**STILES**
The bartender had been watching him for an hour, and Stiles was starting to take it personally.
The bar was a narrow dive three blocks off Bourbon, with neon beer signs and a ceiling fan wobbling on its last screw like it was also trying to leave. There was a pool table with a torn felt corner. It smelled like Abita and fryer grease and the particular sweat of people who'd been day-drinking since the Clinton administration. Under all of that were the heartbeats: the bartender's, and two drunk girls by the jukebox fighting over Fleetwood Mac. Two men at the pool table didn't have heartbeats at all.
Vampires. They'd clocked him the second he walked in and had spent the past hour pretending really hard that they hadn't. They were about as subtle as a golden retriever pretending not to see a sandwich.
Stiles finished his seventh whiskey. It did absolutely nothing, which was rude, considering the price.
"You're staring," he said without looking up.
The bartender's pulse jumped. He was big and gray-bearded, and his name tag said DWAYNE.
"Just making sure you're good to get home."
"Dwayne. Buddy. That's so sweet. Nobody's worried about me getting home since..." Stiles squinted at the ceiling fan. "Okay, I actually don't know. Time's been a little soup lately. Hey, do you know the Mikaelsons?"
Dwayne's hand stopped on the rag.
"Can't say I do."
"Ooh." Stiles tapped two fingers on the bar in a stumbling little double beat. "Your heart just went *ba-bump*. That's a lie, Dwayne. That's a lie heartbeat. I'm a professional. I've been lied to by the best. You're not the best. You're, like, community theater."
The pool balls stopped clacking. The taller vampire set his cue down and walked over with his hands loose at his sides, doing the slow, casual, menacing walk.
"Oh my God," Stiles said, delighted. "Is this the walk? Are you doing the walk? Do you guys all take a class?"
"Friend," the vampire said, "I think you've had enough. Why don't you head on out?"
"Okay, before you grab my shoulder and do the eye thing, two things. One, the eye thing doesn't work on me. Two, I haven't eaten since Baton Rouge, and honestly, you look like a snack. Not in a flattering way. In a literal way."
The vampire grabbed his shoulder and did the eye thing.
"Every time," Stiles sighed.
He had the guy folded backward over the pool table before his pupils finished dilating. He planted his palm flat on the vampire's chest and pulled. The hunger came up out of his hands, hot and red, and whatever dead engine kept the guy walking ripped out of his ribs and poured into Stiles. It tasted like cold, burnt coffee. The vampire screamed. His skin went gray, then papery, then cracked like a riverbed in August.
"Wow," Stiles said. "You taste like a gas station."
The second one lunged at his back. Stiles caught him by the throat without looking.
"Dude, I *saw* you. There's a mirror right there. You're a vampire. You don't show up in it, but *I* do, and I saw my face going *hmm, somebody's coming*."
His eyes flared gold, then red. His teeth came down, wolf and vampire both, too many and too sharp, and he tore the guy's throat out.
It was not neat. Cartilage popped like bubble wrap. Something warm hit the jukebox and Stevie Nicks skipped. Stiles drank until there was nothing left worth drinking, dropped both bodies on the floor, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. That did nothing, since the sleeve was also soaked.
The drunk girls were gone. Smart girls. Dwayne was plastered against the liquor shelves, trying to become one with the Jägermeister.
Stiles came around the bar. "Okay, Dwayne. Round two. Mikaelsons. Where do they live? And do the heartbeat right this time."
Dwayne told him. Street, cross street, color of the gate. His voice cracked twice.
"See? Growth. I'm proud of you."
"Are you..." Dwayne swallowed. "Are you gonna let me go?"
Stiles thought about it. He thought about it for maybe a second and a half, which was a second longer than it deserved.
"Honestly? No. But hey, you went out knowing you finally told the truth. That's a whole character arc."
---
He walked out at 1:14 in the morning feeling pretty good about things.
The Quarter was still going. There was brass on two corners, a bachelorette party screaming the lyrics to "Before He Cheats," and a guy in a Saints jersey throwing up into a planter with the grim focus of a man who'd done this before. The whole city hummed under Stiles's sneakers. It wasn't just heartbeats. It was *magic*, old stuff soaked into the stones like a stain. His palms itched.
"God, I love this town," he told the guy in the planter. The guy gave him a thumbs-up without lifting his head.
Beacon Hills had had magic too. Beacon Hills had also had Scott McCall standing between Stiles and the pack with his eyes glowing red, telling Stiles he was a *monster*. This was Scott, who'd needed Stiles to explain what a *werewolf* was. Scott, who'd once tried to kill a guy with a *lacrosse stick*. Derek had given him the eyebrows. The disappointed eyebrows. The man had murdered his own uncle, and *Stiles* got the eyebrows.
And his dad had sat at the kitchen table, looked him right in the face, and asked, *What are you?*
The streetlight overhead popped and died.
Stiles glared at it. "Don't."
That wasn't sadness. He was pretty clear on that. It was the same thing he felt when someone cut him off on the freeway, a hot, stupid spike of *are you kidding me*. He'd kept all of them alive for years with a baseball bat and a Jeep held together by duct tape and spite. He'd done research at three in the morning while the actual supernatural creatures slept. And the one time *he* got the upgrade, suddenly he was the problem.
So he'd left. He hadn't touched any of them. It wasn't mercy; he just couldn't be bothered. Let them have Beacon Hills. Let them have the Nemeton and the hunters and the monster of the week. He hoped the next thing that came through ate Scott's motorcycle.
What he had now was freedom, and a lot of it. The problem with freedom, it turned out, was that it got *boring*.
Nothing could hurt him. He'd checked the way a teenager checks whether the stove is hot: sunlight, vervain, and a hunter in Arizona with wolfsbane rounds straight through the heart. Stiles had been genuinely annoyed about that one. It had been his favorite hoodie. The hunter had been significantly more annoyed, briefly, and then not at all.
Every day he woke up the same, and every day he was hungry. The days blurred until Tuesday and Thursday were basically the same guy in different hats.
Then he'd heard about the Originals. The first vampires ever. Klaus Mikaelson, the hybrid, the big bad wolf the rest of the supernatural world used to scare its kids.
Stiles stopped in front of a stone compound with a wrought-iron gate and jasmine spilling over the wall. The magic coming off it was thick enough to chew. There was witch blood in there like a thunderstorm.
Something else was in there too. It was brighter and louder than the rest, tangled up: witch and wolf and something old underneath. His mouth watered.
"Oh, hello," he murmured. "What are *you*?"
He knocked.
---
**HOPE**
Hope had been on the balcony for an hour with a sketchbook open on her knees and absolutely nothing on the page.
She'd been home from the Salvatore School for three days. She'd graduated, she was eighteen, and her family had been circling The Conversation about what came next like it was a live grenade. Aunt Freya kept saying "there's no rush." Her mom kept finding reasons to walk past her door. Her dad kept pretending he wasn't doing the exact same thing.
She was trying to draw the fountain when something reached into her chest and pulled.
It wasn't a hand. It felt like a hook set right under her ribs, where her magic lived, tugging it toward the street.
Then someone knocked on the gate.
Nobody knocked on the gate.
She was at the top of the stairs before she'd decided to move. Her father was already in the courtyard. Uncle Elijah stepped out of the east hall, buttoning his cuffs.
"Hope," her father said without looking up. "Room."
"Did you feel that?"
He looked up, and something crossed his face that she didn't like.
"We all did," Elijah said.
A voice came through the iron, bright and chatty:
"Hi! Hello! Sorry, I know it's late. I looked for a doorbell, but you guys are really committed to the whole *Interview with the Vampire* aesthetic. Love it. No notes."
Her father's eyebrows rose a fraction. Then he smiled the smile that meant somebody was going to die, crossed the courtyard, and pulled the gate open.
It was a boy, maybe twenty. He was tall and all elbows in a red hoodie, with a sharp, animated face, moles scattered down one cheek, and his hands shoved in his pocket.
He was *drenched* in blood. It soaked his hoodie, clumped in his hair, and was smeared across his jaw like he'd eaten spaghetti with no hands.
"Klaus Mikaelson!" He actually sounded thrilled. "Okay. Wow. Hi. You're shorter than I thought. That's not an insult, that's just data. In my head you were, like, six-five and brooding on a cliff."
He pulled a hand out to shake. It was red to the wrist. Her father looked at it. The boy looked at it too, shrugged, and wiped it on his jeans, which made it worse.
"Stiles," he said. "Stiles Stilinski. And before you ask, yes, that's a nickname. My real name is a hate crime against vowels. Can I come in?"
"No," her father said.
"Cool, cool, cool. Wasn't really asking."
He stepped over the threshold. Nothing stopped him. The hook in Hope's chest yanked tight the moment he was inside.
Her mom came out of the south wing fast, already smelling it. Aunt Freya appeared on the stairs behind Hope and took hold of her arm.
Stiles turned a slow circle in the courtyard, taking in the fountain, the vines, and the canvases leaned under the arches, and whistled.
"This is *nice*. Do you guys have an interior decorator? Or is it one of those things where you've been alive so long you just, like, accumulate stuff? Like a thousand-year-old grandma with a curio cabinet?"
His eyes swept up the staircase and landed on Hope.
They stopped there.
It wasn't a normal look. It was the way someone looks at a dessert case.
Then her father was across the courtyard before Hope saw him move. He slammed the boy into a stone pillar with a hand around his throat, and the column split with a crack like a gunshot.
"You'll look at me," her father said softly, "when you're a guest in my house."
Stiles's eyes rolled down to meet his.
"Oh, *come on*," he croaked. "I literally just got here."
His eyes weren't brown anymore. Gold flooded in from the edges, then red, a deep, pulsing red. The air in the courtyard dropped like it did right before a storm. Her father's face changed. It was small, a tightening at the eyes, but Hope had never seen it before.
The veins on the back of his hand were going gray.
"See, this is why nobody invites you to parties," Stiles rasped. "You're very grabby."
Elijah ripped her father's arm free. Her father stepped back.
He *staggered*.
Hope's stomach turned over. She had seen her father stabbed, burned, hexed, and daggered. She had never, ever seen him stagger.
Stiles peeled himself off the pillar and brushed stone dust off his shoulder. The crack behind him ran all the way to the ceiling.
"Siphoner," Freya breathed. "Niklaus, he's a *siphoner*."
"Among other things. I'm like a Swiss Army knife, but every tool is murder."
Her mom's eyes had gone full gold. "What the hell *are* you?"
Something hard flashed across his face, quick and sharp.
"Wow. Okay. Great question. Very original. You're the fourth person to ask me that, and the last person who did gave me a *lot* of feelings about kitchen tables." He smiled with too many teeth. "Let's go with 'hungry.'"
---
**STILES**
Klaus Mikaelson tasted like a thousand years of bad decisions and daddy issues, and it was *so* good.
It sat in Stiles's chest like a swallowed sun, hot and heavy, and he'd barely had a sip. He'd tried Chipotle burritos less satisfying than this.
He knew who they all were, because some habits die hard, and research was his love language. Hayley was the brunette with the wolf eyes currently trying to kill him with her mind. Elijah was the man in the suit, watching him the way you'd watch a raccoon that had gotten into the house and was now holding a knife. Freya was the blonde witch on the stairs, who smelled like wet forest and iron.
And next to Freya was the girl.
She wore a sweater three sizes too big and had a pencil behind her ear. Her auburn hair was falling out of a bun that had clearly lost a fight. That was Hope Mikaelson, the miracle baby: witch, wolf, and vampire in one package.
Hers was the loud magic. Up close it was practically *singing* at him. He let himself look for one more second, because he could, before turning back to Klaus. The big bad was flexing his hand like it had fallen asleep.
"Okay," Stiles said, and clapped. Dried blood flaked off like confetti. "You're probably wondering why I'm here. Can I do a speech? I've been working on it for three states. Mostly in the shower. Motels have great acoustics."
"By all means," Klaus said. His voice was all silk. His eyes said *slow death*.
Stiles started pacing. He'd always paced. It had been an Adderall thing before it was an apex-predator thing.
"So. Klaus Mikaelson. Original hybrid. You killed half of Europe, daggered your whole family, and put them in boxes like the world's most homicidal Container Store. Everybody talks about you like you're the boogeyman. Witches in Texas crossed themselves when I said your name. *Crossed* themselves. It was adorable."
He spun on his heel.
"Me? I used to be human. My best friend got bitten by a werewolf when we were sixteen. And instead of screaming and moving to Canada like a *reasonable person*, I stayed. I researched. I figured out the rules. I fought hunters and a lizard guy and a murder druid, and a fox spirit that crawled into my head and wore me like a onesie for a few months. I kept a whole pack alive with a baseball bat and a *library card*."
His voice went up, sharp and hot, because honestly? It still pissed him off.
"And the second I get upgraded? The *second* I stop being the squishy human sidekick they could send to go get snacks? Suddenly I'm the monster. Scott McCall called me a monster. *Scott*. The guy who didn't know how to spell 'lycanthropy' until I wrote it on his hand. Derek gave me the *eyebrows*. And my dad..." He snapped his fingers. "*What are you?* Across the kitchen table. Like I was a perp. Like I'd tracked mud in."
He laughed, and it came out nasty.
"So I left."
"Did you kill them?" Elijah asked.
"No." Stiles waved a hand. "Wasn't worth the gas money. Beacon Hills gets a new apocalypse every six months anyway. Something'll eat them eventually. I'm just letting nature take its course."
"And your pack deserved that," Hayley said. It wasn't a question.
"Lady, my pack deserves a strongly worded Yelp review and nothing else. They're not my problem." He shrugged. "Anyway! Since then I do whatever I want. Eat what I want. Kill what I want. Fun fact: there's a bar three blocks that way with two of your vampires in it, or most of them, plus a bartender named Dwayne, who was a terrible liar. Somebody should probably mop. It's getting sticky."
Klaus's jaw flexed. "You came to my city and fed on my people, and then you knocked on my door."
"I'm very polite."
"Why?"
"Because I'm *bored*, man." Stiles threw up his hands. "You have no idea. Nothing can hurt me. I've tried. I stood in the sun for an entire afternoon in Phoenix. I got a *tan*. I've been drifting for months, I think? Time's gone full Salvador Dalí. Clocks are melting. Tuesday's a concept. And everybody says, *Oh, Klaus Mikaelson, oh, the Original hybrid, oh, the scariest thing on earth*. So I figured, great. Finally. Something interesting."
He let his eyes bleed red, lazy and bright.
"So come on, Klaus. Entertain me. Or I'm gonna start leaving you one-star reviews too."
---
**HOPE**
Hope had grown up with professional liars, and she knew what they looked like.
This wasn't that.
He was funny. That was the horrible part. He was actually funny. He talked like someone doing stand-up at an open mic, all elbows and speed. When he'd talked about his friends and his father, he'd gotten *angry*. It was real, hot anger that came off him like heat off asphalt.
But not about the bar. Not about Dwayne. Not once, when he talked about the two vampires he'd torn apart, did his heartbeat so much as flinch. The dead people were a punchline. He'd told the Mikaelsons to *mop* like he'd knocked over a drink.
Her father was circling now, slow and loose, deciding how much of someone to leave in one piece. Her mom was half-shifted. And none of them knew what to do.
Hope had never seen that before.
"You're not here to fight him," Hope said.
Every head in the courtyard turned.
"Hope," her mom snapped.
Hope pulled her arm free of Freya and came down the rest of the stairs. She stopped fifteen feet from him. That was close enough to smell the blood, copper and salt with something like burnt sugar underneath. It was close enough to feel the hook in her chest go taut.
"You don't care if you win," she said. "You don't care who dies. You just want something to *happen*."
Stiles looked at her. His whole attention swung around and landed on her like a spotlight.
"Okay, wow," he said. "Called out by the teenager. In front of everybody. That's fine. I'm fine."
"I'm eighteen."
"Oh, *excuse* me. Called out by the legal adult." He pointed at her. "But yeah. Nailed it. Gold star. You get a sticker."
"Hope. *Come here*," her father said.
She didn't move.
"Every creature," her father said, still circling, "swears it can't die, until it meets the right weapon. The right spell." His eyes went to the stairs. "The right witch."
Hope felt Aunt Freya's magic rise behind her. The house thrummed, and the air went thick and electric. Freya spoke three words that made Hope's ears ring, and a wall of force came down across the courtyard like a ceiling collapsing.
Stiles lifted a hand.
The spell *bent*. It curved toward his palm like water circling a drain, and he swallowed it. Red light crawled up his arm under the skin in forking lines, over his throat and up his jaw. He closed his eyes and made a noise like someone who'd just had the first bite of a really good burger.
"Oh, that's *nice*," he said. "Is that sage? I'm getting notes of sage."
Freya swayed and grabbed the banister, white as paper. Her mom was up the stairs in a blur.
"I'm fine," Freya gasped. "He took it. He took *all* of it."
Stiles opened his eyes. "Thank you. Ten out of ten. Would drain again."
Hope's magic surged at the sight of her aunt hurt. It came hot and fast into her fingers, shoving against her skin, wanting out.
Stiles's head snapped toward her. The humor dropped straight off his face. His nostrils flared and his pupils blew wide and red.
He looked at her the way her father looked at an open vein.
"Uh-uh," he said, very quietly. "Keep doing that, and I'm gonna take it."
Her heart slammed. "Then why haven't you?"
His mouth curled slowly. The grin came back, sharper this time.
"Because you're the best thing in this whole house, and I'm not gonna eat dessert first. What am I, an animal?" He paused. "Okay, technically, yes. Several animals. But I have *standards*."
Her father was suddenly in front of her, a wall of shoulders and fury.
"You will not," her father said, every word carved out of ice, "*touch* my daughter."
Stiles leaned sideways to look around him. He found Hope's eyes and wiggled his fingers at her.
"Hi."
---
**STILES**
Elijah cleared his throat. It was an extremely civilized noise for a guy who very clearly wanted to pull Stiles's spine out through his mouth.
"What is it you want from us?" he asked. "Plainly."
"I *said*. Something to do. Were you not listening? I did a whole speech. There was a callback."
"And if we decline to provide it?"
"Then I'll find something to do on my own." Stiles jerked a thumb toward the gate. "Big city. Lots of vampires who think they're in charge. Lots of witches. Lots of tourists in Mardi Gras beads. I'm not picky. I'm like a Roomba, but for people."
"My city," Klaus said, "is not a buffet."
"It's *literally* a buffet. Have you been outside? It's all-you-can-eat out there. Somebody put a sign up."
Klaus's eyes flared gold.
"Consider this, then. You can't die. Fine. I've spent a thousand years learning there are much worse things than death. Being buried alive. Chained at the bottom of the ocean. Daggered and left to rot in a box while the world forgets you." His smile was a blade. "I've done all of that to people I *love*. Imagine what I'll do to you."
Stiles actually thought about it, because it was the best threat anyone had given him in weeks.
"Okay, that's good. That's genuinely good. The ocean one's creative." He nodded appreciatively. "But you'd have to catch me first. Then you'd have to hold on. And every second your hands are on me, I'm drinking you like a Capri Sun. So by the time you get that lid shut, buddy, I'm pretty sure it's *you* in the box." He grinned. "But hey, I've got a free calendar. Let's find out."
Klaus stared at him.
Stiles watched him look for the angle, the lever, the soft spot a thousand-year-old manipulator could get his fingers into. He almost felt bad for the guy. He was going to be looking for a while.
Then something shifted in Klaus's face. It wasn't fear. It was worse, and a lot more fun. It was *interest*.
"Get out of my house," Klaus said.
"Sure! Great meeting you. Super fun. Love the pillar. Really opens up the space."
He strolled to the gate. At the threshold he stopped and turned. He looked past Klaus, past the wall of angry Mikaelsons, at the girl at the foot of the stairs. Her magic was still pressing at her skin like it wanted to follow him out.
"See you around, Hope," he said.
Then he was gone.
---
**HOPE**
The gate swung shut and the courtyard went silent.
Freya sat down hard on the steps and put her face in her hands. "It was like pouring water into sand."
"He'll be back," her mom said. Her eyes were still gold. "He found a hunting ground."
"He'll be back," her father agreed. He was still flexing his hand, watching it like the gray might come back. "The question is what he breaks first."
"Me," Hope said. "He *told* us."
Her father turned to her. For the first time in her life, she saw him not know what to say.
"He's playing with you, little wolf. He wants a reaction."
"No, he isn't." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "He didn't lie once. Not about the bar, not about his family, not about me. He was *angry* about his family. Actually angry. But the people he killed?" She swallowed. "He made jokes. He didn't care. Not even a little."
Her mom took Hope's face in both hands, the way she had when Hope was small. "Then you stay away from him. Do you hear me? He looked at you like food."
"I know."
She did know. She'd felt it, that red, starving attention sliding over her.
What she didn't tell any of them was that her magic hadn't settled since he'd walked out. It was still humming under her skin, the hook in her chest pulled tight, pointing out the gate and into the city after him like a compass needle.
She went back to the balcony. Below her, the crack ran through the pillar from floor to ceiling like frozen lightning. She picked up her pencil and meant to draw the fountain.
When the sky started going gray, she was looking at a face instead: a sharp jaw, a mouth caught mid-grin, and eyes she'd shaded red by pressing until the graphite shone.
She closed the sketchbook and didn't open it again.
---
**STILES**
He sat on the roof of St. Louis Cathedral with his legs hanging over the edge and his hoodie slowly turning into cardboard.
"Should've brought a change of clothes," he told a pigeon. The pigeon did not care. Stiles respected that.
Freya's magic was still fizzing in his blood, with Klaus underneath it like a bass line. Down in Jackson Square, a street sweeper grumbled along the curb. A guy was unfolding easels. A woman in a green dress walked home barefoot with her heels in her hand, laughing into her phone. Her pulse was quick and bright. He tracked it for a second, then let her go. He wasn't hungry enough to climb down, and the stairs in this place looked like a whole thing.
Under all of it, clear across the Quarter, was one heartbeat he could pick out without even trying.
It was fast. She was still awake.
*You just want something to happen.*
"Rude," he said to nobody. "Accurate. But rude."
He thought about the look on Klaus's face when the spell went into Stiles's hand. He thought about Freya grabbing the banister, and the crack in the pillar. Mostly he thought about Hope's magic surging up into her fingers, and the way it had *smelled*, and how it was going to taste when he finally got his mouth on her throat.
He thought about Klaus's face when *that* happened.
The sky went pink, then gold over the river. The sun hit him full in the face. It didn't burn. It never did.
Stiles stretched until his spine cracked and grinned at the city spread out below him like a menu.
"Okay, New Orleans," he said. "Let's have some fun."