She dreams that there is a throne of bones tangled in the roots of a dead oak. She dreams of blood leaking slowly down window panes and crows tearing into the still-living flesh of twisted, terrible monsters that run through the forest.
She looks down at the spiral notebook on her desk, at the precise numbers and equations she had written three weeks before.
She doesn't know the answer.
Nobody knows that Lydia has returned to the preserve. Or perhaps they do, and no longer care enough to intervene. She hadn't remembered the first time she wandered along the dirt, leaves tangling her hair and becoming a macabre mimicry of a crown. But now when she wakes in a cradle of fallen branches she simply closes her eyes tightly, waiting until early morning to return home.
A fugue state they tell her. But the shades that lurk in the corner of her eye lovingly whisper that she is theirs. That she belongs among the trees where the moonlight turns her skin to marble and her hair to blood.
Allison is the first, and draws away slowly until all that is left are half truths and the monotonous repetition of a quiet I'm busy, I'm sorry. Jackson leaves too, and his words carve themselves dangerously deep on the surface of her heart. Each beat she bleeds, hating herself for having given her heart entirely and without caution.
But the dark figures grow bolder, carefully creeping closer and closer until eventually they stand before her, fully formed yet blurred along their edges. They reach forward cautiously and trace her veins as softly as a whisper when they promise that they will always be there, they will never leave her. Lydia is their queen they say. They wrap her in embraces that are translucent as smoke, and she can nearly make out the features of their faces.
It doesn't take long before the boy appears to her, pouting lips and ice cold eyes. But she sees the fluorescent light shining through him and the opaque blackness that pours forth when he speaks, when he tries to seduce her with his silver tongue. He comes too close but before she has to scream, her shadows – Lydia's monstrous, beautiful companions – tear into his flesh and wrench him apart. Destroy the echo of the man whose teeth and claws marred her side forever.
The phantom blood that rains down on her is a karmic baptism and the drops taste sweet when they gather in the cracks of her chapped lips.
Mother to shadows. Daughter born of his vicious bite. Sister of shades.
She no longer cares that she might be losing her mind.
Lydia wears pretty dresses and her heels click loudly down the hallways as she walks. Her lipstick is never smudged and her hair is always curled to perfection. But her smiles have grown knife-sharp and when she teasingly trails her clawed fingernails down the biceps of the boys who lust after her, the shivers that wrack them are no longer born of arousal.
I don't know has become a familiar phrase, said in a biting tone that seems to take her teachers by surprise – but her mind is too occupied with the void she that is gleefully swallowing her to focus on something as trivial as math or the history of long dead humans.
She doubts that she still belongs in the latter category.
Nine pounds she had said with an arrogant smile. Her dress had been skin tight and Lydia had been proud to flaunt her newly slimmed down figure. But that was Before. When Allison had walked by her side and she had not yet been enlightened.
Her flesh continues to fall away from her frame. She loses her hips first and her breasts soon follow, but she feels no less womanly. She no longer needs to exude sexuality to feel powerful. Lydia does that on her own now. The emergence of sharp angles and protruding bones is noticed by her ghosts. She finally realizes that is what they are. Phantoms of those who died but didn't move on that she loves with the fierceness of a mother and that love her deeply – possessively – in return.
They think her blind. But she sees, oh, does Lydia see.
Her smiles grow brittle as she sits among her so-called friends. Stiles eventually stops his near-constant badgering, the prodding that makes her hiss out brutal words in return meant to hurt. Lydia does become slightly more interested in the group when she is able to see one day that savagery surrounds Scott, and a twisted sickness leaks from Jackson's pores. She watches in fascination as it spreads to more children – Isaac, Erica, and Boyd. Her eyes constantly wander to them, these beauties and beasts that she would never have looked twice at Before, until the words finally come to her courtesy of a lilting, feminine whisper.
Moon singers. Shape shifters. Werewolves.
Lydia knows she should not have favorites, that she should care for all of her ghosts with equal ferocity, but the woman whose lips brush softly against her ear is the one she holds dearest. The one whose touches she longs for most. Lydia is almost certain that the others know this, but they have shown no malice or anger. Instead she catches the shades who appear to have been only on the cusp on adulthood before their death teasingly smile when a blush creeps up her cheeks in response to the snorting laugh she has grown addicted to.
The living abandoned Lydia to what they believe is her naivety, her obliviousness, and in that time she grew to prefer the dead.
Lydia shivers slightly when her love traces fingertips down the knobs of her spine and she sees Scott whip his head in her direction, detecting her sudden movement. Their eyes meet and she sees his expression gradually shift from confused concern to a wariness that makes her bones tremble with glee.
She merely parts her blood red lips in response to his unspoken question and bares all her teeth in a smile that once brought boys to their knees.
He flinches in a manner that is barely perceptible, but Lydia has been speaking less and less these last few weeks and she now knows that observation is easier when pretty, vapid words no longer leak from between her teeth.
Only you could be equal parts beautiful and terrifying.
Lydia breaks the tense eye contact between herself and Scott, glancing down at her nearly untouched plate to hide her genuine smile at the teasing words.
Beneath the table, Laura Hale laces their fingers together and squeezes Lydia's hand.