The PDF was on page forty-seven and the Latin was terrible.
Not terrible in the sense that it was difficult — Evelyn had been reading Latin since she was nine, because her mother had decided that dead languages were safer than live creatures, and had given her dictionaries the same way other parents gave their children picture books. It was terrible in the sense that whoever had transcribed this particular manuscript in 1887 had clearly been doing it in a hurry, or drunk, or possibly both, because three words in every paragraph were either misspelled or entirely invented and Evelyn had been staring at "vocis terrenae" for the past ten minutes trying to decide if it meant earthly voice or if someone had simply dropped an r somewhere and the whole thing was nonsense.
She shifted on the bed, pulling her knees up, and scrolled back to the beginning of the section.
The screen cast a pale rectangle of light across the ceiling. Downstairs, nothing moved.
She had gotten good at listening for her mother's sleep. So that she could hide everything away before she noticed Evelyn was keep studying on her own.
She had been doing this since Stiles had gotten her the first PDF, every night she read, and memorized and studied and tried.
The notebook on her knee had three pages of notes in handwriting that got worse as the night went on. Formulas — or what she thought were formulas, because the manuscript kept calling them "patterns of intention" instead of anything useful. She had rewritten the central one four times, changing the order of the components each time, because the text was unclear about sequence and Deaton wasn't explaining things to her anymore and she had no one to ask.
That still stung, a little. The particular sting of having done something right and being punished for it anyway.
The power that you've channeled, that is not some usual Emissary's work, he had said to her when he decided to stop training her.
That was ridiculous. He and her mother threated her like that, when now she wasn't even able to move a stupid pen.
She turned back to page forty-seven.
The formula — pattern of intention, whatever — involved what the manuscript called "directed attention", which was a phrase that made complete sense and no sense at all simultaneously. Every druidic text she had ever read was like this. Her mother's books, before her mother had taken them. The ones Stiles had found online, scanned and uploaded from university archives in Edinburgh and Prague and one very specific library in Cork that apparently had digitised its entire collection in 2009 and then never updated its website, so the files were enormous and half of them were sideways.
Stiles had sent her seventeen PDFs in a single afternoon with the message: found these, no idea if they're useful, the one from Cork is upside down on pages 34-67, sorry
She looked at the formula again.
Directed attention. The intention must precede the movement. The practitioner does not push — the practitioner—
The Latin broke down here. Something about inviting. Something about allowing.
She had been trying, for the past hour, to move the pen on her nightstand.
It was a blue pen, slightly chewed at the end, one of about twelve identical ones she kept in a cup on her desk and which migrated to various surfaces around her room over the course of any given week. She had chosen it specifically because it seemed like the least dramatic possible object. Not a candle, not a crystal — things her mother associated with what she called playing at it, said with a particular tone that Evelyn had stopped arguing with at fourteen. Just a pen.
She had been staring at it, concentrating, directing her attention, inviting and allowing and whatever else the manuscript suggested, for fifty-three minutes.
The pen had not moved.
She exhaled through her nose and looked back at the PDF.
The practitioner does not create force. The practitioner recognises the force that already exists and—
More broken Latin. Something about joining. Something about the difference between speaking and being heard.
She wrote it down anyway, in her bad late-night handwriting, and then underlined it twice because it seemed like it might be important and she had learned to write things down before she understood them, because sometimes understanding came later and it was useful to have the words already on the page.
Her mother had taught her that once, actually.
She didn't let herself think about that either.
She looked at the pen.
The pen sat there, indifferent to her attention, the way inanimate objects always were and always would be, because she was seventeen and sitting cross-legged on her bed at two in the morning trying to move things with her mind like this was a film and not her actual life—
You're not pushing, she thought, suddenly irritated with herself. You're not supposed to push. You're supposed to—
Downstairs, the old house made its specific 2 a.m. sound — a soft contraction of wood in the cold.
Evelyn went very still.
Nothing. Just the house.
She let out a breath.
How did I do it? She thought as her leg bounced up and down nervously. How did she managed to help Derek heal? She felt all that power, and now she wasn't able to move a piece of plastic.
She pressed her palms flat against her knees and stared at the pen and tried to remember what it had felt like. Not the theory of it — she had the theory, she had fifty-three minutes of theory, she had three pages of notes and four versions of the same formula and a Latin manuscript that couldn't decide what it wanted to say. She meant the actual feeling of it. The thing that had happened in her chest before her hands had even known what they were doing.
She hadn't been thinking about formulas then. She hadn't been thinking about anything, really. She had been thinking about Scott's bite, and whether it would scar, and whether she was going to get this wrong and make everything worse.
She had been scared.
The pen sat there, indifferent to her attention, the way inanimate objects always were and always would be, because she was seventeen and sitting cross-legged on her bed at two in the morning trying to move things with her mind like this was a film and not her actual life—
You're not pushing, she thought, suddenly irritated with herself. You're not supposed to push. You're supposed to—
Downstairs, the old house made its specific 2 a.m. sound — a soft contraction of wood in the cold.
Evelyn went very still.
Nothing. Just the house.
She let out a breath.
How did I do it? She thought as her leg bounced up and down nervously. How had she managed to help Derek heal? She had felt all that power, and now she wasn't able to move a piece of plastic.
She pressed her palms flat against her knees and stared at the pen and tried to remember what it had felt like. Not the theory of it — she had the theory, she had fifty-three minutes of theory, she had three pages of notes and four versions of the same formula and a Latin manuscript that couldn't decide what it wanted to say. She meant the actual feeling of it. The thing that had happened in her chest right before.
When she had healed Derek she hadn't planned it. She had just — said the words, and the words had found something, and whatever they had found had answered. Like calling into a dark room and hearing footsteps come back.
She looked at the pen.
She felt slightly ridiculous. But she also had three pages of notes and nothing to show for them, so.
She took a breath.
"Motion of the still, turn of the at-rest," she tried, quietly, barely above a whisper, translating loosely from the formula on page forty-seven. "Let what is fixed become—"
Nothing.
She tried again, adjusting the sequence the way the manuscript seemed to suggest, putting the second component before the first.
Nothing.
She tried the version where she changed fixed to rooted, because the Latin was genuinely unclear and radicatus could go either way.
The pen sat there.
She dropped her head back against the headboard and stared at the ceiling. The pale rectangle of laptop light wavered slightly when a car passed outside, its headlights sliding across the window.
How did I do that? She thought again.
She had to learn, she had to make it. How could she be helpful to Scott and Stiles if she didn't manage. She knew she could, she had already done it. Then why that damn pen was not moving?
She looked at the pen.
"Motion of the still, turn of the at-rest," she tried again, flatly, because she was tired and frustrated and the Latin was terrible and she had been at this for almost an hour. "Let what is fixed become—"
The pen sat there.
"Fine," she said, to no one. To the pen. To the manuscript on page forty-seven and its completely unhelpful concept of directed attention. "Fine."
She closed the laptop.
The room went dark except for the thin line of light under her door and the pale wash of streetlight through the curtain. She sat in it for a moment, her notebook in her lap.
Riprendo esattamente da dove hai lasciato.
She sat in the dark for a moment, her notebook in her lap, and thought.
She had to figure out a way to be useful. That was the problem — not the pen, the pen was just a pen, the pen was a test she had invented for herself at two in the morning because she needed something concrete to fail at. The real problem was that Scott was out there with an Alpha who wanted to recruit him, and somewhere in this town Peter Hale was moving pieces around a board that nobody else could fully see from where they stood.
And she was here. In her room. With a pen that wouldn't move and a manuscript from 1887 that couldn't spell.
She needed to be more than someone who had gotten lucky once with a healing formula she didn't fully understand.
Then she found herself talking about Derek.
The empty field, the stadium lights, his voice saying this has nothing to do with you in that tone that wasn't quite anger and wasn't quite anything else she had a name for.
This has everything to do with me, she thought stubbornly.
Then suddenly her phone buzzed. And the house was so silent that even the buzzing seemed to be a ringtone.
She grabbed it in pure reflex before she'd even looked at the screen, her heart already in her throat at the name on it.
"Alan?" she said in a whisper.
"I know it's late." Deaton's voice. Unhurried, precise, every word placed deliberately. "But I need you to come to the clinic."
Evelyn looked at the pen. The notebook. The laptop sitting dark and closed on the bed beside her.
"Now?"
"Yes, now would be better," at his answer Evelyn was already on her feet. Her heand reaching for her boots.
"What happened?"
"I'll explain when you get here," he said after a moment of silence, "Come through the back."
The call ended.
Evelyn stood in the dark of her room with one boot on and one boot in her hand and tried to read the silence he had left behind. Deaton was always like this — careful, measured, giving you exactly what you needed and nothing else — but there was a specific quality to tonight's silence that she couldn't quite name.
She pulled on the second boot.
Something had happened. Something that couldn't wait until morning, which in Beacon Hills meant the category of things had narrowed considerably. She ran through the possibilities while she grabbed her jacket from the chair — Scott, the Alpha, the hunters, Derek...
Something bad must have happened anyway.
She picked up the ashwood vial from the nightstand and put it around her neck without thinking about it. And with the last look at the pen, she left her room.
She went into the hallway, stepping automatically over the third floorboard from the left — the one that creaked — and down the stairs in the particular careful way she had perfected at thirteen, weight to the outside edge of each step, one hand light on the banister, no sudden movements. Her mother's door was closed. The thin line of darkness underneath it was complete.
The night air outside was cold and still.
She got in her car and sat for a moment before starting the engine, looking at the dark street, at the houses with their lights off, at Beacon Hills sleeping around her like it didn't know what was moving through it.
She started the engine and pulled out of the driveway.
The town was empty at this hour — streetlights and silence, the occasional traffic light cycling through its colours for nobody. She drove the way she always drove at night, a little faster than she should, the heater coming on slowly and the radio staying off.
The animal clinic came into view at the end of the block, and her chest tightened slightly at the sight of it — one window lit from inside, pale and steady, the rest of the building dark. From the street it looked almost normal. Almost like Deaton had simply forgotten to turn off a light.
She parked and came around the back of the building through the narrow alley, past the dumpster and the stack of collapsed cardboard boxes that had been there since October, and found the back door unlocked, like Deaton had told her.
She pushed it open and went in.
The back hallway smelled like antiseptic and something underneath it, something older and harder to name — the same smell the room always had when Deaton was doing something that wasn't strictly veterinary. She had stopped noticing it after the third or fourth time. Tonight it hit her immediately.
She pushed through the second door into the examination room.
Her hand was still on the door when she saw him.
Scott was flat on the table, with no shirt on and two wounds in his abdomen, close together, the flesh around them black at the edges and spreading — not like a bruise, like something burning outward in slow motion. And from the corner of his mouth, dark and wrong, blood that was not the right colour.
"Oh my god, Scott..." The sound left her before she could stop it.
"Evelyn." Deaton's voice was even. He was already on the other side of the table, gloved, his eyes on Scott's face.
"What happened to him?"
"Hunters," Deaton answered, "Do you recognize the wound? You've seen it before." Evelyn took a breath looking at it better. Yeah... yeah she had seen it on Derek's arm. The first time that she helped him.
"Mountain ash bullets," she muttered and Deaton nodded his head.
"That's right," he said moving closer to stand on her side, "Now I need you to focus. I have to pull the bullets out without breaking them."
Evelyn's eyes grew lager, "You want me to help?"
Deaton's lips turned up into a little smile, "Isn't he your friend?" Evelyn lost no time on nodding her head, and he gestured to move on the other side of the table, which she did.
Scott's chest was rising and falling — too shallow, too fast, the unsteady rhythm of something working very hard to keep going. His eyes were closed. There was a line of black at his jaw now, tracing the edge of his face, and she made herself look at it and not look away.
"What do I do?" she said.
Deaton was already moving, reaching for the instruments on the tray beside him. "One of the bullet released the ash and it's now curroupting the tissue. I need to be sure the ash is back inside the bullet before taking it out and finish the proceadure." He placed a small glass vial on the table beside her — clear liquid, something faintly luminescent at the bottom. "I need you to pull it back as I extract it. Lay your hands here—" he indicated the area around the wounds, "—and hold it."
"Hold it with what?"
"With whatever you used on Derek," he said, simply, and returned his attention to the instruments. Evelyn frowned at those words, before panic started to creep up in her chest.
"I... I don't-- I... The pen..." she stuttered and Deaton looked at her confused. As her eyes remained on Scott, her body felt frozen.
"I've tried to move a pen for one hour and I couldn't do it. How can I do this?" She asked her voice sheaking.
"You've already done it." Deaton said, but she shook her head.
"I don't know how I did it with Derek, I still don't know, and Scott is—" Her voice caught slightly. "He's right here and if I get this wrong—"
"Evelyn." Deaton looked up then, and his expression was the same as it always was — measured, careful, not unkind. "You are not going to get this wrong."
"You don't know that."
"I know that you healed a werewolf from an alpha scretch on your own," Their gazes met and she could see the resolution in his stare. "
"I also know that the difference between that night and a pen on a nightstand is not technique." He held her gaze for a moment. "Now put your hands down."
She looked at Scott's face. The line of black at his jaw. The too-shallow rise and fall of his chest.
She wanted to help, she wanted to save him. Scott had been her friend since she was little.
She put her hands down.
The heat was immediate — not painful, just present, the way it had been with Derek, that specific sensation of something responding before she had consciously decided to ask it. She felt it move up through her palms and into her wrists and she made herself breathe through it instead of pulling away.
"Spirits of root and stone," she said quietly. Her voice was steadier than she expected. "Guardians of the ancient grove."
"Good," Deaton said. Just that. He was already working, his hands precise and unhurried, and she kept her eyes on Scott's face and kept talking.
"Hold what spreads. Still what burns."
The black at Scott's jaw stopped moving.
She felt it more than saw it — a kind of resistance meeting her hands, like pushing against something that had been pushing back and had suddenly, fractionally, yielded. It wasn't comfortable.
It was just work, the specific exhausting quality of holding something in place that wanted to move.
"Mend what ash has taken. Return what fire has stolen."
Deaton made a small sound — not alarm, more like confirmation — and she heard the precise click of an instrument against something solid.
"First one," he said quietly.
She kept her hands where they were and kept going and did not let herself think about pens.
The second bullet took longer.
She could feel it — the difference between the first and the second, the way the ash had spread further from this one, deeper into the tissue, harder to hold. Her arms were shaking by then, a fine tremor she couldn't stop, and the heat in her palms had gone from present to insistent, the kind of sensation that started to bleed into pain at the edges.
"Return what fire has stolen," she said again, because it seemed to be working and she had nothing else, and her voice came out thinner this time, less steady, the words costing more than they had thirty seconds ago.
"Almost," Deaton said quietly.
She kept her hands where they were. She looked at Scott's face — the slow evening of his breathing, the black at his jaw that had stopped moving and was, she thought, very slightly receding — and she held on.
"Spirits of root and stone. Guardians of the—"
"Got it," Deaton said.
The click of the instrument.
The resistance under her hands vanished so suddenly that she had nothing left to push against, and the absence of it took everything with it. Her knees went first, and then the rest of her, her shoulder hitting the floor before she'd understood she was falling.
The linoleum was cold against her cheek.
She was aware of Deaton moving around the table, of his footsteps, of him crouching beside her. She was also aware that she was lying on the floor of an animal clinic at two in the morning and that her arms felt like they belonged to someone else.
"I'm fine," she said, to the floor.
Deaton crouched beside her without saying anything about that, which she appreciated. He put one hand under her arm and helped her up slowly, delicately and she got her back against the cabinet below the counter and sat there with her knees up and her head tipped back against the cold metal.
"Thank you," she said. "Is he going to be alright?"
He looked at her for a moment — that specific look he had, the one that was reading several things at once without commenting on any of them — and then stood and went back to Scott.
She watched him work. His hands were steady and precise the way they always were, no wasted movement, the kind of competence that looked effortless because it had been practiced until it was.
"He'll recover," Deaton said, without looking up. "Werewolves are resilient creatures."
"Good... that's good," Evelyn let her head fall back against the cabinet.
The linoleum was still cold under her. Her arms still felt like they belonged to someone who had been through something she hadn't. She was aware, distantly, that she should probably get up but her body felt very heavy.
"You'll be feeling quite weak for the next hours," Deaton said still tending Scott's wounds. "What you did just now," he said, "was much stronger than anything I've taught you. How did you came to know of this sort of power?"
"Books," Evelyn said, her breathing eaven as she explained, "Mum had many of those, she said they belonged to my grandmother."
"So you've taught yourself," Deaton said calmly.
"More or less," she said with a little shrug of her shoulders, "Most of all I read and memorized." Then she looked at him from from the corner of her eyes.
He said finally finishing to tend Scott. Then he pulled the stool from under the counter and sat down on it, which was the closest thing to informal she had ever seen from him. "I stopped training you because what I was teaching you and what you were doing had started to diverge in ways I couldn't account for. That's not a failure of yours. It's a limitation of mine."
"What does that mean?" Evelyn said.
"It means that what you did with Derek, and what you did tonight, isn't something I can teach," he said. "It comes from something else. Something older." A pause. "Do you understand what I mean when I say that?"
"I... I know that this practice is an exchange," she said, repeating what she had been studying, "You don't produce energy. You channel it — from the earth, from nature, from whatever is around you."
"That's correct," Deaton nodded, "
What you felt in your hands tonight, that heat, that resistance — that wasn't yours. You borrowed it."
Evelyn looked at her hands. They still felt strange. Emptied out.
"And now I have to give it back," she said slowly.
"You already did. That's why you're on the floor." He watched her. "Tell me something. When you healed Derek — how did you feel after?"
She thought about it. Derek on her couch, the wound closing, her mother's voice from the stairs. "Tired," she said. "But not like this. This is—" She stopped.
"Worse," Deaton said.
"Yeah."
He nodded. Not surprised. "With Derek you were working with something that was already moving in the right direction. His body was trying to heal itself — you accelerated it. You joined a current that was already flowing." He took a breath. "Tonight you held something back that was actively spreading. You pushed against it, consciously, for several minutes, without knowing your own limits." He tilted his head as he observed her. "Those are opposite actions. One borrows energy. The other spends it."
"So I spent too much," Evelyn said.
"You spent more than you knew you had." He looked at her steadily. "What would have happened if there had been a third bullet?"
She didn't answer. She didn't have one.
"You don't know," Deaton said. "And neither do I. And that is exactly the problem." He stood, crossing back to check on Scott one last time, methodical. "You've been practicing alone, without structure, without anyone watching what you take and what you give back. That works until it doesn't. And when it stops working—" He left the sentence where it was.
"Something bad happens," Evelyn said.
"Something bad happens," he agreed, without inflection.
She looked at her hands again. The tremor had mostly stopped. Mostly.
"So what do I do?" she asked.
"You learn how to do it properly." He turned. "Starting next week. You've also have many appointments to arrange." She turned to the front desk, where she used to work. And her eyes grew larger.
"I can come back to work?" Deaton nodded at her question, and Evelyn let out a little chuckle, but then she frowned a little. "Just... just like that? You're going to start training me again?"
"I'm going to try," he said. "Which is different. I want you to understand that distinction."
"Right." She pressed her lips together. "And my mother—"
"Is a conversation for another time."
"She's going to—"
"Another time, Evelyn."
She exhaled. "Okay." Then, because she couldn't quite help it: "Was this your plan? Call me at two in the morning, make me hold back mountain ash until I collapse, and then tell me you'll train me again? Because that's a very elaborate way to make a point."
He showed her his hand for her to take, which Evelyn grabbed letting him help her to stand.
"Take the sofa in the studio, you're gonna need sleep," he said, obviously ignoring her statement from before. She used to hate when he did it, but now... now she realized she had almost missed it.
"Alan," she called him, turning on her way to the studio, the man looked at her. "Thank you, I really want to learn."
Deaton smiled at her, "Good night, Evelyn."
The study was small and smelled like old paper and something herbal she couldn't name. A narrow couch, a folded blanket, a desk stacked with things she was too tired to identify.
Her body felt so heavy as she layed down, but yet again that euphoria came back as she covered herself. The feeling of that power in her vains, going through her, for as much as she understood the danger of it, it was impressive. Exciting.
Can I really channel it better? Will I be able to do it?
And with these thought she drifted away in a deep sleep without dreams.
She woke to pale morning light coming through the small high window and lay still for a moment, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling. The smell came first — old paper and something herbal — and then the rest of it came back in a slow, steady wave. The examination room. Scott on the table. The heat in her palms and the resistance giving way all at once and the floor coming up faster than she'd expected.
She sat up carefully. Her arms felt almost normal. Almost.
Deaton was at the counter when she found her way back to the examination room, working through something methodical and quiet, his back to her. Scott was still on the table. The wounds were covered in clean gauze now, and there was a faint dark stain where something had seeped through in the night, but his colour was fully back and the black at his jaw was gone.
Deaton turned when he heard her come in.
"Good morning," he said. "How are you feeling?"
"Better." She rolled her shoulder experimentally. "I wouldn't run a marathon. But definately better."
"That'll do."
She pulled the chair up beside Scott and sat with her elbows on her knees, watching his face. It was strange to see him still, laying there with his hands loose at his sides he looked younger than he was. He looked like the kid she'd known at twelve, before the bite, before any of this.
Then his eyes opened.
He was upright almost before she could register it, already trying to swing his legs off the table, and both she and Deaton moved at the same moment — her hand on his arm, Deaton's on his shoulder, the two of them arriving at the same conclusion from opposite sides.
"Easy," Deaton said.
Scott blinked, slower, like his body was sending messages his brain hadn't quite received yet. He looked at the ceiling. At Deaton. At Evelyn. Some of the urgency left his face, replaced by something more bewildered and exhausted.
"Welcome back to the land of the conscious," Deaton said.
Scott let out a short, tired laugh that sounded like it had surprised even him, and Evelyn hugged him before she'd made any conscious decision to do so — arms around his shoulders, her chin on his shoulder. He made a startled sound when she did, but then he hugged her back nonetheless.
"You scared me to death," she said, into his shoulder.
"We should probably let him lie back for a little—" Deaton started, and then the bell above the front door rang.
The three of them went still in the same moment.
The shop was closed. It was too early for anyone to be there, and the bell shouldn't have rung.
Deaton called out toward the front — a simple hello, nothing in his voice suggesting anything at all — and when no answer came he moved toward the entrance with the same unhurried precision he brought to everything.
Scott's hand caught his arm.
The look on Scott's face was one she had learned to read over the past few months. It was the look he got when he knew something his body had told him before his mind had caught up — tight, controlled, very still. There was only one thing that produced that particular expression.
Deaton looked at the hand on his arm, then at Scott's face, and smiled in that small, specific way he had, the one that meant he had already accounted for the situation and found it manageable. Scott let him go.
Evelyn moved to where she could see through the doorway into the front of the shop.
Peter Hale was standing just inside the entrance with his hands clasped behind his back and a smile on his face that would have looked pleasant on someone else. Behind him, one step back, Scarlett stood with her arms crossed and her face hard and unreadable.
"I'm sorry, but we are closed," Deaton said.
"Hi there," Peter said pleasantly. "I'm here to pick up."
His eyes moved past Deaton's shoulder with the easy confidence of someone who expected to be let through. Evelyn stepped back slightly without thinking about it. Scott had retreated to the far corner of the room, putting every available inch of distance between himself and the door.
"I'm not sure I remember you dropping off," Deaton said.
"This one wandered here on its own." Peter took a few unhurried steps forward. Deaton didn't move. "Surely you can make an exception."
"I'm sorry. That's not going to be possible," Deaton said keeping his tone kind, but firm. "Maybe you could come back during regular hours."
Evelyn had heard this kind of exchange before, in her mother's shop, with Kate Argent. The same false courtesy. The same pressure applied so gently it almost didn't feel like pressure at all.
"Let's go, Peter," Scarlett said from behind him. Low and flat.
Peter didn't acknowledge her, and he clearly was starting to get angry.
"You have something of mine," he said, almost making Evelyn shiver, "And I'm here to collect it."
But Deaton did not back away, "Like I said," he insisted with resolution, "We're closed."
Peter moved toward the low gate between the entrance and the examination area, reaching for it with the assumption of someone who expected it to open, and stopped. His fingers didn't quite make contact. He stood perfectly still for a moment, and then said mountain ash in a tone that was almost admiring, and the relief that moved through Evelyn was immediate and physical. He couldn't get through.
"Peter—" Scarlett started, before something hit the wall violently and Evelyn flinched.
But Deaton didn't even flinched, if anything his voice got even firmer. "Let me be as clear as possible. We. Are. Closed."
"Peter, let's go." Scarlett's voice had changed — harder now, carrying something underneath it that wasn't quite urgency but was close enough. "You can't get in anyway. Let's go!"
There was a pause that lasted long enough to be uncomfortable, and then footsteps, and then the bell rang again as the door opened and closed, and the shop went quiet.
Evelyn turned to Scott. He was already looking at her from his corner, and they both exhaled at the same moment.
She hadn't missed it — the way Scarlett had spoken. First one moving toward the door, pulling Peter with her voice if not her hands, her face closed and flat and not quite willing. She hadn't looked like someone who had come to collect anything. She had looked like someone who had been brought along and had spent the whole time calculating how quickly she could leave.
What's her game now? She thought confused.
Then Scott's whole body changed.
"Allison!" he said suddenly.
Evelyn looked at him with a frown, "What?"
"He's going to go after Allison." He was already pushing off the corner. "I have to—"
"Scott." She put herself in front of him. "Last night hunters shot you twice. You could have died! You were lucky Deaton found you."
"Where?" She stepped in front of him, which was not her best idea but was the idea she had. "Scott, last night hunters almost killed you. You were lucky Deaton found you."
Scott blinked at her. "He brought us here, not you?"
She frowned. "How would I—" then her breath hinched, "Wait... Us? Who's us? Who were you with?"
"Derek." He said it simply, like it was obvious, and then looked past her toward the door. "Wasn't Derek here when you arrived?"
"No."
Something shifted in his expression. "I thought he escaped." He ran a hand through his hair, the movement restless and a little lost. "I went there to stop him from hurting Jackson."
"Jackson?" She asked at him ever more confused. Derek had been going after Jackson? Why? What the hell happened that night?
"Yeah, but then the hunters arrived, and Derek made me run from the back of the house, and he—" Scott stopped.
Evelyn saw the moment the realization settled into him, the exact instant when the pieces rearranged themselves in his mind. His expression shifted, something tightening behind his eyes as the thought finished forming.
Evelyn felt a cold drop in her stomach.
"Oh my god," she said quietly. "Did he stay to fight them?"
Scott didn't answer right away. He looked away instead, one hand going to the back of his neck, fingers pressing there as if he could physically push the memory away.
"He said he would give me more time?" he said, "Why? Do you think he's dead?"
Evelyn shrudded at the idea, "No, no, absolutely not." She said hoping to be right, but knowing that she was also lying. They had been attacked with wolfsbane's bullets. The hunters had attacked to kill.
He can't be dead...
Evelyn closed her eyes for a second. Then opened them. "Okay," she said. "Okay. Where?"
"The old house. The Hale house. That's where we were." He was already looking past her toward the door, that particular tension in his shoulders that meant he was calculating routes and distances. "Evelyn, if Peter goes after Allison—"
"I'll go to the house," she said.
He looked at her. "What?"
"You said Peter is going after Allison, and someone has to check." She said it before she'd entirely finished deciding it, which was, she had come to understand, how most of her decisions got made lately.
"Evelyn—"
"Six minutes ago you couldn't sit up without help." She picked up her jacket from the chair where she'd left it the night before. "Stay here. Call Stiles. I'll call you."
Deaton, from behind her, said nothing. Which was, she had also learned, his version of agreement.
The Hale house looked the way it always looked — like something that had survived something it shouldn't have and had never quite recovered from the experience. The trees around it had grown into the silence, the way trees did, indifferent to what had happened underneath them. The morning light came through them at a low angle and made everything look almost peaceful, which Evelyn found faintly insulting given the circumstances.
She had parked at the edge of the road and come the rest of the way on foot, partly because it seemed smarter and partly because her legs still had that faint wrong quality to them and the walk gave her time to feel less like she might fall over.
She was about twenty metres from the house when she saw the figure standing at the treeline.
Irene Woods was looking at the burned-out shell of the building with an expression that Evelyn couldn't quite read from this distance — not sad, exactly. Something quieter than sad.
"Irene?" Evelyn said, slowing.
Irene turned. "Oh," she said, as if Evelyn's arrival was unsurprising but still required acknowledgment. "Evelyn. Hi."
"What—" Evelyn looked between her and the house. "What are you doing here?"
"I come here sometimes," Irene said, turning back to look at the building.
Evelyn came to stand beside her. The house looked worse up close. It always did. "Did you know the Hales?"
"No, no." Irene shook her head slightly. "It's just—" She paused, in the way she sometimes did, like she was searching for a word in a language she didn't entirely speak. "I think about what it was like. What it is like. To die."
The words landed strangely in the morning air. Evelyn looked at her. "Why are you saying something like that?"
Irene turned to her, and there was something in her expression that looked almost apologetic. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you. It's just a thought I have sometimes." She tilted her head slightly. "Do you ever think about it?"
"I prefer not to," Evelyn said. "I'm almost eighteen. Long way to go." She glanced at Irene. "You too. You should be thinking about good things. Happy things, like... the formal. Not—" she gestured vaguely at the burned house.
Something like a small, genuine smile moved across Irene's face. "You're nice. Thinking any boy would ask me."
"I have a lot of friends I could introduce you to. I'm sure one of them—"
"Thank you," Irene said, gently. "But no. I won't be around much that night."
"Oh, come on. It'll be fun."
"I'm sure it will be." She said it like she meant it, which was somehow worse. "Just not for me."
Evelyn frowned, "Why not?"
Irene was quiet for a moment. She looked at the house again, at the blackened wood and the collapsed roof and the windows that had long since stopped being windows. Then she said, very simply: "Because I'll be dead Friday night."
Evelyn stared at her. "What?"
"I'm sorry." Irene turned, and she did look sorry — genuinely, precisely sorry, the way someone looks when they've said something true that they wish they hadn't. "I can't seem to have a conversation without frightening people. I really am sorry." She started to move away into the trees.
"Irene." Evelyn caught her arm. "What do you mean you're going to die? What are you planning to do?"
"Oh, no." Irene shook her head quickly. "No, it won't be me. Not like that."
"Then what?"
"I just know," Irene said whit the flat, tired quality of someone stating a fact they've already made their peace with. "I don't know how, or who. But Friday night, I'm going to die. I know it the way I know other things. And there's nothing to be done about it. Whatever I do, whatever I try — it won't change the outcome."
Evelyn shook her head, "Irene, you can't just—"
"You've been very kind to me," Irene said, and the warmth in her voice was real, which made it worse. "Both times we've spoken. I want you to know that." Her lips turned up into a little smile, "But it's not me you should be worrying about right now. Be careful, Evelyn."
And then she walked into the trees and the morning light swallowed her, and Evelyn stood at the edge of the Hale property with the burned house behind her and a cold that had nothing to do with the weather settling somewhere between her ribs.
She had thought about what Irene had said the first time they'd spoken. The strange, specific things she'd said that had turned out to be true. The way her words had a quality to them that was different from ordinary conversation — like they came from somewhere slightly sideways of the present moment.
Did seers exist? She didn't know. She had seventeen PDFs and three pages of notes and a very incomplete understanding of how any of this worked, and the honest answer was that she didn't know.
What she knew was that Irene had never been wrong. Not once.
She needed to tell Deaton. She needed to tell Scott. She needed to—
"Exactly who I was hoping to meet," said a voice behind her.
The shock hit before the darkness did — sharp and electric and total — and then the ground came up, and then nothing.