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The first day Lydia missed school, Allison figured she was allowed a pass, all things considered. She sent her a text after school, teasing her about playing hookie, but wasn't concerned when she didn't receive a response. Lydia wasn't always the most reliable about returning messages. When she didn't show up Tuesday morning, Allison called her, but only got her voicemail.
When Lydia missed her big calculus exam on Wednesday, Allison knew something was wrong. As soon as the bell rang on the last period of the day, she hurried home, and an hour later was following Mrs. Martin upstairs to Lydia's bedroom.
"Lyd?" Allison rapped a knuckle against her door, then cracked it open without waiting for an invitation. "Are you all right?"
The room was dark, the curtains drawn. Lydia was an indistinct shape beneath her coverlet. She had the blankets drawn over her head, only a few stray copper curls betraying her presence.
Allison left the door ajar behind her so she could see enough to make her way across the room. She sat on the edge of the bed and patted a part of the misshapen lump that she hoped was Lydia's shoulder. "I brought soup. Chicken noodle. I made it myself, so you probably shouldn't expect much as far as taste, but I know there's supposed to be actual science behind the advice to eat it when you're sick—"
Lydia pushed her blanket down and shoved the tangled mess of her hair out of her face with a rough hand. "Garlic and onions have antimicrobial properties, thyme has been used for centuries as a natural cough suppressant, and hot liquids help to thin nasal secretions in people suffering from respiratory infections."
"Great!" Allison held the thermos out to Lydia. "So you'll have some?"
"How do you expect any of that to help with my migraine?"
Allison grinned hopefully. "…Placebo effect?"
Lydia stared at her for a moment, then shrugged and sat up. "Fair enough." She accepted the thermos and unscrewed the lid, then flipped it over and pinched it between her knees to use as a bowl. "You really didn't have to do this."
Allison pulled her legs up, sitting cross-legged across from Lydia on the bed, and offered her the plastic spoon she'd brought along in her purse. "Well, you didn't answer my text."
Lydia grimaced and waved a hand over her face. "Light sensitivity. I couldn't even look at my phone."
"Or my call."
"As I said—"
"And you missed your calc test."
Lydia's lips thinned, the corners of her mouth pulling down into a grimace.
"What's going on?"
She blew out a breath and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. "I told you. The doctor said migraine. Gave me a note and everything."
"Yeah. I know what you said." Allison turned her head and watched her. Lydia blew on the soup, then sipped it from the thermos's lid. She kept her gaze on the soup, on the wall, let it flit about the room, but always kept it turned away from Allison's. "I've seen you sick before. I've never seen you blow off school." Or me, she thought, but held that last part back.
Lydia slanted her a sideways glance that was somehow both amused and exasperated at the same time. It was a perfectly Lydia sort of look, and it loosened the knot of worry that had been pressing against Allison's chest for three days. "I've already got a doctor, Allison. And a mother. I don't need you fussing over me too."
"You're my best friend. I get fussing privileges, too." She nudged the thermos closer to Lydia. "Drink your soup. I'm going to go open a window. You could use some fresh air in here."
Lydia made a dubious noise, but didn't voice any protest, so Allison ignored it. She rose and circled the bed to the window, with its curtains drawn tight against the light outside. She twisted the blinds shut, to keep the evening sunlight from coming straight in and blinding Lydia's dark-accustomed eyes, then pushed the curtains aside and hiked the blinds up enough to grab the window frame and pull it open.
The breeze from outside felt like a godsend, cool and fresh in this room that felt too warm and close and stale. Allison lowered the edge of the blinds back to the windowsill, where they could keep the sun out but still let the breeze in through the slats. But there on the sill, a flash of color caught her eye. Allison reached for it, and pulled out from behind the blinds a long stem of purple flowers. Fear and panic hit her like a punch to the throat, stopping her breath and making her chest hurt from the need for air. "Lydia..." She turned and held the flowers out in front of her, where Lydia could see. "What the hell is this?"
Lydia spared her a disinterested glance, then turned her attention right back to the soup. "Lavender, isn't it? Lavender promotes relaxation. I thought it might help with the migraine."
Lavender. Of all the ridiculous things that had ever come out of Lydia Martin's mouth... Allison crossed to the bedside in two long strides and threw the blossoms down on Lydia's lap. "Come on, Lyd, you're not that dumb. That's not lavender." It was maybe the same shade as lavender, with its delicate purple petals, and the blossoms were clustered in the same spear-like formation that lavender did. But the resemblance ended there. These flowers were as big as Allison's thumbnail, and made Allison shiver with foreboding. "That's wolfsbane."
Lydia glanced at it, then stopped and looked again, longer. A crease formed between her brows as she grasped the stem by a finger and lifted it up, studying the plant closely. "No, you're right," she said slowly. She shook her head quickly, like a person shedding off a daydream. "I can't imagine what I was thinking. I was sure it was lavender. It must have been the headache muddling me."
Allison dropped down beside Lydia again, sagged forward with her elbows on her knees. "Where did you get it? Why did you--"
"It was just there! I saw it when I got home from the doctor's. I figured the wind had blown it, or..." She trailed off, and glanced up at Allison through her lashes, grimacing. "That sounds really stupid, doesn't it? I don't know what I was thinking. My head hurt so bad, and I just wanted it to stop."
Allison took the wolfsbane from Lydia and held it carefully in her lap, head bowed. She sighed. "No, Lyd. It doesn't sound stupid." That was a lie. It sounded idiotic to Allison, and she knew Lydia was no idiot. But Lydia hadn't been raised or trained the way Allison had. She never could have mistaken wolfsbane for anything else, but she was the daughter of Hunters. "Get some sleep. Feel better." She bent over and pressed a kiss against the crown of Lydia's head. Lydia leaned into her for a moment, and didn't straighten until Allison pulled away. "I'll stop by tomorrow and see how you're doing."
Lydia didn't even protest or tease, just nodded and looked grateful. That on its own would have been enough to convince Allison that something was definitely wrong.
Maybe mistaking the wolfsbane for lavender was just a mistake, an accident. But Allison was her father's daughter, and she hated to make assumptions. In her family, more often than not, that was a good way to get someone killed.
#
Allison pushed back her knit hat where it had slouched into her eyes. She lifted a hand and waved at him. "Hello, Derek. It's so nice to see you. Lovely weather we're having, isn't it?"
Derek's lip curled back, baring even more teeth. "You come to my house with that and expect to be greeted like a friend?"
"I need your help."
Allison wouldn't have thought it possible, but if anything, Derek's snarl just got more vicious, his glare even more furious. "You come to my house with that and expect me to help you?"
Allison blew out a sharp breath and rolled her eyes skyward. God save her from twitchy werewolves. She tossed the baggies in on the driver's seat and made a show of locking the car up around it. Then she walked toward Derek, hands up and open as she climbed the rickety steps of his burnt-out porch. "Look, I come in peace, all right? I just need you to take a look at something and tell me--"
As soon as she was in arm's reach, Derek grabbed her, wrenched her forward and twisted her arm around until it was straining. Just a twist of his wrist, and he'd snap the bone.
Allison locked her knees when they threatened to buckle. She kept her chin held high and her gaze on Derek's, steady even through the haze of tears the pain brought to her eyes. A moment passed, the space of two heartbeats in which they stared at one another, frozen, deadlocked.
"I didn't bring any weapons," Allison said softly. "I'm not going to fight you. So either break my arm, or let me go."
Derek waited another beat before his hands sprang open. "You come here with wolfsbane and dare to claim that you're unarmed?"
"Oh my god!" Allison dropped her head back with a wild laugh and scrubbed a hand across her brow. "I didn't bring it here to use it, Derek. I just need your help identifying it." She straightened, scrubbed at her forehead once more, then dropped her hand. "I found it at Lydia's. She said it was on her windowsill, and now she's not feeling well, and I just want to know if wolfsbane could make someone like her sick, or if there's a variety of wolfsbane that affects people. She's my friend, and I'm here for your help, that's all. If you don't want to give it, just say so."
Derek stared at her, his brows lowered and his expression menacing, for a long moment. "Someone like her?"
Allison wrapped her arms around her ribs and scraped a foot across the porch. "I just mean... You know. She was bitten."
"She's immune."
Allison's mouth tightened. "She wasn't exactly unaffected, though, was she?" She sighed again and unfolded her arms. "Look, will you let me show it to you or not?"
Derek looked like she'd asked him to suck on a lemon, but after another long pause, he inclined his head a fraction of an inch toward her car. Allison figured that was probably as close as she was going to get to agreement, so she took it with a smile and trotted back to her car. Derek followed her, but halfway across the stretch of ground between the house and the car, his steps slowed, and he lingered several strides back while she unlocked the door and bent in to retrieve the sealed-up wolfsbane.
When she turned around, his nose was wrinkled as though she held a bag of dirty diapers instead of a flower stem. When she approached him with it, he tensed and shoved his hands in his pockets, his face settling into an even more dire expression and his shoulders pulling up practically to his ears.
Allison wasn't sure whether he was trying not to wolf out on her in a feral rage, or trying to sink down into the ground beneath their feet and escape. Either way, she didn't have the patience for it, not when Lydia was unwell and this might be the cause. She strode back to stand in front of Derek and thrust the bag out right under his nose.
He reared back onto his heels, but stopped himself before he fled completely. His expression twisted with distaste as he took the bag from her, corner pinched and dangling from two fingers, and held it up to examine.
"Well?" Allison wrapped her arms around her middle again. She felt as though all the pieces of her were a frazzled mess, pushing against one another until she seemed likely to come apart at the seams. "What is it?"
"It's just wolfsbane," Derek said in disgust. He tossed it back to her with a flick of his hand. "Just common wolfsbane. It shouldn't have any effect on a person, just sitting on their windowsill."
He broke off abruptly, pressing his lips together into a flat line as though there were more words behind those first, and he didn't want to let them free. Allison waited, fingers tapping out a percussive beat against her ribs. "But?" she prompted, when he glanced over his shoulder at the house like he was calculating the odds of being able to escape back inside.
If he'd known her at all, he ought to have known that would have just made her stick around, pounding on his door until the charred remains of the frame gave way and let her in.
He sighed, a sharp exhale that seemed to deflate all the air out of his lungs. His shoulders dropped into a slump and he shook his head. "But, she's been bitten. She's not a wolf, but she's not dead. I don't know what that means. I don't know what effect that might have on her." He glanced sidelong at the wolfsbane baggie. "If you removed all of the wolfsbane that was there, and if it's the reason for her illness, then she should be feeling better in a few days."
"A few days?" Allison pulled her hat off her head and twisted it between her hands. "Christ."
Derek gave a one-shouldered shrug, looking awkward and helpless. "If she were a wolf, it'd be faster. Hours, at most. She may be bit, but she's not a wolf. She heals the same as the rest of you do. Slowly."
"Thanks a lot," Allison muttered. Then she stopped herself, drew a deep breath, and forced herself to continue more sincerely. "I mean, thank you, Derek. I appreciate the help."
He gave the ziplocks a dark look. "I'd appreciate you leaving the wolfsbane at home next time."
She held up one hand, then pressed it over her heart. "Promise. Scout's honor."
He pinned her with a long, lingering look that she didn't know how to interpret. But in the end, he just nodded once, and then disappeared back inside the house.
#
He'd made spaghetti tonight. Allison got home early enough to help him slather butter and garlic on a loaf of garlic bread and throw it under the broiler. While it cooked, she dug a bag of ancient green beans out of the freezer and threw them in the microwave because Dad didn't seem to have any plans to do so, but Mom never would have let them sit down to a dinner that didn't include vegetables.
They ate in silence broken only by the crunch of garlic bread and the scrape of silverware on their plates until Allison was halfway through her spaghetti and trying to stab an olive that kept slithering away from her fork. He cleared his throat before he started talking, like he'd been building himself up to it for the whole meal. "How was school?"
"Fine." Allison stabbed the olive forcefully, too quick for it to escape. "I got an A on my English exam."
The corners of his mouth turned up. "Good for you." He shoved a forkful of spaghetti into his mouth and chewed it quickly. "I wasn't expecting you to be out when I got home."
"I was at Lydia's. She's been out all week, and I was worried. I made her soup."
"That was nice of you."
Allison smiled, but it felt forced, and she was pretty sure it didn't look any better. Sitting across the table from her dad while there was a bag of of wolfsbane tucked into her backpack in the hall wasn't just difficult, she was pretty sure it was impossible. It took all her concentration not to glance over her shoulder at the entryway, and even then she couldn't stop thinking about it, about Lydia, about what her dad would say if he knew what was going on.
That was the problem, though. She didn't even know what was going on. If she told her dad, he'd just leap to conclusions, and probably go running off halfcocked and make things worse. Once she knew what this was, what was going on and why, then maybe she'd tell him. But not now. Definitely not if Lydia was being affected by wolfsbane more than any human should. After everything that had happened in the past year, Allison was certain that her dad going after her best friend was absolutely more than she could bear.
She must have given something away, because her dad asked her if there was anything she wanted to talk about, watching her with that same worried look she sometimes caught him with, like she was a puzzle he just couldn't figure out how to solve.
She shook her head quickly and stabbed as many green beans onto her fork as she could fit. The sooner she was finished eating, the sooner they could end this awkward charade and go back to being obvious about their discomfort around one another. "I'm just worried about Lydia, that's all. She missed a test today, and her grades are so important to her. I was afraid it was something serious."
"Is it?" he asked, his face politely, impassively curious.
"Oh-- No, she's fine. I mean... the doctor said migraines, I guess."
He went through all the motions, making sympathetic noises and telling her a story she'd heard before, about how once when he was a boy they'd had to cancel a vacation because his grandmother had come down with a migraine and been stuck on a couch in their darkened living room for a full week. Allison made all the right noises back at him, and as soon as the last strand of spaghetti was off her plate, gathered her setting up and offered to take her dad's as well.
"Thank you, sweetheart." He brushed a touch across the back of her hand as she reached for his plate. She hid a flinch, and masked the momentary hesitation with a brilliant smile. "I'll help with the washing up."
"You don't have to do that." She gathered up the last of the dishes before he could protest, kissed the top of his head and hurried into the kitchen, calling back over her shoulder, "You cooked. I'll clean."
He didn't fight her on it, thank God. She turned the water in the sink on as high as it would go, turned it up hot enough that it was just on the wrong side of painful, and she grabbed sponge and scrub brush and thrust her hands under the spray, relishing the burn. At least the hiss of the water bouncing off the sides of the stainless steel sink drowned out whatever her dad might have tried to say to her, questions or conversation alike. It was an easy, mindless task, and best of all, it was a solitary one.
There weren't a lot of dishes to clean, with just the two of them, but she took her time at it, and by the time she was done, her dad was firmly ensconced on the couch in the living room, flipping through channels and grimacing at the news.
She grabbed her backpack from the entryway, then hurried up the stairs before he could try to stop her, calling back over her shoulder, "I've got homework," and made it to the security of her bedroom without incident. She shut the door firmly behind her and leaned back against it, letting her breath out with a long, slow sigh. Her backpack slid down her shoulder and dropped to the ground with a heavy thud. Belatedly, she recalled the wolfsbane, and crouched to dig it out.
It wasn't crushed, thank God. The pockets of air left in the baggies had protected it. She propped the package up on her desk, leaning against the edge of her monitor, and pulled up Google. Derek had said it was ordinary wolfsbane, but Derek was a werewolf, and she was an Argent. She wasn't willing to gamble Lydia's health on the assumption that he was being completely forthright with her.
She worked at it until her eyes were burning and the light from the screen made her head throb, but didn't find anything that might identify the strain of wolfsbane, or that might shed any light on whether a human girl might be able to be affected by it.
In the end, she gave up in disgust, took a handful of tylenol, and crawled into bed to sleep away the headache and the eyestrain. But not even sleep or time would do anything for the worry pressing down on her, making every breath difficult.
She hoped the doctor was right, and it was just a migraine. But she didn't believe it. And if something was wrong with Lydia, then Allison was going to tear Beacon Hills up stone by stone until she figured out what it was and how to stop it.
#
"I know. I need your help." She pulled her backpack up onto her lap, then took the bag of wolfsbane out and slid it across the table. "Can you work your Google magic and identify this for me?"
Stiles glanced at it, then did a double take. "Oh my God!" He jerked back as though she'd placed a viper on the table between them. "What the hell is that? You can't give me that!"
Allison glanced down at it, a stem of purple flowers inside triple layers of ziplock plastic. The corner of her mouth pulled up. "It's wolfsbane, Stiles, it's not pot." She kicked his shin under the table and just smiled at him when he yelped and glared at her. "Stop freaking out before you make people think there's something to be suspicious about."
Stiles hunched low over the table, glaring at her. "My best friend is a werewolf," he said, his voice hushed but strident. "And you want me to touch that? You want me to take it home? If you want to chase Scott off, there are better ways to do that than by making me poison him."
Allison sighed. "You're not going to poison him." She picked up the bags and shook them. Stiles glanced around the lunch hall frantically. "It's sealed. And I don't want to chase him off. I just want your help. It's for Lydia," she added, while Stiles waved his hands and tried to shush her.
He froze. His gaze snapped to hers, and his mouth set in an unhappy line. "Damn it," he said. "You are evil."
"I know." She tossed the wolfsbane to him. He caught it midair, then froze, his eyes wide, expression panicked. "Thanks, Stiles. I owe you one." She got up with her lunch tray and ruffled his hair as she passed, then leaned down and whispered into his ear, "Try washing with vinegar. That's what we always use, to get rid of the scent of wolfsbane."
#
I'm fine, Mom, it said. Stop worrying about me and worry about your chem quiz. Don't forget what I taught you about valence electrons.
Allison couldn't help grinning. Lydia couldn't be too bad off, if she was back to teasing and casually expecting everyone to excel just as easily as she did. She shot her a quick text back, I love you too, slavedriver, then tucked her phone away as the bell rang.
If she hurried, she could get to chem before passing period was over. Just enough time to dig out her notes and remind herself what exactly it was that Lydia had said about valence electrons.
#
Her heart leaped into her throat when the line connected, but instead of getting Lydia's acerbic sarcasm teasing her for worrying too much, she got a smooth, cultured voice that said, "Martin residence," and sent Allison's hopes for Lydia's miraculous recovery crashing back into the ground.
"Hi, Mrs. Martin," she said. "It's Allison. I was just calling to check up on Lydia."
"Oh, hello, dear. She's napping just now, but I'll tell you called when she wakes."
For all the good that would do Allison. Lydia seemed to have contracted a phobia of the telephone along with her migraines. Allison repressed her sigh and thanked Lydia's mother sincerely. When they'd disconnected, she started her car and turned resolutely for Stiles's house.
#
"Did it ever occur to you," he called out to her, "after everything, after werewolves and psychopaths and kanimas and your grandfather, that maybe following me wasn't the best idea ever? I can feel my pulse in my throat."
She gave him a little finger wave, and grimaced as she came up the driveway. "Hi, Stiles. Sorry. I didn't mean to frighten you."
He rolled his eyes and pushed his shoulder against hers. "If I have a heart attack, you'd better be prepared to give mouth-to-mouth, that's all I'm saying. Scott will understand."
Scott. She could have protested. She wanted to, the words were poised there on her lips, the frown already pulling at her brow. She wanted to snap at him, that Scott didn't to have any say in whose mouth she put hers on anymore, that he didn't have any right to be understanding because he wasn't her boyfriend and it wasn't his business. Stiles always talked like that, though, like they were still together, like they were one unit he couldn't imagine separate and their reunion was inevitable, just a matter of time. Correcting him constantly was exhausting, and didn't seem to be doing any good anyway. She bit her tongue and followed him into the house. "About that wolfsbane--"
He stopped halfway into the kitchen and swiveled, turning back to stare at her, his jaw gaping. "You do know I'm not actual magic, right? You gave that to me at lunch! I just got home! When exactly do you think I might have had a chance to research anything?"
She shrugged and gave him her brightest, most guileless smile. "You could work on it now, though, couldn't you?"
He stared at her for another long moment, then groaned, "Oh my God!", threw his hands up, and stomped upstairs. She thought she heard him mutter something about, "liked it better when you and Scott were too busy mooning over each other to ruin my life" before he slammed a door shut behind himself and cut off whatever else he might have had to say.
She followed after him a bit more slowly and knocked on the door with a knuckle. "Yeah, yeah," Stiles called from within. "It's not locked."
She slipped inside, shut the door behind herself despite the fact that they were the only two at home and that didn't seem likely to change anytime soon. Stiles had the bag of wolfsbane out and propped on his desk, Google already up and running, his brows furrowed in concentration as his fingers flew over the keyboard.
Allison settled onto the edge of her bed, dragged her backpack up beside her, and pulled her history textbook out. No reason she couldn't kill two birds with one stone and get some homework out of the way while Stiles helped her out, and history was the one class that they shared this year. If Stiles ended up using up his homework time helping her out, it seemed the least she could do to make sure she had hers done for him to copy off of.
Time passed, the quiet broken only by the clatter of Stiles's keyboard and his occasional grunt or groan or wordless grumble as he continued his search. Allison had read half of the chapter on the Medici when Stiles hmphed, straightened up from his hunchbacked crouch and stretched his spine out with a series of cracks that made Allison grimace in sympathy.
"I'm going to get a Coke," he said as he rose. "Do you want one?"
"Sure." She smiled at him. "Thank you."
When he'd left, she turned her attention back to her reading, but half a page in, her attention wandered, drawn back to the glowing screen of Stiles's computer. She set the textbook aside and hopped off the bed, slid into the computer chair and leaned in, elbows on the desk, to see what, if anything, Stiles had turned up.
He had at least a dozen tabs open already, several of them various Google searches but most esoteric webpages that looked like they'd been coded in the nineties, complete with flashing neon text and scrolling marquee banners. Allison laughed beneath her breath and clicked from one to the next, skimming for anything that seemed likely, or even interesting.
One tab pointed to the local hard drive, instead of a webpage address. She scanned through it and realized abruptly that it must have been Stiles's copy of the information he'd got from Peter's old laptop. It looked much more modernized, hyperlinked and cross-referenced in a way that had Stiles written all over it. She was just starting to browse through the section that he'd had it pulled up to, a paragraph about wolfsbane in the middle of a longer article about werewolf physiology, when the door swung open and Stiles returned with two cans of soda, each with little bendy straws sticking out of their opening.
He quirked a brow when he saw her sitting in his chair, poking at his computer. "It's been half an hour, don't tell me you've given up on my magic already."
"Of course not. I shouldn't have been prying." She took the soda and slunk back to the bed, chagrined. "I'm just worried, is all. I want this figured out yesterday."
He took his place in his desk chair and swiveled it around, glanced at the computer monitor. His brows ratcheted up another few degrees as he glanced back at her. "My sources are kind of limited," he said. "I can't imagine the Argent family doesn't have a whole library full of werewolf lore. And probably an entire section dedicated to wolfsbane and its nefarious uses. Wouldn't it have been quicker to start your search there?"
Allison grimaced. Unhappiness pulled the corners of her mouth down and she sighed. She shoved her history book aside. She'd lost her patience for facts and dates, and blew glum bubbles into her soda instead. "You're probably right," she said. "But dad's got it under lock and key, lately. And if I asked him for access, he'd want to know why, and I--" Her throat closed off. She chewed on the end of the straw until it crumpled. "I just really can't deal with my dad deciding that my best friend is something that needs to be hunted right now. I'm trying to help her." She felt the fury settle over her, felt the way it froze the muscles in her face and left her feeling cold and distant from herself. "Getting Dad involved would be the opposite of help."
Stiles stared at her a long moment, long enough that the weight of his gaze began to feel like a pressure. She shifted beneath it, drawing in, pulling her textbook back onto her lap and clutching it like it could shield her from whatever it was Stiles was thinking.
"Right," he said at length, and cleared his throat. "Parents. I know how that goes. Can't live with 'em, can't declare emancipation without a damned good reason." He slurped noisily at his soda and spun his chair around, a full circle that ended with him facing the desk and computer squarely. "I'll do my best, Allison. You know I will." He cracked his knuckles, laced his fingers together and stretched his arms over his head. "One batch of Stiles-brand magic, coming right up. Prepare to be amazed."
For all of Stiles's assurances, though, by the time afternoon had worn on to evening and Allison reluctantly decided that if she pushed it any longer, she was going to be late for dinner, he really hadn't found out much. He gave her a flash drive that he'd saved a handful of the more informative websites to, but he told her that to the best of his knowledge, it was just plain old wolfsbane, at most possibly a less-common variant of the most common strain of wolfsbane around, but he couldn't be one hundred percent certain because the reference photographs on the taxonomy website looked like they'd been shot forty years ago on a polaroid in the middle of a snowstorm.
He'd found a few sources that had made brief mention of possible mildly toxic effects of wolfsbane on humans, and assured her that he'd saved those to the drive as well. "But, I don't know, man," he said, ducking his head and scratching fingers through the fuzz at the base of his skull, "if someone's trying to poison her, that seems like kind of a crap way to go about it."
Allison hummed noncommittally. "Maybe." She accepted the flash drive from him and slid it into her pocket, shooting him a smile. "Thank you, Stiles. I really appreciate it."
"Oh, you know." He stretched his arms overhead again, leaning back in the chair so far that it seemed a miracle of physics that it didn't topple over. "Any time."
She shoved her books back into her backpack and slung it over her shoulder. "I'll email you the answers to the post-chapter review questions when I get home."
"Yes." He sat up so abruptly that his chair launched him forward. He scrambled for the PS3 controller lying on a pile of clutter on the corner of his desk. "Hello, Call of Duty. Tonight, you are mine."
She laughed and waved over her shoulder. "Have fun!"
She barely made it home in time for dinner, but her dad didn't say anything, only gave her a look and asked how school had been as they carried the dishes to the table. She could scarcely think about anything that had happened that day that hadn't been related to the wolfsbane, but she managed to drag up a few anecdotes, enough to satisfy her dad and get them back on to neutral territory.
As soon as the meal was over and she'd finished cleaning up, she grabbed her bag and headed for the front door.
"It's awfully late, don't you think," her dad called from the living room. She froze and glanced over her shoulder. He was watching her from his seat on the couch, one brow raised, his expression expectant.
"Lydia missed class again," she said. "I wanted to go check on her."
He relaxed almost imperceptibly and gave a slight nod. "Curfew's ten," he said, turning back to the TV. "Tell her I hope she feels better."
"Sure thing." She hurried out before he could keep her there any longer.
The sun was long gone by then, the sky dark and studded with stars. If Lydia's migraine -- or whatever it was -- made her sensitive to light, then she hoped that it would be dark enough out now that she'd be able to hold an actual conversation with Allison tonight.
Lydia's mom answered when Allison knocked at the door. She looked mildly surprised to see Allison standing there, smiling politely with her bag slung over one shoulder. "Hi, Mrs. Martin. How's Lydia doing?"
"I think she's napping just now, sweetie, but it's very kind of you to stop by."
"Napping?" Allison hesitated, rocking up onto the balls of her feet. She frowned and tugged at a strand of hair. "I brought her assignments from class. I'll just go up and leave them on her desk, all right? I promise I won't disturb her."
Mrs. Martin simpered over how kind it was to have brought Lydia's assignments. Allison smile and nodded and made her way quickly up the stairs. Lydia's bedroom door was shut, no light coming from the crack beneath it. She tried the doorknob and released a relieved breath when it turned easily under her palm.
The door swung open on silent hinges. Allison left it cracked so she could see by the light from the hallway as she crept across to the desk. She only meant to leave the assignments on Lydia's desk, someplace prominent where Lydia would be sure not to miss them. But the window was open and there was something about the way the moonlight threw shadows across Lydia's bed that made Allison turn her head, made her squint and search through the darkness.
The shadows resolved themselves into a shape, the line of a woman's shoulders, the curve of a face in profile. Allison jumped, a startled scream tangling in her throat before she recognized the tousle of strawberry curls. "Oh my God. Lydia, what the hell are you doing?"
Lydia was sitting upright in bed, the covers piled around her lap, her shoulders turned to a three-quarters profile as she stared out through the window into the night. She barely even flinched in reaction to Allison's voice.
She turned her head slowly, looking at Allison with an eerie gaze that seemed to take note of everything and nothing at once.
"I'm going to turn a light on, all right? I'll keep it low, but I'd rather not trip and break my neck, trying to walk in the dark."
Lydia blinked at her slowly and still said nothing. Allison waited a beat, giving her opportunity to protest, then felt her way over to the lamp on the desk and turned it on.
The light was a low, golden glow, but Lydia flinched back as though Allison had shone a spotlight straight in her face. She turned to the window, her back to the lamp, shoulders hunched as though the light were a physical blow she was bracing herself from.
Allison climbed up on the bed with her and knelt at Lydia's side. She touched Lydia's shoulder. The muscles were knotted beneath her fingers, so tight they practically shivered. Lydia's eyes were tearing from the light, even turned away from its source, but she kept them open and fixed on the window as though it held salvation.
Allison followed her gaze. Her heart jolted, smacking against her ribs until it hurt even to breathe. There was a shadow on the windowsill, a shape that seemed familiar in all the worst ways. With Lydia's back turned to the lamp, she cast a shadow across it that left it dark and indistinct, impossible to be sure. Allison leaned forward and snatched it up, brought it back into the light where its purple blossoms were all too plain to see.
It was more wolfsbane, a long piece of it this time with several branching stalks of flowers. Fury and fear made Allison's chest tighten until it seemed likely to squeeze the life right out of her.
She grabbed Lydia's shoulder and wrenched her around. She shook the wolfsbane in her face. "What is this? Why do you have this?"
Lydia blinked at the flowers, her eyes focusing slowly. Even then, her gaze remained faintly perplexed, her brows furrowed. She shook her head as though in a daze. "I— I don't know. I thought…"
Christ. She looked drugged. Allison bit back a furious tirade. Everything she wanted to say, Lydia didn't deserve it. It wasn't her fault someone was trying to poison her, or whatever it was they were trying to do with the wolfsbane. She was just the nearest person available for Allison's panic to unleash at. She deserved better than that.
Allison kept it bottled and held her tongue. She pulled the wolfsbane back when Lydia tried to reach for it. Lydia's window slid silently, almost effortlessly, when Allison shouldered it open. A cool breeze blew through the room, bringing with it the smell of trees and damp earth and the music of crickets.
Allison leaned her head out the window and tossed the wolfsbane out. It tumbled and rolled down the roof, a darker shadow against the tiles, then bounced across the gutter and dropped off the edge, out of sight.
She wouldn't have noticed if she hadn't been watching the wolfsbane fall, leaning half out the window and staring into the shadows. A darker patch of shadow, roughly man-shaped, standing beneath the shelter of a copse of trees across the street. He was motionless, just standing there facing the house. Facing Lydia's bedroom window.
Allison jerked inside and slammed the window shut before she even stopped to think. Her heart raced and her hands shook. Lydia was watching her now, the first time all night that she'd seemed to look at Allison rather than through her.
"There's someone outside." Allison's voice shook. She'd liked it better when she'd been able to half-convince herself that she was just tilting at windmills, fabricating treachery where none existed. It was so much better than being right.
Lydia glanced out the window, then back at Allison. Her brows wrinkled, and the corners of her mouth turned down in a pretty pout. "Don't be silly. Who'd be out this late at night?"
"I know what I saw, Lyd." She fumbled for her backpack with hands gone suddenly stiff and clumsy. Damn it, why didn't she have her bow with her, or her crossbow? Hell, she'd have been happy with a knife. All she had was her fifty pound history book, a three-ring binder, and a handful of freshly-sharpened pencils. "I'm going to go see who it is. I'll be right back."
"Allison, don't be ridiculous. The human brain is wired to search for patterns in random data, especially the face or shape of other people. It's why we see things like the man in the moon. There's no one out there."
Allison sent Lydia her best, most reassuring smile over her shoulder as she stepped out of the bedroom, but she wasn't sure even her best was very good right about then. "Then I won't be long, will I?" Her smile faded. She couldn't keep it in place very long. "Stay here. Wait for me."
"Allison!" Lydia sounded like she was trying for imperial, her usual tone that commanded legions of high school students to quake before her. But it mostly came out sounding tremulous and afraid. She scrambled after her, tearing at the blankets that tangled around her legs.
Allison shut the bedroom door and hoped Lydia would take it as a deterrent and stay where she was. She made her way downstairs quickly. Her skin was humming with alarm, every nerve singing with the thrill and terror of the hunt.
The living room and hallway were empty. Voices came from somewhere else in the house, deeper within the ground floor, accompanied by the quiet ring of silverware off china. The house smelled like garlic and basil. Dinner time, she guessed, and hoped the meal would keep Lydia's parents too well occupied to notice her sneaking out, or confronting whoever-it-was right there across the street from their front yard.
She left the front porch light off and made her way down the walkway guided only by the light of the street lamps. She kept to the shadows, skirting around the pools of light, her gaze fixed on the trees across the street, searching through the glare of street lamps for the shape she had seen.
Her palm itched for the weight of a weapon to hold in her grasp. With a bow in her hand and a quiver at her back, she could have strode across the empty stretch of asphalt secure in the knowledge of her ability to take on all comers.
Now... now, she was just a high school student. She felt vulnerable again, and she hated it. She hated that her best friend's safety rested on her shoulders, and she didn't know if she had the strength to carry it.
She couldn't even find the shadow now. It had been so obvious from Lydia's bedroom, fifteen feet up. Here at ground level, everything looked different, and the shadows just looked like trees.
She jogged across the empty street to the copse across the way. The stand of trees here was thick, each trunk rubbing shoulders with the next. She circled around and pushed her way through, but she found nothing here except leaves and shadows.
Someone had been down there. She knew it. She was sure of it. Lydia would laugh and toss her hair and take it as proof that Allison should have listened to her from the start, but she knew what she had seen. Lydia could say what she liked.
Allison crossed the street again, at a walk this time. She was in no hurry. She glanced up as she came onto the curb and her steps faltered. Lydia had followed her out after all. She she'd turned the porch light on, but stood halfway down the walk, barefoot and with a thin blanket clutched around her shoulders. She stared the way Allison had come, into the copse of trees. Her expression was wrecked, raw and open.
"Lydia?"
"You chased him away," she said. Her face crumpled. Tears clung to her lashes and reflected the moonlight like gemstones. "He's gone."
Her words weren't relieved as Allison might have expected. She sounded heartbroken. She opened her eyes and stared at the shadowed trees, and she looked it, too.
"Lyd..."
Lydia spun away, a small, strangled noise sounding like a gunshot in the stillness of the night. Her shoulders shook, sending ripples through the blanket wrapped around her. Her knees sagged and seemed to nearly give way, but before Allison could rush to her side and catch her, she bolstered herself up and stood hunched instead. She held her shoulders hunched, her head bowed.
"Lydia, what the hell is going on?" Allison circled around and stood in front of her, a step to the side so the porch light shone on her face. It illuminated the trails that tears had left down her cheeks, the way her eyes scrunched up and turned red. She drew short, sharp, gasping breaths like she was fighting the tears, but if she was, she had already lost the battle. "Who was that?"
"I don't know," Lydia said, shaking her head miserably.
"Come on, you're crying over him."
"I don't!" The ferocity of her snarl took Allison by surprise. She lifted her head, her jaw tightening and her eyes snapping. Her fingers tightened on the edges of the blanket until the beds of her nails had drained of color. "I don't know! I just--" She gasped for air, rubbing the knuckles of one hand against the middle of her chest. "I felt better. And now... God. I'm so tired of hurting." She pressed the heels of her hands against her forehead, bent over at the waist and her breath hitching. "The pills they gave me don't even touch it, and then you came over and I was feeling better and I thought--" Whatever it was she'd thought, she bit off the words and swallowed them back down. She shook her head and continued on as though she hadn't said anything. "But then you chased him off and it came back and--"
Allison dropped her backpack to the ground and scooped Lydia up into her arms, pulling her close and hugging her tight. Lydia just kept talking, her words muffled and indistinct against Allison's shoulder. But Allison did catch the words, "what is wrong with me," and she had to force back her own sympathetic tears.
Lydia clutched at her, fingers biting into skin. Allison wouldn't have asked her to loosen her grip for the world. "Hey," she breathed, holding her just as tight in return. "Hey. It's okay. I'm going to figure it out, all right? Whoever he is, I'm going to stop him. I'll make it better."
Lydia nodded and sniffed and wiped her face against Allison's shoulder. When she drew an unsteady breath and lifted her head, Allison shifted around, one arm still draped around Lydia's shoulders, and guided her back inside the house.
The sounds of conversation and food still came from somewhere beyond the hallway. Allison urged her up the stairs. When they were back in the bedroom, she shut the door and led Lydia back to the bed. She sat on its edge, blanket still wrapped around her like a cloak, looking around the room as though slightly bewildered by everything she saw.
"Hey." Allison lowered herself down onto one knee before her. When Lydia's gaze skimmed past her but didn't settle, Allison caught her chin in her hand and turned Lydia's face to hers. "Are you going to be all right tonight?"
Lydia gave a little derisive huff and tried to pull away from her grip. "I'm not a child. I'm just in pain."
Allison smiled a little. "All the same. That wasn't an answer."
"Yes. I'm not going to die of a headache and I'm not going to do anything stupid."
Allison hadn't even thought to consider that possibility. She frowned into Lydia's eyes, seeking out some sort of reassurance there, some promise of truth.
Lydia pushed her hair out of her face and countered her concern with an oh, please look of her own that did more than any words could have to reassure Allison. She smiled and squeezed Lydia's hand where it lay on her pajama-clad knee. "Okay. I have to get home before my dad decides to send out the hounds. Feel better." She pulled Lydia close and kissed her cheek. "And if anymore wolfsbane shows up, you toss it out in the trash where it belongs, all right?"
Allison left her there after extracting the promise from her to call her immediately if the man in the shadows returned. Lydia agreed, but she looked wistful as she made the promise, as though she almost hoped he would.
Allison couldn't even blame her. Who was to say, if she hadn't been stricken by migraines that some stranger's presence mysteriously cured, that she wouldn't glue herself to the guy's side, either?
"I'll be back tomorrow," Allison promised, kissed the crown of Lydia's head, and then made herself leave before she could talk herself out of it. If she gave in to that urge, she'd probably never leave again.
#
"As a matter of fact," Stiles said, "it turns out that wolfsbane is actually completely harmless and nine out of ten doctors recommend ingesting it regularly." Stiles threw a biscuit at her and rolled his eyes. "No, of course it didn't, wolfbane's scary shit no matter any way you slice it."
Allison tossed his biscuit back at him. She twisted her mouth up and kicked at her backpack beneath the table. "I guess there's no point in asking if you're really sure about that."
"Hey." Stiles leveled a carrot at her. "Don't doubt the magic."
She raised her hands, fingers spread. "I wouldn't dare." When she lowered them, a sense of melancholy slipped in, chasing the humor of teasing away. "Seriously, though. If you turn up anything--"
"I'll tell you, of course. By text and phone call and carrier pigeon and smoke signal, just to be safe. But you have to give me time to get things started. I work magic, not miracles."
"Don't sell yourself short, Stiles." Allison leaned across the table and ruffled his hair, though it was shaved short enough that mostly it just scratched softly across her palm. "You work miracles every day. I've seen it."
He flushed, obviously pleased but bashful about it. "I'll do my best. I'll call you tonight if I turn up anything."
"Thanks. You're a peach." She tossed him her biscuit, as well, and slipped away to find a more secluded spot to eat and ponder Lydia's problems while he crowed and did a little victory dance over scoring a second buttermilk biscuit.
The school day passed interminably slowly. At least twice in each class, it seemed, she got called on or scolded for letting her attention wander in the middle of lecture. She trudged through the day, praying for relief. And when the final bell rang at the end of their last period, she sent a quick text to her dad informing him that she was going over to Lydia's to study and he shouldn't be alarmed if he came home to an empty house, and then she drove straight to Lydia's.
"Lyd?" She let herself in with the spare key Lydia had given her months earlier and called up the stairs for her. "How are you feeling?"
"Like someone just drove an icepick into my temple." Lydia's voice came from behind Allison. She spun and found her in the living room, sitting on their oversized plush couch with a mountain of textbooks open around her. She gave Allison a sardonic smile. "Thanks for the yelling, that's ever so helpful with migraines."
"Shit! I'm sorry," Allison apologized, and then apologized again when the expletive made Lydia wince. "Are you feeling any better?"
She was dressed and downstairs, and the faint, fruity scent about her seemed evidence that she'd even taken a shower, all of which seemed vast improvements. But Lydia's mouth thinned, pinching tight at the corners. "No. Not at all." She said it lightly, as though they were talking about nothing more consequential than the weather. She pulled her hair over her shoulder and slid the nearest open book onto her lap. "But this headache is getting tiresome. I've decided I'm not going to let it keep me from making valedictorian."
Allison smiled faintly as she lowered herself onto the arm of the couch. An ocean of books lay between her and Lydia, and it felt wrong. She wanted to be sitting beside her, pressed close with an arm around her back and Lydia's head on her shoulder. She wanted to make things better -- she'd promised she would -- but she just felt less than useless.
"How long have you been working on this?" she asked, watching Lydia stretch her neck and rub her fingers across the back of it.
"A few hours, I guess." Lydia glanced at her sidelong, eyes narrowed and speculative. "Why?"
"Because it is definitely break time." Allison hopped off the arm of the couch and caught Lydia's hands, pulling her to get her up onto her feet and off the couch.
Lydia resisted, that narrow-eyed look deepening to a frown. "I've got a week's worth of coursework to catch up on. I can't afford to be taking breaks."
"You've been sick for a week. If you don't rest the way your body needs, it's not going to be able to heal." She pulled harder. Lydia relented and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet, but she gave Allison a look that made it plain she was only humoring her. "Have you even been outside of this house since you saw the doctor?"
"I went outside yesterday," Lydia said, deadpan. "You were with me."
"Right, because that counts." Allison draped her arm around Lydia's shoulder the way she'd wanted to earlier and guided her toward the door. "Come on, the sun's out, the weather's lovely. I bet a little vitamin D will do you a world of good."
"Vitamin D doesn't play any known role in the cause of migraines or headaches."
"Maybe not, but eyestrain and bookwork definitely does, I can tell you that from my own experience." Lydia was arguing, but she wasn't fighting, wasn't planting her feet and staring Allison down as she refused, and with Lydia, anything less than that was just a token protest, so Allison kept guiding her through the house.
Lydia allowed herself to be led, which would have been alarming under any other circumstances. Lydia was always the one who led, always the one in charge and giving commands. But considering the night before, she had been a sobbing wreck in Allison's arms, Allison figured that a little subdued snark was a massive improvement, and as much as anyone could have asked from her just then.
Lydia balked a little when Allison led her around to the passenger side of her car. She braced a hand against the car door and turned, fixing Allison with a take-no-shit sort of look. "If you want me to go somewhere, you could at least tell me where, instead of just throwing me in the car and shanghaiing me like an actual felon."
Allison grimaced and worried her lower lip between her teeth. "I just want to take you to see someone."
"I've already seen doctors, you know. Mom took me to the best migraine specialist in the state."
"Oh yeah?" Allison fixed her with a look of her own. She didn't have the patented Lydia Stare down, but they'd been friends for two years now, and she was a quick study. She could hold her own with the best of them. "What does your specialist have to say about migraines that are miraculously cured by the presence of a mysterious stranger in the woods?"
Lydia held strong for a moment, meeting Allison's stare with her own in a battle of wills. But then a moment passed, and she sagged like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Her shoulders slumped and she dropped her head forward, gaze downcast. "Yes, fine," she said, the words mumbled and indistinct. Then she raised her head and glared at Allison, some of the stiffness returning to her spine. "But if you're taking me to some alternative medicine quack, so help me--"
Allison laughed, relief and nerves in one. She pulled the door open for Lydia and urged her in with an arm around her shoulder. "I'm not," she said. "I promise. Well, not exactly."
She shut the door on Lydia's outraged shriek of protest, and counted it a miracle that she hadn't thrown herself out of the car and right back inside the house by the time Allison made it around to the driver's side and slid into her seat.
Lydia glared sidelong at her, stiff with obvious fury. "If he tries to pour snake oil down my throat, Allison, so help me God..."
Allison lifted both her hands, palms out and fingers spread as though something as simple as that might be able to ward off the disdain of Lydia Martin. "We're just going to talk. Cross my heart. Give it five minutes, and then if you want to leave, I'll drive you anywhere you like."
Lydia's lips were flat, her mouth pinched. "You'll drive me anywhere I like, without one single word to try to convince or sway me, and you'll order in Thai food and help me with my abstract for that chem report Mr. Harris gave me an extension on."
She said it imperiously, a queen making a decree. And Allison just nodded, smiled and said, "Yes. Absolutely. Anything you want." If Lydia was feeling recovered enough to have her appetite back, then Allison was damned if she was going to deny her anything she might want to eat. She'd buy her everything off the menu, if that's what she wanted.
Lydia settled back in her seat with a little hmph, mollified. Allison buckled herself in, gestured for Lydia to do the same -- "I'm pretty sure going head-first through the windshield isn't going to do anything for your migraine," she said, when Lydia rolled her eyes at her as though she were ridiculous -- then put the car in gear and started down the road.
She tried to keep Lydia engaged in conversation as she drove. She related all the latest gossip at school, which got them halfway there, and when that conversational stream ran dry, she wracked her brain for anything else they could possibly talk about aside from headaches and wolfsbane and strangers lurking in shadows. She began to tell Lydia about the pop quiz they'd had in chem, but stopped when Lydia started to point out to her every question she'd gotten wrong. She talked about Scott and Stiles, about how somebody had stolen Greenberg's gym clothes during lacrosse practice and he'd gone tearing after them clad in only a towel and cleats and armed with his crosse.
Lydia's mouth pulled sideways like she'd wanted to smile but stopped herself. "Did he catch him?"
"No, but he did smack himself in the face with his crosse and ended up with a black eye and a bloody nose. I heard him telling Laney yesterday that it was a sports injury, like he'd gotten it on the field."
That earned her a slight smile and just the tiniest crinkles of mirth at the corners of Lydia's eyes. It felt like sunshine, like the first faint light before dawn, which seems so bright after the darkness of night. If they hadn't both been buckled in and the car in motion, she'd have pulled Lydia across the center console and given her a great big bear hug right there.
She was just about out of things to keep Lydia's attention preoccupied with when she pulled to a stop in front of the great, burned-out shell of the Hale house. Lydia's gaze swung to it and stayed riveted, eyes opened wide and unblinking, the set of her mouth gone soft and vulnerable. "What are we doing here?" she asked, and it was scarcely a breath of sound.
Allison cursed to herself and spared a moment to smack her forehead against the edge of the steering wheel. She'd thought Lydia might have been upset, to realize where Allison had brought her. She hadn't expected her to sound like this, overwhelmed and uncertain.
"We're going to talk to Derek," Allison said, forcing her voice bright and sure. "Five minutes. You promised."
"You misled me," Lydia pointed out, then tipped her head to the side, lips pursed in thought. "Fine. Five minutes, because I'm feeling generous. But then thai and chem." She held her hand out to Allison, fingers curled against her palm but pinky outstretched.
Allison hooked her pinky finger around Lydia's and shook it, smiling. "Promise. I'll even call my dad and tell him I'm spending the night, and we can make a girl's night of it, if you want."
Lydia smiled, slow and brilliant. "Maybe. If you can come up with a chem abstract that meets my standards." She tossed her hair and climbed out of the car, strode straight up to the old house with long, purposeful strides that left Allison scrambling to catch up to her.
Allison grinned at Lydia's back the entire way.
"Think he's home?" Lydia asked on the front porch. Her lip curled with thinly-veiled distaste as she looked at the ash-stained handle on the front door. "Usually he comes out here and growls at us before we've even got the car parked."
Allison gestured into the woods, where a faint hint of blue was occasionally visible through the brush, as the wind blew through and sent leaves and branches swaying. "Looks like Stiles is here. He's probably keeping them occupied." She gave a courtesy knock on the front door, then grasped the knob and turned it.
Ash and charred wood flaked off of the door and the handle groaned in protest as though it hadn't been used since the fire. Allison forced it open, then pushed the door in and stepped inside. She glanced over her shoulder to be sure that Lydia was honoring their deal and following after, then sighed down at her palm, streaked black and grey with ash.
Lydia's lips quirked, a little smug smile as she brushed past Allison, deeper into what was left of the house.
It didn't take long to discover that Allison's guess about Stiles and distraction had been right. They came into the remains of the living room and found Stiles flailing, Derek's fist wrapped in the front of his shirt and hauling him up onto his toes while Derek growled in his face.
"Come on, man, how was I supposed to know?" Stiles was demanding, wild-eyed and pulling at Derek's sleeve as though that would do anything at all. "She didn't tell me! I came in good faith! Teach me to ever come seeking out your expertise ever again..."
Derek growled again, something low and indecipherable, and shook Stiles by his collar. Allison crossed her arms over her chest and cleared her throat. "Really now, Derek, I thought you were better behaved than that."
Derek's head snapped around. He stared at her with eyes that shone faintly red around the edges, then released Stiles with a growl. Stiles fell to the floor, a pile of sprawling limbs and lanky elbows. Allison watched in bemusement as he picked himself up and got his feet back under him. He tugged on his collar, stretched his neck out, seemed to shake himself to settle everything back in place. "Yeah, okay, I get it," he mumbled, glaring balefully at Derek. "Sorry for being such a stupid kid."
Allison asked, "Are you all right, Stiles?"
"Oh, you know me, fine and dandy." He brushed ash off of his shoulder and tossed her something. She caught it reflexively, then saw that it was the wolfsbane she'd given him earlier, still bundled up in its triple layers of plastic. "You could have warned me beforehand that he's being a little touchy about having this stuff brought to his house."
Allison felt a smile stretch across her face. "I might have, but I thought you were going to work your magic on it. I didn't realize that your magic was just Derek's expertise in disguise."
"Hey, a guy's gotta do what a guy's gotta do." He scratched the nape of his neck and backed toward the front door, keeping a shadowed frown on Derek all the while. "Good luck with him. I'm afraid I went and pissed him off for you. I don't think you're going to get anything but growls out of him today."
Derek just growled at him again, one corner of his lip curling. Stiles jerked and stumbled back and tripped on a loose floorboard. "Christ! Yeah, okay, I'm going." He turned and left, but as he went, Allison caught him mumbling something beneath his breath about, "just for that, I'm going to tell all the neighborhood kids that you've got the good Halloween candy."
Allison waited until she'd heard the door of Stiles's jeep slam, then the engine roar to life and fade away, before she turned her attention back to Derek. "Making friends as always, I see."
He shot her an impatience glance. "What do you want?"
"One minute and thirty-four seconds," Lydia said, glancing at her watch.
"The deal was for five minutes of talking, and you haven't been," Allison countered. "Clock starts now."
Lydia shot her a faintly horrified look. "You want me to talk to him? About what?" Derek, for his part, looked just as appalled by the idea.
Allison sighed and shook her head. To Derek, she said, "She's been having headaches."
He leaned his back against the wall and stared at them as though the sheer force of his glower could propel them outside. "I hear tylenol's great for that."
"Oh, thank you, I hadn't thought of that," Lydia snapped, arms folded and shoulders tight. "I've been taking percocet, for Heaven's sake. It hasn't touched it. Nothing has touched it except--"
She broke off abruptly. Derek's wholly-disinterested look turned to grudging curiosity. Allison, standing behind her, only saw the way the muscles in Lydia's shoulders had jumped, the way her back was stiff as a pole now and her breathing was coming too fast. "Lydia?" She pulled her around so she could see Lydia's face, and found herself pinned by a horrified stare. "Lyd? What? What is it?"
"I feel better," she whispered, in the same sort of hushed tone that someone might have said, I've got cancer, and only two months to live. "I have ever since we got here. I didn't notice. I..."
Elation died a quick death in Allison's chest, smothered by fury. She shifted her gaze over Lydia's shoulder to where Derek was standing behind her, on the opposite side of the room. He looked as befuddled as Lydia, and Allison wanted to claw that expression off his face with her own nails. "What did you do?"
Lydia looked confused and a little hurt. She opened her mouth to say something, but Allison pushed past her, advancing on Derek. She was going to kill him. "What did you do to her?"
She thought of her bow and crossbow, both of them stashed safely in the trunk of her car and not here, where she hadn't thought she'd need them, in the home of an alpha werewolf. She hadn't expected Derek to be the one she needed to use them against.
She strode up to him, grabbed him by the front of his shirt and slammed him back against the nearest wall before he even had a chance to tense up and fend her off. "Whatever you did, you're going to undo it right now, or I'm going to see that every hunter in the state knows that you've got a bounty on your head so big it'll make the Fort Knox vault look like pocket change."
"Oh, I'd really prefer you didn't do that."
The drawled words didn't come from Derek, who had wolfed out as soon as Allison had slammed him back against the wall and was now staring at her with a mouth full of fangs and eyes flashing a warning red. Allison gripped him tighter -- not that that was going to help if he decided to make a move, but it made her feel better -- and turned her head, a quick glance over her shoulder in the direction the voice had come.
Peter Hale stood beneath the arch of the doorway, looking as satisfied with himself as ever and leaning one shoulder against the frame, his ankles crossed like he was in some sort of photo shoot in a nice house in the Hamptons, not standing in the burnt-out shell of the home his family had died in.
Allison pulled Derek away from the wall and spun, propelling him into the room as she released her grip on his shirt. It put the solid protection of the wall at her back, and kept both werewolves in her line of sight.
"What are you talking about?" she demanded as she slid one arm behind her back. She may have left the bows in her trunk, but she wasn't completely unarmed. She had a knife in a holster at the small of her back, hidden away beneath her winter coat. She didn't draw it yet, but she wrapped her fingers around the hilt and kept her grip firm as she stared between Derek and Peter.
Peter pushed off of the door frame and strode toward her, long and languid, his hands in his pockets, the picture of casual indifference. But his gaze was sharp when he turned it on her. It made her skin crawl, and the hair at her nape stand on end. "If you do that," he said, practically a purr, "then it's going to stir up all those nasty conflicts between my family and yours, which would be a shame. We just got them laid to rest, after all. It's a terrible nuisance, trying to secure a pack and a mate, when you've got hunters on your heels all the time."
"My friend's well-being is just a little bit more important to me than your pack," Allison spat out, but Derek had started talking at the same time, his voice rising over hers as he twisted to stare at Peter.
"Oh God," he said. "You didn't."
Peter bared his teeth at Derek. Someone less familiar with werewolves might have taken it for a smile, charming and sure, but they'd have been wrong. The sight of it made Allison tighten her grip on her knife and press her shoulders back against the wall. It made Derek growl, low in his throat, and flex his hands as though readying for a fight. "Of course I did, dear nephew. Somebody had to. A pack needs its leaders, and you've shown no inclination to provide yours with them."
Derek sucked in a sharp breath and advanced on Peter. With both of them preoccupied with each other, Allison slid around the perimeter of the room until she'd reached Lydia, on its other side. Lydia jumped when Allison caught her arm, and spun to her with a small cry.
"Hey," Allison said, low and hushed to avoid drawing the attention of the arguing werewolves. "Are you all right?"
Lydia shook her head wildly and stared at the two as they confronted one another. "Oh my god, he's going to kill him," she breathed, hands clasped over her mouth and voice muffled by her interlaced fingers.
Allison glanced over at both of them. Derek was still wolfed out, and Peter was still mostly human, but he'd brought his claws out and was casually flicking his thumb across them. They were posturing, both of them, trying to intimidate the other into backing down, and Allison didn't have any patience left for any of it.
"Hey!" she shouted, striding toward both of them and raising her voice loud enough that even a human would have winced. Peter and Derek both flinched, recoiling away and glaring at her.
At least they'd stopped glaring at each other. That couldn't be anything but an improvement.
Allison stopped a few strides away from both of them, feet planted strong on the floor and fists on her hips. "Somebody had better start talking right now, or this is going to get ugly."
Peter looked her over with unveiled disdain. Derek didn't look any happier, but at least he wasn't looking at her like he thought she belonged in the garbage bin. "Mates," he spat, as though the word tasted vile. "That's what he's talking about. An alpha needs a mate."
"He's not alpha."
"Not yet." Peter smiled, full of pleasure. The sight of it sent a chill curling down Allison's spine. "It never hurts to be prepared."
She forced her gaze back to Derek. Instinct sang through her veins, pushing her to keep her attention on Peter because he was the greater threat. But as little as she knew Peter, she knew enough to know that the moon would fall out of the sky before she'd ever get a straight answer out of him. "Keep talking," she told Derek. "I'm not anywhere close to understanding yet."
Derek heaved a sharp sigh. "An alpha needs a mate," he said again. "And wolves mate for life. When one chooses a mate, there's a bond created between them."
He stopped talking again, as though that was supposed to be satisfactory. Allison gave him a look from beneath an arched brow. "I don't suppose you're talking about love and dedication here, are you?"
Derek shook his head, one tight, single shake that had huge depths of unhappiness behind it. "It's a soulbond," he said, quieter. He was almost gentle about it. That just made alarm sing even more urgently through her veins. "A physical union."
"What does any of this have to do with Lydia?"
Derek's expression just turned darker, more unhappy. "When the two are parted," he said, staring at a point in space somewhere beyond Allison's left shoulder, "it creates distress. Discomfort." He glanced at Lydia and grimaced. "When they're close to each other, the discomfort goes away."
Cold crept through Allison, slow, seeping, until every part of her felt chilled. "No." She gasped the word out, horrified and desperate. She pulled her knife out of its sheath and advanced on Peter with it clenched in her fist. "No! Whatever it is you've done to her, whatever this bond is, you undo it right now."
Peter caught her by the wrist easily, twisted it until the pain sent her to her knees and she feared he'd break it, then flicked the knife from her numb fingers. "It doesn't quite work like that, my dear," he said, bending over her, so soft and sweet it made Allison want to retch. "The only sure way to sever the bond is through death. And if you think I'm going to kill myself just because you demand it of me, you're quite mistaken."
He released her abruptly. Allison clutched her arm against her chest and stayed where she was kneeling, gasping and shaken. Peter straightened. He towered over her, and looked down on her as though she were nothing. "You could always kill her, of course, if you're that determined to sever the bond." He clucked his tongue. "But I'd rather you not. It wouldn't be terribly pleasant for either of us, should the other one die." He moved a few steps away and kicked her knife back towards her. "So think on that, before you go about making threats on my life."
Allison snapped her knife up and shoved it back into its sheath, glaring at him all the while. "If you wanted to avoid stirring up conflicts between my family and yours, you picked the wrong way to go about it." She pulled herself to her feet and faced him squarely. "This is a blatant violation of the truce. She's human. She's not yours to choose."
Peter grimaced and gave a dismissive wave of his hand. "Yes, well, that was a surprise to all of us, wasn't it? She ought to have died or turned, and then it wouldn't have been a hunter matter either way." He glanced from Allison to Lydia. His gaze softened, opened. "She's strong," he said, his voice full of admiration and pride.
It made Allison's stomach roil. Lydia's strength was her own. Peter didn't have any right to take pride in it. "You leave her alone," she said, then looked at Derek. "Keep him away from her, do you hear me?"
"I will," Derek said, tight and furious. "You have my word."
Peter pushed his hands back into his pockets and rocked back on his heels, humming and smiling to himself. "Are you sure that's what she wants, little hunter?" He angled his head toward Lydia. "To be left alone? To be separated? It won't be easy on her."
Allison hesitated and glanced at Lydia, afraid of what she would see. If this bond between them could make her hurt, what else could it make her do? Could he make her want to be with him? Allison's hand twitched toward her knife again just at the thought.
Lydia stared at him. There was a hint of reluctance in her expression, of uncertainty. But while they all waited, looking at her, Allison hardly daring to breathe, she squared her shoulders and lifted her chin high and looked down her nose at Peter as though he were the lowest on the high school food chain. "It's a headache." Her voice dripped with disdain. "I've had them before. It's not going to kill me." She spun on her heel, tossed her hair over her shoulder, and caught Allison's eye sidelong. "Come on, Allison," she said, as imperious as Allison had ever seen her. "This is dull. I'm ready to go home."
#
Allison put the car into park and then hesitated. She glanced at Lydia, who still had her eyes shut and seemed not to have noticed that they’d stopped. “Are you all right?” she asked quietly.
Lydia opened her eyes and rolled her head so she could look at Allison directly. “I’m soulbonded to a madman,” she said. “No, worse. I’m soulbonded to a werewolf. And my headache’s back and better than ever. Of course I’m not all right.”
Allison gripped the steering wheel so hard her fingers ached. “Lyd…”
“No.” Lydia unbuckled her seatbelt and reached for the door. “I definitely do not want your pity. I meant what I said. It’s a headache. I’ll live.” She climbed out of the car.
“Lydia, please.”
She bent down, looking back in at Allison. “I’ll see you at school tomorrow. Don't forget to finish your English paper, you know Vanek doesn't take late assignments, no matter what the excuse."
Allison tried to summon a smile, but it felt like a feeble, fragile thing. "You don't think finding out that my best friend has been forcibly soulbonded to a psychopathic werewolf wouldn't sway him?"
Lydia answered her with a smile of her own. "Don't use me as an excuse. It’s beneath you.” She shut the door and patted the roof of the car. "Just do your essay, Allison!"
#
"Feeling better?" Allison asked hopefully, leaning against the lockers next to Lydia's.
"No," Lydia said matter-of-factly as she swapped out the books in her bag for the ones in her locker. "Worse. School's farther away from his house than mine is." She pulled out a compact and applied foundation beneath her eyes, where she looked a little red and swollen.
"Are you really sure you're okay to be back yet? You know I don't mind bringing you your assignments."
“I’m not dying, Allison. I’m not even sick.” She snapped her compact shut and swung the door to her locker closed just as hard as everyone else did, as though to make a point. “And I am not falling farther behind in any of my classes because of that… man.”
"Fair enough." Allison hooked her arm through Lydia's and put on the brightest smile she could muster. "Let's get to class."
#
She didn't answer when Allison asked where they were going, so Allison just shrugged, texted her dad that she might be home late, and followed after her.
Where they were going turned out to be Stiles's jeep, parked in the far back corner of the lot. Lydia leaned against the bumper while they waited, inspecting her nails and talking about how Greenberg had come up to her after second period and asked if he could carry her books for her.
When Stiles showed up, a few minutes after they got there, he was absorbed in his phone, holding it up so close he was practically bumping his nose against the screen as he typed something out frantically.
"Hi, Stiles," Lydia said when he was nearly on top of her.
He jerked his head up, saw her and stumbled back, flailing. Allison grabbed the phone out of his hands before he could send it flying. "Whoa. Lydia. Hi. Um." He looked at Allison, his gaze tinged with desperation and just the faintest hint of betrayal. "Fancy meeting you here. At my car, I mean. Is there, um..." He gulped and fumbled blindly with his phone when Allison handed it back to him. "Is there something I can help you with?"
She smiled at him and pushed away from the Jeep, upright onto her feet. Stiles flinched when she draped her arm around his shoulder. "I was wondering what you could tell me about werewolf-proofing."
"Oh my god." Stiles waved his hands frantically in her face, his head whipping around like he expected eavesdroppers to suddenly spring up out of the bushes. "You can't just go around and say things like that, are you crazy? You're going to give me a heart attack. The two of you, you've got it in for my poor little heart." He patted both his hands over his chest, then made a shooing motion. "Go on, get in, we're going to my place. Go ahead and make yourselves comfortable. Somebody ought to be," he muttered as they obeyed, and he climbed behind the wheel.
Lydia climbed into the passenger seat and Allison took the middle seat in the back, so she could lean forward between the two front seats. "You're very smooth, Stiles," she teased. "Very suave. No one would look at you flailing about and ever guess that you were harboring such secrets. It's a marvel."
Stiles twisted in his seat to look at her. "Seat belts, ladies, please! Oh my god." He banged his forehead against the steering wheel. "I cannot get pulled over for unsafe driving. Dad will kill me. He'll take my baby away." He stroked the dashboard lovingly, then turned his head enough to give them both a disgruntled look. "Seat belts. I mean it. My baby doesn't move until all her passenger's are buckled up."
Lydia heaved a sigh, rolled her eyes, and pinned Stiles with a look that made it clear she thought he was the most ridiculous boy on the planet as she reached for her belt. Allison sat back and fastened the waist belt in the back, then leaned forward again, ignoring the way it bit into her sides. "Can't we talk here, Stiles?" She rapped her knuckles against the Jeep's roof. "I don't think the sound's going to travel very far."
"I'm a technowizard," he said. "If you want magic, I need to be plugged in."
They drove in silence, Stiles's rambling monologue a white noise background. When they reached his house and they'd all climbed out of the Jeep, Lydia said, "Now can we--", but he shushed and waved her to silence, and herded them both into the house ahead of him.
Allison held her tongue while Stiles ushered them upstairs and into his bedroom. Lydia turned and sat on the edge of his bed while he made a show of shutting and locking the door, then crossing the room to pull the window shut as well.
"Satisfied?" she asked, brows raised, pinning him with a pointed look.
"All right." He threw himself into his office chair, a sprawling mess of limbs, and waved a hand in an elaborate circle. "Talk. Tell me what the wizard can do for you."
"You can stop calling yourself wizard, for one. And then you can tell me how to werewolf-proof my house."
"Well, sure, but what level of protection are we talking about here? You want wolf-repellant or wolf-resistant or--"
Lydia got up from where she was sitting on the bed, walked toward Stiles and leaned over him. He stared up at her, jaw going slack and eyes unfocused. "I want something that will stop any werewolves in their tracks. I want a fucking wall around my house. I want any wolves to decide they'd be better off chasing rabbits under the full moon than setting one single hairy foot inside my bedroom. Is that clear enough?"
Stiles gaped at her a moment longer, for once speechless. When she put distance between them, he cleared his throat and pulled at the collar of his shirt. "Yep. Crystal. Perfectly clear. One hundred percent--"
"Stiles."
"Right! Right. Okay." He spun the chair around and hunched over his keyboard. He sent Allison a sidelong look as his fingers flew over the keyboard. "Now this, I'm sure your family's bestiary covers better than anything I might be able to get my hands on. Isn't repelling werewolves kind of your whole reason for living? I mean--" He gulped and cringed, his whole face crumpling up on itself. "I meant your family. Not you you. I certainly did not in any way mean to suggest that you repelled Scott--"
"Oh my God, Stiles, can we please focus here?"
"Yes! Absolutely. I am focused. I am a laser." He returned to typing for another half a second before he spun his seat back towards Allison. "I just mean, if Scott's any example, all evidence seems to point to the fact that you are in fact very attractive to werewolves, not the least bit repulsive at all."
"If that's your idea of a scientific proof, then we're wasting our time," Lydia said, lying back on Stiles's bed and staring up at the remnants of sticky tape in the shape of Orion that marred the paint job on his ceiling.
Lydia looked bored, but beneath that facade, she looked pained. Allison swallowed down her impatience with Stiles's rambling and forced tolerance as best as she was able. "Werewolf-proofing," she reminded him. "I'll try to get a look at our bestiary, but it's not as though Dad's just tucked it away on the top shelf and hoped that'll keep it out of my hands. In the meantime..." She gestured to the laptop. "Please."
He nodded, serious for once. "I can tell you mountain ash right now," he said over his shoulder. "But that's about as specific as I've got. Deaton would be the one to talk to about that. Got the whole clinic decked out in the stuff, apparently. As for the rest..." He stretched his arms behind his back, then up over his head. When he poised his hands over the keyboard again, his fingers flew. Websites and search results came up and were navigated or closed faster than Allison could even keep track of.
She settled onto the bed beside Lydia to wait. Lydia was still on her back, still staring idly up at Stiles's ceiling. Her eyes seemed a little glazed. Allison wished she could convince herself that it was boredom or thoughtfulness or anything other than pain. But she knew better.
She pulled Lydia around until she was lying along the edge of Stiles's mattress and Allison could lay Lydia's head in her lap. She stroked her fingers through Lydia's hair, pressed fingertips into her scalp and massaged where she found tension. Lydia smiled and leaned into her touch, letting her eyes fall shut. "Mm. That helps," she murmured. Allison felt the tension ease out of her, felt her relax into the bed and onto her lap. "Don't stop."
"I won't," Allison said, and meant every word.
#
Stiles was draped in his desk chair, loose and sprawled, his head tilted back as he pressed his thumbs into the base of his skull and groaned like a dying man. "Those are the highlights. See?" He reached out with one hand, without rousing from the chair, and flipped a few pages to show Allison where he had marked the pages in yellow highlighter. "I'm not an expert, you know. I'm just a guy whose friend got bit and so he's muddling along as best he knows how. You want the Cliff's Notes version, talk to Derek, or your dad, or Deaton. Me, all I'm good for is supposition and theory."
Allison gave him a one-armed shrug around his shoulders and scrubbed her hand over his hair. "You're good for a lot more than that, Stiles. Don't let anyone tell you differently." She hefted the papers in her arms and inclined her head at them, so he'd know what she meant when she said, "Thanks."
"Welks." He stretched again and yawned noisily. "If you need anything else, let me know, all right?" His gaze settled on Lydia, clouded with worry. "I mean it."
Lydia roused herself from where she'd been sitting slouched on the edge of the bed. Allison held her own papers out in offering, and Lydia added her own to the pile wordlessly. "Thanks, Stiles," she said as she picked her way through the minefield of books, bags, and rumpled clothes that lay scattered across his carpet.
Stiles caught Allison's eye as she followed Lydia out. "What, no quips, no jibes, no finely-honed insults?" His words teased, but there was nothing like levity in his gaze. "Now I know she's not well."
Allison gave him a small smile and a helpless shrug. "We're working on it."
"Feel better!" he called after Lydia, leaning half out of his chair to shout down the hallway, but she'd already disappeared. Allison caught his hand when he started to overbalance and fall. He got all five wheels firmly on the floor again and looked up at her, abashed. "Will you tell her I said so?"
Allison smiled, and this time, she meant it. "Sure. After all the help you've given us, it's the least I could do."
#
Allison set her hammer down and brushed a strand of hair out of her face. Where she was on the ladder, she had to look up to see Lydia. She felt like Rapunzel's prince, come to rescue her out of her tower. If Rapunzel's prince had had a ladder and a bucket of tools and several slats of mountain ash wood to nail up around her window. And if Rapunzel had been soulbonded to a psychopath who had suddenly decided that she was his life mate.
Okay, so not like Rapunzel and her prince at all, except for the window.
"I've been spending too much time around Stiles," Allison said, and stuck a nail between her lips as she got the next board into position.
Lydia angled her head to the side and wrapped a curl around her finger. "What does that have to do with my parents and their imminent filicide?”
"Nothing at all," Allison said around the nail, but if Lydia's faintly puzzled frown was anything to go by, she suspected it had gotten lost in translation.
She hammered the board into the Martin house's siding, then leaned back as much as she was able without falling off the ladder and looked the job over. There'd been narrower pieces of mountain ash at the hardware store, and even some trim that had been thin enough and narrow enough that it might not even have been noticeable from the ground. But when Allison had held it up and eyed that narrow band of wood and questioned whether its effect would be enough to keep a previously-alpha werewolf at bay, Lydia had grabbed it out of Allison's hands, put it back with the others, and said, "Let's keep looking." Allison had followed her down the aisle and pretended she hadn't noticed how Lydia's face had turned grey at the thought.
So now they had big, wide planks that would definitely be noticeable, even from the ground. But Allison squinted her eyes and looked at it sideways and said, "They might not notice. I mean, how often do they come around to this side of the house?"
"Sure," Lydia said dryly. "I'll just spend the rest of my life trying to come up with excuses for why they can only use half of the backyard."
Allison stilled in the act of reaching for the next pair of nails. Her gaze flashed up to Lydia's and her heart lodged in the middle of her throat, so that when she said, "It's not going to be the rest of your life," the words came out rough and too strong.
"I suppose not." Lydia sighed and leaned her chin on the heels of her hands, staring out into the distance wistfully. "It's only a couple of years until I leave for college, after all."
Allison cleared her throat and reached again for the nails, for any excuse to keep her hands busy and her gaze elsewhere. "That's not what I meant." She risked a glance up and found Lydia watching her closely, a slight, puzzled frown turning down the corners of her mouth. "This isn't going to be forever, Lyd."
Her mouth twisted, an expression too bitter for Allison to bear. "You heard what he said. The bond ends when he dies, or I do."
Allison smacked the hammer down, hard enough to make the whole ladder jump. "There's another way. There has to be. And if there is, he wouldn't exactly have a vested interest in telling you about it, now would he? You can't trust a word he says." She grabbed the box of nails and tried to right the disordered mess she'd made of them, when the ladder had jumped. "I thought you knew that."
"I do," Lydia snapped. "But hoping that there's some alternative doesn't mean there is. If he's right, if that's the only way--"
"Then I'll kill him," Allison said quietly.
Lydia sucked in a sharp breath and said nothing. A moment passed, and she still didn't speak. Allison risked a glance up, found Lydia staring at her, her eyes wide and lips parted just a little. Her breathing had quickened, and a pink blush stained her cheeks beneath her makeup.
Allison put the last board in place, the one that run underneath Lydia's windowsill, and ducked her head forward to position the nails. "Werewolves don't get to mess with people," she said, low and quiet. "It's Dad's code. They don't get to do that and not face consequences."
"Right," Lydia said. "The code. Do you want some lemonade?"
Allison startled and nearly dropped both the nail and the plank down into the grass below. "Sure," she said, too quickly. "Thanks. I mean, if you're getting some anyway. I don't want you to go out of your way."
Lydia leaned on one elbow and gave Allison a bemused, lopsided smile. "Sure," she said. "I'm not going out of my way. Just like you're not going out of yours. You just happened to be climbing up the side of my house with a bucket of tools and a box of nails anyway and figured, what the hell, I may as well nail some mountain ash to Lydia's siding while I'm here."
"That's not what I mean--"
"I know.” She pulled inside, and disappeared from the window. “The lemonade will be up in a minute. Don’t kill yourself while I’m gone.”
Allison had finished the last panel of wood by the time Lydia came back, carrying a tall glass of lemonade with a long straw. She climbed in through the window and drank it while sitting on the sill, and afterwards, she and Lydia went downstairs and out into the backyard to stare up at the window, hands raised to shade against the setting sun.
"Well," Allison said eventually. "It's been kind of nippy out. It's possible they won't want to use the yard for a while?"
"Definitely." Lydia nodded, lips pursed. "Plus, there's always the psychological phenomenon of change blindness. They might not even notice it at all."
The wood was very pale and almost buttery yellow against the house's painted siding and white window frame. Allison wasn't sure that anything short of legal blindness would keep someone from noticing it, but she nodded and said, "Yeah. Definitely." She stepped into the shadow of the house so she could lower her arm without being blinded, then wrinkled her nose. "Can I use your shower? After all that manual labor, I kind of smell like I've been rolling around in something foul."
"Please do. Towels are in the linen closet, and you have to jiggle the handle to get the hot water flowing. I'll lay out something for you to wear so you don't have to get back into those."
Allison smiled her thanks and hurried upstairs.
#
She received no answer. The house was silent, creaking slightly as it started to settle down for the night, but otherwise still. She padded on bare feet down the hall to Lydia's bedroom and called out for her again.
The lights were still on, but the room was empty. Lydia had laid out a pair of jeans and one of her tops, as she'd promised. The shirt's material was light, and it fluttered in the breeze coming through the open window.
Allison frowned. She was dead certain that they'd closed that window, after Allison had climbed back through it. Allison had done it herself, pulled it closed and then secured the latch.
She remembered standing below it with Lydia, inspecting their work from the grass, and seeing the window shut. The sun had gone down and the air outside was progressing rapidly from chilly to downright cold, and neither of them had been dressed in enough layers to have been comfortable with the window open, letting all the heat out.
Allison crossed to the window and leaned outside. She looked around, but there was little to be seen, just the Martin's side yard and the faint dusting of grey where they'd sprinkled the wolfsbane ash around the house.
Somewhere in the distance, a wolf howled, and a chill ran down Allison's spine. Stupid. How could they have been so stupid? All the defenses in the world to keep werewolves away wouldn't do a lick of good if Peter could just coax Lydia to come to him.
Allison tore off the towels and scrambled for the clothes Lydia had laid out for her. She pulled on the jeans and the shirt, shoved her feet into her shoes, and grabbed her cardigan as she ran, down the stairs and out the front door, pulse pounding, panic and terror flooding her with every frantic beat of her heart.
She stopped only long enough to grab her crossbow and bolts out of the trunk of her car and put them in the passenger seat beside her, and then she was tearing out of the Martin's driveway, following that ethereal howl. For the first time, she found herself hoping, praying, that that howl wasn't Derek's, or Scott's, or one of the other beta's. She hoped it was Peter, and that he was calling Lydia out to him. Because if it wasn't, then Lydia might be anywhere, and Allison didn't have the faintest idea where to find her.
She felt no surprise when the howls led her straight into the forest, only a cold, heavy certainty and a sense of inevitability. Of course, she thought as she climbed out of the car and fit the first bolt into the crossbow. She crept across the litter scattered over the forest floor on silent feet. Of course he would bring her here.
A gibbous moon hung overhead. It cast enough light to see by, limning the forest paths in silver. But it also made the shadows deeper and more deceptive. Every flash of dappled light made her jump and spin, crossbow at the ready, only to discover that it was a rabbit scurrying by, or a leafed branch swaying in the wind.
Her heart beat so loud that she could hear it, drowning out the rest of the forest's noises. She tried to calm it, tried slow breaths and a few moments just standing still focusing on it. She tried all the tricks her father and grandfather had taught her to center herself and focus. They'd always worked before, but this time the frantic rhythm of her heart was echoed by the mantra spinning through her head, Lydia, Lydia, Lydia, and her pulse never slowed.
Her dad would have scolded her for going out on a hunt like this. Dad would have told her to hold off until she had someone else there to back her up, to be her ears and guard her back. He'd have subjected her to an hours-long lecture about the danger of werewolves and the stupidity of taking one on alone. He'd have called it suicide, and he'd have been right about all of it.
But Lydia was out there, somewhere, and Allison couldn't wait when she might be in trouble. Maybe it was foolhardy, but it was better than doing nothing, and letting Lydia pay the price.
The howl came again, closer and longer. Allison snapped her eyes open, turned in the direction it had come from, and started moving again. She itched to curl her finger around the crossbow's trigger, to have something in her sights that she could aim at, fire at, that she could fight. She hadn't felt this useless since the night they'd been caught inside the school with the alpha.
With Peter. They'd all survived him once. They'd survive again. This time, she had the tools and the skills and the nerve to make sure of it.
Something moved in the underbrush. Allison froze, watching and listening. She could hear the steps, the rattle and shake of the bushes as something definitely bigger than a rabbit passed through.
She held her breath and lifted the crossbow, readying it. This was it. She could feel it in her bones. The brush moved again, and she crept forward, aiming down the crossbow's sights. All she needed was one glimpse, one sure sight of where he was. Even a fraction of a second would do. She just needed him to make one mistake, to step out in the open or for the wind to change in her favor. Just one little ray of moonlight on him and she could wipe that smug smile off his face for good...
The wind changed. The branches shifted and moonlight fell, illuminating patterned fabric and a glimpse of light off hair. Allison tightened her finger on the trigger.
"Hello?" A wavering, uncertain voice rose over the roar of Allison's pulse. "Who's there?"
She jerked at the last moment, sending the bolt shooting off target. A shriek made her run forward, pushing through the underbrush, cursing herself with every step.
She found Lydia a few feet in, standing wide-eyed and gaping at the bolt embedded in the trunk of a tree just a few inches in front of her. She turned her head when Allison came crashing in, and stared at her. Her gaze dropped to the crossbow still gripped in Allison's hand. "Did you just almost shoot me?"
"Oh my God." Allison dropped the crossbow and bent double, gasping. Her hands shook, and the tremors were quickly working their way up her arms and throughout her whole body. "Are you all right?"
"No," Lydia said definitely. "I am not all right. I am staring my own mortality in the face and being forced to confront the fact that apparently I owe my life to your crap aim. It's rather alarming. I can't believe your dad lets you out of the house with that when you don't even know how to aim it."
"My aim is fine." Allison straightened, and drew in what felt like the first deep breath she'd taken in an hour. "I heard you as I was firing and turned the shot aside. Didn't your parents ever teach you to hum as you walk through the woods so you won't startle anyone?"
"My parents taught me to hum as I walk through the woods so I wouldn't startle any bears. We don't have any bears here." She shot Allison a pointed look. "They never said anything about trigger-happy best friends. What are you doing out here?"
Allison unstrung the crossbow. She shot Lydia a sidelong glance as they fell into step beside one another. "I was looking for you."
"Me?" Lydia stopped abruptly, her expression turning puzzled. "Why?"
"Good question. Maybe because you disappeared without a word while I was taking a shower?" Allison came back for her, threaded her arm through Lydia's and led her forward as they made their way back to the path. "Maybe possibly because there's a crazy werewolf who's decided you're his mate running around out here, so when I heard wolf howls and you were gone, I got just a little bit worried." She tightened her arm through Lydia's and helped her step over a thick tree root that had burst up through the ground. "What are you doing out here?"
"I-- I don't--" Lydia stopped and pulled her arm out of Allison's. Allison turned back to her. She looked bewildered, disoriented. She looked around like she was only realizing that they were out in the middle of the forest in the middle of the night. Then she shook her head and held her hands out before her as though they belonged to someone else. "I'm not exactly sure," she said in a small, frightened voice.
Allison filled her lungs with air and let it out slowly, fighting not to let her emotions show. Lydia needed her calm right now, not foaming at the mouth or running off on a rampage. "Peter?" she asked, and despite the force of will she put into, she couldn't help the way his name came out tight and angry.
Lydia was quiet a long moment. She kept her gaze on her feet and the ground ahead of her as they walked. "I don't know."
"You don't remember leaving the house?"
"I remember my head hurting. It was just like it always is, and then it was excruciating. I was trying to find my percocet and... It all gets a little hazy. Then I was out here, not even sure where I was, or why." She shot Allison a sidelong glance. The ghost of a smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. "And then I was dodging friendly fire."
Allison grimaced and smacked a palm against her forehead. "You're going to hold that against me forever, aren't you?"
"Yes." Lydia gave a decisive nod. "I am pretty sure that's in the best friend handbook. If one friend nearly kills the other friend with a firearm, said other friend gets to lord it over the first friend for all time." She shrugged one shoulder and flipped her hair. "Sorry. You can't argue with the handbook. Its word is law."
Allison pressed one hand on her heart and held the other up, oath-style. "I solemnly swear that I will never almost shoot you again. Especially not when I think I'm actually trying to keep you safe."
"Well, that goes without saying," Lydia said primly. "I don't need you to keep me safe, anyway. I'm not made of porcelain."
No, Allison wanted to say, but that doesn't mean you can't break, and she thought of her terror and helplessness when Lydia had been taken to the hospital, that gaping wound on her side that the doctors thought meant the biggest thing they needed to worry about was rabies or sepsis, but that Allison had known would mean the end of Lydia's life, one way or another. The bite would kill her, or it would turn her, but either way, she'd never be the same again.
Except that it hadn't. The trauma had changed her, of course, but not in the way that Allison or her father had feared. She wasn't dead. She wasn't turned. She hadn't broken. So Allison bit back the protest she wanted to voice, and just smiled at Lydia instead, and let herself be content to walk beside her.
The woods thinned, and the path broadened, and eventually led them back out to the clearing where Allison had parked. And there, leaning against the passenger side door as casual as you please, was Peter, hands in his pockets and legs crossed, like a man waiting for a date who was running late.
Lydia froze mid-step. Allison grappled her crossbow over her shoulder.
"Tut tut," Peter said, his eyes glinting yellow at them as he lifted his head. "You didn't think I'd actually meant to lure you out into the woods and confront you there, did you? How crass." He unfolded, hands sliding out of his pockets as he pushed away from the side of the car and stood up straight. "Why lure you out to meet me, where you might defeat the odds and find an advantage, when I could just wait for you to wander away and then cut of your means of escape?" He patted the side of the car and smiled beneficently. It made Allison's skin crawl.
His smile faded. It left him looking just as dangerous as Allison knew he was. "Lydia. Come here." There was something in his voice that rumbled, that made the very air feel as though it shook with the power of his words.
Allison started to roll her eyes, but at her side, Lydia tensed, and made a distressed sound as she shifted her weight and started to step forward.
Allison caught her by the arm and held her back. She stayed where she was, half a step forward and trembling like a dog waiting to be loosed from his leash, but the quick look she shot over her shoulder at Allison was full of gratitude.
"She's not going anywhere."
Peter's gaze flashed to hers, full of something so dark and malevolent that Allison tightened her grip on Lydia's wrist without thought.
"Lydia," Peter said again, and again the air vibrated as though it were some sort of alpha howl, tuned just for Lydia's ears.
Lydia bit off a cry and sagged a little, leaning forward against Allison's restraint. "It hurts," she said, a broken whisper. "Allison."
Allison swallowed down the tangled knot of fear and rage and terror that had lodged itself in her throat. She pulled at Lydia's arm. Lydia backed up a step toward her, but her gaze was still fixed forward, riveted on Peter. "Hey. Lydia, look at me, come on."
Peter rolled his eyes. "Oh, good luck with that," he said, and then called Lydia's name again. Lydia pulled forward against Allison's hold, dragging her forward a step.
"Oh, for God's sake." Allison hauled against Lydia, pulling her stumbling away. She whipped around in front of her and shouldered Lydia back when she tried to duck around her. "Stay there," she snapped, but Peter was talking, too, a low murmur of words that would have almost sounded soothing, if Allison hadn't known him and what he was capable of. Lydia tried to push by her again, but Allison fought her back.
In one swift motion, as quick as she could, Allison stepped in the crossbow's stirrup and pulled the string back until it locked, then loaded a bolt onto the deck. She kept one arm out to hold Lydia back, and with the other raised the crossbow and aimed the bolt directly at Peter's heart.
Peter clicked his tongue and shook his head, looking at her like he was one of her teachers and she'd bombed his latest test. "What do you think you're going to do, kill me?"
Allison smiled, cold and furious. "I've been thinking about it fondly all week."
"Really, now. Weren't you paying attention at all?" He folded his arms and raked her with a look of overwhelming scorn. "She can't even bear to be parted from me when I call to her. What do you suppose will happen if you shoot her bonded mate?"
"She'll survive."
He sniffed disdainfully, but then hesitated. His brows lowered, the skin across his forehead wrinkling with a frown. He sniffed the air again twice, and then he began to laugh.
"You brought plain arrows? What's the matter, daddy wouldn't let you into the good stuff?" He spread his arms and stepped away from the car, toward them both. "What do you intend to do, shoot me and give me a stern warning about how the next ones will be dipped in wolfsbane if I don't behave myself?" His eyes flashed gold and his canines elongated into fangs as he started forward.
Allison fired. The arrow missed his heart, but buried deep in his shoulder instead. He and Lydia let out simultaneous howls of agony.
She caught Lydia before she could collapse, one arm wrapped around her back to help hold her up on her feet. She stepped over Peter as he twisted on the ground, clutching the shaft of the arrow where it jutted out of his shoulder and groaning in pain. Black snakes twisted just under his skin, running across his chest and down his arm.
Allison helped Lydia into the car. Lydia allowed her to buckle her seat belt, then curled up, pressing her head between her hands. Her breath came short and choppy and every time she exhaled, it sounded like a sob. Allison made sure her elbows and knees were tucked in, then slammed the door shut and turned back to Peter.
He was still down, but seemed to be pulling himself back together. He'd stopped groaning and writhing, in any case. He had one elbow underneath him, and the other still gripping the arrow, trying to pull at it.
He lifted his gaze as Allison stood over him. She planted one boot on his shoulder and pushed him back down to the ground with it. He cried out and bared his fangs at her, snarling.
Allison bent and smiled down at him. "Here's a fun fact, Peter." She grasped the arrow right where it penetrated his skin, braced her foot on his shoulder, and hauled the arrow out. Peter howled. Allison wagged the arrowhead before him. "All my arrows are dipped in wolfsbane." She crouched down to clean the arrowhead in the grass, and while she was there, whispered close against his ear, "We just know how to mask the scent."
She left him there in the dirt and circled around to get into the car. Lydia was slumped low in her seat, fingers pressing her against her temples and groaning quietly.
"Are you all right?" Allison asked as she slid the key into the ignition.
"No," Lydia said against her palms. Even muffled, her voice sounded thin and thready.
Allison hesitated. A ribbon of guilt wormed through her heart as she glanced over at Lydia. She caught her lip between her teeth. "I'm sorry," she said on a rush. "I-- I probably shouldn't have--"
"You probably shouldn't have waited so long," Lydia said, and grabbed her and pulled Allison's mouth to hers.
Shock went through Allison, and heat followed right on its heels. It was a potent addition to the adrenaline already coursing through her, making her feel shaky and nervous and ready for anything. Anything but this, Lydia's mouth moving on hers and her hands in Allison's hair and the waxy, slick taste of her lipgloss.
Allison grabbed on to her and kissed her back, all her thoughts humming into white noise. When Lydia eased back, she looked wild-eyed, her hair mussed from Allison's grasping hands. "What you did… That was amazing," she breathed. And then, as Allison tried to remember how to fill her lungs with air, Lydia eased off of the gearshift and settled back into her own seat. She wiped the ruined gloss from her mouth with the back of her hand and cleared her throat. "You should've shot him on sight."
Allison faced ahead again and stared into the shadowed forest. "Right." She pulled her hands through her hair and released a shaky breath, fighting for steadiness. If she put the car in gear right now, her jittering hands would probably run them right off the road. "Sorry. Next time."
She glanced sideways in time to catch Lydia's steely, tight-lipped expression. "No," Lydia said, soft and dangerous. "There's not going to be a next time.
#
"Oh sure," Lydia drawled. "That's totally going to fly under her radar. I'm sure she won't suspect anything at--" She pulled the locker's door open and froze.
Allison leaned in over her shoulder, grinning and bouncing on her toes. "You like it?"
Lydia drew it out, a little posy made of a few slender stalks of wolfsbane blossoms. "What--"
"It's for you." Allison took it out of her hands and tucked it into Lydia's hair, just above her ear. She took advantage of the closeness that provided and dropped her voice so that only Lydia could hear it over the cacophony of kids talking and laughing and slamming lockers and rough-housing in the halls. "You're right. There isn't going to be a next time. I won't let there be." She stepped back, smiling. The wolfsbane was almost the exact same shade as the purple in Lydia's dress. It looked like she'd planned it. "If he even tries to get close to you, I'm going to make it so unpleasant that he'll wish he'd stayed in the ground where we put him."
Lydia patted the flowers in her hair. The corners of her lips turned up. "Thanks." She rose up on her toes and kissed Allison lightly, right there in the hall with the whole school witness. Allison reeled and grabbed on to Lydia's arms to keep herself upright. When Lydia lowered herself back onto her heels, her smile was brighter, sharper. She knew the way her kiss made Allison's head spin, and she liked it.
She spun on her heels, flipped her hair over her shoulder carefully -- so as not to disturb the wolfsbane, Allison realized, and would've run after her and claimed another kiss for her own if the bell hadn't rung just then, making her jump and the hall fill with sudden chaos as everyone rushed to get to their classes on time.
"Have fun at gym," Lydia called back over the din, and reached one hand up to waggle her fingers in farewell.
Allison laughed and resigned her already-sore muscles to another punishing workout. She couldn't even resent it too much. It would make her stronger, and that's what she had to be right now. Lydia needed her at her best.
#
"Hi, Stiles." Allison took a bite of her burger and wiped the smear of ketchup off her mouth. "Oh, I'm fine, thanks for asking. How about you?"
Stiles swiveled his glower over to her, but didn't dim it one degree. He inclined his head toward Lydia. "You realize Scott thinks you're doing that to try to keep him away, right?"
Allison followed his gesture and realized he meant the wolfsbane posy, still tucked carefully into Lydia's hair. "That's ridiculous. If I was trying to keep Scott away, I'd have put it in my hair."
Stiles heaved an aggravated sigh. "You realize Scott doesn't think things through that far, right?"
"You can tell Scott that the world doesn't revolve around him," Lydia snapped. "The flowers stay."
Stiles heaved another sigh and leaned his forehead against the lunch table. "I'm pretty sure I'm going to regret asking this, but... More Peter?" He waved a hand at Lydia without lifting his head. The tabletop muffled his words. "Is that the reason for the-- you know--"
"Wolfsbane?" Allison grinned. "You can say it, you know. It's not a dirty word."
Stiles just groaned against the table's laminate. "Are you kidding me? Have you seen my life? It totally is. My best friend is a wolf, and my-- Derek is--" He broke off with a strangled sound of incoherent frustration and thumped his forehead on the table.
"Yeah?" Lydia smirked, as cool as ever. "Your Derek is what?"
"Oh my god, I hate you." He lifted his head just enough to glare weakly at both of them. "If I hadn't spent the past nine years in love with you, I would be seriously reconsidering offering to help you find a magic out right now."
The smile feel right off of Lydia's face, leaving her starting at him, startled. "Really?"
"Well, yeah, I mean--" He stopped and peered at her suspiciously. "Really which part?"
"The part about helping." Lydia rolled her eyes. "The love part isn't any big secret, I hope you know."
"I know." He didn't sound half so glum about it as Allison might have expected. "And yeah. Really. I borrowed some books from Deaton, and if you want to swing by after school--"
"Yes," Lydia said, too quickly, her gaze just a bit too avid. "Please. And... Thank you."
"Oh, sure, no problem." Stiles grinned, big and goofy. "My best friend and my Derek will probably never set foot in my room again after I bring you in there with your flowers but, you know, I'm happy to help."
"I mean it." She leaned across the table and kissed his cheek, leaving a faint mark of lipgloss on his skin, before she picked up her yogurt carton and lunch tray and carried them both off.
Stiles looked like she'd hit him with a wet fish. He wiped the mark off his cheek and looked at the faint sheen of gloss on his fingers, then glanced up at Allison. As soon as he saw her watching him, trying hard not to laugh at his dumbfounded expression, he scoffed and gave a loose-shrug. "Ah, it doesn't mean anything," he said carelessly. "I hear she's been doing a lot of kissing around campus today." He said it breezily, everything about him giving the indication that it meant nothing more than any of the other randomness that came tumbling out of his mouth on a daily basis. But his gaze stayed on Allison, curious, questioning.
"Has she?" Allison rose with the remains of her lunch, but before she left, she grabbed a fry off of his tray and bit it in half with a grin. "See you after school, Stiles."
#
"Oh, is that all?" Lydia snapped shut the compact she'd been using to check her makeup in. "How silly of me. Why didn't I try just wanting not to be soulbound to this psychotic freak. Problem solved."
Stiles sent her a sharp look. He had his hands resting lightly on his knees and he looked a little bit like a skinny, gangly Buddha. Allison wasn't sure if he was doing it for comedic effect, or unintentionally. "Wanting is the first step. But you also have to believe, straight through to your very bones. That's what Deaton says." His eyes narrowed as he looked at Lydia. "Do you believe that you can break the bond? If there's even the littlest shred of doubt, then this is just a huge waste of time for all of us."
Lydia's fingers tapped an uncertain rhythm against the compact's case. "I can try," she said at last.
"Oh. Try. Sure, that's exactly what I mean when I say believe it down to your bones. Does nobody listen to anything I say?" Stiles heaved a great sigh, then shook his head. "Okay, fine, let's try." He flapped his hands at her. "Shut your eyes. Think about the bond. Focus on wanting it gone, on believing it's gone."
Allison watched Lydia and followed along with Stiles's instructions, too. Just in case, she told herself. Just to be safe. If there was any chance at all that her belief could work where Lydia's might fail, then she was going to give it a try. Lydia might not have believed that she could break the bond with Peter, but Allison did, wholeheartedly. She had to. If she doubted it even a little bit, she might have given into despair or fury, and neither of those were things that Lydia needed.
So Allison believed, and focused on her belief. She believed that her faith would shore up Lydia's where hers failed, and that it would be enough. They could do this. They could break the bond and give Lydia her life back.
Lydia's sharp sigh broke Allison's concentration. "My head still hurts." She rubbed her fingers over the center of her brow. "I tried, Stiles. I promise. I don't think it worked."
Stiles peered at her, his brows wrinkled with concern. He chewed on the corner of his mouth. "Maybe it takes time for the effects to go away?"
"Yeah. Maybe." Lydia didn't sound like she believed that at all. "Thanks for trying." She started to get to her feet.
"Wait." Stiles reached out and caught her hand. She stilled, looking down at his fingers wrapped around her wrist, then up at him. His face flushed and he released her abruptly. "There's something else we can try." His throat worked. "A ritual. I found it in one of Deaton's books."
Lydia dropped back down onto the carpet. "And you're only mentioning this now?"
The color of Stiles's flush deepened. "It isn't exactly labelled Magical Soulbond-Breaking Potion or anything. But it's supposed to give protection from unwanted magic, and if this doesn't qualify, then I don't know what does." He squared his shoulders. His fingers twitched and fidgeted against his knees. "It seemed worth a shot."
A moment passed where Lydia remained tense and unhappy. Then all the tension drained from her in a rush. She slumped over, elbows on her knees, head hanging low. Her loose hair drifted forward, hiding her face from Allison's view. She wanted to tuck it back, to tip Lydia's face up to hers and make sure she was all right. "Yeah," Lydia said. She sounded exhausted. "It is. You're right. Thanks, Stiles. What do I have to do?"
Stiles stood up, so Allison did as well. She reached a hand down to help Lydia to her feet.
"Stay there." Stiles motioned at her, then backed up and drew Allison with him, leaving Lydia standing alone in the middle of his room, her arms around her middle, looking like she was trying very hard not to show how lost and uncertain she felt. Allison itched to go to her, but Stiles was already moving around her, pouring a thick line of ash into a circle around her. "Mountain ash, uh... ash," he said, and Allison sat on the edge of Stiles's bed to keep herself from indulging the urge to cross it. She didn't know a lot about magic, but she knew better than to break a protective circle. "This should shield you from any external sources of magic."
"Should." Lydia gave a breathless, humorless laugh. But then she hesitated, and a wrinkle gathered in the middle of her brow. "I feel better. I think." Her gaze slid across the room. It lingered on Allison a moment before she turned it to Stiles. "Maybe."
Stiles grinned as broad and as happy as if she'd told him that she'd secretly loved him back all these years. "Yes!" He pumped his first. "Okay! Stay right there, I'm going to go make the potion to finish it off." He hopped up, skirted around the mountain ash circle, and darted out of the room. Allison could hear his feet thundering on the stairs all the way down.
Allison sat on her hands on the edge of Stiles's bed and chewed on her lip as she watched Lydia. The silence stretched between them until it felt as fragile as spun sugar, but she didn't know what to say to break it. Hope bubbled up within her, filling her chest until it hurt. She wanted to whoop and jump around and pull Lydia to her and kiss her again, but she didn't dare. They didn't know this was going to work, not for sure. And if she let that hope free and then it didn't, she thought it might break something inside her that couldn't be repaired.
"So," Lydia said, trying to look bored but mostly just succeeding at looking worried. "Potion sounds a little alarming." She twisted a curl around her finger. "Either it works, and I'm free. Or it doesn't, and I'm resigned to a life lived inside a circle of mountain ash, if I want any sort of headache relief at all." She pushed the toe of her shoe against the edge of the mountain ash line, but didn't break it. "That sounds fun."
"It's not going to come to that," Allison said, automatically and without thought. She said it because she believed it to be true, with a fervent and unshakeable faith. And because her faith was useless if Lydia didn't believe it as well.
Stiles returned before the stilted conversation could get any more awkward, pounding up the stairs and bursting through the door with a small glass of something that looked he'd skimmed it off the top of a stagnant pond. Allison recoiled and Lydia wrinkled her nose when he handed it to her. She held it up as though examining it in the light coming through Stiles's bedroom window, but it was too murky and dense for any light to shine through it. "What the hell is in here?"
"A little bit of mountain ash and a whole lot of you don't want to know."
Lydia looked revolted. Allison couldn't blame her. She looked like she was going to refuse, but then her gaze slid to Allison and she hesitated. She set her jaw and got a steely look in her eye an instant before she lifted the glass and swallowed Stiles's potion in one gulp.
Allison was halfway of the bed before she even knew it, responding to the look of abject horror in Lydia's eyes. She froze when Stiles threw a hand out, holding her back just in front of the unbroken circumference of the ash circle. She waited, trembling, her focus riveted to Lydia. Every second that she had to wait was an agony.
Lydia clapped a hand over her mouth. Her eyes went wide an instant before she squeezed them shut. She swallowed the potion with obvious effort, then dropped to her knees, coughing and retching.
Allison fought against Stiles's restraining grasp, desperate to reach Lydia. Only once Lydia had calmed, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and weakly joked, "Thank God I kept that down... I'm not sure it's possible, but I bet it would have figured out a way to be even worse on the return trip," did Stiles let her go.
Allison broke the circle of ash without a thought. Lydia flinched as she stepped across it, and pressed the heel of a hand to her forehead. Allison dropped to her knees beside her and pulled Lydia into her arms. "Are you all right?"
Lydia gave a weak laugh and sniffed and said, "It wasn't poison. It was just gross." But she leaned in against Allison's shoulder all the same, so Allison held her until, slowly, her awareness spread beyond the two of them and she realized that Stiles was standing just at the edge of the circle, shuffling his feet and sighing like he wanted to say something and was only barely managing to hold it back.
Allison sat back, but didn't remove her arms from around Lydia's back.
"Did it work?" The words burst from Stiles like water through a ruptured dam. "Do you feel any better? Or even any different?"
"I don't know." Lydia suddenly sounded like she was carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, and the strain of it had caught up to her. She got her feet under her, and Allison stood quickly and helped her up. "I don't know what I feel like."
Stiles puckered his mouth up, eyes squinting. "Well, maybe it takes a while for the full effect of this one to kick in, too. Maybe tomorrow or, or later tonight…"
Allison grimaced. Lydia sighed. "Thanks for trying, Stiles. I think I'm going to go home."
She left without looking back, but Allison was a few steps behind her, and she saw the way Lydia's words landed on Stiles and made him look like he'd been kicked in the gut. He stared after her, full of hurt and yearning and grief. Allison turned aside quickly, and followed Lydia out, and let it go without remark.
#
She kept an eye on Lydia as they ran through their flashcards and quizzed each other on the book's events, hoping despite herself for some sort of change, even the tiniest sign that Stiles might have been right, and the ritual and potion had worked, only with delayed effect.
Instead, as the evening wore on, Lydia seemed only to be getting more strained, not less. She's tired, Allison told herself, and forced her attention off of her friend and back to her flashcards. Let it be. Don't go making it into something it isn't.
She excused herself to the bathroom a few hours into the study break, when the endless cups of soda caught up with her, and returned to catch Lydia leaning her head in her hands, fingers pressing hard at her temples.
Allison sucked air through her teeth. Lydia jerked up, looking startled and guilty, like she'd been caught at something illicit. Allison dropped to her knees beside her and laid a finger over her lips, silencing the excuse she could already see forming there. "It's not getting better, is it?"
Lydia's jaw tightened for a moment, before she broke and shook her head. "It's worse."
She'd said it had been better before. Allison brushed a few wisps of hair from Lydia's forehead and frowned at the way sweat was already starting to gather there, turning her skin clammy. "Back to normal? Or--"
"Worse." Lydia forced the word through clenched teeth. She pressed the heels of her hands to her temples and squeezed her eyes shut, hunched over like she was trying to curl into a ball. Allison held her, kept her mostly upright, wiped the sweat from her brow and tried to ease the white-knuckled clench of her fingers. "He's close. He's calling for me."
Allison stopped breathing. She held perfectly still and listened, straining. But all she heard was the thundering of her heart and Lydia's ragged breathing and the occasional sigh of the wind through the trees outside. "I don't hear anything."
Lydia shook her head, and stopped with her face pressed against Allison's shoulder, her breath warm and damp through the fabric of Allison's shirt. "No, I don't hear him. I feel him." The fingers of one hand closed into a clawed fist on her own shirt, bunching it up into a mess right over her heart. "In here."
Everything went very still and cold inside Allison. It felt like the moment before she shot her bow, muscles trembling and breath still and the whole world feeling as though it were poised on the brink of motion, the calm, quiet inhale before violence tore the world apart. "He's here, though? He's close?"
Lydia nodded, her hands fisting in her hair, pulling it into a disordered mess that Allison tried to smooth away, because she knew it would only embarrass Lydia later, when the pain had faded enough for her to resume caring about things like personal grooming. "Yes. I can feel him. I don't know how close, but--"
"That's all right." Allison tucked the last curl into place, then set Lydia back as she rose. "Stay here. I won't be gone long." I hope.
Lydia didn't move from where she knelt, but she made a small, urgent sound, and the desperation in her gaze arrested Allison where she stood, halfway to the bedroom door. "Where are you going?"
Allison flexed the fingers of her right hand. She wanted a bow in her grip, wanted the weight of a quiver at her back. "I'm going to end this."
"No." Lydia scrambled to her feet and grabbed Allison's arm before she could so much as take a step toward the door. Her nails bit into Allison's skin, just on the wrong side of painful. "Please don't. Please. Stay. I want you to stay."
The misery written in every line of her body was more than Allison could withstand. She let out a long breath, and with it, the tight, coiled need for vengeance that waited inside her. She forced her shoulders to loosen, her hands to open. She slid her fingers around the back of Lydia's neck and kissed her once, chastely. "All right."
Allison pulled her phone out of her pocket and sat on the edge of Lydia's bed to call home. Lydia sat as well, and leaned in against her, a stripe of warmth up Allison's side. She turned her face in and leaned her forehead on Allison's shoulder. Allison switched the phone to her off hand as it began to ring, so Lydia could stay just as she was and Allison wouldn't disturb her.
It was getting all too easy to lie to her dad. This time it wasn't even really a lie, not at the heart of it. She told him she and Lydia still had a lot of ground to cover on their studying (that wasn't even really a lie, either; they'd hardly covered any ground at all) and so she was going to spend the night so they could get as much cramming in as possible. "I need to be here," she said, her voice breaking over the truth in that statement, and her dad didn't even protest, just made her promise to get at least six hours of sleep so she'd be at her best for the test tomorrow.
"I will, Dad." Relief swamped her. The edges of her phone bit into her fingers, she gripped it so hard. "Love you. Bye."
Even when she'd disconnected and slipped the phone into the pocket of her purse, neither of them made any motion to retrieve their flashcards and resume studying. Lydia stayed just as she was, leaning heavily against Allison's side, her breathing just ragged enough around the edges to make Allison worry. Allison looped her arm around Lydia's shoulder and held her close, just in case she had any stupid ideas about not being welcome there.
They shifted onto their sides at some point, lying curled together on top of Lydia's blankets, their knees bumping, the narrow space between their faces warm from their mingled breath. Allison held her, too conscious of the tension running down Lydia's back and the faint frown lines that ran along her brow for sleep to even be a consideration.
The sky was dark outside, the stars providing just enough illumination to see by. The waxing moon rose over the lip of Lydia's window, casting silver light across her face. Allison watched the slight flicker of muscle movements across her expression, the way the corners of her mouth pulled down or her throat worked as though to swallow a silent cry.
She wished she could kiss those lines away. The urge to do something made her restless, bristling at her own futility. Every time Lydia whimpered or frowned, Allison found herself listening, straining to hear the distant sounds of a wolf's howl. Of Peter's howl. If she'd heard him, if she knew he was close, she could have brought herself to leave Lydia's side and stalk him through the night. She could have ended this.
But Lydia needed her here and the night held no sounds more suspicious than the occasional distant rumble of a car engine.
The clock on Lydia's nightstand ticked away the minutes, one by one, in an endless succession of electric blue numbers. If Lydia had slept, maybe Allison could have managed to do so as well. But though Lydia's eyes were closed, she was just fitful enough that Allison knew she couldn't be sleeping.
The moon kept rising. It slid off of Lydia's face like quicksilver, traveled across the carpeted floor and up the wall, then disappeared as the moon rose beyond the window frame, leaving the room cloaked in an even thicker darkness, broken only by the alarm clock's blue glow and the faint sheen of starlight.
"Lyd," Allison breathed into the darkness, faint enough that if Lydia was asleep, it wouldn't rouse her.
The rhythm of Lydia's breathing changed. She stretched a little, her knees sliding along Allison's, and pressed her face into the pillow. "Hmm?"
Allison ran her tongue over her lip. "What... What does it feel like?"
Lydia's breathing stopped. Silence stretched for an endless moment. Allison's heart thudded against her chest. She should have kept her mouth shut. She shouldn't have asked. It wasn't any of her business. She was just rubbing salt into open wounds.
Enough time passed that Allison thought maybe Lydia had fallen asleep, or wouldn't answer. But then she gave a small little sigh. Her eyes opened, glinting faintly in the starlight. "Like being in love," she said quietly.
Allison jerked, just a little. But they were lying on the same bed, close enough to embrace. Lydia wouldn't have missed it.
Lydia shut her eyes. She flattened her mouth. "Like stories and love songs. Like if I'm not near him, I'm going to die."
Lydia's words strangled something small and fragile in Allison's chest. A sharp, sudden pain caught in her chest. "Is that... what this feels like?" She laid a hand on Lydia's chest, in the open V of her shirt's collar. She swallowed the fear that dried up her throat. "With us?"
"No." Lydia didn't even hesitate. Allison caught her breath. "It doesn't feel like that at all."
"I--" Allison sat up. Her heart was thundering now, a frantic drumbeat that nearly overwhelmed the feel of it shattering right there against her ribs. "Oh. Maybe I should go."
"What?" Lydia flipped over. She caught Allison's hand before she even got both feet on the floor. "No. Don't. Don't go." She pulled.
Allison went where Lydia led her, helplessly. She let Lydia pull her back to the bed, let her push her down onto her back. Lydia braced her hands on Allison's shoulders and swung a leg over her hips. She sat there, pinning her down, and shook Allison by the shoulders. "It's different. The way I feel about Peter..." She shivered. Her fingers dug into Allison's shoulders. "It's not me. It's wrong. You and me..." She let out an unsteady breath. "It's different. I like that. This..." She took Allison's hand and pressed it to her chest again, the same place Allison had put it before. "It doesn't feel like storybooks and songs. It feels real." She gave a broken laugh and threw her head back. She looked glorious in the starlight. "God! If I wanted Peter, I'd be out there with him right now. I'm here because I choose to be." She cupped her hand under Allison's chin and tipped her head back until Allison had to meet her gaze, shining and bright in the middle of the darkness. "I choose you. I choose this. This is what I want. Do you hear me?"
Allison nodded frantically. "Okay." She wrapped her arms around Lydia's shoulders and pulled her down. "Okay."
#
"Christ!" She threw herself out of the car and stalked across the yard. She brought the crossbow with her, just to make a point. "Derek, what did I tell you about giving Stiles creeper lessons?"
"Stealth," Stiles said. "They're stealth lessons, and I'm his star pupil, I'll have you know."
"Why are you here?"
"It's the full moon tonight," Derek said as though pronouncing a dire prophecy.
Allison spared him a glance. "Yes. I know. That's why I'm here. Your turn."
"Us, too," Stiles said. "We thought-- Well. We're not the only creepy werewolves out tonight, and when it comes to searching the shadows, we figured six eyes were better than two."
Allison released her breath slowly. "You're worried about Peter, too."
She'd gotten out of the practice of tracking the moon's phases after she and Scott had broken up. But she'd had plenty of time the night before, lying in bed with Lydia trying to sleep, to contemplate the growing orb of the moon and wonder just how long they had until the full moon, and exactly what it would bring them when it came.
She could have kicked herself the next morning when she looked it up online and discovered that the full moon was tonight. She should have been prepared, and instead she was scrambling.
Peter had been trying to call Lydia to him for days now. It hardly seemed as though the full moon would be likely to make him less aggressive about it. Allison expected him to call, and when that achieved nothing, she half expected him to try to find a way past their mountain ash protection.
So she'd brought her bow, and her crossbow, and every arrow that she could get her hands on. And if she were honest with herself, she was relieved beyond words to find Stiles and Derek here, just as determined as she was to keep Lydia safe tonight.
"Thank you," she told them both. "Thank you."
Stiles gave her a tense little smile. Derek didn't respond to Allison's gratitude at all, just remained standing stoic and grim, but Allison expected nothing less from him. Stiles shuffled his feet and hugged his arms around himself in the night's growing chill, and glanced toward the inviting glow of lights from the Martin house. "So... should we..."
Allison shook her head. "She told me after school that she was going to try to catch a nap. She didn't sleep very well last night. We can keep watch out here while she's sleeping." She patted the pocket of her coat, and the hard lump of her phone inside it. "She promised she'd call when she woke up."
Derek nodded once and shifted his gaze out across the street. Stiles shuffled his feet again and shoved his hands under his armpits and looked so quietly miserable that Allison had to laugh.
"Do you need a sweater, Stiles?"
"Shut up." He hunched his shoulders up toward his ears. "I have a sweater. Nobody warned me I was going to need a freaking parka."
"It's not that cold," Derek said, as though Stiles were being ridiculous.
Stiles shot him a wild-eyed look of belligerence. "I'm sorry, would you like to come over here and share your impressive body heat, O warm one?" He sidled up to Derek, nudging against him with his shoulder, deliberately violating his personal space and, if Allison was any judge, delighting in the way it made Derek's dire expression twist with offended outrage.
"Boys." Allison clicked her tongue. "We're supposed to be on guard here. How are we supposed to hear anything over the sound of you two bickering?"
Derek looked like he wanted to protest his participation in the bickering, but couldn't figure out how to do it without contributing to the noise. Stiles humphed and hugged himself tighter and leaned in against Derek's side, looking up at him and raising one brow in silent challenge.
Derek said nothing, and allowed him to stay.
They fanned out eventually. Allison took watch in the front yard while Derek and Stiles slipped through the gate into the back, in case Peter tried to come at Lydia from behind. When the tedium grew unbearable, they switched places. Allison loitered in the shadows, watching the dancing ripples of light that the pool threw across the yard and listening for the smallest sound that might announce Peter's arrival.
When her phone rang, blaring the melody of her ringtone so loud that wolves two states away could probably hear it, Allison nearly jumped out of her skin. She fumbled the phone out of her pocket and answered it without even looking at the caller ID, just to shut it up. "What?" she demanded in a hushed half-whisper. As though there were any chance of flying under the radar now, after her phone had just announced her presence to the entire wildlife population of Beacon Hills.
Lydia's laughter came down the line. "I didn't scare you, did I?"
"Of course not." Allison leaned back against a pillar and tried to catch her breath. "But you totally blew my cover."
"You did tell me to call."
"I did. You sound good. Are you feeling better?"
"I feel fine, actually." Even Lydia sounded surprised by that. Allison scanned the shadows clustered around the perimeter of the Martin's yard. This felt like a trick, somehow. Like they were having their hopes built up just it would hurt all the worse when Peter tore them away. "Well, mostly fine. As good as can be. Do you want to come up and thaw out?"
"Yes," Allison said automatically, without thinking, and then remembered herself. "Derek and Stiles are here too. We're all coming up."
Derek faded out of the shadows as soon as she hung up with Lydia. Stiles was somewhat more conspicuous about it, stomping through the grass and huffing indignantly in the cold.
"You heard all that, I assume?" Allison asked Derek. He nodded once. "Great. Let's get inside before thawing becomes a necessity and not just a joke."
#
Derek stood just next to the doorway, pressing his shoulders against the wall and looking them all over with crossed arms and his usual dour expression. And Stiles had taken Lydia's chair, spun it backwards and draped himself over it. His fingers tapped out a nervous pattern against the chair's back. "So," he said. His gaze flitted about the room, from face to face. "Are we all agreed that he's not coming?"
"Hardly," Lydia said, at the same time that Allison snapped, "The night's still young. We shouldn't make any assumptions."
"He's not coming," Derek said. Everyone swiveled their gaze to him.
"I'd like to know what makes you think that," Allison said, crossing her arms.
Derek shot her a dark, unhappy look, as though asking him to speak any more words than he already had was tantamount to torture. "The moon overpowers our inhibitions." He bit each word off as though they were painful. "If he were going to come, he'd do it sooner, not later. If he wanted her but didn't want to risk coming, he'd already be calling to her." He looked at Lydia, a question in the arch of his brow.
She shook her head. "Nope. All's quiet on this front."
Derek nodded once, satisfied, and fell back into his usual watchful silence.
"So now what?" Stiles rocked the chair forward onto two legs, but dropped it back onto all four when Lydia shot him a glare. "We all go home and catch up on our beauty sleep?"
That sounded like the nicest way to spend the full moon Allison could have imagined, but before she could say a word, Derek said, "No." His voice snapped out across the room, silencing the rest of them. "We go to him."
A beat of silence stretched between them, then was broken as they all spoke at once, a jumble of, "What?" and "Are you kidding?" and "Of all the stupid--" that Derek cut off with one raised hand and a single sharp look at all of them.
"He'll be vulnerable."
"He'll be wolfed out," Allison said. "He'll eat us all alive and then go looking for dessert."
Derek shook his head. "He'll be stronger, yes. But he'll be vulnerable. The moon strips inhibitions. He won't be in control of himself. He'll be running on instinct, not intellect. So long as we can match him in strength, that will give us the advantage."
"Can we?" Lydia asked, her sharp tone cutting through the rest of their protests. "Match him?"
Derek hesitated. He glanced at Allison. She read plain enough to question there. "I have my bow," she said quietly. "And my crossbow. And enough arrows that… Well. If we need all my arrows, we've got bigger problems than one wolf."
He nodded once. "And you have me." He flicked his claws out, punctuating the declaration. "And Stiles's magic."
"Whoa. Hey." Stiles threw his hands up. "Time out. Stiles's magic? Stiles's magic is good for an infinite mountain ash supply, okay. It's not exactly up to psychotic Peter Hale snuff. I'm not going to be your redshirt."
"I've got a knife in my trunk?" Allison offered.
Stiles stared at her in horror. "Oh my God, I'm totally going to be the redshirt." He crossed his arms over the back of the chair and thunked his forehead against them. "Fine. I'm in. Just please don't let me die, guys."
"Nobody's going to die," Derek snarled, and pulled Stiles upright with a twisted grip on the back of his collar.
"Your faith is touching," Stiles said, his voice strangled and strange as he forced it out past the pressure of his collar digging into his throat.
"Let's do it," Lydia said, sliding off of her bed and standing before Derek. She looked like a goddess, fierce and beautiful, her eyes blazing with determination. Then she turned her gaze to Allison, and it was all she could do not to fall at her feet. "You can teach me how to use the crossbow, right?"
#
Derek took the lead, since he was the only one of the bunch with the werewolf senses needed to track and find Peter. Lydia went behind him, the crossbow settled firmly in her grip and a determined set to her shoulders. Stiles hovered at her shoulder, and Allison took the rear, scanning the shadows to either side of them as they picked their way through the forest. She liked it better back here, where she could keep an eye on their entire party at once. The thought of being toward the front, having any of the others behind her and vulnerable, made her shoulder blades itch and an extra dose of adrenaline sing through her blood.
Derek led them at a quick pace, pausing only when he needed to be sure of the trail, or whenever the rest of them had to catch their breath or needed a bit longer to clamber over an obstacle that lay in their path. The exertion had Allison breathing heavily, enjoying the work and the feel of her muscles gliding strong and steady beneath her skin. Stiles huffed and gradually fell back, from Lydia's side to hers, grumbling with what little breath he had to spare.
They'd forged perhaps a mile into the woods when Derek suddenly froze. Tension rolled down his back, followed an instant later by a low growl that made Allison's blood run like ice through her veins. She tightened her grip on her bow and stared into the darkness for any sign of what had alarmed him.
He took off before she could ask what was wrong, dropping into his wolf's gate and leaving the rest of them running after him, trying just to keep him in their sights. Another growl rumbled through the still night air, a beacon to keep them headed in the right direction. Then a snarl, and a counterpoint in an even deeper timbre, and the sounds of a violent scuffle tearing through the underbrush.
Lydia, still in the lead of the three humans, came to a sudden stop before them, throwing her arms out to keep herself from flying forward as she planted her feet. Allison only barely managed to keep herself from plowing into Lydia from behind. She caught at the hood of Stiles's sweatshirt and hauled him back before he went wheeling out into the middle of the fray. They stood together, huddled in the lee of a tall pine, watching a knot of shadows writhe before them, filling the woods with snarls and growls and the snap of jaws.
"That's Peter, right?" Allison asked against Lydia's ear, her voice hushed. Derek was in his alpha form, nearly unrecognizable, and the other was obviously a beta, pale human skin flashing in the moonlight, but they were tumbling and rolling and throwing each other around too fast for Allison to make out any features beyond that.
Lydia gave a single, short nod. She started to speak, but Derek swiped at Peter with one broad paw, drawing parallel gouges across Peter's shoulder and filling the woods with the hot metal smell of blood. Lydia's words broke off on a strangled scream. She fell to her knees, clutching at her shoulder.
"Stop," Allison cried, and dropped down beside her. "Stop!"
She was more than a little surprised when they actually listened. The two wolves froze mid-fight. Derek had Peter on his back, his belly exposed and one paw pressed to his ravaged shoulder in warning or threat.
Slowly, Peter shifted back to fully human. He held his hands up, palms facing Derek, but his gaze was canted sideways, pinned on Lydia. "You shouldn't have brought her."
Derek gave a warning snarl, baring the full length of his fangs, then shifted out of his wolf form as well. He had a few cuts and bites on him, fading already to new pink skin, but nothing like the gaping wound Peter still bore on his shoulder. That one was going to take a few minutes to heal completely, and Allison was glad of it. She hoped it hurt like hell. "Keep your mouth shut," Derek growled when he was human again. He glanced at Lydia, then at Allison. "Is she all right?"
"She's suffering, you fool," Peter snapped. "You didn't really think you could maul me and spare her the brunt of it, did you?" He looked at Lydia again. "It'll be just a moment, my dear. The wound will heal, and the pain will end."
Crouching right beside her, holding her close, Allison heard Lydia mutter, "Fuck you," but she wasn't sure if it carried to Derek or Peter. If they heard her, neither of them gave any indication of it.
"Go to hell," Allison said, loud and clear so there was no chance of Peter missing it. "You've been calling to her, making her miserable for weeks. You don't get to play the concerned card now."
"Not today," Peter said, droll. He prodded at the narrowing claw marks and grimaced. Lydia whimpered. "You would choose to bring her to me the one day I don't want her to come."
"Why?" Allison groped for Lydia's hand and then squeezed it, trying to convey strength and love and support wordlessly. "Why not today? What are you--"
"It's the full moon," he said, as though explaining it to idiots, or children. "We're not exactly at our safest, when the moon calls to us. She would have been in danger, if she'd come tonight. That's why I didn't call. I care about her safety."
"Oh, spare me." Lydia uncurled, straightening and rising to her feet. Allison helped her up, but as soon as she was on her feet, Lydia shook off her hand and held her back as she started forward, closing the distance between herself and Peter with slow, measured strides. She held the crossbow in one hand, and the other curled to a fist against her side. "If you cared about me, about my well-being, you'd break the soulbond and let me go."
He sat upright, earning a growl from Derek that he ignored. "No. I never lied to you, Lydia. It can't be done, not without killing one or both of us." Then the intensity of his posture eased. The tension slid out of his shoulders and he tipped his head to the side and gave her a slow smile. "Anyway. I wouldn't break it, even if it were possible."
Lydia drew a breath, a single sharp rise and fall of her shoulders. Allison eased from the shelter of the tree and tried to circle around the group, so she could see more than just Lydia's back. "You could leave me alone. You could stop calling me, if you cared about me. I could get by, if you'd do that."
Peter's eyes glinted dangerously in the moonlight. "That's not really my style."
"No. I didn't think so." Lydia spread her feet out until they were braced shoulder-width apart. She rolled her shoulders back and down to ease the tension out of them, and Allison knew what she was going to do before she even lifted the crossbow. It was exactly what Allison had taught her, in their brief lesson in the Martin's backyard.
Allison moved forward, coming to stand at Lydia's shoulder, her bow at the ready should Lydia need the backup. Lydia spared her a brief glance and a fleeting smile. Her finger curved, just a quick movement to disengage the crossbow's safety.
Peter looked from Lydia to her and then back again. His lip curled, baring his teeth. "This is why you refuse me?" He surged to his feet and started toward them, a low growl tearing through the night air and making the hair at Allison's nape stand on end. "You're choosing her?"
"No," Lydia said. "I'm choosing me." She sighted down the weapon and fired.
The bolt hit Peter in the chest, just over his heart. He dropped instantly, crashing into the underbrush. At Allison's side, Lydia fell too.
Allison didn't move fast enough to catch her. She landed sprawled on her back, hands over her face, shaking hard. Not dead, thank God, but that didn't stop Allison's hands from trembling as she threw herself to her knees beside her and tried to pull her hands away from her face. "Lydia? Lyd? Are you all right? Are you--"
Lydia twisted her wrists out of Allison's grip and batted her hands away. She wasn't crying. She was smiling, beaming up at the night sky and laughing, tears rolling down her cheeks. "I thought it was going to hurt." She pushed herself up and stared at Allison a little wildly. "That lying bastard. I feel free."
Allison could hardly dare hope it was true. She ran her hands over Lydia, a restless inventory just to be certain. "Are you sure you're all right?"
Lydia's laughter faded slowly, but her grin stayed in place, brighter than the moon. "Never better," she said, and pulled Allison in for a fierce, glorious kiss.
Allison's face was flushed when they finally broke away from each other. She ducked her face in against Lydia's shoulder, all too aware of the fact that Derek couldn't have helped but eavesdrop, and Stiles was staring as though their kiss had cast a spell over him. Lydia sifted her fingers through Allison's hair and kissed her temple, and it gave Allison enough strength to draw back and get to her feet.
She held a hand down to help Lydia to hers. Lydia grabbed it and used it to draw Allison in for another kiss, when they were both standing. She was still grinning when she pulled away.
The smile finally faded when she turned toward where Derek stood, with Stiles at his side and Peter motionless at his feet. Something solemn settled over her face. "Is he--"
"Yes," Derek said. There wasn't any clue in his voice or on his face as to how he felt about watching his uncle die in front of him once again.
Lydia nodded once and scrubbed her palms over her hips. She caught Derek's eye and held it, looking fragile and indomitable all at once. "I don't care what it takes," she said quietly. "Burn the body, cut off his head, bury him with a stake in his heart -- I don't care, just make sure he doesn't come back here again."
"That's vampires," Derek said. "And it's folklore."
"Whatever it takes."
He took a step back from the power in her voice, then nodded. "Yes. I promise. I'll see to it."
"Good." Lydia's hand found Allison's. She wove their fingers together. Allison turned with her and followed when Lydia walked away, toward the distant edge of the forest and the city beyond it. Their normal lives were waiting for them back on its streets. It would be nice to be able to get back to them.
Lydia was quiet as they walked. Allison was bursting with things she wanted to ask or say, but she held her tongue.
"I don't want to talk about this," Lydia said when they had nearly reached the car. "I don't want to analyze what it means or how I feel or any of that." She stopped and turned to face Allison. "He's been in my head all this time. Now he's out and he's gone. He doesn't deserve any more space in there."
"All right." Allison squeezed Lydia's fingers between her own. "But if you change your mind, you know I'm here, right?"
Lydia smiled suddenly, crooked and more than a little wicked. "Know it? I'm going to make sure of it." And she kissed Allison a third time, there beneath the midnight moon with the solidity of their car to lean against, and this time they didn't part for much, much longer.