until the devil's turned to dust
by Sandrine Shaw
Chapter 1
The sky is clear and dark when they finally manage to crawl out of what used to be the root cellar and is now nothing but a crumbled, caved-in hole in the ground next to a tree stump. Dirty and bruised and tired, Allison can't quite believe yet that they all survived the night. She remembers clinging to Isaac after her dad had been taken, remembers thinking that they were all going to die tonight. Was that really just a day ago? It feels like weeks already. Long, sleepless, painful weeks.
Scott looks at her like he thinks she might fall over, and she can only guess what she must look like. Like someone who let herself be drowned and almost didn't make it back, who was almost buried alive, who almost lost her last remaining family and her friends. There's a lot of almost there, a lot of narrow escapes. But almost means that she's still standing, and after a day like today, she counts that as a victory.
"Are you okay?" Scott asks, leaving his mother's side for the first time since he arrived after the fight with Ms Blake. He gave them a brief summary of how it all went down, but Allison didn't really keep up with the fast-shifting alliances. The gist of it was that Scott and Derek were okay, that Ms Blake was dead and Scott didn't think Deucalion and his pack were an active threat at the moment. It's enough for now. Allison will want to know more later, when she's had a shower and a good night's sleep, when she's made sure that her father and Lydia and everyone else she cares about are safe. For now, she doesn't need any details.
She offers Scott a tired smile and a shrug. "Sure."
"I really don't like small spaces." Isaac's voice comes from right next to her, making Allison jump a little. She hadn't realized that he was so close, or that Scott's question was apparently meant for the both of them, and she figures she must be even more tired than she thought.
Her hand finds Isaac's and she gently squeezes his palm, offering a reassuring smile.
Allison's dad offers to drive them home, but she knows he wants to have a word with the Sheriff sooner rather than later, and it's not like she can't get back by herself. The danger is over – for now, at least, and maybe they're lucky enough to catch more than a few days break before the next supernatural crisis hits them. Deaton's comment about the Nemeton turning the town into a beacon attracting all sorts of creatures sounded ominous, just like his warning of what their sacrifice would do to them. It didn't matter then; it was something that had to be done, potential consequences notwithstanding. Now, though, with immediate peril averted, the consequences seem infinitely more real and scary than they did yesterday.
Allison ends up giving the boys and Scott's mom a lift and drops them all off back at the McCall house. Isaac lingers for a moment while Scott quietly slips inside after his mom with a little wave goodbye.
"Are you sure you're gonna be okay on your own?" he asks, and Allison's heart tightens as if someone closed a fist around it and started squeezing. There is a sudden vivid surge of memory from when she buried two daggers in his back, the way his flesh gave, the rush of blood.
I don't deserve his concern, she thinks. The smile she puts on makes her face ache with falseness. "Oh, don't worry, my dad won't be long. I just want to fall into bed and sleep for a week."
Scott would realize that she's lying, but Isaac hasn't known her long enough to be familiar with her tells yet, nor is he quite comfortable enough with his heightened werewolf senses to read her heartbeat. If he notices that something's amiss, he'll put it down to the scare the last twenty-four hours (though, really, more like the past seven months) gave them or her tiredness, and she's grateful for that.
She parks the car in the underground garage. The pale neon lights flicker on and off like in a bad horror movie, and Allison remembers Lydia telling her – months ago, before werewolves and kanimas and dark druids and human sacrifices, when they were shopping in the huge mall over in Concord – that parking garages scared her. Allison laughed it off, calling her a scaredy-cat, and Lydia had pursed her lips and gave Allison a disapproving look, informing her that 8.9% of all rapes and assaults happened in car parks.
It's such a disjointed memory, Allison isn't even sure where it came from. She distantly wonders if, knowing what they know now, having survived creatures much harder to fend off than regular humans, Lydia is still afraid of walking through a parking lot alone.
The lights still flicker when Allison steps into the elevator and presses the button for the sixth floor. When the doors shut, she closes her eyes and leans against the back wall, overwhelmed by weariness now that it's only a few minutes until she can lock the door behind her, catch a long hot shower and a couple of hours of sleep when she doesn't have to worry about her friends or her dad being dead when she wakes up.
Instead of going straight up to her floor without interruption, like she expected at this hour, the elevator stops too soon. Allison straightens herself, her eyes flying open just in time to see the doors sliding apart.
Deucalion steps forward. He pauses for a moment when he sees her (he sees her – Allison dimly recalls Scott telling her about Ms Blake healing Deucalion before he killed her, but it didn't fully register until now his eyes rest on Allison) before he continues walking inside, offering a stiff little nod.
Unconsciously, without thinking about what she's doing, Allison takes a step further into the other corner of the small cubicle, away from him.
If he registers what she's doing – and she's sure he does – he doesn't let on, calmly approaching the console and pressing the button for the penthouse.
They wait for the elevator to resume its journey upwards.A long, tense moment stretches uncomfortably between them until the silence is shattered by someone hollering outside, sudden enough to make Allison jump, her hand instinctively reaching for the dagger hidden at her waist.
There's no attack, no fanged creature jumping out from the dark. Instead, the teenage girl from 7B stumbles into sight, dragging her boyfriend after her. They're giggling and grabbing at each other, frantically making out, drunk or high or both and completely oblivious to the world around them, not noticing or caring that there are two other people in the elevator with them.
The scene is almost surreal, or maybe it just seems that way to Allison. It's hard to reconcile what happened today with the fact that there are normal people out there, living normal lives untouched by all the death and horrors.
Deucalion's watching them, and Allison, in turn, finds herself watching him.
He looks so dramatically different from when she saw him a few hours ago, he barely seems to be the same person. His shirt is torn and bloody, and he looks oddly lost and vulnerable without his ever-present cane and sunglasses, the effortless, intimidating confidence wiped away. Allison now regrets not paying more attention to Scott's run-down of what happened, not asking for more details.
She barely notices when the elevator grinds to a halt, but suddenly Deucalion turns towards her. All that sharp focus directed at her now, it's almost frightening in its intensity.
"This is your stop, I think," he says. The sound of his voice, faintly amused, his accent curling around the vowels, makes her snap out of it.
She blinks and tries to clear her head, catching sight of the illuminated "6" on the panel. "Yeah, it is. Thanks," she replies before she can make herself stop, years and years of practiced politeness when interacting with neighbors getting the better of her even though she meant to ignore him.
When she hurriedly steps out of the elevator, his gaze burning into her back, she tells herself that it wasn't much of a slip. Deucalion's been nothing but immaculately polite since he moved in, even when he was trying to kill her friends; returning the favor doesn't mean anything.
There's only so much that her father can teach her. It makes sense that she goes to Scott to help out because even if they've broken up, he's still her friend and he considers her part of his pack – a sentiment that flatters her as much as it makes her uncomfortable – so of course he's the first person (werewolf) she'd turn to. It's easy to tell that her father doesn't like the idea of his daughter going off to spar with a wolf, but he understands that it's necessary.
They work on her offense first. Allison feels a warm glow of satisfaction about the progress she's making, which is enough to gloss over the awkward moments that arise when she's play-fighting with Scott (his body underneath hers, achingly familiar and reacting to the position in a way that an attacker probably, hopefully, wouldn't; moments when they're locked fighting face to face and they're suddenly too close to each other and his eyes drop to her lips and she just knows that he's thinking about kissing her).
"We should switch around," Allison tells him one day. "You should be the one attacking me. If something's going after us, I have to know how to defend myself."
It doesn't go well.
While Scott seems to be perfectly fine blocking her blows and kicks and being a target for her arrows, he's evidently uncomfortable with actually fighting her. His attacks are half-hearted at best; he pulls his punches and goes easy on her when she wants him challenge her.
"Come on." She pokes him with her toes after he let her throw him to the floor with less effort than it used to take her to bring down her father. If her kick is a little harder than strictly necessary, well, it's his own fault. It's frustrating that even now, he doesn't seem to think she can handle it if he pushes her harder. "You can do better than that."
Scott's face scrunches up. "Allison. I can't."
"You and I both know that you can. I've seen you fight, Scott. I'm not made of glass. I'm not going to break if you actually hit a little bit harder."
Sitting up, he sighs and rubs the back of his neck, refusing to meet her eyes. "I can't hit you. Not really. What kind of boyfriend would that make me?"
Allison freezes, hating how her heart is suddenly beating a little faster. Hating that he can hear it. She needs the feeling to go away, so she says the most matter of fact thing she can think of. "Ex-boyfriend, not boyfriend."
It's only when the words are out that she realizes with a rush of skin-prickling guilt how cruel they sound.
Scott doesn't look surprised, though, just more determined. He looks up at her. "That doesn't make it better. It makes it worse, actually. I know it's just training, but I can't be the kind of guy who hits his ex-girlfriend."
It's almost sweet, and it's so Scott, she feels a wave of affection for him. Just not quite enough to drown out the frustration. "How am I supposed to get better at fighting if you won't fight me?"
"Sorry," he says, sounding honestly apologetic. A small grin stretches his lips. "You can still use me for target practice, though."
In light of what he just said about not wanting to fight her, she wonders what it says about her that she actually enjoys firing arrows at him. That she feels a thrill of satisfaction when they hit their target.
Isaac has a crush on her.
It's hard to miss, the way his eyes linger, the way he always stands a little too close, the way his hands brush hers when he hands her a tray in the cafeteria or they do a chemistry experiment together. He hangs around at school and sometimes comes over to do homework with her. By some miracle, her father doesn't seem to mind. He likes Isaac, which is plainly bizarre, considering how much effort he spent in keeping her and Scott apart. Maybe he's softened towards werewolves his daughter may or may not be dating, after everything they've been through, or maybe he's just resigned himself to the fact that Allison seems to be like catnip for teenage werewolf boys.
Allison enjoys that she doesn't have to sneak around with Isaac. Her dad tells them to leave the door open when they're studying in her room, but he doesn't burst in with a gun in his hand threatening to shoot a round of wolfsbane bullets into Isaac.
For a while, Allison almost doesn't feel guilty for liking Isaac more than she should, being his best friend's (his Alpha's) former girlfriend and a werewolf hunter. For a while, she can forget that, because he makes her smile and he keeps looking at her with that expression that makes her blush.
She's almost comfortable enough around him to ask him to train with her.
It's then that she dreams about Kate the first time, about Kate and her hurting Isaac, hunting Isaac, killing Isaac. Kate's smile is mischievous and wicked. Come on, you know you want to, she says, sliding the sharp arrow tip down Isaac's naked chest, leaving a trail of blood in its wake.
That's not the scary part, though. Allison is used to nightmares. She's dreamed about the Alpha chasing her through the empty hallways of the school, about Matt holding her down and crawling on top of her, about Gerard killing Scott in front of her eyes. And every time she was more scared and powerless in the dream than she'd been in real life for a long time.
But when Kate holds out a knife to her dream self, she sees herself smiling as she takes it, burying it deep in Isaac's chest and watching the life drain from his face as his blood spills all over her fingers.
She wakes abruptly, breathing fast and shakily, and the sticky sensation of blood still clinging to her skin.
She grabs her cell phone to check the time. 4:17. Too early to ring Isaac and ask if he's okay. It's a stupid urge, anyway. Of course he's okay; it was just a dream, nothing actually happened.
But she doesn't find any sleep for the remainder of the night, and when Isaac smiles at her in their early morning math class, she keeps her head down and focuses on the equations until they start to blur in front of her eyes.
It's weeks after the night of the lunar eclipse until she runs into Deucalion again. She almost thought he'd moved out, skipping town and starting fresh somewhere else the way Derek seems to have done.
She's just back from another fruitless, frustrating training session with Scott, texting Isaac to cancel their tentative plans for homework (she's canceling on him a lot these days, because she can't look at him without remembering what he looks like when she kills him) when she walks into the elevator.
"Hold it, please," someone calls from behind her, and Allison's hand is on the 'open doors' button before she recognizes the voice. It's too late, then. Deucalion steps around the corner into the elevator, balancing a large paper bag with groceries on each of his arms.
It's an odd sight, and her disbelief must be written all over her face because he frowns at her, and even though his tone remains conversational, the set of his jaw betrays his anger. "I know your type thinks that werewolves go into the woods and kill a deer or a couple of cute little bunnies when we're hungry and then we eat them raw, but the truth is, we actually do our grocery shopping like normal people. Shocking as it is, I quite enjoy cooking."
My type? she wants to ask, bristling at the idea of being lumped in with the likes of Gerard. At the same time, she knows that this is the reaction he's counting on, that he's intentionally baiting her, and she refuses to give him the satisfaction of rising to it.
She puts on her most pleasant smile, deliberately obviously fake, and tells him, "Maybe you should make a career out of it. You could have your own cooking show, Kitchen Lessons from the Demon Wolf. I bet you look great in an apron."
She's aiming for biting sarcasm, but Stiles is the one who excels in that, not her. She realizes that the tone was off as soon as the words are out, and they startle a stifled laugh out of Deucalion that seems to surprise him every bit as much as it does her.
"I shall take that under advisement. If the show takes off, maybe you could join me as my lovely assistant." He says lovely in a way that makes her blush. If there are traces of mockery in his voice, they don't appear to be directed at her, or at least not in a malevolent manner.
She's quick to deflect, steering the conversation back onto familiar territory. "I don't think so. My weapon of choice is the crossbow, but I've been told that my cooking is equally lethal." It's not actually a lie. She's a terrible cook, unlike her dad, who can whip out a flawless three-course dinner as effortlessly as he can assemble a gun.
The corners of Deucalion's mouth twitch into a smile. "I could always teach you," he suggests, just as the elevator reaches her floor.
She laughs it off as she leaves, but his words come back to her later when she's unpacking the weapons that she'd used at Scott's place. Much like training with her dad, sparring with Scott has reached a point where she's treading on the spot. She isn't learning any new tricks from doing the same thing over and over again, shooting arrows and daggers at Scott and hitting him while he half-heartedly defends himself.
Deucalion, she imagines, wouldn't have any qualms about hurting her. And he owes her, he owes them all, after what he and his pack put them through.
She remembers the way he looked at her in the elevator. I could always teach you.
Damn right you will, she thinks.
"What's going on with you and Isaac?" Scott wants to know, leaning against the lockers while she's trying to find her textbook for French.
It's odd that he seems to be more concerned about Allison distancing herself from Isaac than he used to be when it looked like they were dating. It's what makes him a good friend – Allison knows that, she likes that about him, but it doesn't make his distinct lack of jealousy seem any less weird to her.
She shrugs it off, not keen on discussing how or why she doesn't trust herself around Isaac anymore. "I have a lot of stuff to deal with," she replies lamely.
Scott frowns. "Do you think it's the sacrifice? That darkness Deaton said we would have to live with?"
Sometimes she hates that he's so attuned to her emotions that he can single out her greatest fear without even meaning to. If there's a darkness taking up permanent residence inside of her that's burrowing into her dreams, trying to make her hunt and kill for pleasure, how long will she be able to hold out against it? The mere idea seems ludicrous now. She's not the person in her dream; they have nothing in common except her face and her skills. But what if that's who she'll become, whether she'll want to or not?
"I'm just busy, okay?" she snaps, not caring that Scott is not going to believe her. She slams the locker shut violently, satisfied when it makes him jump a little.