Prologue

The room they put her in was small. She knew it was small because there was no echo, and the door was very close to her side. Every time it opened she felt a little rush of air, and as an officer would step inside, a frenzy of noise from the station would trickle in behind him, like a brief snippet from some radio station. But then the door would close, and it was silent again. Only her breathing and Malachi's restless sighs every few moments could be heard.

A cup of water sat between her fingers on the table. She hadn't taken the first sip. Instead, she used it to scoot back and forth to occupy her mind. Cecelia quietly hummed a Simon & Garfunkel tune under her breath, and her dog shifted anxiously at her feet. He lifted his head in alert, his ears perked up, and let out a small puff of warning, and her humming cut out as the door opened.

A man stepped in. She knew it was a man because he smelled like aftershave and stale coffee, and Malachi was always more on edge when a man entered a room. Her dog made a little noise of discontent and shifted again, his paw nudging against her shoe. She lifted that foot to cross it, holding it out of his reach.

"Sorry for the wait," Sheriff said. He pulled the chair out from across her and sighed as he settled in. "Are you hungry? I'm sure I could—"

"I'm fine," She said with a smile.

A beat passed as seemed to accept the response and flipped open something on the table. "Cecelia… can I call you that?"

"Well, that's my name, so… yes."

"Okay, Cecelia. I don't like to dance around issues. This whole thing will go a lot smoother if we're both just brutally honest with each other. Is that something you think you can do?"

"Can I be brutally honest?" She smirked, and the Sheriff didn't comment. "Sir, you really don't need to prep me like this. Just get to the point; my dog's about to start crawling up the walls."

He made a noise of hesitation, and in her mind she imagined that he looked down. The response was nothing new to Cecelia; her dog often made strangers uncomfortable. "Do you want me to ask an officer to take him out while we talk?"

"You can try," Cecelia grinned. "Malachi has terrible separation anxiety."

Sheriff snorted and settled back in his seat. "I used to have a German Shepherd," He told her, and Cecelia tactfully ignored that he seemed to be straying from the topic. "When I was a boy. I taught him to roll over, sit and stay. He ate more green beans and peas than anyone I've ever met."

She smirked, trying hard to imagine a youthful Sheriff slipping his dog table scraps at suppertime. "They're good companions."

"They are," He agreed, a grin in his voice. There was another brief moment of silence before the Sheriff seemed to come back to himself. He shifted in his seat and drew in a breath, shuffling some papers around on the desk. "Now… You're aware of some events that happened at the party you were at this weekend."

She kept her face carefully blank. Tilting her head, she said, "That was rather vague. I thought you said you were going to be brutally honest?"

Sheriff's voice was almost hard as he replied. "We already know that you were at the party. What I can't seem to figure out is why you showed up uninvited."

"Uninvited?" She snorted. "Sheriff, no one at that party was invited. It was a high school party. If you're lucky enough to be told about it, you show up."

"How did you hear about it?"

"Mason. Mason Hewitt. He's been showing me around school and he… seems to be under the impression that as the resident blind girl, I was sorely overdue for some fun."

"Fun," The Sheriff dryly repeated. "And what happened at that party was fun to you?"

"Honestly? No. I hate parties." She paused and made the point to push her black sunglasses up. "They're… overwhelming for me."

"I'm sure they are. You're very careful with your words," Sheriff observed. "Why is that?"

"I like to mean what I say. Why are you treating me like I'm hiding something from you?"

"Because I think you are," He bluntly told her. "You're acting like it."

"I'm being very honest with you."

"You're being very careful with me," Sheriff said, his tone dropping with impatience. "If you hate parties, why did you go?"

"Mason can be very persuasive."

"Okay. Fine. So you went to the party because Mason persuaded you to go, because you're new, and he's showing you around, and he wants you to make friends. Does that sound about right?"

She nodded.

Sheriff remained quiet for a few seconds, before finally saying, "I better not find out that you're lying to me."

"You know, you remind me a lot of my dad. That tone you're using… it's the same tone I used to hear whenever I was in trouble."

Sheriff snorted. "Is he in law enforcement?"

"Yes, but that's not the tone of a Sheriff. That's the tone of a father."

He breathed out a laugh and shifted in his seat. "I suppose that's true. Now, back to the party. Do you remember anything happening that was… unusual?"

Cecelia's lips twitched. "A man was decapitated."

"What do you know about that?" He asked, leaning forward slightly.

Malachi sighed and laid his head down, apparently bored. Cecelia seemed calm as she said, "I'm told it was a gruesome sight."

"You were found at the scene when officers responded. You were there. What do you think?"

"I didn't see it myself," She told him. "I'm blind. Or can't you tell from my sunglasses and Seeing Eye dog?"

"I know you're blind, that's not what I meant. You found the body, didn't you?"

"I was there. Along with two other people."

"You told the responding officers that Scott McCall and Chris Argent were there examining the body with you. It's interesting to me that you spoke with them about it first before calling the police."

"They were very capable," She told him. "I know it must seem strange to you, but my first instinct in a crisis is not to call the police like it is with most people. I wasn't raised that way."

"Didn't you say your dad was a cop?"

Cecelia smiled. "Exactly."

The Sheriff remained quiet for a few moments before he continued. "Did you tamper with the body in any way before the police arrived?"

"Of course not," Cecelia answered in an almost offended tone. "Do you think I'm an idiot?"

"No," Sheriff answered, just as testily. "It's obvious that you think you're really smart. And you think you can get by with just giving me the surface of the truth."

Cecelia didn't respond, but her face had lost all traces of amusement. She sat looking much more uncomfortable than before.

Sheriff leaned back and patted something on the desk before continuing. "Now, I don't know what sort of cop your dad was to make you feel like you can't trust the police, but I actually care about what happens in my town. So I don't like it when a grown man is decapitated at a party that my own son was attending. So how about you stop playing games with me, and start acting like you actually care that you found a dead man lying in the street?"

For a brief moment, the Sheriff was confused when he heard a quiet chuckle bubble from the girl's lips. For a split second he thought that someone else had entered the room with them, and then he realized that the quiet, persistent laughter was coming from the girl sitting across from him. He sat up straighter as she kept her head ducked and her laughter grew.

Her dog still had his head down, but when the heel of her hand abruptly smacked the wooden table, he whipped his head up and looked around in alert. Sheriff couldn't keep the expression of mild disturbance off his face as Cecelia, the blind girl he'd never met before, hunched over the desk like he'd just told her the funniest joke she'd heard in months.

"Okay…" She told him, and it occurred to him that the shy, quiet, somewhat standoffish girl he'd been speaking with for the past seven minutes was nothing more than an act, and that the confident, capable woman who sat up and looked at him as if she could actually see his face was the true Cecelia Rose. "Okay. Since you asked so nicely, the truth."

Sheriff gave the most minute of nods and kept his voice measured as he said, "Okay."

Cecelia drew in a breath and her eyebrow cocked again, a movement that the Sheriff was beginning to detect as somewhat of a signature of hers. "Have you ever seen a dam burst, Sheriff Stilinski?"

The Sheriff blinked. The abrupt and complete subject change dazed him for a moment, paired with the fact that she'd used his last name for the first time, and he blinked again as his mind struggled to answer her question. "A dam?"

"Yes. When a dam finally bursts, it swallows up and washes away everything in its path. Drowns anything that remains afterwards. But before it burst, it can be traced back to one single crack. That crack grew, and then another one sprouted, and so on, until eventually…" She trailed off, and the Sheriff could imagine the scene she painted for him as she spoke. The concrete wall cracking over time. The slow leak of water, the relentless pressure pushing against the wall of the dam until it produced another crack, and another, until soon there was nothing but a tangled web of cracks stretching across the wet concrete. Then the final explosion as the water finally burst free and rushed forward in a flood, and the wall was washed away, along with everything that came afterward.

He didn't respond. He just frowned at her in confusion and waited to see where she took it.

"Consider this conversation evidence of a leak in the dam."

"So what caused the crack?"

"I'm glad you asked. See, you're a little behind on the narrative, Sheriff." Cecelia seemed to take no small measure of pleasure in completely stunning the Sheriff into silence as she smugly continued, her legs crossed and fingers tapping a beat against the cup of water. "My family and I moved all the way here from Louisiana. There's a surprising amount of activity in Louisiana. Tensas county especially, right on the Mississippi border."

"Activity?" He asked, almost as an afterthought, and his question was swallowed in her speech as she continued.

"Before Tensas it was Devil's Lake out in North Dakota. It's not as exciting as it sounds. A weird mixture of Boy Scouts and casinos. But there is a rich culture of Sioux heritage to be had… And before that, Vermont. Now there's a beautiful state. Too bad its plagued with vengeful spirits."

"Spirits?" Sheriff asked, his suspension of disbelief finally cracking.

"Werewolves?" She asked, just as smoothly, and he seemed to have a physical reaction to the unexpected word. He jerked slightly and something fell onto the floor, sounding soft and inconsequential. Like a stack of papers. Malachi reached his nose forward to inspect the ones that hit his paws, but didn't seem to mind as the Sheriff quickly collected them.

She didn't give him enough time to compose himself, let alone to come up with any sort of response, as she said, "I come from a family of hunters. We go from state to state, wherever activity is the busiest and most dangerous. Wherever we're of most use. I've moved around a lot in my life, Sheriff Stilinski, and believe it or not, I've seen a lot. But I've never seen anything like Beacon Hills."

Whatever he was expecting to learn from her, this was not it. Maybe a few details that they could use, at the most. For whatever reason, his son and Scott seemed extremely suspicious of this girl. In fact, they'd requested that he interrogate her, to see if he could gauge what it was she knew and wanted from them. It's the entire reason he's been questioning her so harshly. But this? No one could have seen this coming. All the boys really seemed to expect when they requested the interrogation was a particularly nosy blind girl. They'd hoped that being questioned would scare her off.

They'd all had their hands full this month. For the kids, it seemed that they couldn't catch a break. Whether it was normal mundane issues at school, or an injured teammate, or a classmate of theirs having their entire family massacred… and then everything that happened at the hospital? Sheriff was still a bit unclear of the details. Then there was the party.

And amongst all of this, apparently a new girl at school was raising red flags. Stiles claimed that she seemed to be sticking her nose into things that wasn't her business. Scott said it was more like she had an unfortunate habit of turning up in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, he told the Sheriff, maybe that had to do with the fact that she was blind.

There was already one family of hunters in Beacon Hills. Why would they need another? Then again, should he be surprised? So much is changing so quickly in this town, he should have learned to expect the unexpected by now. And given everything else that's happened, how unexpected is it really for a new family of hunters to find their way to Beacon Hills? The supernatural can't seem to stay away from it.

The silence had stretched on for a while. Cecelia was patient with the Sheriff, allowing him all the time he needed to gather his wits enough to form a response. "So… you know?"

She smiled in amusement. "Yes," She told him.

"And… you were at the party."

"Yes."

He sat back. "You hunt werewolves. That's why you killed that man."

"No," She impatiently snapped, as if he was a child and she was his teacher. "We don't just kill without cause. Some Hunters have adopted that method, but we only stop what can't be controlled."

"So why did you kill the man?"

"I didn't," She said, her hand balling into a fist briefly. Cecelia seemed to catch herself and drew in a breath, struggling to maintain composure. "I was investigating, just like you. As I was taught to do."

"…By your father? The police officer?"

"The hunter," She corrected, and Stilinski finally let out a frustrated sigh. "And the police officer," She quickly amended, as if knowing it would confuse him more and doing it deliberately. He shook his head and shrugged at her.

"I don't get it. Your father, the police officer, the hunter—whatever—told you to go to the party so you could investigate an attack that you somehow knew was going to happen?"

Finally, a smirk cracked her tight mask of exasperation. "Perhaps I should start over."

"Yeah, perhaps you should," The Sheriff tersely agreed. Cecelia simply raised her eyebrows at his agitation and shifted in her seat before starting again.

"My family, we're not the sort of hunters you seem to be familiar with. There are those who hunt only werewolves. Then, there are those who hunt the supernatural. You know by now that there are more than just werewolves among us, yes?"

As she asked the question, the ghost of an accent poked through her words. Just enough to tighten certain syllables—and it was too difficult for him to identify. He nodded on instinct, quickly remembered that she was blind, and opened his mouth to respond. But apparently she had some way of picking up on his nod, because she continued.

"We move to a place that has had a spike of activity. Things happen, things that land just to the left of logic. Strange circumstances of sudden death that are written off with an explanation that doesn't quite sit right, like an animal attack, or some bizarre rare illness. We sit back and observe, poke around a bit to get a feel for what's actually happening, and if it seems necessary, we take action."

"What constitutes your intervention?" Sheriff asked, almost critically. "Who makes that call?"

"That depends. If it's threatening public safety, mostly. The supernatural are not vermin that need to be exterminated, as some might have you believe. There are good ones, and there are bad ones. Just like humans."

"How do you know so much?" He couldn't help but ask it. She looked so young, so defenseless.

She kept one eyebrow raised. "It's my job."

Now there was a sentiment that the Sheriff could respect, no matter how disturbing it was to hear it pass through this girl's lips. Content, he kept quiet as she continued.

"So, back to the dam. I already mentioned that Beacon Hills is unnaturally active, didn't I? It's like this place sends up flares that draw the supernatural here. We've known about the werewolves for a very long time, but it's been quiet for the most part."

The Sheriff outright snorted now. "Quiet?" He mocked. "I wouldn't say that."

"In recent months, things have begun to pick up, have they not?"

Sheriff quieted as he reflected. It was impossible for the truth of her words not to affect him. He thought of Stiles, and of what he'd been through. And of Allison. Softly, he said, "They have."

"The Kanima was worrisome, but we assumed the Argents had things under control. Apparently, that is not the case. The Alpha pack. The business with the Darach and all the innocent lives it took. All of this, and still, the dam held strong. I believe your son was the first true crack. Pretty soon it was Allison Argent's death, and now you've got a serial killer running around throwing his tomahawk at people and a family of wendigos filling the county morgue. I'd say you're in dire need of some reinforcements, Sheriff, before this dam bursts. That's where my family comes in. But we're going to need to work together."

His head was practically spinning. "Who are you?" He wanted to know.

"I am Cecelia Rose," She told him. "And I want to help. But we need your cooperation."

"Your father?"

She seemed confused. Sheriff rephrased the question.

"Your father is a police officer. Should I expect him to show up and ask for a position in my station?"

Her face grew sad. "Unfortunately, nothing would shock me more. My father died."

He was hesitant to ask. But, since he'd already started down this road, he did it anyways. "I'm sorry, you just talked about him like he was still—around."

"He is," She said. "In some ways, he is. But to answer your question, no. He will not be applying for a position," Cecelia's lips curled into a smirk and Sheriff felt a morbid twist of amusement and marveled slightly at how resilient she seemed.

"How about we start from the beginning?" Sheriff asked. "If we're going to work together, I'd like to know what you've found so far."

Author's Note: This is an idea that's been rattling around in my mind for a while. I've never read a Teen Wolf OC story where the protagonist is blind, and certainly never one about a family of hunters that isn't the Argents. This was the prologue, to introduce Cecelia. Now the next chapter will go backwards in time, all the way back to the first impression Cecelia has of Beacon Hills. It'll be like a flashback, and every now and then it'll pop back to the interrogation room with Sheriff and Cecelia. Do you guys like it so far? Please let me know what you think!