The back seat of Jackson's car smelled like leather conditioner and expensive cologne.
She pressed the back of her head against the seat and looked at the roof and breathed through her mouth. The silver burns at her throat and her wrists had stopped being a background ache somewhere around the first hour after the chains had come off and had graduated into something more insistent — a slow grinding throb that hadn't let up. Four days without eating. She had known, abstractly, that it would slow the healing. She hadn't understood exactly how much until now.
In the front, Stiles drove.
He hadn't looked at her since they'd gotten in. She knew it was deliberate — the specific quality of his not-looking, the careful angle of his jaw, the way his eyes stayed on the road with a focus that had nothing to do with the road. She knew the difference between someone who had forgotten she was there and someone who was working at it.
The town moved past the windows. Dark, indifferent. It wasn't a long drive, and her mind was still back in that room.
The hunters had left and the silence had come back in and Jackson had stared at her with his eyes doing something she could only describe as architecturally unsound — like a building that had added too many floors and wasn't sure it would hold.
She had pulled herself upright. It had cost more than it should have — her arms shaking with the effort, the burns at her wrists screaming when she put weight on them, a groan she couldn't entirely suppress working its way through her teeth. She had gotten one hand against the wall and used it and stood.
Jackson had said nothing. He'd kept staring.
Stiles had been watching her too. She could feel it — the weight of his gaze, the jaw set hard, the particular stillness of someone who had decided how they felt and was holding it in place with effort. He hadn't moved toward her.
She had passed a hand across her cheek. Felt the drag of blood on her skin, still wet.
"Why did you help?" she had asked.
Stiles had taken a breath. His gaze had stayed hard. "I didn't want him to kill you."
She had looked at him. "Why?"
The word had come out quieter than she'd intended — genuinely asking, not challenging. She had told him, in the corridor upstairs, what she was. What she had done. He had every reason to have let Chris Argent do whatever he'd been going to do.
Stiles had said nothing. His posture rigid, the specific tightness of someone who had something to say and had decided not to say it. Then he had turned toward Jackson. "Let's go."
Jackson had looked between them. "We're leaving her here?"
"Yes."
The word had landed flat and Stiles was already moving toward the door and something had risen in her chest — grief, or anger, or both — and she had pressed it down hard because she was not going to cry again, she had decided she was not going to cry again, and she could feel her eyes already threatening it and she was furious at them for it.
"And what are you planning to do?" Her hand had found the wall. It was the only thing keeping her upright. "Two humans can't stop an Alpha."
Stiles had stopped.
He hadn't turned around. She could see the line of his shoulders, the way they had changed.
"And you're glad of it, aren't you?" His voice had been quiet. Completely direct.
The words had gone in like silver. Finding the place that was already open.
Because part of her was. She couldn't lie about that — not to herself, standing there with the burns still fresh and four days of hunger making everything too close and too sharp. She didn't want Peter dead. She still didn't. He was the only person who had known what she was and stayed, the only fixed point she had had for six years before Beacon Hills. Before everything. Before him.
And that last word had nothing to do with Peter.
But Peter had hurt Stiles, repeatedly, deliberately, and she hadn't stopped it, and Stiles was standing there not-looking at her and she felt guilty, and she was furious at herself for feeling guilty, and none of it was simple and she was too tired to make it simple.
"I don't want him to die," she had said. "But I don't want you to die either."
"So you'll do nothing."
She had glared at him. "Yeah. And so should you."
Stiles had turned around.
The look on his face had not been careful or controlled. Tired and entirely done with being managed. He had looked at her for a moment and then said, "He's going to kill people tonight. Maybe Scott. And you want me to go home."
"I want you to not die." Her voice had come out flat. "Because you will if you face him."
"Big fan of that logic," Jackson had said from the corner, in the tone of someone who had accepted that his evening had become something outside his area of expertise.
She and Stiles had both glared at him.
"The Molotov," Stiles had said suddenly.
Jackson had frowned. "What?"
"You and Lydia made one. At the school." His voice had shifted — she could hear it, the specific change of someone whose brain had found a direction and was already moving. "Can you do it again?"
Jackson had considered it for a moment longer than she would have liked. "I mean. Technically."
Stiles had nodded once. He had looked back at Scarlett. "I have to do something."
"It won't kill him," she had said.
"It doesn't have to kill him," he said firmly. "It has to slow him down long enough for Scott to take him out." The thought made Scarlett's throat tightened.
She had looked at him. At the burns on her own wrists. At the specific exhausted certainty of his face — the look that meant he had already decided and had made his peace with it.
He was going to that house in any way.
And she—
She had looked away.
She had thought about Peter's hand on the back of Stiles' neck in the garage. The sound his head had made against the hood of the car. She had thought about I knew you'd have come and I'll kill him even before you'll have time to do anything, said pleasantly, with that ease that meant he had already thought it through.
She had thought about the promise about Stiles that had never been a promise at all.
She had pressed her lips together.
"You need someone who can actually fight," she had said.
Stiles had looked at her.
"I'm not going for Peter." She had needed him to understand that. She had needed to understand it herself. "I'm going because Kate is going to be there and she still has to answer for what she did." She had stopped. "And because you can't do this alone."
Something had moved through his face that she had chosen not to examine.
"You can barely stand up," he had said.
"I've been worse."
Jackson had looked between them with the expression of someone committed to seeing something through that was entirely outside his area of expertise.
"Jackson," Stiles had said finally. "Get the stuff for the Molotov."
And now the Hale house came into view through the windscreen.
Stiles cut the engine without a word.
She looked at the dark shape of the house against the sky and had approximately one second to register it before the door flew open and Peter came through it.
Alpha form. Enormous, dark, already moving — and Scott was on the ground, trying to get upright, and Peter's hand closed around his collar and lifted him and Scott's feet left the ground and she was already out of the car, already moving, her legs wrong under her and the burns screaming and none of it mattering—
Then the roots came up.
She stopped.
The movement broke the surface of the dead grass without warning — slow, deliberate, the patience of something that had been growing under this ground for decades — and wrapped around Peter's legs before he had understood what was reaching for him. He staggered. His grip on Scott loosened. He looked down at his legs with an expression she had never expected to see on his face.
Confusion.
Scott hit the ground and scrambled back and Scarlett's eyes moved across the field looking for the source of it and found her.
Evelyn was on her knees in the grass, her palms flat against the earth, her lips moving. And her face—
Scarlett stared.
The marks were dark against her skin, spreading from her jaw toward her temples in lines that had no business being there, and her eyes — her eyes were completely black. Not the yellow of a werewolf or the electric blue of Derek's grief. Something older than either of those things, and entirely without limit.
What the hell is she?
Peter roared.
The sound moved through the cold air and through Scarlett's chest and she felt it in the burns at her throat — and Evelyn didn't react. Didn't flinch. Didn't even seem to hear it. She just stayed where she was with her palms in the dirt and her black eyes open and her lips still moving.
She saw his arm come back and she understood what he was doing before she could say anything and the Molotov left his hand in a clean arc—
Peter caught it.
His hand closed around the bottle without even looking at it, mid-air, with the specific ease of someone swatting something irrelevant out of the way.
"Oh, shit," Stiles said.
Peter turned toward him.
The roar hit the air like a physical thing and Scarlett was already moving — every part of her screaming with the effort of it, the burns at her wrists and throat flaring white-hot, her legs not entirely reliable under her — and she put herself between Peter and Stiles with her fangs down and her hands up and she looked at Peter's Alpha form and felt, for the first time in eight years, genuinely afraid of him.
"Allison!" Scott's voice, sharp and certain.
The arrow came from the treeline.
It hit the Molotov still in Peter's hand and the fire was immediate and total — Peter going up like something that had always been meant to burn, the roar this time completely different, pain in it instead of fury — and the flames were enormous and bright and Scarlett felt the sight of them hit her somewhere below the sternum before she could prepare for it.
Fire.
All that fire.
She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth and held herself very still and breathed through it — the vault, the smell, the sounds she could still hear when she let herself — and she did not look away.
"Eve!"
Stiles' voice. She turned.
Evelyn was crumpling — slowly, like something that had been holding itself upright through will alone and had finally run out of it — and the marks on her face were fading as she went down, the black draining from her eyes as the grass came up to meet her.
Scarlett watched Stiles run toward her.
She watched him drop to his knees beside Evelyn in the dead grass, his hands going to her shoulders, his voice saying her name. She watched him look at the girl's face with that open, unguarded expression and she felt something twist in her chest, dull and specific and entirely without remedy.
She turned away from it.
Because there was Peter.
He was several metres away, on the ground, the fire out now, his Alpha form already receding, his body making itself smaller the way bodies do when they have nothing left. She could see the burns on him from here. She could see the way he was breathing — shallow, wrong, the specific rhythm of something working very hard to keep going.
Her eyes stung.
She didn't understand why they were stinging. She was furious at herself for it. He had lied to her about Stiles, repeatedly and deliberately. He had put his hand on the back of Stiles' neck in the garage and pressed his head against the hood of the car and smiled about it. He had never been what she thought he was.
But he was still Peter. The man who had dug her out of her grave. The only fixed point she had had for six years, and she was watching him on the cold ground and her eyes were stinging and she hated herself for every part of it.
She took one step toward him.
Derek moved faster.
She saw him cross the grass with a purpose that made her stomach go cold before she understood why, and she was already moving — everything hurting, her legs wrong under her, the burns at her throat making every breath cost something — and she was not fast enough.
"Derek." Her voice came out low. "What are you doing?"
He didn't answer. He was already standing over Peter, looking down at him with an expression she had never seen on his face before — not anger, something past anger, something that had been waiting a very long time and had finally found its moment.
She grabbed his arm.
He took her and threw her against the nearest tree without even looking at her.
She hit it hard — the bark against her back, the impact travelling up through her spine and into her skull — and slid down the trunk and put her hands out and stayed there for a moment just breathing, because there was nothing else immediately available. The burns at her wrists had split open again. She could feel it, the hot wet wrongness of it.
From somewhere behind her she heard Scott's voice, desperate and climbing.
"Wait! You said the cure comes from the one who bit you. Derek, if you do this, I'm dead. Her father, her family — what am I supposed to do?"
And then Peter's voice from the ground, broken, barely making it out. "You've... already... decided... I can smell it on you."
"Wait! No, no! Don't—"
The sound was very specific and very quiet and entirely final.
She knew what it was before she looked up. And when she looked up it was already done.
Derek was standing.
His eyes glowed red.
"I'm the Alpha now."
The sound that came out of her was not a word. It came from somewhere below language, raw and immediate, and she was on her feet before she had finished making it, the burns and the hunger and everything else irrelevant, her body moving before her mind had caught up.
Peter was still on the ground.
She looked at him for one second — at his face, at the stillness of him, at the specific quality of that stillness that she had never seen from him before and would not see again — and something in her chest collapsed so completely and so quietly that she almost didn't feel it happen.
Then she turned toward Derek and went for him.
She had nothing. She knew she had nothing — no strength, no food, burns at her throat and her wrists, her legs barely holding her up. She knew what Derek was now, what the red meant, what it meant to go against an Alpha in this state. She knew she could not win this.
She went for him anyway.
Because Peter was dead and Stiles was across the field kneeling over another girl and she had nothing left to lose and nowhere left to put any of it except this.
Derek caught her before she had covered half the distance.
She felt it immediately — the difference, the specific weight of an Alpha against her hands, the way he moved through her attack like it was nothing. He caught her wrist — the burned one — and she heard herself make a sound she immediately hated, and he put her on the ground.
She got up.
"Scarlett, stop!" she could hear Stiles' voice, but she didn't stop. She desperately charged Derek, who
put her down again. Easier this time.
And then a third time, and after the third time she stayed down for a moment, her cheek against the cold dead grass, her arms shaking, the burns at her wrists bleeding openly now, and she understood with perfect clarity that she was not getting up again to fight Derek Hale tonight.
She got up anyway. But not to fight.
She got up because staying on the ground was the only thing worse than moving, and she moved, and she walked, and she did not look back at any of it — not at Derek, not at Scott, not at Evelyn still on the grass, not at the place where Stiles was kneeling — and she walked into the dark of the treeline and kept going and did not stop.
She didn't know how long she walked.
The preserve was dark and cold and she moved through it without direction, without purpose, without anything except the specific animal forward motion of something that has been hurt badly enough that stopping feels like dying. The burns at her throat. The ones at her wrists, open now, bleeding into the cold air. The hunger — four days of it, five now, a roar underneath everything that had stopped being background noise somewhere around the second hour after the chains had come off and had become the only sound left.
She was crying.
She hadn't noticed when it had started. The tears ran hot down her face and she didn't stop them and she didn't wipe them away and she kept walking through the dark with the blood from her wrists dripping onto the dead leaves beneath her feet and the cold air doing nothing at all about any of it.
Peter was dead.
Stiles was gone.
She had nothing.
She kept walking.
The trees thinned eventually — she didn't decide to let them, they just did — and the preserve gave way to the edge of a road, one of the small desolate ones that ran along the outskirts of town, empty at this hour, the tarmac pale under the distant wash of a streetlight. She stood at the edge of it and looked at the road and looked at the dark on the other side and breathed.
There was a figure on the road.
She didn't register it as a person at first — just a shape, moving slowly, the particular rhythm of someone walking without particular urgency through the cold. The hunger hit her before the recognition did, immediate and total, her body orienting toward the warmth of another living thing the way it had always oriented toward warmth when it had nothing else, and her fangs were down before she had decided anything, and she was moving before she had thought anything, and the figure turned—
She didn't see the face.
She didn't let herself see the face.
She just moved.
The bite was automatic — the specific, practised geometry of it, her body knowing exactly what to do, the warmth flooding in immediately and the hunger answering it and the burns at her throat beginning, very slowly, to quiet — and she drank, and drank, and felt her hands stop shaking and the burns begin to close and her legs find their steadiness again and the cold recede and everything that had been broken and hurting and wrong begin, very gradually, to knit itself back together.
She drank.
She kept drinking.
She felt herself getting stronger — the specific, terrible relief of it, the hunger finally, finally quiet, her body filling back up with something it had been without for too long — and she drank and she did not think about anything except the relief of it, the warmth of it, the way the pain was receding inch by inch—
The heartbeat slowed.
She heard it before she understood it. The change in rhythm — the slight stuttering, the way it was spacing itself out, the specific quality of a sound that had been steady and was becoming something else.
She stopped.
She pulled back.
She looked at the face.
Irene.
The name arrived before anything else. Just the name, just the recognition, slamming into her with a force that had nothing gentle about it, and she looked at Irene's face — pale now, much too pale, the specific pallor of someone who has lost a great deal very quickly — and at her own hands, still gripping the girl's arms, and at the blood on her mouth, and she understood all at once what she had done.
"No." The word came out as a breath. "No, no, no—"
She caught Irene before she fell, lowering her to the cold ground, her hands shaking again in a completely different way now — not weakness, terror, the specific shaking of someone who has just understood something irreversible.
"No, no—" She pressed her hands against Irene's neck, useless, she knew it was useless, she had taken too much, she could feel it in the way the girl's pulse was moving under her fingers, thin and very far away.
Irene's eyes opened. Slowly. They found Scarlett's face.
"So it was you," she said. Her voice was barely there. But she didn't sound afraid. She sounded almost like someone confirming something they had already known.
"No." Scarlett shook her head, the tears coming again, hot and fast. "No, I didn't — I wasn't — Irene, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry!"
She knew it didn't matter. She had known what she was doing even when she hadn't known who. She had felt the heartbeat slowing and she had kept going anyway, because the hunger had been louder than everything else, because she had been empty and broken and furious and she had let herself stop thinking.
She pressed her lips together.
She looked at her own wrist.
She knew what it meant. She knew what she was about to do and she knew it was not a kindness, not entirely, not in the way kindness usually worked. But it was the only thing she had. It was the only thing left.
She bit down on her own wrist.
The blood welled up immediately — dark, cold, entirely hers — and she pressed it to Irene's lips and said, very quietly, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
Irene didn't fight it. She was too far gone to fight anything. She swallowed, once, and then her eyes closed, and her pulse — what was left of it — stuttered and slowed and stopped.
Scarlett sat in the road with Irene's body in her arms and did not move for a very long time.
She buried her at the edge of the preserve, in the cold earth under the trees, in the dark, with her hands because there was nothing else. She didn't think about the burns at her wrists reopening. She didn't think about anything except the specific task of it, because thinking about anything else was not something she was capable of.
When it was done she sat back on her heels and looked at the disturbed earth.
She was shaking.
She was covered in blood — on her hands, her jacket, her face, drying now in the cold air — and she pulled her knees to her chest and sat in the dark and looked at her hands and did not look away.
This was the thing she had been, alone, when no one was watching. When the hunger was loud enough. When there was no revenge to give it shape and no fixed point to give it meaning and no warm hand to reach for in the dark. This was what was left when all of that was stripped away.
She thought about after the fire. The hunters she had found and taken, one by one — the clean fury of it, the way it had felt like justice, like purpose, like the only available response to something that had no other answer. And then the ones after, when the hunters had run out. When she had kept going anyway because the hunger was there and the anger was there and Peter had always been there to tell her it was her nature and her nature was something to be embraced.
She had believed him. She had needed to believe him.
She pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth and felt the sob come — not the hot blood-tears she had grown almost used to, something rawer than that, something that came from a place she hadn't known was still open — and this time she didn't try to stop it.
She let herself fall.
Her knees hit the cold ground and her hands went into the earth — into the same cold dirt she had just moved with her bare hands — and she stayed there, bent over herself, her forehead almost touching the ground, and she cried in a way she hadn't cried since she was human.
She cried for a long time.
And somewhere in the middle of it, between one wave and the next, the thing she had been trying not to look at directly came into focus with a clarity that had nothing gentle about it.
She had come to Beacon Hills to kill Kate Argent. She had been willing to do anything for that. She had chosen Stiles deliberately — had seen him across a parking lot and had thought useful, had thought accessible, had thought expendable — and had gone to Peter and asked him to hurt him so that she could use him. She had sat across from him for months knowing exactly what she had done and she had let him laugh and she had let him reach for her hand and she had let herself — she had let herself —
She pressed her hands harder into the earth.
Because that was the thing. She had let herself. She had not been performing warmth for strategy. She had forgotten, somewhere along the way, that it had started as strategy. She had forgotten because he had made it impossible to remember— with his laugh and his hands and the specific way he looked at her like she was something worth looking at, like she was someone, like there was a person underneath the thing she had been performing for six years and he could see her and he was not afraid of what he saw.
And who had she been, before that?
She knew who she had been. She had been someone who would have killed him without hesitation. Someone who had looked at the people in this town and seen only what they could give her. She had gone because the hunger was easy and the anger was loud and it was so much simpler to be a predator than to be whatever the other thing was.
She had been that person when she arrived in Beacon Hills.
She was not that person now.
And the only reason — the only reason — was him.
Stiles, who had handed her pig's blood like it was nothing. Stiles, who had defended her to Evelyn with every single time something went wrong she was there. Stiles, who had stood in a parking lot with red-rimmed eyes and cracked voice and said I was happy like it was the most devastating thing he knew how to say. Stiles, who had said I don't trust her to Chris Argent and then stepped between her and a stake anyway.
She pressed her face toward the earth and sobbed.
Because she had ruined it. She had ruined all of it — with what she had done before she knew him and with what she had become while she was with him and with tonight, with this, with the blood on her hands and the grave in front of her and the specific, irreversible fact of what she was when she was alone and empty and had nothing left to reach for.
She didn't want to be alone.
The thought arrived without warning and hit her like something physical — simple and enormous and more true than anything she had thought in months. She didn't want to be alone. She had been alone for six years and she had told herself it was a choice, told herself it was a nature, told herself that creatures like her didn't need the things that humans needed, that needing was weakness and weakness was something Peter had cured her of.
But she was alone right now. Completely, totally alone, in the cold dark with the blood drying on her hands, and it was the worst thing she had ever felt. Worse than the fire. Worse than the vault. Worse than eight years of carrying Kate Argent's name like a wound that wouldn't close.
Worse than all of it.
Now she had nothing. And she had made herself into the thing that deserved nothing, and she didn't know what to do with that except stay here in the cold dark with her hands in the dirt and her knees on the ground and her face wet with blood and feel it, all of it, every specific terrible weight of it.
She wanted to go back.
The thought was so simple it almost made her laugh. She wanted to go back — not to before Beacon Hills, not to the clean simplicity of the hunger and the plan and the empty apartment and Peter's voice telling her who she was. She wanted to go back to the cafeteria table. To his laugh that came before the joke. To the way he reached for her hand without deciding to. To the DVD on the coffee table and the stupid movie she had almost watched with him and the specific quality of the silence in her apartment when he was in it and it was full instead of empty.
She wanted to go back to being the person she had been becoming without knowing it.
She couldn't.
She pressed her hands flat against the cold earth and she breathed and she stayed with that — with the wanting and the impossibility of it and the specific grief of a door that has closed and cannot be reopened — and she let it be as terrible as it was.
She didn't get up for a long time.
When she finally did, the night was still dark and the cold was still complete and nothing had changed except that she had run out of the ability to stay on the ground. She stood. She looked at her hands — at the blood drying in the lines of her palms, at the burns at her wrists still raw and slow to close — and she breathed once, slowly, through her nose.
She didn't know what came next.
Just the dark, and the cold, and the disturbed earth in front of her, and the long road back through the preserve, and somewhere on the other side of it a town that had no place for her and a boy who had every reason to never look at her again.
She turned toward the trees.
And she walked.