The night of the Formal had arrived the way inevitable things did — quietly, without asking permission, turning up on the calendar like it had always been there and she had simply been choosing not to look at it.
Scarlett was in the woods.
She had been in the woods for three hours, following Derek's trail — or what she thought was his trail, the particular set of signs she had learned to read over months of moving through this town — and finding, consistently, nothing. The preserve was dark and cold and completely indifferent to what was happening on the other side of it, in the gymnasium of Beacon Hills High School, where the music had probably already started.
And she hated how that thought made her feel. Because she wanted to go. She would have liked to go. And that was so stupid, because she wasn't even human. She was not a teenage girl, she was a vampire. What would she care of a Formal, and dresses and music and... Stiles...
Scarlett stopped walking, her hands pushed her hair back.
She wanted to stop thinking about it all. But she couldn't, she couldn't and it hurt. Because for the first time in her life she had found something to hold on to different from anger or saddness and... she had burned it down herself.
And there was nothing to do about it right now, Stiles would have kept looking at her with the same hard and painful expression, and he didn't want for her to come any closer. He didn't want for her to explain, or talk. She missed talking with him. She missed laughing with him. She missed how serene she had felt with him. Nodoby had ever made her feel this way.
And now it was all gone. And now he was miles away, dancing with Lydia.
Lydia, who that same morning had knocked on her door.
Scarlett had heard it from the hallway — that particular rhythm, somehow entirely Lydia even through two inches of wood. She had stood there for a moment, looking toward the living room where Peter was in the armchair with his coffee looking at her with and amused expression.
She had gone to the door and stepped out onto the porch and pulled it closed behind her.
Lydia was standing on the front step with her hair perfect and her expression set to the version of neutral that meant she had already decided several things and was waiting to see if she was right. Her eyes moved over Scarlett's face — quick, precise — and settled.
"You haven't answered your phone," she said. "I called you four times this morning."
"So?" Scarlett said flatly.
"You didn't answer last night either," Lydia continued. "Or the day before." Something shifted in her expression — not hurt, something more complicated. "So I came here."
"Lydia." Scarlett kept her voice even. "I really don't want to see anyone right now."
"Is it because I'm going to the Formal with Stiles?" she asked, tilting her head. "I've seen you talk yesterday at the shop."
Scarlett's arms crossed over her chest as she looked to the side.
"What happened?" Lydia said, before she could answer. "I thought you two were— I mean, I assumed—"
"Then why are you going with him?" The words came out before she'd shaped them.
Lydia's chin lifted slightly. "Because Jackson is taking Allison. And I'm not going alone." A brief pause, something unguarded moving through her face before the composure returned. "That's the whole story, Scarlett. It's not—"
It's not what you think. Scarlett heard the end of the sentence without needing to hear it. She looked at Lydia — at the careful way she was holding herself, at the slight tightness around her eyes that meant the Jackson thing was costing more than she was showing — and felt, underneath the jealousy that had been sitting in her chest like a stone since the mall, something that was not quite sympathy but was adjacent to it.
She pushed it down.
"It doesn't matter," she said firmly, "I don't care about a stupid dance. Or about Stiles."
She felt the lie in her teeth as she said it. That specific wrongness — her body refusing to accept what her voice was producing. She kept her face still.
"I'm probably not even staying in Beacon Hills much longer," she said. "So there's nothing to talk about."
Lydia looked at her for a long moment. She didn't seem to be fooled by her words. Which surprised Scarlett.
You used to lie better than that, Stiles' words made her breath iched.
"Scarlett," Lydia said quietly. "I've seen you two together--"
"Well, it doesn't matter!" Scarlett exclaimed, like when she shouted it inside her head, everytime Stiles' image came back in her mind. "It does not matter, we broke up. And maybe it's better like this." She let ou a shakey breath she didn't know she was holding. "There's no point... In him being with me." She could feel her eyes sting and she had to do all she could to keep her tears from falling.
Then a dry laugh escaped her lips, "He cares about you, you know?" She said, remembering how his heart used to speed up when he'd see Lydia. Scarlett had just met him, but she knew that he had had feelings for her. And maybe he still had them.
The thought made her sick to her stomach. Like she could feel it twisting slowly and painfully. Her eyes went on Lydia's neck like they did the day before. And her fangs were begging to come out.
Leave Allison and Lydia out of this. I mean it, Scarlett.
The echo of Stiles' voice made her stop. He would have never forgiven her, if she'd hurt Lydia... she knew.
"Scarlett--"
"Have fun tonight," Scarlett had said, doing all she could to keep her voice steady and her face relaxed. Although she was not sure she was managing.
She reached for the door handle. "I have to go."
She had gone inside before Lydia could answer. Had stood in the hallway with her back against the closed door and listened to Lydia's footsteps on the porch, and then on the path, and then nothing.
From the living room, Peter had said nothing.
Which had been, somehow, worse. She was sick of him observing her every move.
She would have liked to believe her own words. She would have liked to be able to just not feel anything in thinking about Stiles with Lydia. But she would be lying to herself. And it wouldn't have been even a very convincing one.
She sat down at the base of a tree.
I was happy.
Scarlett could feel her eyes sting once more, as she sat there in the silence.
It was probably better that way. Stiles could be happy with someone and Scarlett could go on with her existence like it was supposed to be.
We all win, she thought as she felt a tear run down her cheek.
"Oh, come on!" she said, using the sleeve of her jacket to wipe the blood of her face. "That's just great..." she muttered as she kept rubbing.
Why was she crying? She could go on! She could forget him, finally forget him. But her chest tightened once more. Did she really want to foget him? His beautiful brown eyes, and the smile, and his goofy laugh. Did she really want to forget how good it had felt everytime he took her hand? Could she really ever forget it?
She couldn't. That was the honest answer, the one she couldn't make herself say out loud even here, alone in the woods with no one listening. She didn't want to forget him. She didn't want to forget any of it.
She had spent six years not wanting anything except Kate Argent dead, and then he had entered her life and now she wanted things she had no right to want and couldn't stop wanting them and didn't know what to do with that except sit at the base of a tree in the dark and wipe blood off her face with her jacket sleeve like an idiot.
She pressed the back of her head against the bark and looked up at the branches.
It was supposed to be simple, she thought. That was what she had told him. It was supposed to be simple and it had never been simple, not once, not from the beginning, and maybe that was the thing she should have paid attention to earlier.
I'm probably not even staying in Beacon Hills much longer, she had said to Lydia.
When Kate was dead she would leave. That had always been the plan. It still was. She would leave and the town would close behind her and she would go back to being what she was.
She tried to picture it.
She couldn't.
Not in the way she used to be able to picture it — the clean simplicity of it, the after. Every time she tried, something got in the way. A specific laugh. A warm hand. The way he had looked at her in the school hallway, everytime they met after class. Like he was so happy to see her. Like he had been waiting for that moment all class. And she knew, because she had felt the same.
She pressed her palms flat against the cold ground on either side of her.
No, going is the best option, she told herself.
He should have been with someone like Lydia. Lydia would not hurt him. Lydia would not sit in the dark of his house with her fangs down.
It's better for everyone, she thought.
She would have came back to what she was doing before Beacon Hills, like after the fire. Lonely, exactly like after the fire. But the scolded herself. She was not alone. She had Peter.
Exactly like when she digged up her grave, Peter had always been there. And he would have always been. It was strange though... she remembered suffering for him when she thought he had died... but her chest had filled with anger and vengeance. This time... this time it was different. Still painful, but in a total different way.
Why?
The void she was feeling was still there — that specific hollowness she couldn't fill, the one that had been getting wider and darker for weeks. Four days without eating. She could feel it in her palms, in the slow weight behind her eyes. She should hunt. She knew she should hunt. Peter had been telling her to hunt for days and she hadn't been able to, and she still didn't fully understand why.
It's the bond, Peter's voice.
Maybe.
She was so tired of maybe.
She was tired of not knowing which parts of herself were hers and which parts were the bond and which parts were what she had been before either of those things existed, some original version of herself she could no longer locate. She was tired of the void. She was tired of crying. She was tired of the specific, daily, unrelenting weight of missing someone who had every right to want her gone.
It'll be over soon, she thought.
Then suddenly she opened her eyes.
And then something changed.
It started small — so small she almost didn't catch it, a shift in the baseline of things the way a sound changes when a room changes around it. Something at the edge of what she could feel, faint and distant, like a vibration in a frequency she had learned to read without meaning to.
She found herself standing up.
There it was again. Stronger now. A pressure building somewhere below her sternum. She pressed her hand flat against her chest without deciding to.
It kept building.
Not hers. She understood that first, before she understood anything else — the distinction arriving with sudden clarity, the way you recognise a voice that isn't yours in a room you thought was empty. This was not her fear. She had her own fear, she knew its texture, she had been living inside it for weeks. This was different. This was bigger and more immediate and coming from outside her, flooding in through something that connected her.
Her fangs came down.
"Stiles."
His name left her lips before she had moved, before she had decided anything, while she was still standing with her hand pressed to her chest in the dark of the woods feeling his fear pour through the bond like water through a crack — growing, urgent, the specific animal panic of someone in immediate danger, and it was his, it was entirely his.
She ran, already reading the direction of it — not toward the school, which was wrong, which made no sense, he should have been at the school — and she was running, faster than she usually let herself run, the cold air meaningless, the dark irrelevant.
She hit the edge of the preserve and found the bike and was on it before the engine had fully caught, and then the road and the town moving past her and the pull like a compass in her sternum that she was following without question, without thought. The fear in the bond was not decreasing.
She pushed the bike harder.
The route made no sense. Every turn took her further from the school, into streets she had never driven, past buildings she didn't recognise. The pull didn't care. It was precise and absolute and she followed it through three turns that had no logic she could name, into a part of Beacon Hills she had never had reason to enter, and then she saw it — the garage, the open bay door, the flat industrial light spilling onto the asphalt.
She killed the engine and rolled in on momentum.
Why would Stiles being here? She thought getting up from her bike and starting to walk in the garage. Looking around. It was not a small space. there were many cars, but no one. She kept walking seeming aimlessly, but she knew it wasn't. She could feel it.
Then suddenly, she heard the echo of a voice. Of that voice.
"Look, you still need Scott's username and password, and I'm sorry but I don't know them—"
Stiles.
The specific exhausted frustration of his voice, slightly muffled, coming from deeper inside. She was already moving toward it, already reading the space from the sounds and then she saw him.
She almost let out a relieve breath in seeing him. She could not smell his blood. He was on his feet and he was working on a computer laying on the wood of a car.
And only now she noticed.
"You know both of them."
The sound that came out of her was not voluntary.
Peter.
"No, I don't," Stiles said, and even from here she could hear the strain under the frustration, the specific quality of someone maintaining a position they know is going to cost them.
"Even if I couldn't hear your heartbeat," Peter said, glancing around the garage with that particular ease of his, like a man checking a room before a meeting, "I would still be able to tell that you're lying."
"Dude, I swear to God—"
Peter's hand moved.
It was fast — faster than it needed to be, faster than a warning — and Stiles' head came down against the hood of the car with a sound that went through her like a current, short and sharp and wrong, and his hands went flat against the metal and she was already moving before she had decided to move, already out of the shadow, fangs down, the anger arriving so cleanly it felt almost like relief.
"Get the hell away from him."
Peter straightened. Slowly. He did not release Stiles. He turned his head toward her with the unhurried attention of someone who has heard exactly what they expected to hear, and something in his expression shifted — not surprise, something that looked almost like tired amusement.
"This thing between you two," he said, "is really getting on my nerves." then he took a breath, turning towards her with a smirk. "I knew you'd have come, I hoped it would have taken you longer."
She looked at Stiles — at the angle of his neck against the metal, at his hands still flat against the hood, at the tension in his shoulders that meant he was holding himself very still by choice. And his eyes were on her.
"What is the meaning of this?" Her voice came almost as a growl. "I told you to keep him out of all of this."
"Yes," Peter said pleasantly. "You did."
"You lied to me."
"Yes," his smile only growing larger. "I did."
She moved. One step, automatic, her body already calculating — and his hand tightened on the back of Stiles' neck and Stiles made a sound against the metal, low and involuntary, and she stopped.
The sound of it sat in her chest like something burning.
"I wouldn't move if I were you, my pet." Peter's voice was gentle, but there was anything but it underneath. "Don't make me break his skull." His eyes held hers across the car, completely calm. "And you know I will."
She growled, showing her fangs, "Peter, I swear. If you touch him--"
"Scarlett." Stiles' voice. Strained, slightly muffled against the hood. "Stay back. Stay back, it's alright."
At the angle of his neck against the metal, at his hands still flat against the hood, at the tension in his shoulders that meant he was holding himself very still by choice. And his eyes were on her — for one second, across the car, a whole conversation compressed into the specific way he was still looking at her even now, even here, even after everything.
She held still.
Peter released the pressure — not entirely, enough — and Stiles straightened slowly, carefully. His hands found the laptop. His eyes dropped to the screen.
She began to move, the way caged things move when stillness becomes impossible, three steps one way, three steps back, the length of the car between them. Her fangs were still down.
Her eyes ran the circuit without stopping. Peter at one end, watching her with patient attention. Almost amused and Scarlett could feel the anger flare from the inside.
Stiles at the other, his shoulders set, his hands on the keyboard, his heartbeat loud in her ears even from here. She could feel his fear, but she was too angry to follow it. She knew he was scared, he was right to be.
"Oh, come on, my love." Peter's voice, carrying that particular ease of his. "Let's not fight."
"Stop calling me that."
The words came out sharp and involuntary and she watched something move through Peter's expression, but then his smile returned almost immediately, smooth and unbothered.
"You'll know I'll hurt you if we fight," he said.
She knew. She remembered the school — the specific quality of that pain, how fast it had arrived, the way Peter moved when he had decided to stop being patient. She was not faster than him. Four days without eating, her hands not entirely steady, the hollow weight behind her eyes that hadn't lifted in days. If Peter decided to stop being careful she would lose and she knew it.
It doesn't matter, she thought, as her eyes land on Stiles still typing.
"And anyway," Peter continued, the smirk settling back into place, "I'll kill Stiles even before you'll have the time to do anything." He tilted his head to a side. "Only because you don't have the gut to do it, it doesn't mean I don't."
Her jaw ached.
"He's very useful," Peter added pleasantly. "He's helping me track Derek."
The words landed the way he intended them to. She felt them hit the specific place he had aimed at. He had taken Stiles for something she hadn't been able to do, and he was telling her he knew it, and the fury that moved through her was clean and total and she held it because she had no choice but to hold it.
Had planned for exactly this. The promise had never been a promise.
"No need to be that aggressive, Scarlett." Peter's voice, almost gentle. "I'll let him go once he's done. Believe me."
The irony of that last phrase sat between them like something dropped on purpose.
A growl came up from somewhere low in her chest, raw and entirely involuntary. "Touch him and I swear I'll kill you, Peter."
Stiles turn. The shift of his attention, the fraction of a second where his eyes came off the screen and found her across the car. She did not look at him. She kept her eyes on Peter, on the specific quality of his stillness, on the small muscle at the corner of his jaw that was the only thing that ever moved when he was recalibrating.
Peter smiled. "I'd like to see you try." Scarlett glared at him.
"What happens after you find Derek?" Stiles' voice came out flat and careful.
Peter turned toward him — and Scarlett moved. Two steps, quiet, closing distance while his attention was elsewhere. She stopped when he glanced back at her, his eyes finding her new position with the unhurried precision of someone who had expected exactly that.
She held still. Held his gaze.
"Don't think, Stiles," Peter said. "Type."
"You're going to kill people, aren't you?" Stiles was asking, but he already knew the answer.
Peter turned toward him fully, and Scarlett felt the shift of his attention the way she felt changes in air pressure — the specific quality of his focus moving off her and landing elsewhere. She watched Stiles' profile from where she stood. The set of his jaw. The slight elevation of his chin that meant he had decided something and was holding to it.
Don't, she thought, with a force she couldn't direct anywhere useful. Don't push him. Just type. Please just type.
Peter looked back at her. The smirk had softened into something almost reflective.
"Only the responsible ones," he said. "Right, Scarlett?"
She glared at him.
"Look," Stiles said, his eyes still on the screen, "if I do this, you have to promise to leave Scott out of it."
Scarlett looked at him. At the deliberate way he was keeping his voice steady, the specific effort of it. He was negotiating. Of course he was negotiating, he'd do anything for Scott.
Peter made a sound that was almost a laugh. "Do you know why wolves hunt in packs?" He moved slightly, that unhurried shift of weight that meant he was settling in. "It's because their favourite prey are too large to be brought down by one wolf alone." A pause. "I need Derek and Scott. I need both of them."
"He's not going to help you." Stiles said firmly.
"Oh, he will." Peter's voice carried the mild certainty of someone who had already run the variables. "Because it'll save Allison." His eyes moved briefly to Scarlett — a fraction of a second, just enough to land — and then back to Stiles. "And you will, because it will save Scott. Your best friend, whom you know so well you even have his username and password."
Stiles said nothing. His hands moved on the keyboard.
Scarlett kept moving. Three steps, turn, three steps back. Her fangs ached. The anger was a clean constant thing running underneath everything else, and underneath the anger was the other thing, the one she couldn't name, the one that was specifically about the angle of Stiles' shoulders and the way he was holding himself together with nothing but the particular stubbornness that had always been the most recognisable thing about him.
Peter leaned slightly toward the screen. Something in his expression shifted — a fractional pause, and a frown appeared on his face, while Sacrlett made a step closer.
"His username is 'Allison'?"
Stiles said nothing.
"His password is also 'Allison'?"
"Still want him in your pack?" Stiles said, dry and flat, sarcasem attached to every word. Scarlett made another step, minding Peter's hand still too close to Stiles' neck.
Stiles leaned closer to the screen, and something in his posture changed. "Wait, what the—" He stopped. "That's where they're keeping him? At his own house?"
"Not at it." Peter's voice had gone quieter, more focused. He leaned in slightly. "Under it." A pause. "I know exactly where that is." He paused as he turned to look to his left, focused on something else. "And I'm not the only one."
He had what he needed. She could see it in the way he had turned his head. He was already somewhere else in his mind. Already done with this part.
But his hand was still on the back of Stiles' neck.
"Alright." Her voice came out before she had finished deciding to speak. "You've got what you needed, Peter. Back off."
Peter did not move, but she could see his fingers against Stiles' flesh.
"I said back the hell off, Peter!"
He looked at her. That patient, reading look. And then something shifted in his expression — not anger, something quieter and more deliberate — and his voice came out almost gentle.
"He's nothing to you, remember?"
Stiles' head hit the hood of the car.
It was not hard enough to do serious damage. It was hard enough to make a sound. Hard enough to be a point — look how easy this is, look what I can do, look how little this costs me — and the sound of it went through her like something tearing, short and sharp and completely unbearable, and her hands were already moving before she had finished processing what had happened.
She hit Peter with everything she had.
Both hands, full force and Peter went back, several feet, his shoulders hitting the concrete with a sound that echoed off the garage walls, and she was already in front of Stiles, already between them, her fangs down and her hands shaking and her body in the only position that had ever made sense.
"He's mine."
It took her a moment to realize what she had just said.
She heard them. Heard them the way you hear your own voice saying something you didn't decide to say — from a slight distance, with a clarity that had nothing gentle about it. The garage was very quiet. The fluorescent lights hummed above them, indifferent.
She felt her own eyes widen.
Peter's head came up from the floor slowly. He looked at her with an expression she had never seen on his face before. His eyes were wide. A recalibration happening in real time, visible for once instead of hidden.
"Yours?" he said low, almost in an hiss. His eyes moved briefly to Stiles, then back to her. "Him?"
She had never said it before. Not even to Peter. But she knew she mean it. Was that the meaning? Was it that why she couldn't hurt Stiles? That she wouldn't hurt Stiles?
Oh, fuck... she thought realizing the implication of that. But she could not get distracted.
She straightened. Her hands were still shaking. She kept them at her sides and kept her body between Peter and Stiles and kept her voice as steady as she could make it.
"Stay away." The words came out low and completely final. "You're not hurting him. I won't let you." She held Peter's gaze across the garage floor. "I'll drive him back to the hospital and then you can keep on with your plan."
Peter rose. Slowly, unhurried, with that ease that meant nothing had hurt him enough to matter. He straightened his jacket with one hand.
"My plan," he repeated. Something moved through his expression — not anger, something more disappointed than anger. "I can't believe you're throwing everything away for a seventeen-year-old boy."
"Stay away from him, Peter."
He looked at her for a long moment. And then, very quietly, almost to himself: "Yours." A sound that was almost a chuckle, low and private. "He'll never be yours, darling." His voice was gentle. That was the worst part — it was always gentle when it was meant to cut deepest. "He knows what you are now. He knows what you did."
Something in her chest tightened to the point of pain.
"Leave," she said.
"Oh, Scarlett—"
"Leave!"
Peter looked at her. At Stiles. Back at her. And something in his face shifted into something she had no name for — not defeat, never defeat with Peter, but something that acknowledged a boundary had been reached for tonight.
"You've grown up," he said quietly. "You don't even listen to me anymore." He took one step back, then paused. "But we're linked, love. You know we are. Whatever you think you're choosing right now—" his eyes moved to Stiles one last time "—that doesn't change what we are."
"I said leave."
He went. Peter's car started somewhere at the back of the garage. The sound of the engine turning over, the specific weight of it moving through the space, and then the headlights sweeping across the concrete walls as he pulled out, and then nothing. Just the fluorescent lights and the smell of oil and the specific quality of the silence he had left behind.
Scarlett stood very still for a moment.
Then she turned to look at Stiles.
"Oh my god." The words came out before she had decided to say them, quiet and unsteady. "Are you okay?"
She moved toward him — two steps, her hands already reaching, already needing to know if he was hurt, if the sound his head had made against the hood had done damage, if—
"Don't." He stepped back. His voice came out flat. "Don't-- Don't touch me."
She stopped, observing as he turned. His back to her still, one hand on the hood of the car, the other pressed against the back of his neck where Peter had held him. She watched him breathe. In and out, too deliberate, the specific rhythm of someone forcing their body back into something that resembled normal.
"I'm sorry," she said. Her voice came out smaller than she intended. "I didn't know. I would have never let him—"
"Yeah, right." One word. Dry and flat and completely closed.
"Stiles—"
He turned.
She had been prepared for anger. She had been prepared for the flat controlled look from the garage, the hard jaw, the eyes that didn't give her anything. She had not been prepared for this — for him looking at her the way he was looking at her right now, with an expression that was doing several things at once and none of them simple, his eyes moving over her face like he was trying to reconcile something that didn't reconcile easily.
He had heard her. She could see it. He had heard what she had said and he was standing there with it and he didn't know what to do with it any more than she did. The only difference was that he didn't know what it meant, but she did...
She took one step toward him.
He didn't move back this time, but she saw him tense. So she stopped again.
Close enough to see the redness at the back of his neck, the slight unsteadiness in the way he was holding himself. Her hands wanted to do something useful and she kept them at her sides.
"I need to go to the hospital," he said finally.
She frowned. "What? Why?"
Something moved through his face. The specific quality of a thought arriving that had nothing gentle about it.
"Lydia." The word came out rough. "He— he attacked Lydia."
Her eyes widened.
Lydia? Peter had attacked Lydia? Why? That didn't make any sense. Why would he attack a girl at a formal? She had nothing to do with anything. She didn't even know about creature?
What is he up to?
Then she looked up, when she saw Stiles grount as he bent down to pick up something. "He destroyed my key."
She could feel his agitation, his growing worry. He wanted to go to the hospital. He wanted to make sure Lydia was alright. And Sacrlett couldn't lie to herself, she hated that. But there was nothing she could do about it, but one thing.
"Alright," She said it before she had finished thinking it. "Come."
He stared at her. "What— no?"
"You want to go on foot?" She was already moving toward the bike, pulling the keys from her jacket. "You'll get there tomorrow." She stopped and looked back at him over her shoulder. "Come on. My bike's right there."
He looked at her, she could see and feel how confused he was. And she could really not blame him for this.
Then he observed the bike, and then he went back to her. His gaze was sharp, and stubborn. But they both knew that if he wanted to go faster, that was the best option.
Then he came.
She handed him the helmet without a word — the only helmet, because she didn't need one, and he took it without arguing, but never quite stopping to staring.
She got on the bike. Felt him settle behind her, the specific and entirely familiar weight of him, his hands finding her waist with the careful deliberateness of someone making a decision about where to put them.
She started the engine.
Neither of them said anything.
The town moved past them in the dark, the streets empty at this hour, the cold air sharp against her face, and she could feel his heartbeat through the bond and through the points of contact where he was holding on, still too fast, gradually slowing, and she drove and did not think about his hands or about what she had said in the garage or about the way he had looked at her when he turned around.
She drove and looked at the road and took him where he needed to go.