Chapter 3

Downhill
Head on
This crash is comin' slowly
Move

That Friday, Mal had study hall last period and could be found in the library working on a project for AP Psych. It was her first assignment of the year and one she was taking very seriously.

Theo had been wonderfully meddlesome enough to resolve the dispute with their mom after Mal got back from the woods on the first day of school. He'd said it was just a class, and it wasn't worth putting a strain on their family; it didn't have to be a big deal as long as nobody made it one. ("Nobody" essentially meant Elaine, but he'd used the word to be diplomatic.) The ensuing five-minute silence was disconcerting, but with a single nod of her head, the matter was settled. Mal knew it was a huge compromise on her mother's part, and Elaine was still walking around the house like there was a wooden board strapped to her back, so for the rest of the week, she made dinner and washed the dishes and even did her mom's laundry. Everything within the Durant household was back to normal within a couple of days.

A few minutes before the final bell would ring, Mal was sitting at a table in the middle of the high school's library with her open textbook and a slew of index cards, feverishly taking notes that she could write her "Parts of the Brain" sonnet with. She was brainstorming verbs that rhymed with "medulla oblongata" when Allison Argent wandered in, scanning the not-yet-familiar room for something. Her eyes brightened when she spotted the "Literature" sign on the back wall, and she marched toward it with such single-mindedness, she didn't even see Mal sitting right there at the center table.

Mal leaned her chair back after a few minutes, watching Allison peruse the shelves with her thumbnail between her teeth – visibly unable to locate the book she sought. "Want some help?"

Allison turned to her, surprised that somebody was studying in the library so close to the end of a Friday. Considerately, she answered, "Oh no, you're working. I don't wanna bother you," but the wistful look on her face suggested otherwise.

"It's no problem. I have to leave soon anyway," Mal assured her, pushing out her chair and coming to stand by the bookshelf Allison was browsing through. "What're you lookin' for? Kafka?" she presumed, reading the sign labeled "I – L".

"Oh, uh no. I actually have 'Metamorphosis' already. I was hoping there'd be a copy of Keats's collected works." Unsure if Mal knew that she meant the poet, Allison clarified, "His poems, I mean."

"Mhm, English Romanticism. I'm familiar," Mal confirmed with a smile (thanks to her writer-brother), skimming the shelves but ultimately finding nothing.

Discouraged, Allison grumbled, "Shoot, this is the fifth place I've tried."

"Huh, I was sure we had it. Maybe it's in the returns cart…although it's anybody's guess who reads voluntarily in this school – well, other than you – I'm assuming," Mal said speculatively, shaking her head at how idiotic she thought she sounded.

Allison blushed lightly, scratching the back of her head in a manner reminiscent of Stiles. "Yeah, I read for fun. Is that really lame?" she asked self-consciously, pulling the straps of her backpack tightly around her. She seemed almost nervous.

"Lame?" Mal repeated incredulously. "No. No. Choosing to be literate is not lame. I'm pretty sure it's the farthest you can conceivably get from lame. You're doing what I don't have the attention span for, so really, I'm the lame one here." She'd read Keats before, but certainly not as in depth as Allison was planning to, and she'd read very little for pleasure apart from that. Other than the standard Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.

Allison smiled appreciatively, slackening the tense grip on her bag. When they located the book under a copy of "The Merriam-Webster Dictionary", she sighed with contentment. "Thank you so much! I drove around for three hours last night practically hunting this down."

"Wow. That – that is dedication," Mal declared, thoroughly impressed.

"Um, no. That's a veritable neurosis," Allison corrected. Mal snickered, and the witty new girl smirked in satisfaction.

"I get it, though. I did the same thing when my favorite band released an album a couple months ago."

Allison felt more relaxed now. It was comforting to know that people's interests in the town of Beacon Hills weren't limited to lacrosse. "Oh, okay. Good. I'm not a weirdo, then," she laughed, as they waited by the librarian's desk for her book to be checked-out.

"Well, you probably shouldn't use me as a yardstick for normalcy, but I've always thought being a weirdo was way more fun. If that helps," Mal said with an easy grin, "And on that very promising note, I'm Mallory."

"Yeah, you're in my English class," Allison affirmed with a polite nod. As a matter of fact, she had a fair number of classes with Mal, but the two girls had only ever exchanged the typical 'You're familiar, nice to see you again' smiles. Nothing as solid as the conversation they were having now. "I'm Allison."

"Yeah, you're in my English class," Mal mimicked playfully, but she knew quite a bit more about the new girl than she was letting on.

Vividly, Mal recalled the shit-eating grin Scott had walked into school with three days ago. She thought he might've gotten a raise at work but never expected Beacon Hills Animal Clinic to be the place he'd ask out a girl for the first time. Scott had gushed about Allison to Mal, how she'd hit a dog with her car and cried on the clinic's doorstep ("Oh my god, is the dog okay? Is Allison okay?"), and borrowed his shirt because hers was soaked through from the rain, and finally about her saying yes to attending Lydia's house party with him that Friday. Stiles had listened attentively at first but tuned Scott out when he described her eyes in excruciating detail for the third time, uncertain as to how exactly a person's eyelashes could be "goddess-like". Mal, however, had soaked in every word, feeling a lightness similar to being in zero gravity. She had never heard Scott talk about a girl like that before, had never known him to have such immediately passionate feelings for anyone.

Chatting with Allison now, she could see why he did; the girl was lovely. She smiled with her teeth and, apart from her initial nervousness, looked Mal in the eye confidently but without a trace of arrogance. Unlike the people she was quickly becoming friends with. The one reservation Mal had about Allison Argent was that almost everywhere she'd seen her at school that week, she was with Lydia and Jackson, usually swarmed by half of the lacrosse team. At lunch or by one of their lockers, she'd be talking to the popular strawberry blonde, who would sometimes toss her hair back and laugh like she was being filmed, which slightly nauseated Mal. But she'd keep an open mind for Scott, and anyway, how bad could Allison be when she had such beautiful taste in poetry?

"Whaddya think of Beacon Hills so far? Don't hold back, I can take it," Mal teased, as Allison took her book from the librarian with a "Thanks".

"It's no Beverly Hills, but – "

" – that breed of human does exist here," Mal finished for her. She noted with a smug smile, "And you appear to have fallen in with them."

The corner of Allison's mouth lifted faintly. "Looks that way. So…what do you think of Lydia and Jackson? Don't hold back, I can take it," she said with a subtly wicked expression.

"Hah, you want me to hold back. Trust me," Mal guaranteed with a scoff.

Allison winced. "Yikes, that bad?"

"You don't wanna get me started. Flailing arms and hissing are involved, and it takes a couple hours for the vein in my forehead to stop pulsating."

Allison gave Mal a look that said, 'I think you might be crazy, but I just met you, and I don't want to be an asshole by saying it to your face.'

"Lydia's been really nice, though, showing me around and introducing me to people. She even bought me a coffee this morning," she defended, hoping that Mal was just exaggerating.

"Did she give you a one-way, non-refundable ticket to her lair in hell with that coffee?" Mal inquired offhandedly.

Allison quirked an eyebrow, curious as to where Mal's substantial animosity toward Lydia had come from. I've been here less than a week, she thought, trying to remain objective. (Disliking Jackson, she could wrap her head around. Though she'd never say that out loud.)

"Maybe I dropped it somewhere." She shrugged good-humoredly as she bantered with Mal, who laughed pleasantly.

"I'm only being kind of serious. She seems to have taken to you a lot better than she has to the other 99.9% of the Beacon Hills population." Glancing outside, Mal noticed the throng of excited students that had begun filing out of the school, so she said, "Listen, I gotta go, but it was nice to officially meet you."

Allison checked her phone for the time. "Oh. Yeah, of course. I have to meet up with – "

" – She-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named?"

The new girl snorted. "Oh god, fine."

Mal gathered her things hurriedly, but as she dashed out the door, Allison called her back in. "Hey, wait! I know this is a long shot, but are you going to her party?" Mal offered her a flinty look in response, but she continued anyway, "I'm pretty sure it's open to everyone."

"Yeah, well, I'm one-hundred percent sure that a Lydia Martin-sponsored party would be worse for my physical and mental well-being than snorting crystal meth every day for the rest of my life, so..." Mal commented drolly. Spying the slightly dejected expression Allison was trying to hide, she added, "But I might swing by for a song or two – Just to see what the music's like, though."

"Okay!" Allison accepted sweetly. "If I don't see you, have a good weekend. And thanks again for the book!"

"Any time," Mal beamed, glad she'd opted to spend her study hall in the library that day.


Mal strolled the empty hallway, heading toward Scott's locker to meet up with him before his lacrosse practice. She was eager to witness for herself the highly enhanced athletic skills she'd heard about at great length, but the spectacle that greeted her as she turned the corner soured her mood.

Jackson had his arm at Scott's throat and was aggressively shoving him against his own locker. "What the hell is going on with you, McCall?!" he roared.

"What's going on with me? You really wanna know?!" Scott cried back, frustrated.

Stunned at the outburst from the typically meek boy, Jackson released him and Mal stood frozen a few yards away.

"Well…so would I! Because I can see, hear, and smell things that I shouldn't be able to see, hear and smell. I do things that should be impossible, I'm sleepwalking three miles into the middle of the woods, and I'm pretty much convinced that I'm totally out of my freaking mind!" Scott ranted wildly, breathing laboriously at the end.

"Hey, leave him alone!" Mal shouted, deciding then to intervene. She tried to shove Jackson away from Scott but failed, having underestimated his sturdiness. "What's your problem, Whittemore?" she hissed, his name like ash in her mouth.

Still glaring at the frazzled teammate he'd just attacked, he uttered to Mal in a dangerously low voice, "Walk away, Durant. This is none of your damn business."

"When a pompous asshole harasses my friends, it's absolutely my business," she objected, physically inserting herself between the two boys with her arms folded over her chest and breaking Jackson's hold on Scott in the process. Scott laid a cautioning hand on her upper arm, as if to say, "This is totally unnecessary", but she shrugged it off and scowled at Jackson, the look daring him to fight her. Out of surprise at her protective gesture, Mal guessed, Jackson's eyebrows lifted almost imperceptibly, but his cruel expression returned a second later, so she warningly exclaimed, "Back off!"

"Wow, McCall. Can't even fight your own battles. You have to get your equally pathetic girlfriend to do it for you," Jackson sneered, keeping his eyes on Mal and curling his lip at her. "Whatever, it doesn't matter. I know you're hiding something, and I'm gonna find out what it is. I don't care how long it takes," he threatened, and with one final, hostile glance at Scott and Mal, he strutted away.

Mal gave him the blackest of looks, praying there existed a divine being that would set him on fire right there in the middle of the hallway. But apparently, there didn't, and he passed from their sight, flame-free.

"Oooh, I hate him! I truly and profoundly hate him!" she raged, spinning around to a moderately startled Scott. To be perfectly honest, Mal's overprotective behavior had alarmed him a lot more than Jackson's arm at his neck. Agitated, she asked, "Are you all right? What was that even about?"

He exhaled forcefully and replied, "He thinks I'm on steroids. I'm obviously so bad at lacrosse, drugs are the only way I did that good at the first practice."

She shook her head, too baffled to correct his grammar. "Steroids? That's ridiculous! You're, like, the most upstanding guy I've ever met – possibly that's ever been born," she protested vehemently. Mal wouldn't blink twice if someone showed her an anti-drug PSA starring Scott McCall.

"Apparently not," he said tiredly, unaffected by Jackson's bullying after years of having to deal with it. He'd been a douchebag for as long as Scott had known him. Puberty had made him worse but predictably so.

"God, what a bag of dicks!" Mal fumed, clenching her fists in the direction Jackson had sauntered off.

"Hey, it isn't a big deal. Not like he'll find anything, right?" Scott comforted, his voice gentle. He was mildly irritated himself, but Mal was downright outraged, and he didn't think she had any real cause to be.

She turned to him, affronted by the mere question. "Of course not! But that doesn't give him the right – I mean, Jesus! – The nerve – " she spluttered, too furious to speak properly.

Scott smiled brightly, shaking Mal's shoulder to lighten the mood. "He's always been the stick up his own ass, you know that. Don't let him get to you." Mal thought it strange that she was the one who needed to be talked down. "C'mon, let's go. I'm playing the first elimination today," he announced, brushing aside the unpleasant subject of Jackson Whittemore and ushering his friend to the field.

But as they walked, she thought of something else. "When did you sleepwalk three miles into the middle of the woods?"

"Um, Monday night," he confessed, shrinking back guiltily. The disturbed expression on Mal's face prompted him to add, "Wait, though, it's really not that bad. A lot of people sleepwalk. Stiles used to do it in middle school, right?"

"He – Stiles was – that's different," Mal justified weakly, disinclined to tell Scott the reason behind it; that was Stiles's prerogative. She took a deep breath to relax before attempting to convince him to see a doctor. "Look, Scott. Something…freaky is obviously happening to you because of that bite – which mysteriously vanished in less than twenty-four hours, by the way," she pointed out. Scott had shown her and Stiles his newly unblemished torso after raving about Allison but had again avoided to impart an incredibly significant piece of that night to them. "And I really think you need to get some help now," she pressed.

Scott blew air out of his mouth in denial and dropped his lacrosse bag next to the player's bench, bending down to tie the laces of his cleats. "No, that's exactly why I don't have to," he snapped, getting annoyed. "The bite's gone, and I'm fine. In fact, I'm better than fine. I'm fantastic! So if it's okay with you, Your Highness, I'm gonna –"

"Scott! Mal!" Stiles's piercing voice rang out as he careened around the bleachers, urgency basically scrawled all over his face. "Scott, wait up!"

"Stiles, I'm playing the first elimination, man. Can it wait?" Scott requested, putting his gloves on and eyeing the field distractedly.

"Look – just hold on, okay? I overheard my dad on the phone. The fiber analysis came back from the lab in L.A. They found animal hairs on the body from the woods!" Stiles informed his friends, smacking Scott's shoulders to capture his attention, only to go unheeded.

Scott ran onto the field with an, "I gotta go, guys," and Stiles fell over himself in a frenzied effort to pull him back.

"Wait, no! Scott! You're not gonna believe what the animal was!" he hollered desperately before turning to his other best friend, who was gawking at him like he had fifty heads. "It was a wolf! Mal, there were wolf hairs on the girl's body!"

She exhaled and planted her hands firmly on his shoulders to steady him. "Okay – Stiles? You probably just misheard your dad. Wolves haven't been in Beacon Hills for decades, remember? You said so yourself," she reminded him, using the relatively patronizing tone Stiles hated.

"Well, something changed, then, because my dad definitely said 'wolf'," he swore, holding his ground – but only metaphorically. Mal was the one balancing him in the corporeal sense.

"Look, I'm right there with you about his…recently established weirdness. But wolf hairs? Come on!" she exclaimed, tilting her head skeptically. "Besides, the bite was too large for it to've been a wolf," she reasoned, calling to mind the size of the bandage Scott had fashioned.

Stiles inspected the lacrosse field as if acceptable answers would pop up out of the ground and prove to Mal exactly what she refused to believe. Even at the best of times, it was difficult to convince her of something simply by stating it out loud. She needed proof, not just a cogent argument.

"It just – Okay, we are not done talking about this," he promised, taking off for the middle of the field, where Coach Finstock was almost abusing his whistle to marshal the team into a huddle. Whirling around so he could run backward and then stumbling over his heels, Stiles called out to Mal, "This discussion isn't over!"

Mal rolled her eyes but nodded to humor him before searching the bleachers for Harley, who sometimes liked to keep her company during their friends' practice. (It was the only time they could get new music from each other.) But instead, she identified another friendly face among the amassing crowd. Allison waved at Scott gleefully as Mal threaded her way through the gathering of students.

"You again!" she cried dramatically, plunking herself down on the same bleacher as the other brunette, who smiled brilliantly at her in return.

"Now get out there and show me – what – cha got!" came Coach's booming voice, which was audible even from the stands.

Allison raised an eyebrow and asked, "Is he always so, uh…?"

"Intense?" Mal inferred, her mouth twisting up in a way that suggested to Allison she was trying really hard not to laugh. "Yeah. He's, um, pretty – passionate about lacrosse?" she ventured hesitantly, eliciting a snort from the girl beside her. "No, you know what? Scratch that. He's intense about everything. My guess is that his Econ class next year is either going to be a full-blown nightmare or a total riot."

"You're here for Scott and Stiles, right?" Allison assumed, thinking back to Scott's attempt to lessen her guilt at the clinic the previous Monday. He'd told her how Stiles had struck a squirrel on his skateboard and plowed into a tree in the 6th grade. Allison had dissolved into laughter when she heard that Mal had almost given the creature mouth-to-mouth to try and calm her friend down enough to take him to the hospital for stitches. ("You're not as dumb as they are, so there's that," Scott had chuckled.)

"Yup. They're my best buds," Mal boasted, beaming proudly.

"How long have you guys known each other?"

"Oh man, we go way back. I've known Stiles since kindergarten and Scott since…" She pondered the answer for a second, absently watching Scott put his helmet on. "Hmmm…we met in 4th grade, I think."

"Wow," Allison remarked, unable to imagine being in a place long enough to have such lasting friendships. She'd been drifting from city to city practically her entire life. There were a couple of people she'd kept in sporadic contact with over the years, but when Mal snorted at Stiles, who had just fallen off the players' bench at the sound of the coach's whistle two inches from his ear, Allison understood that what the two girls had in the way of friendship was completely different. The realization made her unspeakably sad.

"Yeah, but it's easy to get along with them. They're really good guys. Scott actually reminds me a lot of my brother." Mal had phrased it so Allison would know that she and Scott were unambiguously platonic without outright saying it and making either of them feel awkward. "He's considerate and easy-going and so much fun to be around."

"You sound like you could be his dating profile," Allison joked, distracted from her gloomy thoughts and appreciably more relaxed.

"Which you would read exhaustively, am I right?" Mal retorted, turning back to the players and smirking when the smitten girl's mouth opened but no reply came. A second later, she pointed across the field where Jackson had just violently checked Scott with his lacrosse stick. "See? This is why I don't like him!" To the snotty lacrosse captain, she screamed, "Go to hell, Whittemore! That was so uncalled for!"

She didn't need to defend Scott after that, though; he'd stepped up his game, deftly weaving the ball around opposing players and then, sincerely shocking every teammate and spectator by flipping clean over three people to successfully shoot the ball between the goalie's legs and into the net. He pumped his fists in the air as a handful of his teammates circled him, while Allison sprang up, clapping delightedly.

"Scott, you rock!" Mal cheered loudly once she'd gathered her wits, relishing Jackson's evident aggravation as Coach congratulated Scott and appointed him to first line.

She basked in her bliss for hardly a minute, however, glimpsing the fiery hair that belonged to Lydia and then Stiles rubbing his chin anxiously on the bench. "Uh, I have to go," she murmured to Allison, while the strawberry-blonde came to a halt making an abnormally ugly face. Mal didn't wait around to give her the snide remark she would've liked to (something along the lines of, "I'd say it's a pleasure to see you, but then I might as well call grass 'blue' and terrorism 'amusing'. If I'm going to completely disregard conventions of the English language.")

"Hope I see you at the party," Allison whispered to Mal in goodbye, wary of the nettled girl on her other side.

"Allison, why were you talking to that mutant? She's not someone you should associate yourself with if you actually want people to think you're compos mentis," Lydia warned with patent condescension while Mal was still within earshot.

Allison frowned disappointedly.

Mal hurried over to Stiles, guffawing. "Wow, you have impeccable taste in girls. What a gem, that one," she commented sardonically, jerking her thumb toward his long-time crush. His resulting glower extracted only a half-assed apology from her. "Sorry, just God's honest truth."

He ignored her, staring at Scott worriedly. He had too much on his mind to be wounded by yet another one of Mal's digs at Lydia. "My house, two hours. Don't be late," he ordered, stomping off without another word.


"All right, Stiles. What's with the nerves? Scott did great today!" Mal praised, entering her best friend's messy room. Stiles's bedroom was always pretty disorganized, but at the moment, it was hard for her to even distinguish the floor under the clutter of books and news articles. Sweeping some of them aside, she conceded, "So he won't be sitting on the bench with you, and that'll suck. But I'm usually there on the bleachers anyway. I'll just sneak down when Coach isn't looking."

"That's not why I'm freaking out!" Stiles screeched, furiously typing away on his computer. His back was hunched over, but every now and then, he'd run a restless hand over his head and let out a short breath. It was obvious that he was extremely stressed out, but Mal had no clue why.

"Then what's the problem? What are you doing, anyway?" she inquired, moving closer to peek over his shoulder. " 'Silver bullet'? 'Lycaon'?" she repeated what she read dubiously. "Why are you Googling werewolf myth – "

Mal stopped mid-sentence, realization washing over her as Stiles swiveled around in his chair to face her, looking distinctly uncomfortable.

"Mal, hear me out," he entreated, jumping out of his seat and guiding her to the foot of his bed. After he sat her down, he rifled through a stack of papers on his desk for an article he could use to substantiate his theory in some way.

Mal followed his frantic movements with her eyes, temporarily speechless, but it seemed like he was too keyed up to actually locate what he was searching for, so she eventually stammered out, "Oh no. No, no, no! Stiles, this is nuts. This – you're – you've finally cracked." She glanced dreadfully around the room at the various book titles; "Lycanthropy: The Howling Wolf", "Werewolvery For Beginners" and "The Meaning of Lunatic" were among them.

"Just listen to me," he implored, striding over to Mal and crouching down beside her as she flopped back onto his mattress with her thumb and middle finger pressed to her temples. He didn't let her stay like that, tugging her once more into a seated position and firmly resting his forearms on her lower thighs to focus her concentration. "You have to listen to me."

"Have to?! This is a whole new level of insanity, even for you!" she squawked, painfully aware of his seriousness. She could usually find the humor in Stiles's jokes – and even the occasional prank – but this was something else entirely.

"Look, I know it's insane, but – "

" – I find that incredibly hard to believe, Stiles," Mal cut in, giving him a sharp look. She very openly accepted that what had happened to Scott was extremely unusual, but the reason had to be grounded in scientific fact. Perhaps an undiscovered strain of the rabies virus Stiles had joked about before.

"Among other things," he countered emphatically, mimicking her glare and folding his arms over his chest.

"Huh, I wonder why? I mean, is anyone else we know a mythological creature? Harley a witch? Lydia a fairy? Maybe my brother's secretly a dragon?" she asked sarcastically, throwing her hands in the air.

"Well…I do kinda think Jackson could be an Uruk-hai. Minus the guile and dark skin," he replied with inappropriate pensiveness, starting when someone knocked on his door.

Mal groaned. "Please tell me you didn't call Scott. He has his first date with Allison tonight! He doesn't need an even higher dose of our crazy than usual," she begged uselessly as Stiles collected himself and opened the door.

Seeing who it was, he huffed and beckoned a greatly amused Scott into the room. "Get in. You gotta see this thing. I've been up all night reading – websites, books. All this information!" he explained, waving his arms frenetically.

Mal ran her hands through her hair in frustration and let out a heavy sigh. "Do yourself a favor. Run for it while you still can," she advised.

Scott furrowed his eyebrows for a second and half-teased his hyperactive friend, "How much Adderall have you had today?"

"A lot. Doesn't matter. Okay, just listen."

"I wouldn't if I were you. He's lost his mind," Mal chimed in before receiving a silencing look from Stiles.

"Oh, is this about the body? Did they find out who did it?" Scott asked, settling down next to Mal.

"No, they're still questioning people, even Derek Hale," Stiles revealed.

"What?!" Mal shouted, taken aback and becoming even more cross with Stiles. If there were anything he should've told her immediately, it was that Derek Hale was a suspect in a homicide case. Given that her brother was still friends with him, this was highly relevant information.

"Oh, the guy in the woods that we saw the other day," Scott said almost uninterestedly, like they were discussing algebra homework and not severed bodies.

Trying to steer his friends away from that tangent, Stiles responded, "Yeah! Yes. But that's not it, okay?"

"What, then?" Scott questioned with a laugh.

"No, hang on! Why is he even a suspect?" Mal yelped, fretting about Theo. There was no way he knew about Derek's involvement in a murder investigation; after all, he was planning on paying his old friend a visit soon.

"I don't know! I'm not even sure he's been accused of anything, but – That is not the issue here, Mal. Just let me talk!" She growled but then clamped her lips together cooperatively, so that Stiles could continue. "Remember the joke from the other day? Not a joke anymore. The wolf – the bite in the woods. I started doing all this reading. Do you even know why a wolf howls?"

Stiles shot up from his chair, and Scott observed him warily. "Should I?"

"It's a signal, okay? When a wolf's alone, it howls to signal its location to the rest of the pack. So if you heard a wolf howling, that means others could have been nearby. Maybe even a whole pack of 'em," he elaborated.

This caught Mal's attention, and she stopped fidgeting with her jeans. She had to admit that what Stiles had learned about wolves was interesting but did so, of course, only to herself.

"A whole pack of wolves?" Scott recapped.

"No," Stiles corrected, "Werewolves."

Mal grimaced. "Here we go."

Peering between his undeniably moronic friends, Scott stood up and cried, "Are you seriously wasting my time with this? I mean, first Mal wants to cart me off to an insane asylum and now you think I'm a werewolf? You guys know I'm picking up Allison in an hour."

"Hey, I'd never 'cart you off' anywhere!" Mal asserted, crossing her arms defensively.

"We saw you on the field today, Scott." Stiles blocked his escape, dragging Mal into his argument as if she all of a sudden agreed with him. "Okay, what you did wasn't just amazing, all right? It was impossible."

"Yeah, so I made a good shot," Scott said, sounding vaguely offended that no one seemed to think he could've become such a capable athlete simply by practicing as regularly as he had – although even he knew that wasn't true.

"No. You made an incredible shot!" Stiles yelled in exasperation, preventing his friend from leaving by throwing his bag on the bed. "I mean – the way you moved, your speed, your reflexes. Y'know, people can't just suddenly do that overnight. And there's the vision and the senses, and don't even think I don't notice that you don't need your inhaler anymore."

Mal scrunched up her forehead in contemplation. She hadn't the patience to listen to Stiles a few minutes ago, but now, her curiosity was overwhelming. When he said it altogether, she had to acknowledge that it made a little sense. In addition, the adrenaline Scott had suspected was the cause of everything would've worn off by now, and he'd have already gone into shock if that were the case. Mal hadn't noticed he wasn't using his inhaler anymore, but that only reinforced what she was starting to consider. Moreover, no disease she knew of had improved breathing as a side effect.

"You know, he – he might have a point," she spoke up tentatively.

Overlooking their previous quarreling, Stiles pulled her up by the arms and with a determined expression, presented her to Scott like she was the concrete proof. "See? Even Mal thinks so, and she's the one who generally has her head screwed on straight. If she believes me, then so should you!"

"Whoa!" she interrupted, whirling around to clarify, "I didn't say I believe you. We don't know for sure what's going on with Scott."

"Holy god, you are the – the most indecisive person I've ever met!" Stiles accused melodramatically, his eye twitching. Snidely, he prattled on, "Do you want to flip a coin like Two-Face? See if you can make up your mind then? Heads says you listen to me and never, ever doubt anything I say ever again, and tails – well, tails says the same freakin' thing because it's a two-headed coin. Or – wait, no, this analogy sounded a lot less faulty in my head. Could you just back me up, please?"

"Look, I have no idea what's happening to him. All I'm saying is that maybe, maybe, there might be a tiny chance he's…um…no longer technically, fully human," Mal stalled, risking a timid glance at Scott. She was reluctant to make any sort of definitive statement.

"Okay, stop! Guys, I can't think about this now. We'll talk tomorrow," Scott tried to delay, averse to thinking about the possibility – however remote – that he was a werewolf. After all, he had a date with the girl of his dreams in less than an hour; there were more pressing things on his mind, like which of his jeans didn't have a hole in the butt and whether or not his mom would let him stay out an hour or two past curfew just this once.

"Tomorrow?! No! The full moon's tonight," Stiles shrieked, still holding Mal and now shaking her. She jerked away from him and rubbed her arms while he urgently demanded, "Don't you get it?"

"What are you trying to do?" Scott barked. "I just made first line. I got a date with a girl who I can't believe wants to go out with me, and everything in my life is somehow perfect. Why are my so-called best friends trying to ruin it?"

"We are your best friends. That's why we wanna help you," Mal defended levelheadedly.

"You're cursed, Scott. You know, and it's not just the moon will cause you to physically change. It also just so happens to be when your bloodlust will be at its peak," Stiles informed them.

"Bloodlust?" the other two teens asked in unison, Scott with impatience and Mal with just plain cluelessness.

"Yeah, the urge to kill."

"I'm already starting to feel an urge to kill, Stiles," Scott warned, significantly unsettling Mal. He'd never spoken to anyone that way. Ever.

"Okay, I think we all need to cool it a little," she cautioned, placing a palm against his chest but also staring pointedly at Stiles.

"No, Scott has to hear this," he protested, opening the book he couldn't find before and quoting from one of its passages, "'The change can be caused by anger or anything that raises your pulse.'" Spinning around, he exclaimed, "All right? I haven't seen anyone raise your pulse like Allison does. You gotta cancel this date. I'm gonna call her right now." He charged at Scott's backpack, yanking out his phone.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm canceling the date," he reiterated, about to dial Allison's number when Scott did the absolute worst thing Mal had ever seen him do.

"No, give it to me!" he bellowed, slamming Stiles against the wall, a snarl tarnishing his countenance and a fist aimed at the defenseless boy in front of him.

"Scott, stop!" Mal screamed, struck motionless by the chaos and beholding Stiles in despair. He had squeezed his eyes shut in preparation for some kind of blow from Scott, looking as terrified as Mal felt. When, at last, she came to her senses, she lunged forward to pull Scott off of him but had to quickly move aside to avoid the desk chair he ended up taking his anger out on instead. Hurled aside savagely, it missed her by an inch.

Scott panted noisily, remorse replacing his previous snarl, while Stiles's shoulders sank in relief. The next few seconds were palpably tense and felt like someone had stretched them out indefinitely, but then, Scott finally stuttered out, "I'm sorry. I – I gotta go get ready f – for that party."

Clutching his backpack, he trudged toward the door, but Mal hastily stepped in front of him, barring the exit. "You can't be serious! You almost punched Stiles! Our Stiles! What's the matter with you?!" she thundered.

"I'm sorry," Scott repeated sincerely, reaching out for Mal's shoulder. But she recoiled from him, much to his distress.

Mal wanted to make sure Stiles wasn't hurt, and she was still really upset that Scott had almost hit their best friend. She ghosted her fingers over Stiles's cotton t-shirt, exposed neck, and then the back of his head to check for damage. As she did so, he watched her, absorbed in dismal thought. Scott couldn't bear to look at them, so he left, truly miserable about what he'd nearly done to the one guy in his life who'd only ever been there for him and angry at himself for letting Mal down because of it. When Stiles thumped his head against the wall unhappily, she drew him in for a hug, patting his back softly. It was a little weird at first, like their limbs were mismatched puzzle pieces being forced together, but after a few seconds, Stiles rested his chin on top of Mal's shoulder and settled his arms loosely around her upper back, hers around his torso. He reveled in the immediate stillness he always got from her hugs, rare as they were, before grudgingly letting go to pick up the fallen chair.

All sense of peace dissipated when he discovered the three jagged tears on the back. "Uh, Mal, you need to see this." He moved out of the way to show her.

"Oh, God," she breathed, her eyes bulging in terror as she swallowed the lump in her throat. She examined the claw-like marks from every angle, only then coming to the fixed conclusion that a human couldn't have possibly created them. But the whole afternoon still felt surreal, as if she'd fallen asleep in the armchair in her living room and had dreamt up this whole ordeal, as if her subconscious was refusing to cut her some slack and allow her a couple of hours of unicorn and house-made-of-candy fantasies. Mal needed something tangible, so she reached out her hand and grazed her finger pads over the slashes, nearly tripping over her feet after flinching back at the fleeting metallic tang in her mouth. Shaken and wholly uncertain about what to make of it, she mumbled, "I think it's safe to say you told me so."

"We have to go to that party. We have to protect him," Stiles insisted, snatching up the car keys from his desk and handing Mal her backpack. Under the circumstances, it was understandable that he didn't sound thrilled at the prospect of seeing Lydia.

"And Allison," Mal said in agreement, slipping her arms through her coat sleeves.

As Stiles backed the Jeep out of his driveway, she realized with unease what the sharp taste had been: fresh blood.