A/N: Here's something a little different for ya! I got a prompt for outsider POV, apocalypse, and Emissary Stiles, and this is what came out of it! So far the story is sitting at ~43k and I'm certainly not done with it yet so I'm not sure how long it's going to end up, but I couldn't stand waiting to post it anymore, lol.
Yes, this story is Sterek, but the main purpose of it is not the romance. It's established relationship (sort of) and their progress does play a part, but there's a much larger narrative that takes precedence in the end. There is no romance for the main character either. Just letting you know that ahead of time.
Please review! You know how much I love reviews! =)
Leah pressed her back as close to the alley wall as she could and held her breath, but there was nothing she could do about her heartbeat. It thundered in her chest, panic-fast and dangerously obvious to anyone with the right ears to hear it. She could only hope the snarls and growls from around the corner would mask it, and that the winners of the skirmish wouldn't care about one puny omega hiding just out of sight.
She flinched as a particularly pained yip stabbed at her eardrums, accompanied by the crunch of a bone. Jesus, how long had she been able to recognize the sound of a bone breaking from a hundred yards away? At least she wasn't used to it yet. The day she didn't flinch at that sound, or the myriad other noises of pain and fear that echoed all around her, was the day she had officially lost every bit of the person she was before, and she was not looking forward to that day.
She was lightheaded by the time the fighting stopped around the corner, and she cursed herself for not realizing how stupid it would be to start breathing again after the silence fell when there was no ambient noise to cover it up. The longest she'd ever held her breath before was approximately four minutes and she was quickly approaching that mark. But there were still three heartbeats within earshot, and drawing their attention was a much surer death sentence than self-asphyxiation.
Her head swam, the heavy rush of her pulse somehow making her twice as dizzy as the oxygen deprivation alone, but she couldn't let herself breathe yet. The crunch of boots on gravel reached her and she dug her claws into the brick wall to steady herself as she swayed on her feet. Fuzzy blackness was creeping into the edges of her vision but the crunching was fading, moving away, and it would only be a few more seconds. Just a few more seconds, that was all she needed. Just a few…
When at last the footsteps were far enough away, Leah gasped in as much air as she could manage. She sagged against the wall, knees shaking too much to hold her up, and the leftover adrenaline was almost enough to force her fangs out. She held them back—she didn't like any part of the shift, but that was by far the worst; the sensation of new teeth forcing their way through her gums was always going to be disturbing, no matter how many times it happened—and gave herself a minute to recover.
Just a minute, though. She couldn't stay too long.
Leah had to keep moving. She didn't know how much time she had but she couldn't bring herself to be generous in her estimation; her optimism had gone out the window a very long time ago. As soon as her legs would support her, she was pushing off down the alley again.
The sight that met her when she rounded the corner was not an unfamiliar one: blood spattered across the cracked pavement and boarded up storefronts, bodies left where they'd fallen, all visible pockets turned out and notably empty. If she weren't still a bit unsteady on her feet, Leah would have held her breath again just to avoid the overpowering copper tang and sour bile smell of the guy with his stomach torn open. As it was, she just swallowed down her gag reflex, stepped over the limp arm flung across her path, and kept heading north.
That was all the other omega had been able to tell her. The north quadrant of the city, she'd said, probably somewhere on the east side of it. Don't bother looking for him; he'll find you.
Leah was counting on that last bit because she had absolutely no idea what she would do if he didn't. She had never been very good at scavenger hunts as a kid, and those at least had had actual clues to follow. Now she was wandering blind.
And it was getting dark. Not that that mattered much, what with the improved night vision and all. Spontaneous werewolfism had a few perks, at least. But nightfall always brought out the crazies, and that was twice as true nowadays when most of them had night vision too. She needed to find somewhere to hole up for the night if she wanted to live long enough to continue her search in the morning.
She found her way to what used to be a pharmacy, judging by the stench of chemicals that lingered on the empty shelves to burn her sensitive nose. There were no fresh scents that she could pick up, though, so no one had been in there in a long time. With nothing left for anyone to loot, it would be as good a place as any to hide. She would make a quick lap of the block just to be safe, keep an ear and a nostril open for anyone in the area, and then she would try to get a few hours of sleep.
She only made it two streets over.
The whiz of an arrow seemed to come before the twang of the bowstring, but neither gave Leah enough time to react before the hood of her sweatshirt was skewered. The force of it dragged her sideways into a wall, the arrowhead embedded in the brick keeping her pinned unless she wanted to tear apart her only piece of warm clothing to escape.
The shivery, prickly-hot rush of the shift came over her, rabid strength pounding through her veins, savage and heady. Leah almost fought against the feeling out of habit, but when she was under attack was the only time she accepted the change. It would be a shame to lose the sweatshirt but being cold, she reminded herself, was a damn sight better than being dead, and she could always steal another one after the fight if she survived it.
Except that her attacker was fast, faster than any human had a right to be even though there was no scent of wolf or coyote or wendigo or any other flavor of supernatural creature on the air. There was just an arm reaching over Leah's shoulder and a serrated knife pressed against her throat barely a second after a perfectly steady heartbeat met her ear.
Leah froze. Every animal instinct screamed at her to attack, fingertips itching around her claws, but the prick of the knife in the soft hollow behind her jaw was a very convincing deterrent.
It didn't cut, though.
Another second passed and her jugular was still intact, which didn't make a damn bit of sense because her attacker could only be one person, and the Archer wasn't known for her mercy. Of course, the Archer wasn't known for missing her target either, and the arrow had gone through Leah's hood, not her heart.
It took two tries for Leah to speak, her mouth dry and clumsy with fangs.
"You're not here to kill me?"
The knife pressed in closer, a threat and a warning. The edge didn't break skin, but the knife must have been made of silver because it burned.
"If I were," the Archer said, breath hot against the shell of Leah's ear, "you'd already be dead. I think you know that."
Leah would have nodded, but that didn't seem like a very good idea in her current circumstances. She swallowed hard and the knife caught on the sensitive skin of her throat, stinging.
"I'm—"
It came out as more of a squeak and, damn it, Leah had really hoped she would be better under pressure than this. She'd be embarrassed if she weren't already so terrified.
"I'm looking for the Emissary," she forced out.
In one quick, fluid, and very forceful motion, the Archer liberated her arrow from the wall—and there went the hood with it, torn to shreds, thanks so much for that—yanked Leah around, and shoved her against the wall instead, knife pressed back up under Leah's chin before she could even think to resist. Not that she would have resisted if she'd had the time to, and not only because the threat of a silver blade being embedded somewhere unpleasant and probably lethal was very real.
This was the Archer, the third most dangerous person in the city, the region, and probably the entire country. Or maybe that was hyperbole, the exaggeration that came with mystique and anonymity. But she looked pretty damn dangerous. She was taller than Leah by a bit, dressed all in a sort of mottled black-and-grey that blended seamlessly with the shadows behind her so that Leah had trouble focusing in on her when she was less than a foot away. There was an impressive bow slung across her back, the fletched ends of a quiver of arrows showing over her shoulder, and a hood pulled low over her face to hide it from view.
All combined, it screamed do not cross me or I will put an arrow in your face and disappear into the night without a trace and no one will ever find your body.
Leah really hoped that searching for the Emissary was not enough to warrant getting an arrow in the face.
"I know who you're looking for," the Archer hissed. "The question is why. "
Okay, so not getting shot just yet, at least. Questions first instead of shooting. This was off to a good start. Leah could work with this.
"I need his help," she said as calmly as she could manage. "There's a—"
"Everybody thinks they need his help," the Archer cut her off. "What makes you so special?"
"It's not for me!" Leah hurried on. "There's a man, a few hours out of town. He was injured or sick or something, I don't know, he wouldn't tell me what was wrong with him. He just said that he had a message for the Emissary and I needed to make sure it got to him as quickly as possible."
The Archer's head tilted, the fabric of her hood rustling quietly.
"A message."
Leah couldn't tell if the Archer sounded intrigued or skeptical. But there was still no stabbing going on, and the longer they went without stabbing the more confident she became that she would survive this encounter. Her heart was still about to beat out of her chest with fear but she did manage to force the shift back, claws retracting, features reforming into something resembling normal.
"Yes," Leah said, once there were no more fangs in the way. "He made it sound pretty important and kind of time sensitive."
"Then you'd best spit it out."
Leah hesitated.
"Look, miss...Archer, um...I don't mean to be rude or anything, but this guy was pretty insistent that I deliver the message straight to the Emissary," she said. "He said only the Emissary would understand what it really meant."
And the knife was back with a vengeance, the flat of it pressed against Leah's throat and the sharp edge digging dangerously into the soft, eminently vulnerable underside of her chin, forcing her head up. Leah whimpered, her hope of survival plummeting again, but she held back the shift with great effort.
"If the Emissary will understand it," the Archer said with all the patience of a coiled snake, "then I will understand it. You have ten seconds."
Leah didn't know if it was ten seconds to make her case before the Archer stopped listening and left, or ten seconds until the Archer stopped toying with her and finally put that knife to good use. Neither were favorable outcomes and she lost the fight against her claws, scrabbling against the brick behind her like that might actually do her some kind of good.
As if anything would do her any good when the Archer—The fucking Archer—had her pinned and, oh god, she didn't want to die. She had made it through the whole goddamn nightmare that was the last six years only to get killed by a would-be-might-actually-be assassin in a fucking back alley of a ruined city all for the sake of some stranger's cryptic fucking message. That was the last time she ever tried to help a strange man on the side of the road.
Last time she would ever do anything at all, probably, because she was going to die right here, right now. The Archer was waiting. Ten seconds, fuck, how many were left?
"Okay, okay, okay!" Leah managed to gasp out, painfully aware that her panicking had already cost her precious time. "Here's the message, okay, here it is: the guy said to tell the Emissary that...Sourwolf says the Honest Man is still alive! That's all he said, I swear, he—"
The absence of pressure all along her front shocked Leah into silence. The Archer's movement was too abrupt and surprising for her to even register that the threat of the knife was gone too, that there was nothing stopping her from getting the hell out of there. She'd done what she had promised to do, passed on the stupid message, and now there was no reason for her not to escape while she had the chance, right? That would be the smart thing to do, just make a break for it, wash her hands of the whole damn thing.
But she didn't. Leah stayed right where she was, hardly daring to breathe lest she bring the Archer's wrath down on her again but too intrigued to flee now and give up finding out why the message would garner such a reaction.
The Archer was still as well, her grip on the knife gone slack. It was hard to get a read on her when her face was covered, but her shock was obvious anyway. She was so shocked that she would have let her quarry get away in that moment—and no one got away from the Archer, not unless she wanted them to.
"Say that again."
Leah almost didn't hear it, the Archer's voice gone thin and shaky. It took another, more forceful command to get Leah to repeat the message.
The Archer sheathed her knife with some difficulty, trembling too much to hold it steady any longer, and then covered her mouth with both hands. She didn't seem half as imposing as she had a moment ago, now that she was just standing instead of looming and threatening. That didn't stop Leah from jumping when she spoke again.
"This man," the Archer said. "The one who gave you this message. What was his name? Did he tell you?"
"No," Leah said with a shake of her head. "No, he wouldn't give me a name. He said he might still have enemies and he didn't want to draw their attention."
The Archer nodded like that made sense, like she knew who the man was anyway and thought that was perfectly in character. Then, after a deep breath, she gave herself a visible shake, sloughing off her surprise like so much rainwater and pulling back on her no-nonsense attitude. Without another word, she turned and took a running leap toward the building opposite them, finding hand- and foot-holds with easy precision even in the failing light of evening.
Leah watched her climb, mouth hanging open. She wasn't sure whether to be relieved to see the frightening woman's back or stung by the obvious dismissal. Was Leah's part in the whole affair over now? She'd done her good deed and now it was time to return to the abandoned pharmacy and go back to spending her days just trying not to die?
"Bring my arrow with you on the way up."
The Archer was crouched on the lip of the roof, shadowed face turned down toward where Leah was still leaning. It took an embarrassingly long time for the meaning of the words to filter through to Leah. When it did, she snatched the abandoned arrow off the ground at her feet and held it up.
"You want me to, uh...you want me to follow you?" she asked, just for clarification.
The Archer didn't bother answering. Leah figured that was answer enough in itself, and also an implicit judgment of her intellect that she didn't appreciate. She scrambled up the wall as quickly as she could anyway, which wasn't nearly as fast as the Archer despite Leah's supposedly superior sight, strength, and reflexes.
The Archer took her arrow back, returned it to its quiver, and set off across the rooftops, leaving Leah to trail after her and wonder for the millionth time in the last half hour alone what exactly she had gotten herself into when she stopped to talk to that man.
"So...where exactly are we going?" she asked.
"Where do you think? To see the Emissary."
Leah didn't know how long they spent scaling buildings and leaping across rooftops, but then she'd never had a very good grasp of time and she'd abandoned her old wristwatch months ago when it had finally run out of battery. It couldn't have been too long; by the time night fell in earnest they had migrated down to solid ground again, and then they were skulking through even tighter alleys, ducking across empty streets, wending their way further into the heart of the city.
Leah stayed close behind the Archer, sure that if she lost sight of her once she would never be able to find her again. Honestly, she would've stayed even closer than she did, but she had a feeling that stepping on the Archer's heel would put her in danger of being shot again, but for real this time. So she did maintain a moderate distance, and she kept any and all questions to herself in the hopes that they would be answered later, though she did acknowledge and accept the sad possibility that no one would bother to tell her anything.
For all that the Archer was damn near silent and invisible, her presence seemed to radiate for blocks. In Leah's experience, it was impossible to navigate the city at night without running into at least four people—or things—that wanted to harm you in one way or another, but now there was nothing. It sort of felt like that moment out in the woods when all the birds and little woodland creatures went quiet because a predator was nearby. She figured that wasn't too bad of an analogy here and a shiver went down her spine; she might be an omega, the lowest of the low where werewolves were concerned, but she was still not used to feeling like prey.
Without the ambient noise of fighting and looting that usually filled the air, the night was almost oppressively quiet, broken only by their own breathing, the steady thump of their heartbeats, the careful tap of their footsteps on the pavement.
And a buzz.
Leah thought she was imagining it at first, or that it was a particularly hardy bug that had survived the recent drop in temperature, but it was too steady for that. Steady and growing, pitched just right to make a whine of protest build in her throat. She rubbed at her ears and cast around for the source, for anything that might be making that godawful noise, but there was nothing. They were in the most derelict part of the city, surrounded by the ruins of old office buildings, every one of them abandoned and dark and not even fit to provide shelter in a storm.
The Archer glanced back at Leah when her whine escaped.
"That'll be the wards," she said. "Sorry about those. The noise turns most supernatural beings away before they even realize they're hearing it. It's subsonic for humans and a few others, but the area's reputation is enough to keep them away too. Don't worry. It'll go away once we reach where we're going."
Leah sure hoped so, or else her ears were liable to start bleeding. She stuffed her fingers in her ears and lamented, not for the first time, that she couldn't figure out how to turn off her enhanced senses.
And then, quite suddenly, it was gone. From one moment to the next, just gone, leaving a ringing silence in its wake that was nearly as deafening as the buzzing itself.
Leah was so taken aback by the change that she stumbled over something in her path: a small, flat stone stuck fast to the asphalt of the road, dark enough to blend in. One of many such stones, she saw, all lined up across the road and leading off between the buildings on both sides. If she squinted, she thought she could make out scratches on the stones' surfaces. Symbols? She didn't recognize them, but they had to be some kind of magic if these were responsible for that noise.
And evidently a whole lot more.
Leah looked up to find a completely different view from when she had looked down. Brighter, for one thing, like these buildings might have working electricity. And the buildings themselves weren't burnt out, smashed up shells anymore, but something resembling actual, stable structures. Some of them had full roofs and even non-broken windows, though most of those were blocked out by heavy, dark-colored curtains.
This magical restoration only extended for a block, maybe four or five buildings in total, and none of them were exactly picture-perfect, but it was the most intact display of civilization Leah had seen in a long time. Her first pitiful reaction was to wonder if they had hot showers in there somewhere and if they would let her use one. Her second was to rush for the nearest building like a moth to flame, but she veered off course when she realized the Archer was aiming more toward the middle of the cluster.
Leah couldn't tell what the building used to be. There might have been signage on it somewhere, years ago, but any such distinguishing feature had gotten torn down or scratched off since then. Now it was just a nondescript three storey of brick and cement with a thick wooden door that looked much newer than the rest of it. The door frame was covered in those same sort of symbols from the perimeter of pebbles stuck so firmly to the ground that even a kick from a werewolf couldn't dislodge them.
More magic, Leah guessed.
Confirmation came when the Archer pressed her palm flat against the door and it lit up like a Christmas tree before swinging open all on its own.
The Archer led the way inside, down a long hallway, through a large room full of boxes and crates with no labels on them, up two flights of mostly-intact stairs, and down another hallway. They passed a few other people on the way, busy-looking people with grim faces and the occasional weapon strapped somewhere on their person, but no one gave them more than a suspicious glance.
The hallway was lined with doors, some closed, some hanging off their hinges, some absent entirely to reveal what might have been conference rooms once upon a time, but the Archer paid no mind to any of those. She headed straight for the door at the very end of the hall, surrounded by more symbols that lit up at the Archer's touch.
This door swung open like the last had and it hit Leah out of nowhere: a dozen heartbeats she hadn't been able to hear before, the murmur of voices and rustle of clothing and shuffle of papers, the concentrated scent that came with a lot of people in an enclosed space. She couldn't stop herself from jerking away from the sudden onslaught, the influx of sensory information overwhelming—almost painful—in its intensity.
In all actuality it was probably nothing, just the soft conversation of a few handfuls of people, but to have it all come out of nowhere like that was a shock to her system. And this happened sometimes, this overload where it felt like every dial had been turned up to twelve and the walls were closing in on her and it was just too much. It had been bad enough when she was human but as a werewolf it was excruciating.
By the time the roar died down enough for Leah to be conscious of her surroundings again, there were eyes on her. That probably shouldn't have been a surprise considering she was an intruder here, and also she was just frozen, cringing in an open doorway, probably reeking of irrational fear and pain. She couldn't bring herself to move, though, not when everyone was staring at her like she would either snap and kill them all or be their next meal, and this was probably the worst possible time to wolf out but everything was still too close and her heart was racing and her fingers were itching to pop claws and—
"It's been a while since you brought back a guest."
The voice was low and hoarse, but it carried. All at once, the muttering and fidgeting of the room's occupants stopped. The eyes on Leah looked away, turning toward a far corner of the room, and the small crowd fell back to clear the way.
The speaker didn't look much different from anyone else there. On the tall side of average, broad-shouldered but not particularly muscled, a mess of brown hair. Dirty jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, a canvas jacket. There was a scar along the side of his neck, thick and white, that extended past his collar. Nothing about him really said leader except the way the others reacted to him, like his word carried weight. Like anything he said was worth listening to, even a simple, innocuous comment like that.
He wasn't facing them, hadn't even looked up from the sheaf of paper in his hands, but it was obvious that he was addressing the Archer. He turned a page and shook his head absently before handing the papers off to the young man closest to him. When he looked up, Leah saw that there were scars on his face too, three thin ones that skipped from above his left eye, across his nose, all the way down to the right side of his jaw. There was a half-smile on his lips, but it didn't look amused.
"And it's been even longer," he went on, "since you brought back a guest without clearing it with me first."
On the surface, his tone was light, casual. And yet there was something almost accusatory about it, something sharp that demanded an explanation. Leah found herself taking a step back, away from the object of his displeasure lest she get caught in the crossfire.
The Archer didn't cower. She just pushed back her hood. It pooled around her shoulders to reveal a woman who was strikingly pretty, pale and strong-jawed, with dark hair pulled up in a tight bun. She held her head high as she faced the Emissary—because it couldn't be anyone else, could it?—and apparently she was out of her mind because she didn't look intimidated at all, not like the rest of the crowd.
"Trust me," she said simply. "You'll want to meet this one."
Leah damn near bolted when the Emissary turned his dark eyes on her. She swallowed hard as he looked her up and down, feeling x-rayed down to her very bones, and she didn't breathe again until he looked away.
"Leave us," he said to the room at large, and immediately people began filing out. Leah finally gathered the fortitude to remove herself from the door when the Emissary raised an eyebrow at her, though she had to wage a battle with her reluctance to get any closer to the man than she had to.
The Emissary was even more of a legend than the Archer. They were partners, true, and they were both fearsome figures in and of themselves, but everybody knew that the Emissary was the more dangerous of the two. The magic man, the guardian of Beacon Hills, the only one to have come face to face with the Warlock and walk away. Some people claimed he didn't exist, that he was a myth, because no one seemed to know who he was or even what he looked like.
Or maybe the people who knew just weren't telling, and Leah couldn't blame them; she couldn't imagine doing anything to cross the man advancing on her now. He didn't address her directly, even as he stopped right in front of her. Instead he turned back to the Archer.
"What's so important that you had to bring a stranger into Headquarters without authorization?" he asked.
"We might have a situation on our hands."
"I hate situations, Alli. You know that."
"I'm pretty sure you won't hate this one."
The Emissary's jaw clenched, his patience for beating around the bush apparently running out, and he crossed his arms over his chest before leveling Leah with another of those penetrating looks.
"So?" he said. "What's my situation?"
Leah opened her mouth with every intention of telling him what she had gone to all this trouble to tell him, but her mind was blank. The message hadn't made any sense to her to begin with and the nonsense words wouldn't come to her now. No words would come to her at all when the Emissary was staring her down like that. She hadn't felt this pinned even when there was a literal arrow holding her in place. Floundering, she found herself looking to the Archer for help.
The Archer—Alli, the Emissary had called her—rolled her eyes and stepped forward to take over.
"Derek and Scott are alive."
The Emissary turned to her so quickly it had to have hurt his neck, features slack with disbelief. Then he was shaking his head, his face closing off and his entire body tensing like he was braced for a blow.
"No," he said roughly. "No, they're dead. They've been dead for years."
"Presumed dead," Alli corrected him. "They've been missing for years and we had no reason to think they weren't dead when—"
"When all evidence and all intel said they should be," the Emissary snapped. "That's what happens when you get snatched by the Warlock, Allison: you end up dead. What the hell could possibly convince you otherwise now? After all these years?"
Allison turned to Leah and said, "Tell him what you told me."
This time the Emissary's gaze was so intense, the message found its way to Leah's lips out of sheer self-preservation instinct.
"Sourwolf says that the Honest Man is still alive."
Maybe it was a good thing the Emissary had braced for impact because the words had even more of an effect on him than they'd had on the Archer when she had first heard them. He staggered backwards, mouth open, and his face drained of its color like he had seen a ghost. Maybe he had, in a way. His hands found their way into his hair, raking through the messy strands and then gripping tight.
"That's not possible," he said weakly.
"No one else would know to call them that," Allison said. "We haven't used those silly codenames in years. Not since—"
The Emissary cut her off with a sharp gesture, his eyes screwed shut, and Leah had the distinct feeling that she was intruding. Unfortunately, moving now would only draw more attention to her, so she just stayed very still and tried to be as unobtrusive as possible.
The worst part was the scent. Not the natural scent of them, but the emotional one, that bizarre combination of senses that somehow imprinted itself into Leah's brain and told her things that she had no right knowing. Like how completely and utterly grief-stricken the Emissary was at the very mention of these people. It was a thick, heavy scent that settled around him like a fog, spiked through with old anger like the rumble of thunder and tang of lightning, and there was no way to ignore it no matter how much Leah wanted to.
It left a bitter aftertaste in her mouth and made her heart clench in her chest, a sympathetic response that threatened to drag up everything she didn't want to think about. She dug her fingernails—the human ones, not her claws—into her palms to distract herself, to keep her from dwelling on borrowed pain. She had her own grief to deal with, damn it, and it wasn't fair that she had to be subjected to anyone else's.
"Stiles," Allison said, gentle and coaxing on what Leah took to be the Emissary's real name. "They're alive. Scott and Derek, they're alive."
"We don't know that for sure."
The Emissary—Stiles—shook his head again, harder this time, like he was trying to shake loose the pall of despair and disbelief and get himself thinking right again.
"You," he said, pointing to Leah. "Where did you get this information? Who gave you the message?"
"Just some guy I met yesterday," she said with a helpless shrug. "He didn't give me a name."
"No, of course he wouldn't. What did he look like?"
"I don't know, he, uh...he had dark hair," Leah offered up with a wince. "I think he was tall, but it was hard to tell. He wasn't standing up straight; he might have been hurt."
"Light eyes?" Stiles pressed. "Thick eyebrows?"
"Uh, yeah, I guess."
"That's Derek," Allison said with a smile, and her eyes were shiny like she might cry. She smelled less like grief and more tangy-sweet, something like joy or hope. It wasn't a scent Leah had encountered many times in recent years. It tickled at her nose, no less intrusive than the grief and twice as uncomfortable to feel secondhand, like she was stealing something fragile.
A hand on Leah's shoulder startled her.
"Where is he?" Stiles asked, gripping just a bit too tight, fingertips biting into the muscle.
"He was just outside of town," Leah told him. "On the west side. Past where the market sets up on Tuesdays, closer to the stream."
"Out by the woods, you mean," Allison said, and Leah nodded.
Stiles nodded too, like that meant something to him. Then he frowned at Leah as if he were just now seeing her for the first time.
"Why did he send you?" he murmured, more to himself than to her. "If he's alive and nearby, he should be here himself."
"He didn't know where to find you," Leah said, though she wasn't entirely sure he had actually been looking for an answer. "No one does. You're pretty effectively hidden here."
"Derek could find us," Stiles said firmly. "He could always find me, could smell me from a mile away no matter how many wards I had up even if he wasn't keyed into them. If he's alive and free, he should have tracked me down by now."
It was Leah's turn to frown; that didn't make any sense.
"She said he was hurt," Allison cut in before Leah could.
"She said he was hurt yesterday. He should've healed by now," Stiles said. "Or if not, then he should be healed soon. I've never known him to be put out of the running for more than a few days, no matter how badly he was injured."
"Okay, wait," Leah finally said, loud enough to get both their attention. She quailed under their combined stares, but something was not adding up here and she had to say something. "Look, I'm really sorry, but I'm not so sure we're talking about the same person anymore."
The two of them exchanged a look.
"We have to be," Stiles said. "The description of the man you met—that was Derek to the letter. And no one else could have given you that message. Why do you say otherwise?"
Leah bit her lip. God, she really hoped she was wrong, that there was another explanation or something, anything. Otherwise she was going to have two very upset, very dangerous people to contend with. But she couldn't not tell them. If there really was some kind of misunderstanding here, then they needed to know. They deserved to know.
"This Derek you're talking about," she said carefully. "He was a werewolf?"
"Yes," Allison said slowly, suspiciously. "A beta. Why do you ask that?"
Fuck.
"Because the man who gave me the message wasn't," Leah said. "He was human."
The Emissary's headquarters did have showers and Leah almost cried. Whether the tears were from relief for the rare blessing that was water not scooped out of a chilly stream or from the sheer stress of the last few hours was up for debate, but Leah was too exhausted to care one way or the other. Anything that got her away from people and noise and scents and emotions that weren't hers. If she'd had to stay in that room for one more minute, listening to them argue and smelling their panic and confusion, she might have had a breakdown. She had never been so grateful to be kicked out of somewhere before.
The Archer had mercifully sent for someone to take her to where she could get cleaned up, the young man that Stiles had handed his papers off to before starting the interrogation. He introduced himself as Mason with a smile and a handshake. Then he led her downstairs to the communal showers and showed her where all the necessary things were before leaving her alone there to hurry back to whatever he had been doing before.
That was fine. He was probably very busy. Everybody here looked very busy, though Leah had no idea what most of them were supposed to be doing. She wasn't sure she wanted to know, so she just made sure the door was locked and all the windows were boarded up securely.
Someone had managed to rig running water into an old conference room on the first floor that had had its carpeting ripped up, plain concrete cold against her feet. The shower heads, lined up against one wall with curtains strung on fishing line in between, may have been made out of tin cans with holes poked in the bottoms, but they served their purpose well enough. It didn't matter that the water, when it worked its way through the ramshackle pipes, wasn't much more than lukewarm; it was heaven.
Leah peeled her clothes off with some difficulty. It had been a depressingly long time since she'd last had the opportunity to wash them, considering she didn't have any spares at the moment and it was too cold to run around naked waiting for them to dry, and her jeans were grimy enough to stand up on their own. She'd been meaning to find something else, but it wasn't like there were fully stocked department stores on every corner anymore.
At least, not around here, there weren't. Maybe there was still a Macy's open for business a few states over, a few Walmarts that had managed to survive this long. Maybe some places even had McDonald's and consistent electricity and an intact police force that succeeded in keeping order. Maybe in other parts of the country things were still functioning in some approximation of how they used to, but this region had been hit the hardest and none of that was left. Beacon Hills was the epicenter, the source of it all, Ground Zero of the fucking supernatural apocalypse.
Leah had tried to get out, she really had. She had made a run for the state line in hopes of finding somewhere better, somewhere safer, but they weren't letting anyone like her through. She didn't know if it was a governmental mandate put in place to protect the rest of the country or if the Hunters had decided on their own that this region needed to be quarantined and assigned themselves as the border patrol, but it hardly mattered who was doing the shooting when the end result was the same: they were trapped here.
Leah scrubbed herself twice over from head to toe, scratching at the grime on her skin and using a ration of actual soap to make her hair less of a giant matted mess. She would say it made her feel more human but it would be a lie. She wasn't human. If she had been, they would've let her over the fucking border, wrapped her up in blankets and taken her far away from this hellhole instead of aiming shotguns loaded with wolfsbane at her head.
If she were still human, she wouldn't be alone. She would be at home with her family, hugging her mother and father, telling her little brother that everything would be okay. And she wouldn't spend every hour of every day looking over her shoulder, avoiding the rogue werewolf packs that ran the streets like they were the fucking mafia, ducking the Hunters intent on wiping them out, waiting for the Warlock to pick her up and carry her off like he had so many others.
Even under the warm spray, Leah shivered. If the Emissary and the Archer were legends, then the Warlock was a nightmare. He was the boogeyman, the monster under the bed, the thing lurking in every shadow and just around every corner. Some said he was a demon, others just a man driven mad by his own quest for power. Everyone agreed that he was the one responsible.
By whatever means, it was the Warlock's fault that Leah and countless other innocent people just like her had simply woken up one day as something else, something other. Werewolves and werecoyotes, kitsunes and wendigos, banshees and sirens, and a hundred other kinds. All across the country, a giant spike in supernatural creatures, all of them spawned out of nowhere with no explanation and no way to stop it. Even now, six years from the first wave, it still happened sometimes. Spontaneous transformations, no bite needed, courtesy of the Warlock and whatever twisted fucking magic he had wrought to bring the country to its knees.
Leah leaned her forehead against the wall, forcing herself to take slow breaths deep enough to make her head spin. Panicking had never done her any good before and it wouldn't do her any good now, no matter how much indulging in a good freak out while she had the opportunity appealed to her. She had to hold herself together right now because, if half of what she had gleaned from Stiles' and Allison's argument was true, then the situation was worse than she had ever imagined.
It had been one thing when they were just rumors. People talked all the time, they gossiped and told stories and exaggerated for shock value, so hearing about the big bad Warlock who would steal you away in the night to work his evil spells on you was alarming but, taken as it was with a grain of salt, ultimately waved off as some kind of cautionary tale. And the story of how the Emissary had risen up to protect the city, fighting the Warlock in an epic duel, forcing him out of Beacon Hills and into retreat, was just a fable meant to give the people who were stuck there a hero they could pin their fragile hopes on.
But it was all true. Stiles had said so himself, that the Warlock really was taking people and that those people ended up dead. Or at least, they usually ended up dead.
What Leah had said about that Derek guy had sent the Emissary into a tailspin. It had been kind of hard to follow what with all the yelling, most of which came out in half-sentences or was cut off by Allison alternately trying to calm him down and yelling back at him, but it seemed like there was definitely some kind of magic going on. The Warlock was using the people he took for something, that much was certain, but maybe it wasn't in the way they had thought. Not if Derek had ended up human.
"Human, Allison!" Stiles had shouted with a definite tinge of hysteria, and Leah had already had her back to the wall, as far away from him as she could get. "How did that even happen? That's not how the spell usually works!"
"Maybe something went wrong?" Allison had asked. "If the draw was botched—"
"The Warlock doesn't botch things," Stiles had snapped, pacing and tugging at his hair. "He's too good for that. And it's been four years, for fuck's sake, four years. We're missing something."
"Derek will be able to tell us. Tomorrow we'll track him down and he'll—"
Stiles had looked horrified.
"No, no, no, we need to go now," he had said. "We can't wait until tomorrow, we need to find him now. Derek's out there right now!"
"Stiles, it's the middle of the night," she'd reasoned. "He's survived his entire life up to this point, he will make it through a few more hours until we can travel safely."
"That was as a werewolf, Allison!" Stiles had shouted. "Derek is human now. Derek can't survive as a human, he doesn't know how!"
That had been about the time Leah had squeezed her eyes shut and covered her ears, wishing fervently that she had more hands so that she could hold her nose too and block out the storm of chemosignals. As soon as the warded door had been slammed shut behind her, all sensory information from inside the room had been cut off and it had felt like coming up from underwater.
Speaking of water, Leah was surprised that no one had come to bang on the door and bitch at her for using up all their precious warm water by now. One last rinse and she turned the shower off, watching forlornly as the spray trickled off to nothing. She headed to the actual bathroom that Mason had pointed out, just off the shower room and barely large enough for a toilet, a sink, and a closet of supplies. She dug up a threadbare towel and dried off, squeezing the water out of her hair before wrapping the damp towel around her torso.
She caught sight of herself in the cracked mirror over the sink and immediately wished she hadn't. Her face was thin like it had never been when she'd had regular access to good food, cheeks sunken and almost gaunt. Her freshly washed hair still looked greyish instead of its old blonde and only so much of that could be attributed to the thin, inconsistent light from the weak bulb overhead. Dark shadows ringed her eyes like bruises and she leaned forward against her better judgment, reaching out to trace the reflection of them.
God, how had she become this? It wasn't a face she recognized, not anymore. She wasn't old enough to look this weary, this broken down, and it wasn't fair. She had been a happy teenage girl once and now there was nothing left of her but a hunted animal. The urge to smash the mirror leapt in her and with it came a flash of yellow, dull brown eyes subsumed by unnatural gold, and Leah flinched backward. Her sudden anger sank under the weight of a familiar nausea and she looked away.
A knock on the half-closed bathroom door made her jump, eyes flashing again on some sort of instinct. She clutched the towel tighter around her chest and turned to find Allison, leaning her shoulder against the door frame with her eyes averted. The Archer had let her hair down sometime in the last hour and it tumbled over her shoulders in a cascade of tired curls. There was a bundle tucked under her arm. After a sidelong glance to make sure Leah was relatively decent, she smiled.
"I brought you something to change into," she said, hefting the bundle. "It looked like you could use new set of clothes. Well, not new. But clean, at least."
"Oh. Uh, thanks."
Leah took the bundle from her, unrolling it to find a long-sleeved black shirt, a pair of cargo pants that promised to be a little too big on her, a belt, and—praise Jesus—a bra and a pair of underwear. Modesty went out the window in the face of clean underwear and she dropped the towel without the slightest concern for the woman watching her, getting dressed in record time and reveling in the feeling of clean cotton sliding over clean skin.
"I'm sorry."
Leah looked up from pulling on her own raggedy shoes, surprised and a little bit confused.
"For being so rough with you earlier today," Allison clarified. "It's not often that strangers come to us on good terms and we learned early on not to trust people too quickly. Of course, that pessimism may have served us well in the past, but I'm starting to think we've moved past a healthy skepticism and firmly into paranoia."
"It's fine," Leah said. "I get it."
It's not like she was inclined toward trusting people either. Trust was a dangerous thing.
Allison shook her head though.
"We never even got your name," she pointed out. "Obviously our social skills have atrophied from lack of use."
Leah hadn't even realized. Honestly, she hadn't thought it mattered. She wasn't what was important in this situation. She would probably never see these people again, so what did it matter if they knew anything at all about her? Still, Allison seemed to be waiting, her bottom lip caught between her teeth.
"Leah. I'm Leah Collins."
She almost held out her hand to shake but that felt too weirdly formal and inappropriate, like an outgrown relic of civilized society.
Allison smiled at her and, honestly, it was criminal that she managed to look so pretty when it was obvious that she was almost as worn down as Leah was.
"I'm Allison," she offered, then rolled her eyes. "But you probably already figured that out. Allison Argent, anyway. It's nice to meet you."
"You too, I guess."
Leah hadn't had to endure an awkward silence in years. It was strangely satisfying in a perverse kind of way.
"Come on," Allison said finally, jerking her head over her shoulder. "You're probably hungry and tired. We'll go grab you a quick bite to eat."
Leah followed her obediently out the door, through the shower room, and into the hallway. They made their way back to the room full of crates. There were more of them now than there were an hour or two ago and Mason was there with a clipboard, tapping a stubby pencil on various crates and making marks on what Leah assumed was an inventory of some kind. He looked up when Allison came in and gave her a weary smile.
"All accounted for," he said, holding up the clipboard. "It'll only last us a few weeks, though, and that's a liberal estimate."
"I know," Allison said with a sigh. "I'll write to Melissa. If she can get word out to Raf, then maybe he can get another batch of provisions across the border for us a little early. Think you and Liam can make it out to her?"
"If the Johnston pack comes under new management again in the next few days like we're anticipating, we can probably sneak through while they restructure," Mason said. "Otherwise we'll have to go the long way and risk pissing off that batty banshee on the south side."
Allison pried the top off the nearest crate and pulled out a can of peaches. She gave it a little shake.
"It'll be worth it," she said, "if we can get a few more shipments of these."
Mason nodded and made another mark on his inventory before shuffling away down the line.
Allison produced a small knife from somewhere on her person, cutting away the top of the can. Then she held both can and knife out to Leah, who took them gratefully. It was tricky to stab the soft pieces of fruit while walking, but she wasn't going to wait to eat until they were standing still and Allison was already moving again so she made it work. The peaches were juicy and sweet and by far the most delicious thing Leah had ever tasted and she had drained the can by the time they reached another set of conference rooms.
These were lined with cots, dozens of them, all set out in rows like a dormitory and laid with blankets and pillows that looked like they had been sewn together out of whatever scraps of fabric they could find.
"We sleep in shifts," Allison told her. "So there's always a few beds available. You're welcome to use any of them. You should get a few good hours of sleep while you have the chance. We leave at first light."
Leah almost dropped the can.
"W-wait. We?"
Allison gave her a funny look and reached out to take her knife back like she was worried Leah would drop that too and lose a toe.
"Of course," she said. "We have to find Derek, and you were the last person to see him."
"He won't be where I left him," Leah protested. "He said it was too exposed there and he had to move."
"We know," Allison said. "And that's why we need you to come with us. We have an idea of where he might have gone but we might be wrong. And if we are, then we'll need your help tracking him. We can't follow his scent like you can."
"Don't you have other werewolves here? Ones you trust?" Leah asked, her arms wrapping around her stomach to quell the uneasiness there.
She didn't want to follow Derek's scent. Honestly, she didn't want to smell him again at all. He had smelled like ozone and fear and pain and something sickly sweet that had stuck in her nose for hours after she had left him behind. Now she knew it was the scent of whatever awful magic the Warlock had worked on him. Following that trail was almost guaranteed to lead her into even more trouble, and she'd already had plenty of trouble lately.
"None of our wolves know his scent," Allison said, and sadness wafted off of her like perfume. "Not anymore. It's been too long."
"What about a spell?" Leah asked instead, casting around for any other option. "The Emissary has powerful magic. He couldn't work some kind of spell to find out where Derek is?"
"Not with the materials he has. He would need a piece of Derek's body, like blood or hair, which he doesn't have. And even if he had something like that left over from the last time we saw Derek, there's no guarantee it would work now that he's human."
Allison frowned at Leah, looking her up and down. The scrutiny made Leah tense and fidget, flexing her fingers to rid herself of the claw-itch.
"You're afraid of us."
It didn't sound like an accusation, just a simple statement of fact, but Leah flushed anyway. These people had done her so much good, had put food in her stomach and clothes on her back and taken her in off the street when they had no real reason to trust her, and here she was being an ungrateful ass making them feel bad for doing what they needed to do to survive. They were obviously very capable of violence, and maybe Allison had roughed her up and threatened her a little bit, but it was no worse than anything else Leah had endured and it didn't seem like they actually intended her any harm.
She opened her mouth to protest, but Allison held up a hand.
"It's okay," she said easily, though she still smelled sad, maybe even disappointed. "I understand. Stiles and I have a certain...reputation, and I wish I could say it's inaccurate, but that would be a lie. For all that we mean well, we are dangerous people and you don't know us well enough to trust us yet. I can't blame you for being afraid of us. You have every right to be."
"I'm not afraid of you!" Leah insisted. She had a healthy fear of all the weapons, naturally, but ever since the hood had come off, Allison had been nothing but kind to her. She wasn't afraid of Allison Argent. Of the Archer, a little bit, but not Allison.
A smile tugged at the corner of Allison's mouth like maybe she believed her, but her dark eyes narrowed in a calculating sort of way and she tilted her head to the side.
"But you are afraid of him."
That Leah couldn't bring herself to deny. She just met Allison's gaze straight on and said, "Aren't you?"
Allison surprised her by laughing, dimples pressing into her cheeks.
"Oh no!" she said, waving her hand. "God, no! I've known him far too long for that. I still remember him as the spazzy, hyperactive kid with a buzzcut he was when we met back in high school."
Leah stared at her, unable to process that information. Her imagination gave out trying to picture the man she had met as anything but the intimidating figure he was today. The mental image simply did not compute.
Allison chuckled at her expression. She sat down on the nearest cot, leaning elbows against her knees and letting her hair cascade over her far shoulder so she could turn and look up at Leah.
"Believe it or not," she said, "but Stiles wasn't always the 'great and powerful Emissary.'" She did air quotes with one hand, rolling her eyes like the whole mystique was ridiculous. "Neither of us started out this way. We were just trying to protect our home. Me and Stiles, Scott and Derek, and all the rest. Just a bunch of kids, really, doing whatever we could to make it through the day."
Leah sank down onto the cot beside her, hands still wrapped around the empty can of peaches. She opened her mouth, changed her mind and closed it, then changed her mind again and pushed on.
"The rest?"
Because there had been plenty of people in that meeting they had busted in on earlier, but none of them had looked at Stiles like Allison did. Like they were his equal, like he was anything other than the Emissary, their fearless leader and greatest hope for the future. Leah hadn't seen anyone else who seemed like they really knew Stiles, and certainly not like they had known him since high school.
The heavy-bitter scent of grief answered her question as well as any words ever could and Leah almost regretted asking, but what Allison said was unexpected.
"Do you know what an emissary is?"
"Like...in general?" Leah asked.
Allison nodded.
"Uh...some kind of envoy, isn't it?" If she remembered her history classes well enough from way back in the day. "Sort of like a liaison."
"That's what it is to humans," Allison said. "It's a little bit different for supernaturals. An emissary is a human member of a werewolf pack, usually a Druid or someone else with magical ability, who serves as an advisor. They help keep the pack stable and in touch with their humanity."
"So Stiles was your pack's emissary?"
"Long before any of us realized it, honestly." Allison smiled down at her hands. "Stiles always made it his job to look after everybody, to make sure they were safe."
"So what happened to them?" Leah asked, as if she didn't already know.
"They're dead."
The new voice had Leah on the verge of shifting, heart in her throat and claws flicking out, because she hadn't heard anyone coming. Stiles' heartbeat was strangely muffled, like she was hearing it through layers of cotton even though he was leaning in the doorway just a few feet away, head down and arms crossed tightly over his chest once more. That seemed like his default pose.
"They're not all dead," Allison said, disapproving but not the least bit surprised by his sudden appearance.
"Dead or long gone, then," Stiles amended. He leveled Allison with a very dark look, one that made Leah shudder a little before she could stop herself. "And we'd be getting two of them back as we speak if you hadn't insisted on sleeping. If you're just going to swap stories and braid each other's hair all night, then we might as well head out now and stop wasting time."
"We're not going anywhere until daylight," Allison reiterated, unphased. "So go to bed, Stiles. I'll be up in a minute."
How Allison could hold her ground against a glare that menacing, Leah would never know. After a momentary staring match, Stiles' eyes flicked over onto her instead and Leah had the immediate urge to bare her neck in submission like she would to an alpha werewolf on a rampage. She held back the impulse, but she still let out a sigh of relief when he turned away and disappeared down the hallway toward the stairs.
Allison patted her leg in a way that was probably meant to be reassuring.
"Don't worry about Stiles," she said warmly. "I'm not saying that his bark is worse than his bite, just that he doesn't bite as often as he wants you to think he does."
Leah nodded like she believed that when she wasn't entirely sure she did or ever would.
"We leave first thing," Allison told her again, standing up and smoothing her hair away from her face. "It'll probably be a long day, so get some sleep while you can."
She followed in Stiles' footsteps with one last smile and Leah was left alone, still clutching the peach can like some kind of lifeline. There was nothing for her to do but follow orders, so she put the can down on the floor beside her chosen cot, kicked off her shoes, and laid down. With the sounds of people and movement from all over the building unnaturally loud in her ears and impossible to ignore, it was a long time before sleep overtook her.