Did the leaves ever stop falling? Her feet sunk in the sea of them. She was perspiring, beads of sweat trickling from her temples and collarbone soaking through her coral red skirt and pearly white blouse. The brittle dead leaves stuck to her ankles itching distracting. It was a sign of growing older to find the seasons had left you behind and everything rushed around you while you were standing still.
But why did she need to move? Her life was set and it was she, she who set it. Lydia was getting a full scholarship and was going to college and her boyfriend was going with her because he was good he was the best they were both going places. Lydia didn't have to move outside the path she carved, her parents surely didn't help, except now when she had to will her leg to lift and take a step and then the other and one more.
Lydia kept walking because she never backed down. Once it had taken her three days to find her way out of the wood. The wood begun in her back yard it shed its leaves in the pool drove her mother crazy when it darkened the solar and terrace with moss. She would not let a few specimens of Quercus garryana and Fraxinus latifoliato make her think the sun would never again rise in the east. Again. She knew that it had hid her four-year old self from her parents until their screams of "Lydia!" had turned hoarse, had hosted fire hazard parties with bonfires and weak beer and that she had learned here the simultaneous feeling of sharp bark and Jackson's fingers in the sensitive inside of her thigh. She hated it for having grown with it and that took her twice and this tiny town and being used, kept in the dark. How she only ever remembered terror like vomit in the back of her throat and the grey skeletal limbs of the trees looking beautiful and welcoming in the face of death. Still she had kept walking. And the house with its colonial brick chimney and hollow windows beyond was not death that dragged you down screaming, just a graveyard kept alive by hatred and pain.
It was just a wood-inhabited by werewolves like Scott, werewolf hunters like Allison and casualties like Stiles. Lydia could reason now that she had been possessed. The little voice that had said: "Do this little thing, and it will all get better, do it doitdoit DO IT!" and kept saying it so she'd done everything the boy's voice asked, there reason hadn't applied. Reason should have said that the cloying flower smell that never went away always clinging on her hair and skin no matter how much she had washed was a symptom of schizophrenia or brain damage or poisoning. Reason should have said she was crazy to even consider the supernatural.
When she reached the dead house and found the living werewolf there she struck him. Beat and slapped at his solid form for being there clinging to ghosts and letting the living sink. He blinked once or twice but he was unmovable a tree and his eyes were the grey of bark and just as hard.
She stopped necessarily, out of breath. "You're supposed to hate him." He had killed him once he had known the awfulness of him.
"I can't. I need him."
Peter had smiled with wolf eyes his mind already fixed in the hunt. He had been fifteen, Derek had been six, and had just had his first full moon. All the family had gathered to celebrate. Birthdays held nothing to becoming a wolf. They were taking Peter to hunt with the pack and Derek had cried. "I promise I'll run really fast." "Sorry coz," Peter had said, "I'll save you some rack and I promise I'll run with you on your first pack hunt." He had kept his word, both times, even if Derek hadn't stayed for the party because Kate Argent had been glorious, beautiful, her skin soft where her bones had been sharp and her smile wicked and sweet-tasting.
Lydia had such large eyes and they stared back at him with a familiar helplessness. The mirror had stopped showing it to him gradually, he had learned it only asked for trouble. But anger always helped. Anger nurtured.
"You have a pack."
"Teenager betas won't do me much good. There's no one else."
"Won't do you- You're using them. You've tricked them into becoming werewolves so that you'd have a pack in your scheme to wipe out the Argents," she said and the helplessness disappeared to make way for correct insights. "You will let the Alpha pack terrorize people who can't defend themselves because Peter said they'll do you more good?"
"The Argents' plan was good and I can see that now but they messed up the execution. They left three Hales behind. I'm not going to make that mistake."
"You're threatening my best friend and her father."
There was always running; it was a drill which was familiar to him. You picked a direction and you took it fast always looking over your shoulder making sure you stayed downwind, transforming in warehouses that locked, and then after a couple of months you picked another direction, rinsed and repeated. That was what Omegas did.
"I'm Alpha. Alphas protect their territory."
She shook her head uncomprehendingly at his words. "You want blood."
"We let the blood debt fester for too long. The crime was left unpunished and the hunters have been decimating unprotected wolves since. Peter and I are going to restore the balance." The pup Laura had sent away grew up and it was his time to act. Lydia shaking her head at him still didn't understand.
"It doesn't stop even after you do what he tells you," she said and it made him bristle that she kept making this about Peter. "He wants more than you can give willingly and it will make you break something of you."
Peter had always played rough when they had been younger and Derek had learned (from him) to give as much as he took. Wolves had a hard and wiry hide and could take a few bites and scratches. What would a witch know about how much a wolf can take?
"Go back to your hut, piglet."
She turned on her heel and walked away letting the challenge unanswered.
"Don't do it, Derek," she called over her shoulder finally. It echoed a whisper half-choked on wolfsbane and panic struggling through the poison haze of that time she had raised the dead.
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