Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

i. 

Lydia Martin is a smart girl.

Not like Allison: Allison’s bright. She’ll do fine at whatever not-quite-Ivy-League college she ends up at (provided that she doesn’t follow Scott to his inevitable future in the liberal arts at some institutionally-grey State school). She’ll handle Scott’s frequent forays into the land of poor life choices pretty well, when she’s not going there herself. She’ll get through. That’s the kind of smart most smart people recognize in themselves; the curious, instinctual kind of smart. It’s why Lydia made friends with her (apart from her killer shoes): It’s the closest to actual intelligence you can get in Beacon Hills.

Besides, they have the same shoe size.

Lydia Martin is not bright. She’s Maria Meyer smart. She is investigating-string-theory-at-age-11 smart, solving-the-Poincaré-Conjecture-in-2009-damn-you-Gregoriy-Perelman smart, future Dr.-Lydia-Martin-of-MIT smart. She’s Marie goddamned Curie smart, screw the cliché.

So she’s a genius, that’s great. Let’s recap her last few months, starting with the instigatory event for her participation in the proceedings:

• Bitten by a werewolf;¹
• Hospitalized for a werewolf bite, from which she neither died nor turned into a werewolf herself;²
• Possessed and manipulated by the biter,³causing her to:
  • Run naked through the woods in near-freezing temperatures for two days;
  • Hallucinate both privately and in public;
  • Spike the punch with a hallucinogen at her own birthday party;
  • Blow a system-depressant variant of wolfsbane into another werewolf’s face, all of which was in order to:
  • Resurrect a dead, potentially sociopathic werewolf from his grave underneath the singed floorboards where his own family burned to death ten years ago;⁴
  • Use the power of love to resurrect her ex-boyfriend and cure him of turning into a murderous lizard thing all the time.⁵

[Notes: (1) At the Spring Formal. In her new dress.  Undignified. (2) During which her popularity fell so dramatically that she might as well not have bothered with her hair for the last ten years. (3) She still feels vaguely sexually assaulted by the nonconsensual hallucination kissing that went on there. (4) This involved an interesting experiment involving moonlight and mirrors. Less interesting: Application of blood from nephew to uncle, in non-laboratory conditions, without the appropriate controls. (5) He still doesn’t want to get back together. Not that she does.]

Basically, her life has been a shit-show since this whole werewolf thing went down at the start of the school year. Screaming in classrooms (and ice-rinks – who does that?). Resurrecting not one but two people. Breaking many, many laws of the land, common sense and natural science.

And she still feels off. That’s the worst of it. Ever since getting out of that hospital bed, ever since that shower where she pulled clumps of her own hair (hallucination hair) out of the drain – her body feels wrong. Like something’s changed, or shifted, or, and this is the scary part, fallen into place.

So she goes to a party, drinks five beers, narrowly avoids making out with Greenberg, gets sick of the stares crawling down her neck, and leaves two hours later, somewhat unsteadily.

“Whatever,” she tells Allison, who’s worrying from home, where she spends most of her time these days. “Creatures of the night: Come get me. I’m here, I’m young, I’m vaguely anemic. Do your worst.”

Allison laughs, but uneasily.  “Do you have the taser I gave you?” she asks. It was an apology taser, from the night a few weeks ago when Lydia had the Allison version of the If anyone had told me what the fucking fuck was going on, I might not have screwed you all at the party and resurrected a possible serial killer, so good job being honest with your best friend, I really appreciate that talk.

Allison had cried. Lydia had not.

“In my bag,” Lydia says. A lie. She doesn’t care for tasers. They’re inaccurate: Sometimes they’ll murder someone, sometimes they’re a funny fifty seconds on YouTube and everyone goes home. If Lydia is going to kill someone, she wants to be damned sure she means to. That’s why she stole her dad’s good hunting knife, which actually is in her bag.

She’s putting one foot in front of the other, doing an exaggeratedly straight drunk walk. It’s not far to home, and Lydia – well, she’s maybe been a little down since Jackson had his own little talk with her, the Thanks for giving me a hand with that whole dying thing, but I need freedom to be me right now. Keep the key if you want, though talk. She’s maybe looking for trouble, or distraction, and not just the kind she’s going to be in when her mom smells the liquor someone spilled on her True Religions. (That’s normally the kind of crime that Greenberg would pay for in blood, but the truth is that Lydia is a little bit burnt out on revenge right now.)

So she’s a little a scared. It’s nice, actually, nice in a way that is distant from all her other problems.  The phone is warm against her ear, an anchor to her real life, and she wants to hang up. Cut the connection. Not forever, just for this moment, tonight. She doesn’t hang up, though. Allison’s still talking. It would be rude.

Lydia is not wearing heels; she might be five feet tall, but she doesn’t have a complex about it. Her feet hurt anyway, because she’s wearing the most uncomfortable flats known to mankind. The Tory Burch medallion is digging into her left foot, and there’s serious blister on her right heel.

It’s cool but not cold, one of those perfect spring days that turned into a nice night to party, if one happened to be in the mood for that kind of thing. Her jacket – a military style Alexander McQueen that had been her Aunt Amanda’s until the season was over a few years ago, at which point it came into Lydia’s life and never left – is loose because she’s lost weight.

(She can feel her hipbones now, when she lies on her stomach to go to sleep. They dig into the extra-firm Sealy Posturpedic. She doesn’t care for that.)

The street is dark, and quiet. Allison’s saying something about risks and safety and blah, blah, blah. Wasn’t Allison the one who flat-out tried to kill lizard-Jackson with a knife? “Allie,” Lydia says, “Quit worrying. Go to bed.”

“I can come pick you up,” she offers, because she really is nice.

“What, because it’s safer to wait around on a dark street than to walk the three blocks home? Get some sleep. You’re starting to sound like Stiles.”

“To be fair, his plans are usually better,” Allison says after a moment. “Or at least more complicated.⁶”

[(6) This is true. Stiles may be the walking embodiment of Joseph Gordon Levitt in 10 Things I Hate About You, only shorter, and Lydia does not want to date him in any way, but she respects that he’s stayed pretty much unscathed throughout this entire ordeal of theirs. And his monster spreadsheet is awesome. He sends her updated versions like clockwork, every two days, and she codes it into something werewolf-user-friendly in Visual Basic.]

“Don’t think you’re keeping me on the phone until I get home,” Lydia says severely. “I’m hanging up on you.”

“Nice,” Allison says, but she’s laughing, and Lydia’s smiling; she can feel the corner of her mouth pull up.  “Stay safe. Have a good night.”

“They all are,” Lydia says airily, just like she believes it. She says goodbye, hits ‘end’, and slides the phone into the back pocket of her jeans, a place it only goes when she’s drunk enough not to care about breaking the line of her outfit.

It’s quiet, actually. Quiet enough that she wishes she’d just kept Allison on the phone. There’s the wind, and a car passes, but it’s not enough to distract her from her blister. She’s still drunk – not really drunk, not blackout drunk, but the tipsy kind that used to end in sex at Jackson’s, her on top – and it’s making her stomach twist with the uncomfortable reality that she is super fucking depressed right now.

And why not? She’s got two years of high school left because her lame-ass parents won’t let her just graduate already; her ex-boyfriend, with whom she is pathetically and devastatingly in love, is remaining steadfastly ex; most of her friends are werewolves; her best friend is a werewolf hunter; she still sees the guy who psychically jerked her chain around town; her feet hurt; there’s whiskey on her favorite jeans; and nothing, nothing is happening for her -

Something twinges in her gut.⁷

[(7) Normally, she wouldn’t admit to having anything so crude as a gut, but in this case it’s a metaphor, and really more physically located near her diaphragm anyway. But nothing twinges in your diaphragm, literarily speaking.]

It’s something more than hearing what could easily be wind rustling last year’s leaves. It’s a half-second’s warning before she’s turning on her blistered foot with her arm up. She blocks an arm, realizes that it was aimed at the back of her head, and throws a punch at a shadowed face before she can think about it.

Whoever it is – a woman, judging by the boobs falling out of that atrocious Hot Topic mess of a dress – flies back, landing in a pool of trashy, crunchy polyester. She tosses her head back, getting overdyed black hair out of her face. She’s snarling. Her face, which is –

Bumpy, actually, and Lydia thinks werewolf, and maybe Erica, except that Erica’s never shown an inclination toward soaking her hair in Manic Panic. And there’s something else, something anatomically different – more pronounced ridges in the forehead, canines extended far past what she considers the werewolf norm (although to be fair, her sample size is pathetically small), and when Lydia glances at her hands, they’re plain old human-looking hands. No claws, just this tragic matte black polish.

“What the hell are you?” they demand of one another at the same time, but Lydia doesn’t have time to explain exactly what she is,⁸ because the woman is flying back at her, and she has to swing around, grateful that the bottle of Jack at the bottom of her purse is full, because it makes a satisfying thump when it hits the freak straight in her topographically-problematic face.⁹

[(8) And where else is she going to have the opportunity to talk about her genius? It’s a social catastrophe at that school to understand basic stoichiometry, let alone the applied mathematics of social networking and change theory. (9) She’s also grateful that she took her mother’s new Marni instead of one of her own bags, because she’s pretty sure the bottle breaks.]

The woman’s staggering back, bleeding – maybe. It’s hard to tell. They’re between streetlights, in front of one of those nauseatingly whimsical McMansions (down to the lattice trim and picket fence – so basic). Its windows are dark, but Lydia still thinks about screaming for help.

The woman spits, “Bitch!” at her, like that’s supposed to hurt her feelings?

“Seriously? You just attacked me. I’m not the bitch in this situation. And quite frankly the word itself is a little beneath me.” Lydia’s breath is coming too fast, and her heart is pounding. She’s never hit someone before in her life.¹⁰ It’s surreal – maybe another hallucination. Maybe she’s going all John Nash up in Beacon Hills, destined to a lifetime of psychiatric drugs and misery.

[(10) This is a lie. She punched Stiles Stilinski in the face on the first day of third grade, because he wouldn’t stop trying to touch her hair. She still maintains that this was a defense of her basic right to bodily autonomy.] 

The woman charges her. It’s pretty quick after that: Lydia knees her in the stomach with force she had no idea she could summon, drives her forward, with the intent of laying her out and crushing her larynx with a foot, and accidentally impales her on the McMansion’s twee picket fence.

The woman’s mouth drops open.

Then she explodes into dust.

Adrenaline, she tells herself, looking over her shoulder: The street seems empty. It could have happened to anyone. Maybe Peter left some lupine fight club secrets in your head when he destroyed your senses of self and security. You’re good at everything else.¹¹ Why not this?

[(11) Not everything. Cheerleading was so humiliating that Lydia secretly petitioned the school to eliminate it, citing irreversible damage based on the message that women exist only to congratulate men on their achievements, rather than to become fully-actualized human beings on their own terms. She succeeded.]

She doesn’t run back home, but despite her blister, the walk takes a lot less time than usual. She lets Prada out to pee (knowing her mother, who still isn’t home from her Match.com date, the poor girl hasn’t been out all day). She locks the door, hangs up the McQueen coat, empties her mother’s purse into the trash (all except her dad’s knife, which she rinses in the sink and leaves there), and leaves it on the kitchen table.

Finally, she strips out of her clothes, which feel disgusting, puts on her favorite pajamas¹² and tucks herself into bed.

[(12) She’s had them since she was twelve. They’re sateen – not even good quality – and emerald green, a color she eschews on the grounds that not all redheads are created to maintain the exact same color palette status quo. They were from her Grams, who was so proud to have found them at Target that she spent extra on 3-day shipping to get them there for Lydia’s birthday. Lydia loves her grandmother more than she loves either of her parents, and her stupid parents are still alive.]

Maybe she should call Allison, or Stiles, or even that freakshow Derek Hale. She doesn’t, though. Her phone is fine even if it does smell kind of boozy, but she doesn’t even bother scrolling through her Werewolves & Freaks contacts group. What would she say? Some lady tried to kill me, and I accidentally made her disintegrate into ash?

She doesn’t want anyone trading looks over her continued adventures in Crazyville. What else could it be? Except maybe that someone of the lycanthrope variety wants her dead.

Lydia Martin – genius, holder of mysterious werewolf immunity, fabulous redhead - doesn’t want to think about that, actually.

Instead, she grabs the bottle of Xanax on her bedside table and taps out a tab. Considers it for a moment, then taps out another one. She swallows them dry, turns off the light, and goes to sleep.

ii.

That night she dreams about falling; drowning; bleeding on a dirt road; and being run through with a sword, right through her chest.

In other words – the usual.

iii.

The creak of a hinge wakes her up. Her mother’s in the doorway, holding the purse. “Really?” her mother asks, looking tired. She’s still wearing her dress from last night, but her lipstick’s worn off, and her mascara is flaking.                                

“Just an accident,” Lydia says. Which is true, more or less.

“When are you going to stop punishing me for – “ Her mother swallows. Lydia thinks that her weakness is kind of gross. “For everything,” she finishes.

“I’m not punishing you for anything¹³,” Lydia says, and her words feel like they’re not even hers. She’s still high on the Xanax, obviously. “I’m just living my life.”

[(13) Lie.]

“Christ,” her mother says, but leaves her alone.

She goes back to sleep.

iv. 

Her phone rings, waking her for a second time. It’s Allison. “Hey,” Allison says, and she’s been crying; Lydia can tell by the stuffiness in her voice.

“Hey,” Lydia says. It’s almost noon, according to the wall clock. “What’s up?” She keeps her voice casual. Allison hates it when people discern her mental state from her voice. Lydia lets her keep thinking that she’s some kind of emotional enigma. They’re friends. That’s what friends do.

“Do you want to come over?”

“Do we have to listen to the Virgin Suicides soundtrack again?”

“I was thinking it was more of a Modern Family kind of day. My dad’s – out. And it’s kind of – quiet, you know?”

Lydia loves Gloria – who doesn’t – and she doesn’t want Allison to start crying, so she says, “I’ll be over in an hour.”

She slides out of bed. Her head is a little fuzzy, but beyond that, she is beer-and-Xanax-hangover free.Her pajamas slide against her skin, and she looks down at her feet for a few moments. Then she puts them on the plush carpet¹⁴ and stands determinedly.

[(14) Mom had the floors and everything else redone after the divorce. It was some kind of remodeling revenge thing; every time Dad came over to pick her up for dinner, something would be different. The carpets, the kitchen, Lydia’s clothes.]

Her shower is perfunctory, her hair piled on top of her head in a messy topknot; she knows that it looks intentional. She exfoliates and moisturizes, because a bad year is no excuse for abandoning a perfectly good skincare regimen, and pulls on a fresh pair of jeans, hopping a few times to inch them up over her hips before finding a bra and a long, swingy jersey shirt it won’t show under. Once she’s smoothed on a layer of beauty balm, highlighted her cheekbones, lined her eyes with a soft dove-gray pencil, and done some other shit with some eye shadow and mascara and tinted lip balm and cheek stain, she’s ready. 

She might be crazy, constantly hallucinating, hopelessly emotionally compromised, and having the worst year of her life, but she’s still Lydia Martin, and that means she’s still better than 99% of the brain-dead morons in this godforsaken town.

v.

“I can’t watch this,” Allison says, covering her face with her hands. She’s laughing. “It’s too embarrassing. Oh my god! No, why did her dad have to walk by, why is her husband so stupid, oh my god. Are you kidding? This is impossible. Who writes this show?”

Lydia’s grinning despite herself. Watching TV with Allison is always fun: She feels everything for the characters, right down where her mushy little heart meets her over-exaggerated sense of responsibility. Yet, somehow, she still can’t stop watching Modern Family, which is based on exploiting secondhand embarrassment. It’s adorable. It makes Lydia glad that they’re friends. “Oh, hey, Gloria’s going to help her out,” Lydia says. “Have you noticed that Gloria is the best?”

Allison’s look is baleful, even though Lydia is totally distracting her from her pain. “You’re just saying that because you are Gloria,” she says. “A tiny, pale Gloria with no accent.”

“Who would never marry an old dude,” Lydia adds, but she is satisfied with this assessment.¹⁵

[(15) More or less. She likes to think that she lacks the stereotypical redhead (or Colombian) temper, having instead a coolheaded knack for destroying the lives of those who cross her with subtle yet insidious malice. Also, she does not plan on children, especially ones who wear ponchos.]

“Thank God it’s over,” Allison says, pulling a pillow over her face as the credits fade out. “That was horrible. I don’t know what kind of people made this show.”

“You’re the one who keeps DVRing it,” Lydia points out.

“I know! It’s addictive! Like drugs. They’re basically drug dealers. Ruining my life.”

Lydia loves Allison. “We can watch another one, if you want,” she says, using her foot to nudge the remote in Allison’s direction.

Allison’s hair is messy and she’s wearing yoga pants and one of her dad’s NRA t-shirts, but she’s grinning and blushing and grabbing the remote, so Lydia just settles back with her bottle of diet Coke and lets herself enjoy the moment. The last few months have been bereft of actual fun – minus winning at State, thank you Stilinski – and she just wants to curl up in this feeling. She leans her cheek against the couch, watching dust motes float in a beam of afternoon sunlight.

The dust reminds her, but today is Saturday, and she doesn’t think about Friday nights until Sundays at the very earliest.  It might be a little hypocritical not to tell Allison about this latest possible hallucination episode¹⁶ but what would be hypocrisy in someone else is simply time management for Lydia. She has a system. Her system works. The end.

[(16) Evidence for hallucination: Person exploding into dust. Evidence against hallucination: These things do happen.]

“Oooh, let’s watch that one,” she says instead, when Allison’s thumb hovers over the remote’s OK button. “It’s the one with Elizabeth Banks.”

They watch it. It’s not until later, when they’re making tea in the kitchen that Allison says, “I’ve been thinking about Matt a lot lately.”

“What about him?” Lydia asks. Matt didn’t impress her when he was alive, and he doesn’t impress her now.

“Just that – I was him,” Allison says, and Lydia blinks. “I mean – what I did to Boyd and Erica, what I tried to do to Derek and everyone else. Because of my mom, even because of Kate, even though I know what she – “ Allison swallows. Lydia crosses her arms and watches the electric kettle in the corner of her eye, but she doesn’t say anything. This has revelatory monologue written all over it, and pours out of Allie’s mouth unstoppably. She’s probably been holding this in for days. “It’s like, we keep talking about him, and it’s kind of either, like, poor Matt, he was so screwed up¹⁷ or, I don’t know, evil Matt, how could he do this, but I did what he did, or I tried to, I wanted to, I told people to, and I don’t know how everyone doesn’t hate me either.”

[(17) When have people been having these ‘poor Matt’ conversations? Not around Lydia, that’s for damn sure. It’s absurd. Without getting into the existence of pure evil in the universe, surely they can all agree that stalker, murderer, and extremely ineffective wannabe date-rapist Matt was in full control of his mental faculties, and is therefore undeserving of post-mortem pity. She obviously has some heads to knock together.]

Lydia crosses her arms. It’s time for her kind of monologue, which is in the emo-smackdown category “Allison,” she says, “if you’re expecting me to stand here and hold your hand over your unfortunate little episode, I mean, have you met me? Obviously you probably shouldn’t have shot that kid Boyd with all those arrows, or let your grandpa electrocute him and Erica in your creepy hunter basement.”

Allison’s eyes are overflowing with tears; silent, miserable, self-hating tears. Lydia lets herself soften a little bit, because she knows Allison won’t tell. “Your crazy aunt who you still loved even though she was batshit died right in front of you. Not to mention, she burned Derek Hale’s entire family to death, so you have to deal with who she really was, too. Your mom killed herself instead of dealing with her newfound lycanthropy, and your grandpa was a straight-up psycho who used you to try and get the thing that your mom killed herself over - with absolutely no in-law resistance, either. Also, your werewolf boyfriend was being kind of a dick to you." She pauses, just for effect, and flips her hair. "Matt had, like, ten years to get crazier and crazier instead of investing in some solid psychiatric help. You – got over it. So stop moping and just be better.”

She’s being hugged before she can sidestep it. For some reason, she doesn’t disentagle herself. She just lets Allison’s long arms fold themselves around her, and even hugs her back, because she is a damn good friend. “Thanks, you jerk,” Allison mutters into her neck.

“You should probably apologize for the whole torture thing at some point, or you’re going to keep feeling bad,” Lydia says, in exactly the tone of voice that conveys Because of your weak human emotions and Allison’s laughing. “God, Argent. How long have you been writing about all these feelings in your kitty-cat diary?”

“I don’t know,” Allison says, wiping her eyes. “A while, I guess. I just feel like everything was so – out of control.”

Lydia says, “Well, it was.” 

“I really missed you,” Allison says quietly, sniffling. “This entire time – ever since you were in the hospital. You really are my best friend. I wanted to talk to you so many times - ”

“Of course I am,” Lydia says, cutting her off before they have to rehash the whole And this is why you tell Lydia absolutely everything important conversation. “And you’re lucky, too, you got in under the deadline. I was thinking about picking three rando losers to make over in my image, but I left it too long and some old creeper in a basic leather jacket beat me to it.”

That makes Allison laugh, and then Lydia’s laughing, too, the kind where you’re both just lost to giggling – that inside joke kind of moment where even if it’s not all right, at least you have each other.

“You know what I want?” Allison says, when she’s wiped her eyes. The kettle has already boiled and switched off automatically, but neither of them can be bothered with the tea anymore.

“A stiff drink?” Lydia suggests, without much hope.

“I was thinking Frappucinos,” Allison retorts. “Ventis. And not the gross light ones, either.”

“You’re such a Zooey Deschanel,” Lydia complains, grabbing her purse.

“I already told you I’m growing out my bangs!”

vi.

That night, Lydia doesn’t fall asleep for a long time after getting into bed. When she does, she dreams about: Running in a corset, her legs lost in skirts. Her breath, short and visible in the cold winter air. Bells ringing. An axe, in her throat. 

And then nothing, nothing, nothing.

vii.

Sunday morning is way more pleasant than Saturday. For one thing, she’s not hungover. For another, there’s a note on the bathroom mirror from her mother: Lydia. Have to be in Eugene for a meeting on a new resort development tomorrow morning, so I’m leaving this afternoon from the office. Money in your account. I’ll call you tonight. Back Tuesday. Love, Mom. 

That means she has the house to herself for a few days. Most parents would make her go stay at her dad’s, but Lydia’s mother is still of the opinion that Lydia chose to live here because her father is a tyrant of some kind.¹⁸ He’s not, but she likes the solitude of being alone in the house, free to order arugula on her gourmet pizza and make cocktails she looked up on the internet.

[(18) The divorce petition cited irreconcilable differences. Those being: Mutual adultery, basic incompatibility, and minor financial malfeasance. Lydia’s dad is pretty much the male version of her mother, which is why they never would have worked out. As a parent, he’s just annoying, and he does insist on a curfew, which makes Mom’s house by far the preferable choice.]

The doorbell rings at around 8:30, when she’s paging through the Beacon Hills Tribune; a clipped-out article sits at her right wrist. It’s too early for any of her deadbeat friends, except Jackson, who wakes up – used to wake up – at five every morning for a ten-mile run and circuit training before lacrosse practice.  She pads through the front hallway in her bare feet and opens the door to absolutely freaking no one.

Fear thrills through her stomach. She’s been down this road before. She hears Prada’s claws clicking on the floor behind her, feels tears sting her eyes, but then Prada’s nudging at an envelope on the doorstep. If Prada’s touching it – it’s real, right? And a plain white envelope, no matter what’s inside it, is too unsymbolic to be a hallucination. She looks up; there’s not so much as a sprig of aconite in sight.¹⁹ The envelope has her name on it, but nothing else: No use in pretending it went through the mail on a Sunday.

Lydia Martin in printing she doesn’t recognize; not Allison’s loopy, half-grown-up script, or Jackson’s precise sans-serif, or Scott or Stiles’s boy-print. There’s something more than a letter in there; it’s heavy.

[(19) And she’s committed to memory every single picture of wolfsbane she could find.]

She slips her little finger under the seal and opens it, peering inside, half-expecting – something horrible. A big spider (not that she’s afraid of spiders, for God’s sake, they’re almost never venomous) or someone’s finger (ditto severed fingers), something meant to shake her.

It’s a crucifix. A medium-sized sterling-silver crucifix on a chain. The note attached to it – in the same unfamiliar print – says, To keep you safe.

She stands on the porch in her bare feet for a few more moments, until Prada whines at the cold. Then she drops the note and the necklace back into the envelope, crumples it into a ball, and throws it as hard as she can into the bushes next door.

viii.

That night, she dreams about lying in the snow until the world fades into darkness.

ix.

Monday morning is quiet; her first period is a spare, technically for studying, but mostly she uses it to perfect her liquid eyeliner in the library. She sits through second-period Chemistry, taking notes on the number of times Mr. Harris makes a mistake he has to correct before anyone notices, naps through English, and then takes her lunch to Allison’s table, where Stiles is currently making an increasingly-unstable stack of everyone’s Jell-O pudding containers and Scott is pretending not to stare at Allison’s face. She sits across from Allison, next to Scott, and eats three bites of her quinoa salad before she makes the decision.

“I’m going to be the bigger person,” she announces to the table, putting her fork down, “and tell you that I have a problem that I cannot solve myself. This is not to say that I think any of you will be able to solve it, but given the problems we’ve had this year regarding appropriate information flows, I thought I would set a good example.” She folds her hands in front of her, primly.

There is silence; Stiles even stops with the pudding tower, and Scott has his adorable little “awoo?” expression on – the one that always reminds her of Prada encountering a squirrel on her walks. Allison just looks at her, eyebrow raised.

That’s nice. She appreciates their focus. 

“On Friday night I killed a vampire,” she says.

Nobody is focused for a while after that.

“When you say a vampire, what do you actually mean by that, because that’s kind of a big deal, I’ve never heard anything about vampires before,” Stiles manages to get out, once Scott’s stopped sputtering.

Lydia lays out her evidence. It is as follows:

• On Friday night, as she was walking home from a party, she was accosted by a young woman in a truly hideous dress;
• This woman attempted to hit her in the head;
• At which point Lydia may have accidentally skewered her on an extremely unnecessary and borderline tacky picket fence;
• Which caused her to disintegrate into either dust or ashes.²⁰

[(20) Having not had the presence of mind to collect a sample, she can’t make a definitive call on the material’s composition. Going by metaphor, it would be ash, but if you take into consideration the actual state of a dead body, which has to use some kind of energy to animate itself, dust may be a better descriptor.]

She pulls out the Tribune article she’d saved from yesterday’s paper. “Also, she was reported dead on Tuesday last week.” Inset into the article is the girl, Samantha Pryor - a local community college student and former president of the California Gothic Society, Beacon Hills Chapter.²¹

[(21) Lydia is sure that goths don’t have to wear polyester.]

Stiles plucks the article from her fingers. She allows this. Apart from her, he’s the smart one. He scans it, eyes flicking down the newsprint. “She died of – exsanguination?”

“What?”

“Blood loss,” Stiles translates for Scott.

“So – you killed someone who was already dead, by pushing her onto a picket fence?”

Lydia says, “That’s what I’ve been saying.”

x.

Very long story short, the action items from the caf meeting are as follows:

• Lydia and Stiles: Spot-check Gerard’s bestiary for references to vampires, vampirism, etc. Previous concentration on lizard monsters may have distracted from valuable information regarding other supernatural phenomena.
  • Stiles: Update monster database to include any new revelations.
  • Stiles: Keep updating monster database until it is actually useful in new monster situations.
• Lydia and Scott: Test new ass-kicking abilities.²²
• Allison: Interrogate Mr. Argent. (Subtly.)
• Scott and Stiles: Interrogate Derek and Peter. Subtlety probably unnecessary.²³ 

[(22) Technically, Stiles will be there too, but Scott is the one who will be getting punched, unless Stiles goes for her hair again. Scott doesn’t seem worried, which means he’s underestimating her. She doesn’t mind, though. She does her best work under the radar. (23) This is the part of the plan no one is comfortable with. Derek, like any sane twenty-something harboring a potentially dangerous murderer in the burnt-out shell of his family home while trying to build a new little family of unstable lycanthropes, is unhappy about Scott’s refusal to join his pack. Jackson has also refused, but who would want him, anyway. In fact, lately it’s pretty much just Derek, dear old Uncle Peter, and Isaac, since Boyd and Erica have obviously found a new alpha to boss them around. Good for them.]

Lydia feels tired. She obviously needs to take her eight hours more seriously; it’s not that there are bags underneath her eyes (with concealer, who could tell even if there were?), but she has a sort of numb feeling in her face. Obviously, it is at this exact moment that Jackson makes an appearance. (It’s not really an appearance. They do have this class together. But if she taught him one thing, it was that every entrance can be an appearance.)

“Hey,” he says, sitting down into the seat next to her.

Her stupid heart hurts, but she says, “Hey,” like she could care less. With Jackson, it’s all about appearances. Well, that’s true of everyone, isn’t it?

“How are you?” he asks. It’s an attempt to be nice. She hates it, him, everything.

“Perfect,” she says, “obviously.” She flips her hair over her shoulder, opens her Bio textbook, not that she even needs it.

“Cool,” he says, and then, “Me too,” lamely, and then class starts.

A minute or two later, her mechanical pencil splinters into pieces of plastic and lead in her grip.

(He doesn’t even look over. What kind of werewolf just ignores that kind of thing?)

xi.

It’s dusk, and Scott’s backyard is silent.

(It didn’t start that way. It started with Stiles all high on sugar and caffeine, urging them on. Scott was laughing, in his mildly-cute self-deprecating way. And he’d said something like, Okay, just try to hit me, and she’d shifted in her Pumas, feeling the stretch of her yoga leggings, stepping back so that she could swing forward. And then, well.)

“Hooooo-ly shit,” Stiles says, breaking the silence from his vantage point on the steps. He’s standing, now, hands sort of flailing around his face, elbows in the air. “Holy shit. “

Scott isn’t standing. Scott is sprawled on the dead grass lawn, dazed, fifteen feet away from Lydia.²⁴

[(24) In her defense, he hadn’t even braced himself.]

He groans. Stiles calls, “You okay, there, buddy?” and Scott lifts a hand in a wavering little thumbs-up. He doesn’t move. 

Lydia walks over, goes up a few steps, and casts her eyes over the yard, the situation, then looks at Stiles. “What do you think?” she asks, her voice dead even.

He grins, wide and generous, spreading his freckles out over his nose. “I think that was the best thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

It makes her laugh, and then he starts giggling, too. They’re both doubled over, sitting on the steps, when Scott and his still-healing jaw make their sheepish way over. “Lydia,” he says, “I think maybe you’re turning into a werewolf.”

“Forget that,” Stiles says, recovering. “She’s turning into Wonder Woman.”

“Excuse me, have you seen what the Greeks did to their economy?” Lydia demands, piqued.

That makes Stiles laugh again. Scott makes a face. “I’m thinking – maybe we should talk to Derek and – and, um, the pack sooner rather than later.” He stumbles over Peter, doesn’t say it, and she wants to punch him again.

She wants to say, You don’t have to do that, and say it sharply, so it sticks with Scott, that she can hear Peter’s name and see his stupid face at Safeway and not cut herself or whatever awful, boring thing it is people do with their feelings nowadays. But then Scott would be confused (can’t you just hear him missing the point?) and Stiles would have to clarify, and Lydia’s been down that road too often for it to hold any appeal.

“Great,” Stiles sighs, when Lydia doesn’t say anything. “We have to go over to Casa Hale and talk to Hamlet and Claudius. Tell me Isaac’s going to be there, at least.”

Scott looks uncomfortable. “I think my mom’s teaching him to make lasagna tonight, actually,” he says, looking up at the house. “When she gets home from her shift.”

“Great. Awesome. That’s just so freaking wholesome,” Stiles mutters.

“Hey, though,” Scott says. “Can you guys wait for a second?” Without waiting for them, he jogs over to the edge of the yard, where he stands completely still, his back to them.

“What in God’s name is he doing?” Lydia asks Stiles.

“Fetching?” Stiles guesses.

“Don’t be a jackass, Stiles!” Scott yells. He walks back over, looking annoyed. “I was – Lydia, you didn’t hear anything I said after I walked away, right?”

“Um, no,” Lydia says. “I’m not an amateur,” she adds, though at what, she’s not sure. “I would have mentioned being able to hear through walls or whatever.”

“So, super-hearing: No check,” Stiles says. “Can you smell who touched me in fourth period?” She stares at him for a full thirty seconds, and he wilts. “What, Scott can!”

Boys.

xii. 

She goes home, leaving Scott and Stiles to their well-worn Goofus and Gallant routine. It's a funny feeling, wishing her mom was going to be there, but she tells herself not to be pathetic; one day her mother will be someone she calls once a month, someone who attends graduations and sends expensive gifts and writes emails about her newest client. Someone she sees twice a year and smiles at, in the way that successful adults smile at other adults who haven’t done so well.

One day, her mother won’t make her feel weak or small.

She makes a salad, cuts pieces of strawberries into it with one hand. She takes Prada for a walk around the neighborhood, telling her what a good girl she is when she tries to protect Lydia from their neighbor’s fluffy piece of shit Persian.

Nothing happens on the walk, but when she gets back, there is another envelope at the door. Anger climbs its slow way up her spine as she bends to pick it up, and Prada snuffles at her ankle, making a little mark on the leather. She tears the side off, not bothering with the glued flap, and the crucifix and the note drop into her palm.

Lydia, (the note reads)
Things are going to get very complicated for you very soon. This will give you some small measure of safety.
A friend

Lydia’s friends don’t leave her confusing, cryptic notes. Lydia’s friends mostly wouldn’t know how to leave her confusing, cryptic notes.²⁵

[(25) If it had come from Allison, she’d have dotted the i’s with hearts or some godforsaken thing; Stiles’s note would have been fifteen times longer; and Scott, even when he was leaving a creepy anonymous letter, would most likely have forgotten by the end and just signed his name. And Jackson, of course, isn’t leaving her notes anymore.]

Lydia’s been getting practice, this year; practice at humility, at humiliation, at rage. It’s the last that ignites somewhere deep in her spine, hard and hot against the cold night: It works its way through her lungs, up her face, coloring her cheeks with indelicate red.

“I don’t like being used,” she says, aloud, her voice thin and tinny in the vast wide world outside her home. It hangs in the more-or-less silence of the street, until the wind rises and blusters through her hair and blows it away.

Prada, at her toes, whines, and she opens the front door to go inside.

This time she keeps the note, and the necklace, tucking them into the pocket of her Alexander McQueen coat. She tells herself that she’ll show them to Allison the next morning, but eventually she gives in and sends a photo to Stiles instead.

He texts her back a few minutes later. cool necklace, he says. showed it to derek he said it looked like something from a catholic vending machine, do you think those exist, maybe in the vatican or japa. A few moments later, he adds: n and scott’s going to ask his abuela.

She lets herself smile, because – it’s not right, actually, to encourage Stiles to think he’s in love with her, but she thinks if he ever gets over that they could be friends. He knew enough to know to tell her he saw it, and Scott saw it, and even super-creeper Derek Hale saw it; he knew to bring it back down to reality for her.

Thanks, she writes back, briefly, and wants to write more, but doesn’t know what.

She thinks about texting Jackson, but the thought sours to dust. She just plugs in her phone and sets her alarm, instead.

xiii.

That night, Lydia dreams about falling.

xiv.

School feels – different. She has a guidance appointment with Ms. Morell²⁶, which is perfect after a night spent in restless repose, falling from fucking scaffolding. She can still feel gravity pulling on her limbs, dropping her stomach.

[(26) Every Tuesday morning, 9am sharp. That damned first period spare had turned into a fabulous excuse to put her in the guidance office for fifty minutes every week. So far they have covered as little territory as Lydia can get away with.] 

She may, possibly, be in a bad mood.

Isaac Lahey is there, too. He has dark circles under his eyes. “This is my appointment time,” she tells him primly. She wants to add something cutting about doggy day-care or something, but she can’t quite bring herself to do it.

He shrugs. “I’m usually Fridays,” he says. “They pulled me out of first period.”

“I’m so glad the mental health professionals at this school have such excellent time management skills,” she says, examining her cuticles. “How was the lasagna?”

He blinks. “Good. Do you know everything?” he asks, mouth quirking.

“I don’t know why you’re choosing to associate with someone who murdered a bunch of people and spent the better part of three months fucking with my head,” she says pleasantly. “But I can understand lasagna." 

He wilts. She doesn’t feel bad for Isaac – she doesn’t. So his dad locked him in a freezer; so kanima Jackson (Matt) killed his dad; so he’s an orphan and forced to interact with Derek and Peter Hale on a daily basis. Your parents and parental figures mess you up. That’s what they do. It’s not Lydia’s problem.

They sit in silence (she suspects Isaac would classify it as awkward silence, but until you’ve returned to school after spending two days naked in the woods, you don’t really understand the nuances of awkward silences) until the guidance office door opens.²⁷ She says, “Lydia, if you don’t mind, I need to ask Isaac a few questions before our appointment.”

[(27) Isaac is reading On the Road, which Lydia disdains as pedestrian. She’s looking through her Physics notes – which are not for class, but rather from the correspondence she’s struck up with a graduate student in Fresno who’s looking into electromagnetic fields. His work may have some werewolfy applications. She does not, however, share this with Isaac, who as far as she knows is lucky to get a D in any science class he takes.] 

“By all means,” Lydia says. “It’s not like I have anything else I could possibly be doing.” Ms. Morell gives her a look, and when the door opens a little bit more, Lydia can see the Sheriff standing there, looking grim.

Finally, Isaac escapes – he does a funny little hop-run thing, too, like he really can’t wait to get out of there – and Ms. Morell stands in the doorway. “Come in, Lydia. The Sheriff’s wondering if he can ask you some questions, too.”

“Can I have my lawyer present?” Lydia asks, standing so she can cross her arms without looking like a third-grader in the principal’s office. (Actually, this is reminding her strongly of the time she had to own up to punching Stiles in the vice-principal’s office at Beacon Hills elementary, except his mom had been there too, in a deputy’s uniform that matched Mr. Stilinski’s.)

“Your parents have already given their permission,” Ms. Morell says. She actually rolls her eyes, which does nothing to discourage people from remembering she's actually just a French teacher.

“I’m glad all of the adults in my life are concerned about my rights as an American citizen,” Lydia says, but she walks, breezes, past Ms. Morell. “Good morning, Sheriff,” she adds, politely.

He tilts an ironic little smile in her direction. “We’re just wondering if you’ve seen Erica Reyes or Vernon Boyd lately,” he says, rather than going through any kind of preamble. She appreciates his straightforwardness, how he doesn’t treat her like she’s breakable – and he saw her, coming out of that forest.

“I thought they ran away,” Lydia says, shrugging. “You know, to the circus or a meth lab or something.” Or to join a pack somewhere far, far away from the clusterfuck of Derek Hale’s. She wishes them all the best, so long as they stay the hell away from her. 

Sheriff Stilinski sighs. “We’re just following up on a few leads,” he says.

“They weren’t my friends,” Lydia says simply. “I only had one class with Erica.” None with Boyd. What year was he in, anyway?

“Thanks for your time, then,” he says. “Let us know if you see or hear anything from them, okay? I’m glad to see you’re doing better.” And he means it, which is – it’s not something she’s going to react to, actually. But she gives him a smile, even if it is tight and uncomfortable.

“I think Mr. Choudhury is waiting for you in the main office, Sheriff,” Ms. Morell says. “Let me know if I can help at all.”

“Thanks,” the Sheriff says. If he had a hat, he’d tip it. Lydia wonders what it’s like to have a dad like that.

“So,” Ms. Morell says, once the door’s closed. “Do you think your civil rights survived that exchange?”

Lydia, perched on the edge of her seat with her spine straight, shrugs. “I just don’t know what he was asking me for,” she says. “I didn’t know either of them. Besides, they’re probably nestled cosily in a tent city by now.”

“And how have you been doing?” Ms. Morell asks, changing the subject.

“Fine,” Lydia says.

“Sleeping all right?” she pursues.

“Like a baby,” Lydia says.

“People always say that. Babies don’t actually sleep that well, do they?”

“It’s a common colloquialism,” Lydia says. “It means I’m sleeping fine. Great, actually. Full REM cycles every night.”

“Glad to hear it.” Ms. Morell leans back in her desk chair; it squeaks a little bit. “We’ve been seeing one another for a while now.”

“Do you want my class ring?”

“I want you to think about why we’re still at this.” Ms. Morell’s eyes are dark, serious.

“My mother thinks it will help me come to terms with what happened with me,” Lydia says, shrugging. “I pick my battles.”

“Is it helping you come to terms with what happened to you?”

“I’m fine,” Lydia says.

“What happened to you, Lydia?”

“Pardon me?”

Ms. Morell shrugs. “If you’re fine, you should be able to tell me what happened to you; who hurt you? Why did you leave the hospital that night? What happened in algebra last semester?”

“I was bitten by a wild animal,” Lydia says evenly. “Everything else was post-traumatic stress.”

“That’s what your file says,” Ms. Morell agrees.

“That’s because that’s what happened,” Lydia says. “I didn’t realize you weren’t up to date on the file.”

“I wrote the file,” Ms. Morell says, raising an eyebrow. “That doesn’t mean I’m convinced that you're okay.”

“I’m not sure what I’ve said to give you any reason to doubt my mental acuity,” Lydia says frigidly. “Maybe you’ve been a little busy teaching the passé composé to freshmen.”

Finally, Ms. Morell sighs, and tucks her long shiny hair behind her ears. “You’re a very smart girl, Lydia. Smarter than your friends; smarter than your teachers. You’re pretty. You have a comeback for everything – I’m not complaining. It’s a nice change of pace, actually. You know that you’re an extraordinary girl. You have a bright future ahead of you.”

“Thanks,” Lydia says.

“So I’m wondering,” Ms. Morell continues, eyes on Lydia’s face, unflinching. “You have all of that going for you, all those things that nobody else around you does, and you’re still unhappy. I suppose I just find myself wondering why.”

Lydia’s jaw tenses, words clawing their way up, but the bell rings before she can say anything.

“I guess that’s all we have time for this week,” Ms. Morell says. “Sorry about the short session. See you next Tuesday.”

Lydia goes to Chem thinking, furiously: I am not unhappy.

xv.

Derek Hale is waiting by her car after school; he’s probably been waiting for a while, since she spent an extra hour in the library writing up a Bio lab with Allison. The parking lot is mostly empty. Derek looks pained (or constipated), but that’s almost as normal for him as stalking high school sophomores.

He’s alone.

“Stiles and Scott seemed to think there was something going on with you.”

“And you thought I’d be in a big freaking hurry to tell you all about it? Really?"

Derek has his God save me from teenagers face on, which is pretty ridiculous, considering that he bit three and keeps trying to add a fourth to his little werewolf family. “We could help. Peter – “

“Don’t talk to me about Peter.” Her voice is cool and unhurried, but that spike of rage in her spine comes back hotter than ever.

He’s quiet. He doesn’t say that he’s sorry, or that he didn’t mean anything, or anything like that. She watches his face, but he’s good at keeping his feelings to himself; almost as good as she is. “This could be bigger than all that,” he says after a moment. He reaches for her elbow, and she –

Well, in a moment she has him pinned by his throat against the PT Cruiser (Finstock’s) next to her Civic, and his eyes are flashing red and dangerous and his fingers lengthen into claws before he swallows and they turn back into fingers. She can feel the movement of his throat under her hands. “Let’s not escalate this,” he says, his voice lower, almost a growl.²⁸

[(28) How stereotypical.]

She takes a breath. Lets him go. She thinks she sees bruises on his skin, but they fade so quickly that they might have been shadows. They stare at one another; her pulse, so calm just a minute ago, beats hard in her wrists and chest.

She says, “Stay the hell away from me.” Her voice sounds far away to her own ears.

He says, “We might not have that option.” His jaw is set.

“We have that option,” she tells him, furiously, feeling like she might cry - later, anyway. “It’s our only option. I am not part of your pack. Of the three of you, and don’t ask me how that constitutes a pack, there is only one of you I am reluctantly willing to share space with, and it is not you or your crazy uncle. I’m not going to be the one hallucinating in math class again. Do you understand? Can you use whatever minor gifts of intellect you have to comprehend that I am not willing to play nice with people who think it’s perfectly all right to screw with my sanity?”

“I didn’t.” Derek looks furious himself, but his eyes stay green. “I wouldn’t.”

“Your uncle did, and from all accounts the two of you are sharing a cosy abandoned public works project now.”

“That’s – complicated.”

“I’m sure it’s very complicated for you; it’s not like he killed your sister and bisected her body or anything.” Derek’s eyes flash red again, just for a second, and she takes a sick kind of terrified pleasure in getting to him the way that Peter’s presence gets to her. “I, on the other hand, have boundaries.”

“What’s happening to you – “

“- is, beyond whatever useful information you might be able to give Scott or Stiles, none of your business.” She meets his eyes. She won’t be afraid of Derek; she will think of him as a sad twentysomething who hangs out with teenagers exclusively, not a mythical creature with the ability (and the will, by now at least) to tear her throat out with his teeth. “We aren’t friends. We don’t share a lupine pack bond of any kind. The only thing you’ve ever done for me is hang out with the guy who did his best to make me lose my goddamn mind, and quite frankly things are going to get out of hand if I have to keep telling you to leave me alone.”

But Derek doesn’t growl. He doesn’t step back into her personal space. He looks – she thinks, for a second, that he looks unhappy, but his face hardens. “Things are getting out of hand already,” he says. “What’s happening to you isn’t even the worst of it.”

More cryptic werewolf bullshit. She shakes her head. “Stay away from me,” she tells him, roughly, hitting the unlock button on her key fob. He shakes his head and walks away.

She gets in and sits with her hands gripping her steering wheel for a few minutes, breathing through her nose. She is not going to cry in her car in the Beacon Hills High School parking lot; she is not going to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing her break down. She can hear the whispers in the hallways and she knows that nobody is talking about her fabulous new boots (although they should be). She is not going to live out the rest of her high school days as the crazy one, like Bella Peretti last year who tried to cut her wrists in the bathroom at a party. If she has to exist on the periphery of high school life for a while, she is more or less resigned to that as a consequence of dealing with supernatural entities. But – to be visible and pitied is so much worse than just invisible. She’s had enough of that.

When she finally has enough presence of mind to start the engine, she looks up to see Jackson standing on the steps. He looks like he’s watching her.

She drives home hating him, hating Derek Hale, hating everyone.

xvi.

That night, after she says good night to her mother, she dreams that she is drowning, a cold hand on the back of her neck.

xvii.

She wakes up very early the next morning, two hours before her alarm is due to go off. It’s outside, still dark, but something feels – wrong. Something is twisting her stomach and pushing adrenaline through her veins.

The house is quiet; so’s the street. She can’t hear or see anything strange. That doesn’t stop her from sliding out of bed, shushing Prada (who sleeps curled up against Lydia’s side, some nights), slipping her phone into the back pocket of her pajamas, and grabbing Dad’s hunting knife from the top of her dresser.²⁹

[(29) She doesn’t even know why he owns a hunting knife, since the only time he goes hunting is for corporate retreats every two or three years, but that just means he won’t miss it.]

The knife’s heavy.

Her mom’s door is still closed. She steps carefully on the stairs, avoiding creaks. She feels cold; it’s so early that the thermostat hasn’t turned the heat up for the day. (Maybe that’s not the only reason she feels chills prickling her shoulder blades, but it’s the only one she plans on accepting.)

The house gets a lot of natural light during the day, and at night there’s enough from streetlights to make your way down and through the front hallway without incident. She looks around, a little wildly, and wonders if she really is cracking up; if all of this, every single second of the last five days, has been a product of her imagination. It reminds her of the feeling of freefall from her dream on – was it Monday? It seems like a long time ago.

She steps into the front room and stops abruptly.

There are people on the front lawn. Five, six – she counts seven figures, in groups of three and four, silhouetted by the streetlamp at their backs. They’re facing her, and she can’t see their faces.

They’re in front of her house.

It hasn’t really been that long since she’s been this scared; somehow, it doesn’t make it easier. They haven’t seen her yet – she isn’t visible from the window, she’s still in front of the front door – but she feels frozen in place. She gropes for her phone, but they’ll see the light if she turns it on, and who would she call? Who could she call? Allison and Scott and Stiles, three against seven? (Four, if you count her; four, if she could imagine breathing or speaking or moving.)

She doesn’t know how to fight, not really. She can throw a punch, and maybe surprise Derek Hale, but the cold, hard truth is that if these things are werewolves – or vampires, or whatever – then she is standing twenty feet away from dying an awful, grisly death, the kind in a horror movie that you feel for an hour afterward – a splintered-bone, rent-flesh kind of death. She knows about those; she’s seen enough of them in her stress nightmares this week. 

Eventually, she sinks to the floor; not out of weakness, but to get herself out of sight, in case they move, change their lines of sight. She moves as slowly as she can to sit with her back against the front door, knees pulled up to her chest.

She spends the time until sunrise with anger building deep in her stomach. When she sees the first sign of grey dawn filtering across the floor, she stands, face burning, heart stuttering; they’re gone. She flings open the door, full of stupid daylight bluster, but the yard is cold and empty, frost tipping the grass.

She has to turn back to the house to see what they left: A symbol spray-painted on the door; a triangle, three spokes extending outward, the tips jagged and angled. The paint is still wet enough to be tacky when she touches it.

They’re gone, but they were there.

They came to her house.

xviii.

The Sheriff’s Department sends a cruiser over when her mother discovers the vandalism. The neighbors come out to see what the fuss is, and her mother spends half an hour on the phone with her contractor. “We might as well replace that door now anyway,” she says, “I’ve been wanting to redo the entrance,” and Lydia shrugs and gets ready for school.

She stares at her reflection: Pale skin, three freckles on her nose, hair that needs styling or product or both. What the hell is she supposed to do now?

After a minute or two, she calls Allison and says, “Want to skip today?”

Allison, who is kind of a saint but not so much that she objects to skipping class (at least ever since Scott indoctrinated her, and who said Scott couldn’t do anything right?), says, “Sure.”

Lydia says, “Tell Stiles and Scott,” and says goodbye. Downstairs, she tells her mother not to forget to call the school about her doctor’s appointment (Mom waves in understanding, still on the phone), and makes herself a double espresso, which she drinks before she leaves. Business as usual.

She looks at the lawn to see if she can find any clues, but there aren’t any, of course. Nothing overtly trampled; no calling card. It’s just grass. She remembers to take a picture of the door so she can show it to her crack team of supernatural detectives (oh, God), and then drives to the diner forty minutes outside of Beacon Hills. It’s small and a little dirty and you wouldn’t skip school just to go there for fun, but they have good coffee and better pie (homemade), and they don’t care if you’re too young to be off your leash during the day.

xix.

“The thing is,” Stiles says, waving his third cup of coffee perilously close to Allison’s face, “ – sorry, Al – the thing is, I don’t think she’s turning into a werewolf.”

“I’m thinking that ship sailed too,” Allison agrees, chin cupped in her hand. “She didn’t get bitten again, and she can’t hear or smell anything better than I can.” Lydia is sure she should be offended by the suggestion that she is somehow normal, but she can’t figure out why, so she lets it slide. “So what is it?”

“Maybe she’s a hereditary witch,” Stiles suggests.

“My dad said that usually involved more mysterious telekinesis murders.” Allison sighs at her pie, like the pie ever did anything to her. Lydia’s friends are ingrates. “And I think she’d also seem eviler.”

That gets her a dubious look from Scott and Stiles. “How could we tell?” Scott asks, and Stiles kicks him. Lydia glares at both of them. “See?” he whines in Allison’s direction, but they’re broken up; Allison is on Lydia’s side.

“Shut up,” she tells him, but she’s trying not to smile.

Lydia sighs. “Stiles,” she says, “I know you met my mom, because she never stops talking about that time you brought us soup when I was sick.” Stiles flushes. “Does she seem like someone with an overabundance of mystical wisdom to you? Evil or not?”

There’s a pause while Stiles thinks about that. “Not so much,” he admits.

“So,” she says, “Let’s go ahead and assume that I am not a hereditary witch.” 

Fifteen minutes later, they’re all sort of staring at their coffee.

“Maybe we should talk about that thing on your door,” Stiles suggests, “Since obviously whatever higher being you’re evolving into isn’t on our supernatural roll-call list.”

“At least she’s not turning into a scaly venom murder monster,” Scott points out, and it is a sad sign of how far she has fallen that it’s actually comforting.³⁰

[(30) Although it reminds her of Jackson, and that makes her have to sit up straighter and think about something else.]

“I sent the picture to my dad,” Allison says. “He sent me a text saying he was going to look into it, but he’s got a meeting with the San Francisco PD acquisitions committee today, so he might not get a chance.”

“I’ll tell you what it looks like to me,” Stiles says. “Derek’s tattoo.”

“That swirly thing?” Scott asks.

“What tattoo,” Lydia says, almost at the same time. She trades a look with Allison. “How do you guys know about Derek’s tattoo, and does it really look like this thing?”

“That guy hates shirts almost as much as sentences,” Stiles says gloomily. “There’s probably nobody at the creepy abandoned transit station hideout to appreciate the results of his finely-honed chest-waxing routine. Except Isaac.”

“Don’t put that on Isaac,” Scott says, appalled. “He’s been through enough as it is.”

That makes Allison snort coffee through her nose, which makes Lydia burst into semi-hysterical laughter. People turn and stare. She can’t stop laughing, though, and Allison’s eyes are streaming while she tries. “What?” Scott demands.

“Nothing,” Allison says finally, coughing and holding a paper napkin over her face, which is red. “Don’t worry about it. Sorry, did I get coffee on your shirt? I think I have a Tide-to-Go pen in my bag.”

Scott is not distracted. “Seriously, what?”

“Dude,” Stiles says, rolling his eyes, “You totally compared being witness to Derek’s OCD man-grooming to being locked in a basement freezer.”

“I did not!” Scott protests. He wilts under Stiles’s stern eye. “I didn’t mean to! I meant – you know what I meant!” Allison is hiding a grin under her hand, because she is weak.

“Anyway,” Lydia says, “tell me about the tattoo. It looks like this?” She wields the phone closer to Stiles’s face, just to make him make that confused kitten look.³¹

[(31) Her life seriously lacks amusement these days.]

“No,” Stiles says. “I mean, sort of, but it’s a classic triskele. People usually think it’s Celtic, but there’s actually a lot of evidence pointing toward a pre-Celtic origin – ow! Okay, okay, I’m getting to the point, no need for kicking, a bruised Stiles is a distracted Stiles, yes, there’s a difference, shut up, Scott. Anyway. It represents a trinity – you know, spirit-mind-body, or past-present-future. It’s about cycles, or action, or especially movement.”

“So the tricycle symbol without the spiral parts means what?” Scott asks. 

“Triskele,” Stiles corrects him. “And I have no idea.”

“The middle looks weird, too,” Scott adds, consulting his own phone for a closer look. “It’s sort of like that’s the focus, not the spiral parts like Derek’s tattoo.”

Scott is not wrong, which is annoying. “Maybe it’s – like, a lone alpha,” Allison suggests, tugging at her thick braid thoughtfully. “You know, he lost his pack, or he never had one – “

“Why are we assuming it’s a he,” Stiles says. “I find that sexist. Reverse-sexist.”

“Reverse sexism isn’t sexism,” Lydia tells him severely.³² “Sexism is prejudice plus power.”

[(32) She has her feminist principles.]

“Fine, it’s just mean,” Stiles says, making a face at her, like he’s forgotten that she’s Lydia Martin. She kind of likes it, until he remembers and straightens up and the moment ends. “But it could be a lady alpha. Like Laura Hale.”

“It’s too bad our experience with normal packs is so limited,” Lydia says, sighing. “All we have are the Hales, and they’re about as typical as Flowers in the Attic.”

“I would avoid the incest allegations anywhere near Derek,” Stiles tells her, and she snorts.

The front window shatters inward a few seconds later.

Chaos spreads, like wildfire on gasoline, jumping from table to table to table. Their waitress drops a pot of coffee, which shatters on the tile floor; plates splinter, dropped from hands and tables. Lydia moves almost not quickly enough, blocking claws to her face and chest, twisting an arm and throwing someone up against the counter. Retro leather stools fall and clang and one hits her in the stomach, hard, but she manages to stay on her feet. Allison takes a hit to the face and swings out with a taser, but it glances off; then Scott and whoever it is are grappling, claws out.

The impression of red eyes flares hot in the frenzied air, obliterated by a blow to the face that she narrowly manages to redirect to her forehead. It stuns her, but she’s still moving. Somehow, her body knows what to do, even if there is a part of her – the part that sat stunned in front of a video store; the part that dream-walked through the forest to the Hale house – that is still frozen, neither fighting nor fleeing. That part is – distant, now.

The noise is amazing, overwhelming; it’s all she can do to keep up, to dodge a snarling mouth and land a knee in someone’s face. (She hopes it wasn’t Scott, but she can’t be sure.) She has to hiss and twist and yank to throw the figure coming at her across the room, and she doesn’t know what’s happening until everything stills and the noise dies down. The commotion has moved outside; she hears screams, sees people standing with hands over their mouths. Two or three people are laid out on the ground, but she can’t see if they are alive.

Their waitress is dead, though, her neck at an angle that makes Lydia’s stomach twist in horrified sympathy. She hasn’t noticed until now that the woman’s nametag said Jolene; she distantly wonders if she was named after the Dolly Parton song. What a terrible namesake.

There’s blood and coffee and pie and pancake syrup on the floor. The smell is nauseating, sticky-sweet, harsh and hot and metallic.

“Miss Martin,” says the woman she threw across the room, standing without difficulty. The table beside her is splintered and twisted, but she’s not even bleeding. “A pleasure.”

There’s liquid trickling down Lydia’s face. “Who the hell are you,” she says, through her teeth.

The woman smiles. She is tall and curvy, with broad strong hips and shoulders, and her hair is sleek and dark and shiny. “I’m Annie,” she says. “I just wanted to say hello before the fun got started, little slayer. I’m looking forward to this. We didn’t realize you’d be so young. Or that you’d have such interesting friends.”

Lydia swallows her sickness and fear and disgust. Her voice is light and high, and she says, tilting her head to Allison, “Is it just me, or is this whole crazy werewolf thing already really overdone?” (And just like that she can tell that Stiles is okay, just from his voice when he says, "No kidding," and the way he moves, scrambling up from the floor.)

“Completely passé,” Allison agrees, and her voice doesn’t even shake. She has a taser in one hand and she’s braced for action, feet wide. Something in the back of Lydia’s mind says, She looks like a warrior, but how would Lydia know?

She says, “So was this whole murder rampage just a little teaser trailer for the movie we’ve already seen? Because quite honestly we have better things to do.” She tosses her hair, doesn’t wipe away what she thinks must be the blood sliding down her chin and dripping onto her chest.

“Oh, honey,” Annie says, smooth and sweet herself, like she hadn’t been a slobbering hell-beast just moments ago. Her coral lipstick isn’t even smeared. Scott’s head jerks to the side, like he hears something, and Annie’s smile widens. Her voice is liquid, like sticky-sweet vodka, like hot light on sunburnt skin. “We’re gonna put you through your paces, little girl. They weren’t kidding when they said you’d be fun.”

“And who are ‘they’?” Lydia grits out.

“Oh, just a few strays we picked up outside of town,” Annie says. “Don’t worry. We’re taking excellent care of them.”

“Boyd and Erica,” Scott says, snarling, wolfed out again – or maybe he never shifted back in the first place. He’s the one Lydia doesn’t need to worry about.

“Boyd and Erica,” Annie sighs. “I love them, don’t you? Her eyes, his mouth. We’ve had a few interesting evenings with those two. The Beacon Hills pack was never this exciting before.” Her smile is wide, generous, doesn’t look feral or malicious at all. She tilts her head to the side. “Well, that’s my cue to leave.”

And Lydia suddenly hears the faint wail of sirens. Annie sweeps out, ears and claws lengthening, and she steps on Jolene’s dyed-red hair on her way.

Lydia wants to shout, “Leave us alone,” but Annie just did. She wants to say, “Get the hell out of my home,” but they’re not in her home. (They were there, though. Her imagination provides Annie's sleek long hair and sturdy legs to one of the figures in her mind's eye.) She wants to scream and cry and lash out with her hands and feet and teeth, until she gets some peace, but she is grown up, and she knows the secret of adulthood; there is no peace.

Instead, she tosses her hair, and gestures to the door. “Let’s get out of here,” she says, and they climb over broken glass and food and Jolene (Lydia is careful, careful, careful to avoid her hair) and through the door hanging off its hinges into the parking lot.

xx.

Sheriff Stilinski is pissed. He was pissed when he picked them up from Trinity County General, where they’d ended up after the attack; he was pissed while he waited for them to make their statements at the Trinity country PD; he was pissed when they arrived at the Beacon Hills sheriff’s department; and he was pissed when he stuck them all in his office and told them to stay put, for God’s sake, he had to make some calls. 

They’re a mess; Scott is fine, but his shirt is ripped and his pants are ruined with what looks like gore and is actually the remnants of a strawberry-rhubarb pie. Allison has the beginnings of a black eye and a sore wrist. Stiles’s palms and elbows are raw from a bad fall. Lydia’s hair is in a ponytail – not a Pintrest easy-retro ponytail, just a plain step-below-gym-class ponytail – and there’s a long cut just under her hairline, over her right eye.³³

[(33) Four stitches. Her mother had said, “Do you think it’ll show?” and her dad had told her to ask for an attending, not a resident, his girl deserves the best.]

“I’m dead,” Stiles moans into his arms. He’s folded forward onto the Sheriff’s cluttered desk, hoodie askew. “I’m never going to see daylight again.”

“We were the victims,” Lydia reminds him. “Of a vicious, unprovoked attack.” She pauses. “By an unhinged spree killer we can’t identify,” she adds.

“Dead,” he repeats, shifting to balance his chin on his forearms. “He’s going to murder me with his disappointed face and serious talks about how he just wants me to be a good man like my mom would have wanted. I’m going to die of shame and I didn’t even do anything wrong. Except skip class, but I get straight As!”

“If that’s the criteria, maybe he should be killing Scott,” Lydia says crisply.

“Oh, God,” Scott says, belatedly horrified. “My mom’s going to kill me! I had a French quiz this morning.”

Since he helped keep everyone from getting disemboweled, Lydia silently resolves to tutor Scott on the conjugation of irregular verbs before his midterm. She learned French by watching CBC News in French, which doubled as research for a project she did on Canadian-American trade relations in the eighth grade.

“My dad’s not going to be thrilled either,” Allison says, frowning at the scuffed toes of her boots.³⁴ “I’m probably going to get grounded again.”

[(34) Lydia sympathizes; her sweater is ruined.]

The door opens, and Lydia is saved from having to say her parents will be furious too. (They might be worried that there are a couple of stitches in her hairline, but she hasn’t been in trouble since she can remember.) The Sheriff’s face is grim.

Stiles doesn’t seem so funny, anymore. Lydia watches the silent interplay between him and his dad, the way Stiles avoids his eyes, and it strikes her how old the Sheriff looks when he looks at Stiles these days, old and careworn and desperate for safety. Her throat constricts. Nobody’s looked at her that way in her life.

“Your parents are coming,” he tells them finally. “I’m glad you’re all safe.” He puts a hand on Stiles’s head, his neck, gentle, checking him over for the fifth time since the hospital.³⁵ He sighs, brushing his hand over Stiles’s hair. Stiles looks miserable but comfortable in his misery, resigned to his little betrayals.

[(35) Of course Lydia’s been counting. She’s fascinated by this rare display of functional familial affection.]

It’s a few minutes before Mr. Argent arrives. He’s obviously flustered, papers under his arm, panic in the lines around his mouth and eyes. “Allison,” he says.

“Hi, Dad,” she says, and he pulls her into a quick, fierce hug.

“I’m glad you’re okay, you escape artist,” he tells her, and she smiles a wavery little smile at him. “Let’s get you out of here. Lydia,” he adds, “Come for dinner this weekend. Allison said your mom’s been working a lot lately.”

“Sure,” she tells him, glancing at Allison, who shrugs; not a traitor, just an excuse.

They wait in silence for a while. Scott’s phone keeps pinging with texts, but, under Sheriff Stilinski’s stern eye, he doesn’t dare look at them.

Scott’s mom arrives, looking harried. “Scott,” she says. “Thank God. You’re okay.” She leans down to check anyway, capable nurse’s hands seeking him out – and she knows he’s a werewolf, that he’s fine, so she’s a great actress; she’s looking at his pupils and checking his hair. She looks genuinely worried. She looks up at the Sheriff. “Thanks,” she says, her voice wavering on a note Lydia can’t place. “Thanks for looking after him, as usual.”

His smile is wry. “Thanks for patching Stiles up all those times,” he says, and she leans up to kiss him on the cheek.

She and Scott leave, so it’s just Lydia and the Stilinskis left. She pulls the sleeves of her sweater over her fingers so that she won’t fidget with her broken nails. She’s been meaning to file them down anyway, since she has decided that the nail art trend is beneath her notice. Short and simple, like Coco Rocha.

Half an hour later, the Sheriff stands up, putting aside the files he’d been going over (or, maybe, just pretending to; she’s noticed him glancing up at Stiles too often to really be focusing). “Lydia,” he says, “I’m going to try your parents again. Your mom said they’d be here, but – “

“It’s okay,” she says. “I can wait out front if you guys want to go home. They’re just – late.” She smiles. “It can’t be genetic, because my punctuality is legendary, but neither of them can be trusted to show up when they’re supposed to. I’m sure they just got caught in traffic.”³⁶

[(36) “Traffic”, in Beacon Hills, is an extra ten minutes at lights on the main drag from 5:15 to 6:05pm. She knows because she did a project on traffic patterns for an online class she took last summer.]

“We don’t mind waiting,” Stiles says, and for once he doesn’t say it like he’s hoping she’ll realize he’s her soulmate. He just says it like he doesn’t mind waiting, and his dad nods and sits back down.

Another fifteen minutes tick by – she’s more conscious of them now – before she hears her mother’s unmistakable voice in the hallway. “– that this happened because I’m not supervising her properly, you are more than welcome to petition the judge for primary custody, but I’d like to remind you what happened the last time – oh, hello, Sheriff.” Her mother is flushed and out of breath, and her dad is red-faced. “Oh, Lydia,” she says, and something in her voice makes Lydia want to leave. “Your poor face.”

“Tough luck, kiddo,” Dad says uncomfortably, leaning in to hug her briefly. He kisses her cheek. “We’re going to have to talk about this playing hooky with lacrosse players thing,” he adds, trying to be stern, but it’s just uncomfortable, an act they’re all putting on.

“Not now, Richard,” Mom says, almost snaps, sanding off the edges as she goes.  “Let’s get you home, sweetheart,” she adds, and it’s mean because she means her home, not Dad’s.

She says, “Okay,” and then, “Thanks for waiting,” to Stiles, who lifts a hand.

“Thanks for the pie, as a last meal it wasn’t so bad,” he says, and she smiles and leaves between her parents, bracketed by their height and age and the conversation they’re having about limits. She’ll never see the results of it, so she tunes it out until she’s hugging her dad goodbye and slumping into the passenger seat of her mom’s Rav-4.

“I was just feeling tired,” she explains on the drive home. “I just thought – why not take a day off, you know?”

Her mother looks fond. “Next time, tell me,” she says. “Believe me, I understand needing a break. We can do a spa day. That way, you won’t be pulling kids who need to be there out of class, and we can spend some time together.”

“That sounds great,” Lydia says. She knows it will never happen, but if your parents can’t be unhappy and worried about you, if they can’t check you over for broken bones or ground you for getting caught in a violent murder situation when you should be in third period, at least they can have good intentions.

Her parents have good intentions. Lydia knows that. They aren’t bad people. They’re just not that emotional.

It’s the last time they discuss the topic. Her mother orders Indian for dinner, and Lydia finds the Polysporin in the medicine cabinet in her bathroom so that she can reapply it before bed.

She looks at her face in the mirror and tells herself what she tells herself when things get bad: Two more years. It sounds stupid, but it works; she feels certainty weighing down all the questions and confusions she’s had for days, weeks, months. She looks at herself – she is small, with sharp elbows, full lips, honey-hazel eyes – and feels like a stranger.

It’s easier to ignore it when her head isn’t throbbing with stress. Since when can she stand up to a werewolf?

Annie had called her little slayer. It sticks in her mind because it’s so awkward; it sounds like a proper noun, not an epithet. She’s only ever killed one thing; and she didn’t mean to.

She uses cold cream to take her makeup off and brushes her hair until it’s smooth. Tomorrow she’ll use her index finger to hide the bruisey shadows under her eyes, and highlight the inside corner of her eyes, and she’ll look like herself again.

xxi.

That night she tosses and turns and can’t sleep. At 2:37, her phone buzzes, harsh and loud in the still night. It’s an unknown number.

She answers it anyway, contrary in the face of her fear – call it caution, rather. “Hello?”

“Lydia, it’s Ms. Morell,” the voice says, smooth, feminine. The sound shocks through Lydia’s stomach unpleasantly. “I thought we could talk, if you’re awake.”

“Our sessions,” Lydia says pointedly, “are on Tuesdays.”

“Do you think I’m calling you at two in the morning about our sessions?”

“I have no idea why you’re calling me at two in the morning. How did you get this number?”

“It’s in your mobile technology contract,” Ms. Morell says. “You signed it at the beginning of the year.”

“So you’re misappropriating school resources to harass me outside of school hours,” Lydia says flatly. “I’m sure Vice-Principal Choudhury would be thrilled to hear about this.”

“I’m sorry about the hour.” She doesn’t sound sorry. "Unfortunately, we have some business to discuss."

Lydia feels too tired to be careful, so she says, "Is this the kind of business that involves werewolves, by any chance? Because if you have some insights on that, I'm fascinated."

“Meet me at the animal hospital,” Ms. Morell says, like Lydia hasn’t even spoken. "As soon as you can."

“The animal hospital?” Lydia asks. “Are you serious?” There’s no reply; the line is silent. “Um, hello?” 

Ms. Morell has hung up on her, which might be a new personal low; dissed by a French teacher. Lydia’s not even sure if it was Ms. Morell. It sounded like her, but she has a shaky truce with her senses now, nothing more. It could have been anyone: Annie, Erica Reyes, Aunt Kate back from the dead, why not.

It could be Peter Hale, reaching out to nudge her temporal lobe into a series of meaningless lies.

It could have been no one. It could be something wrong with her brain, something misfiring all on its own.

She turns on her bedside lamp, and gets dressed in the first thing she finds.

It’s always been her besetting sin; she wants to know, know, know.

xxii.

The lights are on at the vet’s when Lydia pulls up in front. It’s colder than it should be, this time of year; there’s even a thin promise of snow in the clouds. The other car has California plates, but a bumper sticker that says Je suis fier de ne pas voter conservateur. Someone has added an ‘e’ in Sharpie at the end of ‘fier’.

Lydia is distantly aware that her heart is thrumming, fast and consistent. Adrenaline, maybe. She closes the Civic’s door quietly, rocks back on her heels. She feels lightheaded. She feels awake. Her engine pops and cools in the silence, and she squares her shoulders, walks the short distance (it feels longer) to the door, and goes inside.

Dr. Deaton is behind the desk.

“Hello, Lydia,” he says.

“You’re working late,” she says, lifting her chin. “Do you get a lot of business after midnight?”

He raises an eyebrow. “In this town?”

Touché.

“Gen is in the back room,” he says gently, adding, “Ms. Morell. She’s waiting for you,” when Lydia looks – well, she must look confused, or suspicious, or stunned, because he’s reacting to whatever it is that’s on her face.³⁷

There is a dead body in the back room. Lydia sees it – him – before she sees Ms. Morell; he is pale and fishy, naked (probably naked) under a sheet. Under the harsh fluorescents, he looks awful.

The only dead body she’s ever seen before is Peter’s.

At least this isn’t worse than that.

“Hello,” Ms. Morell says. Her voice is quiet. “I’m sorry that we haven’t had a chance to talk yet. How are you?”

“It’s three in the morning,” Lydia says, her voice cold and brittle like the glass panes in the windows out front, “this is a vet clinic, and that is a corpse. Let’s skip the pleasantries.”

“Lydia,” Ms. Morell says, a half-smile pulling on the corner of her mouth. “Calm down; I am sorry that we haven’t had a chance to talk about this before now, but it’s been busy. Did you get my note?”

She is calm. “I got two anonymous notes with ugly jewelry attached,” she says evenly. “I don’t take things from anonymous sources, by the way. I’d think someone who’s responsible for minors would get that. Can we talk about the dead guy? Let’s talk about the dead guy.” She puts her car keys down with a clang on the bench.

“I should have been more sensitive,” Ms. Morell says. “Sorry about the notes. It’s sort of a – well, not really a tradition, but I didn’t have a lot of time, and we weren’t sure if it was really you or not.”

“If what was really me?”

Ms. Morell continues, “I thought it was more likely it was Allison Argent – she has the pedigree – but Alan was sure it was you.”

“Do you need me for this conversation?” Lydia feels – not dizzy, but vertiginous, unstable. She doesn’t like it.

“Allison has her dad, but you were alone – and if it wasn’t you, well, there are things we don’t want everyone knowing, and there’s only so much we can interfere without drawing notice. Still, given your circumstances with Peter Hale, I do regret not finding another way." 

“Excuse me,” Lydia says. “Is this a werewolf thing? Is this you thinking that I’m going to join your little werewolf pack and participate in tiringly trite anthropomorphized wolf behaviors with you?”

Ms. Morell laughs. She has straight white teeth, and her hair, as usual, is shiny and long and sleek, perfectly styled. “I promise that this is not a werewolf thing,” she says. “And I promise that I have answers for you. But – here.” She tosses something at Lydia, and Lydia has to catch it or let it hit her in the face.

It’s a goddamned wooden stake. Just a big old pointy stick. She could have cut herself on this! She could get a splinter! Who knows where this thing has been –

The sound of movement on metal makes her tense all over, almost jump; she could have sworn that she just saw him move. The sheet is a little bit rumpled now; her eyes go to Ms. Morell’s face.

“This is Mr. Hanania,” Ms. Morell says.

“Is Mr. Hanania dead?” Lydia asks, her voice strained, stretched beyond her control.

“Yes,” Ms. Morell says.

An arm jerks. Lydia doesn’t move. She holds the stake in front of her, in one hand, like that’s going to make a difference in this situation. (Maybe she’s dreaming. She hopes she’s dreaming, that this is just another night where she will wake up with the ghost-feeling of another death in her body.)

“This used to be easier to tell,” Ms. Morell says. “It used to be that in every generation, one girl was born with a duty to fight the monsters that plagued humanity.”

On the gurney, shoulders roll.

“One girl, with the power – and a few other things – that she needed to protect people. Simple, right? One girl.” Ms. Morell sighs. “Things changed.”

Mr. Hanania sits up; looks around. His eyes fall on her, and his movements become smoother, like he's getting used to his joints again.

“What the hell is going on,” Lydia says through her teeth, unable to raise her interrogative at the end.

“A while ago, someone realized that it would be easier to fight the forces of darkness if everyone who could become that girl did. There were quite a few upheavals that year, but that one profoundly changed our world, and so few people will ever know exactly how much.”

The man – the body; God, he still looks dead, he looks dead and it can’t just be the shitty lighting – swings his legs off the gurney. The sheet falls in a quick swish of fabric to the floor, exposing him. He is dead, and naked, and grotesque, his skin grey across his belly, his face, his hands.

She doesn’t expect him to be fast. He almost gets a hand around her throat, and all she can think is that she can’t stand for him to touch her; they tangle for a second, until she gets a knee in his stomach. His back hits the gurney, but he recovers faster than she imagines he will. His face looks ruined, bumpy, and his incisors are long and sharp.

He hisses. It’s not like a person imitating a cat; it’s an animal sound, one that reverberates all the way back to her reptile hindbrain and sticks there.

“You know what to do,” Ms. Morell says calmly.

“What the hell – “ Lydia says, before he’s on her again. He hits her in the chest, hard, and she reels for a second because it hurts. Worse than that, she can feel where his skin touched hers, the same feeling you might get when a cockroach runs over your foot.

Later, she’ll feel stupid for how long it took her to put it together. She’s supposed to be a genius, isn’t she?

But just then all she thinks is: Oh.

When it’s over – when Mr. Hanania is just a thin layer of dust on Dr. Deaton’s examination room floor – Ms. Morell says, “Lydia, it’s my duty as a member of the Watchers’ Council to inform you that you have been chosen.”

“Chosen,” Lydia repeats, her eyes on the thin air where Mr. Hanania once stood.

“Chosen,” Ms. Morell says, “to be a vampire slayer.”

Huh.