**Stiles**
The jazz band on the corner of Royal and St. Peter was butchered—metaphorically first, because their trumpet player couldn't hit a high C to save his soul, and then literally about forty-five seconds later when I got tired of the flat notes.
I stood in the middle of the wet cobblestones, licking a streak of hot, copper-sweet arterial blood off the knuckle of my thumb, and tilted my head at the trumpet player's severed arm lying near the storm drain. His fingers were still twitching against the brass valves.
"See, that's rhythm," I told the three tourists currently backed against a wrought-iron balcony pillar, their eyes blown wide, chests heaving so hard I could hear the wet click of their lungs. "He didn't have it in life, folks. Truly tragic. You come to New Orleans for the culture, the beignets, the soulful wail of brass in the humid night air, and what do you get? A guy playing like he's blowing through a garden hose full of oatmeal."
The woman in the middle—thirty-something, wearing plastic Mardi Gras beads in October and a lanyard with her hotel keycard clipped to it—let out a high, thin whine. Her husband tried to step in front of her. Noble. Stupid, completely useless meat-shield behavior, very Scott McCall of him, and that thought alone made my left eyelid twitch.
I blurred. One step between heartbeats.
My hand closed around the husband's throat, lifting him six inches off the pavement until his sneakers dangled and kicked against my shins. Beneath my palm, his pulse hammered like a trapped sparrow. Simultaneously, the magic in my own veins—that bottomless, humming reservoir of Upgraded Original immortality tangled around the hot, feral snarl of the wolf—sparked crimson along my fingertips as I siphoned a sliver of my own power just for the buzz of it. It felt like mainlining espresso and lightning at the same time.
"Don't do the hero thing, Greg," I sighed, squinting at the paper convention nametag stuck to his damp polo shirt. "Can I call you Greg? It says Gregory, which feels pretentious for a guy wearing cargo shorts after dark. Listen to me, Greg. Look in my eyes."
My pupils dilated, dark veins spiderwebbing beneath my lower lids as compulsion rolled off my tongue, thick and absolute.
"You're going to take your lovely wife, and your third-wheel buddy over there who has been silently praying I eat you two first so he can sprint toward Bourbon Street—yeah, Donnie, I hear your heart rate, you slimy little coward, I respect the hustle—and the three of you are going to walk back to the Marriott. You're gonna order room service. You're gonna tip thirty percent. And you're going to remember tonight as an avant-garde street theater performance involving way too much corn syrup. Got it?"
"Got it," Greg wheezed, his eyes glassy and vacant.
"Fantastic. Off you pop."
I dropped him. He landed on his heels, grabbed his wife's hand, and the three of them turned and walked away at a brisk, mechanical clip, stepping right over a spreading puddle of the saxophonist's spleen without looking down.
I stood alone under the flickering amber streetlamp, hands shoved deep into the pockets of my blood-splattered leather jacket, and grinned up at the humid night sky.
God, I loved this town.
No curfews. No Sheriff's department breathing down my neck. No sanctimonious lectures about moral lines or how *we don't kill people, Stiles, even when they're trying to rip our throats out, Stiles, look at me with my crooked jawline and my moral superiority, Stiles.*
Back in Beacon Hills, the second I became this—something unkillable, something with teeth sharper than theirs and a hunger that didn't apologize for existing—Scott, Derek, Lydia, and my own father had looked at me like a rabid dog they were trying to work up the nerve to put down behind the shed. I hadn't laid a finger on any of them. I just laughed in their faces, packed a bag, and left them to choke on their own halos.
Because they were right. I *was* a monster. And being a monster was the most fun I'd ever had in my entire life.
I rolled my shoulders, letting my hearing tune past the distant thump of bass from Bourbon Street, straight toward the big, pretentious brick-and-iron fortress sitting in the heart of the Quarter.
The Abattoir.
Even from four blocks away, the place stank of ancient blood, wet timberwolf, expensive bourbon, and ten centuries of unpaid family therapy bills.
"Knock, knock," I whispered to the empty street, and let my fangs drop—both sets of canines elongating, heavy and razor-sharp, lethal venom pooling sweet and acidic beneath my tongue.
***
**Klaus**
The air in the courtyard changed before the iron gates ever moved.
One does not survive a thousand years of war, paranoia, and patricide without learning to read the weight of a sudden silence when the crickets stop and the wind off the Mississippi goes dead in the ferns.
Up on the second-floor gallery, Elijah paused with a crystal decanter in his hand, his dark eyes narrowing over the wrought-iron railing. Across the flagstones below, Hayley shifted instantly between the fountain and the archway leading to the parlor where Hope and Freya were reviewing boundary sigils.
"Niklaus," Elijah murmured from above, his voice pitched low.
"I smell it," I said, setting my paintbrush down beside the easel.
Fresh human blood, thick and metallic, layered over something altogether wrong—something that smelled simultaneously of wolf, ancient vampire, and the ozone crackle of raw witchcraft.
Then the heavy front doors didn't open so much as disintegrate.
Splinters of three-inch-thick cypress and twisted wrought-iron hinges blasted inward across the courtyard stones. A kid strolled through the settling dust.
He looked barely twenty, lean and sharp-featured, with dark, messy hair and brown eyes that gleamed with a fever-bright, manic amusement. He wore a red flannel shirt beneath a ruined leather jacket, both soaked from collar to hem in fresh blood, and he was carrying a half-eaten powdered beignet in a greasy paper bag.
He stopped beside the fountain, looked around at the hanging ferns, the brick arches, and the four of us converging on him, and took a bite of the pastry. Powdered sugar dusted his bloodstained lower lip.
"Okay, first of all," the boy said, gesturing with the paper bag while he chewed, "the ambiance? Ten out of ten. The exposed brick, the fountain, the whole brooding-Spanish-villa vibe—really sells the *we have a lot of skeletons in the basement and at least two of them are currently our siblings* aesthetic."
Elijah dropped from the second-floor railing in a blur of dark wool, landing three paces to my left. Hayley's eyes flared gold at the edges. Behind her, Freya stepped into the courtyard entryway, and just over Freya's shoulder, Hope appeared, stopping short when she saw the intruder.
"You have approximately three seconds," I said, stepping forward until the fountain lay between us, "to explain why you have broken down my doors and tracked the butchered remains of the French Quarter onto my stones, before I paint that wall with whatever is left inside your skull."
The boy blinked at me. Then a huge, manic grin split his face.
"There he is! The hybrid himself. The myth, the legend, the guy with the daddy issues that reshaped European geography." He tossed the rest of the beignet into the fountain water and clapped his hands together, sending a puff of powdered sugar and dried blood into the humid air. "You see, Klaus Mikaelson—the killer, the man who tried for a thousand years to turn himself into the biggest, baddest monster under the bed—we need to have a little chat."
***
**Stiles**
I looked right at him—at the glowing hybrid eyes, the coiled tension in his shoulders, the way Elijah was edging two inches to the left like he thought he was going to flank me—and I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from cackling.
"See, people love to philosophize about monsters," I said, pacing a slow half-circle around the rim of the stone fountain, dragging my fingertips through the cool water so a ribbon of red trailed behind my hand. "You see, Klaus, you spent ten centuries building a reputation so the world would flinch before it could hurt you. Me? I'm a monster. No tragic Shakespearean monologue required. You see, Klaus, I'm here for one reason, and one reason only. I don't care about anything you care about. People look at me and think, *what's wrong with him? Did he flip his humanity switch? Can we see in his eyes that he's trying to unblock some repressed trauma?* Nope! Nothing's turned off! I woke up one day, became the monster you see standing right here, and realized the only thing wrong with me is that I'm bored out of my skull."
Freya's hand twitched at her side, her fingers curling into the opening syllable of an incineration hex. I didn't even look at her—just flicked my wrist, siphoning the magic right out of the boundary wards carved into the courtyard stones beneath her boots. The runes flared crimson and died with a sharp *crack*, and Freya gasped, stumbling back half a step as the feedback scorched her palms.
"Ah-ah," I tutted, wagging a finger at the blonde witch without taking my eyes off Klaus. "Rude. I'm in the middle of an introduction here, Freya. All of you—seriously, take a breath. I came to New Orleans for one reason: to have fun. To feed. To rip people apart when they play flat notes on a trumpet. Time's been getting a little weird in my head lately because nobody stays alive long enough to hold a conversation, and I thought, hey, maybe the Originals won't break in thirty seconds!"
I laughed—a sharp, genuine, barking sound that echoed off the brick walls.
"I feel everything!" I told them, tapping my chest with both hands. "I get angry. I tell jokes—hilarious ones, frankly, even if you guys are a tough crowd. I can still love, I can still care about what I want to care about! I just don't give a single, solitary fuck about the people I kill or the people I drain. Do you have any idea how liberating that is?"
My gaze drifted past Klaus, past Hayley's bared teeth, and landed on the girl standing in the archway.
Auburn hair. Fierce blue-green eyes. A heartbeat that sounded completely different from everyone else's in the compound—steady, lethal, humming with three distinct currents of blood and magic.
Hope.
She wasn't hiding behind her family. Her chin was up, dark magic already coiling around her knuckles, staring back at me not with horror, but with a sharp, calculating intensity—like a caged predator recognizing another apex killer through the bars.
"Well, hello," I murmured, grinning crookedly at her before Elijah decided to ruin the moment.
"Whatever delusions of invincibility your nature has granted you, boy," Elijah said smoothly, "we have spent a millennium making immortality a very long regret."
He blurred forward, driving his hand straight at my sternum to rip my heart out.
To a human, he was invisible. To me, he looked like a guy in a three-piece suit jogging through peanut butter.
I didn't dodge. I let his fingers punch through my flannel and hit my breastbone—which didn't give a millimeter—and the instant his skin touched mine, I siphoned. Red-black arcs of stolen Original magic crackled up Elijah's arm. His eyes went wide as his knees buckled, the ancient strength draining straight out of his muscles into my chest like a warm shot of bourbon.
"Ooh, vintage!" I grinned, wrapping my left hand around his wrist while my right hand patted his cheek twice—*pat, pat*—hard enough to snap his head sideways. "Tastes like old parchment and repressed guilt. Very classy, Eli."
I kicked him squarely in the chest.
Elijah launched backward across the courtyard like a cannonball, smashing through the stone basin of the fountain in an explosion of water and pulverized marble before slamming into the far brick wall hard enough to crack the mortar up to the second floor.
Klaus roared and lunged from the right while Hayley came low from the left, claws bared.
"Now it's a party!" I whooped, catching Hayley by the collar of her jacket mid-leap and swinging her straight into Klaus's ribs. They crashed together across the wet flagstones, and before Klaus could untangle himself, a roaring pillar of white-hot witch-fire slammed into the center of my spine.
***
**Hope**
I didn't wait for my dad's permission. The second he threw my mother across the stones, I poured everything I had into that fire.
The flames engulfed him from boots to hair, roaring ten feet high. For half a heartbeat, a fierce surge of triumph lit in my chest.
Then the fire swirled inward.
Like water draining down a whirlpool, the entire column of flame twisted around his outstretched left hand and vanished straight beneath his skin. The veins up his forearm glowed incandescent crimson before fading back to pale flesh.
He turned around on the wet stones, not a single hair singed, and looked right at me with eyes that were blazing molten gold and blood-red.
"Oh, that had actual kick to it," he purred, flicking two fingers toward the ground.
The exact concussive force of my spell—amplified tenfold by his own siphoned power—blasted outward in a crimson shockwave that slammed my dad, my mom, and Aunt Freya flat against the far courtyard brick walls, pinning them five feet off the ground like insects on display.
I raised my hands to cast again, my pulse hammering against my throat, refusing to back up a single inch as he crossed the courtyard in a blur and stopped two feet in front of me.
"Stiles," he said, offering a mocking little two-finger salute. Up close, he smelled like rain, cedar, ozone, and copper. "And you're Hope. Gotta say, out of everyone in this dusty museum, you're the only one who didn't disappoint me."
"Let them go," I snarled, though as I tried to summon another hex, he caught both my wrists in one hand, pinning them effortlessly against his chest while his other hand slid into the hair at the back of my neck.
The moment his skin touched mine, he siphoned—not enough to hurt, just a slow, dizzying, electric pull that made my breath catch and sent a terrifying jolt of heat straight down my spine.
"Hold on," Stiles murmured, his comedic bounce vanishing as his dark eyes dropped to the frantic pulse hammering at the side of my throat. His nostrils flared. "Do you have any idea what you smell like?"
"Take your hands off my daughter!" my dad roared against the magical restraints pinning him to the wall, black veins bulging in his neck. "I will tear you apart piece by piece—!"
"Quiet in the cheap seats, Klaus, grown-ups are talking," Stiles called back lazily without taking his eyes off mine. His thumb brushed over my carotid artery, his voice dropping to a dark, velvet-rough purr against my jaw. "Everyone else in this city tastes like swamp water and regret, Hope. Even your uncle's magic tasted like a library basement. Why do I get the feeling you taste like wildfire?"
"Touch me and I'll find a way to kill you myself," I breathed, even as my pulse raced faster and something dark, restless, and magnetic coiled tight in the pit of my stomach—the same part of me that had spent years suffocating under my family's rules and fear of what I might become.
"Promise?" Stiles whispered, grinning against my skin right before his vampire fangs slid down and sank into my neck.
A sharp, involuntary gasp tore from my throat.
The sting lasted less than a heartbeat before the pull of his mouth—paired with the red-and-gold current of our magic tangling together where his fingers held my wrists—turned into a rush of raw, intoxicating heat. My fingers dug into the bloodstained leather over his ribs, my eyelashes fluttering shut before I could stop myself. He took two slow, deep pulls, groaning softly against my skin like I was the best thing he had ever tasted in his life, and then dragged the flat of his tongue slowly up the puncture marks until his blood sealed my skin unbroken.
When he lifted his head, his eyes were dilated black, a drop of my blood gleaming on his lower lip.
"New plan," Stiles whispered, his thumb brushing my flushed cheek while my chest heaved against his. "I just moved in across the street. Looks like we're neighbors, sweetheart."
***
**Stiles**
I wasn't kidding about moving in across the street.
Ten minutes after strolling out of the Abattoir and leaving Klaus Mikaelson foaming at the mouth, I walked into the three-story wrought-iron townhouse directly facing their front gates, compelled the hedge-fund millionaire who owned it to sign the deed over to me before moving to Anchorage to herd caribou, and claimed the master balcony.
By night two, word had spread through the French Quarter that some psychotic new hybrid-siphoner-whatever had bounced Elijah through a fountain and tasted Klaus's daughter.
Naturally, the local supernatural welcoming committee decided to test their luck.
Around midnight, twenty-four of Marcel's old loyalist vampires and a coven of eight Tremé witches crept onto my courtyard patio while I was in the middle of making a grilled cheese sandwich in the kitchen.
I walked out onto the second-floor terrace holding a plate in one hand, looked down at the glowing magical boundary circle the witches were drawing on my flagstones, and sighed.
"Guys, seriously? It's midnight. Do you know how hard it is to get Gruyère to melt evenly when eight witches are chanting in butchered Latin downstairs?"
The lead witch snapped her wrists upward—trying to snap my neck telekinetically.
I tilted my head, siphoned the neck-snap hex out of the air before it reached my collarbones, hopped over the balcony railing, and landed right in the center of the coven.
For the next six minutes, I treated my patio like a carnival game.
I compelled the first six vampires to form a kickline and sing *When the Saints Go Marching In* at the top of their lungs while they systematically ripped each other's arms off and beat the remaining eighteen vampires to death with them. When the witches tried to channel their ancestors to desiccate me, I grabbed the coven leader by the face, siphoned all eight of them through their own linked spell until their eyes bled and their magic flooded my veins in a blinding crimson rush, and then laughed so hard my ribs hurt as I popped three heads off like dandelion tops.
"Look at the footwork on guy number four!" I shouted up toward the street, spinning through a spray of arterial blood as I ripped a vampire's spine out through his ribcage and tossed it into the azalea bushes. "He's got one leg and he's still hitting the high kicks! That's showmanship!"
When the last body hit the stones and stopped twitching, I stood in the middle of the carnage, soaked to the elbows in blood, chest heaving with pure, manic euphoria—and looked up across the street.
Hope was standing on the second-floor gallery of the Abattoir, her hands gripping the wrought-iron railing, staring straight down into my courtyard.
She hadn't called for Klaus. She hadn't called for Freya. She had watched the entire slaughter in silence, and even from across the street, I could hear her heartbeat racing and smell the dark magic humming under her skin.
I crooked one bloody finger at her and pointed up toward the flat roof of Rousseau's down at the end of the block.
***
**Hope**
I told myself I was going up onto that roof to figure out his weakness so my family could put him down.
That lie didn't even survive the climb up the fire escape.
When I stepped onto the tar roof above Rousseau's, Stiles was sitting on the brick parapet overlooking the neon glow of the Quarter, having washed his hands in a rainwater barrel though a streak of crimson still clung beneath his jawline. The second my boots hit the gravel, he flicked his wrist, casting a humming crimson privacy ward around the roofline so my father and Elijah couldn't hear us from the compound.
"You watched the whole show," Stiles said, not teasing this time—his dark eyes locked onto mine with a playful, predatory warmth as he slid off the ledge and walked toward me. "Didn't yell for daddy once. Gotta admit, Hope, I'm starting to think you didn't hate the choreography."
"They came into your house to kill you," I said, though my voice sounded breathless even to my own ears as he stopped inches in front of me, backing me gently against the warm brick parapet. "In New Orleans, that's how you keep territory."
"Oh, don't do the whole *it was strategic self-defense* thing with me, sweetheart," Stiles laughed softly, bracing one palm on the brick beside my shoulder while his other hand came up to brush a windblown strand of hair behind my ear. "I didn't kill those twenty-four guys to hold territory. I killed them that way because it was hilarious. And you stood on that balcony for six minutes without blinking because for the first time in your life, somebody didn't look at you and tell you to be a good little girl and keep your darkness locked in a box."
My breath hitched as his thumb traced along my lower lip.
"My whole life," I whispered, staring up into his eyes, "everyone has looked at me waiting for me to turn into the monster that ends the world. My mom wants me to be better than my dad. My dad wants me to be pure enough to redeem him. Even Aunt Freya watches me when my temper slips."
"Screw redemption," Stiles murmured, leaning down until his forehead rested against mine, his breath hot against my mouth. "Redemption is a scam invented by weak people so the strong ones will put cages on themselves. Back in my hometown, I had a pack—best friend, werewolf alpha, the whole nine yards—and the second I stopped apologizing for having claws, they looked at me with pure terror. So I left. Because look at us, Hope. We're the only two things on this earth built like this. Why the hell would we pretend to be human when being a monster feels this good?"
He tilted my chin up and kissed me.
It wasn't gentle, and it wasn't hesitant. His mouth claimed mine with a raw, possessive heat that tasted like bourbon, iron, and lightning. A low sound tore from the back of my throat as my hands tangled in the back of his hair, pulling him closer instead of pushing him away. When his tongue brushed my lower lip, I opened for him immediately, gasping as he lifted me effortlessly by the waist and sat me up on the edge of the brick parapet, stepping between my thighs.
My legs wrapped around his hips almost on instinct, pulling his body flush against mine.
"That's my girl," Stiles groaned against my mouth, his hands sliding down from my waist to grip my thighs through the wool of my skirt, hitching me closer until I could feel every hard line of him pressed against me. "God, I haven't stopped thinking about tasting you since I walked through your doors."
His lips trailed blazing, open-mouthed kisses down my jaw to the hollow of my throat.
"Then don't stop," I breathed, tilting my head back over the three-story drop, my nails digging into his shoulders as the dark magic inside me—the tribrid fire I had spent years chaining down—rose to meet his siphoner pull in a dizzying, electric rush. "Do it, Stiles."
His fangs sank deep into my throat at the exact moment his hands slid under the hem of my shirt against the bare skin of my ribs, siphoning the raw overflow of my magic while he drank.
I cried out against his shoulder, my whole body arching into him as pleasure and heat coiled so tight in my lower stomach that my vision whited out at the edges. It felt nothing like pain—it was pure, intoxicating surrender and absolute power all at once, our blood and magic feeding a feedback loop that made the bricks beneath us hum.
When he finally drew his fangs from my throat, licking the marks closed before crashing his mouth back onto mine, I bit down hard on his lower lip until his own Upgraded Original blood—hot, dark, and buzzing with immortality—spilled onto my tongue.
Stiles let out a rough, ragged laugh against my lips, his eyes glowing solid gold in the dark as I swallowed his blood and pulled him back in for another kiss.
"Oh, your dad is definitely gonna try to murder me in about thirty seconds," Stiles whispered against my swollen lips, grinning like a lunatic as he glanced down over the parapet edge.
Because right down on the cobblestones below Rousseau's, Klaus and Elijah had just rounded the corner, drawn by the flare of magic when our power had spiked through the privacy ward.
***
**Klaus**
When they came down the wrought-iron stairs to the sidewalk, I didn't need to see the flush on my daughter's cheeks or the way her fingers lingered near his sleeve to know what had transpired on that roof.
I could smell her blood on his mouth. And worse—infinitely worse—I could smell *his* blood on hers.
The red haze that swallowed my vision was instantaneous. I didn't speak. I blurred across the wet asphalt and drove my fist straight at the side of his head with enough hybrid force to shatter a boulder.
Stiles caught my fist in his bare palm an inch from his cheek.
The shockwave of the impact blew the glass out of Rousseau's front windows and cracked the pavement beneath our boots, but his arm didn't move a millimeter. With a lazy smirk, he siphoned the hybrid strength straight out of my knuckles until my fingers went numb, twisted my wrist downward, and forced me down onto one knee on the cobblestones before Elijah could even cross the street.
When Elijah lunged to take his head from behind, Stiles didn't even turn around—just lashed out with a backhanded wave of red-black magic he'd just drawn from Hope, slamming Elijah through the brick wall of the pharmacy across the street in a cloud of plaster dust.
"Stay down a second, Klaus," Stiles said cheerfully, looking down at me while keeping my wrist locked in an iron grip. "See, normally when a guy tries to take my head off while I'm in the middle of a date, I pull his lungs out through his nostrils and wear them like a scarf. Very festive. Great for fall."
I snarled up at him, my fangs bared, straining with every ounce of a thousand years of strength against a grip that felt like solid titanium. "I will flay the skin from your bones, boy—"
"Yeah, yeah, we've covered your artistic hobbies," Stiles interrupted, rolling his eyes before glancing back at Hope on the sidewalk. "Lucky for you, I really, *really* like your daughter, and she's currently giving me the 'don't murder my dad in the middle of Bourbon Street' look. Well—actually, it's more of a 'don't murder him *completely*' look, which is honestly progress."
"Let him up, Stiles," Hope said from the curb, and what chilled my blood more than the boy's impossible strength was the calm, dark amusement in my daughter's voice as she leaned against the lamppost, watching him humiliate both me and her uncle without a trace of fear in her eyes. "If you break his wrist, we'll never hear the end of it at breakfast."
Stiles laughed, released my hand, and patted me on the top of the head like an unruly dog before strolling back to Hope's side and slinging an arm casually over her shoulders.
"Breakfast!" Stiles beamed back at me as Elijah limped out of the ruined pharmacy storefront, brushing brick dust from his ruined lapel. "Ooh, actually, funny you mention food, Hope, because we have company coming into town tomorrow, and I think a big family get-together is right around the corner."
***
**Stiles**
The next evening, I was sitting in the back corner booth of Rousseau's—windows freshly boarded up with plywood thanks to Klaus's temper tantrum—nursing a bourbon and tossing Cajun fries at the ceiling fan while Hope sat slid in right beside me on the vinyl bench, my arm draped behind her shoulders, my fingers lazily tracing circles on the bare skin of her neck.
"Are they really this predictable?" Hope murmured, tilting her head into my touch as she listened with her tribrid hearing to the four heartbeats approaching from two blocks away inside a beat-up Toyota SUV that smelled like wet California dog and self-righteousness.
"Sweetheart, Scott McCall hasn't had an original tactical thought since tenth-grade lacrosse," I grinned, kissing her temple. "Watch this. I already compelled the twenty tourists in here to sit like mannequins, except for my two special guests in booth four."
The bell over the door chimed.
In walked the Beacon Hills nostalgia tour: Scott leading the pack with his furrowed-brow True Alpha slouch, Derek scowling in black leather, Lydia looking like she hadn't slept in three states, and my dadbringing up the rear in his civilian flannel.
All four of them froze when they saw the motionless patrons sitting around the bar—and then their eyes locked onto me in the corner booth with my arm around a drop-dead gorgeous auburn-haired girl who was looking at them like they were mildly interesting appetizers.
"Stiles," Scott breathed, stepping forward with his hands slightly raised like he was approaching a spooked horse. "Stiles, thank God. Listen to me—whatever happened to you before you left Beacon Hills, Deaton thinks there's a way to reverse the dark magic—"
"Reverse it?" I barked a laugh, leaning forward onto the table while keeping one hand on Hope's thigh under the table. "Scotty! My brother! My best friend! Still allergically incapable of listening! Let me spell this out for the whole class so Lydia can stop furiously calculating banshee probabilities in her head and my dad can stop reaching for a gun he couldn't clear leather with before I ate his fingers."
"Son," my dad said hoarsely, his eyes dropping to the way I was smiling at them. "Please. Back home, you were scared of what you were turning into—"
"No, Pop, *you* were scared," I said, my voice snapping sharp with real anger for half a second before twisting right back into a wide, manic grin. "Every single one of you looked at me the second I became stronger than the great Scott McCall and saw a monster. And you still think I have some vampire switch flipped off, or a Nogitsune in my head! You can't wrap your tiny, moral little brains around the fact that I feel *everything*! I'm happy! I'm angry that the fries here are slightly under-salted! I'm completely, madly head-over-heels for the girl sitting next to me!"
I kissed Hope's cheek loudly, and she smiled—a sharp, wicked little smile that made Derek's eyes narrow in alarm.
"I just don't care about the people I kill!" I announced, sliding out of the booth and walking two steps over to the table across from ours, where a middle-aged couple was sitting quietly over a plate of bread pudding. "Take Arthur and Brenda here! Stand up for me, guys."
***
**Scott**
The older man and woman stood up smoothly from their booth, their eyes dilated under whatever mind control Stiles had laid on them. The man wore a Habitat for Humanity shirt; his wife wore a silver cross necklace and a warm, gentle expression.
"Stiles, leave them out of this," Sheriff Stilinski said, taking a step forward.
"Hold on, Pop, this is a visual aid!" Stiles beamed, slinging an arm around Arthur's shoulders and grinning at me with a manic, feverish glee that made my stomach drop into ice. "Listen to their heartbeats, Scott! Use those Alpha ears! Arthur here was a pediatric nurse for thirty-two years. Brenda runs a church food pantry and fosters blind senior golden retrievers. No lies. Salt of the earth. These guys are *good* people, Scott. The exact kind of innocent human beings you think the whole universe revolves around protecting."
"Stiles, stop—" I started, my claws lengthening at my sides.
"Arthur," Stiles said cheerfully, never breaking eye contact with me, "pick up that steak knife next to the bread pudding and push it straight through Brenda's throat while she tells Scott about her dogs."
"NO!" I roared, lunging forward with Derek right beside me.
Before we could take two steps, the girl in the booth—Hope—didn't even stand up. She simply flicked her hand lazily over the rim of her glass.
A wave of crimson-and-gold magic slammed me, Derek, Lydia, and the Sheriff backward into the bar counter, shattering the liquor bottles behind us and pinning all four of us helplessly against the mahogany wood.
"Don't close your eyes, Scott," Stiles purred, leaning his cheek against Arthur's shoulder as Arthur's hand closed around the serrated steak knife and drove it slowly, wetly through his wife's throat.
Brenda smiled warmly at me as arterial blood poured over her silver cross, her voice bubbling through her severed windpipe before she collapsed back onto the vinyl bench in a fountain of bright red. Sheriff Stilinski let out a broken, gutted cry behind me, tears spilling down his cheeks as Stiles immediately grabbed Arthur by the collar and tore the man's throat open with his teeth—drinking deep and loud right in front of us until Arthur's body went limp and dropped to the floorboards.
Stiles wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, blood gleaming across his chin and teeth, and walked slowly over to crouch in front of where I was pinned to the bar.
"See how easy that was?" Stiles whispered, his eyes wide, bright, and utterly manic as he patted my cheek with three bloody fingers. "Not a flicker of remorse. I am evil, Scott. Probably the evilest thing walking around on this planet right now. Look at me! Do you hate me? Do you despise me?"
He leaned in an inch from my nose, inhaling deeply, and let out a delighted, chilling laugh.
"No, you don't," Stiles murmured. "It's fear I see in your eyes, Scotty. You're terrified of me."
He stood up, walked back to the booth, held his hand out to Hope—who took it, her fingers lacing with his without a single glance at the two corpses bleeding out across the floor—and snapped his fingers to drop the magic pinning us.
"Get out of my city," Stiles called over his shoulder as he and Hope strolled out the front door into the humid night. "Next time I see you guys, we're gonna have a much more permanent conversation about lifestyle choices!"
***
**Klaus**
Never in a thousand years had I imagined myself standing in my own courtyard listening to a pack of bedraggled California werewolves, a human county sheriff, and a trembling banshee propose an alliance.
Yet less than three hours after the slaughter at Rousseau's, Scott McCall and his pack had come straight to the Abattoir—having watched Elijah and me shadowing Stiles the night before—begging for a way to cage the monster they had once called family.
"You cannot kill him," Freya said from the head of the dining table, where she had spread three grimoires and a dark iron chain forged in 17th-century Marseille. "White oak will not burn him, and any spell cast directly at him only feeds his siphoner core. Which leaves only one option: a continuous, closed-loop boundary seal powered simultaneously by an Original's blood, a banshee's resonant frequency, and an Alpha spark to overload his nervous system long enough to bind him in cursed iron."
"We don't want him dead," the Sheriff said hoarsely, his hands shaking against the back of a wooden chair. "If we can just trap him—keep him contained until we find out how to bring my boy back—"
"Your boy," I said coldly, pacing behind them while Elijah watched the doorway, "has spent the last seventy-two hours butchering my city, humiliating my family, and sinking his fangs into my daughter. How comfortably he survives inside a box at the bottom of the ocean is of remarkably little concern to me, Sheriff, so long as he is inside it."
"He won't walk into an obvious ambush," the older wolf—Derek—growled, his arms crossed over his chest. "He's smarter than everyone in this room."
"He is also arrogant, manic, and thoroughly obsessed with my niece," Elijah remarked quietly, adjusting his cuffs. "Invite him to dine here tomorrow night under the pretense of a formal truce for Hope's sake. He will know it is a trap, and he will walk through the front gates regardless simply to mock our effort."
Upstairs on the gallery, I heard Hope's bedroom door click shut.
None of us knew that she had been listening through the floorboards the entire time—or that five minutes later, she climbed right out her window and crossed the street into Stiles's bed.
***
**Hope**
"A cursed iron chain from Marseille and a banshee scream," I murmured an hour later, lying naked across Stiles's chest in the master bedroom of his stolen townhouse, the silk sheets tangled around my hips while his fingers traced lazy, sparking patterns of siphoned magic up and down my bare spine. "Aunt Freya thinks if Lydia screams at the exact frequency of your werewolf hearing while my dad and Scott hold the boundary runes, your brain will short-circuit long enough to lock you in a box."
Beneath my cheek, Stiles's chest rumbled with a low, delighted laugh.
"Oh, man, a formal Mikaelson dinner party trap!" Stiles grinned in the dark, rolling me smoothly onto my back beneath him, bracing himself on his forearms as his dark eyes gleamed down at me. Even in the dim moonlight coming through the French doors, I could see the flush of my blood in his cheeks from twenty minutes ago when he'd pinned me to the headboard and drunk from my inner thigh while I came apart with my hands in his hair. "Complete with fine china, Elijah's passive-aggressive toasts, and Scott McCall hiding behind the curtains waiting to save my soul with the power of friendship and iron chains. Are we going?"
"Of course we're going," I whispered, wrapping my bare legs around his waist and pulling him down until his lips brushed the corner of my mouth. "I already picked out a dress."
"God, I love you," Stiles breathed against my mouth—and there wasn't an ounce of mockery in his voice when he said it to me, just a fierce, bottomless, obsessive heat that made my heart skip. "You really aren't holding back anymore, are you?"
"Why would I?" I asked softly, my nails scraping down the hard muscles of his back as he kissed down my throat. "My family spent eighteen years terrified I'd become the monster that ruins them. Let's show them they were right to be scared."
***
**Stiles**
The compound courtyard looked like a five-star restaurant designed by the Borgias.
Long mahogany table set for ten in the center of the flagstones. Crystal chandeliers flickering overhead. Roasted lamb, vintage Bordeaux, and four members of the Beacon Hills pack trying very hard to pretend they weren't hiding behind Freya's boundary cloaking spell in the adjacent parlor with a pile of cursed French chains.
I strolled in wearing a tailored charcoal suit I'd compelled off an Italian diplomat at the Windsor Court, with Hope on my arm in a blood-red dress that made Klaus's left eye twitch the second we walked under the arch.
"Evening, in-laws!" I beamed, pulling out Hope's chair for her like a proper gentleman before dropping into the seat at the opposite head of the table—Klaus's usual spot—and tossing my napkin onto my lap. "Klaus, love what you've done with the fountain! Leaving it as a pile of rubble really gives the courtyard a post-modern, Roman-ruins energy. Eli, looking sharp, glad the drywall came out of your hair. Hayley, radiant, menacing, love the vibe. Freya, how are the wrists?"
"Enjoy the wine, Stiles," Klaus said tightly from the side of the table, raising his crystal goblet with a thin, predatory smile. "In New Orleans, we believe in honoring our guests before business is concluded."
"Oh, we don't have to wait for dessert to get to business, Klaus," I chuckled, picking up a silver steak knife and spinning it between my knuckles. "In fact, why don't we invite the guys sweating in the parlor to pull up a chair? Scott! Derek! Lydia! Pop! Come on out, the lamb's getting cold and Derek's heart rate is so loud it's ruining the string quartet!"
Silence dropped like a guillotine.
Then Freya slammed both palms down onto the mahogany table, shouting the activation incantation at the top of her lungs.
Instantly, the flagstones around my chair blazed with blinding white witch-fire as Scott, Derek, Lydia, and my dad burst from the parlor. Lydia opened her mouth and unleashed a full-throated, ear-splitting banshee wail aimed directly at my skull to shatter my equilibrium, while Klaus, Elijah, and Hayley lunged across the table with the cursed Marseille chains to bind my limbs.
It really was a great plan. Nine out of ten for coordination.
The only flaw was that the tribrid sitting to my right wasn't on their side.
Before Lydia's scream could even reach my eardrums, Hope stood up smoothly from her chair, her eyes flaring bright tribrid gold, and flicked her wrist toward her Aunt Freya.
*"Silencio,"* Hope snapped, her magic slamming Freya backward out of the spell circle and snapping the boundary link in half before turning her other hand toward Lydia and blasting the banshee across the flagstones onto her back, cutting the scream off mid-note.
"Hope, what are you doing?!" Hayley gasped, skidding to a halt on the stones.
"Giving us a fair fight, Mom," Hope said coolly, stepping back beside my chair as her lips curved into a dark, breathtaking smile. "Actually, no—not fair at all."
"That's my girl!" I roared with laughter, surging up from the mahogany chair so fast the wood splintered behind me.
I caught the heavy cursed iron chain Klaus swung at my neck in one hand, siphoned seven hundred years of dark French boundary magic straight out of the iron links until the metal crumbled into harmless rust dust between my fingers, and backhanded Klaus across the courtyard into the brick pillars. When Elijah blurred in behind him, Hope caught her uncle with a telekinetic grip that slammed him to his knees beside Klaus, holding all four Mikaelsons pinned under the combined weight of her tribrid magic and the crimson barrier I threw over them with a flick of my wrist.
Which left Scott, Derek, Lydia, and my dad standing frozen in the middle of the courtyard, completely defenseless.
I walked around the dining table slowly, loosening my silk tie with one hand while smiling from ear to ear.
"You know what my absolute favorite part of tonight is?" I asked, stopping three feet in front of Scott, whose eyes were darting frantically between me and Hope standing calmly behind me with her hands glowing crimson and gold. "You guys saw what I did in that bar. You saw what I am. And instead of driving back to California like smart little puppies, you teamed up with a family of thousand-year-old serial killers to try and lock me in a box! Because you *still* think you're better than me, Scott!"
"Stiles, we were trying to save you!" Scott shouted, his voice breaking with desperation as he backed up a step beside Derek and my dad. "This darkness—this hunger—it's poisoning you! You don't know what it feels like to carry this—"
"Actually, Scotty," I interrupted, stopping dead and tilting my head as a genuinely brilliant, utterly hilarious idea lit up my brain like a fireworks display, "you're right. You *don't* know what it feels like to have this kind of power and this kind of hunger running through your veins! You think you're moral because your wolf only makes you want to run around in the woods and howl at the moon! You judge me because you have no idea how good the blood tastes!"
I turned my head toward Hope, grinning like a kid on Christmas morning. "Babe. You thinking what I'm thinking?"
Hope walked up beside me, resting her hand lightly on my arm as she looked at my old pack with cool, pitiless eyes. "I think hypocrisy looks exhausting, Stiles. Show them."
"What are you talking about?" Derek growled, shifting in front of Lydia and my dad as his claws came out. "Stiles, stay back—"
I blurred.
Before Derek or Scott could blink, I bit deep into my own left wrist, letting my dark, supercharged Upgraded Original blood—humming with siphoned witch magic and immortal venom—well up thick and crimson over my skin.
With my right hand, I grabbed Scott by the jaw, forcing his mouth open despite his Alpha roars, and shoved my bleeding wrist straight against his teeth until he choked and swallowed three huge mouthfuls of my blood.
"Stiles, no—!" my dad shouted, lunging at my back.
I spun around, caught Derek by the throat as he swung at me, forced my bleeding wrist into his mouth until my blood poured down his throat, and then moved in a single blinding flash between Lydia and my dad—Pinning each of them for two seconds, forcing my blood past their lips while they gagged and fought against an immortal grip none of them could budge an inch.
Then I stepped back to the center of the courtyard, wiped my healing wrist on my suit jacket, and looked at the four of them coughing my blood off their chins in pure, dawning horror.
"Look at your faces!" I laughed, spreading my arms wide while Klaus and Elijah stared from the wall in stunned silence. "You came all the way to New Orleans to cure me, and instead, congratulations—you just got promoted! Enjoy the power I have, guys! Let's see how long that famous Beacon Hills morality lasts when you wake up starving for a carotid artery!"
I didn't even use my hands.
I drew a sharp breath, channeled the stolen Marseille magic humming in my chest, and snapped my fingers four times in rapid succession.
*Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.*
Scott's head jerked sideways first. Then Derek's. Then Lydia's. Then my dad's.
All four of them dropped simultaneously to the courtyard flagstones like marionettes with their strings cut, dead in transition with my blood blazing through their veins.
Across the courtyard, Klaus stared at the four bodies lying around the dinner table, and then up at me and Hope. For the first time in his thousand-year life, Niklaus Mikaelson had nothing to say.
"Don't look so glum, Klaus!" I said cheerfully, walking back to the dining table, picking up two untouched glasses of Bordeaux, and handing one to Hope. "When they wake up in an hour, I'm gonna compel the waiters down at Antoine's to line up like a buffet so Scott can see how fun it is to rip a throat out! And the best part? Since I made them, they're sired to me—which means my brand-new vampire pack is gonna love New Orleans almost as much as we do."
Hope took the wine glass from my hand, looked down at the four motionless bodies of my old life waiting to wake up in the dark with us, and then rose up on her tiptoes to kiss the corner of my mouth, her eyes shining bright and fearless against mine.
"To the new neighbors," Hope murmured against my lips, clinking her crystal glass softly against mine.
"To the monsters," I grinned back, and pulled her into my arms right in the middle of her father's house.