As promised, here it is!
This chapter is Cliffhanger-free.
Enjoy!
Pale Horses
Something Dies
You see, the thing about the Kanima venom is that it doesn't render you unconscious – it simply makes you unable to move.
You hear everything. You see everything. You feel everything. From the jostle of a shorter boy throwing you over his shoulder, to the bump in the head at being thrown into the trunk of a car, to the sound of the tires, the panic of being locked up, the turns on the road, the many, many bruises that come up on the skin and then fade away just as fast because of the werewolf healing factor.
You are aware of everything.
It really, really, royally sucks.
Stiles can feel he's hyperventilating, and then he actually stops because he's not sure that, as a werewolf, he's capable of hyperventilating. Or having a panic attack, because if there ever was a proper time for a panic attack, it's here and now.
And, oh my god, what if he could have a panic attack, and then he shifted, and went into panic overload while being a werewolf? What would that entail? So that's when he started panicking about having a panic attack, and his breathing is getting harder and faster and more difficult, and he tries to calm the fuck down, because he doesn't want to die before Gerard had even gotten his hands on him first.
Or maybe he does, because that man is a sick, sick person, and god only knows what he'll do to Stiles if he has the chance. Maybe dying by lack of oxygen while panicking is the way to go today, because he sure as hell don't want to know what Gerard will do to him when he finds out Stiles is a werewolf now – and he has no doubt the man will find out, and soon.
Probably when he realizes Stiles is just fiiiiiiiiine even with all the cuts and bruises he should have from the ride in the trunk of a car.
The ride isn't as long as Stiles thinks it would be. Gerard probably wants him near enough to Beacon Hills that Derek won't have too much trouble getting there to be, you know, maimed, tortured and killed. For Stiles also has no doubt he's being used as bait, whether this was Derek's plan or not.
He really, really hopes not.
The car comes to a stop, and Stiles closes his eyes when he hears the trunk being opened. He blinks when he's thrown over Jackson's shoulder again, trying to see where they are, and his heart stops beating for a second when he recognizes the place.
It's the Hale house.
Of course, why use a warehouse downtown or some rundown neighborhood shack when Gerard can use the one place which will cause mental angst on Derek as well as rage to find Stiles there? Why not put the knife in and then twist it, right?
They get in, and all Stiles can see is the dirt on the floor, and the darkness that surrounds them. They don't stay on the first floor – they go down, deeper and deeper into the house, where the fire had reached, but hadn't been able to consume the stones and iron that made up the foundation of the house.
He hears a metal door being slipped open, and is thrown face first on the floor like a sack of rotten potatoes. He groans at the impact, and his cry of pain is half a laugh and half a cry.
He is so afraid he might actually start crying. Or laughing. He can't decide.
A foot kicks him, making him turn on the ground, and he's finally able to see Gerard staring down at him with an intrigued look on his face.
Crap.
"You know, Stiles, when I caught you, I was only trying to make Hale come after you. But right now, I think I might have taken more than what I hoped for." He says, smiling slightly, and Stiles coughs - he's sure he broke something that shouldn't be broken.
He can taste blood in his mouth.
"I'm not sure what you mean, sir." He gasps out, through short breaths, but he knows that playing dumb will be no help for him in a few seconds, when he starts getting all better from injuries that should take, at the very least, weeks to recover.
"Let's see if you don't, Mr. Stilinski." Gerard says with finality in his voice, taking a small knife from his pocket. He crouches down, beside Stiles, and pulls Stiles's arm towards him, stabbing his forearm, making Stiles scream with the pain again.
"You… You SICK PERSON, my God!" He cries out, but Gerard doesn't even look at him – he's staring at his arm, the wound that was wide open with the knife, and is already kitting together again, closing down, leaving only blood behind.
It's only when the cut is already healed and all that can be heard in the dark basement is Stiles's harsh breathing that Gerard looks at Stiles – his eyes are cold and crazed, he's not playing with bait anymore, he's dealing with the enemy, and Stiles is sure, absolutely sure, he'll be dead within the hour.
And it'll be the longest hour in his life.
"Jackson, I think you'll need to set our friend here in a special sort of accommodation before leaving." Gerard says, while turning his back on Stiles and looking at Kanima-Jackson.
If Stiles wasn't so completely terrified he'd pity the boy. It's not him, and by god, if anyone finds him out, they'll kill him.
Gerard will probably kill him as soon as he's done with Derek and Stiles.
Jackson picks Stiles up, and he bites his lips to keep from screaming again, because he might heal fast, but that doesn't mean that broken bones don't hurt as hell. Jackson pins him to a metal structure, he's actually being hold to some sort of grid, with metal shackles and chains. He can't move yet, not completely, but he feels as his duty to his werewolf dignity to at least protest against being help up on a torture chamber. His head is shaking, and he can feel at least half of his toes. It's a pity that's all he can move.
He hears Gerard's phone beep, and the man leaves them, while Jackson is tying him to the grid.
"Jackson. Come on, Jackson, you can fight this shit, come on, man, help me. I know you totally hate me, because I'm such an ass and also I pined after Lydia while she was your girlfriend, but you and I both know she would never even look at me, man. You don't have to do this. I can't even believe I'm saying such a cheesy cliché, but you can fight this, Jackson."
For a moment, Stiles can swear he sees Jackson through the Kanima's eyes, but the moment is gone as fast as it comes, and he's still chained up to a torture device. Finally Jackson steps back, and Stiles is hurting like hell, because the chains on his wrists are too tight, they are breaking his skin, and his skin is growing back again at the same speed it's being torn apart.
At some point, he's pretty sure, the healing cycle won't be able to catch up, and he'll probably be scarred.
If he's, you know, alive to be scarred.
He'll take scarred over dead any day.
Also, he's pretty sure the chains and shackles are somehow infused with wolfsbane.
Jackson goes to wait by the door at the very moment the door opens again, and it occurs to Stiles the only reason he can see well inside the chamber is because of the werewolf thing. It's dark in here compared to outside, even compared to the rest of the house.
That's why Jackson can see too.
Stiles actually blinks when he realizes Gerard Argent could see him too. He had cut him open, looked at him, straight at him, watched his cut heal.
How did he do that?
He's taken away from his thoughts however when he notices Gerard is not coming back alone to the chamber.
Allison is beside him.
"What is Jackson doing here?" She asks. She can't see him, because he's too far from the light coming from the door.
How did Gerard do it, damn it?!
"Leaving." Gerard answers, and Jackson simply leaves, without saying anything.
It's killing Stiles to see that.
"You said you had caught him, Grandpa." Allison's voice is full of hate and accusation. She's hurting, anyone can see that, and Stiles can relate to it more than most – he actually lost his mother too. Not to a werewolf bite, but to something stupid, and not at all her fault.
If Stiles is honest with himself, he blames himself for her death, and that had fueled his hate towards a lot of people for a lot of months. Allison is in her Rage stage, she hates everything to do with her mom's death, and that includes werewolves.
Mainly Derek. And Gerard is exploiting that, turning Allison into his personal killer.
Gods, who would have thought that the creepy Chris Argent would turn out to be the normal one in the family?
Gerard closes the metal door behind them again, and the chamber falls dark, until he turns on a light, focused solely on Stiles, and his poor, skinny and pale form.
"Oh my god, Stiles?" Allison almost screams, turning to her grandfather with horror in her eyes.
This is going to be awful.
"What did you do?" She asks in a whisper, it's clear she's scared, but Gerard only smiles, and shakes his head.
"That right there, Allison, that's not your friend anymore. That is a monster."
He is not a monster.
"A killer"
He's never harmed anyone.
"A thing that has to be put down before it tears everyone's lives apart, like it did to your mother, and your aunt"
Gerard is the one who tore their lives apart.
"Derek Hale turned him, Allison. Made him into a monster. Into his personal bitch."
And that's when Stiles's already shaken control slips, because he's sick and tired of hearing that man using that word.
"I am no one's bitch. I'm his mate." He growls, and his eyes are grey and glowing, he knows it.
But what's more impressive than his voice, or his control not to completely wolf out, or his even greater control not to cry out in pain when the effort to move makes his wrists split open again, is the fact that, when he hears the last thing Stiles says, Gerard eyes dilate, they widen, and he takes a step back.
And more than that, he reeks of fear.
Hell, yeah. He's not going down without a fight.
"Grandpa, what is it?" Allison asks, and she has her bow raised, but pointed to the ground. It's not focused on Stiles, not it's focused on Gerard, it's just there.
Oh my god, maybe he can make an ally.
"I have made a mistake. We need to kill this beast, Allison, right now."
"What?" She asks again, and Stiles can see her eyes going from Stiles to Gerard frantically. She would be okay with killing Derek, possibly okay shooting some unknown werewolf who got in her way, that night, at the station, but right now?
Killing Stiles in cold blood? The boy who took her messages to Scott, word by word?
Stiles can see she's hesitating, and he tries to calm down, to make his eyes normal again, so she can see Stiles, and not a werewolf. He closes his eyes, trying to normalize his breathing, but that's obviously a mistake, because suddenly he feels his shirt being torn apart, and Gerard is connecting wires to him.
"What the hell?!" He screams, and finds out that being a werewolf won't stop his voice from going high pitched and not at all manly.
"Gerard!" Allison screams, and Gerard turns to her, vicious and cold and crazy.
"This is a Mate, Allison. If your father had educated you like he should have, you'd know that this, right here, is the most dangerous thing you could face. And this is Derek Hale's mate. This thing here will make that wolf ten times harder to kill, and ten times more powerful. It could easily destroy Jackson now. We have to kill it, Allison, now."
He says it all in one breath, and even Stiles is taken aback, because, wow, he had no idea he was such a big deal.
He's finally the bad ass in this shit. Ha!
Okay, so maybe the time to gloat is not when the crazy killer man is setting things up to electrocute him, while he wants his granddaughter to shoot him dead, dead, dead, but it's good to know the Mate thing isn't just, you know, him and Derek becoming fuck buddies.
He looks at Allison – to plead or gloat what a bad ass he is, but he doesn't.
Because Gerard Argent is actually electrocuting him.
It feels, at first, as if his whole body is being shaken from the inside out. It's being shaken by an army of really tiny steel ants that are pinching him hard and all over his body. Stampeding on him, biting him, and it shakes his very core, and it hurts like hell, and he can't stop the scream that tears through his throat, because fuuuuuuck he's going to die.
But of course he doesn't, because he's a freaking werewolf, and he can heal somewhat – he just doesn't know for how long.
Allison is screaming now, telling her grandfather to stop, and he's completely ignoring her. She raises her bow and Stiles thinks that this is it, this is when he has to actually say something to make things stop hurting.
He stops screaming for long enough to gulp some air, the electricity still running through his body, and he's going to die, and he looks at Allison, and tries to speak – maybe he'll just plead for her to kill him fast and now, because he can't take the pain anymore.
"She was KILLING SCOTT!" he shouts instead, the current still flowing, and he feels blood dripping down his chin when his mouth opens. He is hoping it's because he bit himself, and not because his internal organs have started dissolving or something disgusting like that, "You mom, she was killing him! Derek…" He stops talking again, and closes his eyes, and half wolfs out, howling in pain, but forces himself to go on – if he's going to die, then at least he'll make sure Allison knows what a creep her grandfather is, "He didn't mean to bite her. She didn't have to die. It's all his fault, Allison…" He screams again, and this is it. His body can't take it, he can feel the second his wolf healing stops trying, and everything starts fading away, "Gerard's fault" He gasps out, and his eyes are closing.
He hears a loud growl, the loudest one he's ever heard, as if pain and misery and desperation are all laced into one, and there are other howls answering it. Someone screams, and he hears Allison's bow, a shot, and his body stops shuddering.
Everything goes black, and nothing hurts.
He knew he would die today, anyway.
X
When he steps foot into the house, he has to take a second to take a deep breath and not shift. It's hard for him, being here – that's why he chose this place to come to, at first. It hurts him, being in this place. It kills him inside bit by bit, and that's why he's always here, somehow.
When the house is not full of Argents, like now.
"Three heartbeats." Boyd points out, unnecessarily for him, but Chris and John couldn't have known that. John looks confused, and Chris looks down.
"Allison is here." He mutters, and everyone turns to look at him, "That's how I found them. Her GPS, on her phone."
Derek doesn't care that he's found them through magic as long as he's not wrong, but he knows Argent isn't wrong. He knows Gerard has Stiles in this house, in the basement, and he has to be honest with himself that he's afraid of what they'll find.
"It's so quiet." John says, and Derek shakes his head.
"It's not."
"The walls in the basement are sound proof." Derek and Chris say at the same time. Derek is going to say that they should stay up here, that he will go and deal with Gerard and bring Stiles back when he hears the first scream – and then there's no holding his wolf back. He shifts, and there's no thought process, no thinking things through, there's instinct, and there's his mate being hurt, agonizingly so, and he runs to the basement, his betas on his heels, the humans following.
He launches himself on the door, and he hears Stiles screaming from the inside, and he can't seem to open the door – it's locked from the inside, and that door was made to keep wolves from escaping.
It was the room they – his family - all got into during the full moon.
He howls, and his betas answer, and he hears his mate's screams, and one of the humans finally opens the door. He launches himself forward, there's a shot and an arrow, and a cry of human pain, but he doesn't care.
His howl can be heard all over Beacon Hills, and every single thing who hears it shivers from such pain contained in a single, inhuman sound.
Because Stiles's heart is not beating.
X
John is a very adaptable man. He's the sheriff, and has a son with ADHD, he has to be - but it's not something that comes easily for him. He can't even seem to close his eyes that night. Stiles's weight beside him is the only comfort in a night full of terrors and the unknown. His son is a werewolf, and there's another werewolf trying to kill him, and a whole family more than willing to kill him too.
For a split second, John has to wonder if the Argents are right. One of those things maimed his kid, almost killing him to the point where another one of them bit him to save his life – but that's what decides it, isn't it? The fact that Stiles is alive, and mostly fine, and as long as he can keep out of trouble, things will be fine.
Which means things will be fine for about two minutes, because if there's one thing his kid has a talent in is getting into trouble.
He gets up to prepare breakfast, and he sees Stiles take off to school with his… boyfriend. Boyfriend he can deal with. Mate, not so much.
Mate is much too final.
His kid is barely seventeen, he's not dealing with mate right now.
And just like he suspects it, all hell breaks loose with a single call from Scott and the arrival of a very angry, very angsty Derek Hale to his porch. The man looks miserably angry, if that's at all possible.
He's expecting John to blame him, that much is clear, but what could the man had done? Stayed with his kid at school? Foreseen some crazy man kidnapping his son? If he blames Derek for this, he might as well deny everything he's ever said to Stiles, and start blaming his only son for the problems he seems to get caught into, and he will never, ever, do that.
Stiles does that enough for both of them.
So he tells Derek to man up, and try to think of how to get his boy back, and that's it.
They go to the police station, and try to track Gerard or Stiles down, but it's very difficult. John doesn't want to alert his colleagues, because how can he explain werewolves to them? How could he put his son in danger like that? Because he's pretty sure some of the people he works with can take a hyperactive teenager with a talent for trouble, but a werewolf?
They would kill him just as fast as the Argents.
And it's surprising that it's from the Argents that comes the answer – Chris Argent knows where they are, and so they follow.
Stepping into the house with four teenage werewolves, an Alpha and a werewolf hunter is probably the most ridiculously frightening experience of his whole life. It probably just comes second to those few minutes after his wife had died, when he knew he would have to take care of Stiles all by himself, and he knew he'd screw up.
He's in so far over his head in this mess it's not even funny.
When he sees Derek shift and tear through the house, his heart stops for a few seconds before he follows, managing, between him and Chris, to open the door the five werewolves obviously aren't able to.
And he freezes.
He freezes because that's his son, chained up and wired to a machine, with his School Principal killing him, while his best friend's girlfriend screams herself hoarse asking for her grandfather to stop.
Derek jumps forward, and two people shoot – not at Derek, at Gerard.
Allison and Chris shoot at the same time, their weapons in sync, their shots accurate and lethal, Gerard doesn't stand a chance.
The old man falls forward, the hand on the controls of the machine killing his son falls down, and the sound of electricity running stops. Gerard is dead before his body even hits the ground.
Derek, however, doesn't even notice this.
He rips Stiles out of the grid and into his own body, howling so loud and so deep and so desperately it seems to shake the very ground they are on.
His son's body is tightly held against Derek, who's slumping forward, his features changing again to those of a human, and the man screams, as if his heart is being ripped from his chest.
He puts Stiles down and crouches over him – he's doing CPR, and John wants to hysterically laugh at the absurdity of the situation. They are werewolves, there has to be an easier way to save Stiles.
He has to be okay.
While he counts the time between each step of the CPR, Derek says something, so low and so fast John can't seem to understand him at first.
And then he does.
"Not again." Derek is saying, over and over and over again.
John is coming forward, pushing people out of the way, and everything is silent. Chris Argent has his eyes closed, leaning against a wall, and Allison has dropped her bow to the ground at some point, and the werewolves are around Derek.
Derek puts his lips over Stiles's lips, and he pushes air between them, and John closes his eyes.
"Please, son." He whispers, falling to his knees beside Derek, because if he loses his son then he's lost everything, and he might as well die here, with him, "Please." He whispers, and along with his voice, Derek is saying the same thing, "Please." They whisper once more.
And that's when Stiles gasps and opens his eyes.
See! No Cliffies!
Next chapter will be up on Tuesday – or when I get two other chapters written, whatever comes first!
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