Disclaimer: I have not morphed into Jeff Davis, Rick Riordan, or Cassandra Clare overnight. Therefore, one can conclude that I do not own Teen Wolf, Percy Jackson, or The Mortal Instruments. Life sucks don't it?
When Kyla opened her eyes, the first thing she saw were two matching ice blue eyes staring back at her. They weren't an intelligent, dreaming deep blue like Alec Lightwood's, or a comforting earnest light blue like Jason and Thalia's. Instead, this shade just seemed cold and calculating.
She sat up and rubbed her eyes, hoping she was just having the beginning of another bad dream. Gods only knew she had enough of those. Unfortunately, the guy didn't blink out of existence. "Um, hi?" she tried. She wasn't that good with awkward first meetings.
The thirty-something year old man rolled his eyes and took a deep breath. Kyla barely had enough time to cover her ears before he let out a loud below, angling his head slightly back at the bed across from her.
Wait, bed? She looked around, someone had apparently picked her up off the floor and moved her to a couch downstairs. That someone had also evidently given her a blanket which was now twisted up around her waist. She was extremely grateful to whoever had given her the blanket. The inside of this loft was freezing. Kyla's body adjust automatically to natural temperatures, unfortunately that didn't include air conditioning or internal temperatures.
"Derrrrrrrrek!" Kyla blinked several times, trying to wake herself up the rest of the way. She hardly ever got to sleep for longer than about five hours at a time, so when she did she tended to sleep like a log.
Derek bolted upright, looking fuzzy and sleepy. Kyla could see that his eyes had gone glowing steel blue, and his claws had shot out of his fingers at the shock of the man's shout. With a tired groan, Derek rolled out of bed and stood up.
Kyla paused all other thought for a moment to thoroughly enjoy whatever confluence of events had resulted with Derek choosing to sleep shirtless. There were some sights that deserved all levels of godly and angelic thanks. Broad shoulders led down to a sculpted chest and at least a full six pack of abs. The guy's forearms looked like they were probably thicker than her entire mid section. Hallelujah for hot guys choosing to sleep shirtless. "What?" he growled out lowly.
The older man gesticulated wildly at her. "Explain!" he demanded of Derek.
Derek looked at Kyla. Tired, pale grey-green eyes raking up and down her body. Some people had stares that it was possible to feel, just barely over the threshold of sensations the human body can pick up. Like a moth landing on your arm. Derek had a stare like that, and Kyla felt it like a feather brushing against her skin.
Derek watched closely as Kyla raised her hand and gave him a tired wave. He noted that the girl's eyes were large, and roughly the same glowing shade of deep green as grass with the sun behind it. He thought they were probably normally bright and sharp, but just then they were still clouded with sleep. The sun coming in through the window made her skin and hair seem lighter than they had the night before when he had carried her to his couch. "Explain what Peter?" he asked. "It's a teenaged girl who was sleeping on the couch."
"Fine, I'll rephrase," Peter said with a voice of very thinly veiled annoyance. "Explain why their is a teenaged girl sleeping on our couch with one of our blankets!"
Kyla curled minutely further in to the couch. As far as stressful wake up calls went, this wasn't the worst one she had ever had, but it was still way to early in the morning to deal with shouting matches. With this in mind, she chose to not bring up the fact that she was no longer sleeping on their couch. Peter had woken her up.
Derek merely rolled his eyes at his uncle. "Take a deep breath Peter," he advised. He allowed the double meaning to sneak in to his voice. When werewolves told each other to take a deep breath it could either mean to calm down, or it could mean one of them had smelled something. In this case, Derek meant both. "What do you smell?"
Kyla, and ironically enough Peter too, rolled her eyes, but didn't speak. Peter inhaled deeply through his nose, opening his mouth slightly to allow the girl's scen to wash over the scent nodes on the roof of his mouth. "Ah," he concluded, picking up the scent of sunshine. "She's one of the Nephilim. You let her stay to buy some grace with the Clave."
"We could use all the help we can possibly get right now," Derek said with a shrug, leaning back against his dresser. "Lately we've had few enough opportunities to earn it. If one of those opportunities means letting a sixteen year old girl crash on my couch with a blanket, that sixteen year old girl can crash on my couch with a blanket."
"And that seventeen year old girl is extremely grateful for the use of your couch," Kyla interjected, placing extra emphasis on her actual age. One of the strange effects of her mother's genes was that she tended to look pretty much any age between thirteen and nineteen. Almost no one guessed correctly the first time. People saw her lack of height and immediately assumed that it corresponded to a lack of age. "Anyway I'm sorry," she continued. "I followed a sort of supernatural presence in here last night during that party. I meant to leave after the whole demonic ninja thing."
"But instead you ended up passed out asleep on my floor?" Derek filled in skeptically. He hadn't met very many Nephilim, but the more he thought about it the more sure he was that the ones he had met would probably never fall asleep in a place that was clearly the property of a member of the local werewolf pack.
Kyla glared up at him. Her theory on sarcasm was that it was a bit like flu, or the chicken pox. You could be vaccinated against it by being exposed to it in a small dose. Exposure to Jace, Magnus, Simon, Leo, and Percy had long since vaccinated her against it. "You're not the only one who hasn't slept in three days," she said stiffly.
Derek inclined his head in acknowledgment of the not so subtle barb. He allowed a very small amount of admiration for the slight Shadowhunter girl in front of him. Her heart hadn't blipped at all being faced by his questions and his uncle's icy glare. In fact, the steady rhythm of her heart had risen smoothly from it's slow beet of sleep to it's natural waking tempo.
At the moment, the girl was studying the light coming in through the windows between his head and Peter's. She wasn't looking directly at or directly away from either one of them. Derek mentally applauded the decision. He hardly ever turned his back on Peter completely either. Being stabbed in the their made it infinitely harder to remove the blade than being stabbed in the front.
Kyla sighed as she judged that the time was probably somewhere between seven and eight o'clock in the morning. "Speaking of being busy, I've got to get home and clean up. Plus I need to change." She picked the blanket up from off of her lap and folded it neatly before hanging it neatly over the end of the couch. She unfolded her legs and stretched out the kinks in her muscles the way a cat might. "Well, nice meeting you I guess. Let's all just hope it won't be happening again any time soon."
"Oh please," Peter said, turning on his own patented brand of charm. Now that he had recognized Kyla as a potential source of aid, he was more than eager to get in to her good books. "Feel free to use the bathroom here to get ready. It must be easier than walking all the way back to your home," Kyla looked at him a little doubtfully, and then slid her eyes over to Derek. "Oh Derek doesn't mind," Peter said with a serene smile, following her gaze. "Do you Derek?"
The younger man gave a tiny nod, and Kyla reluctantly agreed. Not because she was impressed by Peter's charm. After all, she had spent over half of her childhood growing up in the same household as Jace Herondale. For someone to be honestly charming to her they had to be working pretty damn hard. However, Peter did have a point. If she wanted to get to school on time, she couldn't exactly be traipsing across town to her apartment. Portalling was kind of pointless as well, since the energy needed to make it generally left her too tired to want to go to school anyway.
After shutting herself in Derek's small bathroom, she exerted a small amount of power to summon up her hunter's pack. It was a trick she had managed to pick up from some Egyptian magicians she had met in Brooklyn. She had enchanted her bags so that whenever she left them anywhere they dropped away into a little sub-dimension. She basically just had to use a certain amount of will power to bring them through when she needed them. She had to move around so much that storage was unreliable at best, and having access to all of her things was kind of important.
Jamming her hands into her bag, she willed her clothes and necessary toiletries into her hands and extracted them. She washed her face quickly and brushed her teeth. A shower would have to wait until that night. Even if she had had the time to take one that morning (which she didn't) there was no way she would want to be that vulnerable in a werewolves apartment while to werewolves were in it. Frankly, she didn't want to have to jump out the window and run across town naked. Besides, she had gymnastics that night anyway.
Appraising her clothing for the day was slightly annoying. The clothes in her pack almost solely consisted of hunting clothes and Shadowhunter gear. Neither of which were all that typical of the clothes she normally wore to school. Normally she dressed to avoid attention. Oh well.
She ended up in dark jeans, a black tank top, and her leather gear jacket. The dark colors made her skin seem very pale, and her hair a few shades brighter. However, dark colors were really more about practicality than fashion for Nephilim. Ichor and monster guts were difficult to wash out of fabric.
Her hair she simply brushed and twisted into a messy bun, held in place with a double color pen that turned into her two bronze hunting knives, and the silver tube of an unnamed seraph blade. Whatever, it was convenient and she didn't have a hair tie. Accessorizable weaponry, now that would be a fashion show worth seeing.
After storing her things and extracting her school bag, she sent up a quick thank you to whichever god might be listening. Having her homework was a regrettable necessity of going to mundane school. While normality was nice, school was still difficult.
A strange result of her mixed D.N.A was that her hunting instincts had mostly crushed her ADHD, which was a relief, but hardly surprising. After all, it was hard to track and wait for prey when you were constantly fidgeting. However, her Nephilim side had done absolutely nothing to relieve her dyslexia. In fact, the shadowhunter predisposition for Greek and Latin had probably just made it worse. Since she couldn't exactly request versions of all of her homework in Latin or Ancient Greek, school work was really hard.
When she left the bathroom, she found Peter and Derek (now regrettably wearing a shirt) drinking coffee in the corner of the loft that was apparently designated as the kitchen. Surprisingly Peter had poured her a travel mug of coffee and added cream and sugar. "Where on earth did the bag even come from?" the man wondered out loud.
Kyla took the cup and swallowed a large mouthful. Damn. She wasn't normally picky about her coffee, but this was pretty awesome. "No offense," she said. "But that secret is worth more than coffee. Even really, really, good coffee."
"What about the secret of your name?" Derek questioned, leaning against the wall by the window. Clave connections worth weren't shit if you didn't know who you were connected with.
Kyla considered, knowing why her name was important. For smaller wolf packs, a Clave connection could be the difference between survival and destruction. True she had saved Derek's life the night before, but she had also been trespassing on what was, for lack of a better term, pack territory. Derek would have been within the Accords to attack her if he had wanted to. She owed him something at the very least if not to Peter as Derek was the technical owner of the loft. "It's Kyla Drawright," she enunciated clearly. "K-y-l-a D-r-a-w-r-i-g-h-t."
Derek nodded, acknowledging that the precision with which she provided her name was a strange form of open sesame. A miniscule offering of a possible lifeline. The acknowledgement of the idea that he had a single favor that he could cash in if he needed to. "Derek Hale," he introduced. "This is my uncle Peter."
Taking another sip of coffee, Kyla filed the last name away to pull information on later. The name "Hale" seemed to prick at something in the back of her brain, like a memory that was over halfway forgotten. "I've got to go," she said, holding up the travel mug. "Thanks for the coffee."
"Where are you going anyway?" Peter pried.
Kyla raised an eyebrow, pausing with her hand on the door. "School," she answered. "I have an AP History test first period." She enjoyed the looks of confusion on the faces of the two Hales. She fixed her face into a sweet smile, and with a pageant stile wave Aphrodite and Isabelle Lightwood would have both been proud of, she said, "bye bye now." Then she whirled around and slipped out the door.
"Well," Peter said slowly. "That was... interesting. I must say the last Nephilim I met wasn't quite so-"
"Teenaged?" Derek supplied. "Nephilim age of majority is eighteen. If she's younger than that and going to school then she must be hear unofficially."
Peter shrugged, "you may be right. But no matter how old, a Shadowhunter in town is not something to dismiss lightly. Clave intervention could seriously complicate this situation. Besides," he inhaled deeply. "There's something different in her scent. Something non-angelic."
Derek inhaled through his nose reflexively at the words, picking through the collection of smells that formed Kyla's scent. He put aside the added scents such as chalk powder, coffee, mint toothpaste, a brand of face wash, leather, metal and the hints of pineapple skin lotion and strawberry shampoo.
The scent that was left was a unique mixture of more human, natural scents. He could detect scents like birch bark, warm grass, and something that seemed a bit like rose but slightly more herbal. These were mixed with the shadowhunter smell of ash and sunshine.
Then there was something else. Something cool and powerful that tingled in Derek's nose. He inhaled again. focusing solely on the unknown but strangely familiar element of scent. It was deeply inlayed in the base make up of Kyla's scent. An element central to her personally.
As the tingling hit his nose again, Derek's eyes snapped open. He knew without checking that they had changed form to a glowing steal blue. Kyla's scent drawing up the wolf nature he so often kept buried. "It's like moonlight," he concluded. "She smells like moonlight."
Peter's smile but Derek immediately on edge. He watched his uncle inhale leasurly and the smile he displayed next gave Derek an immediate sense of foreboding. " She's something more than Nephilim," his uncle said. "It's intoxicating."
A/N: So what do you think? I hope you all liked it. I'm trying to update often over the summer while I have the time. My classes next year are going to keep me so busy it won't even be funny. I enjoyed writing Derek/Kyla interaction and Peter is so much fun to write being sinister and creepy. Review for me!xoxoxoxooxxxoxoxoxxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxxoxoxoxo
