and-pecking everything. She was looking up things on magic, on Google.

Which, well, he’d done less than a year ago, so that was fair.

“I have books, actually, if you want to look something up. There’s a file, actually, on there,” he said, and she glared at him over her shoulder, something low like a literal growl coming from her chest.

Stiles left the room, hoping that Malia wouldn’t decide to break his computer if she couldn’t find what she was looking for. He made French toast and put bacon in the oven, humming to himself while he worked. It was almost one in the afternoon, but it was French toast, and bacon, well, he couldn’t let his dad eat it.

“Then the lion said to the lightning bug, gosh, your tail is bright,” he mumbled.

He’d tried to find the song once, but apparently it was one his mom had made up. She always sang it when she cooked. It was about a wolf, a lion, fireflies (lightning bugs, bottled up sparks in their tails, sweetling), and two hawks, who were all going to a queen’s coronation. She changed the details every time she sang it, so that sometimes the lion (who was queen of her pride; everyone in the story was royalty) ate a firefly, or the wolf killed a hawk, but it always ended happily. The queen brought everyone back, and the wolf became a king, and the hawks’ child married the queen’s firstborn son.

Stiles didn’t know how to change the details like she had. It had been a game when he was a kid, guessing what she was going to say next.

Now it was sacred, a memory he held onto until he could tell you exactly how the final song went.

“It’s pretty,” Malia said, and Stiles jumped. Luckily he’d set the bacon down already, or that would have ended badly. She smiled at him, eyes wide, and he frowned. “It’s a pretty song.” She got a plate out of the cabinet and loaded it up with bacon, ignoring all human decency by taking the best ones, the ones with all the fat still on them.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Stiles said, and Malia looked at him. “Okay, coyote for almost a decade, you probably don’t know a lot about human things. So, first rule of human life versus animal life, you don’t take a man’s bacon without asking.”

She looked at the French toast, mouth curling in a smirk, and Stiles knew what she was about to ask. It made him smile inside, even if he couldn’t smile outside.

“Do I have to ask to take the French toast too?” She stepped close, apparently unaware that threatening and seducing didn’t belong in the same universe, and god, he hadn’t known things could be like this. “Do I have to ask for everything I want?”

He swallowed. She wasn’t just seducing and or threatening him, she was asking a question. She hadn’t been human for years.

“Generally, yeah. Usually people know when—when something’s being offered or not, though.” He licked his lips with a dry tongue, trying to keep it together. He was wound so tight, so exhausted and wrung out, that everything had a hint of desperation to it.

“Can I have some food, then?” she asked, and Stiles nodded. He had to turn his head away while she got French toast, but he could still smell her. She smelled like dirt, like a garden, and like him, sort of. His fingernails dug into his palms when she locked her eyes on his, awkward angle and all, and said, “I usually didn’t ask in the woods. If I wanted something I had to take it.”

“Like I said, people can tell sometimes, without asking.”

She nodded, stepping away, and he unclenched. He got his plate full of food and sat at the table, teaching Malia the wonders of maple syrup. She practically lit up when she dipped the bacon in the syrup, and Stiles smiled behind his hand. It was the first time he’d smiled in a while.

She left before his dad got back from work, but not before she kissed him again. It was her kissing him, too, crowding him up against the wall and biting at his lips. He opened his eyes and hers were blue, half turned. She pulled away, smiling, her lips swollen, and she disappeared.

Stiles took down the murder boards and put up pictures of him and Scott. He looked at one of him and Allison, taken right before she left for France, and he put it, facedown, on his desk.

Grief isn’t a straight line, the grief counselor had said. She’d said it about his mom, yes, but it was true now. Twenty minutes ago he was laughing with Malia and making French toast-bacon sandwiches, and now he was crying, stifling sobs with his hands.

He’d felt it, when Allison died. Some bond because of their sacrifice, maybe, but he’d felt her slip away. He’d slept through his mom’s death, a little kid, and he hadn’t known until later what had happened, but he could tell you the minute Allison Argent died.

And the queen slept on, slept on, slept on, through all the chaos and strife.

Malia snuck into his room again that night. She curled up behind him, wrapping her arms around him, and she pressed her nose into his back.

He wasn’t sleeping when she asked, “Can I have you?”

His heart thudded in his chest, and he could see his life sprawling ahead of him. For a long time he’d thought it would end before he was eighteen, but now he could imagine years of this. Malia wasn’t Lydia, but Lydia wasn’t the person he’d wanted for years.

It was terrifying.

He looked at their fingers, hers over his, and twisted them. She let go and he grabbed her hand again. It was warm and strong.

“Don’t eat me, though,” he said, and she smiled against his neck.

The next day Stiles had to go back to school. He had to face the world, and so did Malia, who was going to school for the first time in almost a decade.

The school was in mourning. As it should be, he thought, anger running parallel with grief. Allison Argent was gone, was dead, and the world kept spinning like it had the right to do that. It was only right that everyone else was affected by it.

Scott bumped their shoulders together, and Stiles grinned at him. His eyes were clear at least, and everything would be okay. The world hadn’t stopped spinning, and as much as that hurt now, it would work out if they didn’t die in the next year or so.

Free period had them in the library, Lydia with her red crown and Isaac with his haunted eyes. Scott didn’t talk for a while, leaning on Kira.

She’s probably immortal, so how is that gonna work? Stiles wondered, then Lydia broke the silence.

“Malia is taking placement tests now. Mr. Tate will probably have to hire a tutor, or a set of tutors, so she can get caught up. I think we should volunteer, because no one else is going to understand if she needs to run in the woods for a few hours.”

“Okay,” Scott said.

“And I’ve researched banshee lore, and I don’t know how accurate any of it is. I don’t think I died. Banshees also tend to be focused on a particular family, not—attracted to death. So I think banshee might be what people call necromancers because it’s simpler.”

Stiles’s head jerked up.

“Please don’t summon spirits,” he said, and only after he said it did he realize what that sounded like. “Like, demons are the one thing I don’t think we can deal with right now.”

Lydia looked at him, inscrutable as always, and said, “I won’t get possessed, I promise.” It cut at him, but it was a relief, this snarking version of Lydia who wasn’t the quiet, grieving Lydia who haunted them now. This was familiar territory, a back and forth that maybe one day could be less horrible than it was after everything they’d been through.

At the end of the day Malia’s dad picked her up, and they set up a tutoring schedule.

“I did really good on the math part,” she said, grinning, and her dad grinned back at her.

“You always did like that,” he said, turning away, and Malia smirked at them behind his back. “Anyway, it sounds great, you can come by. Most afternoons I’m working, but you’re almost adults.” He stepped away from the car, far enough that Malia wouldn’t have heard them if she were human. “And maybe help her adjust? I… don’t really know what to do, honestly.”

“Yeah, yes, that’s good,” Stiles said, and Lydia nodded, phone already out, typing furiously.

His dad was home when he got there, sitting at the table. Stiles’s face went cold, and he swallowed around a lump in his throat.

“So, we need to talk about a few things we haven’t talked about before,” he said, and Stiles sat down, wincing when the chair bruised his ass. Dad reached over into the chair beside him, pulling a box of condoms out, and put it in front of Stiles. “I do not want grandchildren right now.”

Stiles looked at the condom box, and how the hell was this his life?

“Take the condoms. When you need more, tell me, whether it’s because these have been used or because they’ve expired. And tell Malia she doesn’t have to sneak over. I’m not sure about whether a relationship started at an asylum is completely appropriate, but at least she’s not a werewolf.”

Stiles opened his mouth to explain that werecoyotes were probably similar to werewolves, considering everything he’d seen of Malia, but Dad held out his hand.

“Which is the second thing. Eichen House is requesting a psych eval. Since you checked yourself in, there’s a little more leeway here, but we have to deal with this quickly. And there are MRIs you have to have because of how the possession looked, and—well, for the next few months it’s going to be very busy.”

“Busy, busy, busy,” Stiles said, and his dad grinned at him. “Is, uh, is that all? Did you have any questions about, uh, werewolves and stuff?”

His dad mouthed “and stuff”, and nodded, pulling a pad of paper out of his pocket.

Most of it was stuff Stiles had no clue about either.

“Maybe ask Deaton. He doesn’t really… answer, a lot of the time, but if it’s not helpful right now maybe he’ll say something.” Stiles stood up, looking at the condoms. They sat, completely innocent, on the table.

Deciding discretion (retreat) was the better part of valor, Stiles took the box and ran up to his room. He put it under his bed, deciding that hiding it and making sure it was close by were both important.

Then he collapsed on the bed, face flaming red.

Video games. He needed to play video games, and forget that this was apparently his life now, where condoms got handed out and psych evals were scheduled between supernatural consultations.

He and Scott played Halo for hours, not talking about anything except the game.

That night Malia climbed into his window before he was even asleep, grinning at him and jumping on the bed. She was radiating happiness, practically glowing with it, and his breath caught in his chest when she leaned over him and kissed him.

“My test scores were all good,” she said, getting in his space and swatting his hands away from her hips, tangling their fingers together instead. He leaned against the pillow, grinning at her, caught up in all her joy. “Except history, but Dad said that that’s normal.” She leaned down, past his mouth, and whispered in his ear, “Now that I have you, do I have to ask for everything?” She pressed her nose to the skin just in front of his ear, inhaling. Stiles’s fingers clenched, and she dragged their hands up her sides, and everything was on fire.

There was fire all around, blistering heat, but they didn’t care, lost to the beat.

“I’ll tell you if you do something I don’t want, how about that, and you do the same,” he said, and Malia nodded, eyes flashing bright, impossible blue, right before they leaned in. Stiles cupped Malia’s face, trying to keep control of the kiss, but Malia pushed him back with her whole body, fingers wrapping in his hair and pulling. He gasped, biting down, and she bit him back. A metallic something was on his tongue, and Stiles swallowed when he realized it was blood.

He opened his eyes, and hers were on him, still blue. She hadn’t shifted any more than that, though, and blue was pretty, especially on her. He told her that, and she blinked and smiled at him.

“Red makes you look nice,” she said, and Stiles swallowed, heat spreading down his chest. He would be splotchy, blushing, and he didn’t care. He wanted to kiss Malia, so he did that. Her skin was flushed too, but it wasn’t like his. It was like she was glowing, lit up under his hands.

He wasn’t going to last. Her shirt wasn’t even off and he could feel it coming, too much heat between them. Malia was rubbing herself off on his hand, which she had a vice grip on, and the other hand was digging bloody crescents into his neck. He panted into her mouth, and she stared into his eyes, and that was what dragged him over the edge, coming in his pajamas. Her nostrils flared and she dropped her head on his shoulder, teeth digging in. He pressed his lips together, hard, to keep quiet. His dad was too close for them to be doing this, but he’d given Stiles condoms, so maybe he wouldn’t be too mad if he ever did walk in on them.

Probably Stiles should just invest in locks.

“You think too loud,” Malia said, dragging them into a better position. She put her mouth where she’d dug her claws into him, and the pain faded. Some of it stayed, though, and he liked that. He liked that she’d marked him, and if she didn’t heal so fast he would do the same to her.

Maybe werecoyotes didn’t heal as fast as werewolves.

“Still thinking too loud.” She wrapped her arms around him, humming into his hair.

“I tend to do that. Comes with the ADD,” he said.

She nodded against his neck, and her hair tickled him.

“Sleep,” she said, and he smiled against his pillow. It was still hours before he fell asleep, and she knew it too, because when she snuck out of his room she brushed his hair back from out of his eyes and sighed. It was the most human he’d ever seen her. When she said, “I wish I could have known her like you did,” the spiral in his head flew away, the real problem dug up by her.

Allison’s funeral was the next day.

Stiles’s mom had had a wake, in true Jastrzebski fashion. Uncles and aunts had come to the house, drinking and letting Stiles take sips from their cups when his dad wasn’t looking. They had sung her favorite songs, and told stories about all the things she’d done, using her first name Sabina instead of her middle name Claudia. It had seemed fantastical, what they said she’d done, but maybe she had ridden a dragon.

Despite the fact that Allison had been Catholic (even though Stiles was pretty sure she was an atheist, in the end), and television had promised him that Catholics had wakes, there was only a funeral. It was California winter, which meant it was gray, and Chris Argent stood a little away from everyone else, face closed up in grief. He didn’t cry.

Her casket was closed, a fleur-de-lis printed on the wood. Her grave was beside her mother’s, close to Kate’s, and Stiles thought, bitterly, that this all led back to Kate. If she’d never set the fire, Peter, then Derek, would never have become Alpha. The Darack would never have come to Beacon Hills in the first place because the Alpha pack wouldn’t be here, and the nogitsune would still be trapped. Allison would be in the dark, but she would be alive.

Stiles held Scott while he cried, head on Stiles’s shoulder. Kira wasn’t here—she hadn’t known Allison that well either, even though she should have. They would have liked each other a lot, Stiles was sure.

They’d fought Oni together. He would have liked to see that.

Lydia was sobbing, fists clenched at her sides, head bowed like she was praying. Stiles’s vision was blurry with tears. Everything hurt, from his head down to his feet.

People went up to Chris, telling them how sorry they were. Stiles remembered this.

“They don’t have the right,” Lydia said, bright spots on her cheeks, eyes glazed. “They can’t even comprehend this.” There was a chill in the air, and Stiles knew that whatever Lydia was, her powers weren’t just about finding dead bodies. Her pupils had taken over part of her eyes, or something black like her pupils, and his lizard brain was screaming at him to run away.

“Lydia, don’t,” Scott said, and she crumpled. Scott pulled her into his arms, let her cry on him.

It just got worse when they lowered her body into the ground. Isaac, who had thus far remained fairly stable, collapsed to his knees, clawing his hands at his face. Scott had to talk him down while Lydia, entranced by the body, swayed in the stillness.

“She’s just sleeping,” she said, and Stiles frowned at her. “Waiting.”

And the lion, convinced, went on and said, she only sleeps, only waits, only dreams, my friend.

“You can’t live like that, Lydia,” Stiles said. His throat wasn’t raw, but it ached, like he’d been screaming for too long. “It’ll drive you insane.”

Lydia turned all her anger on him. He’d wondered, once, what having all that attention would feel like.

It was terrifying.

“I brought Peter Hale back and I didn’t even know what I was doing. Don’t talk to me about insanity.”

Eventually they had to leave. Everything had changed in their world, but everything was still there. It was like they’d broken something that was glued down, and now they didn’t know how to put things back together.

“I’m leaving tonight. Argent left town right after the funeral,” Isaac said. They were all at Stiles’s house, his dad having handed over a bottle and said, “Be careful.” The bottle was empty, most of it worthlessly drunk by the werewolves. Isaac’s breath reeked, but he wasn’t drunk. “I can’t stay here, not after everything that’s happened. Erica, Boyd—now Allison. It’s not—it’s too much.” He looked at Stiles, wouldn’t look at Scott, though. There was so much guilt pouring off him that Stiles could taste it.

Stiles took the bottle, lining up three shots and clearing his head. He handed one to Isaac, one to Scott, and kept one for himself.

“They never had a funeral, but a wake might help,” he said, and raised his glass. “To Erica. She gave me a concussion and went up against an entire pack of Alphas. She was a force of nature.” He took his shot, and Isaac looked into his glass before raising it.

“To Boyd. He kept us sane, me and Erica. He kept us from going off the rails and really hurting people, and I never thanked him for that. He was smarter than anyone I knew, and he hated Paradise Lost, even though he was named after the author.” He slammed the glass back, blinking tears, and turned to Scott.

Scott didn’t raise his glass for a long time, too busy thinking. When he did, he was crying.

“To Allison. She was my first love. She was the first person to kill an Oni. She was strong.”

When Isaac left, Stiles escorted him to the road. There, on a motorcycle, was a girl with scars down her face and neck. She nodded at Stiles, handing a helmet to Isaac.

“You should know, Derek Hale was kidnapped,” she said, and Stiles’s stomach dropped. She shrugged, smiling, and revved the engine. She and Isaac disappeared into the night.

Part of Stiles wanted to say fuck it and abandon Derek to Murphy, who was clearly gunning for him. He’d never liked Derek, after all, even while they were tentative allies. There was too much blood between them for liking each other, at least not yet.

The larger, louder part of him, drowned that part out and started planning.

He’d have to tell Scott, but not tonight. Tonight was about Allison, and Stiles hadn’t seen Derek in a few days—assuming whoever had taken him hadn’t killed him yet, they probably had a day more to mourn.

Of course they didn’t get more than that. Of fucking course.

Malia was in his bedroom, waiting for him. So was Scott, eyes red and puffy from an entire day spent crying. Apparently even werewolf healing didn’t help that.

“Hey, buddy,” Stiles said, and Scott smiled at him. “Wanna play a video game or something?” He shook his head, sniffing. “Well, come on, let’s go to bed, then.” Whiskey tired him out, and the added stress of knowing he had to go back out there, fight more creatures, and for Derek, made his eyes droop.

Scott curled up on the air mattress, under the same blanket he’d used since he was eleven. Back then the bed had been big enough for them, even though Stiles curled up to Scott and cried because his mother was dying. Now Malia curled up behind Stiles, the big spoon as usual, and Stiles listened to their breathing. It evened out, and he was sure they were both asleep when Malia leaned into him, breath a puff in his ear.

“Do you think you’ll be able to save him?” she asked. He flinched, and she continued, “Because if you can’t you shouldn’t, because if you die I’ll kill people. So will he.” He shouldn’t kill people. Stiles could hear it, almost in Malia’s voice.

“I think if we don’t he’ll stop fighting,” Stiles said.

If Scott stopped fighting he would die, and then Stiles really would go insane.

“Okay.” She backed away, head on the pillow now, and wrapped her arms around him. He closed his eyes and tried to fall asleep, but it was only after she pulled him so she was literally wrapped around him that he managed to find the calm.

His dreams were terrifying. They were nightmare images, neon and psychedelic colors swirling around him. He was lost, he was running, and the ground was shifting under him.

“Wow,” Malia said, and Stiles dragged her away from a cliff. She was wearing a leather jacket and looked so much like Peter in that moment that he flinched away from her. “This is really weird.” She touched the colors, one of them blossoming into a flower, and a thin line of steel gray ran from the flower to her arm. It caged her in, somehow part of her skin and a chain around it, and she sighed. “Ain’t that a shame?”

The gray was over her blue veins, trapping them.

“It’s a puzzle,” Allison said. Her stomach had been pierced with an arrow, and blood seeped out from it onto her pretty dress. She was smiling, and her teeth were stained with blood. “It’s a labyrinth, a puzzle. Don’t you get it?” Her eyes were werewolf blue—no, brighter than that, the same color Malia’s went, and she was close enough that she could shove his hand into her stomach. She gasped, choking, but said, “It’s a puzzle, and you’re good at puzzles, aren’t you Stiles? Mama said you could be a safecracker.”

Like that, Allison morphed into his mother. She was dying, skinny because she refused food, and her eyes glowed in their hollows. There were laugh lines around her eyes and where she used to have dimples, though, and she was smiling.

“It’s a puzzle, Stiles. It’s just in a box.”

She handed it to him, the box-that-wasn’t that had at least twelve sides. He’d had one when he was a kid. It was simple, enough to keep his attention but not for long.

Her eyes were red, from her pupil to the skin and faint lashes. It was like blood, the dark kind that came in test tubes. They’d had blood tests when he was a kid to find out if something was wrong with him.

“You look good in red,” Malia said, crowding up behind him, and Stiles closed his eyes.

He opened them to his bed, with Malia’s leg over his thigh and her arms under his fingernails. When he pulled his hands away there were red crescent moons where he’d nearly broken the skin, and they didn’t fade. Stiles’s heart stopped, and then Malia moved, the fading red crescents sliding under his ribcage.

“Is someone dying?”

He turned, staring at her arms while they went back to being perfect. He was convinced something was off, but he didn’t know what.

“No. Just--” He let a smile twist his face. “Just an ivory dream.”

His mom had called his nightmares that, sometimes. He’d only learned about the literary reference when he was thirteen, after she’d already died.

Malia didn’t frown or ask what he meant. She smiled instead, touching his arm.

“My mom said some were ivory, and some were horn. Maybe this one was real?”

Stiles shook his head. You were in a cage made of your own blood.

“Nah, I doubt it. There were all these crazy colors and these lotus—things.” He wiggled his hand in the air, and Malia nodded. Stiles checked the time. “Is your dad going to miss you?”

“No. He isn’t up until twelve on Sundays. It looks like Scott isn’t either.”

Scott, who had up to this point been sleeping soundly, hummed and twisted in his sleep. If they were in real danger, hopefully he’d be more help.

“Yeah…” Stiles took Malia’s hand, looking at her pale arm. “Sorry I dug into you like that.”

She shrugged, then darted forward and kissed his cheek. Her lips were dry, and her eyes were open. Stiles didn’t think she’d closed her eyes once while they kissed. He was sort of bummed out by that, because he closed his eyes so he could feel more, but maybe it was different for werepeople.

“I’ll see you later, right?” she asked, and Stiles nodded, turning her hand in his grip and kissing the knuckle. She grinned, teeth bright and sharp, and said, “I always wanted someone to do that.”

She was gone after that, down the stairs and out of the house like she hadn’t been there at all. Stiles got back in his bed and closed his eyes, the neon lights from his dream flashing behind his eyelids. There hadn’t been a pattern he could see, but at least it hadn’t been the white calm the nogitsune had forced on him.

He hated that color now. He was glad that most hospital waiting rooms invested in beige, or colors. Dr. Patil’s office was a riot of colors, a mural of the jungle done in browns and reds and greens. It was like they were actually in a forest, the ones people wrote stories about. He’d been coming here (weekly, then monthly, then every two months) since he was ten. First for ADHD, and then for grief counseling (it had gone back to weekly for that one).

It was comfortable. Better than the blue in Morrell’s office, that was for sure. There was even a leather couch in Dr. Patil's real office. Sure, putting your feet on it was certain death (Dr. Patil was not a patient woman, and those couches were made of leather).

Dr. Patil was a short, round woman who wore glasses with thin frames. She had two kids, Reema and Javier (Dr. Ortiz-Patil had his own practice, and was the Stilinski family doctor), whose pictures were on her wall, along with her two doctorates. One was MD, the other was PhD. Reema’s picture was over a copy of her diploma, Javier’s an official photo of him in dress blues. They were both very pretty people.

“Are you going to meet my eyes, Stiles?” Dr. Patil said. Stiles looked at her, smiling to cover the sudden spike of nausea. Her hair was all gray, her face a mass of wrinkles. She was old. “What are you thinking about, Stiles?”

Dr. Patil had pronounced his name effortlessly the first time they met. His mom, already dying (they just hadn’t known it yet), had beamed. She’d been kind when Stiles asked her to call him by his nickname instead, understood it wasn’t for the reason some people might have thought.

“Puzzle boxes,” he said, and she hummed. “There are all sorts of kinds, you know, and you can hide things in them. There are some where, if you don’t get the right combination of turns in the right way, it locks up at the start again.”

“Sounds sort of like people,” she said, and he smiled. “Are you going to shut down if I ask about everything that’s happened in the past eight months, Stiles?”

And the funny thing was, Stiles could feel his face harden. He was shutting down. He was thinking of everything, all the death and destruction, and he was thinking, she can’t possibly understand what this is like. And he was glad for it. People who got close to magic ended up dead, and selfishly, Stiles wanted Dr. Patil and her family to exist in a little bubble of safety. Javier was in the Navy, and Reema’s fiancé was a firefighter.

There were enough things in the “real” world to kill them already. They didn’t need more.

“Nope,” he said, lying through his teeth. “Ask away.”

Of course Dr. Patil had a bullshit meter more finely tuned than his dad’s, and she frowned at him.

“Your friend’s funeral was yesterday.”

Dr. Patil didn’t really ask Stiles questions, outside the normal how do we get your medication right discussion they had at the beginning of every session. She preferred to have conversations with her patients, read them while they talked. She’d joked with him that she was probably a con artist in another life.

“Yeah, Allison. She’s been gone less than a week, and yesterday it was horrible.” He could blend the truth and lies here, make it more real. He rubbed his eyes. “She didn’t have much family left, you know, just her dad, and it was like—we weren’t family, obviously, but it felt like she was my sister. And now she’s gone, and it hurts even worse than with Mom, because, well, she was just a year older. She was only seventeen, and now she’s never going to be anything else.”

Oh she’s gone, all is lost, whatever can we do?

“It can be difficult, losing a peer, especially after receiving a death sentence yourself.” Dr. Patil smiled, warm as always. “But they say you just had a strain of meningitis? It seems odd to call that lucky, but it was.”

“Yeah.” Stiles’s throat closed up. It isn’t fair that she’s gone and I’m here. “The doctors are calling it a fluke that I even survived. It’s probably why I went a little, uh, not well for a while there. They’re also taking apart the MRI machine. They think the, uh, electrical storm thing might have made the equipment malfunction.”

Dr. Patil stopped smiling, nodding. She was filling out something on the computer, and Stiles was uncomfortably reminded that this was serving as his psych eval, even if it wasn’t the traditional format.

“Yes. And you chose to check yourself into Eichen House. It must have been terrifying, thinking you had the same disease that killed your mother.”

“It was.” Enough that I didn’t even fight the nogitsune when he took me. “It was like I was living it all over again, and I couldn’t—I couldn’t stay there, at home, where she died, and I was losing my mind, so, yeah, I checked myself in.”

“And you disappeared in a psychotic episode, reappearing with a full bill of health. No signs of infection, no signs of any disease or exposure symptoms—you’re very lucky. Now, I don’t want to ask this, but I have to. Why did you leave?”

I didn’t.

“Honestly, I don’t remember much, so I can’t tell you why I left. I wanted to stay in Eichen House because they had people who were used to dealing with mental illness, and because I’ve put my dad through a lot already.”

She nodded, making a note.

“Tell me about that. You have a note on your record, a restraining order placed by Jackson Whittemore and a citation for theft of police property. You’ve never been that interested in pranks.” She grinned, shooting him a look over her glasses. “Was he a ‘raging douchebag’?”

“Well, that goes without saying,” Stiles said, grinning. “I think, well, I think it was half stress from all the murders, and uh, maybe I was being a bit of a douchebag myself. He dropped the restraining order, though, before he left for London. We actually talk a little now. An ocean seems like a good distance between us to deal with him.” And his record was going to be sealed when he was eighteen, thank god, because Stiles sort of wanted to get the hell away from Beacon Hills and all the magical creatures that were going to be coming here.

“Good. And you haven’t mentioned her, so I will. Lydia.”

Her voice carried a lot in the tone. Stiles winced, because after becoming friends with her, it was obvious how creepy he had been.

“Well, I have a girlfriend, Malia, now, and I think Lydia is, uh, coming off a relationship with someone who I thought was a douchebag. He was, but that was totally her choice, and now she bitches about math and I bitch about math and I like her better now, as a friend. No more creepy ten year plan, uh, that you didn’t know about. It is totally creepy in retrospect.”

Dr. Patil was beaming. Stiles found himself blushing down his chest, and he coughed, rubbing at his shirt.

“I was not that bad,” he mumbled, and she laughed.

“Oh, Stiles, you really, really were. I am completely unsurprised that you had a ten year plan. But it’s fantastic that you’ve managed to have this breakthrough all on your own, and at such a young age. I fully expected you to get slapped at least once.” She leaned forward, and Stiles could almost forget that she was evaluating every response he gave her for signs that he needed to go back to Eichen House. “And Malia? How did that happen.”

Stiles ducked his head, grinning.

“I met her at Eichen House; she punched me in the face. Well, I guess I met her in the woods, you know, when she came back to Beacon Hills.”

“I assume things got better after the punch,” Dr. Patil said, frowning. “Did your relationship start before or after you left Eichen House?”

“Um. Well, it sort of started at Eichen House, but not really. She checked out, like really checked out, didn’t escape, the day after I left. It was only after that that we really started to get to know each other, though. She’s readjusting, and Lydia, Scott, and I are tutoring her in classes so she can be better at school. She comes over to my house most days, and it’s really nice. She’s not—she and I aren’t alike, but in a good way? I know everyone says you don’t really find someone to fall in love with when you’re seventeen, but I really, really like her.” He grinned thinking about her.

“Well, I hope that works out for you two.”

She didn’t approve, Stiles knew with the sudden clarity he got when he was doing math or history homework. Her disapproval was palpable, tasted like sour apricots in his mouth.

“Me too.” He smiled, pretending to be oblivious to whatever micro-expression he was reading off her right now.

They talked for the whole hour he was there, and at the end of it Dr. Patil turned to him, arms on the shiny surface of her desk.

“Well, you’re not going back to Eichen House,” she said. A knot completely disappeared in his chest, warmth flooding through his fingers. They’d been clenched on his knees. “You didn’t belong there in the first place, and now that all your symptoms have disappeared, there would be no reason for you to go back there.” She held out a piece of paper, on which was written a two month prescription for Adderall, and an emergency Xanax prescription since he’d admitted to the panic attack. “You know better than to misuse either of these. Remember, if you think you’re going into a stressful situation, or one where you might be triggered, take the Xanax before.”

“Thanks, but I hope I won’t have to take it, obviously,” he said. She’d bumped up his Adderall, which he’d expected. They walked through the office, and the woman at the desk scheduled another appointment for the Sunday after next. It would probably take six months to go back to what they’d been doing before.

The routine would be nice, he guessed.

When he got home he was happily surprised to see that his Nana Jastrzebski was calling him on Skype. She wasn’t like normal old people, even though she was close to ninety; she was great with technology, and terrifyingly sharp-witted.

“Hi Nana,” he said, waving to the camera, and Nana smiled, the mass of wrinkles that was her face shifting and stretching. He could count every vein under her skin, and her hair was a white cloud around it. She shook a spotted finger at him, swelling up with breath.

Oh no. She was going to rant.

“What have you been doing with yourself, young man? You need a good meal and a few lessons, and here is the first one. It is one thing, young man, to be best friends with the first True Alpha since 1928; even finding a banshee I could understand. But a nogitsune? Oh, pick your jaw off the floor, your mother rode dragons—I preferred gryphons myself, but the Lord knows your mother was born to ride fiery beasts with killing breath.” She spoke quickly, with a light accent—she and her husband Zenobiusz, his grandfather, had moved to the States when they were teenagers.

Stiles gaped. Nana glared at him, picking her glasses off her black top and putting them on.

“You know,” he said, because that was the important thing. Nana knew that Scott was a werewolf—apparently knew that he was an Alpha. She knew enough about werewolves to know when the last True Alpha had been bitten or born or whatever.

She was… still glaring at him.

“And you got possessed by the bastard,” she said. “I had to keep Andy in chains for a week when we realized that the outpouring wasn’t you but some psychotic fucking fox. He wanted to claw its eyes out, you know.” She raised her bony hands to the screen, forming fists with them. “Borys was, of course, a help restraining him. Stiles, you gave an old woman a terrible shock.” She pressed her hand to her chest, and Stiles tried to figure out how to respond to… everything. “But then you beat it. I could hear my Sabina rejoicing that day. Oh, Zenobiusz, Stiles, we are all so proud of you. Now, ask the question that’s burnt you inside for, oh, two minutes.”

“What the hell are--” Stiles backtracked over you, but couldn’t even fathom saying we. “How do you know about werewolves, Nana?”

She leaned forward, brown eyes changing to green, and then filling the whites of her eyes. Stiles, because he’d seen werewolves before, did not recoil. He swallowed and stared, but he was strong enough not to falter.

“My mother told me stories of monsters and men and gods, Stiles. When I was just a young girl we fought monsters and men, and we prayed to gods. You remember the stories I would tell when your mother brought you over, about the war?”

He nodded, numb. The green disappeared from her eyes and she leaned back, sighing.

“It is a parent’s duty to introduce magic to their child, my Zenobiusz. Mother to daughter, father to son. My Tatiana, my Borys, I taught them, and your grandfather taught Sabina. It was right for him, as it was right to teach Tatiana and Borys differently. Our powers are the same, and yours, your mother’s, your grandfather’s, are so very different from ours.”

“Powers,” Stiles said. “Wait, powers as in plural? But the—Void, it--”

“Seeks power, even now, and the power of a name is one we all know very well, Stiles.” Nana’s voice made Stiles’s jaw snap shut. “And the nogitsune fed on your fear, which has always been enemy to magic and thought. You had no idea you could fight it, and it worked like a fox is not meant to work. Using riddles,” she spat. “Riddles, as if it were a sphinx. And you not even through the first test.”

“First test? First test?” Stiles blinked. “What am I getting tested on? I literally just found out I’m some sort of—witch, or warlock or something.”

“If you want to you can learn to be a witch, but what you are, in English, is a conjurer. Witchcraft is something anyone can practice, as your Druid would-be teacher knows. Druids.” She said it like a curse. “Trumped up humans, think they’re the arbiters of good and evil because they earn their power—pah! The tests will show you darkness and light, and where you fall in the scale. Wherever that is your family will stand behind you. Remember, family is forever.”

His mom had always said that too. It helped calm Stiles down now, made him steadier. It stopped him from asking if the tests might kill him, because of course they might. He’d almost died so many times now that it wasn’t even funny.

“So, does Dad know I’m a conjurer?” he asked, and Nana gave him The Look, the one that said, are you serious, telling him would have been a disaster and a half. “Was Mom ever going to tell him?”

“Yes, despite my reservations.” Her mouth turned down; she took off her glasses and sighed. “My Zenobiusz. Your first test came and went with the oni. Now you know what it is to be possessed, and know that you shall never possess the unwilling.”

Stiles swallowed, nodding. If he had that power he wouldn’t use it, ever.

“The tests are your life now, Stiles, until the final test comes. I don’t think there will be too many, so don’t worry. I love you, Stiles. I have to go, your cousin’s girlfriend has managed to conjure a chimera. Do not conjure a chimera, Stiles.”

Harried, Nana closed out Skype. Stiles leaned back in his chair. He rubbed a hand over his eyes, feeling his jaw—he was grinding his teeth together.

“Your Nana seems nice,” Malia said, and Stiles almost jumped out of his skin. He turned around and she was sitting on his bed in full view of the camera, a book in her hands. She put it down, leaning her head back, and sighed hugely. “So, Derek Hale. I tracked his scent to a warehouse, but there were a lot of scents around it. I made sure, and it smelled like guns.”

Stiles closed his eyes. Of course.

“You’re not freaking out over the whole conjurer thing,” he said, opening his eyes. She smiled, eyes flashing bright blue. “Right, things like that probably stop being surprising after a while.”

“Also your eyes glowed when we were having sex,” Malia said, wincing. “I thought you knew.”

Stiles sucked in a breath.

“Red, not green though. Not red like the stoplights or stop signs, but like cherries, the real ones. It looked good on you.” She put the book on the bedside table, stretching out. It shouldn’t have been sexy, not how she did it—not arching her chest but her back, feet pressed, hard, in the mattress—but it was harder to breathe, and she smirked at him after she collapsed back on the bed. Her t-shirt was rumpled. It looked soft, and was gray like doves’ feathers. He fixated on the slice of skin that it didn’t cover anymore, trying to remember why he shouldn’t do that.

Right. Derek. They had to get Derek back, but Malia was staring at him through hooded eyes, nostrils flaring—smirking, god, she was smirking, and Stiles was walking to her. She leaned up and stripped him of his shirt before he swooped down, arms beside her head. Even though he was above her he could feel the shift in power. Her hands were on his belt buckle, rubbing against the tent he was sporting, and he whined high in his throat.

He didn’t need a test to know what he’d do for this.

“Kiss me,” she said, and he did. Her hands fumbled with his belt—finally something that tripped them both up, he thought, a little desperate because a tooth had dug into the skin and he suddenly realized he was into the pain thing—and she closed her eyes with a hiss. His belt flew into the wall, hitting it with a thunk, and Malia grinned.

How he ended up under her he had no idea. He didn’t really care, though, because she took off her shirt too, and he had all of two seconds to think breasts before she kissed him again, fingers kneading his chest and arms while his flailed and finally settled in her hair sliding through it and cradling her head. He had some control, finally, and used it to deepen the kiss, licking into her mouth. She grinned, which made him accidentally lick her teeth, and then their teeth knocked together because they were both grinning.

“You’re doing it again,” she said, pulling away and touching the skin just below his eye. It was such a vulnerable area—she could flick a claw and he’d be blind—but he trusted Malia enough that he just stared at her. Her eyes were glowing too, just like they always did when they did this, and he rubbed a thumb on her cheekbone. “You’re beautiful like this. You’re mine.”

“And you’re mine,” he said, more confident than he actually was. The enormity of what they were doing here astounded him—just a few weeks after meeting they were practically saying wedding vows, and Stiles didn’t even know what her favorite candy was. “We’ve gotta watch TV together at least.”

She frowned, leaning into his hand and humming.

“I used to play Disney games on our computer,” she said, and he grinned.

“I preferred Nickelodeon. Hey Arnold all the way, dude.” He sighed, looking up at her. It was so easy to forget that they were practically in the middle of a war right now with her there, and her everything on display. The mood had gone, though, as enormous as what they’d just said was, if only because of the sheer stupidity of falling in love like this.

“That was sad, though. His parents were probably dead.” She moved her legs out of his lap, huffing. “We have to deal with Derek Hale, don’t we?”

He nodded, handing her her shirt. It was as soft as it looked, and her hands stayed on it after it was back on her body. She had a frown line on her forehead that he touched, and she looked at him for a whole second, silent. This was one of those times where eight years as a coyote did nothing to help them communicate.

“He’s the—not so smart one, right?” she asked, and he shook his head from side to side. So-so, he was saying, and she understood that just fine. “Then shouldn’t we leave him? He’s a wolf, and wolves act like coyotes, sort of. If it’s going to get us killed, why go after him?”

Stiles shook his head, that ruthless, alien thought making him nauseated.

“Wolves in the wild take care of sick members of the pack,” he said, staring straight into her eyes. “And humans are a lot more like wolves than they are like coyotes. If you don’t want to get involved in the fight, you don’t have to. I’m not going to make you, and I know Scott isn’t going to make you, so you--” He stopped, not because he didn’t have anything to say, but because Malia’s arm was on his throat, her weight on his chest. He couldn’t breathe.

“If you go, I go,” she said. “Humans don’t have mates, but I wasn’t human for half my life. I’m learning, and I’ll do better, I promise, but my first instinct isn’t to save an idiot.” She leaned back, glaring at him. “And it won’t be.”

Stiles nodded. It was a smart instinct, he guessed, and would probably save her life if it ever came down to her or someone else.

“Okay, I can accept that,” he said, and her frown turned, briefly, into a scowl before she turned around, straightening her shirt and pants. Stiles straightened out his own clothes and put a new shirt on, foregoing the belt. He got his phone and clicked the four emergency numbers he always texted—and then stopped, eyes going hot.

He’d automatically pressed Allison’s name. It was right there, Allison Argent in black letters, right under Scott McCall and above Lydia Martin. Stiles wiped his eyes and deleted her number and Isaac’s, keeping his breathing steady through years of practice. He pressed Kira’s name too.  

His mom had written down everything in the last months before she died, just to make sure she was still there. He’d still been finding the notes when he was fourteen. He could deal with this.

911 Derek kidnapped. Meet at my house. He typed the message with fingers that didn’t shake, and he sent the message with a breath.

“I’ve got to get a better phone,” Malia said. She looked at his, then sighed. “Scott and Kira are at the door.”

“Stiles, Andrzej is on the phone for you!” Dad yelled up the stairs.

“And-what?” Malia asked. “Is that a name?”

Stiles closed his eyes. Of course Andy would call now, right after Jenny conjured a chimera and probably set Nana’s house on fire. He had the absolute worst sense of timing.

“It’s Polish. Andy’s my cousin, he probably called about the whole conjurer—thing.” He waved his hand in the air, indicating how much bullshit he thought the conjurer thing actually was. So far it hadn’t been much help against any of their enemies, and other than glowing eyes it seemed to be pretty useless. “Dad, there’s sort of a situation with Derek!” he shouted. “Could you tell Andy that he’s been a real freaking help tied up at Nana’s? He’ll know what I mean!”

Malia snorted, and Stiles raised his eyebrows. Scott and Kira had come up the stairs by now and were nodding greetings at the two of them.

“He just asked Andy if your Nana really tied him up,” she said. Scott grinned, and Stiles knew they were thinking about the same thing: the summer Nana came to stay with Dad and him, the summer after Mom died. Nana had approved of Scott and even made special brownies for him whenever he asked, with walnuts and raisins in them. She’d been very physical with her affection and punishments back then too, and their heads still had lumps in them from her slaps. “And Andy says he’s going to be here tonight. Does that mean we should wait?”

Scott shook his head, obviously confused.

“How could another human help?”

“I resent that,” Lydia said, gliding into the room. The dark shadows hadn’t disappeared under her eyes, but instead of sleepy she looked like she’d had some sort of religious experience. Her crown of hair was pristine, her skin was clear and not blotchy, and her nails were bright red like arterial blood. “Though the myths about banshees claim that we’re inhuman, everything seems to be pointing to that being a lie. Wow, your tail is really bright, Kira.” She blinked, shaking her head.

“Uh, I’d still like to be called human, by the way,” Kira said. “Hi Stiles, Malia, Lydia. What do you mean bright? People can’t see my tail.”

Lydia brightened, if that was possible. Stiles had a pit of dread in his stomach. Lydia’s teeth were sharper than they usually were.

“My mom gave me a grimoire,” she said. “Apparently I just had to ask her for it since she didn’t know if I was a banshee or not. She’s not one, by the way. A banshee who has all their powers is really powerful and terrifying.” She tilted her head in Stiles’s and Malia’s direction. “Huh. We should wait for a fully trained conjurer.”

The three sane people in the room shared a look while Lydia sat on Stiles’s bed. Malia walked forward and sat down next to Lydia, quietly grilling her on what exactly she’d done.

“Conjurer?” Scott asked.

“Isn’t that a type of witch in Charmed?” Kira asked, then looked away blushing. Stiles would have been blushing too if he knew enough about Charmed to ask that question.

“Well, apparently my mom actually rode on dragons, and my eyes glow, but—all of them, not just part of them.” He coughed. “I don’t actually know what else I can do. Maybe pull a rabbit out of thin air.” He tried a laugh but it came out weak and hollow. Scott and Malia were both staring at him, a desperate whiteness around their eyes. He tasted rust in his mouth, their anxiety in his nose and in his head, and he laughed again. “And I can sense other people’s emotions, which is gonna be so great later on.”

Kira looked at him, then pulled out his desk chair and put her head in her hands.

“You’re so a witch from Charmed,” she said. She looked up. “Do you think this means whoever wrote Charmed was a conjurer?”

Scott said, “I doubt it, Nana Jastrzebski thought the show was stupid and never let us watch it.” He turned to Stiles. “We’ll figure out what it means, Stiles. Before that, though, we have to get Derek back. Whoever has him hasn’t killed him, so they’re probably going to try to use him for something if they haven’t already.”

It was at that moment that Dad opened the door and leaned against it, face like a corpse. Stiles’s heart stopped beating for a second even though he couldn’t feel anything from his dad. He could feel the blood drain from his face.

“First we’ve gotta kill Andy,” he said. He walked up to Dad, who shook his head. “I just heard about it like twenty minutes ago. I guess it means you don’t have to worry about me as much anymore.” His throat had a huge lump in it, his own anxiety making it hard to talk.

Dad clapped his hands right on Stiles’s shoulders, staring at him.

“I’m going to worry all your life, Stiles. But Andy says he’s here for your tests or whatever, and after that you should be safe from pretty much everything. Just, promise me you won’t try to, I don’t know, go back in time and stop this from happening. ‘Cause everything else, I can deal with it, even magic. If time travel exists we’re moving to Indiana.”

Stiles nodded. The idea hadn’t occurred to him, but thinking about it, he figured it wouldn’t work anyway. Everything that had happened had gotten them to this moment, so other choices would make them end up in different places. It would be a paradox, but he didn’t think explaining that to his dad would make him feel any better.

“I promise not to time travel, if that’s even an option.” He cleared his throat. “So, you’ve got night shift again?”

“Yes, and don’t think I don’t know when I’m being manipulated. Don’t get killed, or maimed, or arrested, preferably by not breaking the law, but only if following the law won’t get you killed or maimed. Got it?”

“Got it.” Stiles stepped away from Dad. He left, closing the door behind him, but Stiles could hear him mutter, “Busy, busy, busy,” through it.

Stiles closed his eyes, then turned to everyone else.

“So, here’s hoping time travel doesn’t exist, because I can’t deal with that,” he said. “And I guess we should have a plan together before Andy gets here.”

Kira and Scott left to do reconnaissance on the warehouse Derek was being held at, while Lydia, Malia, and Stiles got ready to fight.

“I think I can probably do something to this,” he said, holding the aluminum bat. “Make it stronger or something.” Malia was flicking her claws out and then back in, eyes glowing, and Lydia’s eyes were consumed with black while she muttered under her breath. Sigils or some other type of symbol fit themselves on her hands and up her arms, writhing unnaturally.

Stiles looked at his bat, wondering how exactly this had become his life. The bat twitched, and Stiles ran his free hand along the length. What he needed wasn’t much heavier than this but would act like it was. Maybe instead of hollow, there should be a rod inside it just in case something bent it. Something hard but lightweight, maybe.

“Maybe I should make it thicker,” he said. His head hurt at the thought of doing magic—magic, something he’d never really believed in but was undoubtedly real. He flicked the hollow bat, frowning, and flicked it again. The same noise came out the second time, but Deaton had said all he really needed to do was believe if he wanted magic to happen. The third time I flick this, the aluminum is going to be thicker, he thought, ignoring how that sounded absolutely crazy.

Magic was absolutely crazy, and that didn’t make it fake. If someone could conjure a chimera, then he could make a bat a little thicker so he didn’t die fighting with it.

The third flick sounded different. Stiles’s heart skipped a beat, and he gripped the bat like he was about to hit a ball. It was heavier, enough that his swing would have been off if he’d been trying to hit a ball.

“Holy shit,” he said. “Holy shit I did it.” His stomach recoiled, and he dropped the bat on the floor. It didn’t bounce like it would have when it was lighter, and Stiles grinned even though he was probably going to throw up on his shoes. He could recognize the feeling in his stomach as anxiety so he wasn’t too worried.

Malia curled around him, humming, and teeth scraped against the back of his neck when she smiled. Stiles leaned back into her, and she was warmer than the air around them. Stiles had goose bumps, maybe from the magic and maybe from the shock, but it was nice, having her there.

“You’re going to need a better weapon if you want to survive,” she said. “But what you did was nice.”

“Here.” Lydia stood up, and Stiles turned. Malia separated herself from him with a growl in her breath, standing beside him instead. Lydia took Stiles’s hand, drawing a symbol on the back in black marker. It matched one on her hand, and Stiles looked at it while Lydia forced it on Malia as well. It wasn’t like the runes he’d seen when he looked up Norse mythology (because maybe there was something in there that would help them), and it wasn’t like the symbols Deaton used. It was still familiar, and Stiles blinked.

It was a circle inside a circle, like Scott’s tattoo, but there were three lines branching out from the center. Stiles recognized them as the Alpha pack’s symbol and frowned.

“Their particular triskele represents conflict,” Lydia said as if anticipating his question. “Circles represent protection. It’s a very powerful ward. See, it’s on this page.” She opened the book and showed him all those circles, and he couldn’t read the Cyrillic that floated around the page, but he trusted that Lydia could.

Scott and Kira got back just a few minutes later, both gasping when they saw Lydia. She smiled at them under wiggling ink, calm like she didn’t look like some sort of demon. She immediately took Scott’s hand and drew the mark on it, then just looked at Kira.

“Your tails will protect you more effectively than any ward I could make,” she said. She didn’t sound reassuring, though—she sounded irritated, like she considered it a personal affront. Lydia was a bit of a narcissist, which was something Stiles couldn’t have admitted even a few weeks ago.

The worst part was that it was a trait they had in common. Magic was pretty arrogant, all about believing that you were the only one who could get something right. Somehow Lydia had gotten it into her head that she had to protect all of them—before Allison died it hadn’t been so obvious, but she and Scott were more alike than anyone could have expected. Lydia was just more likely to go off the rails if something happened to one of them.

“Well, I guess all we can do now is wait,” Scott said, sitting down on Stiles’s bed and closing his eyes. His claws were out, and his eyes were glowing red, but he looked more in control than he had in months. Stiles felt the same way, like something was racing under his skin but was his, and he suddenly had the thought that anyone who tried to fight them was going to die very badly.

The prince’s heart had love to spare, so the hawk protected it with desperate care.

If Scott killed someone tonight he would be shattered. Stiles wouldn’t, so that was that. He took the bat off the floor and touched the plastic cap.

It didn’t feel sticky already. It didn’t.

“Hey, cousin,” Andy said, appearing in the door like a goddamned ghost. “I felt your premature guilt and I figured I’d take the express way instead of a car.”

Every time Stiles saw Andy he was surprised that he was built like a brick fucking house. He was Borys’s son, so it shouldn’t have been so weird (those two came in two flavors: big, and bigger), but whenever he and Stiles had conversations over the phone like luddites his voice was so soft and quiet that Stiles couldn’t imagine his big bear of a cousin. Like everyone in the Jastrzebski family, his hair and eyes were dark, but his was grown out and tied with a metal clasp at his neck. The clasp, Stiles knew from hours of staring at it when Andy was a teenager and handed it to little-kid-Stiles to shut him up, was in the shape of a sphinx, the wings folded across her back. She had an expression that Andy called defiance and Stiles called pissed off.  

Andy grabbed him up in a bone crushing hug, lifting him off of his feet, and Stiles squeaked. Andy let go of him, grabbing him by his shoulders and examining him.

“You need to eat more. I’m going to get Kasia to make you a whole pie, and there are going to be revitalizing potions in it.” One beefy finger pointed right at Stiles’s nose. There was a ring on a very specific finger that Stiles noticed, raising his eyebrows at it. “Jenny asked me to marry her, it was very romantic, none of that changes the fact that you are coming out of a very traumatic experience and probably haven’t eaten well since True Alpha Dirt-Pie-Eater got bitten.”

“Christ, you could give Nana a run for her money, you know,” Stiles said. He grinned when another very specific finger turned up. “You’re going to make a fantastic house husband for Dr. Woo.”

“I know, it’s been my dream since I was a little kid,” Andy said. He wasn’t joking or making fun of himself like other guys might have—he had always wanted to get married and have a home, and Nana had glared at everyone who had found that weird, including Stiles. Andy was going to be a fantastic stay at home dad someday, and Jenny was lucky to have him. For now, though, he just looked guilty, twisting the ring on his finger. “So, I felt it when the fucker took you. Sorry I didn’t come help.”

Stiles shook his head, a knot in his throat.

“I heard you had to be put in chains. It—I’m pretty sure it would have killed you if you’d come.” He turned to the group, waving his arm in their direction. “You know Scott, but I don’t think you’ve heard of Kira--”

“A kitsune, my god you’ve got some weird friends.” He stepped forward, taking up so much space Stiles could barely breathe. He took Kira’s hand and shook it. “Your sword is very powerful, and I can see that you’re going to be even more powerful than your family expects.” He turned to Lydia and put his hands on his hips. “You need to not have all those on you in broad daylight.”

“They’ll be gone before the end of the night,” Lydia said, smirking. “And you are much more powerful than you look, and that’s saying something. Are all the people in your family conjurers?”

“Nope, but the ones who aren’t become witches anyway. Or Druids, but we don’t talk about that. Hello.” He turned to Malia, who was standing stiffly away from them. Something clenched in Stiles’s chest when Andy approached her, and she was shaking. She was terrified of Andy, and even though Stiles couldn’t feel it (or taste it or whatever), he could see it in every line of her body.

Andy came to a stop, frowning.

“I’m not going to hurt your soul, cousin,” he said, turning hurt bambi eyes on Stiles. “I mean, I’m a little shocked you found her so young, but Sabina found John when she was eighteen and Nana and Grandpa Zeno were together for seventy years. I’m a pacifist, remember?”

“Stiles, you put up a ward,” Malia said. She wasn’t shaking anymore, and Stiles wanted to say, that’s why, you were shaking because you were afraid of him and anything that makes you afraid is going to burn or have to run very fast, but that would actually be insane. He tried to remember why that was insane and drew a blank.

“I can understand being a little nervous, what with the curse, but wouldn’t it just be easier to break it than—hey, what the hell!”

Malia had thrown a book at him. She was glaring, and her body was shaking again. Stiles turned to Scott, who shrugged, eyes wide.

Since no one else knew what was going on and she’d been so smug, he turned to Lydia, who was smirking.

“Werecoyotes don’t exist,” she said, like she was imparting a great secret. Stiles wondered how he had never noticed how cocky she was in all the years he was obsessed with her.“Especially not werecoyotes who stay in one form for eight years.”

“I was working on figuring out what I am,” Malia said. Her fists were clenched; she was bleeding down her palms. “I couldn’t just say what I wasn’t. I needed to know what did this to me and why being around you two made it better. I never said I was a werecoyote—you all just thought that and didn’t question it.” She closed her eyes, breathing in sharply. “I’m sorry I didn’t say something. I can control it, sort of, but I don’t know what I am. Do you?”

Andy nodded. His eyes turned green like Nana’s, all over.

“Elemental conjurer cursed when you were just a kid. You’re probably the second of your line because it’s a blood spell.” He walked around her, humming. “You’re powerful, and the spell is using that power to trap you.”

A trap of her own blood. Stiles was going to be sick.

“I’m going to be sick,” Andy said, mouth twisting. “Blood spells can only be created by close family.”

Malia’s eyes were watery, and her chin shook when she nodded. Usually when Stiles thought she looked like a Hale, it was because she looked like her father. Now she looked just like Derek.

No one should ever look as miserable as Derek, and definitely not Malia. Stiles found himself approaching her, arms out, and she actually accepted his hug. She let out a sob against his shoulder, claws digging into his sides.

“Shh, it’s okay,” he said, holding her. In the background Lydia was explaining what the cage around Malia looked like for Scott and Kira, but Stiles tuned it out, as well as Andy ranting about how families were supposed to take care of each other. “You were right, it was a true dream,” he whispered, and she nodded against his shoulder.

“I could see it.” She shook her face slowly, and Stiles froze when he realized she was wiping snot off on his hoodie. She pulled away, face hard. “We can’t think about that right now, though. We have to go save Derek. Afterward your cousin can teach us how to break a curse, right?”

She had an uncanny ability to cut through everyone else’s conversation. Scott, the one most likely to feel betrayed by her lies of omission, just nodded, and Kira breathed a shaky sigh, sheathing her sword. Lydia closed her eyes—Stiles tasted firecracker excitement, and yep, Lydia was going out of her mind with power, he was going to have to stage an intervention soon—and when they opened they were black.

He tried not to be unnerved. It didn’t work.

“Yours glow blood red,” she sneered.

“Oh, cool, we match,” Scott said, slinging an arm around Stiles’s shoulders. He was using Stiles to hide a faint tremor in his arms, and Stiles was once again reminded that they were all really young. Stiles leaned into him, pressing his lips together hard. “I guess we’ll talk about everything after we get Derek back.”

If they got back at all.

“Yep.” Stiles picked up his bat. Andy was looking at him, smiling. Stiles scowled. “So, I get that you’re a pacifist. Will you still help us?”

The smile widened, making his eyes crinkle and almost disappear.

“The tests told me I was a pacifist and a healer, except when it came to family. When it comes to you or Kasia, or even my dad—and he’s no pacifist—I am not gentle.” He held out his hand and a black mace materialized out of thin air, swinging once, a practiced arc that should have been followed by a spray of blood. “I have a feeling I’m going to need to use this before tonight is over. A bit of advice, don’t go for the kill unless you have to. You’re all kids, and even if you are battle tested, none of you have tasted blood. It’s terrible.”

They ended up taking Stiles’s jeep, the ones of them who couldn’t just run. The baseball bat and the fucking mace were in the floor by Andy’s feet. Lydia had drawn… something, on the one free piece of skin she had left, and every mark had vanished. She looked almost normal, except for the whole demonic eyes thing. They didn’t even reflect light.

“I honestly thought you’d be angry,” Malia said. “Humans don’t appreciate lying.”

Andy snorted, and Stiles glared at him before turning back to the road. If they got in a wreck before they even got to the warehouse, this whole thing would just turn out to be a big mess.

Stiles opened his mouth, trying to find a way to say you were just protecting yourself I would never ever stop you from doing that you shouldn’t have had to go through that I’m going to kill whoever did this to you— in a way that didn’t sound like he was going off the deep end.

“You’re his soul, Malia, and he’s yours. It’s like the concept of soul mates, but it’s more of an understanding; you’ve got similar ways of thinking about things. He’d probably do the same thing in your situation.” Stiles frowned, taking everything in and trying to pretend that all his attention was on the road. “But all that similarity means that when you feel real anger toward each other—it won’t be pretty. Jenny and I started an earthquake once, and we’re both healers. An elemental conjurer and—well, Nana would cut my tongue out if I gave that away before the final test. Just make sure you call and make sure I’m out of the country when that happens, okay?”

Stiles didn’t look away from the road stretching in front of him, but his fists were clenched so tightly on the wheel that he couldn’t feel his fingers.

“You didn’t lie.” Stiles finally found his voice despite the fact that his throat was dry and his everything was shaky. “We never asked if you were a werecoyote. We just assumed that someone who had shifted into an animal was a were-animal.” He glanced at Andy. “Shapeshifting witch thing, real or not real?”

Andy nodded, sighing, “Real, and very dangerous, especially if you’re on the other end of the claws or the talons. Our family isn’t that great at changing our own bodies, though. Pure conjurers are never good at that.”

Stiles turned on the road that led to the warehouse, fingers loosening on the wheel. Andy was lying, or he wasn’t telling the whole truth—he’d said Nana would cut out his tongue if he told Stiles what he was, and Stiles knew that wasn’t a lie (he’d known Nana was a badass for years, and the conjurer thing was just more proof). Stiles was pretty sure whatever ‘pure’ conjuring was, it didn’t include sensing people’s emotions or seeing the fucking future.

Andy was a decade older than Stiles, and he probably thought that hiding things from him was for his own good.

Forget it for now. His eyes skittered over the baseball bat and mace in the floor; they were less than a minute away from the warehouse. It was winter, which didn’t mean much in Beacon Hills, but it did mean that twilight came early and night just as fast. The shadows consumed the buildings around them already, and Stiles shivered—someone dancing on his grave, Mom used to say while she tickled his neck.

It hadn’t been creepy back then.

He pulled up to a parking lot that was far enough away from the warehouse that they wouldn’t be seen. Hopefully Lydia’s wards would give them some luck, too, just in case whoever had Derek sent out people to patrol the area.

“A lot of people died here,” Lydia said, eyes closed. Malia hummed, not asking anything but frowning hard. There was a little furrow between her eyebrows that was going to end up sticking there permanently if this kept up. “Deucalion’s pack died here. He’s an Alpha that killed a lot of people—Scott and Derek let him go free after giving him his sight back. I don’t agree with what they did, but it means the spirits here will help us.” Her forehead creased. “That’s not possible.”

Stiles, Andy, and Malia shared a look. Oh, fuck, that look said, and Andy handed Stiles the bat, gripping the mace tightly in his hand. Stiles looked back at Lydia, whose skin was covered in writhing symbols again—the fleur-de-lis on her neck was jumping with her pulse, an anvil-looking symbol below that changing thickness and twirling. Lydia’s nostrils flared as her eyes opened, gaping black holes in her face that didn’t make Stiles recoil anymore.

Fear tasted like blood, and Stiles only knew what the iron-salt combination on his tongue was because of Gerard. The terror in the car was a mouthful of it, nauseating and terrifying just by existing. It wasn’t Lydia’s, or Malia’s, or Andy’s (he was pretty sure Andy had blocked him from tasting his emotions, the one thing he was grateful for). The ghosts Lydia had been talking to—of course she had been talking to ghosts, of course—were screaming with it.

“Kate.” Lydia spat the word out. “Kate Argent is here.”

Stiles gaped.

“That’s not possible. They buried her. She wasn’t like Peter.” She couldn’t have been. Peter had done something with Lydia and—maybe something with Derek, too, but Stiles wasn’t sure on that part. Kate might have met Lydia before she died, but Stiles hoped that Derek would have told them if Kate used him to resurrect herself. “Wait, did someone resurrect Kate after kidnapping Derek? Is that what happened?”

Lydia shook her head. All the excited color had vanished from her cheeks, making her look like a ghost. Stiles swallowed down his own grief (Allisonallisonallison, wailed somewhere deep inside him), waiting for her answer.

“That took an Alpha’s blood; they would have taken Scott if she was dead. No, I don’t think—are you sure Kate was dead? There are some drugs that mimic death. They slow the heartbeat, so she could have faked her death.” That was how they’d explained Jackson’s “death”.

Andy held up a hand. Expecting him to ask who Kate Argent was, Stiles opened his mouth, but Andy pressed the hand to Stiles’s mouth before he got the chance to say anything. Stiles glared at him but shut it, and Andy pointed at Lydia.

“How did she die?” he asked. Malia’s eyebrows rose high on her forehead, and she opened her mouth. “Hush. Was she killed by an Alpha?” When both Lydia and he nodded he swore viciously in Polish for ten seconds, then breathed, hard, through his nose. “And of course la mere des Argents died before—fucking hell.” He rubbed his hand on his face, pinching the bridge of his nose.

The dance was on them, the beginning of the end, a surprise guest attending, an old friend.

“What happens when an Argent gets killed by an Alpha?” Lydia asked. Malia was trying to get their attention, and Stiles looked behind him. He didn’t know why he bothered, since he’d figured out that his life was a bad movie months ago.

“Why don’t we ask her?” he asked.

He’d never met Kate Argent. He’d seen her at lacrosse games with Allison and Chris, but he’d always been focused on watching the game and hoping he could get some time on the field even once. All he knew about her was that she was a hunter who had murdered eight people when they were too weak to fight back, which meant she was both smart and probably a sociopath. She’d left Derek alive, after all, and he was the only werewolf other than Peter who Stiles knew had blue eyes.

She was really young to have killed children seven years ago. Young and beautiful, looking more like Allison than her dad did, hair just a few shades lighter curling over her shoulders. She had a gun in her hands, a double barreled shotgun, but it wasn’t pointed at them.

“They turn, Stiles, but not into werewolves,” Andy hissed. “The gods created hunters in a time when our kinds were all vying for power—humans, werewolves, vampires, walking snakes, berserkers, centaurs, creatures even scarier than nogitsune or demons. Their women were given the power to take anything the darkness threw at them and turn it into something greater. If they’re killed by something non-human, the power flows in them and can sometimes bring them back, stronger than the creature that killed them.”

Malia rubbed Stiles’s neck where it was starting to ache with tension. Stiles breathed in, trying to control every reaction he was having to this news. He looked at Kate, who hadn’t moved to attack them yet.

Kate died so Allison would live.

“Derek was bait, wasn’t he?” he asked. Kate nodded. “Lydia knew that, didn’t she?” She nodded again. Stiles looked at Malia, at Lydia, who was glaring at him defiantly. Andy’s jaw was clenched, his hand on the mace that had somehow grown spikes on the long part while Stiles wasn’t looking. “She didn’t know it was you who had him.” Kate shook her head and said something, but Stiles couldn’t read her lips from here.

Malia stiffened.

“She’s not the one who kidnapped Derek.” Malia swallowed. “I have to talk to her.”

“What, no, are you crazy?” Stiles asked, grabbing Malia’s wrist when she moved to get out of the car. “She could kill you.”

Malia shook her head. Her eyes were wide.

“She said the person who did this did the blood spell too, Stiles. I have to know if she’s telling the truth. I know what she smells like.”

She? Stiles shook his head, looking at Kate again. She was grinning with sharp teeth.

“We’ll go with you then,” he said. “Give me my bat.”

Scott and Kira must have been listening in on their conversation, because they came up on either side of everyone, Kira with her sword out. Scott stepped close to Stiles, frowning at him.

“She’s going to try to kill us,” he said. Stiles nodded, clutching the bat tighter. “She shot me. She set people on fire and I don’t think she was ever sorry.”

“She also died.” Kate smirked, teeth flashing. Her eyes flashed green, and her teeth got pointy. “And now she finds out that not only did her rather heroic sacrifice not work out, but that you incompetent morons kept the guy who killed her, his own niece, and several other people, alive. I don’t know why, but that seems kind of like a bad idea.” She smiled at Stiles, who didn’t flinch away, but only barely. “Luckily, you people are so incompetent that you actually trusted a Druid to care about you and not his precious balance, because otherwise I’d have to kill you all.”

Stiles went cold. Behind him the concrete cracked under Andy’s feet, and Kate’s smile got even bigger. She was getting off on this, was actually happy that they were floundering.

“We can talk about how stupid that was later, cousin, and how to tell if a Druid is using you for his own personal gain,” Andy said, stepping forward. Between Kate and kids who weren’t trained, with a mace in his hand. Stiles got a glimpse of the edge of his eyes, which were filled with green. “You know what I am, what I can do, even to someone like you. Kindly cut the bullshit and tell us why you’re here.”

Kate nodded, suddenly all business. Stiles’s heart skipped a beat—she looked so much like Allison. She was wearing white, not black, and everything was all wrong. Allison should have been the one still alive, and Kate should be dead. She’d started all this. Stiles’s grip tightened on his bat.

“I made a promise the day Allison was born. Knew I’d never be a mother, either because I died too young or because I just wasn’t cut out for it. She’s the only thing in this world that isn’t screwed up. Probably the first Argent to go bad and pull herself out of the dark. And she was killed by a pretty powerful demon. We both know that the rules don’t apply to Argents, especially not this particular Argent.”

The old queen howled, violence her aim. She planned and she schemed that the girl should reign.

“And Derek?” Scott asked. His whole face was doing this weird pissed off and about to cry thing. Kate turned to him, eyebrows raised. “You expect us to believe that you didn’t kidnap him? It wouldn’t be the first time.”

Stiles could have kissed him right on the mouth. Scott was really the smarter one of them. Telling the people who didn’t know everything Kate had done would have taken too long, and Stiles wouldn’t have been able to do it without rambling.

“I didn’t take him. I wouldn’t have brought him here if I had, either. This is the best place in town to summon a labyrinth for an Argent, and the woman who took Derek knows that. She hates Hales even more than I do, which we all know is next to impossible.” Kate shook her head. “She hates me too. You know how break-ups can get.”

Malia twitched, hands clawing at her sides, and Kate laughed.

“I really can’t tell which one you resemble more. Your father would never lose control like that, but your mother—well, she doesn’t quite have that flare for dramatics that Hales always seem to come with.” Kate raised both her eyebrows at them, and Scott stepped forward.

“I wouldn’t know.” Malia shrugged. Whatever tactic Kate had tried to use to make her lose her cool hadn’t worked, and Stiles’s breath came easier knowing that. She looked at Stiles. “I was adopted when I was five months old. My biological mother left me outside my parents’ house. You’re saying she’s the one who kidnapped Derek?”

Kate nodded, shooting a smile at Malia that was full of pity.

“She’s also the one who cursed you, sweetie pie. Normally I’d be fine with that—one less powerful conjurer to worry about in good old Beacon Hills. But,” and her lips twisted, sour. “Using blood magic on your own family is—well, let’s just say it’s frowned on, even by hunters. And she wants me dead too, so enemy of my enemy and all that.”

Malia held out her hand, smiling. Kate raised an eyebrow, rolled her eyes, and took her hand. Malia shifted, claws digging into her wrist. Still grinning, Kate buckled into the grip.

“Apparently you’re some sort of serial killer. If you turn on my friends I’ll rip your heart out of your chest and feed it to you, cursed or not.”

Kate grinned even though her blood was dripping on the concrete. Stiles swallowed, shoving down the well of panic in his chest. Should have taken a Xanax, he thought. It wouldn’t have helped with his fighting ability, whatever little he had, but if he could just stop feeling like the world was about to fall apart that would be great.

“You’re more like her,” she said. “Lucky for you, since I don’t think she went insane until they took all memories of her from your father and he tried to kill her.”

“I don’t care who gave birth to me,” Malia said, not letting go. Kate’s nostrils flared, and Stiles hated his life, he really did. “My family was my mom and dad and sister, and because of her two of them are dead and one of them is never going to get over that. My dad is all I have left, and just because you apparently know my biological parents doesn’t mean you know anything about me. Now, you said the woman who has Derek is a conjurer. Why does she have hunters working for her?” She let go. Her human hand should have looked wrong covered in blood, but Stiles couldn’t find it in him to be perturbed by it.

“That would be because of me.” Kate shifted, eyes turning green and fur sprouting from her face. She looked like an animal who’d put on a human suit, like a real monster. Malia’s sticky hand grabbed Stiles’s upper arm so he didn’t step back, and he was grateful, really, but the primitive part of his brain was screaming at him to run. She shifted back, sheep’s clothing over the wolf again. “I was supposed to die. When we turn we kill ourselves. There’s a really good reason, you know—you don’t want your enemy to control you, and who would bite a hunter but someone they were hunting. But I died already, so killing me is a little harder than killing your average werewolf. Also, I really didn’t want to die.”

“And the enemy of my enemy is my friend?” Scott asked, grinning. Kate pointed at him with both hands, raising her eyebrows and nodding.

“Got it in one, cutie. They hate each other, but they hate me more, and they know that I’ll attack them because I have to bring Allison back. We’re walking into a trap, and you’re going to walk in because you know Allison wasn’t supposed to die.” She snarled. “And to rescue Derek, I guess.”

Scott and Stiles looked at each other, then Lydia and Kira. Malia rolled her eyes but nodded too, claws flicking out. Andy sighed, raising a finger.

“I’m going to call Nana and tell her exactly how long it took you to decide to go charging into a trap, Stiles, and she is going to make you wish you’d never been born. Then I’m going to drink a whole bottle of vodka. But I’m in.”

The plan was simple. They had to take out the guards with guns first, the most obvious targets, and let Kate confront her ex-girlfriend (and hopefully take her out while getting taken out, because there was no way she wasn’t turning on them the second Allison came back to life). Lydia would use the ghosts to power this labyrinth that would bring back Allison, and hopefully none of them would die.

“Beth’s an ice conjurer, so you have to be careful not to touch her if you do fight. She can make you cold enough to freeze to death in seconds, and that’s not even getting into what she can do with knives. Just don’t go after her if you can avoid it.”

Andy went first, using his teleportation trick to take out the four guys on the roof. He brought back their guns, handing one to Kate and turning the metal into some sort of body armor before shoving it onto Lydia and Stiles. They didn’t argue, even though it was on the tip of Stiles’s tongue to ask what was supposed to protect Andy.

“It’s all going to go to hell once we get in there. Prepare for that now and you’ll be better off.” Andy swung his mace once, fast, and sighed. “If you kill someone, don’t let yourself freeze up. You will die.”

Scott’s hand was warm on Stiles’s back, and Malia’s twisted in his hand. They nodded, and Kira laughed a little, her voice shaky.

“Anyone want to confess eternal love, you should probably do it now,” she said. She pulled Scott to the side, and Stiles looked at Malia. Her face was flushed but her breath was steady, and he cupped her cheek. She leaned into it, eyes closing briefly.

They didn’t kiss. If they kissed right then Stiles was pretty sure he wouldn’t have the strength to let go of Malia and trust that she would be alright without him. Whatever it meant, being each other’s souls, it made him want to throw himself in front of her and make sure nothing ever hurt her again.

“I feel the same way about you,” she said, forehead against his. He nodded, breath shuddering out of him—he didn’t question how she knew what he felt because he could feel it echoing between them, too strong to describe in words. It anchored him, gave him the strength he needed to pull away and take his bat.

It was going to be hell in there. He had to accept that now or he wouldn’t survive, and he really wanted to live through this.

Andy was right: it was complete chaos once they got in the warehouse. The guards were waiting for them, already on edge, and everyone separated to fight. Stiles found himself fighting a guy with a pistol, breaking his hand and then swinging his bat, hitting his head. He fell to the ground in a heap, and Stiles didn’t look to see if he’d killed him. He turned, elbowing the man who’d been about to stab him and getting his neck, stomping on his chest and breathing hard.

Something in his head was clawing at him, but he pushed it down and listened to the other voice, the one that had warned him about the knife. It made him look up, and his heart stopped when he saw the guy taking aim at someone in the mass of bodies in the middle.

No, no, no—he raised a hand and remembered descriptions of what Jennifer had done, how she’d moved things with her mind, and he demanded his power to work.

The man slammed against a wall, his own gun pinning him to it. Stiles tore his eyes away from the image, running toward the main fight and taking out another guy.

He and Malia ended up back to back, Stiles depending more on his power now. He just had to imagine what he wanted and it would happen—a gun in his face wouldn’t fire, and he made it hit the man holding it in the face, hard enough that he went down. It was exhilarating, this feeling, like he was flying, like they couldn’t lose.

Of course it couldn’t last. They weren’t trained, just lucky, and they were fighting people who wanted them dead.

He felt it when the taser slipped through Malia’s defenses, an electric shock that made her scream and fall, and he turned away from the last person he’d been fighting. The fighting had been dying down, they’d been winning, and it all turned around when Stiles looked away for a second.

The butt of the gun hit his neck and he collapsed, staring up at the man who was getting out a gun to kill Malia. Everyone was focused on their own fights; they were going to die. They were going to die, and it was Stiles’s fault.

Afterward Stiles would say that it hadn’t felt like anything at all, that it had been an instinct. He would lie and say it was so fast that even if he’d had a choice he wouldn’t remember.

Zenobiusz, let me, his mother’s voice said, and Stiles surrendered to it, raising a hand.

The world went white.

The men crumbled, fire consuming them from the inside out, and Stiles stared at the ashes. His head was swimming, like he was about to pass out.

That sounded nice. He would do that.

“Stiles!” Malia shouted, cradling his head. “Stiles, don’t you dare.” Her hands shook, and then she was gone. There was a shout that he thought came from a bad guy, and two thumps at his side. Malia’s hand touched his throat, still shaking. “Stiles, take it. Take it, live.”

She was crying, which was what made him choose in the end. The clawing thing in his head took over, and suddenly it was like he could see the whole world. Colors flashed across his vision, neon and blinking and beautiful, and he turned his head. Malia glowed blue, radiant, under sick silver shackles, and they disappeared when he touched her hand. Power flowed into him, the power that had done this, and it was hungry.

His soul had given him a gift. He looked at it, the unconscious body on the floor, and touched the light inside it. It was sick looking, black twisting up the silver, wrong.

It didn’t matter. He was so hungry. The light followed his hand, flowing up and into his mouth, and there it finally untwisted itself. It tasted like bitter coffee, something Stiles hadn’t had since he was put on medication. It sated the hunger in him and made his eyes roll back into his head. He wanted to kiss Malia, show her how it felt, show her how the world was shining.

“Now come back, Zenobiusz,” Malia whispered in his ear, and he shuddered when she said his name. “Zenobiusz Jonathon Stilinski. Come back to me.”

Stiles blinked, vision swimming back into focus. Malia’s eyes were glowing blue all around, not just her iris. Stiles shivered in the cold, which seemed to consume everything.

Elemental conjurer like her mother. An ice conjurer was his soul. 

“Did I set people on fire?” he asked, mouth dry. The sounds of fighting had stopped, the room they were in almost completely silent, so it was probably safe to ask.

Malia’s entire face changed. Oh, shit, he thought while she snarled.

“Yes, you idiot. You used up everything you had and were about to die, and I didn’t know what I was doing so we’re lucky you survived at all. If you ever do anything like that again I’ll kill you, and I won’t make it fast. I’ll rip your spine out through your neck and cut your penis off.”

“I wouldn’t be able to feel that,” he said, numb. The image of two men disintegrating in front of him wouldn’t go away, and he could feel his mind circling around to the other deaths, the first with the bat and the second his own gun. His head fell to the side, and he leapt up when he didn’t find the unconscious man he expected to.

There was nothing there but dust. Stiles kneeled down, pressing his palms to the ground and shaking his head. His vision wouldn’t focus, not now, and his mind couldn’t—wouldn’t—put this together to make the right conclusion.

“You were dying, Stiles, and I couldn’t do anything, and she promised me it was what you needed.” Malia didn’t touch him, wouldn’t, not without Stiles’s permission, and right now Stiles couldn’t talk. “You were slipping away, Stiles. Your life will always be more important than his, and I’m not sorry, Stiles, I can’t be.”

“I destroyed his soul,” he said. His voice was coming from far away, dim and too quiet.  “I took everything from him and destroyed his soul too.” He seized up, vomiting acid on the floor. His body wouldn’t stop convulsing after that, sobs wrenched out of him.

He couldn’t breathe. All that fighting and he was going to die because of a panic attack.

Malia’s hands squeezed his skull, and lines of his panic drained away. Her breath quickened, heart racing in time with his, and she pressed her forehead in between his shoulder blades.

“It saved your life so it’s worth it.” Her voice wasn’t shaking anymore.

She’d cried for him, he remembered. Her eyes were still wet with tears.

My life has to be for living, not regretting what I had to do to survive this, he decided, and something shifted in the ground, in the magic surrounding them. He’d passed this test, whatever it was, found out who he was or whatever, and he could finally feel his breath evening out.

Selfish, maybe, when living meant that other people died. He’d already known he was selfish, and this was just confirmation.

“You broke the blood curse,” Malia said, hooking her chin over his shoulder. The air in front of them shimmered with colors, a map of the building coming up. “I could turn into a coyote again. We could leave; they’re probably going to win anyway.”

There were dots in another part of the building, their friends.

“I have to help them. I… I think I have to go into the labyrinth with Scott to get Allison back.” It’s just a puzzle, his dream had said. That was what a maze like this boiled down to, really, puzzling your way out.

Malia nodded, standing, and offered her hand. He took it, smiling when her eyes faded and, instead of completely disappearing, the color found its way to her hair.

“Blue’s a good look on you,” he said, and she laughed. He picked up his sticky bat, and they ran to join their friends in the fight.

There were no more hunters left, either unconscious or dead. Now the only person they were fighting was Beth, who had her hands on Derek’s throat. Derek was just standing there, under some sort of spell that paralyzed him. Stiles and Malia lined up next to Scott, who was trying to reason with her while Kate writhed on the ground in pain.

Beth looked like Malia, if Malia had been blonde and twenty years older. Her eyes were filled with the same blue, her hand out like Stiles had done at first.

They watched a trick of the light, a smoke and mirror show.

“She’s not really focused on Kate or Derek,” Stiles murmured in Scott’s ear, and Scott nodded. Beth smiled, and it was really weird that Stiles could tell that she was looking at Malia.

“My child, you’ve come into your power,” she said, voice high and happy. It hurt Stiles’s ears. “I knew you would, I knew you wouldn’t be like him. But you have been so strong. I understand why you might think these people will help you, but I promise you they can’t.”

Malia stepped forward, claws coming out. She held her head high and stared up at Beth, who had twitched when she shifted.

“I smelled you that night, you know,” she said conversationally. She started walking, and Stiles could feel her doing something with magic, he just couldn’t tell what. Andy met his eyes from across the room, shaking his head. Don’t do anything stupid. “Your perfume. It smelled like berries and roses, and I never forgot that. I grew up and I learned how to survive and I lived, but I never forgot that this wasn’t something I chose. I never forgot that you murdered my mother and my little sister.”

Beth’s nostrils flared. Her eyes were brown under the blue, angry and absolutely insane.

“You’ve got a lot to learn about magic,” she said. “I could feel the moment you created this ill--”

A knife appeared in her chest. The image of Malia faded, revealing her on the floor where Kate had been. She stared at Beth, they all did, while she slid off the knife and fell to the ground, dead. Derek gasped, growling with blue eyes, and Kate nodded to him before picking up Beth’s body and bringing it over to them.

“I held up my end of this deal. Derek’s free, and I won’t even try to kill him. Now I need you to draw the labyrinth and bring my niece back.”

Stiles shared a look with Scott, who looked just as lost as he did. Lydia stepped forward, skin writhing with black symbols again, and smiled. All her teeth were sharp.

The symbols flew off her arms, burying themselves in the ground and the walls. She walked up to Kate, who handed her a knife.

“Do you give yourself willingly?” she asked, and Kate nodded. “Have you been coerced? Are there any doubts in your mind?”

“No.” Kate stood tall, throat bared. Stiles realized what she was going to do the second Scott did, and he threw himself on him. He held him back and didn’t look at Lydia and Kate, kept his eyes closed.

Then he and Scott were alone, in the white room again. He let go, breathing in and out to calm himself, and he saw the two Allisons standing in front of them.

“Why did you do this? It’s too dangerous.” the one on the left, her hair braided away from her face, asked.

“I don’t want to come back as a monster,” the Allison with a ponytail said, and Stiles looked at Scott. He nodded, and Stiles held out his hand to the Allison on the left. She looked at his hand and shook her head, a smile unfolding on her face.

She was warm, making them both gasp. Someone pulled, and suddenly they were all hugging, Allison clinging to them and crying. Stiles cried, hand brushing Scott’s when they both moved to pat her hair. It frizzed up and she laughed while crying, holding them tighter.

“Oh my god, you’re idiots,” she said, voice choked. “You would have died if you chose the wrong me.”

“That doesn’t matter. We had to get you back, Allison,” Scott said, and they all parted. They were still crying and couldn’t seem to stop, but they were also all smiling. “Come on, we have to go home.”

Allison shook her head.

“It’s not that simple. You have to make it through the labyrinth first, and I can’t help you. You’ll each have to find your way back home alone, and if either of you don’t make it, none of us do.”

Stiles opened his mouth to ask when it started, but both Allison and Scott had disappeared, as had the large white room. He was in a hallway only lit by a single flickering lightbulb. He sighed, turning back to make sure that there was only one way to go, and he was met with blackness.

“That is so not happening,” he said, turning around and marching up to the light. It was a bare bulb, and he sighed, screwing it in so it fit perfectly. The light stopped flickering, steady, and he rubbed his thumbs together. It still burned in Limbo, which was a good thing to know since that meant other things were probably going to hurt.

He turned to the hallway, swallowing and walking forward. The light kept on for a while, then faded out to be replaced with another flickering bulb. Stiles frowned, looking at the walls—they were bare, blank, no door or anything on them.

He fixed the bulb again. The only thing he could hear was his own breathing.

The third bulb was missing. Stiles stared at the fixture, which was in shadows that were threatening to swallow him whole. Pull it together Stilinski, he thought, glaring at the shadows and looking up again.

“Maybe magic works here,” he said. He imagined the other two bulbs, how they had felt in his hand, hot and bright, and tried to remember how Andy had done it. He’d just looked at the gun, just had to imagine it as something else, and hadn’t Stiles already done that? He’d impaled that hunter, set two on fire.

It had to be possible. He was still alive, so it had to be possible.

His fingers made the shape like he was going to turn the bulb, and Stiles breathed deeply. This will work, he thought, and imagined hot glass, how smooth it had been, how brilliantly it had glowed. He watched as, like water sliding down an incline, the lightbulb formed in his hand, already glowing.

“So we are a creator after all,” a voice said, and Stiles looked away from the light to see Kate Argent standing in front of him, a smirk on her face and blood on her throat. “My eyes are up here, witchling.”

“You can’t be real.” Stiles shook his head, refusing to look at her. “You’re dead.”

Kate’s fingers clamped tight on Stiles’s upper arm, and he was forced to look at her. She was cold, and she wasn’t breathing or blinking, and even though she was obviously pissed her cheeks, and the rest of her, were gray. Her eyes were the only bright parts about her—windows to the soul. Stiles shook his head, still disbelieving.

“I can’t get you all the way to the door to the other side, Stilinski, but I can help you with some of the nastier monsters down here. Now come on, you passed this test, now you’ve got to get through the others.” She turned around, swinging a gun onto her back, and Stiles’s brain short circuited again.

“What do you mean test?” He jogged to catch up, grabbing her shoulder. She stopped, snarling, but he didn’t let go. “Do you mean the tests Andy and Nana keep talking about, or are there more? Because I have just about had it up to here with all this test bullshit.”

Kate rolled her eyes, jerking out of his hold and walking again. Stiles shook his head angrily, baring his teeth at her back, and caught up to her again.

“To answer your question, yes, the challenges the labyrinth gives you and your True Alpha friend are the same tests that would have faced you on the other side—both of you. Now, though, the final test for both of you will be a matter of life and death, yours and my niece’s. I wish I wasn’t leaving this all up to a bunch of idiots, but what else could I do? Her father wouldn’t want her to come back, not as a demon.” She shoved Stiles into the wall, which disappeared and became another room, a dank black cave that Stiles didn’t recognize.

In the middle of the cave was a raised table with a set of items on it. Stiles approached it, studying the items as they came into view.

On the far left was a silver dagger with a double edged blade and runes carved into the hilt. Next to it was a ballpoint pen on paper, someone’s handwriting obscured by the pen. There was a lacrosse ball next to that, and under that a wolf figurine with glowing red stones for eyes. There was a whip on the far right of the table, rolled up.

“If I choose wrong, what happens?” he asked, and Kate walked up beside him, fingers trailing over the dagger. She looked at it like a drowning person would look at a life raft.

“You need something here, and if you choose wrong, you won’t have it later,” she said, shrugging. “So choose right.”

Stiles looked at the whip, discarding that immediately. There hadn’t been monsters here, so far as he knew. The lacrosse ball and the dagger went for the same reasons.

Wolf or information. Possible spell or possible clue.

It’s all a puzzle, and people are the pieces. This is how we put them together, through how we talk to each other.

Stiles picked up the paper, the pen sliding to the table. It made a dull thunk that didn’t echo through the room even though it should have.

Zenobiusz John Stilinski, his mother’s handwriting read. You are an idiot, and my family is filled with liars. You already know that, though, if you’re here, reading this. These tests are the most difficult you will face, and you may not survive. Remember, though, the first test that proved your power. You can do anything with it.

Love,

Mom

Stiles brushed tears off his cheeks, rubbing his face and smiling at the paper. He put the paper in his pocket, closing his eyes and shuddering in a breath, and when he opened them the room had shifted. Now he was in another dark room, but this one was halfway lit—like an auditorium.

It was an auditorium, the school auditorium—the stage was lit up, the band playing on it. Stiles couldn’t hear what they were playing, but he could see the players. There was Danny, and other band members. The woman who’d died that night was there, playing. She didn’t even know she was going to die.

“What’s the point sending me somewhere I can’t change anything?” he asked Kate, who shrugged. He glared at her. “Some helpful ghost you are.”

“Hey, you’re the one asking the wrong questions,” Kate said, raising her hands in an I don’t know gesture. “This is your test, not mine. I’m just the cheat sheet.”

Stiles tapped his fingers against his thighs, looking out at the crowd of faceless people in front of him. He tried to remember what all had happened the night of the concert, but so much had happened afterward that he could barely remember where he’d been. His dad had been taken and Lydia had been almost murdered, but everything really happened after that. What did this have to do with the labyrinth, or Stiles, or what happened afterward?

Stiles’s skin went cold.

Lights in a hallway meant to scare me like the dreams it made me live.

“This is the beginning of everything, isn’t it?” he asked.

If Dad hadn’t been kidnapped they wouldn’t have confronted Jennifer, Chris wouldn’t have sacrificed himself. Deaton wouldn’t have sent them to limbo in the first place, and they wouldn’t have found out what she was doing before her spells finished. He wouldn’t have been at the Nemeton to get possessed by the nogitsune, and maybe that would have started a whole different chain of events.

Jennifer appeared in front of him, throat slashed open by claws. Peter had killed her, Stiles understood with the crystal clarity of actually watching that happen. He’d killed her when she was begging the tree for help, when she could have lived.

If you could change these events and have her back, would you? Jennifer asked without opening her mouth. Stiles’s hands clenched at his sides, hot stinging tears pricking at his eyes. His jaw clenched, and he didn’t have to look at Kate to know that the right answer was on the tip of his tongue, as much as it hurt to say it.

“No,” he whispered. “You were too dangerous not to kill. I’m glad you’re dead, and I’m glad my dad and Melissa and Chris aren’t, and I know that Allison wouldn’t—she’d be okay, if she knew that that was why she couldn’t come back. She protected the people who couldn’t protect themselves. I couldn’t—I couldn’t do that to her.”

Jennifer nodded once, solemn, and the face that she’d showed them while they knew her faded, turned into someone a little softer, a little less supernaturally beautiful. There were scars on her face, but she hadn’t been malformed like the creature Scott described. She was just a woman with scars, someone who was obviously dying. More selfish than you realize, but on the surface you may seem like a good man.

Then she faded, and so did the landscape around them. Now they were in the lobby of Eichen House, and Stiles stopped breathing.

This was where he’d failed. This was where he’d let the nogitsune in because of Malia, because even knowing her for a day had been enough to know that he couldn’t let her get hurt. Anyone else but her and he could live with himself, but not Malia.

It was horrifying, realizing that he would let people die, change the world so that they died, to bring her back.

“This is as far as I can go,” Kate said, looking at her fading hand. “If you can’t get through this then all the other tests tonight have been for nothing. Good luck.” She flipped him off and disappeared.

Stiles looked around the room, breath coming fast and shallow. If his body wasn’t really here, then his mind was doing a really good job fooling him into thinking he was about to have a panic attack. He closed his eyes, breathing deep once through his nose, holding it for the count that Dr. Patil had showed him when he was just a kid, and releasing it. It didn’t stop the attack, but it gave him some semblance of control, and that was what he needed right now, right? He needed to be in control of himself, or everything he’d done would be for nothing.

This was for Allison. More importantly, this was his test, his demon to bury right here, right now. He had to do this if he wanted to sleep at night.

He walked forward, toward the only door in this room. It didn’t match the aesthetic of the place, heavy, dark wood with an antique knocker directly in front of his eyes. It was shaped like a bird, beak opened in a scream, and Stiles closed his eyes, reminded himself that he’d survived worse things than a door. The doorknob was brass, and cold enough that it burned. He twisted it quickly and shoved the door open, using most of his upper body strength to do it. The door gave way to an empty room the size of a closet, but this one was open to the sky. He could see Ursa Major above him, which meant exactly nothing in limbo or wherever he was right now.

He looked around the room, expecting to find a door or something that would get him out of here. It was freezing in here, cold like he’d never felt. His aunts and uncles in the Midwest said that sometimes during winter it felt like they’d never be warm again, like the sun was never coming back, and this was like that. His breath frosted in front of his face, and his teeth started chattering in minutes. Full-body shudders followed, and he pressed his hands to the walls in desperation, searching for a way out, any way out.

The only thing that happened was the walls getting closer. Stiles couldn’t breathe, caught in a panic attack now of all times, and he stared up at the moon, full like he’d never seen it before. It was so close, so big, and he tried to think about the tide, what full moons did to the shape of the earth. It didn’t help his panic, made it worse because he could see the scene moving inward, fewer stars every second.

He looked at the walls, which were close enough together now that he could touch both with his hands. His head swam, body sucking in desperate breaths as the solution came to him.

There was a picture on his dad’s bedroom wall of a younger Stiles clinging to a doorframe, from the top of the doorframe. This wouldn’t be any harder than that.

He climbed, jumping sometimes, hands shaking with adrenaline. He looked up, at the window of sky that was closing every second, and it just made him more determined to get up, to get out.

After a minute of climbing he realized that he wasn’t getting any closer to the top. It stretched out, seemingly close, but it wouldn’t move.

“No.” His entire body was shaking, sweat dripping into his eyes. “No, you can’t do this. Not now, not here.” He climbed, not jumping anymore, and it got hard to maintain tension in his feet. He was going to be stuck soon—he was going to die.

He was going to die, and this wasn’t even the last test. He knew it wasn’t the last test, deep in his bones where the magic was churning like a hungry animal, gnashing at his skin. The walls had shoved his arms into a pretzel shape, touching his shoulders now.

“No.” He was stronger than this. He might not be a werewolf or kitsune or banshee, but he wasn’t powerless. He’d killed two men by setting them on fire, completely destroyed a third. He’d made a lightbulb out of nothing less than a day after learning he had real powers. He’d trapped a kanima and a pack of werewolves, he’d been tortured, he’d saved Derek Fucking-Idiot Hale’s life twice. He’d almost been killed by Peter Hale, by a kanima, by Gerard Argent, by a monster under his own skin. He wouldn’t let a wall be the thing that killed him.

He felt for the teeth inside him, what Nana must have called the outpouring, and let the world bleed into neon color.

Everything glowed, even in limbo. Understanding that this was what he was meant to have done all along, Stiles breathed deeply in, hands digging into the wall, and pushed.

Stiles scrambled out of the hole, gasping deep breaths and clutching the ground, sobbing once when his power retreated. It wasn’t freezing anymore, thankfully, just a chill in the air. His lips were trembling though, every part of him exposed and overstimulated. He wanted to run a marathon. He wanted to collapse and sleep for three days.

“Not thoughts of your family, or your friends, or your lover?” a chilling, familiar voice said. Stiles steeled himself, not moving as the nogitsune walked around the forest, leaves crunching under its feet. “No, to you they’re weaknesses. I should have killed your father. You wouldn’t have had the power of will to get past the first task, let alone the Pit. Well, a missed opportunity I guess.”

The nogitsune looked like he had in the beginning, like Stiles but somehow healthier, better. Stiles had dirt on his hands and his chin and his knees. The nogitsune was perfectly clean, composed and grinning. In the moonlight the light filtered through his hair, making him look ethereal instead of demonic.

“And you’re never going to get the chance again, so fuck off,” Stiles said, and the nogitsune laughed out loud. It was full of joy, manic joy that filled it up and made it jump.

“Oh, Stiles, if this were that simple, why do you think they saved me for your final test.” It wiped tears of mirth from its eyes, shaking its head. “No, Stiles Stilinski, he who threw chaos from himself, you have to pass me if you want to get back to your precious world.” It crouched down in front of him, eyes bleeding black. Everything in it was dark, pure and utter evil.

It had a good reason to be that, but Peter had had a good reason, Kate had had a good reason, Jennifer had had a good reason.

“Are you going to try to kill me, possess me, or just keep me here?” Stiles asked, out of patience for mind games.

The nogitsune sat down, mirroring Stiles’s position. Its hands were on its knees, and it was still grinning. Stiles leaned forward, uncomfortably aware of the Nemeton just in front of them.

“The tests your family created have found themselves bound up in this labyrinth, answering questions you never thought you would have to ask yourself. This one, though, the final question, the final test, isn’t one of power or ethics or choice.” The nogitsune rolled its eyes. “The question is pretty simple, really, but you only get one chance to answer. Answer wrong and you’re stuck here, right on the edge of limbo with me, forever. Answer right, though, and you might not be able to live with yourself. There isn’t a time limit, though you’ve been down here longer than you think.”

Stiles glared at the nogitsune, nodding once. It sat back on its hands, coiled danger, and its grin was sharp.

“The Jastrzebski family is the oldest and largest family of Polish conjurers in your world. They have many powers represented among them: elemental conjurers, map makers, even banshees. There is one power, however, the greatest power of them all, that only one line of the family carries. It was the first power you used, your first test answering the question of whether it had died out. What is it?” It stretched, twisting his body in ways that shouldn’t have been possible. “Take your time. I’ve got an eternity.”

Stiles dug his fingers into the dirt. Nothing about the question was simple, a tangle of information and trickery that made his gut clench.

The first magic he’d done had been the conjuring or moving or something with the mountain ash. But Nana had said that his first test was after he’d been possessed. Maybe when he made himself, but that hadn’t really been him, had it? That had been because the nogitsune cheated. He’d gotten caught lying about how the game was played, and that had been what ruined him.

Everyone in the Jastrzebski family lies. Andy had said that pure conjurers had a hard time with human transformation, but he hadn’t said that that was what they were. Mom had sang songs with him that he was now realizing were prophecies, and told him that they were just ways to make chores more fun.

Nana said the first test came and went with the Oni, but she also said the riddle game was before the first test.

One of these things was a lie based on timeline alone. Nana didn’t make mistakes, not like that, and if she knew as much as she seemed to then obviously this was important.

If the first test was after the riddles, he didn’t have a clue what it could be. If it had been before—

Walking through the hospital, feeling like he was in a dream. In a room, feet gone numb from the cold. A threat, and control, and destruction. Hunger like he’d never known, but no satiation from this, and a lie. White light and green glowing power, sucked in in an instant. Taken, used to—

The smoke he remembered clawing his way out of had looked like the Oni’s smoke. And—

Let me help, Mom had said, and he’d raised fire. Malia said she’d told her that the hunter was what Stiles needed. Silver choked by black. The steel chains of blood magic. Pure green, with a mission of good.

Stiles’s body stopped cooperating, heaving acid out of him. Once, twice he vomited, shaking his head. He knelt there, head down, and he closed his eyes. He searched out the teeth, the monster in his belly, in his fingers and toes and every limb—power, so much power was there, waiting to be used. It had showed him how things really worked, it seemed to be saying. It had given him what he needed to survive. It gave him life, and he had more than enough power now to burn the world to ashes if he wanted to.

You can do anything with it. With enough power he could change the past. He could change the landscape of the world. He could destroy, and consume, and out of that he could create things, beautiful things. He could bring back Boyd and Erica, Heather and everyone Jennifer sacrificed. He could make people forget that that was his doing, too, with just a thought.

No. He’d said it earlier, hadn’t he? The people they were, the path that led them here, it was important. He could destroy everything with this power. He could hurt so many people, and Scott would never forgive him for it. Allison would protect everyone or die trying, and it wouldn’t be worth it.

Allison and Scott would be stuck here too if he didn’t answer. He could have a moral crisis later.

“We can consume other things’ power and use it. Souls, magic, it doesn’t matter what it is.” He didn’t look up from the ground.

“I really wanted to keep talking to you, Stiles Stilinski. I guess I won’t get to do that.” Stiles looked up at it, and he blinked. It was dissolving, blackness reaching out into the ground and the sky. It consumed everything it touched.

The ground started to shake, and Stiles closed his eyes, shaking.

No, don’t be afraid, Mom said, and he cried. Limbo, between life and death—Mom was here with him. Always, Zenobiusz. You are my light, and you are good. Your power is mine, my father’s, my grandmother’s. Power is power, and a good man is still a good man if he has it. Think on the tests and what they have taught you. And remember that I love you.

Stiles opened his mouth to answer and swallowed dirt. The ground was still moving, but something was under him, pushing him up with it. He scrambled, digging up, and breathed in clean, cold air.

He blinked, not sure what he was seeing. Above him was an enormous tree, big enough that it had to be centuries old. It was twisting, though, still growing, and Stiles just stared at it as something bright and beautiful lodged itself in his heart.

Thank you.

The voice was alien, so old and so vast that it echoed in his mind. Somehow two words encompassed an entire world, a history that Stiles could only glimpse at before his head started hurting. It showed power and beauty and truth, protection for the land and the people who loved it. It held him up with a root until he got his footing, and a roar, unheard by anyone who wasn’t born of magic—he saw it touching them, calling them—shook the forest.

The Nemeton stood, proud, in a forest that was singing with magic.

“Stiles?” Scott asked, and Stiles turned around. Scott was grinning, eyes Alpha red, and he looked like he’d been taken apart and put back together. He looked like Stiles felt, and they fell into each other, laughing through their tears. They could feel Allison again, just like the day after they first did this, and it was with one thought that they separated. Scott’s dimples were covered in dirt. “You’re all messy. Your dad’s gonna make us get the hose out like--”

“The summer we turned fourteen,” Stiles finished. It had been so hot that they’d rolled around in mud, and Dad had laughed when they ran away from the cold water.

They turned, both of them, and walked around the immense bulk of the Nemeton. Allison was sitting on one of the roots, eyes closed. She had a hand on her stomach and tears on her face, along with a smile that made Stiles’s breath catch.

“I can feel what you two did,” she said. Her other hand was on the Nemeton. “I can feel Void’s power, how you broke it apart.” Her eyes opened, glowing green in the pupil. She looked at them, still smiling. “I can feel your power. I can feel the humans in Beacon Hills, and I can count all the ones who aren’t human. There are so many. There’s so much good here. Thank you.” She stood up. She was wearing a black top and denim pants, hunting boots on. She was covered in as much dirt as they were.

She was the most beautiful person Stiles had ever seen, even when her smile turned bittersweet.

“I can’t stay here. My death was too public, and I wouldn’t be able to do good here. You both know that, right?”

Stiles nodded, letting the tears come. He was happy and sad and so angry, but she was right. Unless he wanted to invade the minds of at least ten thousand people, probably closer to forty, there was no way Allison Argent could live in Beacon Hills.

They ended up in a three-way hug again, clinging to each other with all their strength. Stiles buried his face in Allison’s neck and felt her pulse, steady and strong. Scott’s fingers and his and Allison’s tangled up, and it was the closest any of them were ever going to get to perfect happiness.

“I love you, both of you,” Allison said, voice choked up. “You saved me and I wish I’d been able to help you, and we will see each other again. I’ll visit, I’ll come through the shadows. In a few years I’ll be able to come back, if you stay. I promise.” She kissed Scott’s forehead, then Stiles’s, spreading dirt, and they finally broke apart. She looked completely human.

“Don’t make us have to resurrect you again,” Stiles said, wiping his nose. “I think Lydia’ll be pissed if you die.”

“And you have to call, even if you visit. We—I saw some things, and we really need to be together. Things are happening.” Scott shook his head. “I don’t want to mess up the future, though.”

They said their goodbyes, and Allison vanished into the shadows. Stiles leaned against Scott, both of them crying, and they leaned against the Nemeton, hands clasped tightly together. That was how Malia, Kira, and Andy found them. Andy stopped in his tracks and let Stiles stare him down, shame on his face, but Kira and Malia rushed forward.

Malia was his soul, but separating from Scott was the hardest thing he’d done all night. He staggered into Malia’s arms, held her close, and when they separated it was only so they could press their foreheads together.

“Three days, Stiles. I thought you were gone.” Her voice was barely a whisper.

“Psh, you know me and Scotty are the best team there is. We got her back, and she’s all Onified, so she’s going to fight crime where people don’t know she died that one time.”

Malia’s fingers twisted into his, dragging his hand up and to her cheek. Somehow she mirrored that, her hand on his cheek with his hand over it.

“I love you,” she said, and didn’t give him time to say it back. She kissed him, hard, and it was only a little awkward with all the dirt and tears in the way. When they broke apart for air she was glaring. “Do that again and I’ll make you eat your fingers.”

He swallowed, nodding.

“Yes ma’am,” he said, and she punched his arm. “It’s been three days, so we should probably let our families know we’re not dead. Is my jeep okay?”

They all fit, barely. Andy drove them home.

Dad and Melissa were sitting together at the kitchen table, but they bolted up when they saw Scott and Stiles. Stiles found himself folded into a hug, clinging to his dad as hard as he could and letting out shaking breaths. He could taste rust, cherries, and honey-sweet love filling the room, and he hid a rueful laugh.

At least he wouldn’t feel every emotion, just the really strong ones.

“Don’t you ever do that again,” Dad said, and Stiles nodded. He put his face in Dad’s shoulder and felt phantom hands rubbing his back, and he felt his family around him, part of him.

The hawks, tired, fell into slumber, and the world, baby, went on.